Alas Ethnic Minority Music of Aceh: Kecapi

Sound: Kecapi (also known as canang kecapi or gitar)

Location: Ds. Muara Baru, Kec. Lawe Alas and Ds. Pedesi, Kec. Bambel in Kab. Aceh Tenggara (Southeast Aceh), Aceh

The Alas people live on the very fringe of Aceh, the northernmost province of Sumatra, in a river valley cleft into the Bukit Barisan mountains. Most of what makes Aceh famous - the massive destruction and loss of life in the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami (more than 130,000 people), the strictly enforced Sharia law and public caning, the brutal nearly 30 year insurgency fought by Acehnese separatists - can feel very far away there. The province and its history has been dominated by the 80-90% ethnically Acehnese majority (a people with a vast and rich culture in its own right), with little attention paid to the handful of ethnic minorities that live on its fringes. 

That Alas River valley spills across the provincial border into North Sumatra, and it is with the Batak peoples of that province that the Alas people have their strongest ties - unlike Acehnese, which is a Chamic isolate with relatives in Vietnam and Cambodia, the Alas language and its people are more closely related to Batak ethnic groups like the neighboring Karo and Pakpak, and they share some aspects of those cultures, such as patrilineal clans. Their music, as we’ll see (and hear!), also has tighter links to other Batak groups, with Alas tube zithers and gong ensembles inviting parallels to their Batak neighbors across the border. 

One instrument, though, has no parallel, either in the Acehnese majority or the Alas’ Batak cousins in the south. It’s an instrument that’s frankly so anomalous, and so conspicuously absent from all historical records, that I thought at first that it may be a hallucination. It didn’t help that this instrument was first introduced to me in the form of a plastic toy guitar, bright green, emblazoned with the phrase: MUSIC IS LIFE.

Yes, for once, my introduction to this instrument was not in the pages of Margaret Kartomi’s encyclopedic Musical Journeys in Sumatra (Kartomi, who’d briefly been through the Alas valley on one of her many ethnomusicological field trips to Aceh, has recorded some gems there but had, incredibly, never heard of this one - I asked!). Rather, it was literally thrust into my hands, all glowing green plastic and fishing line, by an old Alas woman saying “This is kecapi.” 

Surely this is a joke, I arrogantly thought. The name pointed towards the two-stringed boat lutes of those Batak neighbors - the kulcapi played by nearby Karo, the Pakpak’s kacapi (which I’d recorded days before - to be shared soon!), the beautifully carved hasapi played by the Toba around their great lake, and to other lutes strewn across the islands (a minor obsession of mine - see the kasapi of South Kalimantan, or the various kacaping of far-off Sulawesi.) But there, in my hands, was a plastic toy guitar, four strings slung over an improvised wooden nut/capo tacked onto the neck with tension. The woman who’d thrust it into my hands was Ibu Siti Rahma, a delightful musician whose lower lip was forever full of betel nut (sirih) and whose scrawny bare arms peeked out of a billowing lavender jilbab thrown on just for me. Thankfully, Ibu Siti began to explain: This is kecapi, yes, but not the “real” kecapi - a real one was hard to find these days, so fellow musicians Ibu Kamrah had taken a kids’ toy guitar and fashioned one herself with that big wooden nut and a few tweaks to the tuning. 

I handed the toy kecapi back to Ibu Siti and asked her to play a tune, unsure of what would come out - would she strum a few chords, like on the keroncong-inspired juks you’d find everywhere from Mentawai to Halmahera? Or would she approximate the drone and hammer-ons of the kacapi across the border? I can’t stress enough how rare and delicious this moment was for a guy who obsessively researches every sound I can find in these islands - I truly had no idea what would come next. 

With a broken piece of plastic in one hand as a pick, Ibu Siti began to strum, the fingers of her left hand hooking around the neck. In total disregard of any notion of “fretting,” her fingers hovered over the fretboard, her thumb, middle, and ring finger slyly muting three strings at once, letting one at a time ring out. In this way, a swinging four-note melody began to emerge ever so quietly from the toy kecapi’s plastic body. Whatever I was expecting, this wasn’t it. 

Rather than point toward the world of the guitar or the kacapi, the music that emerged nodded towards the instrumental worlds Ibu Siti and other Alas women know: that of the canang, the traditional women’s gong ensemble that I’d actually come there to record. In the music of canang (also called canang situ), an ensemble of five women each play a single small brass gong, using tight hocketing to play looping melodies that resemble the talempong gong ensembles of West Sumatra. 

In a bit of ingenuity that echoes the toy guitar, Alas women have for generations replaced four of the brass gongs with dencis - repurposed sardine tins! Clearly for the Alas, canang is an accommodating concept - in addition to the sardine tins, canang gong rhythms are also played on a five string bamboo tube zither, the canang buluh (“bamboo gongs”). Another name for the Alas lute tradition? Canang kecapi, or “gongs on a lute.” Indeed, as another kecapi musician, Bu Sanimah, later explained to me, the pieces played on kecapi are roughly based on the original canang tradition - the lowest string plays the part of the low, leading tone, the indung or “mother gong,” with the three other strings playing, in ascending order, the interlocking parts called tingkah buah, tingkah due, and tingkah telu - literally beats one, two and three. 

