Music of Cook Islands

Summary

The Cook Islands form a musical region through Cook Islands Māori song, island and district ensembles, church singing, string bands and the closely connected communities of New Zealand. Rarotonga is an important gathering and recording destination, but the northern atolls and other southern islands retain their own affiliations. Pukapuka's distinct language is one reminder that neither Rarotongan nor one dance style represents everybody. Music travels with families and visiting performance parties, so this is also an island-centred network extending far beyond the mapped territory.

Its recorded repertoire ranges from Will Crummer's combination of island song and crooning to Brother Love's blues-inflected singing. The 2025 Te Maeva Nui programme placed community chants, drum dances and hymns alongside a closing concert of soloists, bands and a DJ. These different settings reveal how collective performance and commercial entertainment coexist, rather than successive stages in which one replaces the other.

Contemporary and trending

Te Maeva Nui's 2025 Constitution celebrations brought island and district groups to Rarotonga and explicitly welcomed returning families from overseas. The programme distinguished reo tupuna, ute, kapa rima and ura pa‘u, and dedicated an evening to imene tuki. Its closing Imene Mai concert advertised Brother Love, Kutia Tuteru, Savaiki, the Tauraki Sisters and others, with Lomez Brown and Rex Atirai as special guests. This is evidence of an active, varied public programme, not a survey of what residents stream most frequently.

Electronic production offers another contemporary strand. Coco House Bros' own catalogue identifies house music made in Rarotonga, including the 2024 single Mana, its 2025 Watermelon Boy remix and Our Paradise in 2025. Their published mixes connect beach and club settings with international digital distribution. The Ministry of Cultural Development also sells individual recordings of Te Maeva Nui performances online. Dance music producers and community ensembles therefore both circulate through digital channels, although with different audiences and purposes.

History

Christianity, introduced through the London Missionary Society in the nineteenth century, gave churches an enduring place in Cook Islands community life. In New Zealand, church services and island associations helped migrants maintain relationships and language; parties combined singing, guitars and ukuleles. The movement of people was particularly substantial in the later twentieth century, making overseas community halls an important part of the music's history.

Will Crummer's account supplies a more personal history of circulation. Growing up in Rarotonga, he heard his choir-leading mother, local string bands and American singers on the wireless. His preferences included Nat King Cole and Jim Reeves. After moving to New Zealand, he performed within Auckland's island social circuit and recorded for Viking in the early 1960s. Those records reached other Pacific islands, while engagements took him to Tahiti and Hawaiʻi. Employment and family responsibilities subsequently interrupted his professional career. The story connects ordinary migrant work, community entertainment and a trans-Pacific record market without treating the music as an isolated island survival.

Genres

The named performance forms make a useful first listening guide. In the 2025 festival's terminology, kapa rima is action song and ura pa‘u drum dance; reo tupuna identifies traditional chant, while imene tuki occupies a distinct hymn programme. The separation matters: a percussion-led dance presentation and a massed vocal performance organize participation differently, even when the same community supplies both.

Pate slit-drumming gives dance ensembles an immediately recognizable percussive component; string-band and party singing instead foreground voices with strummed accompaniment. Brother Love adds another texture: his label describes a rough-edged voice, ukulele introductions and a mixture of blues with Cook Islands song. His movement between English and Cook Islands Māori illustrates adaptation through language as well as rhythm. House singles and DJ mixes belong to a further, explicitly electronic category. These are useful points of contrast within the region, not fixed rules about the taste of a particular island or generation.

Artists

Will Crummer's Shoebox Love Songs marked a return to recording in 2011, drawing attention again to the songs he had carried from Rarotonga. His daughter Annie participated in the renewed performance career. Annie Crummer's wider work includes Language and Seventh Wave, her contribution to Netherworld Dancing Toys' For Today, and When the Cat's Away. Her career belongs to New Zealand popular music as well as Cook Islands family history; the connection does not require every recording to sound like a drum-dance ensemble.

Brother Love, Rahui Vaka, moved from rock drumming into the string band Sunset Special before developing his solo career with producer Noo Pare. His recording Ruketekete Te Mamae, also associated with the name Roimata, is a useful starting point for his repertoire; the label's account emphasizes blues and his multilingual delivery. Collective creators deserve comparable recognition. The Ministry's 2025 performance catalogue names ensembles such as A‘ua‘u Enua and Vaka Takitumu, preserving the group identity attached to a performance instead of presenting all traditional music as anonymous.

Boundary definition and research

The approved map includes the Cook Islands as a whole. It is an editorial overview of an archipelago whose music is connected through institutions, language relationships, festivals and migration. It should not be read as a single Rarotongan sound spread uniformly over every atoll. The distinctions between northern and southern islands, and between Rarotongan and Pukapukan language communities, remain important within it.

New Zealand and Australia lie outside this outline even though performers, family audiences and recordings continually cross those boundaries. A geographic map cannot express that network fully. The evidence used here combines community history, musicians' recollections, an official festival programme and published catalogues. Programme listings establish that repertoires were presented; label descriptions establish intended style and recorded work. Neither supplies island-by-island listener shares, and no such rankings are implied.