IMS Musicological Brainfood 4, no. 2 (2020)

This edition of IMS Musicological Brainfood ex‐ in the second journey. As with the first recipients plores musicology’s relationship with the envi‐ of the IMS Guido Adler Prize, we asked the 2019 ronment in two journeys. The first is led by recipient, Margaret Kartomi, to write about her Daniel M. Grimley as he takes us across the life and travels, and her perceptions of change landscape of COVID-19. His short provocation, in our discipline over the past sixty years. Her “Moving upon Silence,” should awaken our si‐ unique perspective, shaped by her upbringing in lence as musicologists. We have been advocating Australia, her studies in East Berlin, and her re‐ a global musicology, but to truly listen to the search in Indonesia, provides us with a view of world around us, a global musicology should be musicology with open borders, and one that is as “earthy” as it is socially attuned to different never far from the political, social, and environ‐ cultures—the two, in fact, are inseparable, as mental issues. Her long career as a musicologist Grimley reminds us. This is clearly demonstrated inspires us to be explorers.

Daniel M. Grimley

Among the most unexpected and disconcerting violence rather than address its systemic and in‐ side effects of the COVID-19 pandemic has been stitutional origins. And for others, silence has the silence that has accompanied much of the been an opportunity to reconnect or reattune, to lockdown. Despite the creative flowering of im‐ attend to environmental sounds and ambient promptu balcony concerts and online musical noise in new and defamiliarized contexts, and to events that it has in some places provoked, the take stock in relation to surroundings that seem quietness of much of the pandemic has often irrevocably changed and transformed: the sud‐ seemed deafening. As countries emerge tenta‐ den lack of aircraft or road traffic, the memory tively (or, in some cases, recklessly) out of the of a loved-one’s voice, or the mute response to quarantine measures imposed to try to contain historical injustice. Silence in the bewilderingly the global spread of the infection, there is an op‐ contradictory era of COVID-19 simultaneously portunity to reflect on the meanings and values signals despair, hope, isolation, and immersion. of that silence. For some, it is indelibly associated The ambiguous quality of this silence has with absence: the agonizing loss of friends and been captured by a number of initiatives and relatives or of patterns of work and sources of artistic schemes. The Dawn Chorus Project led income that have sustained livelihoods and by sound artist Bernie Krause, for instance, is ex‐ maintained well-being. For others, especially in emplary in its acknowledgment of the human the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests fol‐ catastrophe caused by COVID-19 and its urgent lowing the brutal killing of George Floyd, silence call for environmental restitution. “The dramatic can only mean condonement or complicity, an silencing of human activities that it has caused,” act of amnesia or betrayal that perpetuates such Krause writes of the pandemic on the project

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website, “is also making the voices of nature re‐ destroyed any continuity with past generations, sound on an unprecedented scale. In this unique and the disruptions faced since.”4 This uncanny situation in the spring of 2020, the idea was born absence strangely foreshadows the COVID-19 to make the birds’ voices heard.”1 Supported by pandemic. As for Krause, it is the “passionate, the Bavarian Museum of the Life Sciences and species-rich dawn chorus” celebrated in Cu‐ Environment and the Nantesbuch Foundation, sack’s recordings that becomes Chernobyl’s the Dawn Chorus Project has created a citizen “keynote,” and which serves as one of the areas science platform onto which users can upload “definitive sounds.”5 For its former inhabitants, sound recordings of the dawn chorus in their sound, and landscape are inextricably bound up neighborhood, creating, Krause suggests, “a with their experience of displacement and the worldwide birdsong concert for the sciences and legacy of enforced resettlement, even in cases the arts.”2 Traced onto a global sound map, the where they have in fact returned to their original inventory of recordings is a moving testimony homes and dwellings. Their singing superficially both to nature’s resilience and to the virus’s in‐ suggests some form of Romantic idyll: ternational reach. As a contemporary record of habitat loss and biodiversity, it has particular sci‐ Oh my beloved village, entific value: it offers an auditory snapshot of our The silence of your marshes, The breadth of your skies, current relationship with the natural world, the Your songs, acoustic veil of the anthropocene. Yet the data And your fields caressed by the sun. also conceals the intractable realities of class and social inequality. The geographical distribution But in the striking strength and richness of their of recordings as of August 2020 speaks all too voices, beautifully captured by Cusack’s micro‐ vividly of persisting asymmetries of power and phone, there is a deeper undertone of fracture human resource: the South African examples, for and loss. Such intensity ultimately points to a instance, are drawn almost exclusively from the hollowness, the desolation and emptiness of protected areas within Table Mountain National what has been left behind: peeling wallpaper in Park, but there is nothing from the shanty settle‐ a bedroom, broken glass, or a deserted Kinder‐ ments of Khayelitsha, Langa or Gugulethu. Lis‐ garten. tening to the dawn chorus in the sylvan sur‐ Perhaps such silence should not come as a rounds of Constantia or Rondebosch assumes a surprise after all, since in some ways it has al‐ very different social-political register from that ways lain at the heart of a particular western of the Cape Flats. landscape epistemology. The emergence of a dis‐ Sound artists, ethnomusicologists, and other tinctive landscape aesthetic, or way of thinking music scholars have for many years insisted that about the culturally sedimented relationships it matters where we listen, and that the silence between land, environment, and human agency, which might prevail is inevitably shaped and de‐ coincided in the early modern period with the termined by particular cultural-historic legacies. invention of perspective as a visual means of so‐ Peter Cusack’s eloquent essay in acoustic jour‐ cial-political representation. In its elevation of a nalism, Sounds from Dangerous Places,3 echoes viewer’s privileged point of spectatorship, per‐ this preoccupation with music, sound, land‐ spective encoded highly asymmetrical hierar‐ scape, and environment. Traveling through the chies of authority, control, and domination. It ruins of abandoned Samosel villages within the was preoccupied by boundaries, borders, map‐ Chernobyl evacuation zone in Ukraine, two ping, and directionality. Yet despite its attempt decades after the disaster at the nuclear reactor to conceal or obscure less desirable or regulated which spread radioactive material over wide elements of its scenic prospects, perspective has parts of northern and western Europe, for exam‐ always hinted at or suggested precisely that ple, he writes: “the quiet is absolute. Traffic and which it has sought to dominate or remove. Mu‐ planes are unthinkable. Only birds and wind can sic has responded intensively to such impera‐ be heard. But there is a strong sense of absence tives: the empty sounds and silences that answer too, of those who lived here, of the disaster that Orfeo’s lamenting calls in Monteverdi’s epony‐

