Erase thirty years, and hear it in Atuona when the “long pig that speaks” was being carried through the jungle to the dark High Place! Then it was the thunder of the heavens, the voice of the old gods hungry for the flesh of their enemies.
We who have become refined and diverse in our musical expression, using a dozen or scores of instruments to interpret our subtle emotions, cannot know the primitive and savage exaltation that surges through the veins when the war-drum beats. To the Marquesans it has ever been a summons to action, an inspiration to daring and bloody deeds, the call of the war-gods, the frenzy of the dance. Born of the thunder, speaking with the voice of the storm and the cataract, it rouses in man the beast with quivering nostrils and lashing tail who was part of the forest and the night.
Music is ever an expression of the moods and morals of its time. The bugle and the fife share with the drum the rousing of martial spirit in our armies to-day, but to our savage ancestors the drum was supreme. Primitive man expressed his harmony with nature by imitating its sounds. He struck his own body or a hollow log covered with skin. Uncivilized peoples crack their fingers, snap their thighs, or strike the ground with their feet to furnish music for impromptu dancing. In Tonga they crack their fingers; in Tahiti they pound the earth with the soles of their feet; here in Atuona they clap hands. The Marquesans have, too, bamboo drums, long sections of the hollow reed, slit, and beaten with sticks. For calling boats and for signaling they use the conch-shell, the same that sounded when “the Tritons blew their wreathed horn.” They also have the jew's-harp, an instrument common to all Polynesia; sometimes a strip of bark held between the teeth, sometimes a bow of wood strung with gut.
The haka, the Marquesan national dance
Hot Tears (on the left) with Vai Etienne
Civilization is a process of making life more complex and subtle. We have the piano, the violin, the orchestra. Yet we also have rag-time, which is a reaction from the nervous tension of American commercial life, a swinging back to the old days when man, though a brute, was free. There is release and exhilaration in the barbaric, syncopated songs and in the animal-like motions of the jazz dances with their wild and passionate attitudes, their unrestrained rhythms, and their direct appeal to sex. These rag-time melodies, coming straight from the jungles of Africa through the negro, call to impulses in man that are stifled in big cities, in factory and slum and the nerve-wearing struggle of business.