Musical worlds in Yogyakarta

Front matter

a7 wors in Yogyakarta Max M. Richter

Southeast Asia Mediated

This series considers media forms and practices, processes of mediation, and the complex evolving and intersecting media ecologies that characterize Southeast Asia whether in contemporary or historical circumstances.

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS vii GLOSSARY OF SPECIAL TERMS ix

INTRODUCTION: APPROACHING MUSICAL LIFE IN EARLY

POST-SOEHARTO YOGYAKARTA 1 Musical worlds and their genres 10 Theory and concepts 21 Research methods 24 Overview 26

Part 1 Music And The Street

BACKGROUND 31 Cultural capital and its spatial variants 34 In-group and inter-group social capital 36

1 SOSROWIJAYAN AND ITS STREET WORKERS 39 Roadsides and alleyways 41 Becak drivers 43 The Sosro Bahu stand 45 Street guides 49 Sriwisata and the Sosro Boys 50 2 MUSICAL FORMS AND SPACES 53 Mobile pengamen 54 Street-worker tongkrongan 60 Transweb 61 Opposite Resto 64 3 MUSIC GROUPS 69 The Sekar Wuyung group 69 The Shower street guide band 72 Shower at Resto and the Sosro Bahu after-party 74

| Contents

PART 2 HABITUS AND PHYSICALITY BACKGROUND Habitus, gender, and socialisation Three forms of musical physicalisation 4 DETACHMENT ENGAGEMENT Kampung transitions From hotel gamelan to kafe pop 5 OTHER WORLDS AND SEXUALISATION

Kampung jatilan and Kridosono metal/electronic

Campursari/dangdut and jalanan/rock in the kampung

Dangdut shows and pub rock

PART 3 STATE POWER AND MUSICAL COSMOPOLITANISM BACKGROUND The bureaucratic field Grounded cosmopolitanism 6 REGIONAL PARLIAMENT Awards night campursari Awakening Day rock and reggae Independence Day wayang kulit 7 ARMED FORCES Campursari at an army battalion Music jalanan at the Air Force Academy 8 UNIVERSITIES

The State Institute of Islamic Studies

Gadjah Mada University

Sunday mornings on the boulevard Hangouts, capital conversions, activities units Large-scale musical performance

CONCLUSION: CAMPURSARI AND JALANAN AT THE SULTAN’S PALACE BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX vi

83 84 86 89 89 94 103

103 108 113

156 160 161 164 167

Acknowledgements

First and foremost I wish to thank my wife and partner, Dr. Tina Kalivas, for her love and support through the long process from planning my doctoral fieldwork to completing this monograph. Secondly I would like to thank my PhD supervisor, Professor Joel S. Kahn, for his invaluable advice and guidance, and also the School of Social Sciences at La Trobe University for the funding and collegial support given me during that time. Also from La Trobe University, Dr. Wendy Mee provided helpful co-supervision, and Dr. John Goldlust kindly proofread a late draft of the monograph. Third, countless people in Yogyakarta were friendly and shared their knowledge, experiences and ideas openly with me. Of these, I would particularly like to express my appreciation to Tyas Madhyatama Pashupati Rana, Nowo Ksvara Koesbini, and Ipeong Purwaningsih. Fourth, my PhD examiners, along with the ISEAS and KITLV reviewers, provided constructive advice on various aspects of the monograph. Dr. Bart Barendregt has been especially important in this regard. Fifth, I wish to thank the Anthropology Program at Monash University, and in particular Dr. Penny Graham, for the very important financial support and assistance with intellectual focus I received through the final stages of producing the monograph. Finally, I would like to offer a general expression of gratitude to the great many friends, family and colleagues past and present who have in one way or other helped to bring this book to fruition.

