Routledge Handbook of Asian Music: Cultural Intersections

Tong Soon Lee, Tong Soon Lee, Tong Soon Lee

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000337327
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Ethnomusicology

The Routledge Handbook of Asian Music: Cultural Intersections introduces Asian music as a way to ask questions about what happens when cultures converge and how readers may evaluate cultural junctures through expressive forms.

The volume's thirteen original chapters cover musical practices in historical and modern contexts from Central Asia, East Asia, South Asia, and Southeast Asia, including art music traditions, folk music and composition, religious and ritual music, as well as popular music. These chapters showcase the diversity of Asian music, requiring readers to constantly reconsider their understanding of this vibrant and complex area. The book is divided into three sections:

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• Locating meanings

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• Boundaries and difference

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• Cultural flows

Contributors to the book offer a multidisciplinary portfolio of methods, ranging from archival research and field ethnography to biographical studies and music analysis. In addition to rich illustrations, numerous samples of notation and sheet music are featured as insightful study resources. Readers are invited to study individuals, music-makers, listeners, and viewers to learn about their concerns, their musical choices, and their lives through a combination of humanistic and social-scientific approaches.

Demonstrating how transformative cultural differences can become in intercultural encounters, this book will appeal to students and scholars of musicology, ethnomusicology, and anthropology.

1
Indonesia, meet the Beatles!

Sound, style, and meaning in Indonesian popular music

Andrew N. Weintraub

On 15 August 2018, the Indonesian House of Representatives introduced a “Draft Bill on Music” (RUU Permusikan) designed to control the creation, production, distribution, and consumption of music in Indonesia.¹ RUU Permusikan raised long-standing issues about foreign musical influences and the role of the Indonesian state in controlling them. Section 5 of the bill, one of the most controversial items, stated that creators of music would be forbidden “from bringing in negative foreign influences” (“membawa pengaruh negatif budaya asing”). The proposed bill quickly raised the ire of musicians in various sectors of the music industry for its high-handedness, and in February 2019, more than two hundred musicians formed the “National Coalition to Reject the Draft Music Bill.” The coalition objected to the bill’s vagueness, restrictions on creativity and freedom of expression, suppression of small independent (indie) distribution, and a discriminatory call for musical competency tests based on a state-run certification system. A petition launched by the coalition on the website “change.org” argued that many of the sections failed to explain “what was being regulated” nor “who was doing the regulating.”² As stated in the petition, the government authors of the draft bill lacked a basic understanding about the “diverse kinds of opportunities as well as challenges in the realm of music.” The petition referred to Section 5 as an “elastic article” that was subject to multiple interpretations and bias which would allow those in power to persecute certain kinds of music simply because they did not like them. In June 2019, the House of Representatives removed the draft bill from further consideration.

The Music Bill and its aftermath demonstrate the contemporary tensions and contradictions that accompany the nature, practice, and meaning of “foreign influences” in Indonesian music. How can we better understand these contemporary frictions by examining the material structures and social processes of cultural intersections in the history of Indonesian popular music? Here, I show how Indonesian musicians, producers, and listeners have lived harmoniously and discordantly with one extraordinarily influential band, the Beatles, from the 1960s to the present. I examine how the Beatles, as a kind of crossroads, have presented “diverse kinds of opportunities as well as challenges” for Indonesian musicians, producers, and listeners. I contend that in order to understand the ideas, practices, and meanings of foreign influence in Indonesian music, we need to examine the sounds of those encounters and the ways musicians have interpreted and used them historically.

In the 1960s, a group of young urban Indonesians redefined the sound, style, and meaning of Western rock music in consonance with their own aspirations, desires, and dreams. Despite being castigated by first-president Soekarno, Indonesian musicians, critics, and fans insisted that Western popular culture, as well as other popular cultures, enriched rather than detracted from local musical cultures.³ In these transnational contact zones of culture, where multiple forms of music intersected, what choices did musicians make about what to adopt and what to discard, and what were the effects and ethics of those choices? What kind of a world did rock music enable young Indonesians of the 1960s to imagine?

George Lipsitz uses the crossroads as a spatial metaphor for understanding how people construct meanings and values in popular music (1994). Using examples from a wide variety of popular music, the crossroads is a paradoxical site of antagonism and peril, as well as reward and transformation: “collisions occur at the crossroads; decisions must be made there. But the crossroads can also provide a unique perspective, a vantage point where one can see in more than one direction” (1994:7–8). From this new vantage point, people can “envision and activate new social relations” (1994:12) and imagine new possibilities of art, commerce, and culture. Lipsitz’s framing of popular music as crossroads helps us to understand the poetics and politics of popular music in Indonesia during the early 1960s. On the one hand, the Beatles represented a perilous pathway for the Sukarno regime of the early 1960s because the band represented the colonial past and foreshadowed a future dominated by foreign imperialist music. But for rock musicians, the Beatles exemplified musical hybridity, creativity, and experimentation, and offered new ways of envisioning individual freedom of expression, commercial opportunities, and global connectivity.

