Music in the Fields: Constructing Narratives of the Late 19 th Century Hawaiian Plantation Cultural Landscape

Abstract

Musical lyrics can infuse semantic breath and cultural meaning to particular localities, helping to transform abstract environments into specific and definable places . Despite this, the literature of geography has been slow to conceptualize and systematically study musical lyrics as source material to decipher the social context for the production and consumption of music with any rigueur. To partially address this gap, this paper is theoretically underpinned first by more contemporary discourses on the “contested” nature intrinsic to cultural landscapes. Secondly, it draws on the small body of literature of music geography seeking to explore music as a means of exploring social-cultural contexts. Methodologically, this paper then employs discourse analysis to explore as case study the limited set of published lyrics of hole hole bushi , the music of Japanese plantation workers in late 19th century Hawai‘i. The imagined and constructed cultural landscapes of this immigrant group are extrapolated from their own lyrical narratives to show, in example, conceptual shifts in their constructions of “landscapes of desire” and “landscapes of despair.” Overall, this paper links the existing frameworks of cultural and music geography in applying musical lyrics as source material for teasing out historical narratives centered in the perception, construction, and interaction with the cultural landscapes of people in a highly contested place .

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