Learning How to Listen: Kroncong Music in a Javanese Neighborhood

ABSTRACT

In this article I consider several weeks of music rehearsals that took place in an urban neighborhood in the Indonesian city of Yogyakarta. The music “rehearsed” by a group of men is kroncong; an urban folk music incorporating a string band, flute, vocals and sometimes a keyboard that in Indonesia dates to the arrival of the Portuguese and the establishment of urban enclaves of traders and slaves in the sixteenth century along the north coast of Java. The melancholy and other historically anchored sensorial sentiments evoked by the totality of sound and image that comprises the songs, as well as the activities and associations that go into making kroncong music, are referred to as kroncong sensibilia. The discussion of sensibilia follows an analytical path that begins with the poetics of the musical genre and moves on to an examination of the politics of kroncong sensibilia in a particular context of social relations. For the Javanese men of the neighborhood, the making of kroncong music was at one level a nostalgic response to their urban lives. However, perhaps more importantly, making kroncong music was a tactical and strategic act of sound and sentiment, a particularly masculine one, seeking “recognition” within an “aesthetic community” and built world of social relations increasingly organized around and by, if not centered on, women.