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RECOLLECTING RESONANCES: Indonesian-Dutch Musical Encounters. Southeast Asia Mediated, v.4. Edited by Bart Barendregt and Els Bogaerts. Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2014. xi, 353 pp. (Illus.) US$162.00, cloth. ISBN 978-90-04-25609-5.
Recollecting Resonances: Indonesian-Dutch Musical Encounters combines musicological, historical, and anthropological approaches to productively explore an array of musical interactions between Indonesians and Dutch, tackling a legacy of Dutch colonialism by taking the reader, through its fourteen chapters, to different parts of what is now Indonesia, the Netherlands, and Suriname; examining an impressive variety of musical genres and other forms of performance; and exploring musical encounters that have spanned centuries. As the editors Bart Barendregt and Els Bogaerts write in the first chapter, "Recollecting Resonances: Listening to an Indonesian-Dutch Musical Heritage," their aims include "broadening discussions on colonial and postcolonial migration and its legacies and the role culture, more specifically musical encounters have played in all of this" (26). They highlight the importance of studying music in this endeavour, and emphasize that in understanding colonial life "[m]usical practices cast a light on the customs of both colonizer and the colonized, and the very fabric of everyday life in those days; matters that otherwise might be difficult to untie" (1). They also recognize the unequal power relations that characterize many of the musical encounters explored in the volume (5).
Indeed, unequal power relations between Dutch and Indonesians underpin many of the issues addressed in the volume. In chapter 2, "Photographic Representations of the Performing Indonesian," Liesbeth Ouwehand analyzes photographs of Indonesian musicians, instruments, and dancers "taken between 1870 and 1910" primarily...