with Saiful Hadi. “Singing ‘Naked’ Verses: Interactive Intimacies and Islamic Moralities in Saluang Performances in West Sumatra.” Sounding Out the State of Indonesian Music, Edited by Christopher J. Miller and Andy McGraw. Under contract: expected 2022.
Abstract Discursive constructions of the people who identify as Minangkabau typically celebrate their Islamic piety, but the musical scene attached to the genre known as saluang challenges these romanticized images. Contemporary saluang performances, which span a range of contexts and musical styles, habitually involve female vocalists out late at night performing in front of predominantly male audiences. In the genre’s racier manifestations, the vocalists deliver pantun telanjang (“naked” or explicit verses) or the milder porno ones reliant on metaphorical reference to bodies and sexual organs, engaging in interactive intimacies with their audiences. In this paper, I offer a performance ethnography of one song and its lively interactions between the vocalists and audience that extend the song to twenty-three minutes, two to four times longer than usual. Singing for a share of the tips at a café by the side of the main road, the vocalists were inexorably responsive to their audience. Men paid for the privilege of making requests, including prolonging the song and requesting the lead singer, Santi, to respond to their jokes. In return, Santi teased specific male audience members, identifying regulars by their nicknames used on the saluang circuit, an intimacy predicated on familiarity. Drawing on ethnographic interviews with performers and devotees, my analysis takes into account the postural, sartorial, and textual choices of these vocalists. Combined with stories of drugs and alcohol, extra-marital affairs and high divorce rates, and the occasional implication of sex work, their performative stances rub against the normative middle-class narratives of Islamic moralities.
with Karla Hubbard. 2021. “Natural” Disasters, Cultural Framings, and Resilience in Indonesia: Transdisciplinary Engagements in an Immersion Program. ASIANetwork Exchange: A Journal for Asian Studies in the Liberal Arts, 27(2), pp.30–42. DOI: http://doi.org/10.16995/ane.299
Abstract In this paper, we will discuss a two-week experiential learning trip to Indonesia, ranging from the design phase to a module course and in-country implementation with two institutional partners in country. The trip involved four faculty and eight students from disciplines ranging from Geology, Anthropology, Environmental Studies to Chemistry and Music. Comparison was at the heart of the project. Our team explored the cultural and functional responses to the 2004 tsunami in Banda Aceh and volcanic eruptions of Mount Merapi in Central Java. Contrasting views of cause and recovery proved especially enlightening. Acehnese responses were tightly woven with immediate pre-tsunami political upheaval along with Islamic framings of the disaster. In comparison, we found responses to volcanic eruptions on Java were quite different because the community affected was more multicultural. We will pepper our account of this pedagogical experience with personal outcomes, cultural interactions, and the trip’s engagement with moving beyond interdisciplinarity to collaborative, transdisciplinary engagement.
“The Sustainability and Evolution of Talempong: Pluralism in Minangkabau Gong Practices” Performing Indonesia, ed. by Sumarsam and Andy McGraw. Smithsonian Institution. Freer Occasional Paper Series, New Series, vol. 5, 2016. https://www.freersackler.si.edu/essays/article-fraser/
Abstract This paper has as its focus the evolution and current sustainability of talempong (Minangkabau kettle gong ensembles) in the twentieth and twenty-first century. Preiously published work devoted to the analysis of talempong music and development of new styles is limited. Drawing on my own ethnographic research over sixteen years, and supplemented with archival recordings and photographs generously shared by Margaret Kartomi, I briefly sketch out the history of talempong over the last sixty years. The main focus of the paper, however, is on the aesthetics of village styles and the sustainability of talempong in several villages today, including the ways they have adapted (or not) to the demands of the times. I am particularly interested in transmission methods, contrasting long-term exposure and imitation employed in village contexts with pedagogical approaches employed at institutions that involve more explicit models, such as notation, analysis, and new epistemologies.
“The Art of Grieving: West Sumatra’s Worst Earthquake in Music Videos.” Ethnomusicology Forum 22(2):129-159. 2013. DOI:10.1080/17411912.2012.707855
Abstract The article illustrates how a series of commercial music videos released in the aftermath of West Sumatra's worst earthquake present powerful local encodings of the disaster that allow Minangkabau communities to comprehend, rationalise, come together, and survive the catastrophe. The analysis, supplemented with ethnographic interviews with musicians, lyricists, and record storeowners, illustrates how the music videos draw on and transform existing Minangkabau literary and musical conventions, philosophies, ideologies, and social habits. I explore how music, lyrics, and visual images were utilised to commemorate the events and places affected, convey grief, and elicit physical and fiscal aid from migrants. While the disaster has been musically articulated through an array of Minangkabau genres ranging from regionally specific traditions with limited audience bases to more mainstream popular styles, my interest in the art of grieving focuses on the emotional power of indigenous practices, particularly saluang jo dendang (flute with song). The article makes a contribution to the growing literature on the ethnomusicology of disasters, but offers a different approach by asking what music can tell us about the localised ways people experience, process, frame, and otherwise comprehend catastrophes through musical practices. I argue that such studies help us engage more fully with the cultural dimensions of disasters.
“Pop Song as Custom: Weddings, Entrepreneurs, and Ethnicity in West Sumatra.” Ethnomusicology 55(2):200-228. 2011. https://doi.org/10.5406/ethnomusicology.55.2.0200
Abstract Attend an urban Minangkabau wedding today and you are likely to hear the pop Minang song Malam Bainai. Interested in cultural change, this article explores the processes and agents through which a pop song about wedding custom has become custom at some contemporary Minangkabau weddings, including the malleable nature of adat (custom) and the positioning of pop Minang as a particularly sentimental expression of Minangkabau identity. In Minangkabau communities, weddings are important social occasions that mobilize hundreds of people and allow host families a chance to position themselves socially. The selection of different musical styles, ensembles, and repertoire speaks to multiple ways of understanding oneself individually and collectively as Minangkabau. Interested in a more nuanced analysis of identity, I follow the cognitive view of ethnicity that shifts the emphasis onto how and when an ethnic category becomes activated. Weddings, and especially the performance of them in cultural displays, have become vibrant sites where the category of Minangkabau is discursively created and invoked. Drawing on Rogers Brubaker’s concept of ethnopolitical entrepreneurs, I highlight the agency of certain individuals in creating ethnic representations, suggesting that these individuals have facilitated the song’s transition from touristic display to embedded cultural practice.