4 IMS Musicological Brainfood 4, no. 2 (2020) mous opera, for example, are landscape’s shady in its own way, a living thing, meaning that it acoustic mirror, the real sonic reflection of the also passes away.”6 Positively embracing the sunlit Arcadian realm from which Eurydice has fleeting contingency of musical events might, in been erased. Though Orfeo can return from the other words, prompt a different way of relating underworld, his landscape is now broken and to the environment, through landscape, by ac‐ bereft. Musical enchantment merely belies the knowledging our own transience, permeability, loss that lies within. It sounds what perspective and interconnectedness. Hence, Watkins writes, seeks to exclude. music’s “acoustic manifestation of dynamic pro‐ Similar moments of silence puncture or un‐ cesses and patterns . . . finds meaning in beauty derpin later musical evocations of landscape. for no other reason than that it is here, now. The The hollow octaves that frame the final bars of flower will soon wilt, the music someday go Haydn’s F Minor Variations, Hob. XVII:6, for ex‐ stale.”7 ample, suggest precisely that same emptiness, Silence amid COVID-19 assuredly offers a as do the halting gaps between the musical oar place for solace, or a moment to grieve. But it is strokes in “Die Stadt” from Schubert’s Schwa‐ also an injunction, not merely to remember and nengesang and the strangely opaque bars that re‐ record past histories of exclusion or loss, but to sound in the final number, “Lualåt,” from Grieg’s attend to and accept responsibility. Only then, Stemninger, op. 73. In each case, landscape ap‐ in landscape, can we begin to hear again. pears not so much as a void or abyss, but as blank space, a series of vanishing points that might References equally indicate infinite extension, convergence, 1 Dawn Chorus Project, accessed August 31, disappearance, or departure. In the era of the 2020, https://dawn-chorus.org. COVID-19 pandemic, it is easy to hear those 2 Ibid. blank spaces only negatively, bound up with the 3 Peter Cusack,Sounds from Dangerous Places collateral damage of a largely mishandled global (London: ReR Megacorp, 2012). crisis. But their ambivalence also permits alter‐ 4 Ibid., 19. native readings. As Holly Watkins has recently 5 Ibid. argued in her Musical Vitalities, it is possible to 6 Holly Watkins,Musical Vitalities: Ventures in conceive of sound and music in holistic, ecocrit‐ Biotic Aesthetics of Music (Chicago, IL: Uni‐ ical ways: “Musical beauty resembles that of versity of Chicago Press, 2018), 65. leaves and flowers,” she suggests, “because it is, 7 Ibid.

Daniel M. Grimley is deputy head of humanities at the University of Oxford and Douglas Algar Tu‐ torial Fellow at Merton College. His books includeGrieg: Music, Landscape and Norwegian Identity (2006), and Carl Nielsen and the Idea of Modernism (2010, both Boydell). In 2011, he was scholar-in- residence at the Bard Festival, for which he edited Jean Sibelius and His World (Princeton University Press). He has led a Leverhulme International Research Network, “Hearing Landscape Critically,” featuring conferences in South Africa and the USA, and his third monograph,Delius and the Sound of Place, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2018.

