Oideion 3 (2003)
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OIDEION The performing arts world-wide 3 edited by WIM V AN ZANTEN Nederlandse Vereniging voor Etnomusicologie "Arnold Bake" Department of Cultural Anthropology and Development Studies Leiden University, the Netherlands 2003 This volume was published by the Dutch Society for Ethnomusicology 'Arnold Bake' Editor: Wim van Zanten Editorial. Board: Ben Arps Saskia Kersenboom Emmie te Nijenhuis Rembrandt F. W olpert ISBN 90-808399-1-4 NUR: 664 Subject headings: ethnomusicology, performing arts, music, theatre Front cover design: Nelleke Oosten Printing: Copy- & Printshop F.S.W., Leiden University AH correspondence should be addressed to: Secretariat Nederlandse Vereniging voor Etnomusicologie "Arnold Bake", c/o Department of Cultural Anthropology and Development Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences, Leiden University, P.O. Box 9555, 2300 RB Leiden, the Netherlands http://www .abake.nl/ Copyright 2003 Nederlandse Vereniging voor Etnomusicologie "Arnold Bake", the Netherlands CONTENTS EDITOR'S PREFACE i.v KI MANTLE HOOD The musical river of change and innovation; The fourth John Blacking Memorial Lecture, ESEM, Rotterdam, 14 September 1995 1 EVERT BISSCHOP BOELE Teaching a multimusical soundscape; Non-Western music in Dutch basic education teaching materials 9 JEROEN DE K.LOET To seek beautiful dreams; Rock in China 29 JAN VAN BELLE Dafsaz in Tajik Badaxshan; Musical genre and rhythmic pattern 48 HANNEM. DEBRUIN What practice? Whose practice? 62 MA TTIIEW ISAAC COI-IEN Details, details: Methodological issues and practical considerations in a study of Barikan, a Cirebonese ritual drama for wayang kulit 73 HAE-KYUNG UM Food for body and soul; Measuring the dialectics of performance 94 Book Reviews 107 Barta Rovekamp, Levende muziek in Amsterdamse cafes (ELISABETH DEN OTTER); Saskia Kersenboom, Word, sound, image; The life of the Tamil text [book + (DIRK NIJLAND ); Antoinet Schimmelpenninck, Chinese folks songs and folk singers; Shan' ge traditions in southern Jiangsu [book+CD] (WIM vAN 2'..ANTEN); Record Reviews 121 The Janissaries -Martial Music of the Ottoman Empire [CD] and Turkish military band music of the Ottoman empire [CD] (WOUTER SWETS). ABOUT THE AUTHORS 128 EDITOR'S PREFACE This third issue of Oideion; Performing arts world-wide contains articles that appeared earlier in the multimedia version Oideion; Performing arts online <http:l/www.iias.nl/oideion>. First among these is The fourth John Blacking Memorial Lecture, 'The musical river of change and innovation', presented by Ki Mantle Hood at the European Seminar in Ethnomusicology, Rotterdam on 14 September 1995. We are very grateful to Ki Mantle Hood, who studied with Jaap Kunst in the early 1950s, to let us publish his lecture in Oideion. Evert Bisschop Boele's article presents an overview of the teaching of music in secondary schools in the Netherlands, discussing the important issues involved. Although nowadays the Dutch 'soundscape' includes music from all parts of the world, the teaching of music in secondary schools has as yet been unable to reach the goals set forth by the Dutch government in a 1994 publication. J eroen de Kloet discusses Chinese rock culture, including producers, singers and the audience. He describes how globalisation processes have changed and increased the space in which young people in China can construct their identity. The Chinese government, as well as educators and parents try to govern this space. Foreign investors play a very important role in the promotion of rock, and the audience uses the music to cope with shared feelings of confusion and fatalism. J an van Belle describes the current form, construction, and use of the circular frame drum, daf, in Tajik Badaxshan and discusses the poetical metres and rhythmic patterns in dafsaz songs. The rhythmic patterns appear to be more complex than thought on first hearing. He shows that the structure of the recurrent rhythmic patterns cannot in any simple way be translated into our W estem concept of measure. He then explains that the original function of dafsaz may have been to aid in the spiritual elevation of the audience. The last three papers are the revisions of presentations in the Panel Asian performing arts and the methodology ofpractice at the International Convention of Asia Scholars, ICAS, in Noordwijk, the Netherlands in June 1998. The three authors, Hanne de Bruin, Hae-Kyung Urn, and Matthew Cohen, were research fellows in the research programme Performing Arts in Asia; Tradition and Innovation, PAATI (1997-2001), of the International Institute for Asian Studies, HAS. The PAATI research programme proposed to analyse and compare processes of change in Asian performing arts, and, in particular, traditional Asian theatre. The