Glossary of special terms abangan aliran anak jalanan angkringan Astro Band

Bar Borobudur becak campursari dangdut dangdut Jawa

DPRD an aliran social grouping, characterised by ‘village sensibilities’ and a syncretic or ‘nominal’ form of Islam (from the Arabic aba'an, a practicing but nonstrict Muslim)

literally ‘stream’ or ‘current’, refers to the abangan, priyayi and santri social groupings in Java that Geertz (1960) identified based on occupational orientation and ‘world outlook’

street child/‘street kid’

portable tea and snack/meal stall

a pengamen group that performed regularly on Malioboro Street and elsewhere in downtown Yogyakarta

a ranch-style pub near Sosrowijayan featuring loud live rock music

two-seater tricycle pedicab

literally ‘mixed essences’, a musical genre that became very popular in central and east Java in the mid-1990s. Campursari combines gamelan ensembles with western diatonic instruments such as bass guitar, hi-tech keyboards and saxophone, and regional and national forms and instruments including kroncong ukuleles and dangdut drum.

major Indonesian popular music genre variously associated with urban lower classes, nationalism and an Islamic ethic. Many of dangdut’s musical elements grew out of melayu ensembles, but it broadly comprises Indian kanerva pattern rhythms on a tabla or a kendang drum; flutes and keyboards played with Hindustani-flavoured lilts; and heavy-metal guitar. dangdut music with Java-specific features, these most often being song lyrics in Javanese

Dewan Perwakilan Rakyat Daerah; Regional Parliament

| Glossary of special terms electone gambus habitus

Islamic Institute jalanan jatilan joged kafe kampung karawitan kendang

KPJM

Kridosono kroncong langgam Jawa hi-tech programmable keyboard, also sometimes called organ tunggal, named after the Yamaha trademarked electronic organs of the same name

a pear-shaped lute of Arabian origin, features in Malay/ Islamic orchestras often known as orkes gambus concept developed by Pierre Bourdieu that conveys the idea that people's dispositions, perceptions of life chances, and habituated physical movements are products of deeply embedded social structures formed through (especially early)life experiences State Institute of Islamic Studies (IAIN, Institut Agama Islam Negeri) in Yogyakarta: became the State Islamic University (UIN, Universitas Islam Negeri) in 2003

of the street, having the character of the streets

a form of trance dance popular in Java

popular dance form found throughout the Indonesian/Malay world; although most often performed in couples, joged can also refer to solo dancers doing the two-step characteristic of the form

term for a type of nightclub that can also function as a daytime café/restaurant

neighbourhood

general term for gamelan music that includes singing

two-headed drum that features in gamelan ensembles and dangdut groups

Kelompok Penyanyi Jalanan Malioboro; Malioboro Streetside Singing Group, also important to the formation of the Malioboro Arts Community

sports hall and stadium that houses many large-scale musical performances

popular music genre featuring diasporic Portuguese mandolin; Sundanese/Betawi flute runs; a distinct guitar style; a nostalgic vocal style; and lyrical themes of love, loss and the Indonesian Independence struggle literally ‘Javanese custom/style’, here a musical genre closely related to kroncong, but which tends to feature Javanese lyrics and slendro pentatonic-scale patterns lesehan Melayu musical physicalisation musik jalanan

Opposite Resto pengamen perek

Prada preman priyayi

Purawisata qasidah

Reformasi

Resto

Glossary of special terms | street restaurants where customers sit on straw mats on the ground

‘Malay’; in relation to music generally refers to elements or nuances characteristic of melayu ensembles the manifested physical behaviours that arise around or through music

street music; in Yogyakarta the term is sometimes applied to street buskers playing traditionalist genres, but more often applies to western-influenced, politically oppositional folk/rock music, with guitars being the most common instrument

a popular night-time ‘hangout’ for street guides and others by the Sosrowijayan Street roadside and opposite the Resto café/bar

street busker

‘experimental woman’, from perempuan eksperimental, a term for women who often have sexual encounters with (especially western) men (the less stigmatised equivalent for local-based men is “gigolo”)

a late-night lesehan eatery on the corner of Malioboro and Sosrowijayan streets

‘gangster’ or ‘thug’ (from the Dutch vrij man, ‘free man’) an aliran social grouping featuring high-status bureaucratic/ Hindu-Javanese

a multi-function amusement park and ‘cultural arts centre’; the open-air Taman Ria venue within the complex regularly houses large-scale dangdut performances

a form of Arabian-influenced lyric poetry, in Indonesia also associated with rebana frame drum accompaniment

