The Agency of a Lute: Post-Field Reflections on the Materials of Music

As I lay drifting to sleep in my hotel room, I heard a groan, an exasperated sound of tension releasing, eeeoowwwhh. Rousted from my hypnagogic state, I felt a jolt of adrenaline as the vibrational frequencies stimulated my sympathetic nervous system. I sat up and moved my eyes toward the direction of the sound. It was my oud, laid next to the bed, as I had been too tired to put it away in its case before lying down. The wooden pegs turned as I watched almost every string fall out of tune, creating a tangled and limp web of nylon and metal coursing the body of my beautiful instrument. I pondered the numerous factors at work: the humidity, the pressure of the flight over still nagging at the instrument’s body, or the low-tech wrapping of a string around a simple wooden peg to high tension. Surely all of these factors and more played a part in this seemingly spontaneous detuning. I realized in that moment that the materials were acting, attempting to return to their place in a natural assemblage, returning to a state from which they came, transforming before my eyes and ears amid the collective of which my body was one of many fluid assemblages (Field notes, September 2015).

While conducting dissertation research in 2015-2016, I situated my research within the realm of traditional arts transmission processes by studying the gambus lute. As a student among other music, theater, and dance students, with particular focus on the gambus, I intermingled with these processes in multiple contexts. Some of these contexts included various educational institutions, such as universities, as well as government, religious, and social events, such as weddings and public arts festivals. This post is intended not as a thorough ethnographic account of my research in Malaysia, but instead as a post-field reflection essay, “notes” revealing some conceptual beginnings to the dissertation. While still organizing and reflecting on the data collected over multiple research trips, saving most for the dissertation itself, this post contributes to wider conversations of organizing, conceptualizing, and “doing” fieldwork. This post is particularly relevant to graduate students who are in the stage of negotiating the balance of ethnographic theory and data as they transition between conceptual field sites in a world that increasingly connects them, moving toward the writing stage of dissertation research.

Gambus Origins

The origins of the gambus in the Malay world are not completely clear. Some sources note its general Arab origin (Matusky and Tan 2004:311), while others note its wide evidence of dissemination from East Africa to Java (Berg 2007:1). Today, various Middle Eastern styles of oud, primarily Turkish and Arabic, have all but replaced the various forms of Malay gambus, but can still be found in various places throughout the Indonesian and Malaysian archipelago (2). Today, Egyptian expressive culture, as a strong representative of a Middle Eastern stream of modernity, increasingly influences both Southeast Asia and the Arab world. Many musicians from around the world who at one time played various traditional and localized lutes, for example, the Yemeni lute known as the turbi, now play the Egyptian oud (Berg 2007: 2; Schuyler 1990:60). In Malaysia, musicians often use the Malay styles of gambus and either the Turkish or the Egyptian oud interchangeably, and when they are not physically interchangeable, the terms “gambus” and “oud” are frequently conflated regardless of the instrument style.

Photo by author ^[2]

The Importance of Materials

Soon after beginning fieldwork, I quickly felt the importance of the materio-symbolic properties of the instrument in the lives of my fellow students and teachers. I discovered several narratives surrounding the materials of these instruments, narratives that overlap and transcend those shared throughout the Middle East. According to one story, cited often amongst the musicians with whom I worked, the instrument was originally made from the bones of Lamech’s son, a descendent of Cain in Abrahamic traditions. These mystical origins provide fodder for auspicious conceptualizations and regard for the instrument itself. Throughout my fieldwork, my teachers and I shared many conversations about the physicality of the gambus. Concerning the proper stringing of the instrument and general upkeep, my teacher, Raja Zulkarnain Raja Yusof, likened the practice to putting on a uniform. We discussed the powerful allure of aromatic woods in lute construction, the importance of intricately carved wooden sound hole motifs, and the lute’s potential as a tool for healing a variety of mental and physical illness. Through these initial conversations and other experiences, I felt I was being pushed toward a more abstract while simultaneously more physical, materially grounded conception of a performative field site, beginning with the brain and human body and extending to its manipulation of the wider physical environment. I view the manipulation of this environment for musically expressive purposes through a performative lens.

In line with ethnomusicological scholarship by Bates (2012), Sonevytsky (2008), Dawe (2013), and others, I am interested in ways that materials themselves act upon human conceptual worlds by imposing physical contingencies emanating from their own kind of material agency. My research in Malaysia examines a range of agentic forces at work, including incidental and practical aspects of design and production of musical materials. As I intend to show with my wider research, the agentic push and pull of these materials is often overlooked in the search for socio-cultural meaning in musical expression and performance.

