auralarchipelago

I was asked a similar question elsewhere so I'll quote that here first:

This is something I try to be careful about. Not all music "should" be shared with the world, and I never want to seem entitled to do so. When meeting with musicians, I always explain what my objectives are and very explicitly ask permission to share their music the way that I do. Almost every single time the musicians have enthusiastically agreed. They are rightfully proud of their music, and are happy to have their music heard and awareness raised about something they care about.

Surprisingly, I can think of only one time that a musician said they didn't want me to record their music. It was a musician in Cianjur, West Java who played a kind of zither called kecapi. His town has a very specific style of playing the kecapi, and he didn't want me recording the piece and sharing it, as then people in other cities in the area would hear it and copy it. That said, he did play it for me, just told me to keep it between us :)

As for compensation, I always try to compensate each musician whose performance I commission. Some even refuse my money, saying they're happy just to play, in which case I play it by ear - I don't want to offend somebody by forcing money into a situation where they don't want it.

This guy's been to Indonesia.

Funny story, Dijf Sanders made that album...with me :) I was his guide and fixer on his recording trip through Java. I later joined him in a few cities in Belgium as I invited some of my favorite musicians from Indonesia to play some shows with him, this was last December.

One of the neat things about ethnomusicology is exploring all the different contexts in which music is played. In Indonesia, as elsewhere, there are all sorts of contexts, but definitely ritual is a main one. For example, there is a kind of music called tarawangsa played in an annual ritual called ngalaksa to celebrate the annual rice harvest and give thanks to the rice goddess, Nyi Pohaci. The elders of the village gather and men and women take turns dancing to the music, becoming possessed by spirits and entering a kind of trance. The music goes on for hours and hours with people going in and out of trance. Some of the most beautiful experiences I've had here has been joining these ceremonies, dancing with the possessed, feeling the beauty of the music and the depth of the traditions.

Music that's played just for enjoyment is also common, but somehow often overlooked as somehow unimportant by academics. I love this stuff, like rinding, a kind of bamboo mouth harp that is played in Central Java to while away the time in the rice fields. Just beautiful, simple music without an audience.

Yeah, that's something super neat about gamelan. In the past literally every village gamelan "orchestra" had its own tuning, though there are standard scales that are common. Interestingly in the 20th century this started to change with recording technology, as people started requesting gamelan instruments made to match the tunings they heard on records or cassettes.

It's hard to talk about Indonesian music in generalities, let alone Asian music, but definitely there are some important differences. One is the way that musical pieces are organized. Western music is linear - in the case of pop or even much of Western folk music, for example, there is a structure that moves a song from point A to point b, something like verse/pre-chorus/chorus/verse/bridge etc. Much of the music I encounter in Indonesia is not linear but cyclical, so the music is structured around something like loops. A piece might have an opener, but after that elements in the piece may be looped, repeated for as long as necessary, until the band brings it to an end. The funny consequence of this is that musicians are often super sloppy with the beginnings and endings of pieces, as in their minds, the songs are kind of infinite - you just slide in and slide out of that eternal loop.