term for the ‘reform era’ that gained momentum leading into President Soeharto’s downfall in 1998; Reformasi and krismon (krisis moneter, financial crisis) were key terms used across Indonesian society in efforts to characterise and institute social and political change during the early-post Soeharto years

a café/bar popular with backpackers and street guides, located toward the western end of Sosrowijayan Street xi

| Glossary of special terms santri

Sekar Wuyung sekaten

Shower Band Sosro Bahu

Sultan's Palace

Tombo Sutris tongkrongan TransWeb UGM wayang kulit Yayi an aliran social grouping based on market and purest-Islamic features (Geertz 1960), more recently set in contrast to kejawen (Javanism) (Beatty 1999) Sosrowijayan-based group whose dangdut Jawa music included many campursari songs

refers to both a commemoration of the prophet Muhammad and a fifteenth-century gamelan set; following the Javanese calendar, each year a month-long carnival culminates in a week of formal rituals at the Sultan’s Palace

Sosrowijayan-based musical group featuring street guides connected to the Malioboro jalanan scene name of a becak driver organization and their stand/ hangout located on Sosrowijayan Street kraton in Indonesian, both home to Sultan Hamengku Buwono X (also Provincial Governor) and seen as the centrepiece of Javanese culture

a campursari orchestra who played at a wide range of functions in Yogyakarta, including those connected to state power

Javanese term for ‘hangout’ (from nongkrong, ‘to squat’)

an Internet café and street guide ‘hangout’ located by a Sosrowijayan alleyway

Universitas Gadjah Mada; Gadjah Mada University shadow puppet theatre

the name of a 17 year old female singer who was very adept at balancing polite deference and sexualised crowd rousing in a wide range of settings and contexts xii

Introduction Approaching musical life in early post-Soeharto Yogyakarta

By four o’clock the midday heat has begun to mellow. Along kampung alleyways the raucous commotion of city life gives way to the occasional sounds of playing children, splashing water, cooing pigeons. Domestic life emanates crisply out of thin walls and open windows. Some people are freshening up with a mandi or cooking in their kitchens; others are watching television or quietly strumming guitars by their doorsteps. The sun, by now sunk behind buildings, has given way to the calm, mild air of early dusk. Islamic calls to prayer and a church choir echo faintly across the neighbourhood; a train whistle signals the next wave of newcomers and returnees from Jakarta.

In the evening, the tranquillity of our leafy open-plan homestay is punctuated only by the fleeting rustle and murmur of a guest, family member or friend. Only 50 metres away, thousands of people are re-converging onto Malioboro Street. The food stallholders have set up along the street; customers sit on straw mats under temporary awnings to eat and chat and listen to the passing busking groups. For a time a political campaign and then a rock concert dominate the soundscape. By midnight, social life has gravitated into smaller pockets, one being the Prada eatery. Individuals and groups pull in to the roadside eatery from nightclubs and elsewhere, eat a meal or drink tea, many then staying on to chat and sing along with the Astro Band and others until the five o’clock closing time.

By this time the sky is beginning to brighten, goods transporters are up and about, and soon breakfast stallholders have set up across the street, catering to truck drivers, students, government employees. By ten o’clock all the stalls and shops along Malioboro Street are open for business, and the road, slip-lanes and footpaths are again crammed with workers, commuters and strollers.

Yogyakarta (or ‘Jogja’) is often described as a palatial ancient city and the cultural heart of Java. It is both a Special Region within the Republic of Indonesia and the region’s capital city, and is a major centre of education, cultural tourism and religious syncretism and pluralism. The city has a vibrant arts scene and progressive student activism amidst its ‘refined’ (halus) Sultanate culture and numerous government institutions. The area has many famous attributes, including the eighth century Buddhist Borobudur and Hindu Prambanan temples, and the city’s temporary role as Indonesia’s national capital during the Independence era adds to its political credibility. In recent years a major earthquake and then a volcanic eruption in the region caught international attention, and at the same time signs of economic development have burgeoned across and beyond the city.

