Antiphonal Histories: Resonant Pasts in the Toba Batak Musical Present by Julia Byl (review)

In Antiphonal Histories, Julia Byl articulates how North Sumatra's Toba Batak people invoke a complicated history of local, national, and global cultural influences to give meaning to their contemporary musical lives. The book encompasses a vast historical and musical terrain in which indigenous ensembles blend with the music of merchants, missionaries, and migrants, who left traces of music from South Asia, the Middle East, and Europe over the past fifteen hundred years. Traditional beliefs and customs coexist side-by-side with Indic, Islamic, colonial, and national pasts. The book, based on Byl's 2006 dissertation (University of Michigan), shows how Toba musical performances sonically activate the "back and forth" (antiphonal) relationship between past and present.

Byl presents contemporary Toba Batak musical life as a multifaceted blend of seven genres that includes traditional, popular, and religious musical expressions. Byl emphasizes the totality of Toba musical life, rather than focusing on a particular genre or genres in depth (in terms of, for example, ensembles, relationship between parts, instrument functions, musical forms, and dance, among others). Genre boundaries are incredibly porous, Byl argues, and singular genres themselves reflect multiple influences of distant histories, places, and cultures. Her fieldwork choices mirror the interlocking histories of Toba Batak music: Byl is equally comfortable studying the intricate patterns of the taganing drum and hasapi lute, as she is singing pop songs at palm wine stands on Saturday nights.

Byl is critical of ethnographies of music that relegate history to a "dense background chapter near the beginning of a text" (5). Yet, Antiphonal Histories is not a broad comprehensive history of Toba Batak music, either. Rather, it is "a music history that leans hard on background and arcane scholarship … [and] also a performance ethnography rooted in the stories of the people one researcher has met over the course of her fieldwork" (21). Reflecting her "antiphonal history" approach, the narrative is not unilinear, but moves freely between past and present.

The performative dynamics of Byl's own embodied experience—"knowing by doing"—are at the heart of her performance ethnography. Byl experienced Toba Batak musical life through the shifting roles of student, performer, ethnographer, archival researcher, daughter, wife, and mother. Antiphonal Histories reflects these multiple perspectives, as well as the integrated processes of experience and interpretation. She states, "I do not try to measure the value of my explanations, or marshal the authority of a sharp, relentless argument. Rather, I mean to offer shifting frames, to be picked up and put down at will, until what is framed becomes a little clearer" (22). Modulating these shifting frames of perspective required a deft hand, and, by the end of the book, there were tremendous insights to be found.

The book covers a relatively long duration of fieldwork conducted over a span of almost two decades. Byl spent twenty-five months in North Sumatra from 1996 to 2004, including a long stint in Medan in 2002. She returned six times between 2004 and 2013 for follow-up research and fact-checking. Byl worked closely with master drummer and instrument maker Guntur Sitohang and was formally adopted into the Sitohang family in 2002. Sitohang, who passed away in June 2017, was a sought-after Toba Batak musician and teacher and the patriarch of a distinguished musical family. He became Byl's father when she married his son Maska. Byl herself figures prominently in the narrative of Antiphonal Histories. She is honest about the ways in which her position in the family shaped her access to knowledge, in both positive and negative ways. For example, her status as a family member opened the door to attending Toba spirit possession ceremonies, but her gendered position closed the door to hanging out at palm wine stands at night. Family obligations sometimes took precedence over fieldwork duties. In one particularly striking passage, Byl admits that writing about historical traces of Hinduism and Islam in contemporary Toba (Christian) musical life "would be found...