The piece Ibu Siti played had a name, based on a cheeky little set of couplets (ngekhane) that Ibu Siti then sang for me: “Selamat Khoh” (in a quirk of Alas orthography, that “kh” corresponds to a kind of gutteral “r” sound.) As Ibu Siti sang it*: 

“
Selamat khoh kandu kakak
Selamat khoh

Pinjam kandu aku ede
Pinjam kandu

Kuge kabakhne kandu
Laus bagahen

De ndak kandu pinjam aku
De ede Ku
Telu wakhi

Made pot
De mebahan!

”

Or, roughly translated:

“Welcome, sister!
Welcome!

Take me with you, sister-in-law
Take me with you!

If it’s true
You’re going to the wedding party

If you don’t take me with you
I’ll strike!
I’ll refuse to work
For three days! 

”

To put it in context: Alas cultural life to this day largely revolves around two mainstays: circumcision rituals and wedding parties. Alas women play an important role in both, whether it’s in preparing giant feasts and welcoming the female guests, or in presiding over certain rituals. As I’ll cover in my posts on canang situ and canang buluh, Alas wedding parties (begahen) especially are massive affairs full of ritual music making (that’s when the canang come out!) and poetic sparring between guests. Ibu Siti’s song was itself a kind of unorthodox ngekhane, a form of humorous improvised verse trotted out in informal poetry slams (similar to the Malay tradition of berbalas pantun) at or before a wedding party. 

As one of Ibu Siti’s daughters explained, there’s a subtext here - Alas women are set to work nonstop by their families, like unpaid farmhands for the elders. Begahen are the rare moment to relax and, most importantly, flirt with boys. In the past, begahen were the site of a semi-formalized courtship ritual called mepakhukh: “You’d go to the wedding and bring your younger female relatives. When you arrived at night, the young folks would “date”, pakhukh we’d  call it. The guys would come from outside and the girls would come from inside, meeting on the porch, whispering, courting each other in secret.” 

Later that night, I met a delightful Alas educator and cultural scholar named Ibu Hamidah who’d written the only book on Alas culture and arts (Seni Adat Budaya Alas - rare but worth tracking down!). When I asked about the phenomenon of the toy kecapi, she laughed and told me where I could find the “real thing.” It was just a few miles away, in a village called Pedesi. 

In Pedesi, I sat down with Ibu Sanimah, a shy woman who refused to be called a musician. In her hands was a “real” kecapi, a wooden lute with the exaggerated curves of a ukulele, but slightly larger and fretless. Her neighbor (or family member?) Pak Sari had made the instrument himself on Bu Hamidah’s request, stringing it with the unwound fibers of a motorcycle brake cable (a popular trick for string instruments across Indonesia!) 

As I sat down with Ibu Sanimah on her porch, she’d play a few notes, look at her fretting hand and sigh. “Aaah, I’m no good anymore. When I was a young girl, I was fine. Now? I’m old! No good!” I could see it was frustrating her - the idiosyncratic playing style, with all that slippery sliding on the fingerboard, really did seem uniquely difficult. Not wanting to push Ibu Sanimah to play much more if she wasn’t feeling it, I instead probed her about the good old days, finally getting a smile when before she’d just been embarrassed. “Oh, we girls would play kecapi while hanging out together,” she reminisced, “calming our thoughts [with the music] while we wove pandan leaf mats.” She wove her hands through the air as she said the word, nganyam - weaving. 

The tradition had mostly faded out, though, and kecapi has been almost unheard of since the 70’s and 80’s - dropped by the past few generations, it was a tradition that really only lived on in the memories of women like Ibu Sanimah, or hacked into existence again in toy guitar form by women like Ibu Siti and Ibu Kamrah. “Kids these days have money for their playthings,” Pak Sari lamented, “but back then we didn’t. All we had was what we made!” 

It was a fascinating thing, getting to spend time with these women and hear stories from their musical world, an intensely gendered one just like almost everything else in Indonesia. In the rest of Indonesia, nearly all instrumental traditions are a man’s world. In most of Aceh, perhaps because of the fiercely religious beliefs and customs of the Acehnese, women don’t play instruments at all. Amongst the Bataks just south of the Alas valley, too, women may sing but playing instruments is almost unheard of. 

I was curious - how fine were these gendered lines draw?

“Would the boys play kecapi?” I asked. 

“Oh, no! The kecapi was for us girls. The boys had guitar, we had kecapi.” 

+++

Kecapi played by Ibu Siti Rahma, Ibu Kamrah, Ibu Sanimah, and Pak Syarifuddin Desky

Mekhizzin (thank you!) to Bu Hamidah and Bang Hajidil for translation, transcription, and help in making sense of Ibu Siti’s verse!