When I was in college, I got to know Kunst through his work entitled Music in Java, although I had not finished reading the book. Subjectively I find this book difficult to understand and understand, maybe because, at first glance, each page contains symbols and numbers that look complicated and logical.

I grew up in Yogyakarta, where gamelan is considered a representation of Javanese cultural identity; I only had the opportunity to learn gamelan when studying at the Department of Ethnomusicology. For five semesters, I studied gamelan, but still far from the word ‘expert.’ Although familiar, the pattern of learning gamelan with number transcription and western music logic is quite confusing and depends on the given sheet music. In 2024, I was invited to see gamelan learning at the Amsterdam conservation by Elsje Plantema and Michiel Niemantsverdriet; I was amazed because the students in the class were very good at playing the gamelan, and they didn’t seem to be reading the partiture. They invited me to play together, and of course, I was very embarrassed because I was not as good as them and depended on the music sheet. I asked Plantema how they could become so proficient and not rely on a music sheet. Plantema briefly replied that playing gamelan, of course, with rasa.

In a small research, I tried to record the process of learning gamelan for children in Yogyakarta. I found that almost all gamelan communities use music sheets as a learning method, not with rasa. In the book Music in Java, Kunst briefly discusses the Sariswara learning method, prioritizing rasa (feelings) initiated by Ki Hadjar Dewantara, the founder of the Taman Siswa school and known as the Father of Indonesian Education. But why do gamelan learning methods now rely on numerical notation transcripts? The gamelan notation system with numbers is assumed to have been widely published and adopted because of the book Music in Java. In 2014 I had the opportunity to become a guest lecturer at the Department of Music UvA to teach several Indonesian culture courses with Barbara Titus. On that occasion, Barbara Titus gave me a lot of reading material for lectures on cultural musicology (ethnomusicology), which differed from Kunst’s book. These readings opened my narrow mind about ethnomusicology, which was not just discussed music form, function, meaning, organology, and notation. Ethnomusicology, as a scientific discipline developed by Kunst, has grown so widely. However, in Indonesia, the material object of science appears still at the level of cultural preservation efforts and does not follow global discourse.

When at UvA B.Titus shared her rooms with me, she told me that the room once belonged to Ernst Heinz, one of Kunst’s students. Not only that, but she also showed Kunst’s legacy that was stored in the room. Titus shows a list of Kunst’s relics that have been successfully inventoried with an incredible number and variety. And at that moment, I felt like I had just met Kunst. I saw several collections of wax cylinders, archived correspondence, photos, films, various sound recordings and read a compilation of fascinating writings by Kunst and his students. In the book, I learned that one of the reasons Kunst did field research by recording in exotic areas was the motivation of conservation efforts before all was lost(Kunst, 1949). Kunst feels that the presence of the Missionaries will make the music and performance culture in the archipelago slowly disappear.

In 2017, Barbara Titus said she was chosen as curator to open the Kunst legacy by UvA; she invited me to participate. We organize Kunst heritage instruments, audio, photos, and videos. After obtaining preliminary data regarding Kunst’s legacy, we filed a hearing with several relevant parties to seek support. A great start, we were able to meet directly with Mr. Hilmar Farid, who serves as the Director-General of Culture at the Ministry of Education and Culture of the Republic of Indonesia. We presented Kunst’s journey in recording music in the archipelago and playing some of Kunst’s recordings. As the authorized official, the Director-General greatly appreciates the project to open the legacy of Kunst and asks his staff to follow up and support the activities we carry out. In 2018 this support emerged with a focus group discussion activity discussing the work steps of this project at BPNB (Cultural Value Preservation Center) Yogyakarta, which happened to be the house of KRT Joyodipuro, where Kunst once lived in that place. Barbara Titus conveys the distribution and condition of the heritage that needs urgent conservation. Seeing the fantastic amount of the legacies, everyone present was enthusiastic about taking part. One of the attendees from the province of Bali said that Bali had carried out a similar project, namely the repatriation of the Bali documentation of 1928. Edward Herbs initiated this activity from UCLA in collaboration with an academician from Bali I Made Bandem. The 1928 repatriation project digitized the scattered recordings of Balinese art produced by the German company Odeon Beka, and some have been returned to the cultural owner’s community. The people who own the culture are surprised because some people still remember the recording process. The process is exciting because the archive is present as a medium to recall a past event with a different narrative. And a little history was formed (Wolford, 2007).

Hearing what Edward Herbs et al. did in the Bali Repatriation project in 1928, the picture of the urgency of opening up Kunst’s legacy becomes more evident and more apparent. Apart from discussing, we also played several pieces of silent film recorded by Kunst. Through this film, the audience witnessed a striking visual change, especially in several parts of Indonesia. Indonesia is anxious about the wave of Islamic radicalism originating from the expansion of Middle Eastern culture as if it gets a breath of fresh air when watching videos of people’s lives a hundred years ago. In the Aceh region, which currently applies Islamic law, it turns out that, visually, none of the women were wearing the hijab at that time. The present Director-General implied that if the project opened the Kunst heritage, there might be a significant change in representing cultural identity. And finally, we will continue the planned opening of the Kunst legacy with the Kick-Off program the following year.

