From the Guest Editors

From dangdut to indie rock, kroncong to jazz fusion, music genres are and have been dynamically interpreted, combined, and created throughout the history of the Indonesian archipelago. The seven articles in this special issue of Asian Music investigate how genres are used by musicians and listeners to intervene in debates about modernity, national identity, and Indonesia’s place in an ever-changing world. By showing how popular music can be a powerful source of existential capital for modern citizens, these studies have implications that go far beyond Indonesia.

This issue began as a panel with R. Anderson Sutton, Brent Luvaas, René T. A. Lysloff, and Wallach at the 2008 Society for Ethnomusicology conference at Wesleyan University. In January 2011, Wallach and Clinton attended a conference in Jakarta sponsored by KITLV, along with Andrew Weintraub and Philip Yampolsky. We are grateful for the feedback we received on those occasions. We are grateful as well for the encouragement and guidance of Ric Trimillos, particularly his support for the idea of this issue that we received in person at a conference in Manila in September of 2011. We thank Ekawati Marhaenny Dukut, Idi Subandy Ibrahim, Achmad Najib, and Sumarsam, as well as two anonymous reviewers, for their insightful comments. And finally, we thank our contributors, David Harnish, Brent Luvaas, Rebekah Moore, Andy Sutton, Andrew Weintraub, and Philip Yampolsky, for their patience, careful feedback on this introduction, and most of all for producing articles of such high quality for this issue.

Bubi Chen (1938–2012). Photograph courtesy of Jazzuality.com.

This special issue is dedicated to Indonesian jazz legend Bubi Chen (1938–2012). We had the opportunity to interview Mr. Chen in Semarang, Central Java, a little over a year before he passed away, and though illness and age had clearly taken their toll, his eyes still glowed with the love of music.