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5 IMS Musicological Brainfood4, no. 2 (2020)

Margaret Kartomi

1940–60: Formative Experiences Born in Adelaide in 1940, I fell asleep as a child every night to music played by my amateur vio‐ linist father and pianist mother and their musi‐ cian friends. Not surprisingly I acquired a love of classical music, learning piano from age four. Our family never needed to buy a record player or (later) a TV, because we entertained ourselves making music at home. To supplement my father’s meagre income as a post office clerk, my mother took in post-war Fig. 1. Dris Kartomi (second from left) playing in acalung migrants as house boarders, including the Yu‐ ensemble at a Musicological Society of Australia Confer‐ ence in Melbourne (Photo: Koswara Sumaamidjaya). goslav Imam of the Adelaide mosque who lived with us for twenty years, inviting us to all the The goal of gender equality in the 1950s was still feast days, where I met young Indonesian stu‐ a distant dream. My mother told me she was dents and other fascinating people. I wrote an only allowed to attend primary school to age ten, essay at school about the heritage mosque’s even though she had won a gold watch in a state- jewel-colored stained-glass windows, its grape wide essay writing competition. Conventional vine and fig tree garden, its whitewashed walls, wisdom held that education was wasted on girls, and four minarets built by Afghan camel drivers for they were not very intelligent and their life who initially came to the central Australian task was just to serve their husbands and chil‐ desert in the 1850s. When my essay was pub‐ dren. I decided to have a life beyond that of a lished in the 1955 Wilderness School magazine, housewife and become the first in my family to I knew the thrill of seeing my first publication. go to university, taking up a scholarship at the Adelaide society in the 1950s was still mainly University of Adelaide that bonded me to teach white, insular, and conservative. However, our secondary school for three years. Quaker house was always open to visitors from After graduating I taught music and geogra‐ around the world, including the Colombo Plan phy at Adelaide High School, and was paid only students from Indonesia and Malaysia who often two thirds of a male wage for equal work. This came to lunch, sang Indonesian songs to my pi‐ and other similar experiences growing up led me ano accompaniment, and introduced me to re– to reject gender inequality long before I knew the cordings of Javanese gamelan music.1 At nine‐ word feminist, and long before reading the eye- teen, my parents took me to Indonesia, and we opening books by Simone de Beauvoir and Ger‐ fell in love with the emerald isles and their warm, maine Greer. hospitable people. Through our peace movement My first strong memory after marrying Dris friends, we met president Soekarno in his palace in 1960 was being invited to accompany the fa‐ and visited the homes of our Indonesian student mous Afro-American opera singer and political friends, including my future husband, Hidris activist Paul Robeson on the piano at many gath‐ Kartomi (Dris for short). He used to play Indone‐ erings during his and his wife’s visit to Adelaide. sian (Sundanese) calung (bamboo xylophone) As he spoke to trade union rallies and others, he ensemble with his friends (figure 1). broke seamlessly into song in his incredibly rich

6 IMS Musicological Brainfood 4, no. 2 (2020) dramatic operatic voice. He sang lyrics about the taught briefly at the University of Adelaide’s struggle for racial and gender equality, workers’ Elder Conservatorium before joining Monash rights, peace and disarmament at a time when University’s young Department of Music as a re‐ everyone was terrified of atomic war, having search fellow under ethnomusicologist Trevor read Nevil Shute’s post-apocalyptic 1957 novel, Jones in 1969. At first I did fieldwork among the On the Beach, set in Central Australia. He sang First Nation Pitjantjara people at Yalata on the stirring spirituals such as “Joshua fit de battle ob Nullabor Plain with Monash anthropologist, Iso‐ Jericho,” “Old Man River,” and other songs that bel Mary (Sally) White, for the Australian Insti‐ met his political convictions. tute of Aboriginal Studies. I was fascinated by the all-night adult cere‐ 1960–72: Early Research monies and the boys’ and girls’ ritual-style play Our daughter, Karen Sri, was born in 1962. Our ceremonies performed at select sites in this family of three sailed to Europe in 1964 where I attractive salt and blue bush country. After the studied in the Department of Musicology at East boys painted their faces with flour and donned Berlin’s Humboldt University. I was thrust into branches to increase their height, they emerged a unique intellectual landscape which helped lay from behind the bushes to dance in an elliptical the foundations of my life as a musicologist and circle in front of the girls, who were beating their intellectual, where the ideas of the Humboldt thighs rhythmically and singing an ancestral brothers, Herder, Hegel, and Marx contributed story about a boy Wintaru. He dared to climb up to the current debate about issues of global sig‐ a ladder to the sky, and just before he reached nificance and intellectual activism; and the dis‐ the brightest star, he was knocked by the mamu tinctively Berlin legacy of “comparative musicol‐ spirits all the way down to the ground. Though ogists” and organologists Erich Moritz von Horn‐ I loved the people at Yalata, I was shocked at the bostel and Curt Sachs influenced my search for children’s pot-bellies, the alcoholic despair of new critical, cultural meanings in musical instru‐ some of the adults, and the almost total igno‐ ments. I was privileged to study under ethnomu‐ rance of their plight among terra nullius-believ‐ sicologists Doris Stockmann and Jürgen Elsner, ing Australians. systematic musicologist Reiner Kluge, and Aus‐ I remember the young, radical Monash Uni‐ trian historical musicologist Georg Knepler versity students’ anti-conscription demonstra‐ (1906–2003; figure 2), who was a student of tions against the American-Vietnam war in the Guido Adler, one of the founders of musicology. early 1970s, when we sometimes had to ring up in the morning to find out whether the campus was closed for the day. At this time, we in the music department—including Trevor Jones, Alice Moyle, and Stephen Wild—were introducing the radical new discipline of ethnomusicology into our hitherto historical and systematic musico‐ logical curriculum. I published my findings on Pitjantjara chil‐ dren’s and women’s music cultures at Yalata and taught a wide range of Western opera, keyboard, and research methods, as well as ethnomusicol‐ Fig. 2. The late historical musicologist Georg Knepler ogy subjects, including a course on the music of exchanging a book with me in his home in Berlin, 1991 Indonesia. (Photo: Dris Kartomi). Convinced that one of the best ways to teach After I completed my doctorate in musicology another culture’s music is to play it, I borrowed and Southeast Asian studies, we were hoping to a gamelan orchestra from the Indonesian Em‐ live in Indonesia, but we were unwelcome after bassy, and produced an annual series of concert we criticized the Suharto-led massacres as he productions of Indonesian music and dance per‐ came to power. So we returned home, and I formed by our students and directed by the Ja‐

