Weavers of Song: Polynesian Music and Dance (review)

Abstract

Following just three years after Mervyn McLean's Maori Music (1996) presented the culmination of the main focus of his distinguished research career, another major work, his Weavers of Song, presents the culmination of his studies in the music and dance of Polynesia at large. In contrast to Maori Music, a work informed by both extensive fieldwork with Maori bearers of the tradition and published sources,Weavers of Song relies almost entirely on the latter. McLean became well acquainted with works on Oceania through his extensive bibliographical research that previously led to An Annotated Bibliography ofOceanic Music and Dance (1977), a supplement (1981), and a revised and enlarged second edition [End Page 503] (1995). In his approach to understanding music, he considers transcription and structural analysis essential,and hestates that this book is "unabashedly comparative even though there are gaps in information" (vii). In spite of these premises, he intends the book "for the general reader as much as for specialists" (viii) and helpfully provides both a guide to the special symbols employed in some of the music transcriptions (viii) and a glossary of European-language musical terms in an appendix (468-473).