In the 1960s, no rock band was more “global” than the Beatles.⁴ Due to new media technologies and the rise of a global recording industry after WWII, the Beatles’ sound and image spread quickly across national boundaries. Between 1960 and 1966, the Beatles performed in Sweden, Ireland, France, the United States, Canada, Denmark, the Netherlands, Hong Kong, Australia, New Zealand, Italy, Spain, Japan, and the Philippines as well as the United Kingdom and West Germany. In 1967, the Beatles performed “All You Need Is Love” on Our World, the first live international satellite television programme, which reached an audience of between 400 and 700 million people. The Beatles’ sound itself, which drew from African-American, Anglo-British, Latin, and Indian music, along with a smattering of songs in French, German, and Hindi, arguably laid the groundwork for the nascent category of “world music.”⁵

A burgeoning field of scholarship has begun to address the nature and significance of local musical encounters with the Beatles. Beatles covers played by local bands in Bogota and Jakarta may sound similar, but the meanings attached to those covers differ from place to place. Further, people in those places have crafted ingenious ways of transforming Beatles music for local taste, context, and audiences. These studies illustrate the myriad ways in which people have used music of the Beatles in creative and unpredictable ways.

One might start with the Beatles’ “invasion” of the United States, beginning with the first time their music was played on American radio in late 1963 and leading to the Beatles as unlikely countercultural heroes of the late 1960s (Lebovic 2017). In Mexico, “rock ‘n’ roll dropped its boyhood charm and began to adopt a more explicitly irreverent posture” after the impact of the Beatles in 1964 (Zolov 1999:11). In Hong Kong, the Beatles showed young male musicians that, according to musician Anders Nelsson, “if you grew your hair longer and shook your head and went ‘woo,’ the girls would scream.”⁶ In Latin America, mimicry of foreign rock styles “still serves as an important way for listeners in Latin America to imagine themselves as part of a global cultural community (Meyers 2015:340). “The Better,” a Thai Beatles tribute band, “enacts a Thai simulation of the Beatles through visual appearances, sound elements, and urban localities embedded in the cultural particularities of Thai music history and soundscapes” (Haanstad 2016:286). As these studies show, the Beatles’ influence on social meanings and youth culture was anything but homogenous or creatively stifling, as scholars had predicted.⁷

Although the Beatles never performed in Indonesia, the band was, somewhat remarkably, central to Indonesian cultural politics of the 1960s. In first-President Soekarno’s Independence Day speech on 17 August 1959, he portrayed the spread of Western popular culture, especially music and dance, as an unwarranted, disruptive, and dangerous symbol of cultural imperialism:

And you, young men and women, who are certainly against economic imperialism and political imperialism—why don’t you also fight against cultural imperialism? Why do you still like to rock ‘n’ roll, dance the cha-cha, and listen to that noisy, grating, and crazy music?

(Soekarno, Independence Day speech, “The Rediscovery of our Revolution,” 17 August 1959)⁸

For Soekarno and his Old Order regime, Western popular culture threatened to destabilise the revolution, encourage decadence among Indonesian youth, and weaken Indonesian national identity (Farram 2007).⁹ The Indonesian revolution was unfinished, and Western popular culture was considered counterrevolutionary (Figure 1.1). Historian Steven Farram explicates the state censorship waged against the Beatles in policy and practice during the Guided Democracy period of Soekarno’s regime, 1959–65 (2007).¹⁰ Soekarno’s anti-Beatles stance expressed a vehement reaction against rock ‘n’ roll, singling out the Beatles for their detrimental effect on youth. Farram pointed out that:

Figure 1.1 Drawing of Soekarno and the Beatles by Aga Depresi that accompanies the article “Lenso bukan sekadar irama Bung!” [Lenso is not just a kind of music, Bung!] in Degilzine, 25 December 2017. Courtesy of Tengku Ariy Dipantara.

Whereas previously in his attacks on Western popular music Soekarno had used the terms “ngak ngik ngok” or “rock’n roll,” by 1965 he had his sights set on “musik beatles” or “musik beatle-beatle-an” (“Beatles music” or “Beatles-like music”). In August 1965, the US magazine Time reported that Soekarno had urged listene...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of appendices
• List of contributors
• Preface
• Introduction: cultural intersections in Asian music
• 1 Indonesia, meet the Beatles! Sound, style, and meaning in Indonesian popular music
• 2 Composing at the intersection of East and West: beyond nationalism and exoticism?
• 3 Composing traditions: cultural consciousness and hybridity in cross-cultural musicking
• 4 From humble beginnings to qin master: the remarkable cross-fertilisation of folk and elite cultures in Yao Bingyan’s dapu music
• 5 Water festival as spectacle: Sino-Burmese identities, ethnic politics, and public performances in Macau
• 6 Nature of narye: sound, spectacle, and the politics of performance in fifteenth-century Korea
• 7 Negotiating rural modernity with acoustemology: Hakka children’s songs in contemporary Taiwan
• 8 Peranakan music and multiculturalism in Singapore
• 9 Imagined homogeneity: maqom in Soviet and Uzbek national projects
• 10 Sikh music and its revival in post-partition India
• 11 Tradition and innovation in the dayunday courtship drama of the Magindanao, Muslim Filipinos from the southern Philippines
• 12 Creativity in Sundanese music and radio broadcasting in West Java, Indonesia
• 13 Music, tourism, and cultural exchange among the Naxi of Southwest China
• Index