Events

CHAIRPERSON

Dr Andrew Conroe, University Scholars Programme, National University of Singapore

ABSTRACT

Kroncong is an Indonesian popular music associated with the nationalist period of the 1920-50s. The prominent intellectual and novelist Armijn Pane argued that kroncongshould become Indonesia’s first national music, rather than a regional music like gamelan, since it made audible the hybridity of modern Indonesian culture itself. In his short novel Shackles (1938), Pane depicts the clash of cultures – local-traditional, upper class-lower class, Western-modern, hybrid-national – in terms of musical forms. The married life of Tono and Tini begins with Western art music and dissolves when Tono – in the search for his true, inner soul – discovers kroncong as sung by a former childhood neighbour who has become a kroncong singer, Siti Hayati. Unable to resist he reaches out to the sound, and secondarily to her, only to discover that his soul is moving to a future that contains neither his Beethoven-playing wife nor his kroncong-singing lover. All three characters find themselves in face-to-face encounters with an (musical) Other (i.e., each other, new “Indonesian” nation, the West). Each realizes that the Other, albeit in varied manifestations, is the cause but may also be the solution to his or her ontological crisis. In this short novel, music functions as a metaphor for shifting Indonesian national and individual identities in the 1930s.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Sarah Weiss is a Visiting Associate Professor at Yale-NUS College in Singapore. She addresses issues of postcoloniality, hybridity, gender, and aesthetics in her writing and teaching. She has examined the international presentation and reception of Sulawesi’s epic in I La Galigo by Robert Wilson and Rahayu Supanggah and Sangar Çudamani’s Odalan Bali. She has also interrogated the role of listener expectation on the reception of world musics (forthcoming from Ethnomusicology). Her earlier work includes the book Listening to an Earlier Java: Aesthetics, Gender, and the Music of Wayang in Central Java (KITLV 2006) and her new book, currently in process, is entitled: Ritual Soundings: Women Performers and World Religions. She has recently begun a research project problematizing the concepts of sustainability and conservation as they relate to performance cultures in Singapore, Indonesia and Cambodia.

REGISTRATION

Admission is free. We would greatly appreciate if you RSVP Mr Jonathan Lee via email: jonathan.lee@nus.edu.sg