Description
It is well known that pioneer ethnomusicologist Jaap Kunst collaborated with Erich von Hornbostel to validate Hornbostel’s expansive blasquintentheorie (“theory of blown fifths”), which posited a common basis in the overtone series for a variety of Asian tonal systems, using Kunst’s tuning measurements from Java as examplars. It is less well known that in West Java, Jaap Kunst collaborated with Raden Machyar Angga Kusumadinata, a Dutch-educated Sundanese aristocrat with Sundanese musical training, who also theorized Sundanese scales and modes. Kusumadinata rejected blown fifths in favor of tuning models rooted in equidistant divisions of the octave that were unrelated to acoustical phenomena—an approach that Kunst could not endorse, but which had compelling precedents in visual/physical approaches to tuning in Southeast Asia. For example, physicist Charles Wead and Philippine ethnomusicologist José Maceda separately proposed that the intervals of Southeast Asian tuning systems are epiphenomena of the symmetrical placement of fingerholes on bamboo wind instruments.
This paper reconsiders a variety of historical and contemporary sources to shed new light on these disagreements, including recent research into the physics of overtones produced on blown pipes and recent research into the Chinese precedents for Hornbostel’s theory. I also consider the how equidistance in the construction of the iconic Sundanese suling (flute) of West Java may lie at the root of Sundanese tunings, scales, and modes; Sundanese instrument makers use equidistant measurements to determine the placement of fingerholes. I argue that this visual approach to instrument construction helps to make sense of both (1) the variability in the precise intonation of salendro (slendro) tunings and (2) the Sundanese predilection for layering hemitonic pentatonic scales over salendro accompaniments.
Neither Kunst’s nor Kusumadinata’s theories account convincingly for Sundanese musical practices; but understanding Kunst’s, Hornbostel’s, and Kusumadinata’s epistemological frameworks helps us reconcile their differing approaches.
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