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The Persistent Refrain of the Colonial Archival Logic / Colonial Entanglements and Sonic
Transgressions
Author(s): meLê yamomo and Barbara Titus
Source: The World of Music , 2021, Vol. 10, No. 1, Postcolonial Sound Archives: Challenges
and Potentials (2021), pp. 39-70
Published by: VWB - Verlag für Wissenschaft und Bildung

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/27032505

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the world of music 10 (2021) 1:39–70

The Persistent Refrain of the Colonial Archival Logic /

Colonial Entanglements and Sonic Transgressions:
Sounding Out the Jaap Kunst Collection

meLê yamomo / Barbara Titus

Abstract

This double-authored article addresses colonial entanglements in the scholarly con-

struction, employment and investigation of sound archives with particular attention
for the aural encounters that such recorded bodies of knowledge engender. Outlining
their academic, epistemic and personal positionalities, meLê yamomo and Barbara
Titus engage in a written dialogue that foregrounds the (equally colonially informed)
entanglements of their collective and individual thought during their ongoing colla­
boration in investigating sound archives. Titus provides a funnel for the foreground-
ing of audible colonial entanglements by analysing the recordings of a Timorese nato-
ni ritual in the early 20th century, by missionary Pieter Middelkoop. These recordings
ended up in the Jaap Kunst Collection, now located at the University of Amsterdam,
the Netherlands, under Titus’s curation. In her analysis, Titus attempts to reach be-
yond the agencies of Middelkoop, Kunst and herself as a curator in the formation of
sound archival knowledge. This attempt succeeds only to a very limited extent. ya-
momo dwells on the wider epistemological implications of such attempts by address-
ing his own archival research as well as the Sonic Entanglements Tour he organised
with scholars from Southeast Asia along formative colonial sound archives in Europe
in 2019.

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40  •  the world of music (new series) 10 (2021) 1

The Persistent Refrain of the Colonial Colonial Entanglements and Sonic

Archival Logic Transgressions: Sounding Out the
Jaap Kunst Collection

meLê yamomo

I know Barbara Titus for six years now. The last three of them saw a deepening of
our friendship and scholarly cooperation. When I began the Sonic Entanglements
project in 2017, I was not only interested in postcolonial sound research. I am also
committed to finding modes of scholarship that reflect the critical and decolonial im-
plications of dialogic thinking and writing and the collaborative possibilities of per-
formance and musicking. I found a collaborator in Titus. Together, we experimented
with the self-critical possibilities of carnivalesque conference panel discussion and
the dialogic focus of intimate round-table workshops. This paper is our parallel at-
tempt to experiment with writing face-to-face/side-by-side, exploring ways of colla­
borative writing that foreground our three years of sustained conversation.

Barbara Titus

The agglomeration of digital files of the In September 2013 I was appointed as

last ten years of my archival research in
and about colonial Southeast Asia1 oc-
cupies four terabytes of hard drive and
three different cloud storages.
At least once a year, I spend a few
days revising my folder organisation
system. Sometimes, a new theoretical
reflection propels me to re-invent my
taxonomic filing system. All such at-
tempts were aborted mid-way. In the
end, I keep falling back on the colonial
categories from which I have copied
them. In the same way, I keep returning
to a vicious loop of the “colonial”—
with its persistence as the root word to
which the polemical prefixes of post-
and de- are attached. In my research,
therefore, the archive and the colonial
are epistemologically entangled with
each other. Colonial historian and ar-
chive scholar, Ann Laura Stoler thinks
of the archive not only as historical
an associate professor of cultural musi-
cology at the University of Amsterdam.
With the job came the curatorship of
the legacy of Jaap Kunst (1891–1960),
which consists not only of a collection
of sound recordings, photographs, si-
lent film, correspondence, manuscripts,
and a library with a wealth of material
from the entire Indonesian archipela-
go, but also of “ethnomusicology” as
an academic discipline. Kunst is wide-
ly considered to be a founding father
of this discipline, being credited with
coining the name in the mid-twentieth
century (Kunst 1950). My predecessor
at the post, Wim van der Meer, had al-
ready abandoned this name, prefigur-
ing the current debates about ethnomu-
sicology’s colonial legacies in the U.S.
(Brown 2020; Averill 2020).
I was thrilled and heavy-hearted
at the same time. Engaging with the