In 2019, the Kunst heritage opening program began to be echoed in several European regions. We started to conduct many discussions and workshops with related parties such as Beeld en Geluid in Hilversum, which stores Dutch Audiovisual heritage; Lautarchive at Humboldt University Berlin, which keeps voice archives of various languages and dialects of prisoners of the First World War; Berlin Phonogram Archive which holds diverse the world’s collection of musical instruments also recorded sound sent by Kunst and the Vienna Phonogram Archive in Austria which is now active in digitizing and organizing sound archives. From that trip, a visit to Lautarchive caught my attention. I like to go to a tomb with thousands of headstones in it. In a reasonably narrow room filled with safes and sound recording plates with detailed catalogues I had the opportunity to choose several plates to play with. One of the played plates was a recording plate of a prisoner from Johor who spoke in Malay. He sang a song about his longing for his hometown and hoping to be released soon.

The poem sounds very sad and heartwrenching. The recording was initiated by a German psychologist named Carl Stumpf, a language teacher, to rule the world with sound culture. Prisoners of World War I who came from colonial countries are a large sample to start research. During the recording process, prisoners were asked questions about their origins and their ability to play music, and after that, they recorded their voices. Some only counted numbers in their language until some sang meaningfully, hoping to be released soon. This condition, at first glance, reminds me of the silent film recorded by Kunst that I have watched to the end. In the video compilation from various archipelago regions, all recorded performances have the meaning of war. In some of his notes, Kunst does not highlight this; he only records and transcribes music from the region, also tells how he persuaded the public to be recorded, which often cost him a lot (Rouget & Kunst, 1960). Based on these records, I assume that people chose war performances to represent resistance to colonialism to be recorded by a colonial. The question then is, can archives track subaltern voices?

In 2022, I visited Hans Romp’s office at UvA. He’s a sound digitizing technician at UvA, he showed off his new and spacious room, which was very different from before. In his new space, Hans displayed several LPs he was and would be digitized on the table. While chatting, he played a record that played jazz music in the early 1900s. The disc is in excellent condition with all the song narration on it printed on the cover, much like a magazine. The information on the outside is complete, discussing the creation of popular music in America written by Carl H. Scheele, followed by the story of each song on the track. With the soothing and fun jazz rhythm, we spent the afternoon with a lot of chatter. Hans said he liked to digitize these plates because all the information was clear. Then he compared it to showing some Jaap Kunst record plates, which he found very confusing because there was only one clue in the plate cover, which I knew was referring to the region. Without years and descriptions plus very dense noise, as a digitization technician, Hans transfers to a renewable medium with no more understanding of the sound he is transmitting than a clue to the region where the sound is recorded. The conversation seemed simple but made me think further. I imagined a time about 100 years ago when jazz music was recorded with complete lingual markings, and sound recordings from my country only had regional indications. In several separate notes from the plates stored in the study room, Jaap Kunst did write down how he recorded the voices and what kind of procedures he had to go through; then, to describe the recorded voices, Jaap Kunst wrote in his way what he did. But rarely narrate the sound in what context. It caught my attention, imagining the different sound archives collected from the same period but in other spaces.

Critics of Archival Relations, Knowledge and Colonial Power

The idea of opening the legacy of Kunst, which is around 100 years old, has not been entirely smooth sailing. The Indonesian government’s support as a state directly related to the archives stored until now has not been seen clearly. Kickoff activities regarding Kunst’s legacy are more like an exhibition of Indonesian musical instruments, not revealing colonial history. Many factors cannot be related to these archives, which is expected as a form of remembering-forgetting. At the same time, many experts state that, unlike national archives, colonial history is rarely recognized as an archive for a postcolonial state (Thrush, 2018). This statement is interesting, considering how Soekarno, as the first president of Indonesia, constructed the nation’s identity by taking BERDIKARI (Stand on one’s own feet) or the contemporary language, “Do It Ourselves” as a movement to reject neocolonialism(Nartey & Ernanda, 2020). This indirectly affects how the Indonesian people view colonial archives. Kunst’s work while in Indonesia (1919-1934) produced a rich archive. The archives highlight many issues, such as how Kunst compiles his material in ‘collaboration’ with musicians from Indonesia can provide valuable insights into the formation of colonial knowledge. The various modes of understanding culture and expression, problematizing the differences between original and imported musical styles, or written and embodied archives, are closely related to ethnomusicology(Feld & Nettl, 1986).

