Musical, poetic, and linguistic form in tom yaya sung narratives from Papua New Guinea

Alan Rumsey, Australian National University/Stanford

Across a large area of Highland Papua New Guinea the
indigenous expressive arts include genres of sung narrative.
My presentation concerns one such genre, tom yaya kange,
as performed in the Ku Waru region of the Western Highlands
Province. Tom yaya kange are diverse in form and content,
but share in common a clear division into audibly distinct
lines of matching length, and organization of these lines
into repeating melodic cycles. I will describe and exemplify
three variants of this structure, with differing melodies
and line types (two of them pentameter and the other
hexameter). Drawing in part on Halle and Lerdahl's model
of textsetting, I will attempt to develop a set of constraints
to account for the ways in which the language of the Ku Waru
narrative is adapted to fit the tom yaya poetic and
musical form.