Transcript Kerongcong Music in a Javanese Neighbourhood.ppt

Kerongcong Music in a Javanese
Neighbourhood
Circuit of Culture
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Representation
Identity
Production
Consumption
Regulation
…and musicking
Assumption
• the social ground for
aesthetic taste can
be read in art, film,
photos, sculpture,
oral narratives,
dress, food, forms of
social etiquette etc.
like texts
The Kampung: Rumah Putri in
Yogyakarta, Indonesia
Kerongcong as representation
• Onomatopoeia
• many elsewheres – the Portuguese fado
• Local and beyond – themes, musicality,
instrumentation
• a cultural “product of encounter”
Kerongcong as identity
– The modern
– The urban kampung
– Urban vs. rural – “the beautiful Indies”
– Rusticity
– Nostalgia and the pastoral
Kerongcong Identity redux
• Kroncong offers “portraits” of rural and urban
lifestyles that have the capacity to function as
meta-commentaries on everyday life in an
urban kampung, or on the general state of
affairs in what many see as a rapidly changing
nation.
• Is this the whole story?
Kerongcong on YouTube
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ou4AB6t
NiFI
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yoF8os5
Pdk
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7c6gZ1u
K3A
Kerongcong as identity
• kroncong music, given the context of this working class
neighborhood, represents a cultural practice of the
“popular classes” that cultivates a response to elite,
aristocratic tastes.
• National identity -- Revolutionary songs
(kroncong revolusi) & Nationalism
– Radio & TV
• Wild unregulated masculinity
• developed in the “poorer quarters” of the cities in Java,
was popular with Eurasians and other “mestico
(mestizo) persons,” and was a musical genre associated
with people of “questionable moral behavior”
Kerongcong and Masculinity
• kroncong early on became associated with “a
Javanese stereotype known as the buaya
(crocodile), or the jago (rooster)”
• communicates the swagger quality of a
Javanese machismo
• revolutionary heros are often referred to as
jagos of Indonesian Independence
• Indonesian Military personnel today are
known for their rooster-like swagger
Kerongcong and the production of
culture
• What to play?
• neighbor’s house
• musical instruments: guitars, a string bass, an
electric keyboard, a viola, a flute, and a
microphone with an amplifier
• The community itself has become feminized in
its reconstruction as the domestic community
• Pak Wayang remarked that making this music
was an ascetic practice referred to as prihatin
Kampung consumption
• ‘MUSICKING’ SOCIAL LIFE IN A JAVANESE
KAMPUNG
• “diversions” and “trajectories” of a musical
genre in various contexts
• “agonistic display”in the poetics and politics of
an ongoing set of social relations
• shifting rhythms of gender relations
• Pak Wayang as visible sign
Kerongcong Regulation
• a cultural production within the real politick of
community life
– it is a “musicking” of social life
– a social life in which the shifting rhythms of
gender relations can be heard.
• choosing a musical genre like the decision the
make kroncong music is a choice in a “social
poetics”
Regulating Social Relations
• lost potency of Javanese men in the everyday
social relations of the kampung
– “agonistic display”
• The End of Kerongcong
– In the end the men and their “passions” were kept in
check
– kroncong music as a “sign of recognition” (Keane
1997)
– a resounding recognition of things as they are as
these men see it, and perhaps as they see themselves
Musicking
• expressive forms of culture, forms of art, play,
display, & performance are shaped & crafted
to heighten experience, comment upon it,
open it up to intensified engagement &
contemplation
• equipment for living - ways of speaking,
dressing, dancing, playing, music, etc. are
social means available to members for the
accomplishment of social ends