Xylophones in Thailand and Java: A Comparative Phenomenology of Musical Instruments

Abstract

The heart of this essay is my experience of learning to play and appreciate the ranaat eek, the leading xylophone in classical Central Thai music, and more generally, learning to play music in Thailand and, much earlier, Central Java. I realized that the “standard” scholarly descriptions and classifications of musical instruments—which I learnt first as a teenager studying violin at the Prague Conservatory, and then again a number of times later—are not just unsatisfactory for my purposes, but are in direct conflict with my own experience of what are musical instruments: in separating the instruments from human experience, human bodies, feelings, imagination, worlds, and applying “universal” methods of “identifying” them, all that I feel is important is methodically ignored. Where are the joy and the pain of learning to play an instrument; the feel of the instrument in my hand, as it gives me a magical power to enter the realm of music and opens up for me a whole field of possibilities; the intimate, physical, life-long bond between the musician and his instrument; the respect and gratitude for my teacher for making me suffer through learning; the atmosphere, excitement, magic of being part of a performance? Each kind of instrument is different, not primarily because of what vibrates in or on the instrument (as the standard classification would lead us to believe), but because each grows from and into human lives and worlds differently. Where are these differences between instruments, the different experiences they make possible, the different ways in which they extend and empower human bodies, the different feelings they evoke, the different roles they play in people’s lives and in their world, the different associations they accumulate? The first and central part of this essay is a phenomenological description of ranaat eek (or simply ranaat). (Figure 1) Its ambition is to offer a few glimpses of the instrument in human experience. Then, I compare ranaat to the Javanese gambang, showing how an instrument that looks very similar if one attends only to its physical characteristics and the mechanics of sound, turns out to be a very different musical instrument if one considers how it is played and experienced by musicians, how it figures in ensemble music and people’s thinking, and what