Hearing the Future

Papua New Guinea won its independence in the 1970s, ending nearly a hundred years of colonial rule, and this upheaval shaped the work of a group of pioneering musicians who called themselves Sanguma. Drawing together artists from across the country, the band set out to picture a future and then perform it at a moment when the region's politics and society were in flux. Their goal was a sound that could express a sovereign Melanesian nation, along with its values, identities and worldview, and their experimental music helped chart the country's path after colonialism.

Australian ethnomusicologist Denis Crowdy documents and examines Sanguma's music and activities. He argues that the band's work was a significant form of cultural expression, moving in step with the political and social changes of the period. Sanguma blended rock, jazz and the early stirrings of world music, and their performances reached listeners well beyond Papua New Guinea, presenting modern music in a Melanesian style that joined the traditional with the contemporary and the local with the international.

The concerts ranged from ensembles of garamut log drums to long songs and improvisations built on electric guitars, synthesizers, saxophone, trumpet, bamboo percussion, panpipes and kuakumba flutes. The musicians sang in many local vernaculars as well as Tok Pisin and English, and wore headdresses and body decoration from different regions, along with trousers printed with indigenous designs, to underline their ancestral roots.

The book also follows what happened as the early optimism of nationhood gave way to hard economic and social conditions and a growing commercial pop scene took over public music. Crowdy places this shift within the wider ethnomusicological study of music's role in shaping national and regional identity, and he shows how the band's Melanesian ideals sit in tension with the pressures of local neoliberal capitalism.