Article

Musical instruments and music

From Munshipedia, the MBRAS digital historical encyclopedia

Musical instruments and music

Scope and Historical Definition

The study of musical instruments and music in the Malay Peninsula and Borneo, as documented in the Society’s literature, spans a wide chronological and geographical range, from early twentieth-century notices of individual artefacts to detailed ethnomusicological fieldwork in the late twentieth century. The records reveal a tradition of considerable depth: royal ensembles with claimed pre-Islamic origins, village-level practices sustained by hereditary musicians, and cross-cultural transmissions linking the Malay world to Sumatra, the Indian Ocean, and beyond. The instruments and practices documented range from the nobat royal ensemble of Perak to the bongai village music of Negri Sembilan, from gong-chime ensembles in Sabah to a single bamboo tuning-fork on a remote island in the West Sumatran chain, and from a melody heard in a French-influenced Indian Ocean community to its eventual adoption as the national anthem of an independent Malaya.

The Nobat and Royal Musical Culture

The most extensively documented musical institution in the Society’s literature is the nobat, the royal musical ensemble of Perak, examined in detail by W. Linehan in 1951. The nobat comprises the negara (kettledrum), two gendang (drums), a silver nafiri (trumpet), and a serunai (clarionet), and was an essential possession of Malay royalty from the earliest periods; a ruler could not be properly installed without its beat [1]. The Malay Annals record that the privilege was first conferred on Seri Benian of Bentan and subsequently extended to the founder of ancient Singapore, while the eighteenth-century Misa Melayu documents its use in Perak for mourning, proclamation, and the conferral of sovereignty on subordinate rulers such as the Raja of Selangor [1].

Linehan’s central interpretive contribution is his etymological argument that the man—the staves of tunes played on solemn occasions—derive from the Sanskrit mantra, meaning magical incantation. He supports this by noting that in Cham the word man (from Sanskrit mantra) specifically denotes a formula of incantation, and that the beman (the tax levied for the privilege of the man) is transparently bea-man, “the dues for the man.” In this reading, the man were originally intoned formulas recited to the accompaniment of the instruments; when Islam replaced the older religion, the verbal formulas were discarded but the instrumental accompaniment persisted [1]. The name orang kalau—the hereditary keepers of the ensemble—may derive from the Cham word kalau (Malay pulau, “island”), suggesting “Men of the Island(s),” or alternatively from the Malay galur (genealogy, pedigree), rendering them “men who have to do with the genealogies” [1].

The instruments themselves carry a sacred character. Wilkinson described them as “haunted” and associated with guardian spirits (jin kerajaan); only the orang kalau may touch or play them, and transgression risks death or disease through the power of the spirit within [1]. Wilkinson’s account specifies nine items in the nobat: four “haunted” instruments (the nobat-drum, the nafiri, and two negara kettledrums), four “unhaunted” instruments (two fifes and two drums), and the conductor as the ninth [1]. The negara drum is identified as the most important instrument, a view corroborated by the Malay Annals, where it is the privilege most jealously withheld, and by a Kedah account [1]. Linehan speculates that the negara and the large single-faced gendang raya signal drums of the Malay Peninsula may be successors of great bronze-age drums, linking the nobat tradition to a deep prehistoric substrate [1].

The Misa Melayu records sixteen tunes for the Perak royal band: the original eight “came out of the sea” and the other eight were added by Perak [1]. The Malay Annals further record that Sultan Muhammad Shah (fl. c. 1420s) prescribed specific instrument combinations for receiving envoys of different ranks: the full negara drum and white double-umbrella for Pasai (equal rank), only gendang and serunai with yellow umbrella for lesser senders [1]. By the time of Linehan’s 1949 interviews, the band numbered fourteen players, but only six instruments retained real significance, with the negara drum occupying the centre of the ensemble [1]. The orang kalau levy a tax of twenty-five cents per year on every Perak family (kelamin); the chief, the Dato’ Setia Guna, may fine any prince or chief who crosses the fowl-feather boundary around the instrument kiosk at twenty-five dollars [1]. A gendang raya from Bachok, Kelantan, held in the Perak Museum, measures 57 cm in height with a 72 cm buffalo-hide face, made of merbau wood with rattan binding and painted magic designs including a human figure symbolising the drum’s guardian spirit [1].

