SOUNDS OF SUMATRA

Vigilance in verse  

   

There’s a buffalo thief abroad. Be on guard. We need a plan.  It must be good. Best recruit a seer who can spirit a tiger.

Those lyrics in Minangkabau were sung and played by New Zealand ethnomusicologist Dr Megan Collins as part of her initiation into the mysteries of West Sumatran music.  They were composed as an exercise in imagining a potential threat.

A tuneful community alert.  A song instead of a siren.

Government orders, official posters and stern pronouncements about dangers by grim men in uniforms have their place, but nothing comes within a chord of a memorable ditty.

In 1907 an earthquake and tsunami killed thousands who rushed to the beach in Simeulue Island [150 kilometers off the west coast of Aceh] to collect fish when the ocean retreated. The survivors wrote and recited the song, which became part of the local folklore.

“Spreading important safety messages through music storylines continues,” Collins said.

“It was effective when the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami hit.  Only seven islanders from a population of 78,000 on Simeulue perished.”

Elsewhere more than 250,000 coastal dwellers in 14 countries were swept away.  The heaviest death toll was in Aceh where about 170,000 died.

Even earlier, memories of the gigantic 1883 Krakatau volcanic explosion in Sunda Strait, which killed an estimated 36,000, have also been preserved in verse.

Collins is an expert on the music of the rabab pasisia selatan.  She says the instrument looks like a baroque violin, though purists who think only a Stradivarius is worth caressing with a horse-hair bow might label it a folk fiddle.

Which isn’t far wrong.  “It’s the people’s instrument,” Collins said.  “It’s made in the villages by craftsmen.  The music is usually heard at weddings and other community events, often accompanied by a flute and a singer.

The rabab’s ancestor may have been the European violin carried by Portuguese or Dutch sailors centuries ago. Collins, who has studied organology, the science of musical instruments, says its provenance is still unproven.

Perhaps a nostalgic minstrel mariner off a three-masted Dutch fluyt and fiddled to remind him of another land. A Minangkabau person was drawn to friendship by the music, which happens in a perfect universe, and was gifted the violin.

Of course it could have been acquired through robbery, not romance, but we digress.

For more than two years in the 1990s Collins studied the music of the Minangkabau at the Indonesian Arts Institute in the West Sumatran capital of Padangpanjang.  Her doctoral fieldwork with masters of the art was in Pesisir Selatan village on the coast.

The rabab is not played like the violin with the musician standing or sitting, but by squatting cross-legged.  It can’t be held hands free under the chin.  It’s a four-string fiddle though only two are played; one lies slack while the other has mystical powers which some claim to be curative.

The instrument is often played by dukun the traditional healers and spirit mediums

Collins modestly claims she has still to reach the level where she can understand the instrument’s supposed magic qualities.

In the meantime Collins’ skills can entice and enchant Kiwis who hear her CDs, play in concerts or on national radio where she’s performed in six one-hour programs featuring the sounds of Sumatra. 

Collins was raised in a musical family that traces its ancestors back to mid 19^th century migrations from Ireland, England and Scotland.  As a child she was “a closet bagpipe fan girl” but instead learned the piano and violin.

Now her mission is to “exoticize music, to get rid of its orientalism” so it speaks to all whatever their ethnicity or national allegiance.

And Indonesians can enjoy her talents too when she tours Java in mid 2016 with the Wellington-based Gamelan Padhang Moncar playing in Yogya, Solo and Malang.

Collins, 43, now manages the gamelan, a role entrusted to her by Professor Jack Body who died earlier this year.  He led the orchestra on a tour of Java in 1993 when Collins was one of the players.

“That kicked off my enthusiasm for Indonesia,” she said. “I won a Darmasiswa Indonesian Government scholarship.  Java was too crowded which didn’t suit a Kiwi country girl, so I went to Padangpanjang. 

“Apart from a few tourists passing through I was the only foreigner.  I lived with a local family so became immersed in the language and culture.” 

Her initiation included rubbing her fingers with limes over an open fire to make her hands supple. She is now fluent in Indonesian and Minangkabau, which she prides herself on speaking with the accent of a native speaker.

Don’t assume all this is esoteric stuff for oldies and academics.  Sumatra’s sounds survive because they’ve adapted, embracing pop and dangdut the throbbing amalgam of Middle Eastern and Indian music.

“Minangkabau music isn’t rare, it’s popular,” Collins said. “It’s played on television and radio and uploaded to YouTube.  A song about a  flash flood that took out a major highway has been viewed more than 50,000 times.

“Siril Asmara’s VCD Sum-Bar Mananggih [West Sumatra Weeps] about other natural disasters following the 2004 tsunami sold 15,000 copies in 2013.  Composing and playing music can have a cathartic effect.”

Collins is now cooperating with NZ geomorphologist Dr Noel Trustrum and Indonesian scientists to produce a multi-media book on preparing for emergencies; it’s based on the principle that local oral wisdom trumps imported knowledge.

Trustrum has worked on aid projects in Indonesia including Aceh and recently published a book of photos and essays about the restoration of Banda Aceh and the resilience of its people.

“Messages can be locally generated, changed and moved between genres,” Collins said.  “They are an amazing way to create awareness and remember the tragedies of the past.

“Think of the Western children’s song Twinkle, twinkle little star. We all know the tune.  Now swap lyrics or create new ones. The rabab is ideal for this because it’s a story-telling instrument.”

