Jaap art
Jaap Kunst (born August 12, 1891 in Groningen , † December 7, 1960 in Amsterdam ) was a Dutch ethnomusicologist who, through his field research in Indonesia between 1920 and 1934 and his later theoretical work on ethnomusicology, provided fundamental knowledge and understanding of Indonesian music has contributed. He steered the subject from a purely comparative analysis of musical structures and styles to a more inclusive consideration of the respective culture . The term “ethnomusicology” introduced by art instead of the previous “comparative musicology” includes this emphasis.
Career
Jaap Kunst grew up as the only child in a musical environment. The parents were both trained pianists and gave concerts, his father was also a music critic. The boy started playing the violin at the age of five . He first took violin lessons in Groningen and was later taught in Amsterdam by Louis Zimmermann, who was the first concertmaster of the Concertgebouw Orchestra at the time. In 1912 he was a member of the Groningen symphony orchestra for six months and kept playing the violin throughout his life. However, he did not change after completing his high school to the music, but took in 1911 at the University of Groningen , a law school to which he in 1917 with the promotion graduated.
He spent the summer semester break during his studies on the West Frisian island of Terschelling , where he began to research the local folk music. While still a law student, he published his first field study Terschellinger volksleven in 1915 , which was followed by a three-volume collection of northern Dutch folk songs, to which he added his own piano accompaniments ( Noord-Nederlandse volksliederen en -dansen, 1916-1919). The song collection is still in use today by musicians and dancers on the island and has helped to preserve the local tradition. In 1956 he put together a widely sold record with his own recordings of Dutch folk songs.
After Jaap Kunst had finished his law studies, he worked for three months as a bank clerk in Utrecht , where allegedly his superiors had little understanding for the fact that he regularly missed his lunch break because he played Terschelling folk songs on the violin on a table in the dining room. He then worked for a year and a half until the end of the First World War as an administrative clerk in the Amsterdam city administration. When the exit restrictions were lifted after the end of the war in the spring of 1919, the violinist set off with a singer, a pianist and borrowed money to visit the Dutch colonial property of Indonesia . There they gave 95 concerts within eight months in the clubs between Sumatra , Java , Sulawesi and Kalimantan . When Kunst first heard gamelan music in the Palace of Yogyakarta , he decided to study this music and not return to the Netherlands for the time being. To finance his livelihood, he looked for a job in the colonial administration in 1920, first in Batavia (now Jakarta ) and later in Bandung . In 1921 he married the teacher Kathy van Wely (later Kathy Kunst-Van Wely). They spent their honeymoon in Bali . After another trip to Bali in 1924, the result of their joint investigation was the two-volume work De toonkunst van Bali , published in the same year . His wife had a considerable share in the joint practical work in Indonesia, which consisted of making wax cylinder recordings with the Edison phonograph , cataloging the ever-growing collection of musical instruments and evaluating the written records.
This was followed by fundamental work on Javanese musical instruments ( Hindoe-Javaansche muziekinstrumenten, 1927) and a long series of magazine articles, mostly written in Dutch, on the music of the entire Indonesian island world, which brought him international fame. Until 1930, Kunst worked simultaneously in the morning as an administrative clerk and in the afternoon, sometimes until late in the evening, as a music ethnologist. Because of his employment, he was tied to a specific location and therefore carried out extensive correspondence. In 1927 the family traveled back to the Netherlands for the first time. In Berlin, Kunst visited the director of the Berlin Phonogram Archive , Erich von Hornbostel , who was his teacher and role model and to whom he had regularly sent his waxed rollers and received empty rollers. The two had been in close correspondence since 1921, but had never seen each other before.
Art tried to convince the colonial minister that the music-ethnological research of the Indonesian island world must be a state task. After advocacy of personalities such as Johan Huizinga he succeeded against his competitor, the music ethnologist Johann Sebastian Brandts Buys (1879-1939), an appointment to the office of a government ethnologist. His case had previously occupied the parliament for the East Indian colonies ( Volksraad ) three times . From 1930 to 1931 he was able to devote himself entirely to ethnological field research and undertake longer journeys through the archipelago. In a letter to Louis Couturier in January 1930, he expressed his satisfaction with his new office, which he would be able to take up at the beginning of March. He informed the same addressee on May 21 that he had just returned from a research trip to the island of Nias off Sumatra .
