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Borneologising S
Fun in Sarawak with nose flutes and zithers. Andrew Cronshawtook his camera and notepad to the Borneo World Music Expo and Rainforest World Music Festival.
ay what you like about ‘world music’ as a term, it’s brought a lot of good people and musi- cians together, and they’ve cre- ated gatherings: festivals and showcasing, networking expo events. The biggest of the latter, of course, is Womex, but increasingly there are oth- ers aimed at giving local music access to the wider world.
The founding a decade ago of the
Rainforest World Music Festival in Sarawak prompted Europeans and Americans to wonder, given that ‘world music’ tends to signify ‘exotic’ to some, what it means on the ‘exotic’ island of Borneo. And this year there took place, immediately before the Rainforest Festival, the Borneo World Music Expo in Sarawak’s capital Kuching. Directed by former Womex director Gerald Seligman, in collaboration with the Sarawak Tourist Board and the festival, it invited a bunch of 20 or so major world- music bookers (and a few lucky journalists) from across the world to three days of two- way communication: seeing show cases and giving how-to-do-it seminars and one-to- ones with bands and musicians from Bor- neo itself and south-east Asia in general.
As delegates flew in, smoke from out- of-control forest burning in Indonesia’s Sumatra had spread across thousands of square miles of the South China Sea, reducing the sun to a pale spot in Kuala Lumpur and Singapore and so threatening flights bound for Kuching.
It was the first year of a new concept for them, and local musicians didn’t leap at the chance to go to seminars with, and showcase in front of, the bookers whose
Song workshop in the Iban longhouse
attention musicians and agents elsewhere expend much effort in trying to attract. Gerald and Rainforest Festival director Jun-Lin Yeoh had to track them down through contacts and even YouTube and persuade them.
The delegates’ positivity towards local indigenous musicians is already turning into gigs for some. The biggest buzz was for Talago Buni (‘lake of sound’) from West Sumatra, evolving music from the range of their Minangkabau traditions. In 1999 an earlier line-up did perform abroad in Ger- many, including the Rudolstadt festival. The current seven-piece showed them- selves absolutely ready for world touring, thrilling with soaring and chanting solo and harmonising group vocals, small bronze gongs, kecapi (the Indonesian box- zither), penting (the typewriter-key-fretted zither known in India as bulbul tarang, in Baluchistan as benju and in Japan as taishogoto), whistles, skirling, droning reeds, electric guitar and hand drums.
Sarawak’s iconic instrument is the
sape of the Orang Ulu (‘up-river’) people. It’s a fretted zither, bottle-shaped in out- line, held like a lute but akin to Norwegian langeleik or Appalachian dulcimer, and similarly equipped with one melody string running over gapped frets to give a dia- tonic scale plus three to five drone strings. Examples are to be found in varying low levels of playability in Kuching’s tourist shops; proper ones, usually electrified, fea- tured in several of the bands, particularly Lan E Tuyang, a Kenyah family group led by Mathew Ngau Jau, which has just received a big financial award from Malaysia’s Petronas oil company to sup- port their work.
Juk Wan Emang plays the nose flute…
A set of big brass gongs used to be a family heirloom in the Bisayah villages up the Limbang river, but the sets of old have been broken up, given away, sold or in museums, as their functions in inter-village communication, dancing and shamanic rit- ual have declined with modern world, modern medicine and Christianity. Peter Sawal, a Bisayah who, seeing his culture disappearing, rather than “shouting from the village” as he puts it, moved to Kuch- ing and got involved in state administra- tion to change things from the power cen- tre. He observes that, for example, “in Sweden people are urbanised but still maintain interest in their culture”. He’s working to reassemble some sets of the old gongs, encourage playing and teach the making of good new ones, and has gathered together some of his fellow vil- lagers as the Bisayah Gong Orchestra.
From Kuching we decamped a half- hour drive north to the seaside, a wide, coconut-palm fringed sandy bay below the steep, densely rainforested flank of Mount Santubong, for the Rainforest World Music Festival. The festival takes place in the Sarawak Cultural Village in which are gathered examples of the range of big wooden communal-living longhouses of the various peoples of Sarawak. In a jar- ring contrast, the holiday complex across the road from the Cultural Village has piggy backed onto the festival with anoth- er aspect of Sarawak culture: a three-day event of loud MOR rock-pop, honking motor bikes and tattooing. After its Satur- day night partying peak its section of the idyllic beach was squalidly littered with broken bottles.
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