Tom Yaya Kange: Highland Voices

For at least 10,000 years, the high mountain valleys of New Guinea have been the most densely populated part of the island. But because of the difficulty of getting there, they remained isolated from the outside world until the 1930s. Among the most striking features of the cultural scene there are its musical ways of telling stories. Composed and performed by specialist bards, these ‘sung tales’ are remarkable for their virtuosity, and for the range of variation that is found among regional genres and individual styles. The focus of this website is one of those genres–tom yaya kange–which is found near the southeastern corner of this map. The site includes audio recordings of five tom yaya kange performances, each by a different bard, annotated line-by-line translations, and a brief plot summary of each story. Also included are a detailed introduction to the tom yaya kange genre, a list of publications about it and other genres of sung tales within the Papua New Guinea highlands, and a video (see below) of a tom yaya kange performance.