Village and Regional Musical Traditions

Beyond the royal sphere, the Society’s literature documents a rich diversity of village and regional musical practices. E.M. Frame’s 1976 survey of Sabah identifies multiple distinct musical forms across the state’s ethnic groups, including vocal genres (songs, chants, laments), instrumental music (gongs, drums, stringed instruments, flutes), and music associated with specific ceremonial or social contexts such as pagan festivals, weddings, funerals, and healing rituals [2]. Frame documents the use of gong-chime ensembles (related to the kulintangan tradition) among the Kadazan-Dusun and other lowland groups, as well as the prominence of the sape (a plucked string instrument) in Bajau musical culture [2]. The article notes the role of music in ritual and cosmological contexts, particularly in the Pagan harvest festival of the Kadazan-Dusun, where specific musical forms are integral to the ceremonial sequence [2]. Frame also highlights the diversity of drum types and their associated musical functions across different ethnic communities in Sabah, and acknowledges that many musical traditions in the state were at risk of decline due to modernisation and the influence of Malay and Western musical forms [2].

In Negri Sembilan, Megan Collins’s 2002 study of bongai music in Tanjung Ipoh provides a detailed ethnomusicological comparison with the rabab Pasisia tradition of West Sumatra. Collins argues that the ornamental violin style of bongai draws on a shared older Minangkabau source of melodic embellishment (gelitik) rather than being a direct derivative of the rabab Pasisia itself [3]. The bongai bioloh employs a standard factory-made violin played under the chin in the Western classical position, following a hijaz (Arabic) scale with the sixth note generally sharpened and the seventh lowered on descent; the rabab Pasisia is a handcrafted, locally modified violin held vertically, using a near-diatonic major scale with the third, fourth, seventh, and eighth notes slightly lowered to match local tonalities [3]. The critical gelitik motif shared by both traditions is an oscillation between two adjacent notes interrupted by an interpolated note approached by leap, bypassing the intermediary tone; at speed this produces a “blip” effect [3]. Collins proposes that the shared gelitik motifs likely originate in the saluang bamboo flute tradition of the Minangkabau highlands (darek), which predates both the rabab Pasisia and the bongai violin [3].

Collins documents the current state of the bongai tradition, noting a significant decline: Pak Udin estimated that in the late 1930s, approximately 95 per cent of people in Kuala Pilah and surrounding villages could sing bongai songs; by 2000 this figure had fallen to roughly 25 per cent, with performances shortened from the traditional all-night duration (9 pm to 5 am) to approximately 2 am due to the absence of stand-in (pelapis) players [3]. The caklempong ensembles found in Tanjung Ipoh village weddings consist of a row of five pots played by one musician, closely matching the old-style talempong duduak ensembles at Unggan and Sialang in West Sumatra, both located in the ‘Rantau nan Tiga Jurai’ migration corridor [3]. Notably, the diatonic talempong/caklempong ensemble, now promoted as the symbol of Negri Sembilan’s “authentic” traditional music, was invented in 1967/68 by Pak Yusaf Rahman and Pak Boestanoel Arifin Adam at ASKI Padangpanjang, with up to 55 bonang (pots) in a full set [3].

The National Anthem and Cross-Cultural Transmission

The most dramatic example of cross-cultural musical transmission documented in the Society’s literature is the history of Negara-Ku, Malaysia’s national anthem. James Harding and John Gullick’s 1997 article traces the journey of a single melody from a French-influenced island community in the Indian Ocean to its ultimate status as the national anthem of an independent Malaya [4]. The narrative begins with Sultan Abdullah of Perak, exiled to the Seychelles in 1877 after the Pangkor Treaty, where he spent seventeen years in a small Francophone creole society. His daughters, Raja Aminah and Raja Halijah, recalled that a French band played public concerts every Tuesday on the Mahé seafront, and that one particular tune was “so popular that it was hummed and whistled by sailors and others on the island” [4]. Upon his return to Malaya in 1894, the Sultan brought the tune with him; it entered the Malay popular repertoire as Terang Bulan and, through a chain of royal family transmission, became the Perak state anthem [4].

