Angklung Buncis: Mutual Aid and Music in the Fields of West Java

Sound: Angklung buncis (often called simply buncis)

Location: Ds. Datarkubang, Kec. Naringgul, Kab. Cianjur, West Java

Take out a 1,000 rupiah coin and flip it over, and you’ll see a single angklung, embossed and floating in a void in front of the mirage-like facade of the Gedung Sate (literally “Satay Building”), the seat of the West Java government. There’s a lot here that we can deconstruct (the co-opting of the instrument to symbolize the prestige of the state is a particular irony, as we’ll see), but what strikes me is the way a single instrument is cast alone, decontextualized and isolated from its ensemble. A lone angklung is a funny thing - a simple bamboo frame contains two, sometimes three, tuned tubes of bamboo all tuned an octave apart; when shaken, the instrument essentially sounds out a single note. The real magic, and the whole point of angklung, in my view, is what happens when multiple angklung (and multiple people) come together, melodies and rhythms arising out of the interlocking hocketing that is central to so much traditional Indonesian music.

Many artists and researchers have argued that this interlocking, the inter-reliance between multiple individuals and their instruments, is not just a neat musical trick. Rather, it’s both a reflection and a reinforcement of the social relations and mutual aid central to the agrarian societies of Java (and elsewhere in the archipelago.) In his article, “From the Rice Harvest to “Bohemian Rhapsody”: Diachronic Modernity in Angklung Performance,” the ever-brilliant ethnomusicologist Henry Spiller puts it beautifully:

“The musical style associated with [angklung], in which musicians (each of whom is responsible for only a single note) collaborate to produce ostinatos and melodies, embodies the egalitarian cooperation so essential for the agriculture that sustained Sundanese people in West Java for centuries. The angklung music that was performed for rice harvest ceremonies symbolically resounded the relationships between individuals, human groups, and the landscapes that nurtured them.”

I’d seen this kind of angklung playing before, when the consciously traditionalist Kasepuhan community of Cipta Gelar in Java’s far western Banten province played angklung dogdog lojor for their seren taun harvest ritual. After reading Spiller’s article, though, I became curious - whatever happened to this kind of angklung playing in the rest of West Java? Had it been completely wiped out, overshadowed by the nationalistic compatability of Daeng Soetigna’s famous diatonic angklung and the rubber-band powered, keyboard-style angklung of urban Java that it spawned?

To look for answers, I headed to Naringgul, a village nestled in South Cianjur on the quietly gorgeous road from Bandung to the southern coast. As it turns out, the most common folk angklung ensemble, angklung buncis (or, as it’s often abbreviated, buncis), is still played in a handful of villages across West Java (and, in modified form, in Banyumas, Central Java.) I’d heard of buncis still being played in villages from Sumedang to Pangalengan, but narrowed down my search, as I often do, after seeing an epic YouTube video.

I was soon sitting down with Pak Catin, a retired teacher trainer and head of the angklung buncis ensemble of Datarkubang village. Blessed with a sharp memory, Pak Catin wove a tale that took us back to the early-to-mid 1960’s, when he was just a young boy. Back then, the rice harvest was a massive community affair, all performed manually and communally and formalized as a ritual called Rasul Taun (Rasul, in Sundanese, means “offering”; Taun, or tahun in Indonesian, literally means “year” - the combined meaning suggests an offering of thanks for the year and harvest before, and a looking forward to the year ahead.) As Pak Catin explained it, the community would gather and manually harvest the rice, tenderly severing the stalks with a knife called etem, keeping up spirits during the hard work by trading in a kind of sung call-and-response poetic verse called sisindiran sesebred.

Once the fields had been shorn, the freshly harvested rice stalks would be gathered up and hoisted over the men’s shoulders on a long bamboo yoke called rengkong. Here again music served to lighten the load: the men would swing the rengkong back on forth on their shoulders, creating a rhythmic squeaking as the palm fiber ropes holding the rice bundles rubbed against the yoke. As the men and their rengkong made their way from the fields to the leuit rice barn where the harvest would be stored, a group of men playing buncis would follow. With the festive sounds of angklung pushing them along, Pak Catin explained, “even those with sweat on their brows would be spirited along, forgetting their labor, their fatigue worn away by the joyful energy.” You have to remember, Pak Catin continued, this community cooperation was voluntary - they got nothing for their labor but a bite to eat, so the music made it all worth it. As the procession (arak-arakan) continued, the angklung musicians would tarry in mock battles with their instruments, trying to get the other to lose the rhythm. The whole joyful parade would finally commence in a more austere and sacrosanct ritual below the rice barn, with piles of offerings to the rice goddess, Nyai Pohaci Sanghyang Asri, and musical offerings in the form of tarawangsa, a sacred duo of fiddle and zither.