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 Colonial Archival Logic / Sounding Out the Jaap Kunst Collection  •  41
sources. She reconsiders the archive
from archives-as-things to archiving-
as-process. Stoler situates colonialism
in “the principles and practices of gov-
ernance lodged in particular archival
forms” (Stoler 2009:20). Stoler defines
“archival form” as the “prose style, re-
petitive refrain, the arts of persuasion,
affective strains that shape ‘rational’
response, categories of confidentiality
and classification, and not least, genres
of documentation.” (ibid.)
This essay functions as a refrain.
It is a short story and reflection of my
expeditions to, encounters with, and
learnings from my decade long rela-
tionship with the colonial Southeast
Asian archives. I write it in conversa-
tion with Barbara Titus’s article—to
provide context to our growing col-
laboration in the Sonic Entanglements
project. Sonic Entanglements: Listen-
ing to Modernities in Sound Record-
ings of Southeast Asia, 1890–1950 is
a research project that examines extant
early sound (musical and non-musical)
media in and about Southeast Asia dur-
ing the emergence and development of
early recording technologies in the re-
gion.2 One of the collections that con-
stitutes this historical investigation is
the Jaap Kunst Collection that is under
Titus’s curation. In writing this essay, I
trace the recurrent conceptual roots of
my examination of the sound archive—
making this a thematic recapitulation
rather than a denouement. Here, I re-
flect on the notion of the archive both
as an institution that stores and protects
documents, and as an embodied site of
memory.
After my PhD and ten years of spas-
modic relationship with archives in and
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Kunst Collection meant coming full
circle for me. I was raised in an aca-
demic family with an expertise on In-
donesia, where Jaap Kunst had always
been a ringing name: a humanist, a man
of reason, a scientist, and a protector
of fragile indigenous cultures against
a voracious globalised mass culture.
Moreover, after a doctorate in German
music history and a decade of research
into South African popular music, I felt
re-united with artefacts and memories
from my childhood when I travelled
back and forth between the Netherlands
and Java where my father was affiliated
for a few months per year as a guest lec-
turer at the Universitas Gadjah Mada in
Yogyakarta. It was a space I had firmly
located in an irretrievable past, like one
does with one’s childhood. Yet, when I
started paying renewed visits to Indone-
sia, after almost 20 years, I found that
I could still move around there—physi-
cally, socially, linguistically—as easily
as I used to.
My time in post-apartheid South
Africa, however, had made me acutely
aware of the privileges that enabled my
mobility. I had also witnessed the vio-
lence of apartheid categories of cultural
difference that eerily resembled Kunst’s
categorical distinctions between mass
culture and indigenous cultures, and
court and folk traditions. Roughly
speaking, these apartheid categories
of cultural difference revolved around
the dichotomy of embodied, spontane-
ous and improvised performance prac-
tices versus intellectual, contemplative
and precomposed ones, which enabled
white South Africans to single them-
selves out as cognitively and culturally
superior. Such violence went far be-
42  •  the world of music (new series) 10 (2021) 1
about Southeast Asia, I could now look
back and reflect beyond the content of
the archive. As I was submitting an ap-
plication for a postdoctoral project to
the Dutch Research Council four years
ago, I realised three recapitulating
paradigms that frame my thinking and
scholarship today.
First, the abilities to archive and
to access the archive are positions of
privilege and hegemony. They are priv-
ileges since they become invisible and
imperceptible to those who are in posi-
tions of power. Second, the archive is
neither merely a repository of histori-
cal sources; nor is it a representation of
history. Rather, it is a site of contradict-
ing efforts to order and create knowl-
edges about the constructed Other and
the Self. Thus, universalising global
historical narratives are ultimately
colonial historiographic enterprises.
Third, as an artist and scholar work-
ing on sound and music, I also became
acutely aware of the epistemic implica-
tions of the senses in how we encounter
the archive through what I call acoustic
epistemology.
I became aware of the power ma-
trix of archive and privilege while writ-
ing my doctoral research project at the
Centre for Global Theatre Histories
(GTH) at the Ludwig Maximilian Uni-
versität (LMU) in Munich, Germany.
My postgraduate and doctoral degree
in Europe allowed me to enter most of
these spaces without being policed. In
those instances, my acquired privilege
from my association with academic
institutions of the imperial centres of
Europe made me blind to such advan-
tage. It was in later moments, when I
was refused access to these collections,
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yond the realm of the conceptual with
devastating consequences far into the
post-apartheid era, since people kept
perceiving themselves and each other
according to these dichotomies. I had
realised that the excesses of apartheid
had been the normalities of colonial-
ism that preceded apartheid’s institu-
tionalisation in 1948, not only in South
Africa, but in all colonies including the
Dutch East Indies where Kunst lived
and worked in the 1920s and 1930s.
This also made me more susceptible
to the implications of these normalities
for my own position as a white Dutch
girl growing up in Indonesia half a cen-
tury later. The country was a postcolo-
nial nation-state by then, but my privi-
leged childhood there—with a maid, a
cook, a gardener and a driver whom we
then called servants—had not been that
different from the childhood of many
of my white South African friends in
the 1980s.
As Kunst’s successor at the Univer-
sity of Amsterdam and as a curator of
his collection, these biographical de-
tails are a case in point. My own past
is entangled not only with Kunst as a
researching individual, but also with
his legacy as a whole, which includes
archived material, ideological stances,
disciplinary constellations as well as
the contributions and agencies of many
actors that have remained subservient
or nameless. In this article I employ my
entanglement with this past to critically
scrutinise this legacy.
I build on the concept of entangle-
ment developed by theatre and sound
scholar, theatre maker, and composer
meLê yamomo, with whom I collabo-
rated intensively on a related sound ar-
 Colonial Archival Logic / Sounding Out the Jaap Kunst Collection  •  43
that I became painfully aware of the
implicit power dynamics of archival
institutions. In conversation with other
scholars and artists, I realise how some
racial, gender, or class identities are en-
tangled with our ability to access spac-
es and documents.
My research was about the routes
of travelling European music, the-
atre, and opera companies in South-
east Asia in the 19th century. With the
generous support of the GTH Centre, I
was able to conduct transregional and
transcontinental research in the differ-
ent archives in Southeast Asia and in
the metropolitan capitals of the former
colonisers of Southeast Asia in the 19th
and early 20th centuries. My archival
journeys brought me to Manila, Sin-
gapore, Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta, Hanoi,
Bangkok, Amsterdam, Leiden, Lon-
don, Michigan and Sevilla. Having ac-
cess to the different archives allowed
me to trace the broad strokes of global
cultural migrations in the Pacific and
Indian Ocean rims. Such understand-
ing of the global is, of course, in fact
colonial. These migration routes are
premised by the colonial trade routes
of former European empires.
The funding allowed me to trace
these translocal migrations by travers-
ing the national circumscription of the
archives. In using the term translocal
rather than transnational, I underscore
the notion of interconnected localities
that predate the national logic, which
in Southeast Asia did not transpire un-
til decolonisation in the 20th century.
In these archives, some have digitised
their collection, and most materials are
available online. This was the case of
the historical newspaper collection in
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chive project while I was writing this
article. Our exchange of ideas and its
sedimentation in this article raises
multiple questions about intellectual
ownership that I discuss with regard to
Kunst’s legacy as well as in my ongo-
ing collaboration with yamomo (in the
parallel column). The prominence of
yamomo’s ideas in my part of the ar-
ticle made me aware of the power of
collaborative thinking. It also pointed
me to the problems of single-author-
ship conventions within the humanities
as well as normalised logics of capital-
ism that easily prompt an appropria-
tion of ideas and previous intellectual
labour. In earlier drafts of this article I
had credited yamomo for the concept
of “colonial entanglement” in passing,
but I had also started to regard it as my
own through our intensive collabora-
tion. This became clear to me only
when I received credits from reviewers
for “introducing” the concept of colo-
nial entanglement. It worried me that
yamomo, who has been working with
and through this concept much longer
than I have, ran the risk of becoming
invisible in its exposure to our peers.
This potential invisibility is particu-
larly poignant since he is an untenured
postdoc and I am a tenured associate
professor. In order to foreground the
collective ownership of our ideas, ya-
momo’s research has been made ex-
plicit as a conceptual frame for my ar-
ticle on the left-hand side of this page,
in order to disentangle our respective
agencies in the collaborative thinking
that has been so productive for both our
projects: the Sonic Entanglements proj-
ect and the disclosure of the Jaap Kunst
Collection. This disclosure takes shape
44  •  the world of music (new series) 10 (2021) 1
Singapore and the Dutch East Indies
(which are included in the Delpher
project of the Dutch Royal Library
in The Hague). Most of the colonial
documents in Southeast Asia are ac-
cessible only on paper in their respec-
tive national archives. The Malaysian
National Archive has digitised most of
its paper archives, but the collection
is only viewable in the reading room.
The financial support from GTH en-
abled me to implement a transnational
investigation. It also allowed me to re-
peatedly cross national borders to fol-
low leads that would turn up from one
archive and follow them into another
archive. Some of the musicians whose
lives I have been tracing would often
first arrive in Singapore as the last port
stop of the British Mail express ship.
While Singapore was not an important
theatre or music city in the 19th century,
these musicians would perform in the
multi-purpose room of the city hall
while waiting for their onward ship to
their next colonial metropolis destina-
tion. French opera companies would
further travel to the Dutch East Indies
for a nine-month residency in Batavia
(now Jakarta), or Italian opera com-
panies would hold an opera season in
Manila. Oftentimes, these touring com-
panies would also switch cities within
the region or sail northwards to Shang-
hai and Japan, or further southeast to
Australia. In the same period, Manila
musicians also began to travel with
performing troupes, or they would be
hired to form resident bands in other
Asian cities.
While it shouldn’t come as a sur-
prise that music and other cultural
practices crossed geographic and ideo-
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as part of a recently started project:
Decolonizing Southeast Asian Sound
Archives (www.decoseas.org) that ya-
momo and I coordinate together.
yamomo explains that
rather than a presumed purposive
or meticulously woven tapestry of
imperial machination, colonialism
is, in fact, an entanglement of the
different threads of social, cultural,
and political narratives of impe-
rial hegemony and subaltern agen-
cies. Entanglement as a metaphor
conceive[s] histories of multiple
intertwinings of intentional, but
often accidental historical trajec-
tories. Researching global and co-
lonial history, therefore, is an en-
terprise of disentangling the knots
and twines of these translocal and
trans­regional connections. (yamo-
mo 2020)
yamomo situates such entanglements
in the archive as a site of knowledge
formation, and he highlights the impor-
tance of listening to sound recordings
in the scholarly enterprise of disentan-
glement. These recordings enable us to
hear the ways in which individuals and
groups of people positioned themselves
and related to each other in colonial en-
vironments through speech, voice in-
flections, musical skill, singing styles,
performance styles, the use of musical
instruments—and the exchanges there-
of. Hearing multiple voices and parts
simultaneously facilitates acts of dis-
entanglement. Through his conception
of entanglement, yamomo interrogates
two hegemonic conceptual dichoto-
mies that I also intend to question in
this article: between coloniser and col-
onised, and between past and present.
 Colonial Archival Logic / Sounding Out the Jaap Kunst Collection  •  45
logical boundaries throughout history,
the records they leave behind are stored
and organised in today’s national ar-
chives. Here, I recapitulate my second
thought on the archive’s implication
with colonial historiography. Migrat-
ing musicians and performers often
disappear in the archival and ideologi-
cal gaps of the nation states. They are
often left out in national(ist) archives
wherein itinerancy is uneasily catego-
rised within the filing system of the
geo-politically-settled concept of the
nation. Thus, migrant actors are often
excluded in conventional historiogra-
phies that are premised on national ide-
ology. In an article about 19th-century
migrant musicians, I describe how this
transpires: [F]irst, the migrant actor is
omitted in the history of their nation
of origin because the archive lacks re-
cords during their period of absence in
the “home country.” Second, the mi-
grant actor is ignored in their host coun-
try because their transience is deemed
inconsequential to national(ist) teleol-
ogy. (yamomo 2017:57)
With this epistemological compass
at hand, I discovered the border-cross-
ing musicians once again traversing
different shelves and corridors of the
archives: in the ship arrival logs, pass-
port application dossiers, in police files,
and in fire safety reports. I discovered
how the imperial authorities saw them
when I stopped looking for them in the
filing system. And within these proto-
cols, I also heard the musicians using,
playing, and resisting the colonial log-
ics in their own pursuits of taking part
in the global modernisation project. In
the bureaucratic traces of their colo-
nial compliances and disobediences, I
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Jaap Kunst and ethnomusicology
Kunst owes his worldwide reputation
as a founding father of ethnomusicol-
ogy to his mid-20th-century conceptual-
isation of this discipline (Kunst 1950)
that was adopted in virtually the whole
Anglophone academic world (Nettl &
Bohlman 199: xi). Kunst’s notion of an
“ethno-musicology” was revolutionary
and emancipatory in a scholarly cli-
mate shaped by unquestioned assump-
tions of white and European cultural
and epistemic supremacy. However, it
also vindicated and boosted these su-
premacist assumptions.
Early fieldworkers such as Kunst
directly engaged with those who made
and enjoyed the music that, in Euro-
pean ears and eyes, was exotic at best,
but mostly “weird” and “primitive.”
This direct engagement was instigated
and enhanced by nascent technologies
of sound recording (Brady 1999), the
ability to capture sound, replay it, get
used to it, transcribe it and discover
that there are levels of complexity and
intricacy in it that complicate qualifi-
cations such as “primitive” or weird
(Kunst 1950 [1959]:38). Even though
Kunst adhered to the crude categories
of “primitive” and “civilised” cultures
(50), he asserted—in the footsteps of
Austrian representatives of the Kul-
turkreislehre—that music from outside
Europe should be studied and judged on
the basis of the aesthetic, technical and
formal starting points of those partici-
pating in the community or “ethnos” in
which it was created and enjoyed, and
not on the basis on European aesthetic
premises (Kunst 1931c; Kunst 1942b;
Gales 2018). His emphasis on cultural
46  •  the world of music (new series) 10 (2021) 1
listened to a different understanding of
global histories. I returned to my half-
written dissertation realising that I was
not interested in writing a “Southeast
Asian” footnote to the grand history
of European opera. My research inter-
est shifted towards an inquiry on how
Southeast Asians were listening to and
performing their modernities.
These entanglements of thinking
within, against, and beyond the archi-
val and historiographic logic led me
to the sonic materiality of history and
the archive—the third recurring motif
of my academic reflection. This acous-
tic turn led me to questions that would
frame my scholarship today: In think-
ing about an imperialist history of op-
era, there is an assumption that there is
only one way of listening to this mu-
sic. In my doctoral project, I reflected
on how these musics and performances
were heard and listened to when they
arrived in the 19th-century Dutch In-
dies, Spanish Manila, and British Sin-
gapore and Malaysia. How did the
archive (mostly written during this pe-
riod) capture imprints of the processes
of colonial and possible de-colonial
listening in these societies? Where can
we find materials that explain what
they heard? This question foregrounds
two issues in historiography: 1) What
we recognise today as “history”’ is
mostly written. Unwritten histories of-
ten eventually disappear in Eurocentric
historiography; 2) History requires lit-
eracy. But who can write? And in what
language? And who reads what is be-
ing written? Who is the writing meant
for? In Southeast Asia most of the colo-
nised were illiterate in the language of
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diversity was ground-breaking in the
context of comparative musicology,
not in the least because it encompassed
an inherent acknowledgement of the
fact that music is a set of activities rath-
er than an object, not only shaped by
those who create it, but also by those
who appreciate, criticise or interpret it
in a specific sociocultural environment
(Kunst 1950 [1959]:12).
Yet, Kunst lived and worked in a
colonial society in which the realms of
coloniser and colonised were supposed
to be separate and the terms of their
encounters were prescribed. The same
nascent technologies of sound record-
ing that enabled closer encounter also
depersonalised those who were being
recorded. Instead, their voices, songs
and gestures were collected, catego-
rised and classified as representatives
of an empire. The phonograph suggests
a nearness and intimacy to whom or
what it records, but it also forcefully
establishes an intransgressible separa-
tion between recordist and recorded
due to their respective active and pas-
sive roles in engaging with the equip-
ment that controls “the noisy chaos of
real life in the field” (Lysloff & Gay
2003:3). In this capacity, the phono-
graph satisfied the European idea of
scientific objectivity by providing the
illusion of observing from close prox-
imity while also being able to stay aloof
from what it observed—this sounding
“it,” by then being transformed into an
articulate[d] object (García 2017:11). It
was no coincidence that sound record-
ing equipment was a status symbol of
epistemic authority (Brady 1999:7). It
was this illusion of close proximity and
alleged non-interference that enabled
 Colonial Archival Logic / Sounding Out the Jaap Kunst Collection  •  47

