Kaluli-zangers (Koluba-groep)

From HitStory, the pop encyclopedia of School of Rock · Artist

Kaluli-zangers (Koluba-groep) · The Kaluli are a people of the rainforest of Papua New Guinea, around Mount Bosavi in the Southern Highlands. The Kaluli singers of the Koluba group are not professional performers, but men and women from a village community who sang while they worked in and around the forest. Nothing about the individual singers has been recorded in the available sources, so this text sticks to what is generally known. The 1991 recording Cutting Trees for a Garden is a field recording.

Music and breakthrough

For the Kaluli, music is bound up with the nature around them. Birds, water and insects have a place in their songs and in their conception of sound. Many songs are about paths, rivers and places in the forest, and are sung to remember, to mourn or to celebrate. Work songs accompany tasks such as cutting trees for a garden, where song and labour coincide.

Influence

The singing is often polyphonic, with voices that overlap and alternate, without a conductor and without a fixed metre. The recordings let you hear how singing and surroundings flow into one another, with the sound of the forest in the background. For the history of pop, this kind of music matters because it shows that music is not always a separate performance but part of daily life, and because such field recordings have later inspired composers and producers.

Listening

• 
  Cutting Trees for a Garden · Kaluli-zangers (Koluba-groep), 1991

See also

• Music of Papua New Guinea