Al-Mizan music group and the State Islamic University in Yogyakarta

Preliminary fieldwork observations from Yogyakarta:

The city of Yogyakarta in Indonesia is well known for its artistic culture, great universities, and an impressive array of important historical sites and museums that annually attracts millions of visitors and tourists from around the world. During the month of August 2016, I travelled to Jogja, a common abbreviation stemming from the colonial Dutch orthography of Jogjakarta, and set out to conduct preliminary fieldwork among musicians in the city. This fieldwork involved examining different forms of Islamic musical practices such as Quranic recitation, Anasheed (religious anthems), and Sholawaat (religious prayers) in Jogja. Within a couple of days of my arrival, I realized that my ideal site for these practices would be Islamic universities, which have become important centers for the practice and development of these forms among students in remarkably innovative and recontextualized ways.

I was very fortunate to be hosted by a local family that was willing to help me make the proper connections during this short preliminary visit, paving the way to meet those individuals who pioneer and perform these genres in the city. The institution that would eventually be my main focus is UIN Sunan Kalijaga, one the largest religious universities in Jogja—one that is fully funded by the Indonesian government and attended by more than twenty-five thousand students. I would eventually spend the next few weeks of my visit observing, documenting, and even performing with the student-musicians on campus and at different public events.

Figure 1: Observing and rehearsing with students from UIN

UIN students can chose specific majors within religious studies such as Adab (Islamic ethics), Da’wah (proselytizing or preaching), Sharia (Islamic law), Tarbiya (Islamic and secular social sciences and humanities), or non-religious studies like science, technology, and management. Paralleling these majors are a variety of extracurricular activities like sports, art, and music which form an important part of the student’s daily life outside of their core academic disciplines. A benefit that arises from working with UIN is its reliability as a formal institution and its willingness and commitment on the part of students and faculty members to collaborate with me throughout my fieldwork, importantly laying the groundwork for the coming years. This enables me to produce an ethnographic work that includes the input of scholars and students from the field itself. More than just a reflexive ethnography, local scholarly voices of professors and students provide highly rigorous and well-reasoned perspectives from the local culture. While speaking to the dean of student activities at UIN, he assured me that UIN would be willing to share its resources and faculty members’ input throughout my work in Jogja. The students embraced my presence among them beyond what I had ever anticipated before coming here. I ultimately found myself surrounded by a group of people who were willing to share their homes, rehearsal room, instruments, and even motorbikes for travel around the city and to performance sites.

Figure 2: Students from UIN rehearsing for their upcoming concert.

Jam’iyyah al-Qurra’ wa al-Huffazh (JQH), or Al-Mizan, is a large student organization of approximately 300-350 students dedicated for the development of artistic practice among students. JQH consist of five divisions: tilawah (Quranic recitation), tahfizh (memorization), tafsir (interpretation), kaligrafi (calligraphy), and shalawat (the singing prayers). Generally, this organization is dedicated to nurturing sacred artistic performance through public and private engagement with various occasions such as festivals, holiday concerts, and Islamic weddings.  Most of my time in Jogja was spent with the shalawat division, which is a group of about twenty students. The shalawat division members have higher musical aptitude and are generally handpicked in the beginning of the academic year through an audition process. Their abilities range from playing melodic or percussive instruments to reciting and singing Arabic text either from the Quran or poems praising the prophet. It is important to mention here that JQH members can be involved in more than one division at a time. For example, a student can recite the Quran as part of the tilawah division, while also being a percussionist within the shalawat division. During my stay in Jogja, I was able to observe the shalawat division quite frequently in their audio-equipped small rehearsal space on campus. About 7 to 10 individuals from the group play various different hand percussion instruments, primarily an instrument called the duff, a cylindrical large tambourine like frame-drum with thick brass symbols. The duff was originally brought over from the Arabian Peninsula via trading routes connected by the Indian ocean (Poche 1984). The rest of the group played instruments like bass and electric guitars, violin, synthesizers able to electronically reproduce quarter tones, and Javanese gamelan instruments like saron and peking with pelog tuning. The student’s Arabic diction and ability to perform the maqam is outstanding—the result of years of immersion in the tonality of Near Eastern music. This is especially the case for those who can recite the Quran in the melismatic and highly ornamental style known as mujawad. Members have familiarized themselves with music through audio and video recordings shared by their peers or teachers from past performances.

Video 1: Sound check for Al-Mizan during the August 17^th concert in Bantul, Yogyakarta.

Figure 3: Sound check for Al-Mizan during the August 17^th concert in Bantul, Yogyakarta.

As a performer of Arab music, I was quickly able to adapt to perform these genres and participate in the group’s activities throughout my stay. Impressed with my ability to play the oud (called the gambus in Indonesia) and sing in Arabic, the group asked me to perform in one of their large upcoming events during the 17^th of August, which marked the 71^st Independence Day for Indonesia. I had come to learn that some of the members saw my videos performing with the National Arab Orchestra in the United States and were excited to have me play along and sing with them. I was also asked to perform a solo piece. Attended by hundreds of people from the surrounding community, the program for the night of the 17^th ranged from solo Quranic recitations by members of the tilawah division to newly compositions pieces by one of the students. The event took place in Bantul, an area in the southern surrounding suburbs of Jogja, far enough from the congested space of the city center where I stayed. For that night, Al-Mizan had prepared an instrumental piece that would accompany newly written nationalist poetry. The piece featured a pelog melody played on the saron by two students, drum set, duff, distorted guitar, and synthesizers. Hearing this collogue of different sounds coming together in one powerful piece, I had realized that this was a tremendous group of students who have produced something profoundly unique with their talents and commitment to musical innovation. There were three other pieces that night with this particular instrumentation each with different sacred content and melodic vocal lines. The group does not always use this particular arrangement, in a different context related to religious chanting they may only use percussion and voice while refraining from melodic instruments all together.

Figure 4: Performing live with Al-Mizan during a large religious gathering in Yogyakarta.

With this rich and diverse array of talents around me performing the new sounds of Southeast Asian Islam, I found myself flooded with multiple inquiries about what this means in terms of the broader understanding of Islam and artistic practice I came here to observe. Performing Southeast Asian Islam by the students of UIN sets this space apart in terms of the type of its cultural Islamic expressions. Although my stay is short, I have come to the conclusion that this can be a tremendously rich fieldwork site; perhaps one that can reveal the inner workings of a space that is caught up between different expressions of modernity and traditionalism within Islam. The relationship between Islam and music in Southeast Asia is constantly changing and adapting to newer global cultural contexts. There are different individual perspectives on what it means to be a performer of Islamic music in Yogyakarta. There are those who are strictly bound to religious settings and do not partake in any forms of secular performances due to the controversial dichotomy between music and Islam. Others completely immerse themselves with secular music accepting the fact that any performance that uses music from the Arab world is inevitably Islamic by its sheer historical and cultural connection. UIN students possess a combination of individual perspectives and subjectivities regarding music’s role in their lives, often with multiple conflicting stances on such issues. As a major artistic hub, and more specifically UIN as a dependable institution with its multiple academic resources, Yogyakarta has a lot to offer as a site to explore and attempt to answer these current critical inquiries about Islam and musical practice. 

References

Poche, Christian. 1984. “Duff.” The New Grove Dictionary of Musical Instruments, 526-7. London: Macmillan Press.

About the Author:

Albert Agha is currently a graduate student in the department of ethnomusicology at UCLA examining music and Islam in contemporary Southeast Asian society. His dissertation work focuses mainly on the area of central Java and the special region of Yogyakarta.