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Traditionalism and Modernity in the Music and Dance of Oceania: Essays in Honour of Barbara B. Smith. Helen Reeves Lawrence and Don Niles, eds. Oceania Monograph 52. Sydney: University of Sydney, 2001. 267 pp.
Barbara Barnard Smith, a leading light of Oceanic ethnomusicology, began her career as a concert pianist. In 1945, at the Eastman School of Music, she gave the first Rochester performance of Shostakovich's Piano Concerto No. 1. Accidents of personal history led her to the University of Hawai'i at Manoa, where she taught piano and music theory. She continued her concertizing career, which culminated in a performance of Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 4, accompanied by the Honolulu Symphony Orchestra. Meanwhile, she served as director of the Honolulu Piano Teachers' Guild and the state festival for bands and choirs.
Amid this bustle, a surprise awaited her. She found herself drawn to non-Western music brought to Hawai'i by immigrant East Asians and Pacific islanders. The teacher became a student again. She learned to play the koto, and then took up the Japanese taiko-uchi, the Korean kayagum, and the Chinese zheng. She began playing in Japanese, Korean, and Okinawan ensembles. To foster these and other artistic joys among students, she set up an ethnomusicology program within the music department, and laid the groundwork for a dance-ethnology program. In 1963, at her Micronesian students' invitation, she conducted pioneering musical fieldwork in the Caroline and Marshall islands. She returned for more fieldwork in 1970 and 1976 and during the 1980s and 1990s. She retired in 1982 but continues to nurture her students' and colleagues' careers. Under the auspices of the International Council for Traditional Music, a UNESCO-affiliated organization dedicated to preserving, analyzing, and practicing the performing arts, she helped establish the Study Group on Musics of Oceania. She served as its chair from 1983 until September 2001, when, after two years of secret work, the group presented her with this volume.
Smith's personal journey of discovery yields themes that have attracted the volume's authors: how people review their values when challenged from abroad; how focusing on insiders' and outsiders' perceptual differences can serve analytical ends; and how cultures manage the teaching of their performing arts. The editors have arranged the contributions under these themes.
Part 1, "Changing...