From July to mid-August 1930, art traveled across Flores , which he called a musicological paradise because of the independent musical styles of the various ethnic groups. The yield was correspondingly high: he recorded 70 wax cylinders with vocal and instrumental music, collected 90 musical instruments and brought a number of photos and films of music and dance performances with him.
Due to the global economic crisis , his position was cut for financial reasons in 1932. As a companion of the ethnologist Bertram Johannes Otto Schrieke (1890–1945), art could continue to travel to remote islands and continue his music-ethnological work. At the end of the same year he was appointed head of the religious department at the Ministry of Education and Religion. In the afternoon he worked on a monograph on Javanese music, which appeared in Dutch in 1934 under the title De toonkunst van Java and which established its international fame.
In 1934 he traveled back to the Netherlands with his wife and three children. A return to Indonesia was initially prevented by the impending Second World War ; after the end of the war, research trips during the Indonesian struggle for independence, which lasted until 1949, were no longer an option. Two years were filled with intensive lecturing and traveling until he was hired as a curator at the Koninklijk Institut voor de Tropen ( Royal Tropical Institute , formerly Colonialinstitut te Amsterdam ) in 1936 . There he structured the musicological archive, which was expanded to include his own extensive musical instrument collection, sound recordings, photographs and literature. The focus of the collection remained later on Indonesia and Suriname , but from then on the art-scientific activity was more universal.
In 1942 he completed his habilitation in comparative musicology at the University of Amsterdam . In addition to his work as a curator, from now on he gave lessons in Javanese music as a private lecturer at the university. When he became an assistant professor in 1953 , his number of hours increased to six per week. He was involved in the founding of the International Folk Music Council (later renamed International Council for Traditional Music ) in 1947 and, in 1959, succeeded Curt Sachs as honorary president of another music-ethnological organization, the Society for Ethnomusicology, founded in 1955 . To this day, this society publishes the Jaap Art Prize for the best article in a music-ethnological journal every year. Art's best-known students in the early 1950s were Bernard Ijzerdraat (alias Bernard Suryabrata, 1926–1986), his assistant at the Tropenmuseum, who acquired a seven-tone Pélog - Gamelan in 1952 and founded the first gamelan orchestra outside Indonesia, and Mantle Hood (1918–2005 ). Hood wrote a music theory dissertation on gamelan in 1955 and later continued the art scholarly tradition at the University of California, Los Angeles .
In 1958, two years before his death, Jaap Kunst became a member of the Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen . He died of throat cancer .
field research
Jaap Kunst often influenced situations in his field research and thus abandoned his role as an outside scientist. So he added a violin part to the folk songs of Terschelling, which probably existed earlier, but no longer existed at that time. His method of making corrections to melodies with the inscription which, in his opinion, were performed incorrectly, sums up the saying ascribed to him: "Now he sings it this way, but he probably means it that way", whereby he recorded the latter in writing.
In order to recruit suitable musicians for field recordings in Indonesia, unconventional methods were occasionally required, as described in the work Musicologica from 1950. Apart from distributing the souvenirs valued by the respective ethnic groups, suitable words and gestures were necessary to relieve the musicians of their initial fear of the recording device. In Nias it was difficult to take away the fear of the unpleasant consequences that the Protestant missionaries of the Rhenish Mission Society had instilled in the locals , which they would have to expect from the performance of their old songs. In the northern half of the island, missionaries threatened to exclude those who performed traditional music and dances from communion . In other cases, Kunst used to play something on his violin, sing or perform a European folk dance, so that in return the local audience would be encouraged to perform their own. As a reward he distributed cigarettes (roko roko) , sweets, necklaces and some traditional gifts such as pigs. In areas that were under more missionary influence there were higher expectations.