the colonial state. Often, they could not Kunst and his consociates to conceive
write at all. of distinct, homogeneous and static
In Sonic Entanglements, I inter- cultures as an abstracted “ethnos” to
rogate the “sensory” dispositive of which often nameless singers and in-
universalised European knowledge. strumentalists contributed their voices,
Since the Enlightenment, visual per- sounds and bodies as specimens of it
ception has been given dominance in (Kunst 1950 [1959]:20).
academic discourse. Seeing is regard- The taboo on transgressing the
ed as the “objective” sensory tool of border between people as specimens
ethnography—with its presumed dis- and people as recordists-researchers-
tanced observation (see Connor 1997). scholars (or colonised and coloniser)
Scholarship founded on hermeneutics accounts for Kunst’s purist conception
is a cultural technology premised on of culture. For him, unlike his prede-
literacy. Writing and reading, after all, cessors, the taboo went both ways.
are cultural technologies of the eyes. Through his recording and documen-
It is within these sensorial priorities of tation practices (to be discussed be-
knowledge that we find epistemic vio- low) Kunst implied that not only did
lence in the silencing of subaltern voic- European culture need to stay white;
es. In this research project I investigate indigenous cultures also needed to re-
sound and the epistemologies of listen- main indigenous. Kunst detested what
ing as the site of post- and decolonial he called the “contamination” of in-
strategies. digenous musical and cultural prac-
tices with European influences (Kunst
1947:26). In Kunst’s eyes and ears, missionisation was the most destructive force
in such transgressions, making people denounce their own songs and rituals, and
causing irreparable damage to indigenous cultural practices. He observed how
whole communities became uprooted and faded away due to the loss of their in-
digenous modes of expression (1947:12–13). He did not, however, interrogate the
presence of missionisation and colonial imposition per se, and their purpose to “ci-
vilise” the colonial subject. Thus, he subscribed to and reinforced the colonial strat-
ifications of Indonesian society in which everyone should have their fixed place
and in which entanglement was actively discouraged and denied.
Such ethnographic practices testify to the intrinsically racist setting in which
ethnomusicology developed and flourished, and how it continues to influence the
discipline’s current constellation (Brown 2020; Averill 2020; Ewell 2020). Where-
as racism has been denounced and race debunked in the early 21st century, disci-
plinary practices that were implicated in racialisation have remained remarkably
consistent: the field is still predominantly staged by the ethnographer who—from
an Archimedean point—takes decisions about who and what is being recorded, se-
lected, preserved and on what terms (see Fig. 1).
One of the aims of this article is to expose this Archimedean point. I do this not
only by looking back at the ethnographer, but also by listening to the voices that ap-
pear as shades in between the lines of his written testimonies. In doing so, we might

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48  •  the world of music (new series) 10 (2021) 1

Fig. 1: Jaap Kunst recording the voice of an anonymous person in the village
Urbinasopèn, Waigéo, 1932.

become aware of significant Others that staged the field with him and that decentre
his agency. Redirecting our attention to these actors might help the decolonisation of
standing research and archival practices whose consistency comes under increasing
critical scrutiny.
In this context, a critical examination of Kunst’s work is long overdue.3 Kunst’s
research is often cited by those studying the many musics of Indonesia (Becker 1975;
Messner 1989; Barendregt & Bogaerts 2014), or discussing Dutch ethnomusicology
(Roon 1995). Kunst’s assistants and later successors at the University of Amsterdam
and the Royal Tropical Institute, Ernst Heins, Felix van Lamsweerde, and Elisabeth
den Otter, compiled a volume with a selection of Kunst’s publications in English
translation with clarifying articles (1994). It contains useful meta-data concerning
the archived sound material in the Jaap Kunst Collection (Van Lamsweerde 1994b),
and it presents relevant biographical information concerning Kunst’s field practices
and career (Heins 1994; Van Lamsweerde 1994a). There is only limited reflection
on the dynamics of power between Kunst and his consociates without whom Kunst
could not have produced his writings and built his career. Such critical reflection
would enable further investigation of the scholarly norms, premises and practices
that shaped the worldwide institutionalisation of ethnomusicology as an academic
discipline in the 20th century, and the implications of these norms and premises for
music research in the early 21st century.

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 Colonial Archival Logic / Sounding Out the Jaap Kunst Collection  •  49

In my roles as a grandchild and a guardian of Kunst’s legacy, I initiate such criti-

cal reflection by attempting to exorcise Kunst from his archived sonic specimens of
an abstracted ethnos. Caroline Bithell (2008) argues in her praise song to our ances-
tors in anthropology and ethnomusicology that to exorcise someone is not only to
drive someone out, but also to set them free. Following Bithell, it is not my intention
to excommunicate Kunst, but rather to make peace with him, to communicate. For,
as Bithell points out,
our ancestors, by definition, lived in a different age, “knew” different truths, incubated
different complexes, learnt from different mistakes. […] some, at least, of those […]
were pretty radical in their own time. An anachronism does not have to be discredited.
We don’t have to throw out the grandfathers with the bathwater. How quaint might
our carefully formulated pronouncements sound to our own grandchildren? On what
account or charge might we be exorcised in our turn? And what would we say in our
defence? (Bithell 2008:77)
I propose to exorcise Kunst as an ancestor by communicating with him as a pre-
decessor who was musically, conceptually and socially entangled with those who
worked with him and who remain invisible and inaudible as equally important pre-
decessors. As Stef Koenis observes in his MA thesis about Kunst: “In his travel jour-
nals, Kunst abundantly described the villages he visited, the songs he recorded and
ceremonies he attended, but the experiences of the visited communities would re-
main anonymous” (2018:15) —and, I would add, remain undocumented. This com-
prises another irony of colonial entanglement. Just as Kunst saw indigenous prac-
tices of music vanishing before his ears and eyes, 21st-century postcolonial scholars
like me try to salvage the voices that have been written out of history. This salvaging
not only begs the question what do we do today with the sonic materials that were
collected in this way, but also who are “we” in shaping the discourse about this
history (see also Brown 2020). My doubts about my potential appropriation of the
concept of colonial entanglement in my collaboration with yamomo testify to the
importance of this question, but they are not the only case in point. Transferred agen-
cies to actors in Southeast Asia will undoubtedly lead to new negotiations of power
and, potentially, to new regimes of inclusion and exclusion.
In my attempt to hear and foreground hidden voices occluded by the collection,
I am inspired by Ana María Ochoa Gautier’s historical searching for “the traces and
excesses of the acoustic:” practices of listening, aural perceptions and their descrip-
tions (2014:7) in 19th-century Colombia. Ochoa searches for them “in the nooks and
crannies of history, dispersed across several fields and sites of knowledge” through
different practices of sound inscription (6). She calls these practices of inscription
“technologies of the legible [that] made and still make sound circulation possible”
(7). In my engagement with Kunst’s collection, the wax cylinders serve as literal
inscriptions of sound, but I also foreground many other practices of listening, aural
perceptions and descriptions in colonial and postcolonial constellations of power
that are scattered in field notes, research reports, recitations and hymns. In doing so I
also draw on Olivia Bloechl’s remark that the sources she consulted for her research

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50  •  the world of music (new series) 10 (2021) 1

into Native American song at the frontiers of early modern music were, despite their
status as “European ‘master narratives,’ […] forged in the crucible of early modern
colonialism and slavery and that they never lose this doubled origin—the debt of
their belonging both ‘here’ and ‘there’” (2008:23). In my view, this is her account
of yamomo’s notion of colonial entanglements. Ochoa and Bloechl question eu-
rogenic epistemologies as self-referential and independent (Bloechl 2008:23), and
they attend to testimonies of Europe’s cultural and epistemic dependence/entangle-
ment that have remained unnoticed, illegible and/or barred from the realm of “plau-
sible knowledge” (6). Before I address those testimonies in more detail, I provide
an overview of what Kunst’s collection encompasses and who was involved in its
constitution.

