Dongs & Oo-Wahs

The stack of discs stands waisthigh, big 16-inch transcriptions, some 100 hours of music, a recorded hullabaloo of wails, twangs, drumbeats and gong-whams. It is the biggest mass of raw material that U.S. musicologists and anthropologists have yet had from the East Indies and the South Seas.

The big collection of primitive music survived a shipwreck and an automobile smashup before it was brought home by a footloose family--bronzed, youngish Bruce and Sheridan Fahnestock, and their plump, jolly mother.

Thanks to movies, phonograph, radio and missionary, the world's primitive music is fast dying. Long ago Hawaiian guitar and ukulele tunes were corrupted by the harmonies of the missionary hymn. Elsewhere cowboy ditties and last year's swing hits on battered records have influenced, if not supplanted, the authentic aboriginal hotcha. So the Fahnestocks, who began sailing the South Seas seven years ago, resolved to catch some native music before it got G-stringed.

Most of their recording was done on a big expedition (backed by NBC, the Carnegie Corporation, the American Museum of Natural History, etc.) which ended a year ago when their 137-ft-schooner foundered on an uncharted Australian reef. The records and the Fahnestocks were about all that was saved.

> Most sophisticated and euphonious of the Fahnestock records are those from Bali, reproducing the gamelan (gong) orchestras of the Balinese temples. Balinese gongsters, whose instruments range in timbre from trumpetlike brass gongs to tinkly wooden ones, play complicated rondo-like pieces, entirely without notation; a player remembers his notes by silently reciting a long poem. The Balinese scales correspond roughly to the Western; one of them has notes named ding, dong, deng, dung, dang. The Dutch Governor of Bali discovered a scale not previously identified, and the Fahnestocks recorded it in the singsong of an eight-year-old boy reciting a pornographic fairy tale.

> Tahitian music has been largely Frenchified. The Fahnestocks could not find what they most wanted: a nose-flute. But Tahitians are distinctive guitar players, and have a trick of chanting double-talk to get in the groove before cutting loose. They also like to take a Western tune and Tahitify it. Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay was one the Fahnestocks gave them; it came cut Ta-ra-ra-bon-si-ay.

> In the Marquesas Islands, the oldest people sing "prediction songs," They saw the Fahnestocks' first ship (a 65-ft. schooner), then the second, which they declared was the first one grown up. They sang a prediction that it would go away and never return.

> In New Caledonia the Brothers Fahnestock spent a day getting ready to record songs by a particularly promising pair of natives. Finally the natives sang their piece: Oo-Wah, Oo-Wah, over & over. That was all they knew.

> Chief hope of the Fahnestocks: that their records will show that at one time there were migrations from Northwestern India down to New Zealand, thence to Hawaii. Preliminary study of the music shows overlapping themes in island groups several thousand miles apart.

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