Surviving Traditional Music
Traditional music is preserved (though how faithfully we can only guess) in the set pieces performed at royal and noble weddings and funerals, and in the song sung during the traditional ceremony of apology, the lou-ifi.
Radio Tonga begins each day's broadcast with a recording from Veʻehala, a nobleman and celebrated virtuoso of the nose flute. The nose flute is otherwise rarely heard. Contemporary youth prefers the guitar.
Some ancient dances are still performed, such as ula, ʻotuhaka and meʻetuʻupaki.
The lali or slit-gong, is still in use—as a substitute for a church bell by congregations that cannot afford a bell.
Read more about this topic: Music Of Tonga
Famous quotes containing the words surviving, traditional and/or music:
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—Samuel Butler (1835–1902)
“The invention of photography provided a radically new picture-making process—a process based not on synthesis but on selection. The difference was a basic one. Paintings were made—constructed from a storehouse of traditional schemes and skills and attitudes—but photographs, as the man on the street put, were taken.”
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“Who that has heard a strain of music feared then lest he should speak extravagantly any more forever?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)