The Kunst Collection

Trained as a lawyer, Kunst lived and worked in the Dutch East Indies between 1919
and 1934 as a colonial administrative officer. He worked in the office from 7am to
2pm and devoted all his spare time, including late evenings and early mornings, to
his research of musics of the Indonesian archipelago that he regarded to be at the
brink of extinction. In 1930 and 1931 he occupied the unique post of government
musicologist, a job he had lobbied into existence by himself, with the help of his-
torian Johan Huizinga and government official Bep Schrieke (Heins 1994:16; Roon
1995). His many letters speak of his urge, obsession almost, to capture, collect and
safeguard as much music as he could before it would stop being practiced. To a large
extent he paid his research—recording equipment, expeditions, musical instruments,
archiving tools—from his own private means (Heins et al. 1994:41).
During his expeditions on the island of Java, Bali, Sumatra, Celebes (Sulawesi),
Nias, Sumba, Flores, Timor, the Kai Islands, Banda, and Waigeo, he and his wife
Katy Kunst-Van Wely recorded music on wax cylinders, collected musical instru-
ments, took photographs and shot silent film. They also recorded music on events in
Java with music from Kalimantan and the Moluccas. Missionaries and colleagues,
such as Father Verschueren and C. C. F. M. le Roux in West Papua and pastor Pieter
Middelkoop in Timor, recorded material on Kunst’s request or sent their recordings
to him in order for them to be galvanised and copied (Van Lamsweerde 1994:247).
Kunst’s wax cylinder collection encompasses more than 300 indexed items recorded
by Kunst & Kunst-Van Wely, about 25 indexed items from Father Verschueren, and
around 50 indexed items recorded by Le Roux (Ziegler 2006:391–413). The con-
tinuous stream of publications, initially in Dutch and later also in English, (Kunst
& Van Wely 1924–1925; Kunst & Goris 1927; Kunst 1931a; Kunst 1931b; Kunst
1934; Kunst 1939; Kunst 1942a; Kunst 1945) that resulted from these recordings
presented Indonesian music to a northern-hemisphere readership—often based in
colonial metropoles—and it established Kunst’s reputation (his, not hers) as the fore-
most expert on Indonesian music.

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 Colonial Archival Logic / Sounding Out the Jaap Kunst Collection  •  51

Kunst sent his sound recordings directly from Batavia to Berlin where his friend
and mentor Erich Moritz von Hornbostel galvanised and copied them at the Berlin
Phonogramm-Archiv. The Phonogramm-Archiv sent copies to the Colonial Insti-
tute in Amsterdam (later Royal Tropical Institute), where Kunst worked as a curator
from the late 1930s onwards, after his return to The Netherlands. He was succeeded
there by Felix van Lamsweerde who made an inventory of Kunst’s sound material in
this Institute (Van Lamsweerde 1994b). In the early 2000s, the Phonogramm-Archiv
digitised and systematically described all wax cylinders (Ziegler 2006). Not sur-
prisingly, Van Lamsweerde’s inventory and Ziegler’s description of Kunst’s sound
recordings largely overlap. When Kunst left the Indies in 1934, he expected to re-
turn, so he left the musical instrument collection at the Museum of the Koninklijk
Bataviaasch Genootschap (Royal Batavian Society). The instruments are currently
maintained by the National Museum in Jakarta.
Kunst was a very active and successful networker and devoted special attention
to maintaining his social and professional relations, to a large extent through writ-
ten correspondence. Not only did he keep the letters he received, he also kept cop-
ies of the letters he sent out. Thus, the Jaap Kunst Collection holds ca. 10,000 let-
ters, including scholarly correspondence, from the period 1920–1960 encompassing
40,000 pages. These letters include scholarly correspondence to colleagues in the
Dutch East Indies, Germany, the Netherlands, Britain, among others, members of
the Javanese nobility, government officials, universities, museums and professional
societies. Correspondence before 1940 has been indexed (Proosdij & Roon 1992).
Correspondence after 1940 is ordered chronologically, but has not been indexed.
The collection also encompasses research reports; about 6,000 projection slides for
teaching purposes with images of musicians, musical instruments, orchestras, music
transcriptions, dance forms, mostly taken from books and periodicals; 1,600 glass
plates (copies from those held at the National Museum in Jakarta); 6,500 photo-
graphs of musical instruments, dance and theatre practices, and numerous music
practices from the entire archipelago (the negatives of these photographs have been
lost); travel diaries from trips to Australia and the U.S. in the 1950s; and ca. 2 meters
of publication manuscripts.
When Kunst passed away due to cancer in 1960, Katy Kunst-Van Wely had to
sell the collection in order to make ends meet. She sold it to the University of Am-
sterdam (UvA)—where Kunst had been teaching since 1942—on the condition that
the material would be kept together. Correspondence between Kunst and Hornbos-
tel’s successor Marius Schneider (10 January 1934) points out that Kunst paid for
the galvanisation and copies of the records at the Phonogramm-Archiv. The records
in Berlin are hence part of the collection that Kunst-Van Wely sold to the University
of Amsterdam in 1960. Kunst’s assistants and successors Ernst Heins and Felix van
Lamsweerde maintained and enlarged Kunst’s collection with material from their
own collections and those of their students and colleagues. They also inherited simi-
lar cataloguing styles from him. Heins founded the Ethnomusicologisch Centrum
Jaap Kunst (ECJK) at the UvA that was dismantled in the early 2000s. Thus, against

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52  •  the world of music (new series) 10 (2021) 1

Heins’s wish, the University violated the agreement with Katy Kunst-Van Wely to
keep the collection together. Kunst’s written archive (correspondence, reports, pho-
tographs, teaching material, manuscripts) is currently stored at the UvA’s Special
Collections division at the University’s Allard Pierson Museum. Kunst’s library was
usurped in the University Library’s general collection. The sound archive of the
ECJK (with recordings from many parts of the world, recorded by Kunst’s students
and successors on a range of sound carriers) is still part of the musicology depart-
ment and is currently in the process of being digitised. New discoveries of letters and
photographs by Kunst’s granddaughter Clara Brinkgreve will probably enlarge the
existing collection in the near future.

Involvements

From Kunst’s correspondence it appears that Katy Kunst-Van Wely’s involvement—

recording, archiving, and annotating the material, and guiding guests through the
large musical instrument collection—was, in Kunst’s own words, indispensable for
their founding and maintenance of the Musicologisch Archief (Letter to Schrieke
23 May 1922). Not only did the couple devote all their free time to the collection,
they also spent all their available money on it, which led to perennial money issues
for daily amenities (Brinkgreve 2009:131–210). Decisions about the structure and
content of the archive—what material was to be admitted and what wasn’t, how
the material was to be organised and numbered, how it was to be annotated and de-
scribed—may have been taken by Katy Kunst-Van Wely as much as by Jaap Kunst.
The correspondence also shows Kunst’s indebtedness to his Indonesian (mainly
Javanese) colleagues. Joint authorships with Katy Kunst-Van Wely (Kunst & Kunst-
Van Wely 1924 & 1925 on Balinese music), Wiranatakoesoema (Kunst & Wirana-
takoesoema 1921 on Sundanese music), orientalist scholar R. Goris (Kunst & Goris
1927 on Hindu-Javanese musical instruments) and composer and musicologist Koe-
soemadinata (Kunst & Koesoemadinata 1930 on pelog and slendro scales), he faith-
fully acknowledged. Research by historians Sri Margana (2019), Indra Fibiona Su-
warno (2018), and Djajadiningrat & Brinkgreve (2014), among others, looks beyond
these published acknowledgments, providing insight not only in who assisted Kunst
in his work, but also from whom Kunst got his materials (recordings) and knowledge
about music from the archipelago.
Margana and Indra have pointed out the intensive and sustained interaction be-
tween Kunst and Raden Mas Djojodipoero, court musician and dancer at the royal
court in Yogyakarta. Djojodipoero—whom Kunst calls a great friend (sobat baik)
and an excellent teacher—exposed Kunst to dances, gestures and musical conven-
tions that may have remained unheard and invisible to him, had he not been made
aware of them (Indra 2018:102). Such interactions provide insight into the dynamics
of knowledge formation in colonial Indonesia. On many occasions, knowledge was
produced collectively even if the power dynamics were unevenly distributed. It was

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 Colonial Archival Logic / Sounding Out the Jaap Kunst Collection  •  53