Malioboro Street is ‘the centre of life for Yogyans historically, religiously, politically, economically and socially’ (Berman 1994:20). With its daily transformation from shopping strip to night market to, finally, a strip of eateries, it has been called ‘the world’s longest permanent open-air market’ (Berman 1994:20). The city merges into villages in every direction, with the region around the city including some of the most densely populated rural areas in the world (Damage earthquake 2006). Inner-city congestion has intensified over recent decades, with workers, students and others almost doubling the population each workday (Sasongko 2001). This is the setting for this monograph, in which I will show how musical and related activities helped to promote peace and intergroup appreciation and tolerance during a period of great social and political change. I also schematize combinations of performance setting, social relation and power dynamic that facilitated these largely peaceful interactions.

In the final years of the twentieth century, Indonesia experienced and negotiated several major changes. The Asian economic crisis that began in 1997 had a significant impact in subsequent years; and politically, President Soeharto’s downfall in May 1998 signalled both the end of the New Order government’s 32 year rule and the start of the Reformasi era (Aspinall 1999; Aspinall, Van Klinken and Feith 1999). In the optimism of new political freedoms and opportunities among ongoing economic crises, social relations in Indonesia were marked by both occasional horrific violence and, given the immensity of change underway, exemplary moments of cooperation.

Between April and October 2001 alone, a new mayor was instated in Yogyakarta, Indonesia’s President Abdurrachman Wahid (Gus Dur) was impeached and replaced by Megawati Sukarnoputri, and the September 11 attacks in New York occurred. Large banners and roving campaigns often dominated the streetscape in political contests over public space. Meanwhile, neither completely removed from, nor wholly bound to these events, the midyear in Yogyakarta remained highly active with major rituals and festivals such as Sekaten (May), the Yogyakarta Arts Festival (June), the Yogyakarta Gamelan Festival (July), and Independence Day (August). The public, street-based nature of these political and cultural events offered rich material for sensorial ethnography and social analysis.

I undertook a study of music in Yogyakarta during the early years of Reformasi (the Reform movement). The variety of musics I had encountered on previous visits there intrigued me, and I also felt that the topic might help to reconcile theories of Javanese dominance in Indonesia with the humble living conditions of most Javanese. Given that Indonesia was undergoing its biggest changes since the mid-1960s, I wanted to capture as much detail of the cur rent period as possible. At the least, then, the study from the outset was intended to produce a record of social and musical life in the midst of the many transitions underway in Yogyakarta.

In what follows I seek to develop a set of concepts and approaches through which to construct an account of musical influences on social relations. In Yogyakarta, as to a large extent in wider Indonesia, popular music and social relations passed through two discernible phases during the study period. First, oppositional music gained increasing momentum in the late New Order period and through to the early euphoria of Reformasi. Second, the shocking reality of inter-ethnic/religious and anti-Chinese violence, along with ongoing economic hardship, compelled several social organizations and associated musicians to promote peace as their main priority. In Yogyakarta in 1999, these were manifested in various concerts, message T-shirts and the like. When I visited in 2000, a kind of Reformasi fatigue had set in. In 2001 music remained a vital part of many people’s lives; however, while it sometimes served as a direct vehicle for people to enhance their stakes in power struggles, more pervasively it helped to maintain cooperative social relations during a period of great uncertainty.

Added to the multilayered changes occurring during the early post-Soeharto period, research on social relations and culture in Java must also consider the island’s long and complex history. As Clifford Geertz (1960:7) pointed out several decades ago:

Java — which has been civilized longer than England; which over a period of more than fifteen hundred years has seen Indians, Arabs, Chinese, Portuguese and Dutch come and go; and which has today one of the world’s densest populations, highest development of the arts, and most intensive agricultures — is not easily characterized under a single label or easily pictured in terms of a dominant theme.

Archaeological evidence shows that Hindu and early gamelan instruments have been in use in central Java since at least the eighth century (Kunst 1968), and many people in Yogyakarta have assured me that lesung music made with rice pounders existed before that. In the turbulent years between Indonesian Independence and Soeharto’s New Order, Geertz (1960) developed the Javanese/Indonesian notion of aliran into an important tool for conceptualising Javanese society and culture. Aliran, meaning literally ‘stream’ or ‘current’, refers to three broad groups based on occupational orientation and ‘world outlook’, these being village/ syncretic abangan, market/purest-Islamic santri (further divided into reformist moderen and traditionalist kolot) and bureaucratic/ Hindu-Java priyayi.

