ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the ways in which diatonic angklung music is able to model—indeed, to performatively express—the nuances of different economic/political ideologies in Indonesian history. Following Japan’s surrender to the Allies at the end of World War II, Indonesian republicans, under the leadership of President Sukarno, declared an independent Indonesia, and then struggled for four years to throw off the yoke of Dutch colonial rule once and for all, finally succeeding in 1949. It was six short years later that delegates to the KAA met in Bandung to promote cooperation among emerging African and Asian nations, coordinate strategies for decolonization, and discuss options for navigating alternative paths through the opposing ideologies of the US and the USSR. According to a placard in the museum of the KAA, which now occupies Gedung Merdeka, “Indonesian women demonstrated how to play the ‘angklung’, one of the activities in the ladies programme”.
