Music Worlding in Palau: Chanting, Atmospheres, and Meaningfulness is a detailed study of the performing arts in Palau, Micronesia as holistic techniques enabling the experiential corporeality of music’s meaningfulness – that distinctly musical way of making sense of the world with which the felt body immediately resonates but which, to a significant extent, escapes interpretive techniques. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research alongside Pacific Islander and neo-phenomenological conceptual frameworks, Music Worlding in Palau distinguishes between meaning(s) and meaningfulness in Palauan music-making. These are not binary phenomena, but deeply intertwined. However, unlike meaning(s), meaningfulness to a significant extent suspends language and is thus often prematurely considered ineffable. The book proposes a broader understanding of how the performing arts give rise to a sense of meaningfulness whose felt-bodily affectivity is pivotal to music-making and lived realities. Music Worlding in Palau thus seeks to draw the reader closer to the holistic complexity of music-making both in Palau and more generally.

Birgit Abels is professor of cultural musicology at the University of Göttingen. She is the author of Sounds of Articulating Identity: Tradition and Transition in the Music of Palau, Micronesia and Principal Investigator on the European Research Council project Sound Knowledge. Alternative Epistemologies of Music in the Western Pacific Island World.

Acknowledgments

Music Worlding in Palau: An Introduction
Meaningfulness
Music Worlding
Intensity
Atmospheres
This Book
Music Worlding in Palau
Music Worlding in Palau: The Background

1 Latmikaik’s Children and Their Music
Palau
North Atlantic narratives of Palauan history
Meaningfulness
Schmitz on Meaningfulness
Surfaceless: Beyond the Binaries
Musical Meaning | Musical Meaningfulness
Musical Meaningfulness and Atmospheres

2 Vaguely Specific: Resonant Historicity with Chesóls
Chesols Meaningfulness
Suggestions of Motion
Sound’s History Lives on
Intensity: A Closer Look
Musical Meaningfulness as Latently Historical
Conclusion

3 Listening with the Dancing Body: Ruk and Movement’s Incipiency
A Sense of Klebelau: Going through the Motions
The Body Complex and Sound
Schmitz and the Threshold
Preacceleration | Suggestions of Motion
The Dance of the Not-Yet in New Phenomenological Perspective: mSuggestions of
Motion in Palauan Ruk
Body percussion
Group shouts
Rhythmic layering and densification
Conclusion: The Body in Sound and Motion

4 “Rak, Where Is He Now?” Presence | Present
Present, Presence, Meaningfulness
Omengeredakl
Sense Effects | Presence Effects
Music, Meaning, and Meaningfulness
Meaningfully Present

5 Resonance: Co-Becoming with Sound
Ngerulmud 2006: The Mother Bat
Resonance
Resonance: Conceptual Implications
Revisiting the Mother Bat
Conclusion

6 Of Magic and Meaningfulness : Chelitákl Rechuódel and the Felt-bodily Dimensions of Spiritual Practice
Magic | Olai
Present-day Magic
Magically Meaningful

Conclusion

Glossary

Bibliography

Index