The Sound of the Ancestral Ship: Highland Music of West Java (review)

The Sound of the Ancestral Ship is about tembang Sunda, a musical genre associated with highland people of aristocratic descent from the Sundanese area of West Java, Indonesia. Formerly known as cianjuran, after Cianjur, the small regency in which it originated, tembang Sunda subsequently spread across West Java and is now primarily associated with the regional capital, Bandung. Williams's primary focus is thus on the effects of urbanization on the genre, its practitioners, and audience members.

Tembang Sunda songs are performed by one or more vocalists (usually, but not exclusively, female) accompanied by a small ensemble comprising one bamboo flute (suling) and two boat-shaped zithers, kacapi and rincik (the former being larger and lower in pitch than the latter); its lyrics "amplify feelings of nobility and the longing for an idealized rural past" (p. 3). While the singer's performance is crucial, Williams suggests that the shape of the kecapi has become "a cultural metaphor ... to aurally transport its audience into a different time and place." In effect, functioning as an "ancestral ship," carrying the urbanites "back to a time of aristocrats, ancestors, and gods, the kacapi locates its listeners in the ancient kingdom of Pajajaran (1333- 1579), as both a historical kingdom and an imagined paradise" (p. 4).

The book is divided into four parts. The first section, "The Transformation of the Past in Politics and Music," provides us with an introduction to Sundanese culture and to the early history of the genre. The second (and longest) section, "Tembang Sunda and the Urban Enviroment," is the ethnographic heart of the book. Based on fieldwork that spanned a decade (primarily during three research trips: 1987-89, 1991, and 1996), her experience as a trainee singer (who followed traditional teaching methods), and private lessons on kacapi and suling, Williams is ideally placed to discuss this evolving urban tradition. She describes in fascinating detail contexts for performance, especially the lingkung seni (arts circle, a recurring informal musical gathering centered around a well-known singer or patron), pasanggiri (tembang Sunda competitions), and increasing patronage by government employees; the relationships between primarily female vocalists and primarily male instrumentalists; the dissemination of tembang Sunda via the cassette and radio industries, television, and print media; and the various ways in which tembang Sunda students learn their craft.

The third section of the book, "The Music of Tembang Sunda," provides "an outline of some of the musical elements that constitute tembang Sunda" (p. 139). This involves not only descriptions of tuning systems, the distinguishing features of five main musical styles, the types of pieces that open and close performances, and the increasingly popular instrumental kecapi-suling repertoire, but also a detailed discussion of instrument construction and the main ornaments for each instrument and for singers. This is the most challenging section for the nonspecialist reader. Despite assistance from the indispensable glossary, the reader may find the sheer quantity of Sundanese technical terms overwhelming at times. It is sometimes difficult to relate the plethora of small-scale patterns to the "big picture" and—even though the discussion of ornaments and techniques is a major topic of conversation among performers—terminology appears mutable, which results in much comparison of terms Williams encountered vis-à-vis those described in publications by the Dutch scholar Wim van Zanten. The best antidote to this section is the accompanying compact disc, which, though not as connected to the text as I would like, gives one a much better appreciation of this complex and hauntingly beautiful song tradition.

The final section of the book, "The Meaning of Tembang Sunda," returns to the metaphorical links between the musical genre and nostalgic Sundanese notions of Pajajaran, the ancient kingdom that has become a kind of spiritual home to modern...