A number of scholars have drawn attention to the need for Geertz’s aliran concept to more accurately define the party-political, religious and occupational differences underpinning the three groups (Kahn 1988:182-4; Newland 2000). Others have reconceptualised the three aliran streams, classifying the cultural orientations of Javanese into the two broad categories of kejawen (Javanism) and santri (Beatty 1999). Nonetheless, viewed historically the concept of aliran helped to challenge the simplistic ‘traditional/modern’ dualisms that dominated emerging development discourses at the time (Gomes 2007:43). Additionally, the term still resonated among the people I spoke with in Yogyakarta in 2001, albeit modified to fit current times.

Several other studies of Javanese culture and society inform the following analysis.’ A few Javanese/Indonesian terms were central to the street life and intergroup relations I encountered. Tongkrongan, or ‘hangout’ (Echols and Shadily 1982), tended to carry the same mixed connotations as its English counterpart. Depending on speaker and context, a tongkrongan could be a place where layabouts laze around with nothing better to do, ora ‘hip’ place where real life happens. A popular tongkrongan site was the angkringan, a portable tea and snack stall. Most angkringan workers set their ready-stocked stalls strategically close to trading areas. By catering to basic needs, they facilitated interactions between street workers, civil servants, and others who otherwise generally remained separate, especially on and near Malioboro Street.

Other tongkrongan settings included warung, these being more permanent tea stall/shops; and lesehan, street restaurants featuring straw mats spread out on the ground. People would regularly gather and ngobrol at these hangouts. Ngobrol can be translated as ‘chat’

1 Anderson 1990, Guinness 1986, Sullivan 1994; Siegel 1986; Robson 2003.

and, as with tongkrongan, was perceived variously as light and trivial, or as code for matters of real importance. In Part One, I attempt to problematise too straightforward a reading of these hangouts as exemplars of intergroup harmony. Nevertheless, overwhelmingly these hangouts and eateries were important sites in which amiable intergroup relations were maintained daily among diverse occupational, ethnic, and other affiliations.

Despite Yogyakarta’s reputation as a ‘traditional’ city, several changes were occurring during the main research period. The city area was inhabited by people with a wide range of livelihoods and lifestyles, one indicator of which was the myriad uses of technology. Thousands of motorcycles crammed the roads, along with pedicabs (becak), horse and carts, old buses and bicycles. Garbage collectors pulled heavy carts by hand, while increasing numbers of aeroplanes flew overhead. Countless government administration offices and education institutions each featured cumbersome filing cabinets and manual typewriters. The only high technology cinema had burnt down years earlier, leaving only others built decades ago. At the same time, dozens of internet cafés and VCD libraries enjoyed high levels of business, and mobile phones numbered in their thousands (Hill and Sen 2005). It seemed clear to me that text messaging became widespread in Yogyakarta before ‘modern’ cities such as Melbourne.

Referring to its multi-ethnic character, several people told me Malioboro Street was the ‘real mini Indonesia’, unlike the fabricated ‘Beautiful Indonesia in Miniature Park’ (known as Taman Mini) in Jakarta. During my fieldwork, Malioboro Street was blocked to traffic by the railway line crossing its northern end, with Malioboro itself a smooth double-lane, one-way road leading southbound on a slight downhill slope. Starting from its northern end, large establishments included Hotel Garuda, the Regional Parliament and Malioboro Mall, government offices, the large, traditional Beringharjo Market, Fort Vredeburg and the Central Post Office. South again, less than two kilometres from Malioboro Mall, are the highly symbolic Sultan’s Palace and its ceremonial grounds.

