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Song in the Sumatran Highlands

Genre: Sijobang

Sijobang is a regional Minangkabau vocal genre from Payokumbuah that draws on kaba for texts, rather than pantun. Kaba are epic stories, adopted in a number of genres. Sijobang was performed over night as entertainment in similar contexts to saluang (for weddings, circumcisions and other life cycles), the performer, always gendered male, weaving a long tale. Historically, the solo vocalist accompanied himself using just a box of matches as percussive rhythm. More recently, kacapi (a kind of keyed zither) were used as accompaniment. But by 2020, the genre has all but disappeared, displaced, in part, by the popularity of saluang in the region.

To learn more about sijobang, consult the follow resource:

Phillips, Nigel. [1981] 2009. Sijobang: Sung Narrative Poetry of West Sumatra. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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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.
Song: "Cancang Kambiang" 6 This song is affiliated with the place, the city of Payokumbuah. plain 2021-06-30T22:02:50+00:00
Translation of Title: "Cancang like a goat."
Composer: Unknown.
Type of song: Satangah Tiang (other people noted this as gembira).
Genre of origin: Sijobang.
Place affiliations:
- City: Payokumbuah.
- Luak: Limopuluah Koto.
- Darek or Rantau: Darek.
Source: Te E's List of Songs, Mardjani's List of Songs.
Term: Kaba 5 Kaba are Minangkabau epics plain 2021-07-01T00:55:09+00:00
Kaba are Minangkabau epics or stories. As Minang historian Taufik Abdullah writes kaba rely
on an imaginatively constructed narrative to present the social and personal consequences of either ignoring or observing ethical teachings and the norms embodied in the adat system of action. (1999: 336)
They can also incorporate stories about social change and recent events (Abdullah; Yampolsky). Junus (1994) makes the argument that historically kaba were set in the remote past, but their publication in print in the 1920s, along with their proliferation on cassette recordings in the 1980s, has meant that kaba are presented in novel ways today. Newly-composed kaba, such as one that documents the large 2009 earthquake in West Sumatra, introduce an immediate past, rather than deal with the remote past (Fraser 2013).

The manner of presentation can range from live storytelling to theatrical production, print publication, or sound recording. As narratives, kaba become texts for a number of performance genres, including sijobang, rabab Pasisia, rabab Pariaman, dendang Pauah, and randai. As Yampolsky and Hanefi write in the linter notes to an album involving recordings of two forms--rabab Pariaman and dendang Pauah.
In randai the kaba is partly sung and partly enacted; in the others it is sung, to the accompaniment of a single instrument...When kaba are sung, the medium is usually rhythmic lines, without rhyme schemes or stanza forms (1994).
The poetic form means that most of the genres drawing on kaba have quite a different feel than those (see Abdullah 1999: 337 for an excerpt from Johns (1958)), like saluang, that draw on the pantun form.

Related Resources
- Abdullah, Taufik. 1999. "Tambo, Kaba, and History: Tradition and the Historical Consciousness of the Minangkabau." In Walk in Splendor: Ceremonial Dress and the Minangkabau, ed. A. Summerfield, J. Summerfield. Los Angeles: UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History. 334-339.
- Johns, Anthony, editor and translator. 1958. Rantjak diLabueh: A Minangkabau Kaba. Southeast Asia Program. Department of Far Eastern Studies. Cornell University., Ithaca., New York.
- Junus, Umar. 1994. ‘Kaba: An Untold (His-)Story’. South East Asian Studies 32(3): 399-415.
- Phillips, Nigel. [1981] 2009. Sijobang: Sung Narrative Poetry of West Sumatra. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Song: "Cancang Pidia" 3 This song is affiliated with the place, the city of Payokumbuah. plain 2021-06-29T19:11:38+00:00
Translation of Title: "Cancang of Pidia," where Pidia was the name of the performer who first used this tune in saluang performance.
Composer: Unknown.
Type of song: Satangah Tiang (Other people noted this as gembira)
Genre of origin: Sijobang.
Place affiliations:
- City: Payokumbuah.
- Luak: Limopuluah Koto.
- Darek or Rantau: Darek.
Source: Te E's List of Songs.

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