From the Editor

Aloha kākou! Issue 49(1) contains contributions on East Asia, Southeast Asia, and West Asia. Music making takes place in a defined physical and/or geographical space. Each of the major articles takes into account this kind of space. On the one hand, the space can be as delimited as a recording studio, which the Bothwell study of Syrian radio broadcasting describes, or a particular section of town, as Sutopo maps for jazz in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. On the other hand, the space can be more general: for example, a region such as Okinawa for Gillan’s discussion of kumiudui, or the larger geographical entity of nation-state addressed by Deschênes and Eguchi in their discussion of oral transmission in Japanese performance. The physicality of each space so identified is a factor in music production—the principal focus for each of the four major articles—and also a variable in its reception, an aspect that is receiving increased and welcome attention. While current scholarly discussion has expanded and redefined references to space in ways other than the geographical and the physical, these are still useful to understanding music making in Asia.

Another aspect of the physical concerns the body. Australian sociologist Raewyn Connell has conceptualized the body as machine, which provides a strategic point for considering the mechanics of music making. For example, Bothwell reports differences in radio programming for singers Fairuz and Umm Kulthum, both female voices. Further related to the body are issues of embodiment and their epistemological implications, as Deschênes and Eguchi note for learning Japanese performance and as Sutopo theorizes in relating doxa to success in the Indonesian jazz industry.

The consideration of the body leads to another topic of interest: gender as social negotiation and expectation. Gendering can be as implicit as the virtually all-male jazz scene in Indonesia described by Sutopo or as explicit as the prescribed vocal and gestural features for the adolescent character type in kumiudui. As is often the case, points of commonality and connectedness emerge among studies that are apparently diverse in genre, culture, ethnicity, and geographical location.

“Listening to the Voice in Kumiudui—Representations of Social Class and Gender through Speech, Song, and Prosody” by Matt Gillan takes a cue from the culture itself, which uses the phrase “listen to kumiudui” to denote attending a performance. He focuses on the voice as carrier of the word, as a means for characterization, and as a major vehicle for conveying prescribed melodic patterns. He notes vocal and prosodic details that identify the genre as Okinawan rather than Japanese derived. Timbre is a conscious aspect of gender characterization, and the tradition has a well-developed vocabulary for describing its many facets. In a narrative that interfaces the sonic with the physiological and the social, Gillan provides a fascinating analysis of vocal production as signifier for androgynous adolescent gender and sexuality in the Shuri court, a particular space.

Selecting the historical metropole of Yogyakarta on the island of Java as sited geographical space, Oki Rahadianto Sutopo and Pam Nilan view modernity played out in Indonesia through survival and success of jazz performers in their study, “The Constrained Position of Young Musicians in the Yogyakarta Jazz Community.” Rather than problematize jazz through its colonial past, the two collaborators narrate the tensions and ironies inherent in a contemporary music industry that in the first instance valorizes the authenticity and mimesis of external models but depends on a performer population that by its nature is creative rather than derivative. The resulting disjuncture between economic and artistic drives is further exacerbated by generational tension among musicians, which itself is complicated by a traditional Javanese patriarchy with its values of respect and privilege accorded an older and male generation. Referencing geographical space, the authors describe the bifurcation of the Yogyakarta jazz scene into northern and southern districts of the city while mapping features of gender, social class, and age. Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of practice and specifically his concept of doxa shape the study, as does a synchronic comparison to global punk and its notion of DIY.

“Embodied Orality: Transmission in Traditional Japanese Music” presents a...