The blog is moving!

 Thanks to everybody who has been keeping up with my blog, but just in case you follow with an RSS feed, I want to let you know the blog will be moving to my website. You can find today's entry on Malaysia over here: https://www.adameasonmusic.com/index.php/bloghome/world-composers/91-composer-for-every-country-malaysia

A Composer for Every Country: Cameroon

 At some time in 1472, the Lepidophthalmus turneranus (or ghost shrimp, if you're a plebian (not to be confused with the other two species of shrimp called ghost shrimp)) had one of their massive swarms they have every 3 to 5 years, bursting out of the mud for a grand shellfish orgy in the Wouri River. It was a grand time to be a ghost shrimp. At the same time, a group of Portuguese sailors arrived on the coast, made their way into the river, and couldn't help but notice the piles of copulating shrimp, and decided to name the river Rio dos Camarões, or "Shrimp River." This marked the beginning of a less than grand time to be African in the area which English speakers would mispronounce as "Cameroon."

Before we get to that colonial Cameroon, there are two human groups which formed the first cultures in the area. The first, the Baka peoples (or "Pygmies," but you'd do well to avoid using the term) settled the area probably 5000 years ago, or so. Hunter-gatherers of the Central African rainforest, their culture is undergoing rapid change due to increasing deforestation. They are also excellent fishers, and if you want to learn more about Baka fishing practices than you'd ever imaging, you can click on this link.

Afterwards, and alongside them, came a number of Bantu migrations, leading eventually to the Bornu Empire. This empire lasted from about 700AD to 1900AD, encompassing areas of Chad, Niger, and Sudan. The history of the Bornu Kingdom is known mostly through a text called the Girgam, or Royal Chronical. The long-lived kingdom finally fell in 1900 when the French won a decisive victory against warlord Rabih az-Zubayr in the Battle of Kousséri and captured the capital, Dikwa.

Is there much can be said about the region before 1800? Yes. Can I easily find that information? No. But the 1800s saw two big events - Modibo Adama led the Fulani people in a jihad and established the Adamawa Emirate, causing a large redistribution of the population in the area; and Sultan Ibrahim Njoya invented what is called Shumom, or the Bamum script, a written language that compressed the whole range of script evolution, from pictographs to phonetic script, in 14 years. The time was otherwise rather dark for many people in the area because the German colonizers ran a system of forced labor (I don't know why Wikipedia doesn't call it slavery) to lay down railroads, and introduce industry. The treatment of local Africans got so bad, one governor, Jesko von Puttkamer, was relieved of his duties. But don't worry, Wikipedia tells us he at least left a "splendid residential manor" behind.

Wikipedia was less than helpful with Cameroonian art. Literature is divided between colonial writers and post-independence (1960) writers. The city Yaoundé is rising as a center of various visual and performative arts exploring nature, ecology, and colonial fallout. Standout musical genres (beyond traditional music) are the enormously popular makossa and a dance craze called bikutsi. 

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Our composer today is Francis Bebey (1929-2001). Poet, guitarist, composer, mathematician, radio broadcaster... He had many talents. As a guitarist, he was influenced by Andrés Segovia while in Paris, and was hired by UNESCO to travel and document music of Central Africa. Stylistically, he blended elements of African, Latin American, and European classical music, leading many to consider him a pioneer of the world music genre.

A good introductory song to his pop-oriented style is The Coffee Cola Song. 

A Composer for Every Country: Indonesia

 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.

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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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3aEWmmbaCKU