OCEANIA AND THE PACIFIC ISLANDS

Making music in Oceania and the Pacific Islands seems to be as natural as the burning hot sun, the beaming blue sky and storms that rise from the sea.

First a clarification. The term “Oceania” is rather fuzzy and one could use it in many ways (at least according to the Oceania definition on the take-with-a-grain-of-salt-but-usually-pretty-darned-reliable Wikipedia):

– as a blanket term for all the atolls and volcanic islands of the South Pacific (“ethnologically divided into the subregions of Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia”)
— to encompass the whole area between Asia and the Americas (including Australasia and the Malay Archipelago)
— with a narrow focus on Australia and its nearby islands
— as a synonym for either the Australasian ecozone or the Pacific ecozone (Melanesia, Polynesia, and Micronesia apart either from New Zealand or from mainland New Guinea).

Actually, that wasn’t a clarification at all.

In our classes we’ll use the term rather vaguely, then compound that vagueness by adding the equally vague term, “the Pacific Islands.” Together using those terms we will vaguely cover all the island nations in the region, starting on the island continent of Australia, venturing north and northeast to Melanesia (from the Greek: “black islands”), going further north and even further east to Micronesia (“small islands”), then further to the east, both north and south, where we sing, dance, chant and stomp all over Polynesia (“many islands”).

EXPLORE OCEANIA AND THE PACIFIC WITH…