(First published in The Jakarta Post Friday 2 October 2015)

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JACK BODY: Kiwi master of Indonesian music

Jack Body
Interpreting Indonesia’s sensuality through the Bard © Duncan Graham 2008

Living in one of the most isolated Western countries in the world requires adjustments and rituals. For Pakeha (white Kiwis) one essential has long been the big trip abroad known colloquially as OE, or overseas experience.

This journey, mainly to explore the northern hemisphere and seek the family’s roots, is an important part of the culture of New Zealand, a country still searching for its identity.

Young musicologist Jack Body was no exception. He’d already graduated with a masters degree from Auckland University and won a prestigious arts fellowship. In the late 1960s he headed for Europe where he studied in Cologne and at the Institute of Sonology at Utrecht.

Then he took the long way home wandering through Europe and South-East Asia with his mind and microphone open. The last stop was Indonesia.

“I was an innocent abroad and I knew next to nothing about the country,” he said. “I’d already been to India and was intrigued by the music I’d heard in the streets and villages.

“But Indonesia was quite different. By comparison I found India to be harsh. In Indonesia I started recording the sounds I heard, like other people take photographs of their travels.

“I followed my ears. I recorded birds, animals, street sounds, music. I was fascinated by the fantastic richness of the culture. I liked the way that people took things easily. They couldn’t be bothered to get hot and bothered.

“What attracted me most? The sensuality.”

Back in NZ Body transcribed some of the music he’d collected, a laborious task but one he thought necessary to understand what he’d heard. He also knew he needed more of the seductive archipelago.

In 1976 he scored a guest lectureship at the Akademi Musik Indonesia in Yogyakarta where he stayed for two years. On his return home he joined the academic staff of the School of Music at Wellington’s Victoria University where he’s now an associate professor.

He’s been a featured composer in the US and Holland, a widely exhibited photographer and he also runs a music publisher called Waiteata Music Press. His speciality has been cross-cultural compositions and experimental electro-acoustics.

In these jobs he’s set out to bring the music of Asia, and Indonesia in particular, to the attention of Kiwis and he’s done this with such success that he’s won a swag of awards, including a NZ Order of Merit in the 2001 Honors List. The following year his recordings titled Pulse won the NZ Music Award for the Best New Classical CD.

And all the time he’s been promoting Indonesian culture, along the way collecting a set of Javanese gamelan instruments for his university donated by Ibu Tien Soeharto, the wife of the late Indonesian president.

This year he’s been back to Indonesia twice, recording music played by the soldiers of the kraton (palace) in Yogyakarta. He said the music was an intriguing and ancient European-derived mix of fifes, drums and other instruments performed by men in quaint uniforms whose origins could well be the topic of a PhD.

Body’s work isn’t the only way Kiwis are learning more about Indonesia. He’s organized numerous residencies in Wellington for Indonesian artists and praised the Indonesian government for offering a range of cultural scholarships for structured three-month arts programs. These are expected to be enhanced later this year when an agreement between Indonesia and NZ is signed allowing young people from both countries to get work visas.

Now 64 Body shows no sign of going stale, repetitive or monotone. If he followed the Shakespeare formula he’d be ‘the lean and slippered pantaloon’ but he moves, physically and intellectually, as nimbly as his students.

He has the quirky mannerisms of a long-time creative artist living in a parallel universe where music rules. While he has to be involved in teaching and university administration his mind seems to be somewhere else, pulling sounds and ideas together for some future fusion.

His latest production (“exhilarating, the most ambitious I’ve ever done”), staged with help from the Indonesian Embassy in NZ and the Asia-NZ Foundation, was the Seven Ages of Man, a ‘cross-cultural, multi-media music theater’ piece based on Shakespeare’s famous lines in All’s Well That Ends Well:

All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages.

Body’s idea was to mix bits of the Bard in English with music from the Javanese gamelan and a Balinese gamelan, plus an electric violin, four vocalists singing in Javanese and Balinese, and have the lot interpreted in dance and puppetry.

Translation of the Shakespeare was not without difficulties. The verse about the soldier ‘full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,’ caused problems.

“In Shakespeare’s time most of the military were mercenaries, but in Indonesia being a soldier is an elitist occupation,” said Body. “We had to make some adjustments in the language.

”Many people in the English-speaking world have been taught the Seven Ages of Man and I found Indonesians related well to the sentiments.”

The composers included the Javanese gamelan director Budi Putra (originally from Solo but now a NZ resident) and the Balinese gamelan director I Wayan Gde Yudane. Most of the gamelan players were university students and staff, including Jack Body.

In the wrong hands this could have become a real dog’s breakfast, but in fact it worked brilliantly on every level – emotional, imaginative and creative.

There were several reasons; the inclusion of the masked multi-talented Balinese dalang (puppet master) I Nyoman Sukerta as a musician, singer, dancer and actor, was a masterstroke.

So was a lighting system that included a haze machine, recreating in the Wellington timber studio the misty, musty, dusty, mysterious, spooky, smoky and almost tangible atmosphere found in villages and kampongs of Indonesia come nightfall. The only thing absent was the scent of clove cigarettes, for NZ takes its anti-smoking laws seriously.

“The reception has been great,” said the exuberant ethnomusicologist. “I love this synthesis – I’ve long wanted to use dance and now I’ve got the theater bug. We’re hoping to take the production on tour around NZ, maybe even to Indonesia. That would be terrific.”

(First published in The Jakarta Post 11 November 2008)

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