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vanese musician on our staff, Poedijono. Our fresh scented air after the rains while we walked concert productions over the next few decades along the forest paths; short rocky streams that to audiences that included thousands of school cascade down the narrow west-coastal plains; students and teachers of music and Indonesian and the magnificent long navigable rivers that language raised enough money to buy Monash’s flow eastward from the mountains and high own gamelan. lakes through the foothills, alluvial plains and From 1972 onward, I did fieldwork on Aus‐ coastal mangroves to empty finally into the tralian Research Council grants in Indonesia ev‐ Strait of Melaka. Sections of each river, ranging ery year with Dris, at first in Java where he was from the young and vigorous to the old and slow, born, and then in the little-known outer islands have their own soundscapes, ranging from the of Indonesia, especially the island of Sumatra brilliant bird sounds in the glittering upper and (figure 3). middle reaches of the rivers to the calm washing sounds downstream. We trekked through the forests in the moun‐ tains and agricultural and fishing villages on the plains and sailed across lakes and down rivers with our sturdy Nagra tape recorder, reel-to-reel tapes and cameras, etc., staying in isolated vil‐ lages and towns, explaining our purpose to won‐ derfully hospitable women and men in materi‐ ally poor but culturally rich communities, and asking permission to record their music, dances, Fig. 3. Dris and I received traditional titles as guests and theater to take back to neighboringnegara of honor at a wedding in Pasar Liwa, Skala Berak, kanguru (kangaroo land) as they called Australia. Lampung, Sumatra, 1981 (Photo: Darmawan). Later we recorded on Nakamichi MiniDiscs and Meanwhile our colleagues and students were various cassette formats, and most recently on also bringing back valuable field recordings, mu‐ our mobile phones. sical instruments, books, pamphlets, textiles, I tried hard but never managed to meet a and memorabilia that needed to be deposited Sumatran tiger, elephant, or crocodile, or even a somewhere; so we founded the Music Archive of mischievous little squirrel, deer, or pig in the Monash University (MAMU) in the 1970s. Over wild. However, I stepped over many snakes in the the decades we also received invaluable bequests forest and learned to like the cicak geckoes who and museum collections of music and music-re‐ disapprovingly said “st–st–st” every time I un‐ lated materials from Australia, Asia, Europe, and dressed to go to sleep at night. I even grew to beyond. We did fieldwork in Baghdadi Jewish like the rather harmless spiders in the houses. towns in South, Southeast and East Asia, and I met several people who had befriended poten‐ created the Australian Archive of Jewish Music, tially dangerous tigers by turning into were- which focuses on Asian and Australian Jewish tigers, and a number of art of self-defense (silat) music, and produced CDs and publications. performers whose forebears had learned to imi‐ tate the Sumatran tiger’s long stealthy steps and 1972ff.: Fieldwork in Sumatra and Beyond techniques of attack and defense. My first pub‐ Now to a few impressions of my field work in lication on Sumatra was about a series of rare the wilds of Sumatra from the early 1970s on‐ mystical songs to praise and capture tigers by, ward, experiences which shaped the course of sung by shamans in the forests of Solok, West my research life over the decades. Sumatra. My most vivid recollections of Sumatra’s still I remember some of our adventures on Suma‐ unspoiled beauty and natural environment are tra’s great lakes. One evening after recording of towering volcanic peaks in the mountain Toba Batak sigale-gale puppet theater, we were ranges along Sumatra’s west coast; jagged ridges in a small boat during a violent storm. The thun‐ with white mist hanging over crater lakes; the der and lightning flashed and gusty winds blew

