Art Museum Journal

featuring more than 50 works, explores the diverse forms and roles of musical instruments created by various Pacific peoples.
 
The objects displayed, drawn primarily from The Met's vast holdings and enhanced by loans from the American Museum of Natural History and two private collections, range from wind instruments such as trumpets, ocarinas and flutes, through string instruments including lutes, fiddles and the Hawai’ian ukulele, to drums in a wide variety of shapes and sizes. Their purposes are as varied as the techniques used to play them. Large freestanding drums and conch trumpets were designed for signaling over long distances; nose flutes and their delicate tones were used to beguile a lover. It's this astonishing diversity of works and their purposes that will fascinate visitors to this exhibition.
 
Entering the first gallery, the intended use of the monumental carved wood slit gongs as signaling devices may be immediately obvious due to their enormous size – some up to 12 feet in length. Less apparent may be the musical function of the lime spatula/rasp in its case at left. The spatula, a flat spoon used in the practice of chewing betel nut with a bit of powdered lime and betel leaf for a stimulant effect, was utilized by the men of Papua New Guinea to assert their masculine presence and to draw attention to

themselves. The spoon was pulled vigorously in and out of its case, creating a rasping sound. The most striking of the exhibition's examples was decorated in accordance with this purpose, its handle depicting a male figure with outsized genitalia.
 
Further along, a bamboo tube zither with metal strings makes use of a palm leaf, attached on top and bottom, spread to its fullest extent at its middle to create a wide resonating chamber. In a vitrine nearby are other stringed instruments, including a lute with elaborately carved floral motifs and a charmingly simple and instantly recognizable ukulele.
 
In the exhibition's second space, the viewer finds a collection of pan pipes, the use of which appears to be culturally ubiquitous. Pan pipes are considered the first mouth organ and the structural ancestor of such varied instruments as the pipe organ and the

harmonica. At the gallery's rear are a water drum (played by two men striking it against a body of water) and a pahu drum of wood and sharkskin (almost certainly part of the ritual paraphernalia of marae or sacred sites). This particular example is girdled with braided fiber and carved elaborately with rows of stylized female figures which may represent ancestors.
 
The religious use of music appears to be universal. Music is often regarded as the voice of spirits or the way in which one spoke to the spirits or gods. Instruments themselves may even have been considered animate things. This is apparent in the carving and decoration of many of the works exhibited. Drums with their heads, string instruments with their necks, all these have bodies and voices that illustrate their essential vitality and spiritual embodiment. Often ornately decorated, they were important visual and aural symbols of phenomena from supernatural agency to social authority.

 
Though this particular exhibition is only a small part of the Metropolitan Museum’s collections, it's worth spending extra time to fully appreciate the delightful variety of works that will be found here. Especially interesting is the recorded tour's descriptions of these objects, in which some of the instruments are played, adding the dimension of performance to the visitor’s enjoyment of the works' visual artistry. In this way, the curators of Sounding the Pacific... have truly brought these objects to life.