Sounds of the Sunny Island E-Book

Maher Asaad Baker

• Herausgeber: tredition
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 100

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

Sounds of the Sunny Island provides a historical overview of music in this rapidly developing city and the impact of immigration on its melodies. Covering folk music to popular tunes, this book reveals the basis of music and relates it to society. Explore how Chinese opera tunes, Malay rhythms, Indian raga, and Western styles evolved to become the Singapore memories of today. With each chapter, the definitive cultural milestones and art movements of the chapter's featured cities are revealed, along with the locals that keep the music scene alive today. Incorporating elements of Traditional and Modern, "Sounds of the Sunny Island" is your gateway whether you are a music freak or a wanderlust. Feel the beat of this gay sunny island and learn about the pulse of the people that from generation to generation continued to beat in music.

Leseprobe

Maher Asaad Baker

Sounds of the Sunny Island

© 2024 Maher Asaad Baker

ISBN Softcover: 978-3-384-42120-3

ISBN Hardback: 978-3-384-42121-0

ISBN E-Book: 978-3-384-42122-7

This work, including its parts, is protected by copyright. The author is responsible for the contents. Any exploitation is prohibited.

Cover image designed by Freepik

Contents

Introduction

The Roots

Ethnic Melodies

Popular Music Evolution

Classical and Experimental

Music as a Social Commentary

The Future

Heritage Preserving

Disclaimer

About the Author

Introduction

Singapore is a city that has such a great blend of culture that can only be described through good music. Due to Singapores being multiethnic with Chinese, Malay, Indians and Eurasians music is an important way through which people of these cultures express their society and togetherness. Given the influences from the neighbouring countries as well as the links with the colonial powers of the Western world, Singapore presents a successful effort at one of the regional rhythms, which is Singapore’s own tune.

Singapore is acknowledged today to have a modern musical culture that developed from its multicultural environment together with the country’s function as a trading port. Previously in the fourteenth century, Singapore was a port city which later turned into a place of trading and immigration for the people of the Asian region. This produced a society that is Chinese, Malay, Indian and Eurasian with the Chinese identified with music and Opium, the Malays with music and festivals, and the Indians with music and rites.

Under British colonialism in the nineteenth- twentieth centuries the music of the region was also affected by European classical/popular music. The Singapore Symphony Orchestra for example was put in place as well as music education policies formulated. After the independence, the social programs were designed so as to define and preserve the culture of every ethnic group along with encouraging an inter-ethnic exchange of artistry. The result is a diverse and contemporary Music Industry whereby performers and musical groups are as committed to social integration as they are to aesthetics.

The Chinese emigrated to the region started shortly after Raffles a British trader established a post on the island in 1819. The majority of them were ordinary traders and labourers who brought Chinese folk songs and opera and musical instruments including the two-stringed bowed fiddle erhu to Japan. There was also the Peranakan or Straits-born Chinese who he said had interchangeably adopted the Malay and Chinese cultures and over into song and dance.

It is noteworthy, however, that the native Malays who were inhabitants of the island were already in place when the British arrived. Their music is accented in Arabic and Persian influences as Islam extended its influence in the Malay Archipelago from the 12th century onwards. Dikir barat and the zapin are forms of poetry, music and dance respectively which are still performed today as part of the Malay folk arts which includes gamelan ensembles.

In the later part of the 19th century, Indian migrants further enriched the cultural diversity in Singapore. They originated mostly from south India and they introduced classical music such as Carnatic music, dance such as Bharatanatyam and the Tabla drums. Other ethnic community settlers in Singapore included those from Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and north India.

The Eurasians who are of European and Asian descent are also present, albeit in less numbers. However, they have also helped to shape Singapore’s musical palette by being the first to bring in Western pop and jazz styles while also keeping alive the Portuguese and Dutch folk influences.

This diversity is the strength of Singapore because it gives the opportunity to have artistic interactions between the ethnic groups. However, music also validates the culture and one’s heritage. The culture and traditions that Singaporeans grew up with give them an indoctrination of their heritage despite the fast growth of new civilizations.

Music is thus performed during festivities such as Chinese New Year, Hari Raya Puasa, Deepavali, and the Eurasian Fiesta. It is associated with events such as the Malay wedding or the Chinese seventh-month Hungry Ghost Festival. Due to cultural diversity, most performances involve the use of multiple languages and different aspects of various cultures in one show.

The government encourages such cross cultural interaction through performances like concerts, music competitions and educational policies as a form of social inclusion. Chinese opera troops will perform with Indian classical dancers or Malay orchestra players. It is also noteworthy that Ukrainian ballerinas, Japanese drummers, and African American soul singers are also frequent participants in the lineups.

It also plays a very important role in the formation of bonds within the different ethnic strata of a particular region. They attend concert halls or stadium concerts and, on most occasions, they are organized in groups of families. While musicians have taken time and effort to form collectives in order to ensure that folk arts are kept alive, the entertainment business remains to expand. Participating in practices for competitions results in youths coming in contact with different cultures. Even equal stranger sings together during busking performances as well as others who have one language in common.

