ABSTRACT
Most recordings of Oceanic music remain unpublished. These include, beginning i n 1893, thousands of wax cylinders, housed mainly in archives around the world. The latest large-scale recording effort is sponsored by U N E S C O , which has so far made a dozen territorial surveys [see ARCHIVES A N D INSTITUTIONAL RESOURCES: Aotearoa]. Commercial releases include those made and distributed by museums (Basel, Berlin, Paris, Hawai ' i ) , Smithsonian Folkways, the Australian Institute of Aborig inal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, and record companies i n Australia and the Pacific Islands. The most prolific L P labels were Hibiscus and V i k i n g . The latter listed more than four hundred albums. A n important series derives from the Pacific Festivals o f Ar t , especially the first festival (1972), from which V i k i n g published ten "spectaculars "—LP disks of music by ensembles from the Solomon Islands, K i r iba t i , F i j i , Tonga, American Samoa, Niue , Tuvalu, and the C o o k Islands, and a disk of musical highlights of the festival. The sixth festival resulted in the cassette Visions of the Pacific (1992), plus a lavishly illustrated coffee-table book and videos.
