2 Martin Hatch
Popular music in Indonesia
It is impossible to avoid being impressed by the richness and variety
‘of musical experiences in Indonesia today. Not only is this richness
and variety impressive, but the omnipresence of musical experiences
‘overwhelms even this American who is accustomed to weekly
concerts, daily TV and radio jingles and soundtracks, supermarket
muzak, the chimes of a fully programmed bell-tower, or the music
that cascades from the radios of passing cars. In this essay I want to
present one kind of survey of the repertory of Indonesian song
recorded on cassette tape during the past ten years and distributed
and sold, at the least, throughout the island of Java, Indonesia. The
designation Indonesian in the construction ‘Indonesian song’
means, for the most part, songs with texts in the Indonesian
language, not in any one of the 250 regional languages and dialects
of the Island nation. This designation also means songs with other
musical ingredients - instruments, timbres, or melodic, rhythmic,
and formal organisation — which came to Indonesia within the past
fifty years, or which are not directly derived from any one of the
many regional types of music from Indonesia's past. I am focusing
on the island of Java, because almost all of the two years I have been
in Indonesia I spent on that island, particularly in the central area,
the district known as Surakarta.
Java, which is approximately the size of New York state, has a
present population of over eighty million people, and the absence of
urban concentrations of population, other than Jakarta with its
eight million and Surabaya with its four million, guarantees that
there are few places now on the island where one does not find
communities of people. In fact, the conception of a return to nature,
an outing away from others, or even a search for the natural world,