Assembling Bamboo Panpipes in the Blended Life: Musical Mediation in a Village of ’Are’are, Solomon Islands

Abstract

The musical instruments in ’Are’are, the southern region of Malaita Island in the Solomon Islands, seem to be or sound like a mixture of various cultural and social elements. Likewise, the ’Are’are people’s contemporary life contains a mix of multiple sociocultural factors with different roots. In this paper, I try to understand the relationship between musical instruments and the contemporary life as a kind of mediation. For this purpose, I focus on the unique way in which bamboo panpipes, significant musical instruments in a village of ’Are’are, exist in local life and explore how the panpipes are assembled in village life from the point of view of people in ’Are’are. After outlining of the nature of contemporary life in a village and the features of contemporary bamboo panpipes, I describe 2 cases: the bamboo panpipes performance during a Christian ritual in the village; and the way of adopting musical instruments with different roots into the village band’s bamboo panpipes.