The other comment I am responding to is by James Fox in his essay in this volume: “To explore the nuances of this topic, it is likely we will need to know more about the musical details of the polyphonic structures.” (Blench 2014:14)Ħ That is to say, the blanket term “polyphony” is insufficient to deal with Arom’s eight forms and their countless combinations. In this I am responding to two observations by eminent scholars. Instead I confine my efforts to trying to differentiate the music of the “eastern southeastern islands” (NTT/TL see footnote 2) from the music of the islands to the west and northwest. I cannot attempt such explanation and comparison here. Moreover, they call for comparison, in the same terms and at the same level of detail, with musics to the north and east, in the Philippines and Oceania. Nevertheless it is clear that the similarities and dissimilarities in music systems throughout Insulindia call for some attempt at explanation. For this discussion I adopt Arom’s taxonomy and terminology.ĥ Given the rapidity with which music can change, at least in its surface characteristics, I am not convinced that the musical practices of today can truly illuminate the movements of populations and cultures tens of thousands of years ago. 2007:1104)Ĥ The distinctions I want to make between varieties of polyphony (and other musical features) in Insulindia require this more detailed and specific approach. The different plurilinear musics are distinguished then less by the procedures they employ than by the specific manner in which they combine them.” (Arom et al. “polyphonic procedures permit an infinite number of combinations. offer an eight-fold taxonomy of polyphonic techniques from all over the world, remarking in closing that In the more expansive book on the peopling of Polynesia (McLean 2014), he devotes chapter 6 to polyphony but recognizes only two kinds: melody-with-drone and parallelism. In his statistical clustering study (McLean 1979), he speaks simply of “polyphony,” undifferentiated, as one of the traits he tracks. 3 McLean also considers vocal music, but with regard exclusively to the presence or absence of polyphony.
Kunst does discuss vocal music (1939, 1942), but he looks at the distribution of only two traits, which he sees as co-occurring indexes of megalithic culture. Furthermore, the emphasis on instruments has drawn attention away from vocal music, which is necessarily my focus since I am concerned with eastern Insulindia, where the principal forms of music-making are vocal.
This mapping reveals musical similarities and dissimilarities that in turn pose questions that may be addressed by researchers competent in archaeology, linguistics, and population genetics. I aim to offer an initial mapping of present-day distributions of immaterial traits-not musical artifacts but ways of making music, ways of organizing groups of performers, and the musical concepts and compositional elements available in a music culture.
The aim has been to reveal cultural continuities and discontinuities and propose hypotheses about prehistoric settlement and culture contact in Insulindia and Oceania.Ģ My concern here is less far-reaching. With the exception of McLean, these studies have focused exclusively on material culture, namely musical instruments, tracing their geographical distribution and the vernacular terms associated with them.
It is thus a distribution study, in line with others that have looked at the distribution of musical elements in Indonesia (Kunst 1939), the Philippines (Maceda 1998), Oceania (McLean 1979, 1994, 2014), and the region peripheral to the South China Sea (Revel 2013). 2 Essentially this is an inquiry into certain musical features that are found in eastern Insulindia, together with a survey of where else in Insulindia they are or are not found. 2 For the purposes of this article and this special issue of Archipel, “Insulindia” is Island Southea (.)ġ In this paper I attempt to distinguish the music of “eastern Insulindia” from that of other parts of Insulindia.
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