Tarawangsa - a revelation!

A few weeks ago we went to see a concert by a band called ‘Trah Project’, whose distinguishing feature is their combination of both traditional and modern Indonesian music. We were treated to gamelan instruments played alongside rock and heavy metal style music, mixtures of traditional drumming on kendang backed up by drum kits, and the haunting sound of live Sundanese singing against a slightly electronica style backing track. Overall I didn’t find these combinations overwhelmingly appealing, but right at the beginning, for about one minute, a stringed instrument was being played with a bow, accompanied by someone plucking the strings on a small, zither- like box. This was before I had begun to form a true appreciation for Sundanese music, and I assumed the bowed instrument was a rebab as I couldn’t see it very clearly and the sound was similar. One of my friends however, was transfixed by the sound of this instrument, and a week or so ago we started to research it.

The instrument is a tarawangsa, which is similar to a rebab (in that it’s played upright with a loose bow and it has two strings), but the sound of it is more somehow more subtle and pure than the rebab, which in comparison sounds nasal and harsh. It has such a beautiful sound that we were both surprised at the fact we had never really come across this instrument before, and that it doesn’t seem to be very popular. It’s unique to Sunda, (the area of West Java we’re currently living in) and if you search for tarawangsa on youtube you will find a few videos with varying degrees of quality in the recordings, but that seems to be the extent of its popularity.

This youtube video demonstrates the sound of the tarawangsa very well: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xk2DHf9t6ZA

After spending quite a long time on youtube listening to this music I started to really fall in love with the sound of the tarawangsa, and being a musician and a string player, just listening to it wasn’t enough – I wanted to play one of these! The trouble was finding someone who plays it (very rare these days), getting in touch with them and convincing them to teach a couple of ignorant westerners one of the most traditional Indonesian instruments there is. Luckily, we have an amazing supervisor of the program here in Bandung, and when we told him about our interest he managed to take advantage of his contacts, pull some strings, and got in touch with a tarawangsa player who was actually willing to come to Saung Angklung Udjo to give us a demonstration!

So yesterday we met a student called Tegu, the tarawangsa player, who came here along with his friend Wisnu who plays the zither-type instrument which accompanies the tarawangsa. Tegu is the only person at his university who plays this instrument; even his teachers and lecturers in traditional music (his area of study) don’t know how to play it so he has to travel a long way for infrequent lessons. He explained a little more about the instrument, which started to give us an indication of why it seems to be dying out.

The tarawangsa is an extremely sacred instrument. It’s possibly the most sacred of Indonesian traditional instruments, and not only is it sacred, but very very old – it originates from pre-Islamic times in Indonesia. Before Islam the people of this country were animists, believing that everything had a living soul and worshiping the gods of the things that were most important to their daily lives. The tarawangsa is the embodiment of the goddess of rice; the staple food of the Indonesian people and therefore extremely important to the animists. Because of its sacredness, there are rules concerning the instrument which people have been unwilling to break. Firstly, the tarawangsa is always accompanied by the jentreng – the zither-like instrument demonstrated at the Trah Project concert. Secondly, the tarawangsa is never played with any other instruments. It’s not inconceivable… it’s just not done! Tarawangsa and jentreng is the traditional way of doing it. Thirdly, the tarawangsa is almost always only played at very important ceremonies, and rarely played for performance. These rules limit the ways and situations in which the tarawangsa can be played, and in a world which is evolving fast and in which musical cultures have to evolve to survive, the tarawangsa seems to struggle to keep up. As a result people who play the instrument are becoming rarer, and many Indonesians, even the Sundanese people, no longer even know what the tarawangsa is.

This sad reality made us more determined to learn how to play the tarawangsa, and I’m even considering the possibility of buying one and bringing it back to the UK. However there are other limitations of the instrument, for example although it has two strings, only one of these is used to play a melody. Any wide intervals in pitch are extremely difficult to play as the hand has to be moved up and down the string very quickly, although the tarawangsa suits the meandering, pentatonic melodies of Sundanese music perfectly. But my friend and I are resolute (for now at least) and after an amazing evening of sharing music and traditional tunes from around the world with Tegu and Wisnu, with our Thai friend playing the Saw Duang and myself on violin, we arranged another lesson for Sunday (at a negotiable price).

