Rapa Nui: Keys to the Island

The Toki Music School rises gracefully from the slopes of Rapa Nui, blending so seamlessly with the landscape that it appears natural. A distinctively squat structure, the heptagonal building has sloping roofs covered with moss and adobe walls plastered with glass bottles. Constructed from over 2,500 used tyres and 60,000 cans and bottles, the world’s most remote music school stands out for its uniqueness, where music education is interwoven with an environmental ethos.

The school was born from a long-held vision of classical pianist Mahani Teave, who grew up on Rapa Nui, also known as Easter Island. Situated around 2,300 miles from Chile, the country that governs the island, Rapa Nui is one of the most remote inhabited places in the world. Needless to say, large, heavy instruments like pianos were hard to come by. Teave remembers when the first piano arrived on the island in the 1990s after a retired German missionary shipped one in: “I was nine, and I ran to her house and said, ‘Please teach me!’”

Teave admits that nine years old is quite “old” for classical pianists to begin learning. “Most start at two, three or four years old,” yet that did not deter her from pursuing the instrument professionally. When the German teacher left the island – taking her piano with her – the young Teave decided to change her life completely to keep playing the instrument she loved.

She moved to southern Chile and studied under Ximena Cabello at the Valdivia Conservatory. At 19, she moved to Cleveland, US to work with Sergei Babayan. After a four-year stint in Berlin and performing in high-profile venues across the world, she felt a pull to return to her Pacific homeland.

But the island still didn’t have a piano.

“I could never stay long, as there were no pianos, and I couldn’t practice,” she says. “It was unfortunate, as the island has such a musical culture. Everyone is an artist; they can pick up a guitar and play it, or create percussion with rocks.” With a few friends and help from the Itaú Foundation, she was able to dispatch two pianos to the island. From there, the idea for a music school began to take root: “We decided to look for funding. The concept was free education for kids.”

The NGO Toki Music School was born in 2012 by eight founding members: architects, lawyers and musicians, including Teave – most of whom grew up on the island. “This is the dream school that many of us wished to have had back then,” she says. “Not only teaching music but being aware of music’s importance in cultivating values: perseverance, tolerance, respect, all that effort. To sing out, speak out—what that does for a child’s self-esteem.”

This year, a group from the school (whose children range in age from five to 17) sing to a crowd of a thousand people during the main event at the island’s annual week-long Tapati festival, which celebrates Rapa Nui’s culture and traditions. Dressed in traditional clothes and performing with ukuleles and palm claps, the children sing an original Toki-composed song about the passage of birds and the importance of nature.

The Toki musicians make appearances throughout the festival. In the Umu ceremony, meat and sweet potatoes are heaped into an earth oven and covered by banana leaves, feeding hundreds in the community. Teave and a dozen children gather beside the smouldering heap and perform a song to bless the food before it is served. Toki’s performances during the Tapati events underscore the school’s importance in continuing cultural tradition while also introducing formal education. This reflects the two main educational areas of the school: classical and ancestral. Classical focuses on reading music, ear training and orchestra practice, while the ancestral seeks to preserve culture through classes taught in the Rapa Nui language. “At the moment we offer dance, ancestral chant, ukulele and percussion,” says Teave.

The Rapa Nui are a Polynesian people; their culture shares stronger ties with island neighbours such as Hawaii than with Chile, which annexed the island in 1888. Indigenous customs were prohibited and stamped out by European missionaries during the colonial time, and diseases and slave traders caused the island’s native population to dwindle to a scant 111 people by the late 19th century.

Music and tradition continue to be an act of resistance on an island known for its enigmatic moai, carved in pre-colonial times by islanders to represent their ancestors. “Toki is the tool that was used to carve the moai, so the name is a metaphor,” Teave says. “We each are a toki while we are alive, we can carve a present, a legacy which we want to leave for our society.”

The island’s values of looking to the past to preserve the future are core to the Toki school. That’s why providing education that equally nurtures the environment around it is so important. Teave consulted “radical sustainability” engineer Micheal Reynolds to create his earthship bio-construction alongside 70 international volunteers and the local team. It took over a year to complete the school, which is powered by solar panels and is off-grid, able to store 40,000 litres of rainwater.

Rapa Nui is grappling with climate and environmental challenges, including historic droughts and rising sea levels while facing an onslaught of the world’s plastic waste washing up on its shores. For a small island of 7,000 people, it’s a constant struggle. Toki strives to sustain its resources, ensuring that music is accessible for future generations. “This NGO is hoping to achieve even the smallest change: teaching children to take care of each other. What we need is more love. That’s all it is. If we love each other more, we’ll love our planet more.”

This article originally appeared in the August/September 2024 issue of Songlines. Never miss an issue – subscribe today