ABSTRACT
“Entanglement as a term aims to allow a materialism but embedded within the social, the historical, the contingent”. Hodder identifies “affordance, abstraction and resonance as different dimensions of entanglement”. Returning now to Hodder’s notions of affordance and abstraction: West Java’s two primary contrasting pentatonic pitch systems (salendro and pelog degung) can be interpreted as abstractions of the affordances of bamboo. The persistence of these tunings, even in Sundanese musics that do not use bamboo, exemplify Hodder’s third level of entanglement: resonance, the “process by which at a non-discursive level coherence occurs across domains in historically specific contexts”. By caring for bamboo musico-technical assemblages—by nurturing them, giving them new life and new contexts—the assemblages (in turn) bestow their coherence onto Sundanese modernity.