This all came to an abrupt end in the the years of 1965 and 1966, that infamous period in Indonesian history when, ostensibly prompted by a failed coup allegedly hatched by communists, new president Suharto spurred on a nationwide retribution against anyone remotely suspected of being a communist. Hundreds of thousands of people were killed. Just that alone would be enough to put a momentary stop to merry music-making, but there was more to it. Folk arts and rituals were soon eyed with suspicion for a number of reasons and by a number of groups: the ranks of the national communist party, the PKI, had been full of farmers, as the egalitarian philosophy of communism had a natural draw to the largely landless peasants of the nation. With this link firmly drawn, any folk arts, linked as they were to agrarian practices and mutual aid, were eyed with suspicion by the state and the thugs who killed for it. The wave of killings in West Java was also largely enacted by, as Pak Catin put it, “Islamic fanaticists” who disapproved of syncretic, spirit-laced rituals like Rasul Taun. In some areas, traditional music and ritual was outright banned by these new authorities; in others, people simply stopped out of fear.

The communities of Naringgul were quickly pressured into abandoning a ritual they had maintained for centuries or longer, and the music would have died along with it - I can’t count how many times I’ve heard of entire rich musical traditions going completely extinct in those years, never to return. However, these folks had an admirable stroke of subversive tenacity, and they continued a modified form of ritual under cover of darkness. They soon seized on the tradition of cacarekan or nazar, a Sundanese Muslim convention in which a family makes an oath to throw a party if a bit of fortune they wish for (a sick family member recovering from illness, or someone getting a good job) comes true. To evade the gaze of authorities, the cacarekan ritual would be held in the middle of the night, but still featuring all of the arts that had once been tied to Rasul Taun, from buncis to tarawangsa to the local gamelan dance music called pakemplung.

While buncis and other traditions remained underground for years, the state eventually switched course. Rather than eyeing folk arts with suspicion, Suharto and his government came around to supporting the arts when it was to the advantage of the state - as Pak Catin put it, Suharto and his bureaucrats realized that “national culture is built on the backs of regional cultures” (“budaya nasional ditopang budaya daerah.”) In other words, the state was turning back on years of repression and urging its citizens to embrace their local culture and traditions for the benefit of the nation. The community in Naringgul wasn’t prepared for this turn: “We weren’t ready to perform on the public stage…we were traumatized.” Nonetheless, year by year, local arts like buncis came back into the light, but in the service of the nation before the community: the sole regular occasion on which buncis is played, even now, is on August 17th, the Indonesian Independence Day. As proof, the angklung buncis that I recorded were still topped, awkwardly, with miniature Indonesian flags that waved as the angklung rattled.

Despite the vastly different context in which buncis is played now, the music and performance of buncis hasn’t “modernized” in the way that other traditional arts have - nobody added keyboards or dangdut rhythms, and the government isn’t organizing instrumental “massives” as they are with other instrumental traditions, where 1,000 schoolkids turn an instrument into a spectacle in the city square. Just as in the Rasul Taun era, the format has remained largely the same: nine angklung accompanied by two or three dogdog, single headed cylindrical drums often played in a pair with one larger (dogdog ageung, “large dogdog” or dogdog indung (“mother dogdog”) together with a smaller one whose rhythm follows (dogdog alit, “small dogdog” or dogdog anak “child dogdog.”)

Here in Naringgul, some of the angklung follow a similar naming convention: the largest is called ageung or indung, or even goong (“gong”) after its function as the lowest angklung which may often root a melody and rhythm as the goong often does. Following the ageung/indung, from largest to smallest, is ambruk, engklok, surupan, and roel. These five types more or less match onto the five tones of the pentatonic slendro scale used here, though roel is generally two differently tuned angklung played by one person. Together, with the instruments reaching two octaves, the complete set reaches nine angklung, though its not set in stone (in our session, some angklung were cracked, giving off a dull rattle - the musicians shrugged it off and doubled the broken ones up with a less broken one.)

Each angklung type is thought of as having its own function, individually important but inseparable from the whole. Pak Catin did me the courtesy of explicitly describing each angklung type, from smallest/highest to largest/lowest, as is the Sundanese way!

Roel: “The two smallest angklung, played by one person. Functions as the melody.”

Surupan: “Two angklung played by two people with two different, interlocking notes. Functions to control the tempo and dynamics when playing.”