The tune was known in the Seychelles as Rosalie, with opening lyrics “Mon fiancé soyez toujours constant.” A long-standing tradition attributed the melody to the French chansonnier Pierre Jean de Béranger, but Harding and Gullick’s systematic search of Béranger’s approximately 650 published songs yields no song titled Rosalie and no trace of the Negara-Ku melody in any of his published settings [4]. The opening words recalled by Seychelles informants are noted as unidiomatic French for a lover’s address, further weakening the Béranger connection [4]. The authors also correct a persistent error in the oral tradition regarding the adoption of the tune as state anthem: the relevant event was not an 1888 London visit but the 1902 coronation trip of Edward VII, when Raja Chulan—who had himself visited the Seychelles and heard the tune—accompanied Sultan Idris [4]. In 1966, Dr. Mubin Sheppard sent a gramophone record of the Perak anthem to the Seychelles, where it “was recognised without hesitation by an old resident as a tune which was popular over seventy years ago on the island” [4]. The final chapter of the melody’s history is brief: in 1957, Tunku Abdul Rahman, after hearing compositions submitted by international composers for a national anthem competition, selected the Perak state anthem for its “dignity and charm,” and it was formally adopted as Negara-Ku [4].

Research and Documentation

The Society’s literature on musical instruments and music reveals a clear evolution in methodological approach and scholarly priority across more than a century. The earliest record, C. Boden Kloss’s 1906 notice in the JSBRAS, is a brief artefact description: a bamboo tuning-fork found in Engano (the most southerly island of the West Sumatran chain), measuring 25 and 30 cm in length and played by striking on the thighs, and two variants of the gnong zither from Simalur, one five-stringed (66 cm) and one single-stringed (37 cm), both played with wooden plectrons [5]. Kloss’s observations are taxonomic and comparative, noting that the Enganese are Proto-Malayans with no Negrito strain, which complicates a previously proposed Semang–Negrito link, and suggesting that the gnong variants may be of Achinese origin given the presence of Achinese settlers on Simalur [5].

By the mid-twentieth century, the approach had shifted toward interpretive and historical analysis. Linehan’s 1951 article on the nobat represents a significant advance, combining textual analysis of the Malay Annals and the Misa Melayu with oral interviews conducted in July 1949 with the orang kalau leadership, including the headman Muhammad Hashim bin Chu and the pawang Haji Mat Drus bin Kechil [1]. His etymological identification of man with mantra and his argument for a Brahminical-Buddhist origin for the nobat cult built on and extended the earlier descriptive accounts of Winstedt (1929) and Wilkinson (1947) [1].

The 1970s and 1980s saw the emergence of systematic ethnomusicological fieldwork. Frame’s 1976 survey of Sabah, while primarily taxonomic and descriptive, provided one of the earlier scholarly attempts to document Sabahan music in a peer-reviewed academic journal, predating the more extensive ethnomusicological surveys that would follow in the 1980s and 1990s [2]. Harding and Gullick’s 1997 article on Negara-Ku combined oral testimony, archival research, and musicological analysis to address a specific historiographical question, contributing to the historiography of Malaysian nation-building by documenting how a colonial-era cultural accident was transformed through royal patronage, popular music, and political decision into a symbol of national identity [4].

Collins’s 2002 study represents the most analytically sophisticated treatment in the corpus, combining close musical analysis of recorded performances with historical documentation of Minangkabau migration and a comparative methodology linking Peninsular and Sumatran traditions [3]. Her identification of the saluang flute as a probable common source for shared ornamental motifs opens a new line of inquiry into the saluang repertoire of West Sumatra [3]. Across the full span of the literature, a consistent theme emerges: the documentation and preservation of musical traditions under threat from modernisation, whether in the declining village practice of bongai in Negri Sembilan or the endangered traditions of Sabah’s ethnic communities [2], [3].

MBRAS Sources

References

  1. W. Linehan (1951). The nobat and the Orang Kalau of Perak JMBRAS 24(3): 60–68.
  2. E.M. Frame (1976). Several musical forms of Sabah, Malaysia JMBRAS 49(2): 156–163. Read on JSTOR
  3. M. Collins (2002). Bongai in Tanjung Ipoh, Negeri Sembilan JMBRAS 75(1): 91–114. Read on JSTOR
  4. J. Harding and J.M. Gullick (1997). The music of Negara-Ku. J JMBRAS 70(2): 68–74. Read on JSTOR
  5. C.B. Kloss (1906). Malayan musical instruments JSBRAS 45: 285–287. Read on JSTOR