Notes
245 Notes PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 1. Adnan Adlan, the host of this event, was a gregarious and hospitable man who gave me a warm welcome on this visit to Sumatra. I also had the honor of performing with him among the members of IPQAH in 2003. Adnan Adlan died suddenly in Sweden in the fall of 2003, when a delegation that included Maria Ulfah, her husband Dr. Mukhtar, and Dr. Yusnar Yusuf were on a professional tour during Ramadan. 2. Evidence for this bold assertion is manifest in the phenomenal documentary recording project undertaken jointly by the Indonesian Society for the Performing Arts (Masyarakat Seni Pertunjukan Indonesia) and the Center for Folklife and Cultural Studies of the Smithsonian Institution, which has resulted in a series of twenty compact discs with comprehensive liner notes in Indonesian and English (Yampolsky 1991–99). See also Sutton 1991, 1996b. 3. A website for Maria Ulfah may be found at www.mariaulfah.com. . SETTING THE SCENE 1. I began studying Bahasa Indonesia the week I arrived in the country, in July 1995. My formal studies during 1995–96 were accomplished first at a community center and then at the Indonesian Australian Language Institute in Jakarta. In 1999 I continued private studies with a teacher from the Indonesian Australian Language Institute. I have also studied French, German, and Arabic, languages I have also used in my work. 2. The notion of the “field” to which the anthropologist or ethnomusicologist must travel to conduct fieldwork has expanded to include a greater variety of sites (including the home as the field) and a multitude of modes of operation, including, for example, the acts of reviewing notes, translating materials, and the writing process itself. Furthermore, 246 notes to pages 2–19 the act of being “in the field” has come to incorporate newly mediated “fields” such as the internet, email, SMS text messages, and other sites for and contexts of exchange. See, for example, Shadows in the Field: New Perspectives for Fieldwork in Ethnomusicology (Barz and Cooley 1997). 3. As a point of comparison, voter turnout for the American presidential elections that same year (2004) was 53 percent. 4. It is difficult to determine whether or not the current events that seem so pertinent in the course of ethnographic fieldwork will be relevant by the time students and colleagues read one’s published work. Although they may seem myopically situated ten years hence, it is my belief that the political events that occurred during the ten years or so during which this research was conducted will be relevant for some time. What is difficult to predict, however, is whether the turnover in the Indonesian presidency or the outbreak of war and incidents of terrorism will occur as frequently as they seemed to during the time I describe. If this turns out to be the case, the specific moments I cite here, specifically the second Gulf War and the election of Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, will certainly become quickly dated and perhaps less significant. 5. Singers and instrumentalists in the Western world (Andy Williams, Dolly Parton, and Wynton Marsalis, to name only a few) similarly get busy producing Christmas albums when the leaves start turning. Whatever else their motivation may be, such musicians know that it is simply good business to capitalize on the season by releasing festive recordings, as well as by participating in the countless holiday specials that air on network and cable television stations in the United States. 6. During Suharto’s regime, criticism of the government and its leaders resulted in censorship, the most famous example of which was the censorship of Tempo Magazine, which was founded in 1971 but forced to cease publication in 1994. The magazine, edited by founder Goenawan Mohamad, resumed publication in 1998. 7. Ricklefs introduces his History of Modern Indonesia with the assertion that although the “spread of Islam is one of the most significant processes of Indonesian history ,” it is also “one of the most obscure” (2001, 3). He dates the earliest Muslim gravestone to 1082 and evidence of the first Islamic kingdom to the grave of Sultan Sulaiman bin Abdullah bin al-Basir (d. 1211). 8. One could argue that percussion instruments could be played in a nonmetric or random fashion, but that is usually not the case. An exception might be the case in which a percussion instrument functions as a signal, as, for example, in the beating of the drum called bedug at a mosque to indicate prayer...
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