Xylophones in Thailand and Java: A Comparative Phenomenology of Musical Instruments

The heart of this essay is my experience of learning to play and appreciate the ranaat eek, the leading xylophone in classical Central Thai music, and more generally, learning to play music in Thailand and, much earlier, Central Java. I realized that the "standard" scholarly descriptions and classifications of musical instruments—which I learnt first as a teenager studying violin at the Prague Conservatory, and then again a number of times later—are not just unsatisfactory for my purposes, but are in direct conflict with my own experience of what are musical instruments: in separating the instruments from human experience, human bodies, feelings, imagination, worlds, and applying "universal" methods of "identifying" them, all that I feel is important is methodically ignored. Where are the joy and the pain of learning to play an instrument; the feel of the instrument in my hand, as it gives me a magical power to enter the realm of music and opens up for me a whole field of possibilities; the intimate, physical, life-long bond between the musician and his instrument; the respect and gratitude for my teacher for making me suffer through learning; the atmosphere, excitement, magic of being part of a performance? Each kind of instrument is different, not primarily because of what vibrates in or on the instrument (as the standard classification would lead us to believe), but because each grows from and into human lives and worlds differently. Where are these differences between instruments, the different experiences they make possible, the different ways in which they extend and empower human bodies, the different feelings they evoke, the different roles they play in people's lives and in their world, the different associations they accumulate?

The first and central part of this essay is a phenomenological description of ranaat eek (or simply ranaat). (Figure 1) Its ambition is to offer a few glimpses of the instrument in human experience. Then, I compare ranaat to the Javanese gambang, showing how an instrument that looks very similar if one attends only to its physical characteristics and the mechanics of sound, turns out to be a very different musical instrument if one considers how it is played and experienced by musicians, how it figures in ensemble music and people's thinking, and what cultural values it embodies. Next, I introduce another apparently similar xylophone, the Thai ranaat thum, to complicate any establishment of a Javanese–Thai dichotomy, and to show that while ranaat thum is part of the same musical culture as ranaat eek, it is a very different instrument. The final sections of the essay articulate how my study goes against the values of the dominant Hornbostel–Sachs classification. In agreement with a (rather slowly) growing body of scholarship that searches for new ways to understand musical instruments, I offer an alternative to standard methodologies for studying particular musical instruments, and for comparing musical instruments across cultures in a way that prioritizes the experiences and world-views of people in different parts of the world.

Figure 1.

A boy playing ranaat at a competition, watched by his teacher.

Ranaat Eek

In learning to play an instrument, a person enters into an intense interaction with it and establishes an intimate physical and mental relationship to it. The student learns how to handle, understand, think, and feel about the instrument. It is this that I am concerned about in this essay: how musical instruments figure in people's lives. Thus, examining the learning process closely is important. Another reason why it is important is methodological. I do not want to limit this discussion to intellectually conceptualized images of the instrument, but I believe that it is essential to take seriously the immediate physical and mental experience of the instrument. For the researcher, undergoing the learning process is a way to learn to know the instrument in the way a musician learns to know it. This is also a reason why my own experience figures prominently in the following pages, as does my first ranaat teacher, Bussakorn Sumrongthong...