Engklok: “One angklung played by a single player. Functions to fill the empty space between the other notes, and the player himself plays the role of the ‘clown.’ [pelawak or bodor - the funny guy in the ensemble, a key part of many Sundanese musical groups]”

Ambruk: “Two angklung played by a single player in unison. Functions to reenforce the tempo [ketukan] with the notes mi and la [The Sundanese solfege for the pentatonic scale is, from high to low, da, mi, na, ti, la, da]”

Indung: “The two largest angklung, played together with surupan. Functions to fill out the low end.”

Together with rhythmic shouts called senggak and even some high-pitched beluk singing (the contents of which are freeform poetic verse), an angklung piece (considered a piragan, “pattern,” or tabeuhan, “rhythm”, rather than lagu, “song”) comes together when the various instruments interlock to create looping ostinatos. Some pieces, like Tabeuh Jalan (“Walking Piece,” played during the procession through the rice fields) are rhythmically rather simple: nearly every musician plays an unwavering pattern - indeung on the downbeats, ambruk fills in the upbeats, engklok and surupan in between those. The melody, so to speak (and that is indeed how it’s described by the players), emerges with the roel: the two smallest angklung, clutched by the most senior or skilled player and set to rattling out longer, more variable trills over the steady rhythmic foundation provided by the others.

The musicians in Naringgul knew of only three basic patterns: Tabeuh Jalan, Tonggeret, and Kacang Buncis. Tabeuh Jalan I’ve just described, while Tonggeret (“Cicada”) features a kind of funky, more purely rhythmic pattern which mimics the persistent buzzing of the eponymous insect. Finally, Kacang Buncis (“Green Beans”) or simply Cis Buncis is kind of the tune: it’s the piece from which the entire ensemble gets its name (angklung buncis, in that sense, can be thought of as “that angklung group that plays Buncis!”) It’s a really catchy melody (many non-Sundanese may recognize it, as a variation was used as the theme for the popular Indonesian children’s show Si Unyil) which has dozens of verses, the first of which is the one most folks know (though it varies from place to place.) The verses are in a form called sisindiran, a pantun-like quatrain where the first two lines are essentially nice-sounding nonsense designed to rhyme with the punchy couplet that follows. I’ll use a transcription and translation from Randal Baier’s wonderful piece on folk angklung ensembles, which you should definitely read: Cis kacang buncis nyengcle’

Cis kacang buncis nyengcle’/ Di anggo latih(p) kuda/ Nu geulis ancla’-ancle’/ Ngajak seuri ka kaula
Buncis beans set up on top/ Used to train a horse/ A pretty girl comes swinging by/ Come to me laughing and smiling

Taking a look at Baier’s research from the early 1980’s, its fascinating to see that so much of the data that he gathered in Ujung Berung maps on to what we found in Naringgul. The sad twist is that, forty years on, much of what he found is no longer - buncis is almost non-existent in Ujung Berung these days. As for Naringgul, the state of buncis is honestly not much healthier - when we arrived in 2021, the group hadn’t played in five years, partially due to covid restraints in the years previous, but even before then there had been a “vacuum” as they say here. The state of the instruments told this tale readily - angklung were cracked, and both dogdog had their goatskin drumheads completely caved in (nobody could say how or why - we managed to find some substitutes just in time for recording.)

When asked about the state of the tradition, Pak Catin and others in the group lamented the lack of support from regional government. I bit my tongue, but in my mind I thought what I often do when I hear this line from musicians with rotting instruments and dying traditions - whatever happened to the mutual aid of days past? A neighbor repairing a drum head in exchange for a bag of rice, or a community getting together to harvest together, play together, struggle together, each action reenforcing the other. Nobody had the notion back then that the arts must be kept alive by the state - it sounds romantic, but it’s true to say that in years past, arts thrived within the community, because of the community. Maybe the sounds of the angklung, each rattle supporting the other, can remind us of those days, and inspire us to think once more of how to revive these vital traditions from the ground up.

Context: This was not your ordinary Aural Archipelago expedition. Back in September 2021, I was contacted by Irish-Australian musician and composer Bianca Gannon (a friend from some interesting collabs with bundengan in Australia years back.) She had been commissioned by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra to write a symphony for orchestra and angklung! Bianca had studied the modern, diatonic angklung tradition at Saung Angklung Udjo years prior, but wanted to know more about the folk traditions, so reached out to me.

