By Michael Koretzky

Explorer Series: Indonesia/South Pacific

(Nonesuch)

“Do not expect to hear Hawaiian guitars, ukuleles, and the Hula,” begin the liner notes to Island Music, one of 12 discs in the Indonesia/South Pacific collection, which itself is a subset of the whopping 92-disc Explorer series that Nonesuch is in the midst of reissuing.

What you should expect on Island Music is a massive culture shock. It’s easy to peruse the liner notes by British composer David Fanshawe and think they were written instead by British comedy troupe Monty Python. For example, what Westerner isn’t going to grin at a photo of a man sticking a flute up his nose? But as Fanshawe states quite seriously, “The Honorable Ve’ehala performs the rare nose flute [and] played this chant to Queen Elizabeth in 1953.”

Such cultural quirkiness fascinates many North Americans. Perhaps that means we’re ethnocentric; if these quirks make us feel culturally superior, then perhaps we’re racist, too. Mostly, however, we’re simply curious. So if The Discovery Channel is the official TV network for our Third World voyeurism, and if National Geographic is its official publication, then the Explorer series is surely its soundtrack.

The Explorer series was one of the first collections of world music recorded in the field, instead of the studio. From 1967 to 1984, Nonesuch pressed 92 vinyl records from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe and many nations in between. The reissues — which Nonesuch is releasing in batches about every four months — have been remastered, and the artwork redesigned, but the track order and liner notes remain largely untouched.

That was an important non-decision. Like the 13-disc Africa reissue that preceded it, Indonesia/South Pacific is expansive and encyclopedic. It would have been very simple — and economically tempting — for Nonesuch to skim off the most melodic tracks and pare down the liner notes to a handful of breezy paragraphs. Instead, this remains a serious project meant to appeal to both ethnomusicologists and enlightened consumers. Thus, for every “Lullaby,” a beautiful and brief (1:43) solo by a young Balinese woman, there’s a 22-minute “Ramayana Monkey Chant,” with 200 Balinese men crying out in unison, “tjak tjak tjak…,” to imitate the primate.

Nine of the 12 Indonesia/South Pacific discs feature forms of gamelan music, as crucial to South Pacific composition as the12-bar blues is to rock ’n’ roll. A gamelan is essentially a set of bronze gongs and metallophones (similar to a vibraphone, with thick bronze keys struck by wooden mallets). But that description doesn’t connote the personal value of the instruments. They’re precious family heirlooms handed down through generations.

There’s so much to learn and listen to here — from a one-minute Tahitian version of “We Shall Overcome,” learned from Christian missionaries, to Music for the Shadow Play, an album-length soundtrack for a highly ritualized Balinese puppet show. Taken collectively, this series is subversively educational.

For instance, both the music and the liner notes on Tahiti explode the prevailing Hollywood myths about a friendly island paradise sparsely populated by free-loving natives. In fact, “The Polynesians’ greatest problem, before European disease solved it, was overpopulation,” writes Jane Sarnoff in the original 1968 liner notes. The solution, she says, “was war.”

That’s why some of the 26 brief tracks — none longer than three minutes, and a handful shorter than one — have titles like “Drums of War” and “The Story of Battle.” Their percussive aggressiveness is countered by a few oddly melodic, serene tracks, like “Song for Birds in Flight,” which are also misleading. Sarnoff says the Polynesians were highly superstitious: “We may be romantically affected when we hear a singer in ecstasies about the flight of a bird. More likely, the composer was trying to placate a bird after killing another one.”

While the men are singing about fighting, the women are simply singing and dancing. In Java, the bedaya is “a sacred and classical court dance performed by nine women of royal blood.” In Bali, the legong is a dance “performed only by little girls who have not reached puberty.” And in the Gilbert Islands, the te kawawa is a dance for “different groups of young girls” who are “covered in coconut oil” so they can “perform and excite.”

Finally, a word of warning: Tracks that are heavy on the gongs (such as “Hudan Mas” or “Golden Rain”) are much more appealing to the Western ear than those heavy on the flutes (such as “Lagu Kodok” or “Frog Song”). When accompanied by subtle percussion, the gongs sound funereal and haunting. By comparison, the flutes can sound like a classroom of fifth-graders who are handed plastic recorders for the first time. If anything, these tracks sound a bit like free jazz.