the communication of
RASA ,
part 2
that this is Suhartå’s idiosyncratic term for a certain type of pesindhèn, and yet in the Kamus Besar (the standard dictionary of Indonesian) we find, under kemanjamanjaan (to act spoiled), the following example: caranya bernyanyi masih kemanjamanjaan (he or she still sings in a pampered way). Suhartå is not alone.33 But, try as I might, I cannot get a handle on just what he means—I can describe it, but I cannot always recognize its musical manifestations. The picture I get from his many scattered comments is of a woman who tries to lure men with her charms, and who is not above sleeping her way to the top (to put it crudely). Musically, this translates into using showy, hyper-feminine melodic variants—even when singing a song from a masculine genre, like a båwå (cf. pp. 153-54). It has to do with calling attention to yourself, with showing off, with letting your own personality show through rather than focusing on the character of the piece, and, above all, with singing late. By “late,” I mean getting to the final note of a phrase long after all the other parts have gone on to the next phrase (the pesindhèn is expected to arrive a little late, but not to overdo it). The Javanese term for this is nglèwèr (to hang down loosely). Biographical details that enter into the rasa of a performance include anything that shapes the performer’s personality. For instance, if a person has known a lot of suffering, that will usually be reflected in his or her music. Suhartå is a self-proclaimed expert on sad music and told me it was because his life had had more sadness in it than happiness (see pp. 145 and 147 in chapter 5). Another type of relevant life experience, of course, is musical training. Many, if not most Javanese gamelan musicians have had some previous experience performing nongamelan music (see chapter 1). Sutarman had started out as a kroncong singer, Suhartå had been in a church choir, Wignyosaputro had received at least a partial education in Western music. Sometimes these other traditions are said to detract from a performer’s ability. For instance, one very good båwå singer’s voice used to be criticized for sounding too Islamic (i.e., Arabic), on account of his early pesantrèn (Muslim boarding school) education. But non-Javanese training may also be seen as an advantage. Oddly enough, several people told me that one reason the late Mardusari was so
33. It is difficult to say just how synonymous the dictionary’s kemanja-manjaan is with Suhartå’s manja.The masih (still) in the sentence implies that this is something children do—which presumably would rule out the temptress-like overtones.What the two usages might have in common is a certain attention-grabbing quality, reflected in a derived form of manja, namely bermanja, which Stevens and Schmidgall-Tellings define as “to coax, cajole, court.” Along the same vein, they give “attached (emotionally),” and “intimate, familiar, confidential” for the root itself, providing another clue as to connotations of manja in Indonesian that are not present in the English word spoiled. Aside from the above-mentioned citation linking manja and singing, there is additional evidence for the term’s being used by others than Suhartå: I have heard Druhendro—at the time, a young graduate of STSI, where Suhartå teaches—apply manja to the same singers Suhartå does. One might object that Druhendro got the term from his teacher. But at the very least, it is not restricted to the latter’s idiolect.
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