Soon I was digging into past research (I’m a bit of an angklung freak - see my posts on angklung buncis in Banyumas, angklung dogdog lojor, angklung Kebumen, and gondolio/bongkel), hoping to give Bianca as wide a picture as possible of the variety and depth of angklung traditions across Java. We both soon settled on angklung buncis as a variety that was worthy of exploration, as it had this perfect mix of authenticity, melodicism, and joyful energy. Ideally, the musicians would be flown out to collaborate directly with Bianca and the MSO, but as it was peak covid, that was out of the question. The next best thing would be to specially commission a recorded performance of angklung buncis to be recorded and filmed and then incorporated into the final composition.

I felt confident taking the reins for the audio side of things, but I wanted to collaborate with a local. Luckily my friend, Bandung-based digital ethnographer Gigi Priadji, was instantly on board to shoot video and help navigate the cultural ins and outs of the Sundanese village scene we’d be stepping into. Next we had to find an angklung buncis group suitable for the world stage, and for this I turned, as I so often do, to YouTube. Soon enough I’d found this treasure of a video, posted a few years back by a YouTuber named Ardi Hardiansyah Fajrin aka ArdiHardi. Doing some social media detective work, we tracked down Ardi’s Instagram and realized he was friends with a mutual friend of ours…a small world, indeed. Within a matter of hours we were talking to Ardi and planning a trip out to Naringgul.

The road to Naringgul is outrageously beautiful. You’ve got to make it through an hour or so of urban sprawl as you fight through the south of Bandung, but soon you’re passing through the tea plantations of Ciwidey, the pine-covered volcanic complex of Kawah Putih, and the deep blue lake of Situ Patengan. That whole corner of the greater Bandung area is mega-popular with domestic tourists, and for good reason. But keep following the road south as it dips down to the coast and you get to Naringgul, a deeply carved river valley that seems straight out of a fantasy novel. The road zigzags through pine forested switchbacks before spititng you out onto a wide open road with towering, jungled cliffs on all sides, down which stream literally dozens of waterfalls, some of them gushing straight to the roadside.

It’s one of the most gorgeous corners of Java, but also one of the most remote, with the road to the coast only properly paved within the last ten years - folks there only just got reliable electricity in the last few years. As is often the case, it’s likely this very remoteness that has allowed traditions like buncis, long extinct in other more urbanized corners, to survive.

It was already late afternoon when we pulled off the main road, down a long and unreasonably rocky road and around the corner of the local mosque to the house of Pak Catin, Ardi’s contact and the head honcho of the buncis crew. Pak Catin was a gracious and extroverted host, sitting us down with coffee and fried bananas as we tried our best to explain our mission and make our intentions as clear as possible (try explaining the concept of sampling in another language to a folk musician in his sixties - it’s not easy!) Bianca and MSO had been wonderfully conscientious about the whole process, making it clear from the beginning that the buncis musicians were to be considered on par with, and compensated in line with, the key players in Melbourne. Luckily, Pak Catin and his group - Pak Ayo, Pak Sukiman, Pak Salim, Pak Atam, Pak Bana, Pak Karjudin, Pak Deni, Pak Sarna, and Pak Yayan - were on board, mystified that we had made our way to their village because of a YouTube video but proud and excited that outsiders were showing interest in a music that even folks in their own community had begun to ignore.

We agreed to shoot the next morning, hoping to avoid afternoon rain and the intense sun of midday.

It was bright and early when we hopped on our motorbikes, Pak Catin on the back of mine, and headed to our arranged meeting spot with the crew. We parked where a sharp switchback in the rocky road led down into an even muddier valley, then followed a narrow farmers’ path through some rice paddies to a truly stunning view of the main Naringgul valley, waterfalls tumbling down in the distance. We’d simply requested a spot far from the noise of traffic, and Pak Catin had delivered: far from the main road, we sat beneath the squeak of bamboo windmills (kolecer) beside an empty field just beginning to be tilled by a bemused farmer in patterned purble hijab with a pink conical farmer’s cap (caping). The farmer watched with curiosity, hoe in hand, as Gigi and I set up tripods, recording gear, and cameras in the middle of the field and the musicians set about rehearsing.

In a typical Aural Archipelago recording session, failure is not ideal, but it’s not the end of the world - sometimes a musician just can’t perform, or it starts raining, or I run out of goddamn batteries for the tenth time. This time, though, the stakes were high, and we all knew it. As we began to record our first track, we encountered our first issue: for audio, I tend to set levels like they did back in the early jazz age - if an instrument is too loud, I kindly ask the musician to move farther back. Not balanced? Everybody shift to the right a little bit. Buncis, I’d failed to consider, is a processional music - the musicians are constantly on the move, dancing, circling, falling into formations and out of them. It’s an incredible visual, as Gigi can attest with his video, and its what brings the music to life, the players lining up their rhythms with their footsteps. However, it makes for a mess of a recording - a dogdog would start off in the periphery only to march right in front of the microphone, blowing out the sound with its percussive bass aimed right at my poor Rodes NT5s.

