Songs from Siberut, Flores, and Solor Islands (Indonesia): Two Albums

These two superb albums from far-flung regions of Indonesia are extremely welcome, both for the music they bring and for the approaches they exemplify. Where nowadays many albums are organized around a single performer or ensemble, a featured instrument, or one genre or category of performance, the Mentawai album has the classical aim of presenting a survey of the full range of music-making in a given place—in this case Siberut, the largest island of the Mentawai group, at the westernmost edge of Indonesia, about 90 miles west of Sumatra. (Apparently a few recordings were made not in Siberut but in Pagai, farther to the south in the Mentawai chain, but the commentary does not indicate which ones.) The Flores album, on the other hand, is a careful exploration of a musicological question, namely, the distribution and range of variation of the practice of diphonic singing in narrow simultaneous intervals. This is the music that led Jaap Kunst to hypothesize a musical link, some 2,500 years ago, between Flores and the Balkans (Kunst [1954] 1960).

Two adjectives seem particularly appropriate to the Mentawai album: respectful and generous. The compilers—Reimar Schefold and Gerard A. Persoon, anthropologists from the University of Leiden in the Netherlands—have dedicated decades to the study of Mentawai,¹ and the album shows a deep respect and affection for the people of these islands, whose dignity and self-possession are evident throughout. The commentary regards the performers as individuals and explains not only the social functions of the music we hear, but also the emotions underlying the personal songs and the belief system underlying the shamanic songs. The album’s generosity is seen initially in the expansive production, filling two CDs, with separate booklets for commentary in English and Mentawai. (The Mentawai booklet gives the full texts of nearly all the songs in the original language, while the English booklet translates some of these texts but simply summarizes others.) It is also generous in that the compilers often give multiple examples of the key genres of song, for both the western and eastern sides of the island; moreover, their selections range over 30 years of fieldwork. Of course, it helps that Siberut is comparatively small, with a population of only 30,000, but even so the compilers have been remarkably thorough in their coverage of the island’s musical life.

The principal kind of music-making in Mentawai is singing, and within the vocal category the compilers distinguish several types: shamans’ songs for ritual, curing, and the gathering and preparing of medicinal plants; dance songs, typically about animals; and “youth songs” or “girls’ songs,” personal creations about daily matters, love, and events in the community. These personal songs are sung at moments of relaxation or while canoeing or doing other kinds of work. Interestingly, once they are sung aloud they become available to everyone, regardless of the age or gender indicated or implicit in the text of the song. For example, the “song of a dying mother” parting from her daughter is here sung by a man. (It is not clear from the commentary whether this wrenching piece is a youth/ girls’ song or belongs to some other category not specified here.) The singing is solo or by two or three singers in unison; there is no harmony or drone, and only accidental heterophony. One striking feature...