The Gauguin Years: Songs and Dances of Tahiti (review)

In 1956, French explorer-filmmaker Francis Mazière arrived in the small village of Omoa on the isolated island of Fatu Hiva in the Marquesas Islands, where he filmed scenes of island life and made the sound recordings that eventually appeared on this CD. Since this visit was part of a his Expédition Pacifique Sud, he traveled to other islands and archipelagos as well; the disc traces his trip through the islands of French Polynesia, offering twenty-six examples from Tahiti and the Leeward Islands, the Tuamotus, and the Marquesas. Its particular value as a historical document, however, is that among the fifteen examples tentatively attributed to the Marquesas Islands are some of the most important recordings of traditional Marquesan music ever released commercially.

The recordings released here first appeared on an undated monaural Vogue LP disc (LD 540-30), probably in the late 1950s or early 1960s, and then reappeared circa 1968 as a stereo LP in the Nonesuch Explorer Series (H-72017). This 2003 release is thus the collection's third time on the market. The product is updated with a curious new cover, which features a 1960s-era photo of two young Tahitian women in pareu wraparound cloths standing next to a traditional-style house with a Jaguar XKE parked nearby, but otherwise it is an exact digital duplicate of the 1968 album and its liner notes.

It is, in fact, this exact duplication that underlies some of the problems surrounding the disc. Like the original Vogue disc titled Tahiti au temps de Gauguin, the Nonesuch cover reveals a commercial effort to establish a link to a well-known place and the nostalgic "old days" of Gauguin, even though both have little connection to the compositions included or the various times they represent. For over four decades, however, the disc has been listed in the archival collections of major museums and universities around the world, where curators have understandably identified it as Tahitian music; it has also appeared as a Tahitian source in the discography of one ethnomusicology textbook. This has happened mainly because, unlike the original Vogue LP that included an island provenance for each cut, Nonesuch chose to exclude this identifying information.

Drawing on ideas apparently gleaned from other parts of Polynesia, Jane Sarnoff's unpaginated liner notes begin, "The music on this record is not for the tourist trade; it's Old Timey Polynesian. Yes, there are love songs and hulas here—but also war chants, histories, prayers, and protest songs. You'll hear the ukulele and guitar (even an electrified steel guitar)—but listen for the shell trumpets and the nose flute." However, with no hulas, war chants, protest songs, or prayers among the examples, and with no steel guitar, shell trumpets, or nose flutes appearing on the disc, the written information creates a disconnection from the sounds presented. The rest of the notes are equally inaccurate and clearly should have been dropped from or rewritten for the CD version.

In a 1974 review, ethnomusicologist James Porter noted problems with documentation on the Nonesuch label in general, writing: "The Nonesuch Explorer series manages to alienate as well as attract devotees of folk and ethnic music. An adventurous policy is sometimes coupled with a perverse desire to deprive the consumer of essential contextual information" ("Recordings of Extra-American Music," Journal of American Folklore, 84[346]:389). Mentioning three recent releases, including The Gaugin Years: Songs and Dances of Tahiti, Porter continues, "All of these discs are of value in some way, and all are guilty of defective or skimped annotations. For any layman not enough information is provided, . . . but for the expert the wish to know more about the circumstances of the recordings, the personalities of the musicians, and the structures of the music itself is simply thwarted" (389-90). What he does not mention is that on the 1968 release, Nonesuch chose not only to eliminate the identifying...