Gerd Koch
He collaborated with Dieter Christensen, a music-ethnologist, on The Music of the Ellice Islands (German: Die Musik der Ellice-Inseln) (1964) and Koch also published the Songs of Tuvalu (translated by Guy Slatter) (2000).
After he completed his secondary school leaving examination his family could not afford to send him to university so he became an apprentice salesman at the Pelikan fountain pen company in Hanover.
[2] In 1951 he obtained the support of the Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft (Emergency Association of German Science) to carry out field work on cultural change in the Kingdom of Tonga from October 1951 to June 1952.
[2] He received assisted from the Crown Prince (later King Tāufaʻāhau Tupou IV) who arranged for Koch to stay with relatives on Nomuka in the Ha'apai group of islands.
During this expedition Koch also carried out research and made further documentary films in Fiji (in the Sigatoka region) and in Samoa (in Falealupo on the western tip of Savai'i).
[5] Koch visited the atolls of Nanumaga, Nukufetau and Niutao, which resulted in his publication of a book on the material culture of the Ellice Islands.
[8] Koch filmed men of Niutao engaged in mock battles in which traditional styles of combat and self-defence called failima were displayed.
[13] From November 1966 to the end of February 1967 he undertook field studies in the Pacific, spending several weeks on Gazelle Peninsula in New Britain and in the Maprik District of East Sepik Province in Papua New Guinea (PNG).
Significant artefacts that he brought back to the Ethnological Museum of Berlin were the gable roof of a large meeting house from the East Sepik Province and the last still complete Tepukei (ocean-going outrigger canoe) from the Santa Cruz Islands.
[2] In the 1970s Gerd Koch and Klaus Helfrich, who subsequently became the Director of the Berlin Museum, attempted to get funding from the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG)) for an inter-discipline project to carry out field work in the Papua Province of New Guinea belonging to Indonesia, near the border with Papua New Guinea, which Europeans has not visited, and which in the 1970s had become a focus for Christian evangelists.
Gerd Koch brought his life to a self-determined end on 19 April 2005 off the coast of Newfoundland when travelling by boat to New York.
[17] The Ethnological Museum of Berlin also holds approximately 12,000 photos and an extensive collection of audio tapes (including music-ethnological material) recorded by Koch.