Meanwhile, in trying to answer the question about looking at the sound files in Hans’ room, I remembered an article I had read some time ago. In a dissertation entitled Community that embodies dance traditions and their changes in Java, Felicia Hughes-Freeland. The title of this article is very interesting because it counters the phenomenal writings of Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities. In this paper, She tells about the power of dance as a political representation that has socio-cultural values not as a rule but as being turned on by the Community(Picard, 2010).

In this paper, She shared about how dance in Java exists as a system of representation as well as a form of action. She says her interest in dance is how it helps us understand how people construct their worlds in everyday life and stage performances. In a long research process, armed with scientific mastery of dance notation systems such as Benesh, Laban, or Eshkol Wachman that she obtained at SOAS did not answer his anxiety in contextualizing dance movements with the community. Finally, participating in dance practice and memorizing dance moves and choreography inevitably became the main way to answer her research questions. Friendship with the teacher, physical experience of learning dance, conversations during practice, and watching dance performances are very helpful in completing the dissertation. From deep observations, she stated that the performances held in Asia had long been part of the secular and religious expressions of the community. Ceremonial dance and dance-drama have also long been associated with centers of power and political rituals. Javanese court dances have long been part of a community that is both realized and imagined. It provides evidence of how dance practices and traditions become involved in social interaction and fosters a sense of identity in local face-to-face communities that are also part of the national state. Kraton dance has undergone a process of debate, positioning, and revival in national cultural politics. Stuck in the state rhetoric of proclaiming the unity of Indonesia, this has long been used to create a semblance of a glorious past for an area dependent on colonial borders. Indeed, scientists often write about the Kraton dance as an Indonesian culture by emphasizing its Hindu-Javanese predecessors (400-1300 AD). Still, this approach is also found in Dutch research on dance and theater in the late colonial period. Some examples include Groneman, documenting the dance of the Yogya Palace (1888- 1899) Also, photos of Grebeg by Cephas in 1895, as well as numerous papers published linking Javanese culture with Hinduism and Lelyveld’s writings (1931) for colonial exhibitions which treat Javanese court dance as a modern version of a Sanskrit performance. She argues that Javanese court dances are not a ‘natural’ continuation of an earlier tradition. So far, they have been constructed in a ‘modern’ way that is self-conscious and must be understood as a series of embodied practices that continue to be carried out and have been worked on by interests determined by the ideas of the political community.

avanese tradition emerges from a process of political possibility and is strategically constructed by showing that tradition is a process, not an object. In this way, the Kraton tradition demands many associations that predate its chronological origins. Besides, so far, the culture of the palace continues dynamically. By being continued through a ‘mutrani’ process, each work is considered a ‘child’ of the previous work, similar but not the same. The replication of this tradition is evident in the further branching of the palaces in Java. The activities that were once elite from the colonial era palace became part of an identitybuilding plan to create a new independent Indonesian nation through various forms of education, and dance became the foundation of local culture in the newly formed republic. After independence, court dances gradually spread from the king’s palace and princely residences to educational institutions, heritage homes, hotels, and, finally, theaters. A contrast distinguishes its aesthetic identity between the inside and outside of the Kraton, and this contrast is ideological. As a newly emerging category, Kraton dance maintains its distinctiveness from other types of performances classified as ‘folk’ and ‘pop’ arts.

From the description, I tried to understand why the sound recorded by Kunst lacked lingual signs and mostly only referred to the region. The process of inheritance of traditions that occur in the Javanese palace can at least be used as a reference for how art is developed. The ‘mutrani’ process makes work no longer personal but communal. Also, the dynamic inheritance system makes the created works indirectly make recording efforts to extend the work life, not the process’s focus. In the literary tradition in Java, in particular, poets are usually sent by the authorities at that time to rewrite (anyerat ulang) the writing of the previous poets with interpretations adapted to the conditions of the times; this is interesting if it is related to the process of cultural production which is always tied to the work of the poet previously. I assume that this kind of cultural inheritance process makes the tradition of storing cultural materials not go well in Indonesia. At a meeting mid 2022 in the province of East Nusa Tenggara, Titus and I shared Jaap Kunst’s archives in the form of photos, sounds and videos recorded a hundred years ago from several areas in NTT. The record only mentions the region’s name without any other linguistic markings. Unexpectedly, the audience who came to the meeting knew and knew well what we shared; they were even able to explain in detail what was in the archive. They said that although there may have been many changes, they still recognized the voices, dances, and performances presented in the archives. This experience more or less answered how cultural reproduction process. Also explains the lack of literacy in this process. I see a clear distinction in Eastern society’s view of culture. Orality is the main thing, and cultural inheritance is carried out with spoken language and a sufficient time marker system with morning, noon, night, and the rainy season that appears after the dry season. The achievement of artistic creativity is common, so it does not require signs or notations to be written; the important thing is that the community understands these activities for entertainment or rituals. And one more thing I see is that archives are important. Still, I also can’t seem to reject the view that in our country, history is present in the form of oral records; therefore, efforts to return archives to the community where the sound was recorded (repatriation) make it possible to present a new historical story.

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