8 IMS Musicological Brainfood 4, no. 2 (2020) the heavy rain in the wrong direction. The boat like ours, who knew how to wait in a shallow pilot uttered mantras over his offerings and spot, throttle fast, and lurch furiously into each asked for foreign cigarettes to appease the spirits of the seven roaring walls of water that rolled in of the lake so that they would calm the waves at us leaving a misty spray, and who finally and give him confidence to steer safely between brought us out safely through the ten-kilometer- and around the rocks to Tomok on Lake Toba’s wide river mouth to an island out at sea, where Samosir Island. As he confessed, without the in‐ we recorded an itinerant troupe of Orang Laut tervention of the foreign cigarettes and spirits of (sea people) performing flirtatiousjoget couples the lake, we might never have made it. dance songs set to Malay poetry with biola, I vividly remember listening to local legends gong, and drum music. Our boat pilot told us sung to us under the stars before we fell asleep proudly that many colonial era Portuguese en‐ on sacks of copra on our all-night sea voyage emy boats and Dutch vessels had been destroyed from Sibolga to southern Nias, where we heard because their pilots could not pass safely the soaring music of the powerfulhoho choirs, through the bono tidal waves. watched the ultra-slow female welcome dance, Over the decades we recorded a cross-section and saw young men jumping over a two-meter- of the music, dance, martial arts, theater, com‐ high rock to show their manly fitness before they edy, and vocal music in all ten of Sumatra’s large were allowed to marry. provinces and in many other parts of Indonesia One unforgettable river voyage took us all the and Malaysia, depositing them with annotations way from the Muara Takus mountain temple in the MAMU through the offices of its long- complex on Riau’s Kampar River past the former term archivist, Bronia Kornhauser, and donating Pelalawan palace and riverside villages to the is‐ copies of some to Jakarta’s National Library and lands out at sea. We canoed around a maze of Aceh’s Syiah Kuala University Library, hopefully rivulets where we recorded snake-skin covered for present and future generations to use. bowed fiddle and jews harp music, passing under huts built on low bridges by semi-nomadic Peta‐ 1980s and 1990s: International Reach langan fisherfolk who prefer to live with the for‐ Our field trips in out-of-the-way villages, former est fairies (orang bunian) and enjoy their music palaces and towns continued unabated. How‐ and live in town only when necessary (figure 4). ever, we saw that some communities were in‐ We met a honey-collecting shaman singing to creasingly losing much of their musical and lin‐ the venerated spirit of a tall sialang tree for pro‐ guistic diversity and that illegal logging, forest tection while his young partner shimmied up the burning, and expanding palm oil plantations tree to collect honey from the beehives. were endangering many species of Sumatra’s flora and fauna. We were increasingly worried about the future viability of the vulnerable music cultures we saw around us. Our archive kept acquiring valuable deposits. Actually, much of our research data in the MAMU still amaze me. The fact that we hap‐ pened to bring the unique prison-camp made gamelanDigul (figure 5) to our music archive in 1981 resulted not only in the telling of its incred‐ ible story to the whole world in a book2 and its Fig. 4. A ritual musician’s hut built over a forest rivulet Indonesian translation, but also in its restoration near Betung, Riau, Sumatra, 1984 (Photo: Dris Kartomi). by expert museologists funded by the Australian Then before reaching the river mouth we saw a government’s Department of Foreign Affairs, mighty four-meter-high tidal wave approaching. its formal public recognition as the musical sym‐ Twice a day it crashed thunderously on the river bol of the beginnings of Australian-Indonesian banks, destroying everything in its path except friendship, and its prominent display in several for the boats piloted by experienced navigators museums over the decades.

