Music and the Cline of Malayness

The cline of Malayness as exhibited in Sumatra and the Malay Peninsula extends through tribal-Malay, rakyat-Melayu, raja-Melayu and modern urban-Melayu. As a consequence of the manner in which Malay states came into being, this cline exhibits an increasing elaboration of the cultural expression of transition and transitivity. These differences are paralleled closely in such areas of Malay cultural expression as: social personality, cooking & eating, dance, religion, grammar & lexicon. They are also manifested in the different manners of musical performance favoured in the various Malay populations (as illustrated by the recorded examples). Introduction: music-and-culture studies Language-and-culture studies are a well established activity in anthropology and related fields. 1 Music-and-culture studies, on the other hand, are far less frequently undertaken. Ethnomusicologists have had much to say about the characteristics of many of the world’s musics, and increasingly about the social context of those musics. But music-and-culture studies still form a small proportion of the musicological research output, and are still somewhat controversial. 2 Judith Becker spells out the divisions thus: In ... ethnomusicology, there is sometimes a three-way tension between (1) musicians who play, those who think and feel in music, (2) scholars who write about music as musical sound, (3) scholars who write about music as cultural expression, i.e., those who find in the music of a particular group of people an enactment of some of the deeply held values of the group. (Becker 1993: 1.) Taking my cue from Becker’s own studies in Javanese music-and-culture, it is approach (3) that I wish to take in this exploratory study. What is it that makes a musical tradition – a ‘music’ – meaningful to its participants? As with any other form of culturally embedded expression, there is no simple answer to this question. We cannot predict a priori just which components of cultural life are the ones that are given expression in such forms as dance, language, architecture, food – or music. But there must be some degree of coherence between these different domains, or they would cease to draw or retain anyone’s attention. 1. Linguistic studies of Malay from this approach include Alton L. Becker 1979, Asmah 1985, Benjamin 1993, Benjamin in press. 2. For recent comprehensive surveys see Fletcher 2003 and Miller & Williams 1998. See also the discussions by Feld et al. (1984) that occupy a whole issue of the journal Ethnomusicology. For a critical-sociology assessment of such studies – as applied to Western music – see Martin 1995: 126–166.