In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Hawaiian Music in Motion: Mariners, Missionaries, and Minstrelsby James Revell Carr
  • Ricardo D. Trimillos
Hawaiian Music in Motion: Mariners, Missionaries, and Minstrels. By James Revell Carr. Music in American Life. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014. ISBN 978-0252-03860-0. Cloth. Pp. ix, 272. $95.00

Hawaiian Music in Motion: Mariners, Missionaries, and Minstrelsby James Revell Carr foregrounds the maritime experience as a Western source for Hawaiian music, providing a convincing alternative to the received account of Western music transmitted solely through American Protestant evangelization. The study is an exemplary and eminently readable account, although the title is a bit misleading. The inseparability of music and dance is implicit; hula is as central to this history as is music. Of the three domains listed in the secondary title, the study privileges mariners and minstrels; the missionary component functions primarily as a foil for the other two.

The book’s historical focus is the nineteenth century, and it integrates a staggering amount of historical and archival data with ethnography and musical analysis. The author presents an impressive array of written documentation that provides a wider lens for the analysis of Hawaiian, American, and British musical interchange; the sources include newspaper notices, sojourners’ accounts, bills of lading, and fascinating bits of marginalia. He documents the circulation of Hawaiian music and its performers much earlier than the often-cited First International Period of Hawaiian music (ca. 1870–1940).

This work is provocative in its presentation of a number of alternative interpretations to widely held views of Hawaiian performance. Privileging a new—but [End Page 407]ultimately old—perspective, Carr proposes understanding “Hawaiian music from the perspective of the sea” (11). He presents an alternative reading of King Kalākaua’s advocacy for traditional hula and music as resurgence rather than renaissance. And in contrast to historical narratives of victimization and loss, Carr argues for the agency of native Hawaiians, cites instances of resistance and resilience for Hawaiian culture, and maintains that music and musical performance have been and continue to be “aspects of ‘heritage’ … central to struggles over cultural identity and self-determination” (186).

In keeping with a maritime emphasis, the introduction is titled “Setting Sail.” It presents a useful guide to the contents of five imaginatively titled chapters, the theoretical tools the author proposes to use, and his position as a non-Hawaiian ethnomusicologist with an extensive background in maritime lore.

The first chapter carries the provocative title “‘Lascivious Gestures’ and ‘Festive Sports’: Early Interactions, 1778–1802.” The author problematizes the (mostly male) Western gaze upon Hawaiians as the Other, particularly the gaze upon Hawaiian women, whose interaction with sailors (sexual and otherwise) he sees as strategies of leveraging power, which he identifies with the Hawaiian entity of mana. The maritime circulation of Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders was well established: a 1792 account of performances by two women from Ni‘ihau on George Vancouver’s ship plying the Pacific Coast of North America and an 1802 report of Hawaiian sailors performing in a New York production of The Death of Captain Cookare engaging descriptions of a gaze on the Hawaiian Other. In the opening chapter Carr argues convincingly for seafaring as an early means of contact and mutual interaction between Hawaiian and Anglophone worlds.

Although the first chapter used the motif of the sea to understand land-based events and institutions, chapter 2, “‘A Wild Sort of Note’: Hawaiian Music at Sea” shifts the locale to the open seas and more specifically to the decks of seagoing vessels, which the author posits as cosmopolitan spaces. The first ten pages are devoted to whaling as a culture and industry, an orientation this reviewer found useful. Carr cites the reputation of Hawaiians as “hardworking” on boats, thereby suggesting that the plantation stereotype of them as lazy masked a strategy of resistance. The author’s considerable expertise in sailing and general maritime lore is evident in this chapter, in which he establishes the close relationship of Hawaiians to American and British maritime history.

In the same chapter Carr shifts our attention from performances and performers to selected pieces of repertoire. His explication of the provenance and distribution of...

pdf

Share