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rope, and beyond. We did not employ teams of academic managers then as we did from the early 2000s. After my experience of UC Berkeley’s inte‐ grated music curriculum, I felt it was time to expand our gamelan performance units and in‐ troduce Western music performance and compo‐ sition streams at undergraduate and postgradu‐ ate levels on being appointed professor and head Fig. 5.The gamelan Digul, built by a prison-camp musi‐ of the Monash Music Department. So the staff cian in a Netherlands East Indies prison camp in the and I spent well over the next decade establish‐ 1920s, now housed in the MAMU (Photo: Hervaert). ing a new Monash symphony orchestra, choirs, The international conference that the MAMU or‐ double degree programs, and a full bachelor of ganized later about a totally unique duck-herds’ music degree while continuing the bachelor of zither (bundengan) that I brought back from arts music major, and postgraduate degrees in Java’s Wonosobo area in the 1970s and was later performance, composition, musicology, and eth‐ researched by Rosie Cook and interdisciplinary nomusicology, with equal prominence given to teams of Australian and Indonesian museolo‐ all four streams. gists, engineers, organologists, sociologists, and ethnomusicologists had a lasting effect in Java— The 2000s to the Present Time many more instruments have been hand-made, Musicological meetings such as the IMS Inter‐ and they are now being played by hundreds of congressional Symposium held in Melbourne in school children and adults who are composing 2004 were inspiring events, with presenters dis‐ new music for the duck-herds’ zither. cussing a range of papers about traditional re‐ I spent the American academic year 1986/87 search topics, and more than ever before about as visiting professor in the University of Califor‐ musical expressions of indigenous peoples such nia at Berkeley’s Department of Music. I taught as Canadian Indians and Australian Aborigines, ethnomusicology and used UC Berkeley’s mag‐ and about increasingly important social issues nificent library to finish writing my book On such as the effects of human-induced climate Concepts and Classifications of Musical Instru‐ change, and other aspects of the existential crisis ments. I likely would not have written it without state that many perceived our societies were in. my organological and other musicological train‐ Meanwhile universities in many countries ing in East Berlin and the formative experience were becoming very different places, with con‐ of building the instrument collection in the tinuing budget cuts by governments. Enroll‐ MAMU. ments of many full-fee-paying international stu‐ On returning home from UC Berkeley, I con‐ dents and increased links with overseas vened the IMS Intercongressional Symposium in universities gave us a greater international feel Melbourne in 1988. Scholars and graduate stu‐ and scope for our activities, but they also dents from around the world presented papers brought new language problems and induced an on historical and systematic musicological top‐ over-reliance on international student fees used ics current at the time as well as on diverse eth‐ to finance research. Technology allowed us to nomusicological topics, jazz, and popular music, work more efficiently. Our campuses and build‐ and some were illustrated by concert perfor‐ ings became more beautiful, and our campus mances at the event. cafes and restaurants more diverse. The tertiary Universities in the 1980s were relatively well- environment for females, LGBTQ cohorts, peo‐ funded for musicological research on a range of ple of color, and other people of difference be‐ fundamental, systematic, and historical musico‐ came more favorable, though there was still a logical topics. Promising young graduates ob‐ long way to go. Increasing social inequality in‐ tained university positions relatively easily spired more research into their experiences and throughout Australia, Asia, the Americas, Eu‐ musical expressions.

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Some of us argue that our universities are But what, you might ask, can we musicolo‐ now more like corporations than traditional cen‐ gists do about these problems? ters of learning, with all the consequences that It seems clear at least that if our discipline is that brings. Many younger research and teach‐ to survive, some of our research and teaching ac‐ ing academics live on annual contracts in uncer‐ tivities have to be made more relevant to the tain employment conditions with punishing problematic world we live in, while continuing workloads, or are forced to move careers every and building on our extremely valuable historical time their short-term grants run out. Until the and systematic research achievements and pro‐ COVID-19 pandemic struck in early 2020, many moting our orchestras and other cultural institu‐ of us who were in employment were too busy tions. even to have lunch with colleagues—though I Musicologists can work with musicians, com‐ hasten to add, we at the MAMU regularly had posers, community organizations, NGOs, gov‐ lunch together at least twice a week! ernment departments, and corporations to re‐ In addition, the fragmenting political in‐ search the musicological implications of such trigues of the late twentieth and early twenty- systemic problems as the shocking effects of cli‐ first centuries have led to culture wars and mate change leading to the unprecedentedly threats to diminish or even abolish some human‐ wild bush fires and floods in Australia and Cali‐ ities subjects in favor of business, commerce, fornia in recent times. Some of us are continuing management, IT, engineering, and science stud‐ to research the musical results of human-in‐ ies, with an increasing trend to substitute narrow duced global warming, including rising sea levels skills training for courses that develop students’ and inundated islands that are already causing critical thinking, reading, writing, and intercul‐ the loss of whole music cultures among people tural skills—the very skills that musicologists who live on houseboats at sea or on low-lying teach so well, and that new graduates will al‐ islands in South and Southeast Asia and the ways need if they are to contribute fully to a Pasifika, leading to forced mass migrations to healthy society. higher lands, where they are often rejected From the 1970s on, many music departments rather than being welcomed. Others are re‐ around the world realized the need for their stu‐ searching the musical results of the endemic dis‐ dents and future music teachers to be exposed crimination against women in our societies, and to music cultures other than just the Western the implications of the current COVID-19 pan‐ tradition. Yet ethnomusicology subjects are be‐ demic recovery and future crisis response. ing sidelined in some universities today, as the In the past two decades, more musicologists focus is diverted to the acquisition of practical than before have been asking penetrating ques‐ skills. We need to keep arguing that studies of tions about the state of the music cultures of in‐ other music cultures remain important, not only digenous peoples such as the Romani in Europe, because they broaden students’ minds and ears the Indian nations in North America, and forest and satisfy their intellectual curiosity but be‐ dwelling peoples in Southeast Asia. According to cause they help build and maintain a tolerant, the International Labour Organization, there are peaceful multi-cultural society, and—surpris‐ approximately 476.6 million indigenous people ingly to some—they even foster greater under‐ in the world who belong to 5,000 different groups standing of the logic and history of the Western in ninety countries worldwide, yet we know very music repertoire and tradition. Intercultural little about many of their music cultures. studies are particularly important now, just sev‐ Some of us in Australia have been asking enty-five years after our great losses in the world whether we can do more to help establish a First war against fascism, given the increasingly bla‐ Nations Voice in the current discussions and Na‐ tant expressions of racism and religious extrem‐ tional Commission tell the truth about our so- ism in our midst today, including by some heavy called terra nullius colonial history in Australia. metal bands, one of which has a 100% national Can we support First Nation composers wanting socialist membership, as Benjamin Hillier dis‐ to expose their works to the public, such as a re‐ covered after some exhaustive research.3 cent oratorio by Yorta Yorta woman Deborah