R. M. Djojodipoero who decided which dances he would demonstrate to Kunst in

order to introduce him to what Djojodipoero and Kunst agreed was pre-colonial and
“authentic” Javanese court music.
In order to tease out these distributions of power and agency—both with regard
to who was involved and where this agency was located—I focus on those sound
items within the Jaap Kunst Collection that interrogate its organisation and coher-
ence as a collection of specimens of indigeneity. Going through the Collection’s ma-
terial with my ears, I was struck by item numbers 323–327, the digitisations of five
wax cylinders. To my ears the sounds they carry occupy a middle ground between
speaking, reciting and singing. When I wanted to know what these sounds were and
where they came from, no information turned out to be available. Their position
within the collection is that of an appendix, being the final numbers. Ziegler states
that no information could be found about these numbers in the Berlin Phonogramm-
Archiv (Ziegler 2006:412n). In the Tropenmuseum—where the copies of the Berlin
originals are stored—information about these final numbers is also lacking.
In his critical account of how sound archives function as sites of aesthetic and
ideological knowledge formation, Miguel García outlines how acts of recording
and archiving turn sounds into “things” through the removal from their context,
the alienation from their creators and their lodging in containers, such as archives,
files, discs, wax cylinders, diaries, shelves, and cases (2017:11–14). The thingness
of these sounds makes them suitable for submission to research: (repeated) observa-
tion, analysis, description and interpretation. Although item numbers 323–327 have
been recorded, removed, alienated and lodged, they have not been described or indi-
cated in any way, apart from their final numbering in the collection. In their case, the
archiving process is not entirely completed yet; they have not fulfilled their transfor-
mation into distinguishable things. We don’t know what the sounds on record are,
where they come from, what they mean, to whom, and even who recorded them.
This not-yet thingness, their temporary escape from a submission to research,
makes them powerful and attractive to researchers like me who have been trained to
objectify. What do we do with them? Let them be, in their limbo existence between
recorded removal and archived destination? In what follows I intend to recuperate
them through an attempt to foreground their entanglement in colonial society and to
forge new possible relationships between various actors and heirs in present debates
about their legacy. To do so, I have to turn them into things first by pursuing their
ontological status: what are they? This endeavour serves two aims: 1.) to describe
the fabric of epistemic relations (entanglements) between the actors that made them
into what they are, and 2.) to critically scrutinise my own strategies of knowledge
acquisition and see how these depend on Kunst’s epistemic practices. For this aim, I
deliver a report of my search for information about these items.

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54  •  the world of music (new series) 10 (2021) 1

A church service?

Although there is no information about these items, Van Lamsweerde has obtained
some information about the adjoining numbers in the Collection from Kunst’s letter
to his successor in Batavia, Karl Halusa, an Austrian musicologist who continued
curating the material that was still in the Dutch East Indies after Kunst returned
to The Netherlands in 1934 (Van Lamsweerde 1994b:270). On 5 May 1936 Kunst
writes to Halusa that two sets of copies from Berlin must have reached Batavia with
numbers 312–315. One set should stay at the collection, the other should be sent on
to one pastor Middelkoop in Kapan on the island of Timor. Kunst calls them “record-
ings of an Atoni recitation from Kapan (Central Timor).”4 Halusa responds on 19
May that two sets of five roles have indeed arrived from Berlin, and that he will send
one set to pastor Middelkoop. This set of five might have been numbered 312–316
instead of 312–315. Van Lamsweerde assumes from a letter from Kunst to Marius
Schneider on 26 November 1936 that items 317–321 must have come from West
Papua. He poses the hypothesis—with a big question mark—that items 322–327
(the final numbers of the collection) could also stem from Timor (Van Lamsweerde
1994b:270).
Items 312–316 are held neither in the Phonogramm-Archiv nor in the Tropen-
museum, just like the ones that Van Lamsweerde assumes are from West Papua
(317–321) and item number 322. They should be considered lost. Items 323–327,
however, the ones that struck my ear and possibly come from Timor too, are acces-
sible even though they lack all meta-data.
Items 323 to 326 contain speech and recitation in a local language, alternating
between an exalted lead speaker (probably male) and a just as exalted congregation
(consisting of men, women and children) responding with excited shouts and calls.
The lead speaker declaims with an abundant prosodic variety in pitch, rhythm and
volume, articulating clear divisions between sentences through his prosody. He starts
a sentence high in pitch and gradually descends at the end of sentences. The congre-
gation lifts this up again by repeating and confirming specific words and clauses with
renewed energy and vigour. This speech periodically shifts into recitation with quick
formulaic repetitive clauses that are much more tone-steady and constitute a pattern
of melodic arches in the spoken formulas. Here the participation of the congregation
is more regular and more abundant. The responses have audibly been internalised in
the congregation’s bodies and voices.
The lead speaker and response “chorus” seem to consist of the same voices
throughout items 323 to 326. Some parts of the recitation seem tailor-made for the
length of the wax cylinder (that is relatively long with more than four minutes); the
speaker seems to wrap up sentences and wind down his intonation when the cylin-
der reaches its end. Did he get a cue from the recordist? At other times the speech
quickly fades away on the recording and picks up again on the next cylinder; it
seems unlikely that the speaker halted his speech in between.

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 Colonial Archival Logic / Sounding Out the Jaap Kunst Collection  •  55

The antiphonal character of the spoken and recited exchanges made me think of
a church service. Item 327 confirmed this suspicion. The congregation sings a me-
tred, strophic hymn in F-major. It is sung a cappella, in unison (or parallel octaves
by women and men) apart from the cadential last three notes of each verse, where a
discant gesture is added in the male voices. One louder male voice seems to guide
the predominantly female chorus in the a cappella singing. The recording starts at
a moment when the singing has already begun. The next four verses are sung inte-
grally. The ritenuto at the end of the fifth verse is longer than the ritenutos of the
previous verses and this is precisely the time that the cylinder runs out. It might well
be possible that this performance, too, was tailored to be recorded.
After having heard this unquestionable signifier of Christian missionisation, I
started listening out in the previous items for sounds that could confirm my hypoth-
esis of what this recording might be. Did I hear “Amen”? Maybe, sometimes. Did
I hear “Hallelujah”? No. Did I hear Indonesian/Malay words? Maybe. Yet, would a
congregation in Timor in the 1920s or 1930s use that language at all, or would it be
Portuguese, which is now one of the official languages of Timor Leste? Most likely
it would be Dawan or Tetum language, which are most widely spoken in West and
East Timor, if, indeed, the recordings were made on Timor.
At this moment of listening, the framing of this event as a church service was
a preliminary hypothesis. I had no idea what information was exchanged between
speaker and congregation, whether it was a sermon or a prayer or music or all of it.
Whether it might have been a call to political action or a reminder of the power of
some god or gods. Whether people were married or buried. The hymn sounded prot-
estant to me for its strophic and metric structure. Having sung in anglican services
myself, and to a lesser extent in Dutch protestant services, I knew I had sung this
hymn, even if I wasn’t able to tell which one it was.
Apart from this ontological question (What is this?), the epistemological and
ideological ones are just as poignant. If the recordings were samples of a Timorese
church service what were they doing in Jaap Kunst’s collection? He vented his cri-
tique of missionary work as an instigator of harming indigenous musical and cultural
practices with European contaminations (Westersche smetten) at a lecture at the mis-
sionary school in Oegstgeest in 1946 (1947:26). The unison F-major strophic hymn
would have abhorred Kunst, and he would certainly not have brought it forward as
a specimen of Timorese musical practice, even though—after centuries of catholic
and protestant presence—so many people in Timor had internalised this music in
their bodies, minds and voices as much as their religious consociates at the other
side of the globe. Might this be the reason why these items have not been annotated
in any way? Have they been buried on purpose in the abundance of representative
indigenous musical samples that encompass most of the collection? Or have they
simply been neglected, considered unworthy of ethnomusicological attention? And
who decided this? Jaap Kunst, Katy Kunst-Van Wely, Karl Halusa?

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56  •  the world of music (new series) 10 (2021) 1

Natoni and “Even Me”

So, as a typical ethnographer, I started mining my social and professional network in

search of informants who could help me identify the material. I contacted Timorese
sociologist Dominggus Elcid Li, to whom I became acquainted in 2017 while visit-
ing the Institute of Resource Governance and Social Change (IRGSC) in Kupang
that he founded and still directs. He was emphatic about the fact that the exchange of
sonic information was not a protestant church service but a traditional natoni ritual
of the Atoni Pah Meto (People of the Dry Land) in Central Timor, executed in Dawan
language. Elcid stated that he had witnessed these rituals with people standing in a
circle, moving in circular manner while calling out to each other (Elcid 2020). Thus,
Van Lamsweerde’s hypothesis that items 323–327 come from Timor was confirmed
by Elcid, but my hypothesis that it was a protestant church service was refuted.
The thought exchange between Elcid and me reminded me of a couple of im-
portant ontological and epistemological tensions in formations of knowledge about
music and performance. My hearing of the fragments had been totally steered by
the church hymn I had heard on the final wax cylinder of the series, a fragment to
which Elcid was not exposed. The hymn had enabled me to position the sounds into
a framework that I knew and this had completely determined my interpretation of
what it was. I was reminded that not only my knowledge, but also the degrees of
my experiential familiarity with various aesthetic and ritual utterances accounted
for my subject position as a researcher of Jaap Kunst’s Collection. Like all music
researchers, I employ my own embodied aural archive as a fluid and permeable da-
tabase of sonic memories in order to carry out my research and find hermeneutical
anchor points (see also Hahn 2007:10), but I often do this subconsciously, so this
aural archive might be said to possess an agency of its own. In such hermeneuti-
cal endeavours, my embodied aural archive intersects with the samples of Kunst’s
archive, and shapes their ontological status. It is yet another colonial entanglement
that demonstrates the need for a variety of subject positions from all those involved
in this material in order to engage in a sustainable manner with it.
I had never heard of natoni rituals. I started looking into it and found that natoni
rituals are recitational orations, often in procession, and often with an antiphonal
structure between groups of people or between individuals and a group (as on items
323–326), divided between Na (which is a mode of addressing a man, like Mister or
Sir) and Atoni (the people as flanking escorts of the Na). The antiphonal structure is
meant to instil and confirm one’s beliefs and messages to one another. The Atoni will
often confirm the message of the Na by repeating and emphasising specific words
and clauses (Banamtuan 2016:85). Everyday Dawan language is shunned; rather
words and phrases from historical ritual and/or very localised Dawan poetry are used
to emphasise the elevation and aesthetic importance of the message and occasion,
and to pay respect (ibid.:75). It is therefore difficult to understand natoni even for
those who speak standard Dawan.

