Near Future Tokyo Sound rounds out musical repertoire

By Franki Raden

JAKARTA (JP): The shifting tides of world music will be on show when Japanese music group Near Future Tokyo Sound takes the stage here this week.

The group, led by Mahkoto Ohdate, will perform at Ancol (Drive-In Theater), North Jakarta, tomorrow. Originally a percussionist, Ohdate will introduce a giant Japanese drum (taiko), which will be planed in combination with Western percussion instruments, a synthesizer and a traditional Japanese pluck instrument called shamisan. The group's instrument formation and the pieces it will perform suggests its orientation to the "world music", which in this case is a combination of pop and contemporary music. In Indonesia, such groups as Kyai Kanjeng and Kua Etnika are good examples of this trend.

The term "world music" was coined in the 1970s in the context of proportionally evaluating all kinds of music the world over in a manner divorced from European ethnocentrism. The latter originated from the attempt by several 19th century European and American musicologists to study non-Western music in a perspective called "primitive music".

Charmed by the evolution theory developed by social scientists like Herbert Spencer, Henry Morgan and Edward Taylor, these musicologists believed world music had developed from its origin in "primitive" music, such as found in Africa and the Asia Pacific. According to this theory, the music developed unilinearly and reached its apex with European classical music.

It was then common to resort to social sciences and musicology to legitimize Western cultural expansion to the Third World through colonialism. However, towards the transition to 20th century, anthropology, through its leading figure, American Franz Boas, rejected this ethnocentric view. He affirmed that it was not possible to conclude that one nation was superior to another, or vice versa, in view of the great number of variations made up in the elements determining the cultural identity of a nation.

It does not stand to reason to view the world's cultural structure in the framework of the theory of evolution. Any judgment about the quality of a cultural form, Boas believed, is based on a premise founded on a given cultural background which is not impartial.

In ethnomusicology, which set out as a study of traditional music only, things were finally settled when Alan P. Meriam in the 1980s asserted that a study of the music of a traditional society must be placed in its cultural context and cannot be considered as something autonomous. In the meantime, anthropologist Clifford Geertz in the 1970s popularized his view that arts must be seen as a cultural system. This view indicates that the aesthetic norms in a work of art are basically a system which also holds in the cultural system of the society creating the work.

Fascinating

It is from this concept that ethnomusicology later developed ethno-esthetics, a study attempting to assess problems of musical esthetics in the context of the cultural system of the society where the music is created. As this happened at the same time the ideology of post-modernist dynamics began to fascinate the public, Western societies finally accepted the presence of the wealth of Third World music in their countries.

This music, previously only an object of study of ethnomusicologists at universities, is now easily available in audio cassettes or CDs. Third World maestros make their presence felt in Europe and America and are accorded equal standing with maestros of classical music.

In the meantime, ethnomusicologists have convincingly made public the results of their studies which explain that in terms of sophistication, Third World music is on a par with classical music, the product of a European society previously considered as the zenith in the development of the world music. The most interesting implication of the emergence of this new trend is that international music has become greatly pluralistic, gradually eliminating the assumption that Europe and America are the centers of the world music. Add Surakarta to the traditional list of Vienna, Paris and New York, as the Central Java city is now a place of "pilgrimage" for those studying the Javanese gamelan.

World music abolishes the idea of hierarchy in the order of world music and also in the existing musical genres. In other words, terms which suggest qualitative evaluation such as "folk music", "classical music", "pop music" and "serious music" are now open to question. Therefore, the term "world music" is now used to get rid of hierarchical distinction in musical genres and the wealth of music belonging to diverse societies under the sun.

Interestingly, the information available about rich Third World music has prompted the emergence of a new trend in commercial or noncommercial contemporary music. Pop music composers and pop music groups now try to include ethnic musical elements, including the text element, in their composition.

In pop music, for example, a lyric, previously very important, can now be ignored. In the lyric of a pop song oriented to the world music style, the words may be taken from all languages in the world. Following in the footsteps of contemporary music composers, some pop music composers use in their lyrics a language of their own creation, which is based on the sound morphology alone.

This world music now demands music enthusiasts to be more open to novel things. Irrespective of like and dislike, listening to a new type of music is a useful experience in enriching our spiritual life. It is now time for us to enjoy the music from other nations which has the same right to exist as the commercial music which makes our appreciation shallow through uniformity of taste.