Iacobus Leodiensis [Iacobus de Montibus, Iacobus de Oudenaerde]

(ii) National and regional culture.

As Indonesia has only been an independent nation for half a century, and indeed has only existed with its present boundaries for the last 100 or so years (since the Dutch achieved full control over the archipelago), the question arises of what exactly ‘Indonesian culture’ is. If the notion requires the existence of an Indonesia, then nothing created before about 1900 can be considered Indonesian; alternatively, Indonesian culture could be considered to be whatever has developed, over thousands of years, among hundreds of ethnic groups, on the thousands of islands now grouped together as Indonesia. These issues have provoked extensive and unresolved debate (Mihardja, 2/1977).

Government statements and policies on national culture are ambiguous and contradictory (see Yampolsky, 1995). On the one hand, the government claims the so-called ‘peaks of culture’ of the many ethnic groups of modern Indonesia as part of the national heritage. On the other, according to critics, the government's cultural engineering policies and programmes to ‘preserve’ and ‘foster’ the ‘traditional’ (that is, in this context, ethnic, or ‘regional’) arts show a low regard for the arts themselves as traditionally practised and a distrust of the ethnic identity and ethnic pride they symbolize and affirm (see Widodo, 1995 and Yampolsky, 1995). The government also discountenances the so-called ‘animist’ religions with which traditional arts are often associated. Indonesians are pressured to adopt instead one of the five world religions: Islam, Christianity (counted as two: Catholicism and Protestantism), Hinduism and Buddhism. Unless an indigenous belief-system can be interpreted as a form of one of the world religions, its adherents are described as ‘not yet having a religion’.

Many Indonesians outside the government are equally uncertain about the value of traditional culture, which is often seen as backward and (in the eyes of those who have accepted Islam or Christianity) heathen. Moreover, shared nationality has apparently not broken down musical barriers. With a few short-lived exceptions (e.g. Sundanese jaipongan and Minangkabau-language hiburan daerah; see §VIII, 1 below), attempts by the entertainment industry and the government to disseminate the music of one ethnic group to the rest of the country have failed, especially when the music in question is sung in a regional language rather than the lingua franca, Indonesian.

Even if traditional arts are in principle accepted as an element of Indonesia's national culture, they are not shared by or known to all Indonesians. In music, a paradoxical situation has arisen: since no indigenous musical idiom or instrumentation is accepted by all Indonesians, any ‘national’ music must use foreign idioms and instruments, i.e. those of Western and, to a lesser extent, Middle Eastern music. The result is that the only kinds of music accepted throughout Indonesia are the various forms of ‘national’ popular music, which are sung in Indonesian and are not tied to specific ethnic groups. A related paradox is that in a country where nearly three-quarters of the population lives in rural areas, the music with the highest prestige and widest dissemination is the urban popular music of the cities, particularly Jakarta.

Within their home regions and ethnic groups, however, traditional musics survive and, in some cases, thrive. Often where one of the officially-sanctioned world religions has become dominant, an accommodation has been reached with traditional culture, permitting traditional practices (including music) so long as they do not violate the tenets of the world religion. Such accommodations favour secular entertainment forms of traditional music, the sort that might be performed to celebrate weddings, circumcisions or community anniversaries. Typically, traditional music is enjoyed and supported more by the middle-aged and old than by the young, who prefer forms of urban popular music, but there are frequent exceptions to this rule.

Indonesia, §I, 1: General: Cultural and musical geography

(iii) Musical overview.

The outline that follows of the principal kinds of music that have developed or taken root in the islands now part of Indonesia focusses on genres, contexts and musical materials (instruments are discussed in §3 below).

Indonesia is so large and fragmented that few generalizations about music can apply to the entire country. Some observations of this sort are attempted here, but attention is also given to genres and musical traits that, while not distributed over all of Indonesia, cross one or more of the major cultural or geographic boundaries within the country. Music characteristic of a single clearly bounded entity (e.g. of Kalimantan, or of the Javanese ethnic group) is discussed in the appropriate regional sections below.

Margaret Kartomi has attempted to classify the music of much of Indonesia according to periods or ‘strata’ in the music-history of the region and to identify instruments, genres and techniques characteristic of those strata (Kartomi, 1980). The principal strata she distinguishes are pre-Islamic, Islamic and post-European. This effort is related to Kunst's attempt to identify the elements of a ‘megalithic’ stratum (Kunst, 1939 and 1942), and to the interests of some scholars in determining the Austronesian foundations of Indonesian music. One objection to all such projects is that foreign musical influences have been felt in Indonesia for so long – Indian influence for perhaps 2000 years, Muslim influence for at least 1000, European influence for 500 – that they can in many cases no longer be disentangled from each other, let alone from an ‘original’ stratum. While it is true that certain features are often likely indicators of one or another strand of influence, many genres mix features from several strata. Historical classification will be avoided here in favour of identifying traits and complexes that may stand alone or in combination with others.

This survey is inevitably incomplete. Specific instances of genres of pratices discussed here have been chosen because of availability of recorded examples or because of substantial coverage in the scholarly literature (see bibliogaphy). Scholarly and popular documentation of Indonesian music has concentrated on Java and Bali and, to a much lesser extent, Sumatra. Although excellent studies of instrument construction and distribution throughout Indonesia were produced in the colonial era, the musical practice of the ‘outer islands’ (including Sumatra) was drastically under-reported until the late 1970s: there are some scattered studies from the 1920s and 30s, mostly based on brief fieldwork, overviews by Snelleman (1818) and Kunst (1946; Eng. trans. in Indonesian Music and Dance, 1994) and occasional descriptions by ethnographers, usually without much musical detail. Recordings of this period are even scarcer than written materials and often have only minimal documentation.

This situation began to change when recordings with scholarly commentary were published on music in Lombok by Seebass, East Kalimantan by Maceda and Revel-Macdonald, and Timor by Clamagirand. Further recordings with documentation have followed on North Sumatra by Kartomi and by Simon, Irian Jaya by Simon, East Kalimantan by Gorlinski, and highland South Sulawesi by Rappoport. In 1991 Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, in collaboration with the Indonesian Society for the Performing Arts (Masyarakat Seni Pertunjukan Indonesia, formed as Masyarakat Musikologi Indonesia in 1988), launched an extensive survey: the Music of Indonesia series of 20 compact discs presenting music from all over the country. Publication of another recordings series, Musik Tradisi Nusantara, was begun by the Indonesian government's Departemen Pendidikan dan Kebudayaan, in 1998.

Useful books and articles on the music of hitherto little-known areas have begun to appear, and there is a growing stream of dissertations and theses in Indonesia and abroad. In 1990 the Indonesian Society for the Performing Arts inaugurated a journal, Seni Pertunjukan Indonesia, with frequent articles by Indonesian and foreign researchers on lesser-known traditions and regions. Ethnographic attention to these regions has also heightened. Nevertheless, the picture of Indonesia's music is still sketchy and tentative. Only the ‘art’ music traditions of Java, Bali and Sunda (West Java) and some of the village traditions of these areas, can be said to be well covered.

(a) Scales and metres.

(b) Genres and ensembles.

Indonesia, §I, 1(iii): Cultural and musical geography: Overview