The reason is, that immigrants from various parts of the world have put up residence in Singapore and if not well managed the society could have been characterized by disharmony. But there is elegance in unity in diversity, where each community brings their notes, keys and beats together to make a national orchestra. Through understanding music, I would like to define how it becomes the voices of people and at the same time unites people in a multicultural way. The essence of the Singapore spirit is perhaps this, the ability to bring harmony where there is discord and the abundance of the musical culture of the country could not have best depicted this.

The Roots

Concerning Singapore music, it is significant to assume that Singapore music evolved from the melodic and rhythmic music of the ethnic people who inhabited the Singapore island for centuries. Singapore, being one of the most important trading centres of the world has been the place of residence of people of different cultures and origin belonging to South East Asia and other parts of the world. Musical histories of Singapore reveal the travelling of people across seas and the effects of the breaking waves on the shore society.

If we go to the following history, it is clear that people first settled in Singapore in the early 3rd century CE. For these groups of indigenous hunter-gatherers and fishermen, there were musical activities related to animist mysticism functions and assembly. They sang their music for generations, through some of the popular tribal rituals.

They also used music in relation to their religious healing trances, initiation rites, marriage ceremonies, funerals and harvest celebrations. It also had bamboo pipes and drums made from the monitor lizard skin that used tree stumps to create a call for the spirits. It was used mostly when people or the shaman himself or herself performed the trace dance and danced in a circle around the fire.

Tragically, there could be no documentation in relation to certain tunes and songs and for this reason, historians agreed that the music is in the pentatonic scale similar to other indigenous groups of southeast Asia. The rhythm and drum patterns could have been related to choral work songs that were used while out at sea fishing and sailing, paddling upstream on canoes and headhunting missions against an opponent’s village. Tribal elders could also sing a particular story or myth along the string or percussion instrument in order to let the generations share the oral history.

While the tribes were murdering each other for territory and the right to kick the other one out of the territory, the musicality of the interpenetration between the two was also happening here. However, animist religions ceased to be practiced in the Indus Valley civilization due to Hindu and Buddhist influences entering the region with trade from India and China in the early century CE.

Singapore is situated in the central Malay Archipelago and for this reason, musical ideas can be taken in and out of Singapore from over the sea. As early as the seventh century CE, Indian, Chinese, Arabian and European traders engaged with the ports of many of the ancient kingdoms of Sumatra including Srivijaya in Palembang.

Another connection that the Malay world had with the other regions of musical culture was through the trials; music of India and China mixed with the animistic highland tribes of the Indochina peninsula. Such gong’s chimes, xylophone, drums and even the bamboo flutes of the gamelan orchestras which are from Java and Bali must have been taken in a ‘katipo’ leading to Riau and Riau archipelago to have an influence on the indigenous quarters before the formation of kingdoms like Singapura.

Similarly, the musical ideas from the upland ethnic areas like the Orang Asli of the Malay Peninsula exported or rather travelled south with traders who floated their boats along the River with the music. Of course, the flow was bidirectional since Malay folk songs and poetry from other developing sultanates also entered upstream.

From 1299 Singapore started transforming into a port settlement its music was influenced by both the higher and the lower classes from across the seas. Safeguarding indigenous rainforest cells as Hindu-Buddhist, Islamic, Chinese and the final European, American, Peranakan, and Eurasian influenced local music.

In the beginning, there emerged the initial stages of the music developments in the region which could have relatively more values placed on the vocal and poetry. Myths, creation and other legends, love stories, historical and customary legislation, and religious beliefs were sung in verse, and sometimes: music was set to the simplest boat lute, two strings.

The vast majority of the fairy-tale information about the formation of Singapore surrounds the story of Sang Nila Utama, the king of the Palembang, Sumatra in the early half of the 13th century who was believed to have dubbed Singapore after he sighted a lion in the mainland. Its presence is still being perceived through the likes of Malaysia’s folk theatre of Dikir barat where Malay poetry is recited in chorus while the silat martial arts and frame drums are performed.

Sung narrative forms survived to rhymed lullabies to babies, songs for children on manners and behaviour, or morals, and memorized epics in order to pass down history, songs of protest as well, if necessary. Likewise, there are fiddle folk songs in the Malay language and one such song is Dondang Sayang where there are elements of tease, deeper thinking and social criticism in a mock battle of wits between the sexes through poetry.

Other aural practices which developed the shared musical identity and rhythms for the Malay peoples are the call to prayer (azan) while Islamisation continued through the established channels of the Malay trade networks in the Malay Archipelago. Sufi artists contributed songs including Ronggeng whereas female court performers introduced music from Arabia and India known as Machin. Night performances depicted Wayang theatre troupes that performed scene summaries from the Hindu epics with the use of gorgeously ornamented gendang drums and the Chinese oboe.

Like any other early musical culture, the emphasis was given to the songs; but some indigenous instruments were used for accompanying rhythm and melody. Music ancestors discovered by archaeologists in the boat-shaped lutes, flutes, xylophones as well as the jew harp found in Southeast Asia have shown this.

The drum is a fundamental or rudimental instrument that accompanies tribal ceremonies, rituals, dances, and martial arts as well as vocals. The Rebana frame drum remains a critical component of Islamic praises and cultural events to the current generation. These gong-like instruments were large and intricately carved with symbols on their surface with painters; they were incorporated into healing, trance dancing and ceremonies. Tupai barrel drum was coordinated and they used it as a logboat and also used it as a resonator. The bamboo slit drums also produced low tones to their slaps.