Musically Mediated Technologies in Independence Era Malay Films (1950s-1960s) (original) (raw)
Related papers
Cosmopolitan Sounds and Intimate Narratives in P. Ramlee's Film Music
Journal of Intercultural Studies, 2019
This article illustrates historically, how the cosmopolitan aesthetics of Malay musical practices operated in tandem with the cultural intimacies of vernacular Malay film narratives to express the complex interconnectivities of a fluidly linked and diverse region. The film music icon, P. Ramlee, employed a cosmopolitan approach to making music; merging Anglo-American jazz and Latin American rhythms with regional Malay and Javanese folk music, themes and cultural references. When screened, heard and reproduced in contemporary contexts, such films and music illicit nostalgia for an idealistic era during which the nation was in-the-making. A narrative of pity for P. Ramlee is affectively instrumentalised by the Malaysian state, local cultural producers and multinational corporations; recalling his image and works to appeal to the Malaysian public. An analysis of the film music in Ali Baba Bujang Lapok (1961) directed by P. Ramlee unravels the threads of cosmopolitan musical practices and culturally intimate expressions that challenge the rigid boundaries of the nation-state; expressing a unique inter-regional, multilinguistic and multiethnic collective identity. This paper argues for a conceptual approach that examines the cosmopolitan intimacies of cultural production; revealing the complex cultural, political, national and transnational contestations and connections of a postcolonial Malay world.
Scoring Tradition, Making Nation: Zubir Said's Traditionalised Film Music for Dang Anom
The Malay-language films produced by the Cathay-Keris Studio in 1950s to 1960s Singapore were known for their 'traditional' narratives based on Malay folklore and legends set in the pre-colonial Malay world. Made during a period of nation-making in the region, these films used musical accompaniment that had to be culturally-rooted in the music of the Malay Peninsula while expressing the region's aspirations for postcolonial independence. Interestingly, this task was undertaken prominently by the film composer, Zubir Said, who was not a citizen of Malay-majority Malaysia. Instead, he was commemorated as a national icon of Singapore, in which Malays form a minority. This paper aims to unravel the paradoxical process of 'traditionalising' national culture in a period of cosmopolitan postcoloniality in the Malay world. Through an intertextual study of his biography and film score analysed against the history of Malay nationalism, this article unravels the 'traditionalised' Malay musical aesthetic established through the musical compositions of Zubir Said in historically-themed Malay films. The article analyses the use of musical motifs and styles in Zubir Said's music for Hussein Hanniff's Dang Anom (1962). The juxtaposition of an aesthetically-traditional film score against the film's anti-feudal narrative results in a critique of archaic notions of tradition that articulates a subversive message of ethical modernity, freedom and self-determination. In conclusion, this intertextual analysis of film, music and history reveals how the melodic construction or scoring of musical tradition on the silver-screen was concomitant with the postcolonial aspirations and contradictions of nation-making in the Malay world.
Two of the most well-known Malay films from the 1960s, Antara Dua Darjat (Between Two Classes, 1960) and Ibu Mertuaku (My Mother-in-law, 1962) feature ‘jazz-heroes’: a consummate jazz pianist and a tragically blind tenor saxophonist. During the 1960s, the vernacular Malay entertainment industry was based in Singapore; a cosmopolitan hub of international commerce and cultural exchange. In my paper, I consider how jazz-musician protagonists and their music articulated the concerns of an emerging nation and negotiated issues of class, gender and modernity in Malay ‘social’ films of the 1960s. This emerging genre of vernacular film, scripted and directed by local Malays, articulated the tensions and anxieties of a predominantly rural Malay community adapting to urban environments. Such films engaged progressive ideas about working-class rights and challenged Malay feudalistic elitism. I consider in the above mentioned films how ‘jazzy’ and cosmopolitan music negotiated the fissures between modernity and tradition, urban and rural, working-class and elites, autocracy and self-determination. P. Ramlee – an omnipresent national culture icon until present day - directed, starred, composed and performed music for both films. Both films feature musicians as a marginalised working class, performing for the elite classes in exclusive private parties or swanky nightclubs. In my intertextual historical-musical-narrative analysis, I note how the performance of jazz or jazz-like music allows such musicians to cross the class divide and Ramlee’s ‘jazz heroes’ cross further by courting women from the elite classes with their music. In turn, these female protagonists in their class-defying romances articulate notions of self-determination and challenge the patriarchal orders of elite Malay society. I argue that ‘jazz’ on the Malay silver screen provided a cosmopolitan musical aesthetic for the imagining of new class and gender roles; resonating the zeitgeist of modern postcolonial nationhood in 1960s Singapore and Malaysia.