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 Colonial Archival Logic / Sounding Out the Jaap Kunst Collection  •  57

Natoni rituals can be executed at all kinds of occasions for a range of purposes:
initiation rites such as births, marriages and funerals, as means to educate children
and pass on (hi)stories in a largely oral culture, and to add lustre to important events
such as the welcoming of guests. With its historical, religious and social dimensions,
it is an important mode of knowledge formation (Banamtuan 2016:86–88). Natoni
researcher Banamtuan talked to practitioners who suggest that one can make any
event or occasion into a natoni (the verb: ber-natoni [to make into-natoni]) if one
attributes a certain ritual value to this event or occasion, or if the message to be com-
municated warrants natoni expression (ibid.:84–85). Thus, Banamtuan states, natoni
is occasionally carried out in church, to mark important church feast days (ibid.:76).
Banamtuan’s findings, almost a century after Kunst and/or his consociates re-
corded a natoni ritual, point at the fluidity, permeability and flexibility of ritual prac-
tice per se, not only in the globalised world of the early 21st century, but also in
colonial societies of the early 20th century in which people exchanged their customs
in complex and imbalanced constellations of power. What does this tell us about
the presence of the protestant hymn? Christian missionisation has been extremely
successful in Timor. Currently, more than half of the Timorese are catholic, another
35 % are protestant.5 Yet, we cannot be sure that cylinders 323 through 327 belong
together. The hymn only features the last cylinder (327) and the recording comes in
when the singing has already started. It could have been recorded on another day
and at another location than the natoni recitation exchange on cylinders 323 to 326.
I received confirmation that the singing on item 327 is indeed a protestant hymn
from a choir mate, Bram Trouwborst. Born and bred in a protestant family, he iden-
tified the hymn on first hearing. It is the hymn “Even Me” (Lord, I hear of showers
of blessing) composed in the U.S. in 1862 by William Batchelder Bradbury (1816–
1868) on a text by Elizabeth H. Codner (1823–1919). It was translated into Dutch
(Heer, ik hoor van rijke zegen) by the Surinamese-Dutch poet Meier Salomon Brom-
et (1839–1905) who studied theology in Britain before joining the Scottish Mission
in 1872 and devoting the rest of his life to spreading the gospel in Suriname. At
present the hymn features in basically all Dutch protestant hymn books, and is wide-
ly sung by protestant church choirs and congregations throughout The Netherlands
(Meier Salomon Bromet’s setting can be consulted at http://www.journaltheworldof
music.com/insidewom2021-1/ together with the hymn’s rendering by the Timorese
congregation on wax cylinder 327).
Pastor Pieter Middelkoop (1895–1973), the alleged owner of the lost items
312–316, was also protestant. He spent 35 years of his life in Timor, from 1922 to
1957. His missionary post in Kapan was located in the Dawan speaking area of the
Atoni Pah Meto (People of the Dry Land), the predominant practitioners of natoni
(Banamtuan 2016). This makes it very likely, in my eyes, that Halusa indeed sent
items 312–316 to Middelkoop and that items 323–327 are the duplicate set that
Halusa mentions in his letter to Kunst. I’d like to substantiate this hypothesis by say-
ing more about Pastor Middelkoop’s involvement with natoni practice that compris-
es a fascinating counterpoint to Kunst’s ideas about missionisation and indigenous

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58  •  the world of music (new series) 10 (2021) 1

culture, and that demonstrates the necessity to look beyond Kunst’s agency and that
of Middelkoop towards those individuals who worked with them.

Middelkoop and Timor

It is possible to shed light on these entanglements thanks to the industriousness of

the Dutch protestant mission in documenting their own past. Middelkoop’s corre-
spondence and research reports have been published in a series of publications about
the history of Dutch oversees missionisation (Geschiedenis van de Nederlandse Zen­
ding en Overzeese Kerken). His impact seems to have been enormous. In 2005, in-
habitants in many remote villages in Timor recalled his name (Middelkoop-Koning
2006: viii); Elcid also immediately knew who he was when I mentioned his name.
His status is due not only to his activities as a pastor, but also as a teacher and cul-
tural interlocutor. He published widely in Dutch, Timorese (Dawan) and Indone-
sian about Timorese indigenous cultures and beliefs, and about theological ques-
tions pertaining to the confrontation of his gospel with the belief systems of those he
lived with and worked for (Middelkoop 1982). He translated an immense number of
psalms and hymns into Timorese (published in 1948 and immediately sold out) and
regularly preached in Timorese (Middelkoop 2006:33). It is well possible that this
congregation sung this hymn in Middelkoop’s Timorese translation, although this is
difficult to hear due to the quality of the recording.
If the hymn is sung in Timorese, another important question with regard to co-
lonial entanglements should be raised. What does it mean that a congregation in
Timor in the 1920s or 1930s and the many congregations in The Netherlands in the
early 21st century sing the same melody and have a similar linguistic understanding
of the text? Is there an overlap in the ways they participate in and are affected by the
sounds and the words, or is the academic ascertaining of sameness between these
two practices just a mode of establishing the political ramifications of colonialism
and the wide missionary reach of Dutch protestant churches? I have no answer to
this question, but it needs to be raised in order to involve the inheritors of this prac-
tice that range from current protestant churchgoers in Timor and The Netherlands
to the Surinamese poet Bromet and all the others who felt that the sound and textual
message of this hymn should be heard, preached and disseminated.
Middelkoop’s stance in propagating the hymn’s importance is as ambivalent and
paradoxical as Kunst’s stance in propagating the purity of indigenous cultures, and
they intersect in fraught and skewed but fascinating manners. With regard to reli-
gion, Middelkoop was as categorical as Kunst, finding himself at the exact opposite
end of the binary between tradition and new-found faith. Unlike the many roman
catholic missionaries in Timor, he did not regard christianity as a complement or
addition to existing modes of worship. Whereas catholic saints could easily feature
existing Timorese offering sites, Middelkoop required his followers to “destroy”
(vernietigen) their sacrificial and ritual practices as a precondition for embracing

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 Colonial Archival Logic / Sounding Out the Jaap Kunst Collection  •  59

their new protestant faith. The physical destruction of indigenous sites and practices
of worship was for him not only a clear and reassuring sign that heathen worship had
been left behind, but also that distance from catholicism was observed (Middelkoop
2006:33).
Acknowledging the gap between ideal and reality, Middelkoop was, however,
also very pragmatic in optimising the spread of the word of his lord. He regularly
explains how he consciously employs existing indigenous phrases of worship in
his prayers and sermons delivered in Timorese (letter to his parents-in-law, 20 May
1927). This makes it all the more compelling that a thoroughly protestant hymn and
an indigenous natoni ritual have been recorded by Middelkoop, and sent to Kunst,
who abhorred missionary influence. What did Middelkoop want to demonstrate with
this? And might Kunst’s abhorrence of this influence have been sparked, fuelled or
softened by Middelkoop’s material?
Thanks to the publication of Middelkoop’s correspondence and research reports
it is possible to read his report of his attendance at a natoni ritual in his capacity of
assistant pastor in 1924. The series of events at this funeral service make a huge im-
pression on him:
Suddenly—in passionate language—with the rhythm of a galloping horse—exten-
sively exclaiming at the end of each sentence, the old mafefa started to speak—no, to
call out—as someone who proclaims and resists, who passionately both charms and
begs. And each time—at the end of each sentence indicated with a long extended final
syllable, the choir standing behind him repeated in one voice the most important word
in the flood of words that the mafefa had just poured out, often accompanied with a
pound of the feet. (Middelkoop 2006:117)6
The rhythm with which the mafefa had spoken stayed in my ears and it can be com-
pared with a dactylus, i.e. as follows: one arsis—two theses—one arsis—two theses,
etc. The first syllable or sound with clear emphasis, then two without emphasis, the
first three metrical feet quickly poured out, the subsequent emphases somewhat ex-
tended, the accompanying unaccented theses also somewhat less short and then the
voice keeps exclaiming extensively after an emphasis that has been started in an ex-
plosive manner and ends with a hardly audible unvoiced closing sound. This metre
is not always maintained, but no matter how quickly it is spoken, each change within
this main rhythm remained clearly audible and sensible in our experience (Middel-
koop 2006:120—translation by the author).7
Middelkoop’s detailed report of what he sees and hears with acute attention to sound
indicates that he wanted to record it, both in textual and aural respects, in order to
study it for future aims. He explicates these future aims right at the end of his report.
Here we arrive at a crucial paradoxical—but certainly not unique—colonial initia-
tive. Middelkoop, in his own words quite spontaneously and taken by the spell of
the moment, decides to explore options to use this ritual for missionary purposes:
If the right form, with as much indigenous elements as possible—also rhythm and
thought that fits the Gospel of Jesus Christ, Saviour of the world—can be maintained,
found and [if] subsequently the old and useful [can be] filled anew, deepened and ex-
tended by appropriate sentences from the Gospel, then the longing and intention can

