Kittoro

One from a group of Roro natives, eastern Papua New Guinea
14 x 11 inches, oil on silver ground on canvas, 2019

According to the Roro of Papua New Guinea (and many other peoples) ceremonial songs contain magical power. The particular Kittoro song illustrated here was given to the Roro by a friendly tribe from Rigo. The Roro live 130 miles further east on Yule Island in Eastern Papua New Guinea. The Rigo group can't perform the song anymore as it now belongs to the Roro. Jaap Kunst of the Indische Museum in Amsterdam introduces the song on The Columbia World Library of Folk and Primitive Music (Vol. 7: Indonesia) but quotes from Father Dupeyrat who recorded the song in 1951 in Tsiria on Yule Island. Kunst talks at length about magico-religious qualities of indigenous music in a lecture given at The Smithsonian Institute in 1959, but does not comment on the question if the magic is still contained in the recorded version (eight years old at the time and now 68 years later.) Don't get me wrong, I truly love this song but the magic doesn't work for me.