Alas Ethnic Minority Music of Aceh: Canang Bulu
Sound: Canang buluh (also called canang kecapi)
Location: Ds. Muara Baru, Kec. Lawe Alas, Kab. Aceh Tenggara (Southeast Aceh)
There’s something delightful about multiple musicians teaming up to play on a single instrument together - whether it’s a piano duet or two gamelan musicians sitting across from each other and playing interlocking rhythms on a single saron, the practice is such a clear illustration of the heightened social cooperation and creative mind-melding that is at the heart of what makes communal music-making so joyful.
Imagine my delight, then, when I found a tradition that takes one of my favorite Indonesian musical instruments, the bamboo tube zither, and puts it in the hands of three musicians at once!
This is our third post from the Alas Valley, a relatively remote highland enclave near the border between North Sumatra and the autonomous province of Aceh. Unlike the Acehnese ethnic majority that dominates a large swathe of the region, the Alas people who call this valley home have closer linguistic and cultural roots to the various Batak peoples south of the provincial border in North Sumatra, and certain Alas musical traditions, like the recorder-like bansi flute, have musical cousins across the border.
As I wrote in the last post on canang situ, the interlocking gongs and sardine tins of that ensemble are something of a musical anomaly in the area - the dense interlocking of gongs and tins remind me more of talempong pacik of the Minangkabau of West Sumatra than anywhere else nearby, and indeed our tube zither of the day sets me into nostalgic reminiscence of my time in Silungkang, West Sumatra playing as a trio with my friend Albert and the maestro Pak Umar on his Minang-style tube zither, the talempong botuang.
Just as with the talempong botuang (literally “bamboo talempong [gong chimes]”), the music of the Alas canang buluh (also literally “bamboo gong(s)”) is deeply tied to an ensemble gong tradition, here the aforementioned canang situ. As a refresher: in the canang situ tradition, a group of women play interlocking rhythms on a set of small gongs (in the old days) or a single gong and a set of sardine tins, or dencis. One gong leads (the canang situ or indung (“mother”) while the others fill in the musical gaps with a set of interlocking tingkah (“rhythms”) that are numbered - tingkah buah, due, telu, and empat (one, two, three and four). The cooperation required to play such music fits in nicely with the social context, wherein Alas women tasked with cooperating to handle the various rituals of large wedding or circumcision ceremonies similarly share in communal music-making that brings a lively atmosphere to these profoundly important and sacred gatherings.
As the name implies, the canang buluh takes the interlocking rhythms of the five canang situ gongs/tins and transfers them to the five strings of bamboo tube zither. Fans of Aural Archipelago surely need no introduction to this remarkable class of instrument, but for the layman: in bamboo tube zithers, a single section of bamboo (the space between two of the plant’s natural, knuckle-like nodes) is cut and “strings” are formed by separating the glossy skin of the bamboo from the body and raising them with tiny bamboo bridges. There are all sorts of variations (see the Sundanese celempung, Karo ketteng-ketteng, and Sumbanese gogah, amongst others), but that’s the general idea! These instruments are some of the most ancient in all of Indonesia, likely spreading with the Austronesian expansion theorized to have made its way from Taiwan to the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, and onwards.
In the Alas permutation, a sturdy type of bamboo called buluh khegen is chopped and dried before being transformed into a tube zither (usually by a man, the women of Muara Baru explained, despite being played exclusively by women.) In this case, one of the musicians, Ibu Siti Rahma, had made the instrument featured here, but was shy about her handywork - “The ones made by men sounds much sweeter!” she insisted. With a hole dug out of one node to allow for the sound to escape from the bamboo’s natural resonating chamber, five strings (selimar) were cut and roughly tuned to the relative tones of the five canang gongs/tins.
In the old days, the women explained, the canang buluh was a favorite plaything of young girls (“mainannya anak perempuan”) who would gather after a long day working in the fields with their family, winding down the day with some canang buluh tunes as they awaited the evening call to prayer (“sebelum Maghrib”). While the canang situ required five musicians and was more explicitly tied to ritual and performance, the canang situ was pure pleasure - just sitting in front of the house with friends, three girls collectively cradling the single instrument and summoning familiar sounds from its strings. With three musicians taking over five musical parts, some creative re-arrangement was necessary - each armed with a single thin bamboo striker, one musician plays the part of the tingkah lime or indung (the single “mother” gong in the canang situ ensemble) on a single string in the middle, while her friends take two strings each. This is an arrangement that comes easily, if you remember how canang situ is organized, with pairs of gongs described as “friends” that “call and respond” (“teman sesautan”) to one another. Finally, just as in canang situ, the rhythms are kept crisp with precise, selective muting of the strings with the musician’s free hand.
Ibu Tinah teaches my wife Sinta some tingkah rhythms.
Just as with canang situ, the canang buluh is still around, though even rarer than its gong and tins counterpart, and nowadays only played by an older generation of middle aged and elderly women who play at family gatherings, a quaint but powerful reenactment of the music-making of their youth. I’ve often lamented that it is these humble, non-performative traditions - music very much for music’s sake, not for ritual and not suited for the stage - that are often the most easily discarded in a modernizing Indonesian society where other more seductive distractions are increasingly abundant. For now, I’m thankful that there are still women who gather in this remarkable corner of Sumatra and collectively summon beautiful music from a single instrument.