The earliest sound recordings of art came from Javanese gamelan orchestras from 1922 and 1923, which he first sent to Erich von Hornbostel's Phonogram Archive in Berlin in April 1924 . Most of the recordings were made on wax cylinders with a playing time of four minutes. There were some technical problems to be solved until the art could produce phonograph recordings that Hornbostel could play back without interference. The regular correspondence between the two testifies to this. The phonograph was suitable for one or two singers in front of it, but recordings with large gamelan orchestras were problematic. For this, Kunst obtained an oversized bell that was one meter long and 1.5 meters wide and yet, according to the letters, did not provide a satisfactory sound quality.
Despite careful packaging, it happened that wax cylinders broke during shipping. In Berlin, a company made negative casts of the rollers from copper, of which a sufficient number of copies could be made. Art received two copies of each of its recordings back from Berlin with the blank rolls. He kept one of these as a reserve and used the other to transcribe the music. Kunst's research expenditures in the 1920s were financed almost exclusively from private grants. During the two years as a government ethnologist, the colonial government provided a fund for the purchase of musical instruments, wax cylinders and photographic material.
Contrary to expectations, art found relatively few original songs on the very remote Kai Islands in 1929, but all the more influences from immigrants who had come from the East Indonesian area in the past centuries. The field research in the same year on the north coast of Dutch New Guinea was supplemented by the analysis of Papuan singers who performed at an ethnographic exhibition in Batavia and were recorded with the phonograph. Art no longer considered the Papuan songs to be traditional either. After evaluating these and other recordings that an expedition to New Guinea in 1926 under the direction of CCFM le Roux had brought with him, he presented the first overall presentation of the music of New Guinea in 1931 in A Study on Papuan Music .
In contrast to the predecessors and founders of the specialty Carl Stumpf , von Hornbostel or Curt Sachs, art belonged to the first generation that carried out intensive field research. This also included the somewhat older ethnomusicologist Johann Sebastian Brandts Buys, with whom Kunst in Bandung came into contact. However, both lived under colonial conditions and had to accept their social role, according to which it was unthinkable for a European to learn the music that they theoretically examined and to play in an orchestra. For Jaap Kunst's student Mantle Hood, on the other hand, active music-making was a prerequisite for ethnomusicology.
Musicological work
Music and society
The English term ethnomusicology ("music ethnology") appeared for the first time programmatically in the subtitle of the basic work Musicologica , published in 1950 , the first edition of which was a brief summary of what art as a private scholar taught its students in Amsterdam. The subject previously known as “comparative musicology” should get rid of comparison, that is to say, relate it to Western music as the defining starting point and focus more on the overall cultural context of the music under study. Art did not “invent” the term, it probably goes back to von Hornbostel, as another of his students, Fritz Bose (1906–1975), mentioned it a year earlier, rather casually and described it as “musical ethnology”. Although the discussion about the name change continued into the 1970s, the new term has since been mutually accepted. The diverse ideas, social norms and practical conditions on which music production is based, as well as the musical forms, are at the center of the new research approach.
Kunst's fundamental concern, which permeates his entire work, can be read in the foreword to this work: It is the fight against the widespread prejudice that non-European music in any form is the expression of more primitive cultural levels and only represents an aberration from Western music creation Art expressed itself several times about the destructive influence that Christian missionaries had on the local musical culture. He noted with regret that even on remote islands large parts of the traditional music had already been lost and that children in European schools had to sing patriotic Dutch songs. In a lecture to prospective missionaries in the Netherlands in 1946, he asked them, as he had already done in 1930 as a government ethnologist to missionaries in Flores , to use traditional melodies to set the psalm texts to music. He highlighted the practice of the Rhenish Mission of forcing its converts in Sumatra to sing four-part Bach chorales as one of the numerous negative examples. In an essay from 1952 he summarized the musical historical development of South Sumatra, which was shaped by a sequence of external influences that have become indigenous musical styles. With the European style of guitar and violin brought by the Portuguese from the 16th century (which became today's krongcong ) and the hymn-like singing of the American and English missionaries accompanied by a harmonium from the end of the 17th century, he complained about the disastrous effect on the local population Music.
