Sekar Alit’ and the Three Times of Text

1 ‘Sekar Alit’ and the Three Times of Text Oleh I Ketut Wandia FAKULTAS ILMU BUDAYA UNIVERSITAS UDAYANA 2019 2 ‘Sekar Alit’ and the Three Times of Text Defining ‘Sekar Alit’ ‘Sekar Alit’ is one of the poetic genres of the Balinese Traditional Song (henceforth BTS). It is one of the most commonly heard and enacted verbal arts in Bali. It is the singing or chanting of the of BTS text which is then directly followed by line by line interpretation of the meanings or messages shared or conveyed by the song lyric, delivered by an interpreter (‘pengartos’). Soon after one line of the song text is sung by the respective singer (‘pengewacen’), the interpretation follows. The role of the interpreter is to put the meanings or messages across to the audience by using his/her stylistic modes. It is a kind of embroidering of the messages conveyed in the song lyric. The performance is usually accompanied by a set of Balinese orchestra – an ensemble called ‘gaguntangan’. This musical ensemble is also commonly used in ‘arja’ drama play performance. ‘Sekar Alit’ has long been known and has become part of the life of the Balinese community. This genre is not an unusual commodity for the Balinese. They encounter this kind of ‘tembang’ or song almost every day. The Balinese cannot be separated from this tradition since it has been embodied in the entire life of the community, and the instances of BTS punctuate the day in their enactment with the obligatory, diurnal rituals. “Sekar Alit’ is also called “Sekar Macapat” or reading the song lyric in fours. This will be more elaborately presented at point 1.5.3 - Table 3 below. The central claims of the Thesis 3 The central claim of this thesis, and its rationale for further enquiry into a field already engaged by established scholars (Creese, 2009; Putra, 2009, Putra and Creese, 2012), is as follows: ‘Sekar Alit’ is a paradoxical cultural, artistic, and even social phenomenon. Rather than experiencing the shrinkage of its participatory base (performers and audience), ‘Sekar Alit’ is undergoing a “revitalization” which may exemplify to a wider world, as well as to Indonesian communities, what are the crucial factors in retaining a cultural activity, or any form of “local genius”. By contrast in Japan, Noh theatre is supported by only a section of older members of the community; Opera and theatre in Sydney (despite the Opera House) have to find new ways of appealing beyond a minority (of typically older patrons). How is it that the younger members of Balinese communities (of customary villages) become so deeply and competitively imbued with the conduct of ‘Sekar Alit’ (and its related forms)? This thesis suggests that 8 main variables – cultural, political, and artistic – are involved in what must be seen as a growing success in the maintenance, and extension, of a traditional form. The success is all the remarkable because ‘Sekar Alit’ involves an unusual combination of singer and interpreter: this is to say, it is not simply a traditional song genre per se; rather it involves a discourse which embroiders the feelings conveyed by the song. The techniques for this embroidery require expertise distinct from voice quAlity, namely, knowledge of a cultural background associated with older (male) members of the community. This thesis, therefore, takes up the work of others in observing and analysing the currency of “matembang”; but the new electronic forms of delivery, and the “flexibility” in 4 the genre emphasised by Putra and Creese (2012), are explored by applying various functionalist concepts to the most successful genre – ‘Sekar Alit’. These concepts include 3 temporal perspectives, explained below, which permit us to separate, and then combine, factors from the historical evolution of culture in Bali (phylogenetic perspective), examples from the development of lives on an individual basis (the ontogenetic view), and the dynamics of the form and functions of a collection of around 150 instances of ‘Sekar Alit’ (with an inner core of 20 instances with accompanying commentaries/interpretations). This last point allows the characteristic unfolding of ‘Sekar Alit’ to emerge – this is a ‘logogenetic’ perspective (how the text “unfolds”, or is delivered, in real time). The 3 perspectives on the times or “histories” of the genre are developed with input from public performances and analytical methods drawn from the tradition of functional linguistics based on the concepts of the British (now Australian based) linguist, M.A.K. Halliday. His work, for example, emphasises the importance of the 3 histories implicated in all text, and which provide 3 perspectives by which semiotic evolution needs to be considered (Halliday, 1995/2003: 412- 13; 1997/2003: 250). In essence, by reflecting on 3 verbs, the significance of the 3 histories can be quickly communicated – language texts “evolve” for