Traditional Music and Contemporary Trends: Music in Asean Communities

Abstract

The traditional music and performing arts in the ASEAN have found new powerful conduits of transmission with the advent of the digital age. Although claims of cultural ownership over music and dance occasionally appear on social networks and media platforms, the ubiquity of the Internet has in fact benefitted the general public, allowing them access to images and sounds hitherto unknown. Modernisation has taken its toll on the region’s musical heritage. Ancient elements of indigenous music have faded away. The influx of popular and Western music has increasingly eroded the space and demand for traditional music. Many orchestras in the region feature diverse musical instruments tuned to a common Western tuning system, thus relinquishing their Asian musical roots. The fusion of Asian musical ensembles with Western musical instruments has forced the tuning of gongs, xylophones, metallophones, and singing to the Western diatonic scale, losing their indigenous resonances, sonorities, and timbres. Urbanisation and the migration of the young into urban areas disrupted the discontinuity in generational transmission of music. Village rituals and ceremonies play an important role in preserving ancient religious systems where music, dance, and theatre were essential as part of agricultural life, trance and curing rites, and communal well-being. The onslaught of mass media and the Internet has also accentuated the de-sacralisation of ritual spaces, leaving many musical traditions behind as memories of the past.Keywords: traditional music, urbanisation, de-sacralisation, memories, ASEAN.