Folk Routes
In Search of String Band Music – in Southeast Asia (Part 1)
By Peter Anick
(reprinted from Fiddler Magazine)
While Europe gets the credit for creating the modern violin, it is said that the use of a bow to sound a string probably originated in Asia. In this issue’s installment of Folk Routes, we’ll begin a two-part visit to Southeast Asia to seek out traditional string band music. We’ll start out in Taiwan, move south to Borneo, then (in the next installment) head back north into Thailand. As we’ll see, Southeast Asia’s variants of the fiddle, guitar and banjo have a number of unusual “twists”.
Unless you’ve got local connections or a lot of free time, it usually takes some combination of luck, perseverance, and prior research to locate traditional music in an unfamiliar country. Arriving in Taiwan on a business trip with only one free day to explore, I was counting primarily on luck. It was disappointing to learn at the hotel reception that I had arrived one day too late for Taipei’s famous Lantern Festival. Nevertheless, figuring that the best place to look for anything is under a light (even at ten in the morning), I headed for the festival site at the Chiang Kai Shek Memorial plaza. The streets surrounding the plaza were still covered with lanterns of every conceivable shape and size – paper tigers and fish, birds and dragons. And from somewhere in the distance came the sound of live string music.
In the shade provided by a long covered corridor within the Memorial park itself, no less than half a dozen groups had gathered to play “Peking Opera” music. Peking Opera is a Chinese art form combining music, acrobatics, masks, and stylized acting. But this gathering had all the hallmarks of a western “jam session”, not an opera performance. Musicians, dressed in their everyday clothes, moved from group to group. They compared bows and showed off their huge calluses. Singers discussed their phrasings. The music itself made little sense to my western ear - there was rarely a discernable rhythm and the melodies, while limited to a one-and-a-half octave range, sounded dissonant, as if consistently out of tune.
A typical group consisted of a singer facing three instrumentalists – two playing bowed instruments and one plucking a “moon lute”, a banjo-like instrument with a wooden head. The smaller of the bowed instruments, called a jinghu, took the lead, while its larger cousin, the erhu, sounded a nearly identical melody an octave lower. These two-stringed Chinese fiddles are played vertically; their soundboxes - covered tightly in python skin - rest on the player’s knees. Bowing technique differs from the western violin and cello, in that the bowhair actually runs between the two strings. The hair is rosined on both sides and the strings are sounded by pushing or pulling the bowhair to make contact with one string or the other.
Peking Opera musicians “jamming” at the Chiang Kai Chek Memorial plaza.
Perhaps the most unique feature of these fiddles is their lack of a fingerboard, which permits the skilled player to create a range of sounds almost as versatile as the human voice. The left hand can put pressure on the string to vary the pitch and generate a warble, a technique often used in conjunction with slides and grace notes. Sharp bow strokes and subtle bow dynamics that vary the intensity of a note can create a sound of great complexity, in spite of the limited range of pitch.
By about 12:30, most of the groups had dispersed to seek lunch and the long corridor resonated only with the voices of passers-by on their Sunday morning strolls. I, too, headed out for a bite to eat, and the only other musical instrument I encountered during the rest of my stay in Taipei was a lantern fashioned in the shape of a moon lute.
My business engagements allowed for a weekend in transit between Taiwan and Singapore, and this gave me the opportunity to stop off in Borneo, an island I first heard about in a Jim Kweskin jug band ditty describing the “wild dance” they allegedly do there. What attracted me to Borneo was not this wild dance, however. It was a public television special showing a glimpse of an unusual stringed instrument called the sape.
Rather than leave a musical encounter completely to chance, I contacted several Borneo travel agencies about the possibility of finding sape music. It would require an 8-10 hour up-river trip deep into the rainforest to locate the sape-playing Orang Ulu people, I learned, a somewhat daunting expedition for a short weekend. Alternatively, I could meet with the resident sape specialist at the Sarawak Cultural Village, a short car ride from Kuching. I opted for the latter.
The Cultural Village is a living museum, representing many of the indigenous cultures of Sarawak, Borneo. I found Dungau Tegong playing his sape outside an ornately decorated replica of an Orang Ulu longhouse. The huge 5-stringed instrument dwarfed him, as he deftly brushed his thumb to create bell-like rhythms with drone strings while playing a sweet, intricate melody on the top fretted string. Through translator Wynner Samud, I learned that the tune was for a dance depicting the movement of the flying hornbill.
Dungau Tegong playing a 5-string sape he made himself.
To my surprise, before starting the next tune, Dungau rearranged the locations of the frets! It turned out that the frets were actually small wedges of rattan held temporarily in place by a gummy substance. He explained that he knew over ten different such “tunings”. He played another beautiful piece, this one to accompany a men’s blowpipe dance.
PA: Are all the tunes for dancing?
WS: Yes, for dancing. The Blowpipe dance for men and a different dance is for women. “Leleng” is something like a welcoming dance whereby every villager will dance around his longhouse when they play the sape. Normally they will play it in a group.
PA: Do you know where the instrument came from? How far back it goes?
WS: A very long time. He says his grandparents created this instrument. The spirits, who, when we sleep, talk to us in our dreams taught us how to make these instruments and how to play them. In those days, strings were made of animal intestines and the sound was more to a bass sound.
Dungau brought out an old-style sape he was building. The old sapes had only two strings and three frets. They were used to create a deep soothing repetitive melody capable of inducing a trance state. One of the old tunes featured a mournful 7th note played against the drone, bending the note and letting it ring, like part of an old Robert Johnson blues number. It was for accompanying a jumping dance.
Dungau Tegong arranging the movable frets on an old-style sape he built.
PA: Where did you learn to play?
WS: He says he didn’t learn from anyone. He only listened to his parents. You know, the music that they’re playing is just like communication. It’s just like writing words, just like singing, but they don’t sing with voice. They just sing with the sape.
The following day, I joined an overnight excursion to an Iban longhouse not too far upriver. The Ibans dance to a slow hypnotic rhythm produced on a set of gongs. After a few cups of tuak, I too was enticed to imitate the hornbill to the rhythm of the gongs. (Perhaps this was the “wild dance” referred to in the Jim Kweskin tune?)
Dancing at an Iban longhouse
I noticed hanging on the longhouse wall a tiny one-stringed bowed instrument with a round skin head, looking something like a miniature jinghu. I couldn’t find anyone there who knew how to play it, but later that weekend I found another in a collection of musical instruments on display at a Kuching museum. A note alongside it called it an Iban “enserunai”. Its bow was nothing more than a curved twig stretching a short length of hair. Seeing it reminded me of the time I first viewed a reconstruction of the famous australopithecine “Lucy” and was struck by the diminutive size and crude features of this skeleton thought to be a human ancestor. As I gazed at the tiny single-stringed instrument and its twig bow, I wondered – might I be looking at the humble ancestors of the Stradivarius violin and Tourte bow?
If you go… Contact the Sarawak Cultural Village about their resident musicians at Pantai Damai, Santubong, P.O Box 2632, 93752 Kuching, Sarawak, Malaysia. (Tel: 082-846411). A variety of Borneo tours are offered by CPH Travel, at No. 70, Ground Floor, Padungan Road, P.O. Box 725, 93714 Kuching, Sarawak, E. Malaysia. (Tel: 082-414921, 243708, 24228, email: cphtrvl@po.jaring.my). Peking Opera musicians can also often be found at Hong Kong’s “Night Market”.