Here are some more pictures of the instruments Tegu left for us to practice with:

The top of the tarawangsa and its two pegs

The sound box (the sound hole is actually at the back!) is made entirely out of wood with no stretched skin or membrane

The bow is loose and the correct tension needs to be applied using the little finger; another reason this instrument is difficult to play!

The tarawangsa with its accompanying instrument, the jentreng

During the lesson, Tegu revealed that he only knew of one other non-Indonesian who has learned to 

play the tarawangsa, and also that I am probably the first woman to ever learn this instrument! I feel incredibly lucky to have this opportunity, and I will try to keep people updated with our progress!

Language Update

We have now been living at Saung Angklung Udjo for one month and have established a comfortable and easy way of life here, although some of the initial excitement and motivation of the group as a whole has worn off a little, which is maybe why I haven’t written a blog for a while. Part of the reason for this is that our final performance still seems so far away, and yet we’re practicing for it every day. It would be nice if we had some smaller and closer goals or performances to work towards – this would encourage us to practice in our own time and turn up to lessons on time (which has been a bit of a problem recently, for some people!).

After a month my Bahasa Indonesia is getting better, although I still feel that if this is one third of how good it’s going to be by the time I leave here, I need to start improving at a faster rate! Before I came here I was told that Bahasa Indonesia is an easy language to learn. And at the beginning it was! Words are fairly easy to pronounce and remember so I learnt a lot of words very fast, and the basic phrases for ‘how are you’, ‘my name is’, ‘thank you’ etc came naturally after the first week. But as we learnt more we started to encounter the various complexities and idiosyncrasies of the language, and these are slightly more difficult to get my head around. I am at the stage where I need to learn these complexities to progress, but it’s getting slower and harder with every new aspect I come across.

Sometimes there appears to be a distinct lack of rules. At the end of many words there is a silent ‘k’, but there doesn’t seem to be a system explaining when the k is silent and when it’s pronounced – you just have to learn it. Cintak (love) and bapak (or just pak, used to address older men) both have a silent k, while in the word duduk (sit) the k is prounounced. The one word tidak (with a silent k, obviously) means no, not, don’t, and many other variations implying a negative, but then sometimes, and I can’t quite work out exactly when, I am told by my teacher that I can’t use the word tidak in this case but have to use bukan instead. There is a lack of gender words – dia means both him and her, as well as he and she, while adding the suffix ‘nya’ to a noun means the object is both his or hers. So if you’re not familiar with Indonesian names, it’s sometimes difficult to work out if someone is talking about a woman or a man.

At other times there are complicated rules which would be embarrassing to get wrong, such as ways of addressing people respectfully which is very important here. To address an older man, maybe aged 50 or over, you would use the word bapak, usually shortened to just pak, which means ‘father’. But you wouldn’t use this word while addressing your actual father; in this case you would use ayah. To address a man closer to your own age but with a position of authority, you use the word kang, and the polite way of addressing any man your own age is mas. There are also formal and informal ways to say almost everything, and you need to use the appropriate way of speaking depending on who you are speaking to and the situation you’re in.

The grammatical system is called ‘imbuhan’ which is a system of suffixes and prefixes which change root words to their correct form. In some cases this seems simple and logical. Makan is ‘to eat’ and adding ‘an’ to the end turns the verb into noun making makanan meaning ‘food’.  There are certain suffixes which turn a word into its past tense, but sometimes you don’t need to use these. Suda makan? means ‘already eaten?’ although there is no change to the root word for ‘eat’. I feel like once I have mastered imbuhan I will be able to construct sentences properly, but for now I’m stuck with using what our silat teacher calls ‘bahasa tarzan’ which consists of a lot of gesturing and shouting out random words in the hope that I will make myself understood.

Despite the difficulties, I am really enjoying learning a new language! I feel like every new word I learn gives me greater power to communicate and understand, although I really have to work to not forget the words! Listening to conversations between my Indonesian friends, I am managing to pick out more and more words and sometimes can get the general meaning of what they’re talking about. It’s still hard trying to talk to local people or get information when I really need it though, for example asking for directions when I’m out in Bandung. The amount I still have to learn just to have a basic conversation is overwhelming.

[As an edit: kang (used to address a man closer to your own age) is actually Sundanese, not Bahasa Indonesia! Here both languages are used, so when talking to people here and addressing our teachers and friends it's easy to get mixed up between the two!]