Biographies of Florenese Musical Instruments and Their Collectors

Abstract

"Biographies of Florenese Musical Instruments and Their Collectors" by Paula R. Bos is reviewed.

BOS, PAULA R. Biographies of Florenese Musical Instruments and Their Collectors. Bulletin of the Royal Tropical Institute 347. Amsterdam: Royal Tropical Institute, 1999. 95 pages. Map, b/w photographs, line drawings, bibliography, appendices. Paper Dfl 19.50; ISBN 90-6832-8336.

While the major court music traditions of Java and Bali have succeeded in attaining something like "classic" status in the ethnomusicological canon, other Indonesian types of music, in no way inferior, have long been neglected by both scholars and the recording industry This situation is not simply the result of a natural evolution of interests from the center to the periphery: Sumatra, for example, is certainly no more peripheral than Bali. Rather, the order in which Indonesian cultures have been studied has had far more to do with the political history than it has with the intrinsic interest of the cultures concerned. In particular, musicological interests have been more or less based upon the random presence of missionary headquarters, colonial government offices, merchant and trading facilities, army outposts, and marketing decisions by commercial recording companies. In the last few decades, however, as the number and influence of missionaries and foreign occupiers has decreased, musical genres of other islands in the Indonesian archipelago have begun to receive the attention they deserve. Among such areas is Flores, whose music was already admired by Jaap Kunst in the 1930s, but has rarely become a target for Western record companies. That things are beginning to change may be sensed from the fact that today at least two compact disks of the Smithsonian Folkways series "Music of Indonesia" (vols. 8 and 9) devoted to Flores are easily procured by anyone who wishes to take the time. Together with another release announced by Celestial Humanities, and a selection of field recordings from the 1950s and 1960s made by Pe (Peter) Rozing (published by Pan Records in Leiden), sound recordings are now available that offer the musicologist and the audiophile a smattering of the rich and highly varied Florenese musical culture.

Increasing amounts of scholarship, too, are being devoted to Florenese music, but for those who do not read Dutch, the list of studies is still far too short, despite KUNST's pathbreaking Music in Flores of 1942. Paula Boss short "bulletin" thus offers a welcome and valuable addition to the subject, especially for the Anglophone reader. Boss study focuses on instrument collectors and the musical instruments in the Tropenmuseum (Royal Tropical Institute) collection in Amsterdam, but also provides a concise introduction to Florenese music in general. Bos knows, however, that an adequate account of all music in this ethnically and culturally diverse area is out of the question in such a short study. Instead, she attempts to demonstrate that "the social lives [of] these instruments are closely related to the social lives of their collectors" (17), thereby giving a refreshing new twist to the field of organology, historicizing and contextualizing what has usually been considered irrelevant or relegated to the periphery

Bos treats three important collectors of Florenese instruments: Jaap Kunst; Pe Rozing, who studied with Kunst and worked as a missionary on Flores from 1946 to 1984; and Bos herself, who conducted fieldwork in Flores and collected instruments for the Tropenmuseum for some five months in 1993 and 1994. Boss own work has focused on the foi meze, a large bamboo flute, examples of which were also collected by both Kunst and Rozing.

The longest chapter, and for many readers no doubt the most useful, is the fourth (35-67), which presents an outline of musical instruments of Flores, specifically those in the Tropenmuseum. Besides presenting information on construction and geographical distribution, Bos briefly describes how these instruments are played, who collected them, in what contexts they were used or collected, and in some cases how their function has changed in recent years. Twenty-six black-and-white photographs are included, helping the nonIndonesianist in imagining what is being discussed.

The all too brief fifth chapter of Boss study is devoted to the foi meze and its performance context in the village of Rowa, where Bos completed most of her fieldwork. In this area, this flute accompanies songs that are heard only in a coming-of age ceremony when a young girl has part of her upper Front teeth and incisors filed away. This ritual, as Bos explains, is of great importance, for if a girl "comes close to a man before her teeth have been filed, she will disturb the harmony between the cosmological and the human world. Such an encounter will result in a long dry period and a bad harvest for the whole community. This can only be undone by sacrificing a buffalo, one of the most valuable possessions in Florenese villages" (70). Though this painful mutilation practice is thankfully gradually dying out (today sometimes the filing is only symbolic), the music accompanying it is unfortunately also being lost. Nevertheless, Bos was able to hear and record some ten songs in the foi meze repertory. Three song texts are provided (72-73) in both the original and translation, but alas, no transcriptions accompany what is after all a song, not simply a poem. For hints on the nature of the music, the reader must rely on footnotes (notes 20-21, pages 74-75), which present a general (verbal) description of the principles governing performance practice and fingering. Despite this shortcoming, Biographies of Florenese Musical Instruments and Their Collectors is bound to be welcomed by anyone with an interest in the musical culture of Indonesia.

References

REFERENCES CITED

Compact disk citations

References

Music from Flores (East Indonesia): The Father Rozing collection. Pan Records, 4008 KCD TAU PATH. P O. Box 155, 2300 Leiden, The Netherlands.

Music of Indonesia: Flores. Celestial Humanities Records, 1999.

References

Music of Indonesia 8: Vocal and instrumental music of east and central Flores. Smithsonian Folkways, 1995. SFCD 40424

Music of Indonesia 9: Vocal music of central and west Flores. Smithosonian Folkways, 1995. SFCD 40425

References

Book citation

References

KUNST, Jaap

1942 Music in Flores: A study of the voal and instrumental music among the tribes living in Flores. Leiden: J. Brill.