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60  •  the world of music (new series) 10 (2021) 1

be realised to give the Timorese people their own comprehensible funeral procedure
in their mother tongue, and a new door to preaching will be opened. (Middelkoop
2006:122–123—translation by the author)8
Crucial is his acknowledgment that this is not (only) his own idea, but that his reli-
gious assistant (pembantoe agama), P. Maboi, reached the same idea on his own ac-
count, namely to conceive a protestant natoni ritual (Middelkoop 2006:122). Thus,
Middelkoop instructs Maboi to “document” or “record” (vastleggen) the usual idi-
omatic formulae that shape the ritual in order to use it for the construction of a prot-
estant natoni. The meaning of the Dutch word vastleggen could encompass the act of
written documentation of the formulae, or indeed the aural documentation through
sound recording/phonographing.
Is the ritual recorded on roles 323–326 the natoni ritual that Middelkoop de-
scribed in his research report in 1924? Or does it encompass Maboi’s later attempts
to document the rituals for the aim of protestant adaptation? Or is it Middelkoop’s
proud registration of an already fabricated protestant natoni ritual, conceived by
Maboi and himself for the further glory of their protestant lord? The hymn on item
327 points at this latter option, especially considering the fact that correspondence
between Middelkoop and Kunst about securing the recordings takes place ten years
later, between 1934 and 1936.

Colonial entanglements

The items 323–327 in the Jaap Kunst Collection provide an insightful example of
how colonial entanglements can be heard, and that they can be heard in different
ways by different people. The presence of this alleged protestant natoni ritual in
Kunst’s Collection of ethnographic specimens of indigenous Indonesian cultures
provides food for thought, indicating many potential subject positions vis-à-vis the
Collection’s constellation. As a curator of this Collection, bringing my own colonial
entanglements into the field, I see it as my task to foreground this variety (or messy
din) of subject positions that can lead to a more diversified dialogue about the cura-
tion of this legacy.
Kunst’s correspondence indicates that Halusa did not send the duplicate set of
items 312–316 to Kupang as planned, since Middelkoop was on leave in The Neth-
erlands, just like Kunst. Instead, Halusa was instructed to ask one of Middelkoop’s
acquaintances in Batavia to take the duplicate set along with her to Holland for
Middelkoop (Letter Middelkoop to Kunst 20 June 1936, letter Kunst to Halusa 27
June 1936). Halusa seems to have followed this instruction since in December 1936
Middelkoop writes he has received the recordings and asks Kunst for technical ad-
vice about the play-back of the cylinders. The two men meet in Kunst’s residence
in Bilthoven in December 1936 to discuss this, just before Middelkoop returns to
Timor where he would stay until the late 1950s.

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 Colonial Archival Logic / Sounding Out the Jaap Kunst Collection  •  61

No written documentation is left of them discussing any of the content of the

cylinders. Yet, Middelkoop’s initiative receives a quaint resonance in a speech that
Kunst delivers ten years later at the missionary school in Oegstgeest, the very place
where Middelkoop had received his training some thirty years earlier. Kunst declares
that:
the path to the heart and soul of the people to be converted is tread most surely by him
who uses, as much as possible, the expressions of the people themselves. Christianity
professes, correctly, to be universal; it does not need a particularly Western format.
If one lets the people keep their own culture, in as far as it is not in conflict with the
Christian outlook on life and view of the world—or to quote missionary Fries, the
adiaphora—one will do well. (Kunst 1947:45–46, translated in Heins et al. 1994:85)9
These are the final sentences of the very same lecture in which Kunst condemns mis-
sionisation’s “systematic destruction” of indigenous culture, leading to the uprooting
and fading away (gederacineerd, ontluisterd) of indigenous sound (1947:12). This
surprisingly supremacist conclusion seems to be at odds with Kunst’s clear and re-
peated condemnations of missionisation. Like many colonial ethnographers of his
time, Kunst expects Indonesian cultures to remain as he once found them in order
for him to assess their cultural purity and authenticity. Yet, he also commits himself
here to the colonial need to convert and “civilise” the people that—quite literally—
embody these cultures. It is at such instance of undecidedness that Bloechl’s and
Ochoa’s method of “reading the archive [including the primary sources] against the
grain” (Ochoa 2014:4) becomes particularly productive. Kunst seems to be trying to
mitigate a variety of colonial interests and agencies here. He finds himself in front of
a group of missionary students that he wants to convince. At the same time, he wants
to protect the many Indonesian communities whose mission-inflicted uprootedness
he witnessed. His struggle with divergent colonial loyalties leads him to a combina-
tion of statements that do not add up. This inconsistency indicates a “nearly agential
pressure” (Bloechl 2008:10) of those colonial subjects that might “not constitute
discrete oppositional figures or gestures” to colonial violence. Nevertheless, they
“prevent the emergence of a self-identical European subject” (ibid.) in Kunst’s un-
decidedness, and are therefore acutely present. As scholars of colonial legacies, we
might try and hear these voices between the lines if we cannot read them in the lines
of the ethnographers’ testimonies.
As Kunst’s reference to missionary Fries indicates, Middelkoop was not the only
missionary to use allegedly indigenous expressive and ritual practices to further
the spread of his own religion. Such invented traditions also reached beyond mis-
sionisation. A well-known example is Walter Spies’s conception of Balinese kecak
dance that was supposed to highlight and enhance those aspects of Balinese cultural
expression and religion that Spies and his European consociates found authentic.
Rather than focusing on the most visible protagonists in such inventions (the alleged
single inventors), Kendra Stepputat combines archival with ethnographic research to
foreground the role of dancers, village elders and other Balinese practitioners in the
development of kecak (2012:50ff). Sri Margana’s historical research into R.M. Djo-

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62  •  the world of music (new series) 10 (2021) 1

jodipoero’s role in the conception of scholarly ideas about music and culture from
Java (2019) similarly foregrounds the entanglement of various actors in colonial so-
cieties. Their research offers a productive model for researching the sonic and visual
material in the Jaap Kunst collection.
An academic reorientation towards such involvements implies a potential trans-
fer of agency from the colonial recordist to the current inheritors. These involve-
ments demonstrate the importance of the archive as a site of colonial knowledge
construction. This might be one way of exorcising Kunst from his archived sonic
specimens. What idiomatic natoni formulae did P. Maboi document and/or record in
order to conceive of a protestant natoni ritual? What was R.M. Djojodipoero’s role
in Kunst’s normative descriptions and constructions of Javanese court music? How
did all these actors experience their position in colonial society? In foregrounding
their agency, colonial entanglements can be described in all their complexity. Actors
like Maboi and Djojodipoero were central in setting the terms and establishing the
parameters for the ontological determination of these practices as they were record-
ed and stored in European archives as well as described in academic publications for
a Euro-American readership.
Thus, restitution might not (solely) encompass the physical repatriation of the
recordings to those places and communities where they are said to have been prac-
ticed, but also the shaping and facilitating of a more inclusive discourse about what
these recordings are supposed to represent and do. Sensitivity to the positions of
various (new) participants in this discourse and the situatedness of their stances re-
quires the exorcising of ancestors by foregrounding and dispelling their hardly ques-
tioned autonomy and hegemony in the conception of culture and history. A focus on
colonial entanglements complicates the relationships between coloniser and colo-
nised and forges new relationships that might reconnect archived objects with those
people from whom they were removed and alienated.
My aim to salvage the voices of those archival actors, like Maboi and Djojodi-
poero, and reinscribe them in history has not been achieved in this article since I,
Kunst and Middelkoop are still the main protagonists of the narrative. Is this the
beginning of a larger process of recovering these voices, and if so, am I the right
person to do this? It is clear to me that these questions draw attention once again
to the deadlock in which ethnomusicology currently finds itself. More attention is
needed for who shapes, conceives and speaks in practices of researching music, or
in Danielle Brown’s critical view of institutionalised ethnomusicology: “Changing
the system […] means that when large numbers of BIPOC are finally put into certain
leadership positions that white people show up. Show up, listen, and learn” (2020).
The writing of this essay has made I began this essay with a descrip-
me aware that this listening and learn- tion of my digital research archive. I
ing takes place out there in the world would like to end it by telling an ex-
on public forums and debates, but also perience from our archival tour, giving
inside my body and mind. The social, voice to an embodied research archive.
personal, ethical, familial, and profes-

