The Sine Qua Non Of Life

People are being driven to extinction. Communities that seek nourishment from the environment in their habits and for sustenance are now fazed with a resolution to either assimilate or reject the consequences of global development. While the left may say abolish the old and embrace the new, presenting only a world of absolutes, artists, are thankfully a creative bunch, and can envision a world with greater possibilities.

Once a year, artists from throughout the world convene at the foot of a mountain in Sarawak, Borneo, a land of orangutans, headhunters, and the world’s largest flower. Along with these artists will follow an assembly of pilgrims from as diverse an origin as life itself. For three days they will engage in song, dance, and rudimentary moonshine in a celebration of life, diversity, and music, in a pulse that reads anything but extinct. It’s called the Rainforest World Music Festival.

More than just a music festival this event that has taken place annually at the foot of Mount Santubong for the past nine years is an epic and moving story of how diversity, tradition, and the splendor of being human can exist amidst an increasingly competitive and apathetic society. This year the Rainforest World Music Festival saw a total turnout of 18,000 people from the reaches of Scandinavia to the edge of Australia. Artistes from 14 countries showcased their cultures and heritage through music and dance, echoing sounds though the rainforest with instruments of old, and of curiosity.

Sarah Larsen, a student from Australia, has been following the event for the past three years. She says the energy of the people and the setting of the festival keeps her coming back every year. “I wouldn’t miss it for the world! I’ve met so many people here, new friends from so many countries. It’s a place close to home, which helps me afford it here every year.” Luke Trusel, a graduate student from Norway says the rainforest and the warmth of the Sarawakians is central to his festival experience. “There’s no where else you can have a party in a rainforest. The hotel we live in is right by the forest edge, and every morning there is birdsong to get you started. It’s a holistic experience from everything, the music, the atmosphere, even the booze is made of Iban culture!”

The spirit he’s talking about is called Tuak, a traditional Iban sweet rice wine served during big celebrations and festive occasions such as Gawai Antu, or “festival for the departed souls.” Gawai Antu is not practiced by all Iban communities, only mainly by the people of the Sri Aman Division, particularly the Kalaka and Saribas rivers and their tributaries. It is not merely an annual feast like the Christian All Souls Day or the Taoist Hungry Ghost Festival, but a rare and splendid occasion, held at the most once in a generation for any given longhouse, and usually far less frequently than that. A fundamental constituent of the occasion is of course Tuak, which was recently commercialized for sale in a fancy bottle packaged similar to the long-serving HOOCH, and available in 7-11 stores throughout Kuching. Now you don’t necessarily have to visit a longhouse for a swig.

Alcohol isn’t the only thing being repackaged these days. A tabor pipe traditionally made from bamboo of the Madagascan forests has been reinvented by famed world music band from Madagascar, Kelima, into something more sustainable. During one of the afternoon workshops at the festival, where audiences become participants and get acquainted with the artistes, their cultures and their instruments, Kelima introduced a homemade tabor pipe fashioned from a plastic pipe. “This is an ordinary plastic pipe that you use in the home for water. Traditionally we make this from a bamboo found in the forest, but because the forests in Madagascar are getting pressured and are disappearing, we can also make this pipe from plastic.”

The unassuming instrument with its industrial matte-grey finish looks hardly like a conventional instrument. Approximately two feet in length and half an inch in diameter, this is not a flute, but a pipe. Flutes have holes carved along a tube where a musician by covering select holes at any given time, manufactures the preferred sound. A pipe is intrinsically a wind instrument with no openings other than at both ends at where it was cut, and its sounds are produced and controlled by the musicians’ breath and fingers that regulate the pressure of his or her breath by partially covering either the opening, and or end of the pipe.

Some instruments however, aren’t quite so easy to replace. The hurdy-gurdy looks somewhat like a typewriter with several keys and a crank that looks reminiscent of a typewriters roller. Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, manages a digestible and concise description of this instrument noting, “A hurdy-gurdy is a stringed musical instrument with several strings arranged so that they can be played simultaneously by a rotating wheel covered with rosin. It is essentially a mechanical violin. This method of producing sound is similar to string instruments such as the violin, but because the hurdy-gurdy produces several notes together, with a melody accompanied by chords made by ‘drone strings’, its sound is perhaps more comparable to that of bagpipes. For this reason, the hurdy-gurdy is often accompanied by the bagpipes.” The 18,000 people that arrived at the Rainforest World Music Festival had the privilege of appreciating the tunes from this quaint and bizarre bagpipe-sounding, typewriter-violin invention which origins are believed to be from the northern part of the Iberian Peninsula sometime prior to the 11th century A.D. The band that brought the music to Borneo this year was Austrian trio Hotel Palindrone, and yes, they had bagpipes, plus a good sprinkle of yodeling no less. It apparently took the organizers four years to find a band with the hurdy-gurdy, and it proved to be well worth the wait.

Alcohol and peculiar instruments aside, the Rainforest World Music Festival plays a pivotal role in facilitating the popularization and continuation of world music and its traditions. The seemingly phenomenal turnout at this year’s event has exploded from just 10 people in the audience nine years ago, to its 5-figure, colossal number today. That tells us something about world music and the people who make it, as well as those who support it, as an audience, or as an organization. That perhaps, despite the capitalist regime of assimilation, some diversity will prevail, regardless of origin, creed, or culture, and that the tool for the very survival of an endangered peoples and their way of life is an unobtrusive and ever prevalent art form. When you arrive at the next Rainforest World Music Festival in July 2007, and witness how artistes from Mongolia, Kyrgyzstan and Mali, with cultures and languages so abruptly distinct, create synergy in song, you too will be made to believe that music is the sine qua non of life. That the depletion of natural resources, and the environments that they have influenced and given birth to, could still survive, because as Kelima said it ever so precisely, “we still have it in the heart in the blood.”