The island nation of Indonesia is a tough one to write about succinctly. Not only is the country expansive, but every island has its own unique culture, and there are a LOT of islands. 17,500 of them, in fact, and 6,000 of them are inhabited. It's also a bit tough to find information on Indonesia in English. Not only is Indonesia apparently a bit of a lightning rod for "alternative histories" involving Atlantis, Lemuria, and cryptids, but the country's rich archaeological sites prove problematic for young earthers who search for creationist explanations for the Java Man. Also, there's a Java Man coffee house which sucks up a lot of prime Google pages, in case you want to learn more. The internet never fails to surprise.
In any case, fossilized Homo erectus skeletons suggest inhabitation started between 500,000 and 2 million years ago. Heck of a margin of error, but that's how archaeology do sometimes. For modern humans, there are two major groups of note - the Austronesian people showing up around 2,000 BCE and known for their pottery and woodcarvings, and the Melanesian people who were displaced by the Austronesian migrations.
As far as large scale kingdoms go, Indonesia is largely shaped first by Hinduism and Buddhism, and then by Islam. The Srivijaya kingdom really took off in the 7th century CE. Two kingdoms highlight the religious influences: the Saliendra kingdom, who were Buddhist and are primarily known today for the Borobudur Temple; and the Mataram dynasty, who are largely known for the Prambanan Temple. In the late 1200s, the Hindu Majapahit kingdom spread across Java, leaving a large body of terracotta works. The spread of Islam into the archipelago was slow, a process occurring over several hundred years.
As one might expect, these religious roots had a dramatic influence on the arts of the kingdom, informing art with Buddhist and Hindu styles from India and south China. The influence of Islamic art is, for some reason, less well studied, but is present nonetheless. The influence can also be found in architecture, as can be seen in the candi structures on Bali or the temples in Java.
Christianity was brought by Europeans in the 1500s. While the Portuguese made first contact with the Indonesians, it was ultimately the Dutch East India Trading Company that became the dominant European force in the area. Not that they had an easy time of it. Rebellions against Dutch presence were frequent, and several leaders, like Prince Diponegoro, Tuanku Imam Bonjol, and Kapitan Pattimura have been canonized as national heroes and are pictured on their currency.
Getting into music, traditions are markedly different from island to island. Indonesia's biggest claim to musical fame is the gamelan, an orchestra of gongs and drums, but the styles of Javanese gamelan differ from the Balinese. Bali also has a traditional ceremony called the kecak, a ritual telling of the Hindu epic, Ramayana. Another distinct tradition is Sundanese folk music, from a minority group on the island of Java. Music and dance are often (almost always?) tied together, and two notable examples include the saman "Dance of a Thousand Hands" and the dances of the Mirangkabau peoples. Many of these musical traditions are still living, with new compositions being written for them, but Indonesia also has its own genre of popular music called dangdut which blends many of the traditional instruments with electronic instruments, while adopting a modern pop style.
--- --- ---
Today's composer is Dr. Gumgum Gumbira Tirasondjaja (1945-2020), a Sundanese musician, choreographer, and orchestra leader from Bandung, West Java. Dr. Tirasondjaja's music is a 20th-century reimagining of rural dance rituals. His compositional direction was dramatically influenced by Indonesian President Sukarno who, in 1961, prohibited Western popular music like rock and roll and pushed for a renewal of local traditional music. The most popular result of Dr. Tirasondjaja's studies was a dance called Jaipongang, combining influences from the Indonesian martial art, Pencak Silat, the masked dance, Topeng, and Wayang shadow puppet theater.
Apparently, Jaipongang wasn't the "right" Indonesian art, because the government did try to suppress it after its debut in 1974, but it survived and continues to survive to this day, although rather reduced in popularity. Here is a solo dance, Keser Bojang, which, due to my illiteracy in Indonesian and total lack of information in English, I can't find much to say about. The little I've been able to find tell it is a dance of "moving," that is "moving from one position to a better, more precise position." Given the sung accompaniment, I would guess the movements are also a form of pantomime.
No comments:
Post a Comment