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Song in the Sumatran Highlands

Song Texts

Some performers and devotees consider the texts the window into the soul of the Minangkabau people. The content of texts, like other key forms of Minangkabau oral literature, deal with Minangkabau philosophy, morality, emotionality, and humor. They touch on a range of life and emotional experiences, from the depths of sadness to the teasing budding young romance. To the chagrin of some, they can even cover erotic sensitivity. They are full of references to the natural world, reflecting the tenet of "alam takambang manjadi guru" (nature becomes the teacher). Infused with references to landmarks and places, the texts are also key to navigation of and existence in the Minangkabau homeland. In short, song texts offer an important window into Minangkabau worldviews, deliberately expressed to reflect plurality rather than universality, the contentious erotic texts case in point.

In saluang, the structure and delivery of texts is complex and subject to many variables. Yet the use of pantun, an important Minangkabau literary genre, has received little to no scholarly attention in English language literature compared with other forms of Minangkabau oral literature, such as the kaba (Johns 1958; Junus 1994; Phillips 1981; Suryadi 1993) or pantun found in other parts of the Malay World (Daillie 1988; Matusky 2004; Sim 1987; Thomas 1979; Weintraub 1994-5). The only sustained engagement with the texts of saluang are found in Sanday’s “Songs and the Performance of Desire” (2002). However, her analysis involves an ahistorical ethnographic present that does not take into account important gendered changes within the genre and her texts are only presented in English, not the original Minangkabau language.

One of the most important features of song texts is that unlike popular song, including Minang pop, the texts are not firmly attached to specific melodies. Or, rather, specific tunes do not have fixed texts. In saluang, most texts are interchangeable between songs. Very few are affiliated with a specific song. The adoption of a text to a specific song may require adjustments to make the poetry fit the melodic structure. This includes two different techniques: 1) the insertion of vocables (syllables and words without lexical meaning in the context) or repetitions of particular phrases and lines.

The texts, moreover, have an element of flexibility. Many of the texts are baku (frozen), meaning they are relatively standard in form, known by different singers, repeated, and sometimes event connected with a specific melody. Other texts are more spontaneous, created in the moment of performance. Some of these use predictable formulas used to create part of a text. Others--the most engaging for audiences--are those that are responsive to the performance context, referencing specific people, responding to audience requests, or addressing something about the context. Pak Ketua estimated about 80% of texts are pantun baku, about 20% are pantun spontanitas.

The following sections will break down the structure of pantun, the kinds of pantun, the use of metaphor, all illustrated through examples from performance and interviews.

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Introduction to Songs Songs--called "dendang" in Minangkabau and "lagu" in Indonesian--are at the heart of saluang. But just what is a song in the context of saluang and how do people talk about them, how do they know and approach them as things in the world? This page provides a basic introduction to help orient you, the user, to the local ways of knowing and thinking about these songs.
What is a song?
What constitutes a song--that is what makes up the DNA of any given song--might be different than your definition. Very few of these songs have identified composers. These songs are identified by title and tune, not by their lyrics. That is because the textual content is not fixed. That content may--and usually does--change from one performance to the next, with padendang drawing on their stock of memorized verses or creating them anew in response to the performance context and interactions with the audience members. Make sure to read song texts for more information. People identify songs largely by their structure, including melodic and rhythmic content. But they also categorize individual songs and group them together based on similarities in a variety of different ways.
Classification of songs
Practitioners and devotees of saluang alike provide a number of categories for classifying songs. These categories provide local ways of knowing the repertoire, ways of interpreting, understanding, learning, appreciating, requesting and otherwise interacting with the songs. The most important ways of knowing and classifying the songs are through type of song and their place affiliations. In presenting individual songs in this site, we engage and use these local systems of knowledge to organize them. It is also important to note that different people might have divergent knowledge about a song's associations, based on their positionality and individualized experiences. The associations presented in this site reflect an identification provided by an individual to me. That doesn't make it necessarily it the "right" interpretation. I think the moments of multiple identifications are more fascinating than the clear cut cases, revealing the way knowledge is differently structured and experienced by individuals.
Classification by type of song
Most practitioners and devotees classify the songs according to one of three song types: ratok (sad songs, literally from the word "lament"), gembira (happy songs) and those in between, satangah tiang (literally "half mast"), which are sometimes described as "half happy" and sometimes as "half sad," depending on who is talking. There are also a large collection of songs from the region called Singgalang. Some people refer to these songs--a very distinctive collection--as a fourth category and others refer to them as a subcategory of ratok.
Classification by function
There are a few songs that are classified according to their function: talingkin (songs sung without saluang in the middle of a performance) and jalu-jalu (the songs used to close a performance).
Classification by place affiliation
Most songs are affiliated with places, identified by performers and devotees as affiliated with either the darek or the rantau, a specific luak or kabupaten, a region (an area that doesn't map neatly onto any one administrative unit), a nagari, or a specific landmark.
Classification by pokok
Tukang saluang (flute players) also classify the songs according to pokok (a system that references how many finger holes are open or closed). This is a more specialized level of knowledge, so we've opted to exclude it for now.
Origin of songs
Most of the songs in the repertoire are considered "klasik," meaning they have been part and parcel of the genre for a very long time. The genre, however, incorporates new material from other genres, both regional Minangkabau practices, such as indang or sijobang, and popular genres, such as regional and national dangdut tunes. It is not clear how long this incorporation of "outside" material has been occurring, but it has been occurring at least since I started tracking songs in 2003-2004. See Songs Imported from Other Genres.
Attribution of Songs
Most of the songs in the repertoire are not attributed to any specific composer. Most of these songs could be considered part of the "klasik" repertoire, composed before the practice of making connections between content and individual ownership. There are some songs, however, that we present here that do have attributed composers, most of whom are well-known padendang (see composers). Practitioners and connoisseurs alike sometimes offer attribution in discussing the songs, but there is not always agreement in that attribution. I expect that is for a number of reasons: not documented in writing, people offering covers and variations, people familiar with the first person to have popular or commercial success with a tune, even if they didn't initially compose the tune. It is sometimes difficult to parse these stories to get to the truth, whatever that may be; instead it is best to consider each claim telling a different kind of truth.
Structure of Songs
Most songs are strophic in form, meaning the melody stays consistent for each verse. There are a handful of songs, for example, "Pariaman Panjang" and "Kambang Aia Aji," that have multiple parts, with each part having a distinct melody. These parts are know as induak (mother) and anak (child). While there is an ideal progression of order through these multi-part songs (say induak, anak, anak), my recordings suggest that order is not always followed. See Songs with Interesting Features.

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