Malioboro Street was flanked by hundreds of stalls and shops catering to various classes, needs, and interests. Particularly from around ten am until eight pm each day, the street was chiefly characterised by the stalls cramming both sides of the pedestrian walkway under the archways. Stall items were predominantly commoditised culture’ crafts and cheap clothing made mostly from batik off-cuts and seconds. Each morning at around nine o’clock, traders and their assistants wheeled out large trolleys from side-street depots, opened them, and set up their stalls. With a flick of the wrist, they

Becak line the slip lane on Maliboro Street

The Malioboro walkway flanked by street stalls and a brightly-lit department store

Introduction

Inside Malioboro Mall unrolled shirts ten at a time, each previously set on coat hangers, and then swung them onto bars they had strung up and balanced between pylons. By this time, traffic had built up on the road, with the flow on to and off the main thoroughfare generally characterised by patience and courtesy. For example, motorcyclists often helped becak drivers across to the slip lane by bracing one foot on the becak’s mudguard and pushing them along.

The crowded and relatively gritty street level of Malioboro contrasted with the bright lights illuminating the evening skyline. Dazzling neons emanated from shopping malls and from department stores specialising in carpets, plastic ware, or clothing. Malioboro Mall, built in 1994, is open plan and four levels high, in many senses typical of suburban shopping malls throughout the world. But the ‘Mal’ was also illustrative of social relations in Yogyakarta. Hundreds of motorcycles crammed the parking bays at the main entrance, each coordinated and monitored by attendants in orange overalls. Several sellers of cigarettes and newspapers waited for incoming and outgoing customers at the bottom of the steps, as did becak drivers whose vehicles sat parked in the slip lane on the other side of road. The inside of the mall featured department stores and smaller specialty shops and stalls, although the main activities here were arguably not those of shoppers but rather those ‘hanging out’ chatting, or simply looking about, while leaning on the silver-plated rails. Many of these were students and youth, while families ambled past the shop fronts. ‘Village folk’ (orang desa) could also be seen enthralled by the novelty of hi-tech escalators and shiny surfaces.

In this light, three broad groups or classes gravitated around the Mal: the wealthy, who were able to purchase expensive coffee and goods from the various stores (see also Mundayat 2005:128-9); the middle- to lower/middle-classes, such as students and visitors from elsewhere in Indonesia, who spent little or no money at the Mal but hung out or did some of their grocery shopping there; and a section of the urban poor, who sought to carry out their trade from the entrance but rarely if ever entered the Mal proper.’

The highly congested and diverse setting of Malioboro Street serves as the focal point for this study. Some people regarded life here as highly agreeable and pleasant, while others saw the area as overrun with problems and stressful. Of the former, many spoke of enjoying Yogyakarta’s laidback, Santai aja’ (take it easy) lifestyle, as well as its relative affordability, with many Indonesian university graduates choosing to stay on in the city long after completing their studies. Hundreds of foreign travellers and students were drawn there by an interest in the arts and/or activism, and many rural-oriented locals spoke with great reverence of Yogyakarta’s Sultan. As well as being characterised by polite ‘high’ culture, the region also has a reputation for inter-ethnic, -class and -religious tolerance. Exemplary in this regard was the regular socialising between shoe shiners, professors and others at tea stalls, as mentioned above. Whenever I arrived by train from Jakarta, I was struck by the air of youthful vitality around Malioboro Street. Talking with passersby on the street, I often felt that, as with the popular saying about New York, Yogyakarta had as many interesting life stories as it did people.

At the same time, tension and conflict were by no means absent from Yogyakarta in the early post-Soeharto years. The movement of pedestrians along Malioboro Street was severely hampered, forcing many to take the slip lane only to then experience repeated near misses by bicycles, becak and horse and carts, especially those travelling northbound against the legal flow rather than take the impractically long route via Joyonegaran Street or through narrow residential alleyways. Many people treated crossing Malioboro as an adventure, but the absence of traffic lights and zebra crossings made this an even more perilous task. The recent economic cri-

2 On shopping malls and social differentiation in Southeast Asia, see Young 1999; Van Leeuwen 2011; on Yogyakarta specifically, see Wibawanta 1998.

Introduction sis had played a role in exacerbating the strained conditions on Malioboro Street, but there were other factors involved. In the mid- 1970s, a long-time resident told me, Malioboro became the site of battles among becak drivers, resulting in the deaths of a number of ethnic Batak drivers from North Sumatra. He added that something similar could well happen again.

