Music—Indonesia
The thousands of islands in Indonesia have been home to its mainly Malayo-Polynesian ethnic groups and musical practices since prehistoric times. The broadly similar musical instruments, performance practices, and music-generating concepts throughout the archipelago are partly due to use of the Malay lingua franca and constant sea and land contact over the millennia.
Culturally, the ethnic groups can be classified as uplanders and lowlanders. Uplanders (for example, the Torajans of South Sulawesi, the Dani in Papua, and the Batak, Kerinci, and Basemah of the mountainous backbone of Sumatra) speak diverse local languages and are mostly nomadic or seminomadic hunters and gatherers who adhere to ancestral and nature-venerating (animist) beliefs and practices, or, from the seventeenth century, to a blend of Christianity and animism. Each performs ritual-associated songs (for healing, lamenting, soothing, war making, celebrating life events, and so forth) and self-expressive songs (for example, for love, courting, raising one's morale while in the forest), often playing portable musical instruments (for example, flutes, Jew's harps, and drums).
Lowlanders, who are mainly Muslim wet-rice farmers, gardeners, and fishers, have a great trading and seafaring culture. Each group has its own instrumental ensembles and vocal styles, and many have their own music-theatrical traditions. Examples include Javanese wayang (shadow puppet theater), magical songs, such as solo kapri songs of coastal northwestern Sumatra, and many Muslim-associated forms. Some minority Chinese, Arab, Indian, and other immigrant communities practice musical forms from their cultural heritage or practice syncretic forms. As the reliefs on the eighth-century Buddhist Borobudur and the ninth-century Hindu Prambanan temples in lowland Java indicate, musical ensembles comprising gongs, drums, xylophones, and flutes already existed during the period 400–900 CE; their aesthetic remains Hindu-Buddhist. In southern Sumatra, the Srivijaya empire (flourished from the seventh through the eighth centuries) brought Buddhism to various areas, whereas in central Java the Majapahit empire (1200–1500) continued the Hindu tradition, giving way from around the 1400s to Islam, with communities in Java, Sumatra, Kalimantan, the Moluccas, and beyond being governed by sultanates. The main surviving musical expressions of Hinduism today are the gamelan (Indonesian percussion orchestra) ensembles and vocal music of Java, West Java, and Bali. Associated with Hindu-Balinese religious functions and theater forms, the latter have been performed for centuries at temple festivals, street processions, cremations, and other life-event ceremonies.
Music and the Natural Environment
That music everywhere reflects the natural environment is widely apparent, as in Javanese gara-gara gamelan music, which depicts natural turbulences during the middle section of the Javanese wayang or wayang orang (human theater) night. The materials of which the puppets, theatrical properties, and musical instruments are made—mainly leather, bronze, iron, wood, and bamboo—are determined by local flora, fauna, and metals, while traditional farming and socioreligious practices provide the contexts for their artistic usage. Bronze, known to have been made in mainland Southeast Asia from about 3000 BCE, was brought to Indonesia during the period 300–200 BCE; remnants of bronze Dong-son era (400 BCE–200 CE) "kettledrums" have been found in Java, Sumatra, and the Moluccas. Around 200–100 BCE, bronze gongs are thought to have been made in Java and other islands, ranging from large hanging gongs to gong chimes and bronze metallophones. Gongs of various alloys and sizes are still made, for example, for iron gamelans in central Java and for the brass talempong (gong chime and drum) ensembles used in Minangkabau (on the western coast of the central portion of Sumatra). Varieties of bamboo and wood found ubiquitously are used to make tuned slabs of keys for trough, leg, and frame xylophones and many kinds of plucked lutes, flutes, oboes, mouth organs, board and tube zithers, Jew's harps, bullroarers, slit drums, shaken idiophones (an instrument that is naturally sonorous and that may be shaken, struck, plucked, or rubbed), and stamping poles. Conical, truncated conical, cylindrical, hourglass-shaped, and other shaped wooden drums with buffalo or goat skins occur in many sizes, producing various drum timbres when beaten with hands, fingers, or sticks.
