Late breaking information

MUSICOLOGY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF AMSTERDAM

05/12/2019

Making Sundanese music local again: Galengan Sora Awi

Colloquium Musicology
Henry Spiller, UC Davis

Thursday 12 December 2019 15:30-17:00
Nieuwe Doelenstraat 16, room 3.01

Since the fall in 1998 of Indonesia’s authoritarian regime headed by President Soeharto, and the beginning of the era of reformasi, residents of Bandung—the capital city of the province of West Java and the cultural center of Sundanese traditions—have experimented with ways to affirm their regional Sundanese identity. Musicians in particular have looked to musical instruments made of bamboo to bring a sense of place and Sundanese-ness to their musical expressions.

This presentation introduces one such bamboo musical group—Galengan Sora Awi (hereafter GSA)—and examines how the group expresses a bottom-up approach to reconnecting to a Sundanese identity that is rooted firmly in a unique place—Bandung’s Dago neighborhood on the Cikapundung river. They achieve this connection by performing an eclectic repertory of Sundanese styles and genres, deploying idiosyncratic, homemade bamboo musical instruments, for audiences and events that are associated closely with Bandung’s physical environment and nascent grassroots environmental movement. I mobilize Bernard Stiegler’s notions of primary, secondary, and tertiary retention (Technics and Time, 1998) to examine how GSA’s bamboo musical instruments help them achieve their goals.

GSA’s musical activities fit well with the post-modern “do-it-yourself” (DIY) principles that drive alternative music scenes all over the world and are also associated with environmental and social reform movements. For GSA, however, it is the revival of a very old technology— bamboo—that enables them to perform a variety of musical genres once limited to specialists. For GSA, the path to renewing and reviving their connections to human groups and to the landscapes that nurtured them, even in contemporary Bandung, is paved with bamboo.

Henry Spiller (BA, UC Santa Cruz; MM, Holy Names University; MA and PhD, UC Berkeley) is an ethnomusicologist whose research focuses on Sundanese music and dance from West Java, Indonesia, on gender and sexuality. His award-winning books include Gamelan: The Traditional Sounds of Indonesia (ABC-CLIO, 2004), Erotic Triangles: Sundanese Dance and Masculinity in West Java (Chicago, 2010), and Javaphilia: American Love Affairs with Javanese Music and Dance (Hawaii, 2015). At UC Davis, he teaches world music classes and graduate seminars, and directs the Department of Music's gamelan ensemble. Currently he is a fellow at NIAS (Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences) in Amsterdam.