By Philip Yampolsky

I have been asked by the editors of this volume to comment on a question posed by a reviewer: Is documentation all I have to propose in support of vanishing traditions?  For ethnomusicologists who come from outside the community, I would say yes, because it’s the only thing that outsiders can do. Any other kind of support has to come from the inside, from the tradition-bearers and inheritors themselves. Possibly appreciation by outsiders will help, but that seems dubious. One of my youthful hopes was that demonstrating outside respect for an art could rekindle respect for it within the community and stimulate young people to take it up. My presence in two communities in Timor for some 15 to 18 months in each, showing up at events to record and commissioning recordings if no events were happening, did not have that effect. I was surprised that even elderly singers were not more interested in my presence—I had expected people to start coming to ask me to document the singing in their village. Perhaps they were simply unwilling to deal with an outsider, or (despite my explanations and those of my local colleagues) they mistrusted my motives, but neither were they doing the documentation on their own. Instead it seemed that the elderly had just given up: our children won’t learn the music, so it will die out with us. Nothing to be done.

The methods for sustaining waning traditions usually proposed in Indonesia are: promoting them through media; presenting them in festivals; and making them attractive to tourists. A few high-prestige genres are brought into higher education (conservatories).  Some traditions can benefit from these methods: ones that are already professionalized and configured for a division between audience and performers; those that have visually interesting elements such as dance, theater, striking costumes; those that have virtuoso performing techniques; those that are predominantly instrumental or at least not dependent for their impact on little-known languages.

But to my mind these strategies are destructive when applied to what I call the “inward-facing” genres, ones that do not meet these conditions, threatening precisely the intimacy and community focus that are essential to the beauty, power, and local meaning of these arts. Such genres—like the singing I described in the coda—have, I believe, no appeal to the media or to tourists. Kananuk in performance is just old people sitting around singing at each other. There’s nothing spectacular about it: applying the gandrung sewu method and mobilizing 1000 people to sing the kananuk in Figure 11 would be grotesque, not to mention impossible to keep coordinated without a conductor.

The only way for local traditional arts to survive into the future is for the young to take responsibility for learning and performing them; and the only way to get the young to do that is to raise the prestige of those arts, so that people are proud to participate in them.

I can suggest two low-cost community initiatives that could help in raising the prestige of communal traditional arts. (Low cost is important, since few local governments or education departments have a robust budget for the arts.)

Send in the grandmothers. In communities where traditional music is unprofessionalized and is open to anyone to perform, it could be taught extra-curricularly in schools by local singers and musicians. This program would need to be based in the elementary schools, aimed at children while they are still open and impressionable. Teaching should take place after school hours, to avoid the standardization that is applied to the official curriculum. Local teachers should teach local styles. Elders from the vicinity of the school—grandmothers (grandfathers too!)—would be well-suited to the teaching, and they would likely be happy to do it as volunteers.

Opening acts. If community leaders and local government were in support, it could be instituted as normal practice that official, communal, and large-scale family events would include a preliminary performance of local traditional music. It could be framed as honoring tradition or something of that sort. Twenty minutes of a traditional genre—but not always the same genre nor the same performers—would raise the visibility and prestige of the genres, and would also be an incentive to musicians to keep in practice and train younger performers.

Insider documentation. A third program would not be a community initiative, but it would involve young people from the community. Secondary schools, colleges and universities, and cultural institutions could encourage students to undertake projects to record traditional music in their home villages. Ideally, students would be furnished with relatively inexpensive recording equipment, like the Zoom H4n or similar devices, but cell phones would also serve. The students should be trained to collect the texts of songs (directly from the singers), the names of performers, and other basic data, and systems would have to be established for depositing the recordings and text-transcriptions in local archives (at the schools, or in the offices of village government).

With this third proposal we come full circle, back to documentation. The reviewer who asked whether I didn’t have anything more than documentation to recommend also remarked that my call to focus on documenting vanishing traditions is old and familiar. Indeed, ethnomusicology has been lamenting the loss of traditions for over a century; but rather than engage with this old familiar problem, much ethnomusicology today prefers to look the other way, focusing on music in media, music in diaspora, and music in relation to social issues of power, equity, inclusion, and social justice. These are all vitally important things to study, but so are the localized, undervalued, inward-facing musics that are sliding away beyond memory.