We ended up having to compromise, shooting each track a few times for video, as the musicians would normally and most comfortably play, complete with spontaneous angklung battles and snake-like conga lines through the grass. For each track, though, I’d need one sonically perfect take, so I’d shamefully ask if the men could stay more or less in the same position for one track, just for sound. Luckily it was an intuitive enough issue that everyone got why I was asking, but it was a tough decision in a project where authenticity is kind of the whole point.

Next, I tried a new experiment: multi-tracking. A friend of mine had turned me on to the work of Israeli ethnomusicologist Simha Arom, who famously recorded the incredible polyphonic singing of the Aka pygmies of Central Africa. Arom had come up with a technique in which complex, polyphonic music can be recorded both as a whole and as individual parts, so as to better isolate and analyze the structure. For Bianca’s soundbank, I wanted to provide the flexibility to play with the interlocking parts, adding and removing certain instruments, isolating particularly special sounds. I didn’t have ten separate microphones or a studio in which I could stick each musician in their own soundproof booth, but there was indeed a way, as Arom had figured out.

First, I recorded a master track, rhythmically clapping in front of the mic before asking the musicians to play Tabeuh Jalan once altogether for about two minutes. Next, I headed to the farmer’s shed on the edge of the fields and began the experiment. Taking out my laptop, I loaded the freshly recorded file into my editing software. I could now play back that original recording through headphones to individual musicians while still leaving my ZOOM recorder free to record new tracks. Surely there’s an easier way to do this, but I would put the headphones on, press play on my laptop and get my ZOOM recording at the same time. As I heard my rhythmic clap preceding the master track, I’d in turn clap along, then pass the headphones to the first musician. As he listened to the track, he’d play along alone to the sounds in his headphones. Once that was finished, I’d start the whole process over with a new instrument.

With eleven instruments, the Simha Arom technique was time consuming but ultimately worth it! Later, I lined up the waveforms of the claps in each take and got a result that might be blase for a studio recordist but like magic for a field recordist used to recording everything live - fully isolated, close-miked tracks all stacked together, sounding more or less live if not a little wooden.

Just as I was recording the last few angklung tracks, the wind started picking up and the kolecer windmills above us started spinning wildly, their bamboo propellers squeaking up a storm like a pack of angry seagulls. I was getting to the end of my rope - we were all sweating in the now midday sun, the wind was ripping through my mikes, and a pack of rabid seagulls were descending. Luckily, the musicians knew another quiet place we could finish up, so we wound our way down through the rice paddy tracks again and back into the village, where a quiet schoolyard, empty due to covid, made for a perfect place to end a marathon recording session.

[To watch the “Utter Stutter Flutter” portion, skip ahead to around 1:21:30 in the video above]

Just this past week, the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and Bianca premiered her composition, the quixotically titled “Utter Flutter Stutter,” to a live audience at the Sidney Myer Music Bowl in Melbourne. Pak Catin, Gigi, and I watched it streaming on YouTube, Gigi’s footage and the sounds of Naringgul’s finest playing over, through, and around the sights and sounds of an orchestra. Bianca had taken bits of the history of angklung, from buncis to its 20th century diatonicization to its place on the 1000 rupiah coin; she had reckoned with this problematic history and all those historical contingencies leading up to the commissioning of a piece for Western orchestra and angklung and boldly made the piece about all of that; she had shown respect to the musicians and their art, let the beauty of that music shine and then added her own avant garde twist to it, not appropriating but honoring before building something new and odd and beautiful in a totally different way. Beautiful, profound art had been made two times over now, and I was proud to help, in my small way, to make it happen.

Pusaka Mekar are:

Pak Ayo - Roel

Pak Sukiman - Surupan

Pak Salim - Ambruk

Pak Atam - Indung

Pak Bana - Engklong

Pak Karjudin - Indung

Pak Deni Ramdhan - Indung

Pak Sarna Wijaya - Dogdog Ageung/Beluk

Pak Yayan - Dogdog Alit

Pusaka Mekar is led by Pak Catin Setiawan. The recording session was facilitated by Pak Wahid, Pak Ramdan, and Kang Ardi.

Huge special thanks to Pak Catin and the Pusaka Mekar team, to GIgi Priadji for his beautiful videography, and to Kang Ardi for helping us connect with the group and leading us straight to them. Extra special thanks to the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and Bianca Gannon for helping to commission this track and putting their trust in helping share the sounds of Pusaka Mekar and angklung buncis with the world.