Menjadi pembicara dalam seminar international “Keynote Talk, Gather, Keep, and Return: the Transformation of the University of the Philippines Center for Ethnomusicology

Aryandari, Citra (2022) Menjadi pembicara dalam seminar international “Keynote Talk, Gather, Keep, and Return: the Transformation of the University of the Philippines Center for Ethnomusicology. In: “Keynote Talk, Gather, Keep, and Return: the Transformation of the University of the Philippines Center for Ethnomusicology, 4 November 2022, Department of Musicology and Media Studies Humboldt, Universitat zu Berlin, Berlin.

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Abstract

A few days ago, I visited Hans Romp's office at UvA. He showed off his new and spacious room, which was very different from before. In his new space, Hans displayed several LPs he was and would be digitized on the table. While chatting, he played a record that played jazz music in the early 1900s. The disc is in excellent condition with all the song narration on it printed on the cover, much like a magazine. The information on the outside is complete, discussing the creation of popular music in America written by Carl H. Scheele, followed by the story of each song on the track. With the soothing and fun jazz rhythm, we spent the afternoon with a lot of chatter. Hans said he liked to digitize these plates because all the information was clear. Then he compared it to showing some Jaap Kunst record plates, which he found very confusing because there was only one clue in the plate cover, which I knew was referring to the region. Without years and descriptions plus very dense noise, as a digitization technician, Hans transfers to a renewable medium with no more understanding of the sound he is transmitting than a clue to the region where the sound is recorded. The conversation seemed simple but made me think further. I imagined a time about 100 years ago when jazz music was recorded with complete lingual markings, and sound recordings from my country only had regional indications. In several separate notes from the plates stored in the study room, Jaap Kunst did write down how he recorded the voices and what kind of procedures he had to go through; then, to describe the recorded voices, Jaap Kunst wrote in his way what he did. But rarely narrate the sound in what context. It caught my attention, imagining the different sound archives collected from the same period but in other spaces. In trying to answer the question about looking at the sound files in Hans' room, I remembered an article I had read some time ago. In a dissertation entitled Community that embodies dance traditions and their changes in Java, Felicia Hughes. The title of this article is very interesting because it counters the phenomenal writings of Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities. In this paper, Felicia Hughes tells about the power of dance as a political representation that has socio-cultural values not as a rule but as being turned on by the Community. In this paper, Felicia tells about how dance in Java exists as a system of representation as well as a form of action. Felicia also says her interest in dance is how it helps us understand how people construct their worlds in everyday life and stage performances. In a long research process, armed with scientific mastery of dance notation systems such as Benesh, Laban, or Eshkol Wachman that he obtained at SOAS did not answer his anxiety in contextualizing dance movements with the community. Finally, participating in dance practice and memorizing dance moves and choreography inevitably became the main way to answer his research questions. Friendship with the teacher, physical experience of learning dance, conversations during practice, and watching dance performances are very helpful in completing the dissertation. From deep observations, Felicia stated that the performances held in Asia had long been part of the secular and religious expressions of the community. Ceremonial dance and dance-drama have also long been associated with centers of power and political rituals. Javanese court dances have long been part of a community that is both realized and imagined. It provides evidence of how dance practices and traditions become involved in social interaction and fosters a sense of identity in local face-to-face communities that are also part of the national state. Kraton dance has undergone a process of debate, positioning, and revival in national cultural politics. Stuck in the state rhetoric of proclaiming the unity of Indonesia, this has long been used to create a semblance of a glorious past for an area dependent on colonial borders. Indeed, scientists often write about the Kraton dance as an Indonesian culture by emphasizing its Hindu-Javanese predecessors (400-1300 AD). Still, this approach is also found in Dutch research on dance and theater in the late colonial period. Some examples include Groneman, documenting the dance of the Yogya palace (1888-1899) Also, photos of Grebeg by Cephas in 1895, as well as numerous papers published linking Javanese culture with Hinduism and Lelyveld's writings (1931) for colonial exhibitions which treat Javanese court dance as a modern version of a Sanskrit performance. Felicia argues that Javanese court dances are not a 'natural' continuation of an earlier tradition. So far, they have been constructed in a 'modern' way that is self-conscious and must be understood as a series of embodied practices that continue to be carried out and have been worked on by interests determined by the ideas of the political community. Javanese tradition emerges from a process of political possibility and is strategically constructed by showing that tradition is a process, not an object. In this way, the Kraton tradition demands many associations that predate its chronological origins. Besides, so far, the culture of the palace continues dynamically. By being continued through a 'mutrani' process, each work is considered a 'child' of the previous work, similar but not the same. The replication of this tradition is evident in the further branching of the palaces in Java. The activities that were once elite from the colonial era palace became part of an identity-building plan to create a new independent Indonesian nation through various forms of education, and dance became the foundation of local culture in the newly formed republic. After independence, court dances gradually spread from the king's palace and princely residences to educational institutions, heritage homes, hotels, and, finally, theaters. A contrast distinguishes its aesthetic identity between the inside and outside of the Kraton, and this contrast is ideological. As a newly emerging category, Kraton dance maintains its distinctiveness from other types of performances classified as 'folk' and 'pop' arts. From the description of the dissertation, I tried to understand why the sound recorded by Jaap Kunst lacked lingual signs and mostly only referred to the region. The process of inheritance of traditions that occur in the Javanese palace can at least be used as a reference for how art is developed. The 'mutrani' process makes work no longer personal but communal. Also, the dynamic inheritance system makes the created works indirectly make recording efforts to extend the work life, not the process's focus. In the literary tradition in Java, in particular, poets are usually sent by the authorities at that time to rewrite (anyerat ulang) the writing of the previous poets with interpretations adapted to the conditions of the times; this is interesting if it is related to the process of cultural production which is always tied to the work of the poet previously. I assume that this kind of cultural inheritance process makes the tradition of storing cultural materials not go well in my country. At a meeting mid-last year in the province of East Nusa Tenggara, Barbara Titus and I shared Jaap Kunst's archives in the form of photos, sounds and videos recorded a hundred years ago from several areas in NTT. The record only mentions the region's name without any other linguistic markings. Unexpectedly, the audience who came to the meeting knew and knew well what we shared; they were even able to explain in detail what was in the archive. They said that although there may have been many changes, they still recognized the voices, dances, and performances presented in the archives. This experience more or less answered my country's cultural reproduction process. Also explains the lack of literacy in this process. I see a clear distinction in Eastern society's view of culture. Orality is the main thing, and cultural inheritance is carried out with spoken language and a sufficient time marker system with morning, noon, night, and the rainy season that appears after the dry season. The achievement of artistic creativity is common, so it does not require signs or notations to be written; the important thing is that the community understands these activities for entertainment or rituals. And one more thing I see is that archives are important. Still, I also can't seem to reject the view that in our country, history is present in the form of oral records; therefore, efforts to return archives to the community where the sound was recorded (repatriation) make it possible to present a new historical story. (Utrecht, 2022)

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