Hypotheses and controversies
In his inaugural address as a teacher at the University of Amsterdam in 1953, he laid out his broad field of music-ethnological interest, which extended beyond Indonesia to include structural aspects of music worldwide. In the background were hypotheses about the origin of music and its distribution, as they were discussed as a result of Darwin's theory of evolution at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. In Musicologica of 1950, art took over the ideas of this culture . According to the saying that a bird can be recognized by its twittering, art tried to classify melodies, rhythms and performance styles as culture-specific characteristics according to races . With the connection between culture and race, art referred to works by Hornbostel and Robert Lachmann ( Asian parallels to Berber music , 1933) and Marius Schneider ( The musical relationships between primitive cultures, old planters and shepherds, 1939) Term itself - as scientifically obsolete, as well as the culture group theory, which was widely accepted until the 1950s and which served to classify cultural expressions. Art established musicological relations, among other things, on the basis of five- and seven-step scales worldwide and brought the notion of spherical harmony in connection with the tonal systems .
In general, this research approach is criticized for the fact that the postulated statements do not have a valid basis, since the source material is more or less incomplete and has come together by chance. Individual finds scattered over wide areas were often related to one another. For this reason, Artur Simon criticizes the two above-mentioned writings by Hornbostel / Lachmann and Schneider as typical of an overly universalistic approach that overlooks the fact that very different musical styles can occur within a musical culture. By adopting this approach as his own, Jaap Kunst lost sight of his own demand for the inclusion of the social environment.
The rapid disappearance of old forms of culture that could be observed had given rise to a general longing for the origins. Attempts - geographically and formally - to track down the beginnings of music also belong in the context of the diffusionist cultural group theory , according to the title of a work by Carl Stumpf , who in 1911 had collected the previous theories of the origin of all musical forms. Of the theories listed there, art agreed with that of the melody of speech , according to which the origin of vocal music is to be sought in language. With the fundamental distinction made by Curt Sachs between singing and instrumental music, which he assigned to separate spheres, art considered singing to be the older form of expression.
Together with von Hornbostel, Kunst developed a universal theory for classifying the tone scales . Measurements of a 23 centimeter long, at the end closed ( pressed ) flute resulted in a series of 23 natural tones by overblowing . From this they calculated a structure that theoretically underlies many tone systems (“ circle of fifths ”). The theory is summarized in the treatise Around from Hornbostel's Theory of the Cycle of Blown Fifths (1948). This was supposed to bring historical and today's sound systems into connection worldwide, for example a line should lead from ancient China via Java to Central Africa ( a musicological proof of cultural connections between Indonesia - probably Java - and Central Africa, 1936). A piece of the mosaic in this context is the attempt to connect the small Schlagidiophon kemanak , which is only used in a few old gamelans in Java and Bali, with handbells in Africa and ascribe to it an origin in the prehistoric Mediterranean region. Even these diffusionist theories could not withstand the growing criticism. Jaap Kunst orally distanced himself from this towards the end of his life.
effect
In the 1950s, Jaap Kunst was considered to be the leading international authority in music ethnology. As the administrator of Erich M. von Hornbostel's estate, he initiated the compilation of Erich M. von Hornbostel's extensive but widely scattered writings under the title Opera omnia . He carried out pioneering research in Indonesia and wrote numerous works that are still recognized as standard literature today. This includes the only systematic work to date on the music of the entire island of Nias ( Music in Nias , 1939) and his analyzes of gamelan music: the two volumes De toonkunst van Bali (1924) and De toonkunst van Java (1934). The latter contains a classification of gamelan musical instruments . The gaps in these works with regard to playing techniques have meanwhile been filled by other ethnomusicologists. On the other hand, the amount of data collected by art with a high daily workload with its structural analysis is unsurpassed.
