EVERY GENRE PROJECT - June 26 - Keroncong
Genre of the Day - Keroncong
Album of the Day - Ngelam-lami by Waldjinah (1968)
INDONESIA ALERT! INDONESIA ALERT! <3 🇮🇩
Today’s genre is a reminder that every vision of modernity is transient, and every fresh new sound and artist will one day become a relic of the past. It’s a reminder to take musical innovations in and fully dive into their glory while they activate our brains with the glitter of novelty. It also prompts us to try to situate ourselves in the relics of past times and imagine ourselves there. Luckily, unlike paintings that bear the wear and tear of time without proper archivists and architecture that crumbles without reinforcement, recorded music is much more easily reproducible and you can hear music the exact way someone did decades or a century and a half ago. Today, we hear the sound of Indonesia folding pieces of colonial history into its ironclad musical traditions.
In many countries in the formerly colonized sphere, in broad sketches there have been two major phases dubbed ‘modernization’—first, widespread transitions in the 1800s from traditional hierarchies supplanted by colonial overlords to westernized mannerisms and institutions, and subsequently from decolonization to the globalized economic and media network. Keroncong is a musical representation of the former. Like in my article on Zimbabwe’s jit, many musicians in these nations embraced western forms of song and instruments, but only as a jumping off point. In jit, ingenious musicians bridged the versatility of the guitar with the traditional sound of the finger-plucked mbira and transposing its intervals to the guitar’s tuning. Keroncong lies in the same vein by dusting the ukelele with a dose of Indonesian musical magic. Portuguese sailors seemingly pushed the cavaquinho (the ukelele’s precursor) with the zeal of the most dedicated door-to-door salesmen, but their cuteness and portability seemed to resonate easily leading to their popularity in far-flung corners from Hawai’i to Java.
Besides the love for the ukelele, Portugal and Indonesia share a common love of sailing. Portugal is a tiny, dense nation, so it was imperative to sail for resources, and Indonesia is a massive archipelago network with a long history of constant trade. Portuguese sailors circled the islands like sharks, establishing a trade presence in Malacca in modern-day Malaysia. As in a few other genres we’ve seen, the Portuguese brought in new musical traditions, instruments, and dances through the dastardly practice of slavery. By the late 1800s, a new genre of music based on the integration of Portuguese sailor tunes with unique Indonesian musical practices was born.
As a country noted for its complex, large gamelan ensembles, keroncong musicians inevitably needed not one but two ukeleles for their musical vision. One is called the cuk, with four metal strings, and the other is known as the cak with three nylon strings. The name ‘crong’ is thought to be an onomatopoeia derived from the sound of strumming the caraquinho, a delightful little addition to this genre’s lore. It also incorporates other western instruments, particularly the cello, violin, and flute. As Indonesia further emerged as a nation, keroncong became the sound of the country on the eve of its independence. It was perfect for the moment—fresh, new, and Western, but undeniably rooted in Indonesian senses of melody and rhythm. This was particularly true in the subgenre langgam jawa, emerging in the city of Surakarta late into keroncong’s mid-20th-century heyday with an emphasis on rebridging traditional sounds and the genre by employing the seven-tone pelog scale used in some gamelan forms. Rock and roll swept aside these old-timey genres in Indonesia’s second portion of the aforementioned modernization phases, but there was a time when keroncong’s sound represented a path forward, a novel and cosmopolitan future.
Waldjinah is one of the few musicians who has continued keroncong’s golden era into the present. Blessed with extreme clarity of voice, her soaring singing is like glass elucidating the fascinating blend of the cuk, cak, flute, and variety of rhythmic elements. The pelog and metal gleam of the cuk’s tone helps this keroncong set approximate gamelan while modernizing Indonesian music through short song lengths and melodic variety. These tunes act as pop-like vocal standards, even though Waldjinah’s voice is less front-and-center and more one portion of a harmonic, multi-tiered whole afforded all the elegance of Indonesia’s highly intricate traditional music. The entrancing rhythms plant it firmly in Indonesian soil; circulating melodies ascend, descend, and interlock as on “Andum Basuki,” every instrument’s melody slightly offset to create an experience with a profound depth of movement in only twenty short minutes. Even if keroncong is technically dated, genres that fill the spaces between colonial and traditional legacies and a futurism that incorporates both still feel radical if you only close your eyes and pretend to be strolling through Jakarta a hundred years ago.