ABSTRACT
Jaap Kunst’s distinction between the strict and controlled rhythm and sweet sounds of the people from southern Nias and the incoherence of the sounds from those of northern Nias comes down to a dichotomy that all early music ethnographers endorsed: of traditional, indigenous culture versus hybrid and ‘contaminated’. The dichotomy of the pure and the hybrid was functional to colonial societies in which colonizers and colonized were supposed to occupy separate realms, and the terms of their encounters were prescribed. Being and remaining ‘indigenous’ put those being colonized at a safe experiential distance from those who set these terms of encounter. During the ten years in which she researched maskanda, the author worked with numerous maskanda musicians and learned from them how this music had been inspired by a range of widely diverse musical practices: amahubo a cappella choral dance song, ragtime, jazz, strophic boereliedjes, umakhweyana gourd bow playing, Christian church hymns, among others.