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Cheetham that aims to correct the false claim life, museums, archives, libraries, the education that pre-colonized Australia was aterra nullius system, festivals, tourism, and youth cultures. when Captain Cook “discovered” it in 1770? I be‐ lieve we can, by the subjects we choose to re‐ Concluding Thoughts search and the publications we produce. I confess that in the few years that may remain A few Australian First Nation musicians have to me, I want to finish digitizing our field data, begun researching their fragile music cultures in which cover decades of social and musical collaboration with non-First Nation musicol‐ change. I also want to comply with requests to ogists. The National publish Indonesian translations of my publica‐ Recording Project for tions, to help my students publish their research, Indigenous Perfor‐ and to try and finish my self-imposed task of mance in Australia has publishing on the performing arts of all of Suma‐ supported indigenous tra’s ten provinces and the fascinating historical Australians’ efforts to and theoretical issues that arise from this task— record, document, ar‐ still three provinces to go! chive, and revitalize No rest for the wicked, as they say. It’s better their music and dance to expire, when the time comes, thoroughly worn traditions for applica‐ out and proclaiming—wow, what a ride! As tion to business, infor‐ Jeffrey Cheah says, “I’ll perspire to inspire before mation technologies, I expire!”5 Fig. 6. A cangget dancer the arts, education, in Sukadana, Lampung, research, governance, Sumatra, 2013 (Photo: References 4 and health. Karen Kartomi Thomas ). 1 The Colombo Plan was founded in 1950 as At our next interdisciplinary conference at a framework for international cooperation Monash in December 2020 (if the pandemic al‐ among countries in Southeast Asia. lows), we will address important issues regard‐ 2 Margaret J. Kartomi,The Gamelan Digul ing the preservation and future development of and the Prison Camp Musician Who Built It: Indonesia’s formerly neglected Lampung prov‐ An Australian Link to the Indonesian Revolu‐ ince’s traditional, new, and popular music, dance tion (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester theater, bardic, martial, and visual arts (see fig‐ Press, 2002). ures 6 and 7), including their role in communal 3 Benjamin Hillier, “Genre Hybridity in Aus‐ tralian Extreme Metal,” paper presented at the 43rd National Conference of the Musico‐ logical Society of Australia, December 6, 2019. 4 Our daughter, Karen Kartomi Thomas (PhD, UC Berkeley), an Indonesian theater re‐ searcher, carried out fieldwork with me in In‐ donesia’s Riau Islands province and Lampung province in the 2010s, and published articles on various forms of Sumatran folk theater. Fig. 7.Lampung’s talo balak orchestra performed in Melbourne by the Monash University Talo Balak 5 Jeffrey Cheah is the foundation chancellor of Ensemble, 2019 (Photo: Sastra Wijaya). Sunway University in Malaysia.

Margaret Kartomi is professor emerita in the Sir Zelman Cowen School of Music, Monash Univer‐ sity, and founding director of the Music Archive of Monash University. Her books includeOn Con‐ cepts and Classifications of Musical Instruments, Musical Journeys in Sumatra, and Performing the Arts of Indonesia. She has served as president of the Musicological Society of Australia, board mem‐ ber of the Society for Ethnomusicology, and convened IMS Intercongressional Symposia in 1988 and 2004. She was elected corresponding member of the American Musicological Society and Fel‐ low of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, and received the Centenary Medal for service to Australian society and the humanities, and a Cultural Endowment from the Indonesian government.

