It's an honor for me to have been invited to speak on this occasion of the golden anniversary of the ICTM. Bemused by this choice, I have sought for the program committee's motivations and have concluded that they asked me because they thought I am such a senior citizen that I probably helped Theodore Baker proofread his dissertation in 1882. Not so, but as I was present at the 1950 meeting of IFMC in Bloomington, I may qualify as the person who has been attending IFMC-ICTM meetings longer than anyone else here today. In that summer of 1950, I had just begun to study seriously with local arrangements chair, Dr. George Herzog, and he asked me to be his errand boy. So I'll hark back several times today to those precedent-setting times. I also have the feeling that the program committee ended up with me because they associated me with the part of the world in which we are meeting today, an area that was seminal, as well, to much of what happened later in our field. And so, in looking unsystematically at our history, I'll be pointing out how so much of significance happened within two or three hundred kilometers from here. And also, while the concept of “keynote talk” suggests prediction and a perspective of the future, I have always ducked when asked by students what I think may happen some day, so I'll talk somewhat about the past and avoid prediction.

Almost 200 years ago, Immanuel Kant developed the notion of the aesthetic community: a community that forms and undoes itself on the basis of taste. Aesthetic communities are strangely ambivalent formations, marked by the Kantian antinomy of judgements of taste. On the one hand, they emerge out of the “hope,” as Kant puts it in Critique of Judgement, for unanimity. But because, on the other hand, the basis for such communities lies in subjective tastes and in divergent notions of what is beautiful, aesthetic communities can never reach a status of stability and permanence. Aesthetic communities, then, for Kant are more an idea, a promise, than they are a concrete reality. What keeps aesthetic communities alive is that this promise is never fulfilled. Like clouds, they must disappear the moment they take shape.

Os que věem a música em compartimentos fechados, sob a forma de castas aristocráticas, não entenderão o que está se passando, mas também nao verão nada além de seus compartimentos. [Those who see music in closed compartments, under the form of aristocratic castes, will not understand that which is going on, and further, will not see anything outside of their compartments] (de Campos 1993:345).

In the last two decades, the Nicaraguan experience demonstrated the proposition that periods of dramatic political and economic changes are also times when symbols of national unity, social identity and ethnic solidarity become questioned, their meaning(s) recast and their import heightened. The mobilizing potential of expressive forms encoded with notions of tradition can make such forms especially important when these periods involve an accelerated negotiation of what constitutes national identity. Such was the case in Nicaragua, where the overthrow of the Somoza dynasty and beginning of the Sandinista Popular Revolution in 1979 ushered in an era of intense and unprecedented engagement with cultura popular (popular, or people's culture), forms of expressive culture identified with the clases populares (the popular classes.) Performances that could be classified as folkloric, or típicos (typical or native to the area) became the focus of attention by those geographically removed as well as socially distanced from the traditional performers of these expressive forms. Father Ernesto Cardenal (1982:252), one of the revolution's principal cultural visionaries, described the early results of this process: “Our patrimony, which before was unseen, has been made manifest” (“Nuestro patrimonio, que antes no se veía, se hizo presente”).

The 35 million Sundanese of West Java are known in Indonesia for their sense of humor, the conservatism of their Muslim religious practices, the sadness of their music, and their relatively relaxed codes of behavior that allow for raucous laughter, broad physicality in musical performance, and strong innuendo in song lyrics (Williams 1993). The Sundanese also have well-established performing arts specific to the area, as well as a specific set of gender-based conventions in organizing their living arrangements. Although the links between gender, spirituality, home life, humor, and music may not seem readily apparent, the bridges between them become clearly demarcated through an examination of the ways in which physical and musical domains are divided along gender boundaries. In this article I examine some of the multiple domains of Sundanese men and women, not only within the boundaries of their homes but also on performing stages and within musical repertoires, revealing the tensions between the sexes and highlighting the areas in which men and women can meet and communicate both socially and musically.

The subject of this article is the history of a single song, Bengawan Solo ('River Solo'), written by the Javanese composer Gesang Martohartono (see illustration 1) in September 1940, just before the Japanese occupation of Java from early 1942 to 1945.

In modern musicological literature the saeta is considered to belong to the domain of cante flamenco. It is a kind of song that is performed in several cities and villages of Andalusia, the most southern province of Spain. The lyrics, a stanza generally made up of five lines, deal with the suffering of Christ or the grief of his mother Mary. The music of the saeta is a rhythmically free flamenco song containing many melismas and ornaments. It is performed without the accompaniment of instruments (a palo seco; literally, “with a dry stick”). The performance of saeta takes place in the religious processions that are held in town during Holy Week, before Easter, and are organized by the local religious brotherhoods, the cofradías. During these processions through the streets of the cities, huge images of Christ and the Virgin Mary, called pasos, are carried. When at specific times such a procession comes to a halt, a singer, who is generally hired for the occasion by one of the local brotherhoods, may take the opportunity to direct him or herself to the image and perform a saeta. The performance gives listeners the impression of a spontaneous and improvised outburst of a musically gifted worshipper, who expresses his grief and feelings of sorrow aroused by the image.