Austronesian Soundscapes: Performing Arts in Oceania and Southeast Asia (original) (raw)
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(ed.) Austronesian Soundscapes. Performing Arts in Southeast Asia and Oceania
The IIAS Publications Series consists of Monographs and Edited Volumes. The Series publishes results of research projects conducted at the International Institute for Asian Studies. Furthermore, the aim of the Series is to promote interdisciplinary studies on Asia and comparative research on Asia and Europe. The International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS) is a postdoctoral research centre based in Leiden and Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Its objective is to encourage the interdisciplinary and comparative study of Asia and to promote national and international cooperation. The institute focuses on the humanities and social sciences and, where relevant, on their interaction with other sciences. It stimulates scholarship on Asia and is instrumental in forging research networks among Asia scholars worldwide. IIAS acts as an international mediator, bringing various parties together, working as a clearinghouse of knowledge and information. This entails activities such as providing information services, hosting academic organisations dealing with Asia, constructing international networks, and setting up international cooperative projects and research programmes. In this way, IIAS functions as a window on Europe for non-European scholars and contributes to the cultural rapprochement between Asia and Europe. For further information, please visit www.iias.nl. Edited Volumes 4 Cover illustration: Simeon Adelbai Cover design: Maedium, Utrecht Layout: The DocWorkers, Almere ISBN 978 90 8964 085 7 e-ISBN 978 90 4850 811 2 NUR 761
Voices in Bali: Energies and Perceptions in Vocal Music and Dance Theater (review)
Asian Theatre Journal, 2002
This is an important book as much for its style as its content. While Balinese dance and instrumental music have been the subject of excellent studies in recent years, this represents the first attempt to provide Western scholars with an in-depth examination of Balinese vocal music and techniques. It contextualizes the circumstances in which this music is learned and performed and explores its philosophical, cultural, and religious underpinnings. This is accomplished by juxtaposing analysis with anecdote in a free-flowing style inspired by the writings of composer John Cage. The book includes a compact disc with recordings of musical examples used in the text, transcriptions of lyrics with translations, and a useful glossary. In her excellent foreword, Judith Becker alerts the reader to the "polyphony" of this vivid and densely packed text in which complex musicological analysis of idiomatic forms appears alongside anecdotes and diary entries of the researcher in the field. Herbst uses the tools of Western academic discourse in an effort to make the techniques of Balinese vocal music and dance-drama comprehensible to Western musicologists. Using a "fluid sense of orientation," Herbst attempts, with some success, to engage with the perceptions and energies of both cultures and reveals much about the complexities of this multivalent oral tradition. The book begins with an introduction to key concepts of Balinese aesthetics upon which Herbst bases his examination of the island's traditional vocal music. These concepts include perkembangan (creative flowering), nusup ("penetration," which comprises both physical and intellectual understanding), m a s o l a h (characterization), p e n g a l a m a n (experience), and b a y us a b d a-idep (energy-voice-perception). Among these is also the significant Balinese conceptual construct of desa-kala-patra (place-time-context) to which he devotes the first short chapter and which provides a useful touchstone throughout the book. The collective and individual meanings of these terms give a number of perspectives from which to view the analysis that follows. They refer not only to geographical space and measurable time but also imply orientation in relat i o n to s i g n i fi c a n tp h y s i c a la nd s p i r i t u a l" l a n d m a r k s "-occasion, season, microcosmic and macrocosmic confluences, and so forth-adding even more layers of meaning. The first musical examples from the accompanying CD come into play in the second chapter, titled "Aji nusup, 'Lessons in Penetration.'" (The illustrations were recorded in Bali by Balinese singers and musicians between 1972
Language documentation and cultural practices in the Austronesian world: papers from 12-ICAL, Volume 4, 2015
Eastern Indonesia is a region of great musical diversity. In contrast to the large choruses characteristic of this region, an unusual kind of two-part singing was discovered in the 1930s in eastern Flores and has received further attention since the 1990s. In this music, a first voice (hode’) is combined with a second (nuku), at very narrow intervals. The same kind of duet singing–with narrow intervals, movable drone, intermittent unison, and similarities in musical syntax–has recently been reported from eastern Timor. In the larger landscape of big choruses and gong music, these duets stand as an enigma. They are isolated not only from the surrounding musical practice but also from each other: the language in eastern Timor is Fataluku, a member of the Papuan language family, while in eastern Flores it is Lamaholot, an Austronesian language. Is there evidence for a link between them? This paper proposes an hypothesis of migration, using musical evidence and other cultural indications through a comparative approach.
From oriori to the everly brothers: Observations on the music of nukumanu
Journal of the Polynesian Society, …, 2006
A decade ago, The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music published summaries of musical research on eight of the Polynesian Outliers (Kaeppler and Love 1998). 1 Those summaries implicitly suggested an exciting project, comparing a set of musical traditions that had similar origins in West Polynesia and developed under roughly similar conditions. At the same time, it was clear that documentation of Polynesian Outlier music was, to say the least, uneven and meaningful comparison required further data. Here we present the music of one Outlier community in the hope that it will help facilitate an overdue comparison. Nukumanu is a Polynesian atoll in Bougainville Province of northeastern Papua New Guinea. Also known as the Tasman Islands, it includes approximately 30 islets and is 11 miles in diameter; in 1984, it supported a population of about 400 people. There is no published Nukumanu lexicon or dictionary, and detailed information about the music is unavailable in any published source (Love 1998:834). This article is based on data collected by Feinberg during four months of fieldwork in 1984. 2 Johnstone has provided the musical analysis. Nukumanu has close relations with two Polynesian neighbours: Takü to the west and Ontong Java to the south. Takü labourers imported many Nukumanu dances to their atoll (Moyle 1995, in press), while Ontong Java, only 30 miles away, is even closer socially, linguistically and culturally. Ontong Java was documented by Ernst Sarfert and Hans Damm as part of the
The patterns of musical practice in Melanesia: can this be tied to linguistic affiliation?
The musical instruments in use in Melanesia are extremely restricted compared with island SE Asia. In particular in the Non-Austronesian area, they are few both in number and organological type. Typically these are large slit-gongs, hourglass drums, end-blown trumpets, flutes, ocarinas and jews’ harps. It seems likely that when the speakers of the Oceanic branch of Austronesian arrived in the area around 3000 BP, they brought new instrument types and musical practice and that their distribution can be plotted against linguistic affiliation. However, there is some evidence the Austronesian also borrowed musical instruments from the mainland and carried them onwards to remote Oceania. In addition, there appears to be a comparable pattern with respect to vocal music. Papuan music can sometimes be polyphonic, with two or more distinct vocal lines sung against one another. In the Austronesian world this is only known from Taiwan, Flores and Timor, and otherwise music tends to be monodic, despite the complex heterophony of Java and related cultures. However, there is a striking example of two-voice polyphony on Manus, a key site where early Oceanic speakers interacted with speakers of NAN languages. It is suggested that this is the origin of the polyphony characteristic of Malekula and Grande Ile in New Caledonia. The paper synthesises the distributional data on musical practice and language to suggest how the impact of Austronesian speakers on the culture of Papua can be detected.