Sound Ties, ‘Rising from the Depths of Brine and Regions of Fire Deeper Still’

Knowing through Popular Music in the Western Pacific Island World

Authors

  • Birgit Abels University of Göttingen

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1558/jwpm.20197

Keywords:

Music, Micronesia, Palau, epistemology, string band

Abstract

Pacific Indigenous scholars have long emphasized the role of relationality for Pacific Islanders’ epistemologies. In this article, the author rethinks music in terms of the procedural knowledge inherent in and specific to popular music-making by exploring the latter as knowledge practices in Micronesia. This approach opens new vistas on the relationality at the heart of Western Pacific music-making. The author calls the musical manifestation of that relational capacity sound ties, suggesting that if, following Epeli Hau‘ofa, Oceania is “humanity rising from the depths of brine”, then it is not least the sound ties of knowing in and through music that mould that very humanity of people who are at home with the sea into aquapelagic assemblages that are, after all, so much more than water and land.

Author Biography

  • Birgit Abels, University of Göttingen

    Prof. Dr Birgit Abels is Professor of Cultural Musicology at Georg-August-University Göttingen (GER). Her research interests include neo-phenomenological approaches to music and music-making as an epistemological practice. Her books include Sounds of Articulating Identity: Tradition and Transition in the Music of Palau, Micronesia (2008), The Harmonium in North Indian Music (2010), and Music Worlding in Palau: Chanting, Atmospheres, and Meaningfulness (forthcoming with Amsterdam University Press).

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Published

2021-12-10

Issue

Section

Articles

How to Cite

Abels, B. . (2021). Sound Ties, ‘Rising from the Depths of Brine and Regions of Fire Deeper Still’: Knowing through Popular Music in the Western Pacific Island World. Journal of World Popular Music, 8(2), 236–254. https://doi.org/10.1558/jwpm.20197

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