Through January 23, 2011
Sounding the Pacific: Musical Instruments of Oceania, the first exhibition devoted to the subject ever mounted by an art museum, will open at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on November 17. Featuring more than 50 outstanding works—including percussion, wind, and string instruments and forms unique to the Pacific—the exhibition will explore not only the diverse forms of Oceanic musical instruments but also the many different roles they play, or played, in Pacific cultures, from announcing the onset of war, to embodying the voices of supernatural beings or softly enticing a lover. Drawn primarily from the Museum's collection, the exhibition will showcase the objects that were created and used from the early 19th to the late 20th century in all five regions of Oceania: Melanesia, Polynesia, Micronesia, Australia, and Island Southeast Asia. The works on view include instruments ranging from small flutes and ocarinas used for private entertainment or courtship, to massive slit gongs played in performances for entire communities, in which the thundering beats can carry for miles.
The exhibition is made possible through the generosity of the Friends of the Department of the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas.
Musical instruments and musical expression take an almost infinite variety of forms throughout the world. This is especially true in the Pacific Islands, whose more than 1,800 different peoples create an astonishing variety of musical instruments. They vary from familiar forms such as drums, flutes, and the Hawaiian 'ukulele, to unusual types such as slit gongs carved in the form of massive ancestral catfish, friction drums whose otherworldly sound is likened to the cry of a bird, and flutes that are played with the nose rather than the mouth. From the tropical rainforests of Island Southeast Asia, to the Australian outback, to remote coral atolls, musical instruments in Oceania are played to accompany all aspects of life from the most sacred religious rituals and initiations to feasts, celebrations, courtship, and casual entertainment.
The works on view will include a sesando from the Indonesian Island of Timor, an instrument resembling the opening bud of a flower. Sesando music is said to have magical properties and was typically used to accompany songs in bini, a special poetic language that often emphasized the poignant and fleeting nature of human life. One of the earliest examples of a Hawaiian 'ukulele, probably dating to the late 19th century, will also be on view—it was made only a few years after the ancestral form of the instrument, a small guitar, was initially introduced to Hawai'i in 1879 by Portuguese settlers.
The wind instruments featured in the exhibition will demonstrate different forms. Among them are a more than six-foot-long sacred flute made by the Murik people of New Guinea, and trumpets (or fu) carved in the form of stylized human figures by the Asmat people of New Guinea. An intricately decorated nose flute from the Fiji Islands also will be included in the exhibition. Played by holding one nostril shut and blowing into the instrument with the other, it produces a soft, plaintive sound used for relaxation or by courting couples.
The percussion section of the exhibition will present two rare sacred slit gongs (or waken) carved in the form of a giant ancestral catfish with projecting crocodile-like jaws. These objects, made by the Iatmul people of New Guinea, were part of an ensemble of secret instruments known only to initiated men; they was sounded during rituals, in which the gongs might be played continuously for months on end, with each successive player seizing the gong beater from the moving hand of his predecessor so that the rhythm remained unbroken. Also on view will be a tall, elegant drum from the Austral Islands adorned with stylized female figures. The beauty of Austral Island drums was so greatly admired that, in pre-European times, they were occasionally exported to Tahiti, some 400 miles away, by voyaging canoes.
Sounding The Pacific is organized by Eric Kjellgren, the Evelyn A. J. Hall and John A. Friede Associate Curator for Oceanic Art in the Department of the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas, in consultation with J. Kenneth Moore, Frederick P. Rose Curator in Charge, and Jayson Dobney, Associate Curator and Administrator, all of the Museum's Department of Musical Instruments.
The sounds of selected instruments and further information on the works on view will be available on the accompanying Audio Guide program, which will be available for rental at the Museum ($7, $6, for members, and $5 for children under 12).
The Audio Guide is sponsored by Bloomberg.
A variety of related educational programs will also be offered.
The exhibition will be featured on the Museum's website (www.metmuseum.org).
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July 26, 2010
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