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On Metaphor and Analogy in the Concepts and Classification of Musical Instruments in Aceh

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 March 2019

Margaret Kartomi
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Abstract

Artists, scholars and audiences in Aceh, the northernmost province of Sumatra, conceive of their percussive, wind and string instruments as symbolising Aceh's “glorious past” and attach a variety of metaphorical and analogous meanings to them. Implicit in the culture, and formulated explicitly by Acehnese scholars, is a classification that divides the instruments at the most general level into three main categories, or metaphorical socio-historical streams: those associated primarily with (i) the pre-Islamic ancestral and nature venerating (animist-Hindu) stream, practices, or presumed origins (ii) the Sunni and/or Syiah Islamic stream (including borderline cases of instruments that straddle both Islamic and animist practices), and (iii) the European or Western socio-historical stream. Organological sub-categories at the second level of categorical thinking are based on an instrument's manner of exciting sound, while the third level comprises the instrumental types with their local names. The instruments are also attributed with broader, changing sociocultural meanings, including gender and class divisions.

Type
Articles
Information
Yearbook for Traditional Music , Volume 37 , 2005 , pp. 25 - 57
Copyright
Copyright © 2005 By The International Council for Traditional Music

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Footnotes

1

Original data for this article were obtained from my fieldtrips in Aceh and among Acehnese in Jakarta in 1982 (February-March and August), 2003 (February-March) and among Acehnese in Jakarta, (January-February, 2004). On my field trips to Aceh in 1982 and 2003, I was very grateful to the many Acehnese artists for their performances and discussions about the nature and meaning of their performing arts culture, as well as to Acehnese diaspora musicians who assisted me in Jakarta in 2003 and 2004. I am especially grateful to the master artists and dear colleagues Bp Noerdin Daood and Bp Marzuki Hassan, to Mark Durie for valuable linguistic advice, to Kay Dreyfus and Iwan Dzulvan Amir for their thoughtful critical readings of this article, to Gary Swinton and Iwan Dzulvan Amir for art work and to Mas Kartomi for taking photographs in the field and helping in countless ways. My research was funded by a grant from the Australian Research Council; recording equipment was supplied by Monash University's School of Music-Conservatorium.

References

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