Indonesian regional music on VCD

Inclusion, exclusion, fusion
Join ethnomusicologist Dr Philip Yampolsky as he reports on a 15-year project to research the representation of Indonesian regional music and theatre on VCD.

This talk reported on a 15-year project to research the representation of Indonesian regional music and theatre on VCD (video compact discs) which were, until recently,  the main commercial medium for music in Indonesia.  Representation is a key term here.  There are countless varieties of local music in the regions of Indonesia, but only a small portion of them appear on VCD.  The manner in which those that do appear are represented is often heavily influenced by two national manners or modes of presentation, one musical and one aesthetic. 

The musical mode or manner is that of national popular music, which is essentially Western in instrumentation and idiom; and the aesthetic mode is that of television and stage performance.  That regional music on VCD often conforms to these norms clearly reflects widespread Indonesian ideas of what regional music should be or should aspire to become.

For the main, my approach will be descriptive, seeking simply to identify the categories and trends in regional VCDs.  In a coda, however, I will discuss an example from Indonesian Timor of the kind of traditional rural genre that—failing to conform to the prevailing norms, and hence having no commercial appeal—is excluded from VCD production.  Here my stance becomes critical—not of Indonesians or Indonesian media, but of current scholarship, which, fascinated by the popular, the diasporic, and the global, allows such rich rural micro-genres to vanish (as they almost certainly will) undocumented and unstudied.

About the speaker

Dr Philip Yampolsky has studied the music of Island Southeast Asia since 1971.  In  the 1990s he recorded, edited, and annotated the 20-CD series Music of Indonesia (Smithsonian Folkways Recordings). From 2000 through 2006 he was Program Officer for Arts and Culture in the Jakarta Office of the Ford Foundation.  In 2007 he founded a world music institute at the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign).  Since retiring in 2011 he has concentrated on researching and documenting traditional music in rural areas of Timor.