focus was on vi EDITORIAL ® the way in which the performing arts are institutionalised and standardised; how they balance between flexibility and fixedness under the influence of globalisation and localisation; ® how these processes of change affect form and content of these art forms and the organisation of the teaching; ® the study of audiences in relation to performers and patrons. Earlier studies had shown that these processes of change occur in similar ways in different regions and in different performing arts. P AATI wanted to expand on this knowledge with a comparative programme, based on three individual studies. It was decided, therefore, to right from the start of the programme focus on methodological issues. The ICAS panel and the resulting three articles in this issue of Oideion were first fruits of the reflections on the methodology needed to compare the PAA TI research findings. In her contribution 'What practice? Whose practice?', Hanne de Bruin looks at the different practices in South Indian artistic traditions. She goes on to discuss the theatrical event and Western academic practice in researching such events. She points out that '[t]he essence of an artistic performance becomes available to a person only through his or her physical and mental involvement in the event or her acquisition of experiential knowledge; it cannot be expressed in words or represented satisfactory in any other medium than the human body: She then goes on to say that ' ... physical and mental involvement in the event transgresses the framework of W estem academic practice [ ... ] Involvement remains taboo, in spite of propagation of research methods, such as that of participant-observation and learning by performing ... ' (p.69). In 'Food for body and soul; Measuring the dialectics of performance' Hae-Kyung Um discusses processes of performance and methodological research instruments, using her research on a traditional Korean musical drama (p'ansori) as an example. Researchers are not kept completely outside the processes of composition, performance, and transmission. In the course of her fieldwork in the Korean communities in the former Soviet Union and China, her informants also saw her as 'their informant who performs and transmits [her] cultural knowledge of Korea, and other Korean migrant communities in the former Soviet Union and the United States.' (p.l 03). The researcher is very much part of the processes of making sense of the performing arts we study. A conscious application of a theoretical and methodological framework may somewhat correct the 'inherent partiality' of our research (p.104). In his article 'Details, details: Methodological issues and practical considerations in a study of Barikan, a Cirebonese ritual drama for W ayang Kulit' Matthew Cohen stresses that performances exist in a unique moment of time, never to be repeated. We often study performances through their remains: photographs, notes made during the performance or afterwards, physical materials, post-performance discussions etc. However, we should instead look for the combination of 'liveness' and detailed particularity, which is the most meaningful to the audiences (p. 7 4 ). Matthew Cohen exemplifies the importance of details in a 1994 performance of a ritual drama, called barikan, in northwest Java. EDITORIAL vii most meaningful to the audiences (p. 7 4). Matthew Cohen exemplifies the importance of details in a 1994 performance of a ritual drama, called barikan, in northwest Java. These last three articles offer interesting viewpoints on the methodology of research in the performing arts. It is a well-known methodological issue in anthropology, and more generally the social sciences, that while every human being is considered to be unique, groups of human beings have so many things in common that we can generalise about them. Case studies and life histories of musicians can help us to understand the complexities of musical worlds. However, it would be counter-productive if we were to forget that when building models, the empirical sciences deal with generalisations. Although generalisation, or systematic description for that matter, may not be easy to do, just describing particular instruments, tunings or individual musicians has limited utility if we don't bear in mind that these may supply information about situations elsewhere, or at different times. The anthropological case study is only useful if it also tells us something about how things may happen at other times and places. It should present us with the set of relations between the different concepts that are used to describe the situation. We may say that it is difficult to generalise from case studies, but they can supply much 'intuitive knowledge' of the problem, namely a set of relationships. Cohen points out that