For several generations, encyclopedic surveys of traditional music on Indonesia’s most densely populated islands—Jaap Kunst’s monumental Music in Java, Colin McPhee’s Music in Bali—provided vivid glimpses of rich musical traditions that inspired scholars to pursue further research there. In contrast, other areas of Indonesia have received scant attention from ethnomusicologists—including Sumatra, the world’s sixth-largest island. Although not as densely populated as Java or Bali, its remarkable history and extraordinary ethnic, religious, linguistic, geographical, and political diversity are hardly less significant. In writing Musical Journeys in Sumatra, Margaret J. Kartomi was acutely aware of the legacies of Kunst and McPhee, and she consciously endeavored to create a book that might stimulate comparable interest in the musical traditions of Sumatra. In my estimation, she has succeeded.
Kunst and McPhee wrote their tomes in a much different era—a time when Western scholars could claim a kind of omniscient authority that is simply out of the question today; when change was often seen as pollution from the West rather than as an ongoing, natural process; and when tuning systems and organology were the meat and potatoes of ethnomusicological inquiry. Experts were not necessarily expected to acknowledge their local sources, and were wont to draw sweeping generalizations from the extremely particular data they acquired. Mindful of current trends in ethnomusicology, Kartomi has written a book which, although firmly rooted in the twentieth century, is compatible with twenty-first-century scholarship; she carefully circumscribes her topics, scrupulously acknowledges her consultants, and analyzes change as an inevitable process.
Given Sumatra’s size and diversity, no book, no matter how large, could even begin to survey the entire island’s full variety of musical traditions. Kartomi limits her scope to ethnic groups and regions that she has had the opportunity to explore during thirty-two trips to the island over the past four decades. Overlapping organizational schemes—consecutive, standalone chapters, most (but not all) of which fall within geographically defined “parts”—give the reader a clear roadmap of the book. The major parts focus on West Sumatra and Riau, South Sumatra and Bangka, North Sumatra, and Aceh. Within each part, she addresses a sampling of ethnic groups and specific genres, often presented through the lens of a particular aspect of culture (identity, religion and ritual, politics, gender, organology, musical change, dance, transmission, etc.). Framing chapters, introductory chapters for each part, and a series of appendices provide overviews, comparative perspectives, and summaries.
Kartomi has published much of the material before, widely scattered in a variety of journals and edited books, many of which are difficult to procure. Simply gathering all this information in one place is an enormous boon to the field. But Kartomi has done much more than simply republishing her earlier work; much of the material is expanded, recombined, reconsidered, and revisited to add significant value to the present work. In addition, the book’s organizational scheme, the framing chapters, and the appendices provide illuminating context for each of the topics she pursues in more detail.
The book is rich in both extremely specific detail (in the form of musical transcriptions and artful play-by-play descriptions of events) and extremely broad theoretical musings about history, acculturation, gender, and pan-Sumatran themes and trends. Nevertheless, the book often has the feel of a travelogue. For the most part, chapters are based on short in-situ engagements with performing traditions, supplemented by scrupulous examinations of existing literature and interviews with key participants and stakeholders; they rarely provide ethnographic depth. In some cases, however, she has had the opportunity to take multiple samples of performing traditions over a long period of time, which leads her to make interesting diachronic observations about the transformation of music and dance in some parts of Sumatra since the 1960s.
A large collection of audio and video examples, carefully keyed to the book’s text and transcriptions, are available on Kartomi’s own website. These invaluable resources are not stored there in an especially user-friendly way, however; it took me considerable tinkering to figure out how to download and play the files (on a Mac, using several different browsers; perhaps it is more straightforward on a PC). On the plus side: there is much more available here than could possibly fit on a CD, and, once downloaded, these files immeasurably enrich the book’s content and make excellent teaching materials.
I very much appreciate Kartomi’s decision to distill the information about scales and tunings—subjects which occupied an inordinate amount of space in Kunst’s and McPhee’s books on Java and Bali—into a pithy and informative appendix. The appendix on Sumatran languages, too, is an extraordinarily useful introduction to a thorny subject. The literature-review appendices—one on history, the other on music—on the other hand, probably would be more useful as annotated lists of references than as narratives.
The sheer heterogeneity of the book, not to mention its substantial size (478 pages plus considerable front matter) makes a detailed account of each section impossible in this forum. For me, highlights include: the close reading (in Part II) of how the creators of “Gending Sriwijaya” navigated the treacherous political waters of Indonesian politics during World War II; the richly-textured, multidimensional, diachronic account of the significance of rapa’i drums in Aceh (in Part IV); and the fascinating accounts of a variety of Mingangkabau music-making (in Part I). I expect other readers will be attracted to other chapters, depending upon their own scholarly predilections. There is truly something for everybody in this book.
Although much of the writing strives for an objective voice, Margaret Kartomi’s singular personality shines through on practically every page. Here (as in person) she combines genuine warmth and gregariousness, a keen eye and ear for detail, and a disarmingly pragmatic matter-of-factness about potentially surprising or difficult subjects to fully engage her readers. It all makes for extraordinarily entertaining as well as informative reading. After a while, I came to feel that I was sharing the travails and joys of travel with Kartomi and her husband, Hidris “Mas” Kartomi, who invariably travelled with and worked alongside her. Who better to guide me—and you—on these “Musical Journeys”?
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[Review length: 1003 words • Review posted on December 12, 2013]