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Directorium President: Daniel K. L. Chua (HK) Vice Presidents: Egberto Bermúdez (CO), Andrea Lindmayr-Brandl (AT) Immediate Past President: Dinko Fabris (IT) Secretary General: Cristina Urchueguía (CH) Treasurer: Beate Fischer (CH) Executive Officer: Lukas Christensen (AT) Directors-at-Large: Antonio Baldassarre (CH), Andrea Bombi (ES), Per Dahl (NO), Sergio Durante (IT), Manuel Pedro Ferreira (PT), Florence Gétreau (FR), John Griffiths (AU), Jane Hardie (AU), Klaus Pietschmann (DE), Christopher Reynolds (US), Nozomi Sato (JP), Elaine Sisman (US), Laura Tunbridge (UK), Christiane Wiesenfeldt (DE), Suk Won Yi (KR) Directorium Consultant: Jen-yen Chen (TW)

Editors ofActa Musicologica Philip V. Bohlman (US), Federico Celestini (AT)

Chairs of the IMS Regional Associations “East Asia”: Jen-yen Chen (TW) “Eastern Slavic Countries”: Natalia Braginskaya (RU) “Latin America and the Caribbean”: Juan-Pablo González (CL) “Study of Music of the Balkans”: Evanthia Nika-Sampson (GR), Mirjana Veselinović-Hofman (RS)

Chairs of the IMS Study Groups “Cantus Planus”: James Borders (US) “Cavalli and 17th-Century Venetian Opera”: Ellen Rosand (US) “Digital Musicology”: Johanna C. Devaney (US), Frans Wiering (NL) “Early Music and the New World”: Egberto Bermúdez (CO) “Gender and Musical Patronage”: Maria Cáceres Piñuel (CH/ES), Vincenzina C. Ottomano (CH/DE) “Global History of Music”: David R. M. Irving (ES) “History of the IMS”: Dorothea Baumann (CH), Jeanna Kniazeva (RU) “Italo-Ibero-American Relationships”: Annibale Cetrangolo (IT) “Mediterranean Music Studies”: Dinko Fabris (IT) “Music and Cultural Studies”: Tatjana Marković (AT) “Music and Media”: Emile Wennekes (NL) “Music and Violence”: Anna Papaeti (GR) “Music of the Christian East and Orient”: Maria Alexandru (GR) “Musical Diagrams”: Daniel Muzzulini (CH), Susan Forscher Weiss (US) “Musical Iconography”: Björn R. Tammen (AT) “Shostakovich and His Epoch”: Olga Digonskaya (RU), Pauline Fairclough (UK) “Stravinsky: Between East and West”: Natalia Braginskaya (RU), Valérie Dufour (BE) “Tablature in Western Music”: John Griffiths (AU) “Transmission of Knowledge as a Primary Aim in Music Education”: Giuseppina La Face (IT)

13 IMS Musicological Brainfood4, no. 2 (2020)

As a member of the IMS you will enjoy a wide One important benefit of being a member is that range of exclusive benefits that will serve you you can join an IMS Regional Association or throughout your career. The annual membership IMS Study Group for free. By joining, you’ll includes be able to • online access to all past and current is‐ • support the advancement of musicology in sues ofActa Musicologica, the official peer- your region or field of study; reviewed journal of the IMS (print mailing of • help set agendas for research; current issues is also available, if preferred); • establish new contacts—to share ideas, dis‐ • the electronic IMS Newsletter, which keeps cuss problems, and further your research; members informed of internal affairs; • have the opportunity to play leadership roles. • online access to theIMS Publication Ar‐ As an international society, we recognize that chive, which includes electronic versions of the distribution of wealth is unequal across the previously publishedIMS Newsletters andIMS world. We have therefore tried to reflect the sit‐ Communiqués; uation by keeping our fees as low as possible • discounts with publishers when purchas‐ compared to similar organizations. There are ing books and journals (e.g., MIT Press, Ox‐ also substantially reduced fees for students and ford University Press, Routledge), or when retirees. We do not offer free membership but, if subscribing to online resources (e.g.,Grove for any reason, fees should be prohibitive, please Music Online); contact us and we will check if we can help alle‐ • discounts on IMS events, such as the quin‐ viate the problem. quennial IMS Congresses, symposia of the In order to keep our fees low and to provide IMS Regional Associations and IMS Study support, we encourage those of you who would Groups, as well as other joint conferences; like to help in this area to give a little more. Your • and more. generosity is much appreciated.

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IMS Musicological Brainfood

published by the International Musicological Society (IMS) PO Box 1561, 4001 Basel, Switzerland

Editors: Lukas Christensen, Daniel K. L. Chua Layout and typesetting: Lukas Christensen

Musicological Brainfood is a fresh intermittent IMS dish—an “amuse-bouche”—that may delight or possibly perturb you. These pithy, informal paragraphs are cooked up by leading musicologists to advance, refresh, or reinvigorate different aspects of our field; and they are anything but bland. Remember, these are “provocations” with flavors designed to prod, needle, and pinch your brain. They are not meant to be representative, and they are surely not official or definitive. Enjoy!

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