Ensemble Music
Ensembles minimally comprise drums, gongs, and an optional melodic instrument or voice. The gamelans of Java and Bali combine various sizes of drums, gongs, metallophones, xylophones, cymbals, zithers, plucked lutes, bowed strings, and solo or group vocal parts, or both. Textures usually comprise layers of musical parts (stratification), each performed idiomatically for the particular instrument or human voice and combining to produce composite rhythms and melodies in binary meter by sharing (interlocking, or colotomic) parts. Mostly tuned in pentatonic (fivet-one) slendro and heptatonic (seven-tone) pelog occurring in several modes (pathet) ( Javanese terms), they feature (1) a rhythmic, tempo-controlling drumming part, (2) a repeated fixed melody at walking pace on the slab metallophones, (3) slower-moving interlocking parts on the hanging and horizontal bossed gongs, and (4) more densely ornamented parts on the gong chimes, softer metallophones, spike fiddle, flute, and vocal parts. Interlocking also governs the practice of many other ensembles, including gender wayang quartets in a Balinese shadow play, the long wooden pole-beating on stones in Minangkabau, and the thunderous gordang sembilan (nine-drum ensemble) played with gongs, cymbals, and oboe in Mandailing ( just above Minangkabau on Sumatra). In addition, strict- or free-meter narrative story-telling, histories, or genealogies, with or without instrumental accompaniment, are performed, as are ritual songs of love and courting, laments, lullabies, magical shamans' songs, songs for and by children, and work songs.
Popular Music
Kroncong music (which originated via sixteenth-century contact with Portuguese traders and features vocal soloists, string instruments, and flute) and orkes Melayu ("Malay band," which originated in the early twentieth century and includes vocalists, strings or harmonium, and drums) still accompany couples dancing and also serve as progenitors of modern popular forms. Thus dangdut, Indonesia's main contribution to the world's popular music from the 1970s, developed from orkes Melayu, combining Indonesian texts and styles with electrified Western rock and pop and featuring a distinctive rhythm often heard in Indian film music. Other popular forms adopted since the introduction of radio, television, and cassette technology and consumed by all social classes contribute to the lucrative domestic and foreign commodity industry, including the indigenous Sundanese popular genre jaipongan (with a female singer-dancer and small gamelan) and various fusions of regional and Western popular elements that express youthful rebellion, social criticism, and love themes. Meanwhile, from the 1970s, avantgarde composers created new music, largely based on traditional forms, for specialized audiences.
Further Reading
Becker, Judith. (1980) Traditional Music in Modern Java: Gamelan in a Changing Society. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.
Becker, Judith, and Alan Feinstein, eds. (1984, 1987, 1988) Karawitan: Source Readings in Javanese Gamelan and Vocal Music. Ann Arbor: Center for South and Southeast Asian Studies, University of Michigan.
Frederick, William H. (1982) "Rhoma Irama and the Dangdut Style: Aspects of Contemporary Indonesian Popular Culture." Indonesia 34: 103–130.
Kartomi, Margaret. (1998) "Sumatra," "Sulawesi," and "Maluku." In The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music: Southeast Asia, edited by Terry E. Miller and Sean Williams. New York: Garland Publishing, 598–629, 804–811, 812–822.
Kunst, Jaap. (1973) Music in Java: Its History, Its Theory, and Its Technique. The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff.
McPhee, Colin. (1966) Music in Bali: A Study in Form and Instrumental Organization in Balinese Orchestral Music. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Sutton, R. Anderson. (1991) Traditions of Gamelan Music in Java: Musical Pluralism and Regional Identity. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.
Sutton, R. Anderson, Endo Suanda, and Sean Williams. (1998) "Java." In The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music: Southeast Asia, edited by Terry E. Miller and Sean Williams. New York: Garland Publishing, 630–728.
Tenzer, Michael. (1991) Balinese Music. Singapore: Periplus Editions.
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