ABSTRACT
The idea of ‘Malay music’ is a slippery concept that defies easy classification or categorisation. Malay music has long been shaped by intercultural encounters, internal renewal and external pressures. Like the notion of Malayness itself, Malay music has been identified with multiple peoples, times and places; regular tides of cultural influence from neighbouring regions, as well as overlapping waves of Portuguese, Dutch and British colonialism in the Malay World, have imbued Malay music with an assimilatory character. Over many centuries, numerous instruments, genres, and philosophies of music have circulated around the archipelago, and have been adopted, reformulated, or hybridised within multiple local practices. In classical Malay literature, a remarkable range of instruments and genres is mentioned (Andaya 2011). While Malay music can be seen as an overarching category (like ‘European music’), there are clearly many branches within it. Distinctions between local styles are highlighted in certain texts, such as the Misa Melayu of c.1780, which points out how the music of Aceh and Kedah were considered different from one another (Andaya 2011: 26-7). Most famously, the Hikayat Hang Tuah ties melody types to local identities, as seen in the epigraph, and implies the Malays of Melaka as the custodians of ‘pure’ culture, as opposed to the ‘hybrid’ Sumatran Malays of Indrapura.2 Even so, Hang Tuah still acknowledges the essential hybridity of Melakan Malay culture.