Works
- Terschellinger volksleven. Uithuizen (near Groningen) 1915, 3rd edition 1951
- Noord-Nederlandse folksliederen en –dansen. 3 vols. 1916-1919
- with Kathy Kunst-Van Wely: De toonkunst van Bali . Vol. 1. Weltevreden, 1924; Vol. 2 in: Tijdschrift voor Indische taal-, land-, en volkenkunde, LXV, Batavia , 1925
- with R. Goris: Hindoe-Javaansche muziekinstrumenten . Batavia, 1927; 2nd revised edition: Hindu-Javanese Musical Instruments . Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague 1968
- A Study on Papuan Music. Written at the hand of phonograms recorded by the ethnographer of the expedition, CCFM Le Roux, and of other data . G. Kolff, Weltevreden 1931
- Musicologically onderzoek 1931 . Batavia 1931
- Over zeldzame fluiten en veelstemmige muziek in het Ngada- en Nagehgebied, West-Flores . Batavia 1931
- De toonkunst van Java . 2 vols. Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague 1934; English: Music in Java. Its History, its Theory and its Technique . 1949; 3rd expanded edition 1973
- A Musicological Argument for Cultural Relationship between Indonesia: Probably the Isle of Java, and Central Africa. In: Proceedings of the Musical Association, 62nd Sess. 1935-1936, pp. 57-76
- A musicological proof of cultural connections between Indonesia - presumably Java - and Central Africa. In: Anthropos. Vol. 31, 1936, pp. 131-140
- Music in Nias . International Archive for Ethnography Vol. 38, EJ Brill Leiden 1939
- One and another over the Javaan gamelan . Amsterdam 1940; 4th edition 1945
- Music in Flores: A Study of the Vocal and Instrumental Music Among the Tribes Living in Flores . Brill, Leiden 1942
- Around from Hornbostel's Theory of the Cycle of Blown Fifths. In: Proceedings of the Royal Tropical Institute, 76, Amsterdam 1948; later in: Kay Shelemay (Ed.): Ethnomusicological Theory and Method. Garland, New York / London 1990, pp. 43-75
- The Cultural Background of Indonesian Music . In: Koninklijke Vereeniging Indian Instituut No. 31, Mededeling 82, Afd. Folklore, Amsterdam 1949
- Begdja, het gamelanjongetje . Amsterdam 1950
- De inheemsche muziek in Westelijk Nieuw-Guinea . Amsterdam 1950
- Meter, Rhythm, and Multi-part Music . Leiden 1950
- Sociological bindingen in de muziek . The Hague 1953
- Musicologica: A Study of the Nature of Ethnomusicology, Its Problems, Methods, and Representative Personalities . Amsterdam 1950; 2nd extended edition: Ethnomusicology. A study of it's nature, it's problems, methods and representative personalities to which is added a bibliography. Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague 1955; 3rd expanded edition 1959, supplement 1960; Text from 1950 printed in: Tropenmuseum, 1994, pp. 89–149
- Cultural-historical relations between the Balkans and Indonesia . Amsterdam 1953; English 1954
- Article Gamelan, Gong, Hindu-Javanese Music, Indonesian Music and Javanese Music in Music Past and Present, Part 2, 1955–1957
- Some Sociological Aspects of Music. The Library of Congress, 1958 ( Online at Archive.org )
- The origin of the kemanak. In: Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- and Folklore. 116, No. 2, Leiden 1960, pp. 266-269
- Music in New Guinea. Three Studies. Martinus Nijhoff, Den Haag 1967 (New edition of A Study on Papuan Music , 1931, Songs of North New Guinea , 1931, and De inheemse muziek in Westelijk Nieuw-Guinea , 1950, in one volume. The latter study translated into English)
literature
- Tropenmuseum, University of Amsterdam (Ed.): Jaap Kunst. Indonesian music and dances. Traditional music and its interaction with the West. A compilation of articles (1934–1952) originally published in Dutch. Amsterdam 1994
- Rüdiger Schumacher: Art, Jaap. In: Ludwig Finscher (Hrsg.): The music in past and present , person part 10, 2003, Sp. 860f