a community; language texts “also “develop” for persons in each individual life history; and, in any given instance, language – a text – “unfolds”. A critical topic is the electronic ‘explosion’ of the possibilities for the performances to be shared across communities in Bali, and beyond. Creese (2009) has highlighted this revolution, with particular emphasis on ‘interactive’ radio. This trend is growing with the development of You Tube and with televised, modified forms, including village, work place 5 and school competitions. The concerns of this thesis are mainly to view the combined influence of a range of factors around this new technological breadth of exposure. These interacting variables can be suggested, at this stage of discussion, as some indication of the overall findings of the thesis. The factors might be listed, perhaps too briefly, as: 1. the relative cultural homogeneity in village unit, 2. the early socialisation into ‘arts’ and ‘taksu’ 3. the ‘amplification’ through new media 4. the interaction of artistic or religious images and ideas 5. the ‘ngayah’ principle of obligatory practice; 6. the use of Balinese 7. the freedom from class, gender, and age restriction; 8. the melding of social and personal emotions in the songs Functional perspective and the three times of text In this thesis I will be adopting a functional perspective on ‘Sekar Alit’, a perspective drawn from Systemic Functional Linguistics and one that emphasizes that every semantic event in a culture involves 3 dimensions: form, function and a specific relationship with cultural contexts. In this I am following the tradition of researchers including M.A.K. Halliday, R. Hasan, and J.R. Firth, going back to the anthropology of B. Malinowski. One needs to illuminate the integration and dynamism of generic traditions in changing to meet the evolving conditions of a society. 6 In understanding this relationship between tradition and the integration of new social conditions, it is useful to adopt the ‘3 times’ perspective of Halliday who draws attention to the fact we can take every text as a pulse of semantic energy which has to unfold in real time, the time of the text. This we can regard as logogenetic time, the unfolding of the wordings and performance in a specific cultural milieu. But, similarly, we need to take account of the fact the utterance of the text, whether one of verbal art or of casual conversation, contributes to the actuAlities of a person’s living in a community. Therefore, every text plays roles in what we call the ontogenetic development of the interactants, the persons who create the text, and those who use and share the meaning as it impacts on human life at that time. This is the time of individual life spans. We may think of it as an “ontogenetic perspective” on the time of the text. So, at this stage we get the logogenetic perspective, the actual unfolding of the text as a succession of meaningful acts; and then we have the way those meaningful acts impact upon the life of a particular member of the community. But beyond these two immediate perspectives, we also have what Halliday calls the phylogenetic perspective in which we treat the culture and its vector of change, the progressive growth and evolution, as the third form of time, a 3rd form of collaboration between text and time. The text can only exist because it takes up and carries on patterns from the past and delivers speakers and interactants into the future, which they are making by the utterance of a text. That future is typically a future of a collective, of a whole community or culture where the text has already established itself. Its roles, and its functions as actual patterns of the text, are carried over into the future, at the same time as typically they must adapt to the facts of the community experience. The facts include the 7 conventions surrounding the exchange of goods and services and, more important, the semiotic structure of channels by which people can communicate to exchange any messages. These channels of semiotic potential are always subject to change. And the phylogenetic perspective is the grand arc of a culture’s or community’s history, within which the text has served a function, or a range of functions. We can look at the 3 times of text: the logogenetic, the ontogenetic and phylogenetic in any order. We can set out, as many do, first of all, from the phylogenetic, cultural evolution perspective and from this perspective, the actual generic form of the text, particularly the generic form of the song, or genre of song, becomes central. On the other hand, we have the ontogenetic significance of speaking, uttering and performance, and this ontogenetic significance demands that we fill social space with texts: texts that do something for us, texts that are tools for us to address the needs that we have.

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