Another source of resentment stemmed from the early 1980s, when the then Sultan gave away Malioboro pavement spaces to petty traders. Yogyakartans, for the most part being irresolute in business matters, did not take up the offer. However, other groups did, in particular ‘immigrants’ from the island of Madura off the northeast coast of Java. Nowadays, the argument ran, these same groups were selling the spaces back to long-term residents at exorbitant prices, causing tensions and arguments over trading rights. Finally, resentment on Malioboro Street towards Malioboro Mall’s profiteering managers was such that it would only take someone to walk down the main street with a megaphone calling for street traders to mobilise against this injustice, and within an hour, it was said, the mall would be ablaze.

Social tensions and conflict also extended beyond Malioboro Street. Longstanding hierarchies continued to be exercised through subtle but effective language use and physical gestures. Although prior to September 11 and the Bali Bombings, militant wings of organizations such as Laskar Jihad were certainly active in Indonesia. Political campaigns by the Gerakan Pemuda Ka’bah (GPK, Ka’bah Youth Movement) and others sometimes menaced the streets. Finally, nature and ‘human error’ sometimes combined to inflict suffering in Yogyakarta. Transport accidents and power blackouts were commonplace, and the more recent earthquake and volcanic eruption caused indescribable trauma and devastation.

In the heavily congested Malioboro Street area of Yogyakarta in 2001, the friendly and tranquil interweaved with the exclusivist and occasionally violent. Relatively wealthy, footloose visitors could easily romanticise the quality of life there, particularly given the jovial bearing of many materially poor locals. On the other hand, while focusing on the numerous social problems in and around the city reveals underlying issues and realities that such a view ignores or avoids, much commentary on Indonesia concentrates only on problems and conflict. This view is blind to signs of contentment, pleasure or acts of goodwill and cooperation, and also the roles that these can play in progressive politics. During the eight months in which I spent most waking hours in the crowded Malioboro area, gestures of kindness were always evident. In light of the heightened political, economic and interethnic tensions of the time, the incidence of public conflict was remarkably low. As I will seek to demonstrate, musical practices played an active role in facilitating these relatively peaceful social relations.

MUSICAL WORLDS AND THEIR GENRES

The following chapters present an ethnographic account of a number of musics and social situations in Yogyakarta.* Amidst the explosion of musical diversity across much of early post-Soeharto Indonesia (Barendregt and Van Zanten 2002), in Yogyakarta gamelan ensembles, Islamic choirs and punk bands could all perform at the same event. Single acts combined classical (gamelan), folk (rakyat) and western pop instrumentation and playing styles. The ethnic-Chinese barongsai lion dance re-emerged in street parades and began to influence other musical performance styles. Islamic a-cappella groups, known as nasyid, were gaining popularity.

This monograph takes these hybridized musical realities as a primary focus, rather than any single genre, subculture or artist. Arguably, analysing a broad range of public performances and genres can produce different understandings of social and musical groups and connections to those possible through a singularly focussed study. To that end, this study begins and concludes with the street workers I conversed with on a daily basis, and who subseguently became central to the research.

I seek to minimise a reliance on high/popular, traditional/ modern and other established classifications of cultural practice. Instead I analyse music by considering the variables of event theme, physical setting, social context and behaviours, and musical genre. The setting, function and content of musical events tell us a great deal about the social and political factors that underpin them, and furthermore allow for the incorporation of all of the musical phenomena involved. In turn, musical dimensions affect and are affected by participants and their social relations. While opinions vary as to the academic and political significance of these kinds of interplays, most important for my current aims are the studies of

3 In relation to contrasts and commonalities of popular music trends such as these across wider Indonesia, a prominent Indonesian musician told me that the country has four main centres, each with their own characteristics: 1. East Java has those who praise and commemorate nationalism and its heroes, such as Gombloh and Leo Kriste; 2. in Yogyakarta musicians tend to focus on social concerns through mixing poetic lyrics with traditional musical forms; 3. Bandung leads in national and international fashion and trends; and 4. Jakarta, despite being home of kroncong and dangdut, is ‘the big toilet’.