From the Editor

Aloha kākou! The present issue, 46(2), foregrounds two related themes. The first is cultural loss in the face of modernity. Loss has been a pervasive and long-standing concern for national and international scholarship, increasingly so in its relation to projects of nation building and identity construction. The articles in this issue present different perspectives on cultural loss. Genres that flourished in the past and appear at present to be in decline are the focus of three of the four articles: Peter Manuel’s study of the Hathrasi rasiya tradition of India, Nancy Cooper’s essay on campur sari in Javanese Indonesia, and Clare Suet Ching Chan’s discussion of tourism and the Mah Meri aboriginal people of Malaysia. The theme of loss manifests itself in the book review section as well. Jennifer Fraser’s review of Margaret Kartomi’s study of music in Sumatra notes the demise of certain genres and the repurposing of others, while Hugh de Ferranti’s study of biwa and Bruno Deschêne’s review of it speak to a genre of biwa in decline. Although the theme of loss is explicit in each presentation, the different ways in which it is framed and problematized attest to the range of alternatives current in the field.

The second theme concerns the nature and intensity of engagement with modernity, including but not exclusively Western modernity. The analytic study by Michael W. Harris argues that the disjuncture of pre-Meiji Japanese values and twentieth-century Western democratic ones problematized in Mizoguchi’s 1954 film Sanshō the Bailiff has parallels embedded in Fumio Hayasaka’s musical score. The Cooper essay on Indonesia’s campur sari posits direct confrontation between practitioners who choose to retain traditional Javanese gamelan tunings and those who opt for Western diatonic tunings, which requires an often traumatic and irreversible retuning of the bronze gamelan instruments.

However, not all modernity is Western; Chan’s report on the Mah Meri of Malaysia shows the complicity of modern Malaysian bureacracy for changes in performance practice. Manuel suggests that for the Hathrasi rasiya tradition an emergent Indian modernity, with its attendant cosmopolitan urban hegemony, has greatly affected the popularity and practice of a music he identifies as from the “intermediate sphere” of Indian tradition. One outcome of modernity, particularly national modernity, is the marginalization of regional practices. The reviews of Stephen Jones’s two studies on folk Daoist traditions in Shaanbei (Shaanxi) Province and in Shanxi and Heibei Provinces by Beth Szczepanski and Min Wang, respectively, speak to this marginalization. Finally, the review by E. Taylor Atkins of David Novak’s Japanoise reflects upon a modernity that privileges “noise” and neutralizes if not negates “music.” At the same time it wonders about the irony of a study opposing music being reviewed in a journal that advocates for music!

Asian Music endeavors to present a diversity of approaches, voices, and perspectives on Asian music within the limits of print communication, which we feel continues to be the most useful and accessible medium for our present and future constituencies. We continue to explore ways to keep it so; our introduction of non-English abstracts represents one such attempt.

In closing, it is fitting to mark milestones in our own histories as well as in the histories of the musics and peoples we study, because these signposts provide a measure of the work we do and the contributions we make. With issue 46(2) I complete my first five years as editor of Asian Music. It has been both a privilege and a pleasure to serve in this capacity. My engagement with the journal has allowed me to meet and interact with colleagues worldwide, to further appreciate their generosity (notably the anonymous readers), and to discover a greater appreciation for the breadth and quality of research on music in Asia, from Asia, and of Asia. I look forward to a continuing involvement with and commitment to Asian Music and to an expanding international community that it serves.