Performing Religion through the Gambus

Digging deep into materials as field sites, I am particularly drawn to the power of the acoustic environment, specifically timbre and tone quality. When I first arrived in Malaysia for my fieldwork, I decided to listen to Radio Television Malaysia (RTM) radio broadcasts, mostly to practice my Bahasa Melayu (Malay language). As I listened throughout the day, I was particularly struck by the azan; the call to prayer that airs five times per day. Before each azan, the network plays a short gambus clip that is usually but not always a taksim, or solo melodic improvisation.^[3] The broadcast occasionally features an oud clip from the Middle East, but more typically it is an example from a Malay repertoire. Most frequently the clip is a recording of the most famous gambus recording artist in Malaysia, the late Fadzil Ahmad. This phenomenon is a deliberate indexing of the gambus’s sound and timbre with Islam in Malaysia.^[4] After inquiring with several colleagues who have spent significant time in Islamic cultures, it seems that Malaysia is the only country (of which I am aware) that consistently presents the azan alongside gambus or oud (lute) music.

Photo of the late Fadzil Ahmad, circa late 1990s courtesy of Kosmo! Online.^[5]

Indexing as Cognitive Process

Music psychologists have found that the brain’s recognition of certain features, such as timbre, occur within the first 250 milliseconds of hearing the sound (Huron 2006:208). This research suggests that tying timbral cues to identity categories occurs at a subconscious level. This perceptual process is unlike other, more time-consuming and consciously learned processes such as identifying the difference between large-scale musical forms. Part of the reason for this quick identification of sound quality has to do with the basic evolution of the brain as being wired for survival.

There are many types of sounds in the world and, evolutionarily speaking, it is important to know not only from which direction a sound originates, and quickly, but also to be able to identify the nature of the sound based on its quality. After all, the sound of a dangerous tiger is much different and much more threatening than the sound of a harmless bird. Brain structures are thus organized hierarchically, as some processes are more consciously learned, while others occur at the subconscious and innate levels. Neuroscientists have found that “Hierarchical structures play a central role in many aspects of human cognition, prominently including both language and music” (Martins et al 2014:300). Much of this has to do with the way the brain has evolved through the ages (ibid.).

Understanding the physiological impetus and thus symbolic power behind categorical/schematic thinking is useful in exploring the popularity of an instrument like the gambus amongst those with whom I worked in Kuala Lumpur and beyond. I am especially drawn to ways that identity categories are negotiated in Malaysia through performative cultural transmission and expression, especially with regard to race and religion. This interest spawns from the fact that identity politics are a particularly pronounced part of daily life for Malaysians. As I explore in my research, the gambus embodies strong indexical relationships with Malay Muslim expressive identities in Malaysia.

The Power of Categories in Malaysian Social Life

Largely a remnant of its colonial history as British Malaya, as Thompson notes, “Perhaps no other citizenry has a more deeply ingrained self-consciousness of ethnic identity, represented in naturalized categories of ‘Malays, Chinese, Indians, and Others’” (2003:418). As he also reminds, “These categories are woven into everyday discourse and the fabric of government in Malaysia and they are found in nearly every introduction to every text written about the country” (ibid.). Thus it is the Malaysianist scholar’s obligation to reiterate that Malays and smaller indigenous groups make up 58 percent of the population, Chinese 24 percent, Indians 7 percent, and Others 11 percent (ibid.).^[6]

All citizens must indicate their religion on their government-issued identity cards, known as kad pengenalan. During my fieldwork I became acutely aware of the importance of identity categories, especially when new acquaintances would occasionally offer to show their identification cards as a part of our introductions.^[7] What is interesting for my purposes is that these religious and racial categories are largely conflated in a Malaysian context, especially with regard to Malay and Islamic identity constructions. As I conducted fieldwork, I became increasingly aware of the competing ethnic, religious, and transnational symbolics that the gambus imbues in Malaysia.

Orientalism and the Gambus

During my time in Malaysia, I repeatedly experienced the oud/gambus paired with Islamic cultural imagery, yet grounded in Malay traditions. One demonstrative experience was when I was invited to appear as a student on a Malaysian television documentary about the gambus alongside my teacher, Raja Zulkarnain Raja Yusof. The filming took place in Kuala Lumpur at a Hadrami Arabic restaurant, specifically chosen for its ambience.  As seen in the photo below, the episode was shot with the purposely chosen backdrop of Middle Eastern lanterns, pitchers, tapestries, and other emblematic decor. Thus I see this representation as a continued and deliberately Orientalizing process of Islamization in Malay culture. While crowded with Islamic cultural imagery from outside Malaysia, the theme of the television program was Malay cultural traditions, a part of a larger series known as Orang Kita, or “Our People.” This is but one anecdotal example of the many experiences I had where the gambus lute is bound up with both local and transnational ideas of Islamic cultural traditions in Malaysia.

