More than a decade of research and mobile
field recording
went into the highly acclaimed twenty-volume
Smithsonian Folkways
series devoted to the music of Indonesia.
Philip Yampolsky
, an ethnomusicologist who specializes in the music of the Indonesian archipelago, collaborated with the Indonesian Society for the Performing Arts on this remarkable and wide-ranging series. Volume seven concentrates upon music from the forests of Riau and Mentawai; the ethnic groups heard here are the Petalangan, the Talang Mamak, and the Mentawai of southern Siberut Island. The Mentawai are said to have little or no cultural links with the other two groups, who regard themselves as descendants of the "original Malay". Much of the instrumentation consists of xylophones and drums; there are a small number of male group vocals and on track 12 a woman sings a sad song in duet with a diminutive flute. In an accompanying essay,
Bart Barendregt
describes paired principles that commingle in this music -- the male element is called Peningka and the female is Penyelalu. While a comprehension of this and other underlying concepts undoubtedly enhances the informed individual's appreciation of the music, most will take the xylophone, the drums, and the singing at face value without needing any kind of ethnographic context to qualify what's going on. ~ arwulf arwulf