This paper examines the distinctive social project of the native brass band and the making of the modern musician on Upolu Island at the turn of the 20th century. It considers the construction of the brass band as a status symbol and the emergent band leader as a modified kinship behavior within the context of strategic management of sociocultural capital amid the threats of Euro-American imperialism in the Pacific. The narrative traces how Samoans negotiated social cues in cross-cultural encounters as they sought to remain politically autonomous and agents of their own shifting identities in the age of modernity. Rather than starting with the narrative of colonial encounter, I introduce an origin of Samoan brass bands through the influence of the Native Hawai’ian naval band’s assignment throughout Samoa in 1887, finessing King Kalākaua’s attempt at forming a Polynesian Confederacy with the rival kings of the land. This history rewinds previous timelines offered by other scholars to suggest that the eagerness of Samoan women to have their sons trained as band leaders was propagated by the favorable impression that the large assembly of brown boys playing in an auxiliary of the Royal Hawaiian Brass Band made on them at home and abroad. An analysis of physical spaces where modern musical phenomena developed on Upolu will be examined through Agha’s concept of chronotopic formulations and kinship behaviors to articulate the negotiation of foreign status symbols of colonial power and how Samoans repurposed them to signal their road to national independence.

The codiapi, or the boat-lute, is a two-stringed zither from the Philippines. Although the instrument is still in use in the southern islands of Mindanao, it has entirely disappeared in the central island region of the Visayas. The only proof of its once wide-spread use comes from accounts of Spanish missionaries in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The most notable and thorough of such accounts is found in Fransisco Alcina’s History of the Island and Indians of the Visayas (1688). While Alcina’s text has been used to reconstruct the organology of the codiapi, I will show that the text can also be used to infer how the instrument was played and sounded. By having retranslated the text and putting this new translation into conversation with more contemporary ethnographies on living boat-lute practices from Mindanao, I conclude that the music of Alcina’s codiapi uses a pentatonic mode. Additionally, based on Alcina’s text, I reconstruct how the codiapi sounded and speculate why its music could have been appropriate for courtship rituals. Used exclusively by men, when played along with its female counterpart, the corlong (raft-zither), the codiapi is described as enabling an extra-musical communication which induces both players to fall in love. Described as being “[deeper] in sentiment or sensuality…than if they were using words,” this extra-musical power must nonetheless be deeply rooted in how this music sounded. This paper will discuss how mode and rhythm could have been used for this communication.

Trinidad and Tobago’s national instrument, the steelpan, has a history rooted in masculinity. Early steelbands and panyards were understood as spaces where violence flourished, and young women and girls were discouraged from entertaining these spaces. Over the course of the instrument’s seventy-five-year history though, women have made fundamental strides in the steelpan movement, and are now a central part of steelpan culture in the country (Munro Smith 2016). Despite growing academic attention to women in the steelpan movement, no attention has been given to girls’ role and place in these spaces. School Panorama, the annual steelband competition sponsored by Trinidad and Tobago’s Ministry of Education, is an apt stage to study understandings of girlhood in steelbands. A quarter of government schools in Trinidad are single-sex schools, bolstered by a large number of single-sex prestige schools (Blair 2013); as such, many of the schools that enter the School Panorama competition are single-sex; however, numerous schools combine efforts to create larger co-ed ensembles for the competition. Two notable exceptions are St. Francois Girls’ College and Bishop Anstey High School Port of Spain, who, although invite a select number of boys from neighboring schools to fill their ensemble, purposefully choose to remain a predominately female ensemble. This paper examines the two schools’ appearance in the 2025 School Panorama and their negotiation of girlhood on and off the competition stage. I argue that through the prioritization of girlhood, these young players challenge Trinidadian understandings of both the steelpan and of competition in general.