Bioscope: South Asian Screen Studies , 2021
Studies of music in South Asian cinemas are dominated by discussions of popular film songs, their lyrics, vocal style, visual coding, placement in film narratives and their afterlives in diverse media formats. Moving away from the song-driven approach, this keyword is an attempt to expand the definition of film music by following its aural trace amidst shifting media technologies and listening practices. The aural force of film music carries an affective charge in excess of the verbal and has created a forcefield of intertextual memory that was not recognised by academics until very recently. Here, I focus on commercial Bombay cinema that has dominated popular music of the subcontinent and is the site of my own research. The overt presence of music in films as song has been framed as a continuation of the idiom of musical dramas that drew on classical raga-based melodies. Further, the predilection of audiences to hum film songs with an 'easy', 'repetitive' musical structure was linked to their affinity to communal folk music (Beeman, 1980). Interestingly, it was the dispersal of film music into other intermedial forms such as printed chapbooks and song booklets that nudged listeners to sing the lyrics and ignore the instrumental sections. The radio stepped in to keep listeners connected to these non-verbal musical sections of a film song. Highlighting the tensions and divergences between verbal and non-verbal as being critical to performing arts, Ashok Da. Ranade (2006) has drawn attention to the aesthetic principles that bring auditory and visual elements together in film music. Introductory non-verbal sections of film songs and background scores perform the work of effecting these divergences. Another vexed question for both composers and film-makers has been to establish a hierarchy of sources for film music. Satyajit Ray found Indian classical music unsuitable for background scores as it 'lacked a dramatic narrative tradition' (Robinson, 1989). Noticing how the Jatra companies in Bengal drew from a curious mix of both Indian and western instruments, Ray tried to bring in a similar experimental approach. Missionaries of the colonial period, military bands, jazz clubs in Calcutta, Bombay and Lahore, gramophone records and the exhibition of Hollywood films had introduced Indian listeners to Western classical and popular music genres. These influences made their way into films. In the 1950s Bombay, working in an industrial context, music directors like Naushad Ali expressed a similar concern as Ray. They felt that Indian instruments such as the sitar, sarod or the flute fell short in expressing violence or
2021
This chapter provides a critical overview of the birth and development of Iban popular music in Sarawak from the 1950s to the 1970s. It examines the potential of popular music historiography to uncover paradoxes of modernity in the socio-cultural meanings of song lyrics of the Iban who are the largest indigenous ethnic group in Sarawak. During this pivotal period in Malaysian history, the Iban experienced modernity in fux through the agents of change from Brooke’s rule to British colonialism to the Federation of Malaysia. Inspired by Barendregt’s (2014) “alternative conceptions of modernity” in Southeast Asian popular music, this chapter traces the historical introductions of Western music in Sarawak from the Brooke Dynasty, the establishment of Iban Radio under Radio Sarawak during the British colonial era, and the development of the Iban recording industry in the late 1960s during the formation of the Malaysian nation-state. Tese introductions reveal that Iban popular music did not just imitate pop culture but commandeered it as a platform for pre-modern warrior identity, nation-state promotion, and proclaiming pride in regional Sarawakian identity.