- Mantle Hood: Art, Jaap. In: Stanley Sadie (Ed.): The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. Vol. 10, Macmillan, London 1980, pp. 307-309
Web links
- Literature by and about Jaap Kunst in the catalog of the German National Library
Individual evidence
- ^ Living Folksongs and Dance Tunes from the Netherlands . Smithsonian Folkways, 1956
- ^ Felix van Lamsweerde: Jaap Kunst's field recordings. In: Tropenmuseum, p. 38
- ^ Elisabeth den Otter: Music in the Tropenmuseum: from Jaap Kunst to the present . In: Tropenmuseum , p. 25
- ^ Jaap Kunst: Music in Flores: A study of the vocal and instrumental music among the tribes living in Flores . Brill, Leiden 1942, pp. Ix
- ↑ General Information. International Council for Traditional Music
- ^ Founding of SEM. Society for Ethnomusicology
- ↑ Jaap Art Prize. Society for Musicethnology
- ^ Ernst Heins: Jaap Kunst and the rise of ethnomusicology. In: Tropenmuseum , pp. 13–18
- ^ Jaap Art: Musicologica. A study of the native of ethnomusicology, is problems, methods and representativ personalities. In: Tropenmuseum, p. 102f
- ^ Felix van Lamsweerde: Jaap Kunst's field recordings. In: Tropical Institute, pp. 37–45
- ^ Paul Michael Taylor: Assembling, Assessing and Annotating the Source Materials for the Study of the 1926 Expedition. (PDF; 3.1 MB) In: Ders .: By Airplane to Pygmyland. Smithsonian Institution Libraries, Washington 2006
- ^ Artur Simon: Ethnomusicology. Aspects, methods and goals. Simon Verlag für Bibliothekswissen , Berlin 2008, p. 13
- ^ Ernst Heins: Jaap Kunst and the rise of ethnomusicology. In: Tropenmuseum , p. 19f
- ^ Jaap Kunst: Indigenous music and the christian mission. Lecture presented to the Missionary School in Oegstgeest, the Netherlands, 1946. In: Tropenmuseum , pp. 57–87
- ^ Jaap Kunst: Two thousand years of South Sumatra reflected in its music. (1952) In: Tropenmuseum, pp. 233-240
- ↑ Erich Moritz von Hornbostel, Robert Lachmann: Asiatic parallels to Berber music. Journal for Comparative Musicology, Vol. 1, 1933; Marius Schneider: The musical relationships between primitive cultures, old planters and shepherd peoples. Journal of Ethnology, Vol. 70, 1939
- ^ Jaap Kunst: Musicologica: A Study of the Nature of Ethnomusicology, Its Problems, Methods, and Representative Personalities. In: Tropenmuseum, p. 119. - It is incomprehensible that here (p. 101) a work (from the time) of National Socialism could be mentioned in a text written after the Second World War: Fritz Bose: Klangstile als Rassenmerkmale. In: Zeitschrift für Rassenkunde, XIV, 1943
- ^ Artur Simon: Ethnomusicology. Aspects, methods and goals. Simon Verlag für Bibliothekswissen, Berlin 2008, p. 19
- ^ Jaap Kunst: Musicologica: A Study of the Nature of Ethnomusicology, Its Problems, Methods, and Representative Personalities. In: Tropenmuseum , p. 125
- ^ Jaap Kunst :: The Origin of the Kemanak , 1960
- ^ Ernst Heins: Jaap Kunst and the rise of ethnomusicology. In: Tropenmuseum, p. 21f
- ^ Rüdiger Schumacher, MGG, Sp. 860
- ^ Jaap art, Marjolijn van Roon: Erich M. von Hornbostel. Opera omnia. Compiled by Jaap Kunst, 1946. Prepared by Marjolijn van Roon, 1996. In: Sebastian Klotz (Ed.): “From the sounding vortex of human activity.” Erich M. von Hornbostel as a gestalt psychologist, archivist and musicologist. Studies and documents. Schibri, Berlin 1998
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Art, Jaap |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Dutch ethnomusicologist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | August 12, 1891 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Groningen |
| DATE OF DEATH | December 7, 1960 |
| Place of death | Amsterdam |