Author and teacher, Raja Zulkarnain Raja Yusof, courtesy of TV1 Malaysia.

Concluding Remarks: Aesthetics and a Phenomenology of Material Agency

The philosopher Eli Siegel explains his theory of beauty, which he calls aesthetic realism, by describing art and expression as a function of humans endeavoring to “like the world with facts present” (1981:viii). By “facts present” he describes the entire world of overlapping and competing phenomena. He says that value judgments are made in terms of either contempt or respect, and that “All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves” (ibid.). Using “opposite” in the most abstract sense to describe competing forces in the world, Siegel’s philosophy reveals a common thread in dialectical approaches to aesthetics. He says that “beauty,” the oft-purported goal of artistic expression, is to balance the understanding of the agentic self with the world, especially if that world is a hostile one.

My research reveals the competing agentic forces that contribute to the individual’s motivations in negotiating their identity through musical expression in a world with multiple competing socio-material agencies. By striving to holistically examine as much of the music transmission praxis as possible, I observed culture bearers negotiating multiple and overlapping forces of influence. In other words, these human cultural actors were “making one of opposites” by repeatedly aligning their own sensibilities with a variety of extant materio-symbolic possibilities. Many of these possibilities include the manipulation of instrument materials and the acoustic environment while consciously, subconsciously, and incidentally—often for the sake of pragmatism—indexing materials and thus creating, reinforcing, and reinterpreting new socio-cultural meanings. Through my fieldwork, it became clear to me that the gambus holds great materio-symbolic power that allows players to align their sense of self with particular senses of identity, and primarily Malay and Muslim in my experience.

Moving beyond a typical analysis of symbolic expression through traditional performing arts, I widen the lens of agency by unpacking the symbolic resonances that begin in the human brain and expand to the wider environment. By focusing on different kinds of agency, those that arise from a basic material reality, this thick, materially descriptive approach to ethnography helps reveal the cultural forces behind the sensibilities by which an individual navigates their world. By examining pedagogical, performance, and transmission practices beginning with the gambus and the humans that play it, I conducted ethnographic research in various contexts, including arts institutions, weddings, festivals, and other events. I observed individuals seeking out a fluid balance of competing material and cultural constructions in contemporary Malaysian life. Aiming to make sense of their own positions as cultural actors, I suggest that Malay gambus musicians in Kuala Lumpur are striving to “like the world,” searching for a kind of palatability of being in an ideologically contested sphere that is urban Malaysian social life.

References

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Berg, Birgit. 2007. "Presence and Power of the Arab Idiom in Indonesian Islamic Musical Arts." Conference on Music in the World of Islam:1-12.

Dawe, Kevin. 2013. "Guitar Ethnographies: Performance, Technology and Material Culture." Ethnomusicology Forum 22(1):1-25.

Hilarian, Larry Francis. 2005. "The Structure and Development of the Gambus (Malay-Lutes)." The Galpin Society Journal May (58):66-82.

Huron, David Brian. 2006. Sweet Anticipation: Music and the Psychology of Expectation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Martins, M.J., F.P. Fischmeister, E. Puig-Waldmüller, J. Oh, A. Geißler, S. Robinson, W.T. Fitch, and R. Beisteiner. 2014. "Fractal Image Perception Provides Novel Insights into Hierarchical Cognition." NeuroImage 96:300-08.

Matusky, Patricia Ann., and Tan Sooi Beng. 2004. The Music of Malaysia: The Classical, Folk, and Syncretic Traditions. Aldershot, England: Ashgate.

Schuyler, Philip D. 1990. "Music and Tradition in Yemen." Asian Music, Autumn-Winter, 22(1):51-71.

Siegel, Eli. 1981. Self and World: An Explanation of Aesthetic Realism. New York: Definition.

Sonevytsky, Maria. 2008. "The Accordion and Ethnic Whiteness: Toward a New Critical Organology." The World of Music 50(3):101-18.

Thompson, Eric C. 2003. "Malay Male Migrants: Negotiating Contested Identities in Malaysia." American Ethnologist 30(3):418-38.

Turino, Thomas. 2008. Music as Social Life: The Politics of Participation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.