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 Colonial Archival Logic / Sounding Out the Jaap Kunst Collection  •  63
sional struggles that accompany my en-
gagement with Jaap Kunst’s legacy are
entangled in one person. In my close
collaboration with yamomo, I have
not only contemplated the risk of in-
voluntary appropriation of his ideas, I
have also internalised his voice. “What
would meLê say about this?” I ask my-
self about my writings. I always do this
when I write: “What would my expert
Indonesianist parents say about this?
Would my students understand this?”
Increasingly, I am forced to listen to
voices with stances that I may have
disregarded in the past. Increasingly, I
am forced to account for the inequali-
ties of power and agency that persist.
The entanglements between yamomo’s
and my thoughts are not exempt from
such dynamics, and it is hence insight-
ful to disentangle our agencies in these
entanglements to some extent, as we
have tried in this face-to-face article.
By outlining how the increasingly rich
and messy din of internal(ised) voices
and testimonies feeds into our intellec-
tual collaborations, yamomo and I can
articulate our personhood since such
entanglements constitute the social
fabric of which we form part.
This social fabric extends into our
pasts and to our ancestors. As Kunst
was delivering his speech to the mis-
sion school in Oegstgeest in 1946, he,
too, was listening and responding to
the messy din of testimonies in his own
mind and body that encompassed the
voices of countless singers, instrumen-
talists and speakers whom he had re-
corded in the Indonesian archipelago,
his Indonesian, Dutch, German, Brit-
ish and U.S. colleagues, missionaries,
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In 2019, in cooperation with Titus,
Sonic Entanglements gathered schol-
ars of history, anthropology, ethnomu-
sicology, performance studies, media
studies, and psychology as well as ar-
chivists, programmers, and sound en-
gineers working on/in Southeast Asian
sound histories. The team embarked
on a nine-day/four-city workshop/con-
ference/archival tour visiting various
archives in Amsterdam, Hilversum,
Berlin, and Vienna.10 Here, we prac-
ticed the dialogic thinking of our carni-
valesque conference panel discussions
and round-table workshops that led to
current multi-voiced paper.
On 11 September, we visited the
Lautarchiv of the Humboldt University
of Berlin. This archive houses linguis-
tic recordings by the Royal Prussian
Phonographic Commission. During
our visit, we listened to recording file
LA 448-1—labeled as a short story
recited by Javanese artist, Raden Mas
Jodjana in 1925. I have listened to this
recording several times and have al-
ways wondered if it was mislabeled by
the German recordists who often don’t
speak the language of their record-
ed “subject.” Jodjana’s lilting voice
sounds like he was singing rather than
narrating. I asked the archive staff for
the transcript and asked Sri Margana, a
team member whose mother tongue is
Javanese, if he understood the record-
ing. He followed the text and began to
sing along. Margana later explained
that the recorded melodic recitation
was part of a 14th-century Panji Story
which until today is sung accompany-
ing Tari Topeng, a mask dance from
Malang, East Java (Margana 2020).
64  •  the world of music (new series) 10 (2021) 1

teachers, interlocutors, and govern- Margana is a history professor at the

ment representatives. And what would Gadjah Mada University in Yogya-
his wife have said about it all? These karta, specialising in the colonial his-
internalised voices cannot always be tory of the Dutch East Indies Company
historically reconstructed as discrete (VOC). He grew up listening to these
figures or gestures. However, even in performances and is intimately ac-
their partial articulation, we can listen quainted to this sound culture. Through
to and learn from them. Such listening Margana’s re-embodiment of the sing-
and learning might forge new relation- ing of the Panji tale, the archived sound
ships that could enable a more inclu- breathed life anew.
sive musicology.
In foregrounding this experience, I return to the archival refrain—this time
modulating it to a different register. We re-encounter an archive that goes beyond
its Greek etymology of government building and public records. Sound and media
scholar Jonathan Sterne (2003) calls sound media resonant tombs where the voices
of the dead reside. In this framework, sound archives resemble cemeteries with de-
ceased sounds. In the case of recordings in colonial archives—stored in the former
imperial metropoles in Europe and removed from the communities that may keep
them alive through collective memory—they have died twice.
In many aural/oral cultures, the archive resides in bodies through what per-
formance scholar Diana Taylor (2003) calls “performative repertoires.” A sound
practice is kept alive in the persistent repetition of these repertoires in performing
human bodies. In this sense, the sound culture is inscribed in the mediality of the
body. And as a repository of a cultural repertoire, the body then is also a metaphysi-
cal medium. When Margana sang along with the Panji story on the Lautarchiv re-
cording, his corporeality and his voice became the medium through which Raden
Mas Jodjana and the history of this performative repertoire was reanimated.

Notes

1 Southeast Asia, whose unitary naming did not happen until the middle of the 20th century, was
previously part of the bigger geographic area of the Asia Pacific. Prior to this naming, the dif-
ferent colonies were separated and segmented by the imperial powers in the region. The term
Southeast Asia first appeared in the 1940s, as a military-political term during the Second World
War. Much later the term was formalised through the publishing of several books specifically
coining the term to refer to the region by former colonial civil servants working in the region.
See for example: John Furnivall (1941) and (1943); Rupert Emerson, Lennox Mills and Virgi­
nia Thompson (1942); Bruno Lasker (1944) and (1950); and the first attempt to write the his-
tory of the region by D. G. E. Hall (1955).
2 For more information on the Sonic Entanglements project, please visit the Dutch Research
Council website: https://www.nwo.nl/en/research-and-results/research-projects/i/47/29747.
html and the project website: https://sonic-entanglements.com/.

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 Colonial Archival Logic / Sounding Out the Jaap Kunst Collection  •  65

3 The unpublished MA thesis by Stef Koenis (2018) provides a decent start of employing cur-
rent theories of listening, aural knowledge and its cultural situatedness (Bloechl 2008, Ochoa
2014) to Kunst’s legacy. Friedlind Riedel (2019:14) critically discusses Kunst’s notions of at-
mosphere and sound.
4 “U zult bij de phonogrammencollectie ook nog in duplo aantreffen vier opnamen van Atoni-
reciet uit Kapan (Midden-Timor), wellicht reeds genummerd 312 t/m 315. De duplicaten daar-
van komen niet het Kol. Instituut, doch den hulpprediker Middelkoop toe, welke ze met z’n
eigen toestel opnam en de origineelen mij ter fixatie toezond.” (Kunst to Halusa, 5 May 1936)
[Translations from Dutch to English are my own, unless otherwise stated.]
5 The divisions between catholicism and protestantism reflect the colonial histories of the island,
having been under Portuguese and Dutch rule. The Dutch and the Portuguese struggled for cen-
turies for the control over the island and divided it in 1859 in a Portuguese east part and a Dutch
west part. Whereas the Dutch left “their” Indies in the 1940s (with West Timor becoming part
of the new Republic of Indonesia), Portugal remained until 1975, which prompted Indonesia to
invade East Timor as soon as the Portuguese left and occupy it with brutal violence until 2002.
Since 2002, Timor Leste is an independent nation state. It is no coincidence that, throughout the
20th century, high numbers of Timorese (if not the majority), like the inhabitants of many of the
other Lesser Sunda Islands in East Indonesia, fought on the side of the Dutch and Portuguese
against the Indonesian nationalists.
6 “Eensklaps—in hartstochtelijke taal—in het rijthme van den paardengalop—aan het eind van
elken zin lang uithalend, begon de oude mafefa te spreken—nee, te roepen—als een die uit-
draagt en afweert, die hartstochtelijk bezweert en smeekt beide. En telkens—aan het eind van
elken zin aangeduid met een lang-uitgehaalde slotlettergreep herhaalde het achter hem staande
koor, dikwijls vergezeld van een voetstamp, als één stem het belangrijke woord in de pas door
den mafefa uitgestorte woordenvloed.”
7 “Het rythme waarmee de mafefa gesproken had, bleef me in ’t gehoor hangen en kan vergele­
ken worden met een dactylus, dus als volgt: Een arsis—twee thesen—een arsis—twee thesen
enz. De eerste lettergreep of klank met duidelijken klemtoon, dan twee zonder klemtoon, de
eerste drie voeten snel uitgestooten, de daarna volgende klemtoon iets gerekt, de daarbij behoo-
rende, niet-beklemtoonde thesen ook iets minder kort en dan blijf[t] de stem na een explosief
begonnen klemtoon lang uithalen en eindigt met een nauwhoorbare geen stemhebbende slot-
klank. Niet altijd wordt deze maat volgehouden, maar hoe vlug ook gesproken, elke wisseling
in dit hoofdrythme bleef duidelijk hoor- en voelbaar in onze gewaarwording.”
8 “Is eenmaal de geschikte vorm, waarin zooveel mogelijk al het eigene—ook het rythme en
de gedachtengang, die past in het Evangelie van Jezus Christus, den Heiland der Wereld—zal
worden behouden, gevonden en voorts het oude en bruikbare nieuw gevuld, verdiept en uitge-
breid door gepaste zinnen aan het Evangelie ontleend, dan zou daarmee het verlangen en het
voornemen om den Timorezen een hun eigen en goed verstaanbaar begrafenisformulier in hun
moedertaal te geven, verwezenlijkt zijn en een nieuwe deur voor de prediking geopend.”
9 “[D]e weg naar hart en ziel van het te bekeeren volk wordt door hem het zekerst betreden, die
zooveel mogelijk gebruik maakt van uitingen van dat volk zelf. Het Christendom pretendeert
terecht universeel te zijn; het heeft geen speciaal Westersche vormen van noode. Men late
een volk zijn cultuur, voor zoover niet bepaald in strijd met de christelijke levensopvatting en
wereldbeschouwing, dus, om met zendeling Fries te spreken, de adiaphora, en men zal er wèl
bij varen.”

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66  •  the world of music (new series) 10 (2021) 1

10 For more information about the tour, you can visit the short report on the Sonic Entanglements
website: https://sonic-entanglements.com/2019/10/01/sonic-entanglements-on-tour-a-short-
update-by-mele-yamomo/.

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