Alas Ethnic Minority Music of Aceh: Canang Situ

Sound: Canang Situ 

Location: Ds. Muara Baru, Kec. Lawe Alas, Kab. Aceh Tenggara (Southeast Aceh)

The Alas Valley is full of musical anomalies, and for the past year I’ve been obsessing over exactly why. Is it their location? Like many of my favorite musical places, it lies in a fringe borderland - geographically in Sumatra’s autonomous province of Aceh, it is a full day’s drive to the provincial capital of Banda Aceh, and in some senses a world away from the majority Acehnese cultural sphere of those lowlands. The valley itself, where the Alas River flows through the market town of Kutacane, has greater cultural links to the famous highlands of North Sumatra and the Batak peoples who call it home. 

While the continuities with Batak culture are fascinating to me - the Alas people once lived in communal longhouses just like the Batak Karo and Toba farther south and had clans just like their neighbors - it is the discontinuities that get me. Nearly all of the Batak tribes (Toba, Karo, Simalungun, Pakpak, and Mandailing) share similar instruments - boat lutes, drums (big and small, tuned and untuned), and lots of double and single reed aerophones. The Alas have (almost) none of those! Instead, heading down into the villages around Kutacane after a trek in the jungle of Ketambe with orangutans, I found ukulele-like four-stringed lutes, Malay-esque guitar music, and complexly interlocking gong music played on sardine tins. 

For the purposes of this post, I’d like to zero in on musical anomaly number three, the Alas gong music called canang situ. As I mentioned in my previous post on kecapi, Alas women traditionally make music as part of the ritual ceremonies surrounding weddings (begahen) and circumcisions (sunatan). As folks gather for begahen, women will play to accompany dance, martial arts (pelebat), or just to enliven the ritual atmosphere. 

Ritual gong music played by women is not a total anomaly in Aceh - the Alas’ ethnic minority neighbors, the Gayo to the north and the Kluet to the south, also have strong traditions of women playing gongs, also called canang, at weddings and other ritual occasions.

Have a listen to those examples linked above, though, and then to the Aural Archipelago recordings, and you’ll hear vastly different musical textures and techniques. All of these Aceh minority gong traditions feature handheld gongs played individually by a group of women in interlocking patterns. There’s a kind of informal sloppiness at play in those traditions though - anyone with hands picks up a gong (or a plastic bucket, or a tambourine!) and bangs away, generally straight downbeats with a few players filling in the spaces with upbeats or a dangdut-inspired percussive pattern. There is little precision, little technique - the Gayo tradition of mugeul canang or “striking the gong”, specifically, is one that emphasizes joyous noisemaking, a sense of rame (lively vibes), over finicky patterns or set rhythms. 

The canang situ of the Alas, meanwhile, is tight, precise, even funky at times in the way that the players can get into a deep pocket and groove. In this way, its closest relative may be the tight interlocking rhythms of the Minangkabau talempong pacik, more than 500 kilometers away in West Sumatra. In talempong pacik (also sometimes called canang or canang pacik!), handheld gongs also beat out tight hocketing rhythms, though usually two gongs to a player. The fact that it’s women who play the canang, as is often the case with talempong, makes me wonder if there’s some hidden historical connection here - Minang people have been migrating to the southern parts of Aceh for centuries, so it’s possible! 

In The People of the Alas Valley: A Study of an Ethnic Group of Northern Sumatra  (the one and only published ethnography of the Alas people) by anthropologist Akifumi Iwabuchi, Iwabuchi notes that “small brass gongs (canang situ) , which were imported from the Siamese country in the Malay peninsula , used to be ubiquitous.” However, Iwabuchi continues, “since free movement between Sumatra and Malaysia was forbidden after the Second World War, no Alas have been able to obtain these instruments , and so gong - beating has been on the wane . These days tins are beaten in the absence of gongs , because almost all the old gongs are broken or have been sold to antique - dealers.” 

Indeed, when I arrived in the Alas Valley thirty years after Iwabuchi’s stay, I could find nearly no evidence of any villages left playing ensembles with actual gongs. Instead, what remains popular are ensembles in which one brass gong, the indung or mother gong, is joined by three or four dencis or empty sardine tins! These tins, vaguely gong-like with their ridges and shallow cylindrical shape, are bent such that, when struck with a wooden beater, each tin rings out with a slightly different clanging tone - not quite tuned, but close enough! In Muara Baru, the village I recorded, these tins were called canang ayan, or “tin gongs,” with only the brass gong properly called canang situ or canang toktok sekali, the “one strike gong” (perhaps because there’s only one?) 

As the women of Muara Baru explained it, each gong or tin plays the role of a different tingkah, a word I’d crudely translate as “rhythm.” The four canang ayan each had their own number - tingkah buah (first), tingkah due (second), tingkah telu (third), and tingkah empat (fourth.) The canang situ bronze gong, meanwhile, holds down the tingkah lime, or fifth rhythm. Each rhythm is paired with another - tingkah buah and tingkah due have a kind of call-and-response back and forth (bersaut-sautan in Indonesian), as do tingkah lime and the gong, tingkah lime. The fourth gong, meanwhile, was described as “paling bungsu”, “the youngest,” and follows the gong. With this system in place, the women are able to coordinate tight hockets with relative ease. 

Because the tradition of playing gongs, malu canang, is so interwoven with wedding celebrations, each piece in the small canang situ repertoire isn’t given a name, but rather has an association with specific rituals within the grand Alas wedding ceremony. First the women played a rhythm associated with Tangis Dilo, a ritual in which the bride sings a poignant, crying lament to her parents before being married off to join her husband’s family. Next came Canang Gasak, played during a kind of courtship ritual called mepakhukh where young folks gather at the wedding and flirt. Finally, there is Nakhuh, a piece played when the bride is brought in a big procession to the home of the groom’s family. In her book on Alas performing arts, Hamidah S. Pd. cites a veritable laundry list of other canang pieces that we didn’t get to here: “Canang Selalu, Canang Tingkah, Canang Nggasak, Canang Popok Sekali, Canang Bang Bang Pret, Canang Jing Jing Tol, Canang Jengki, Canang Kute Buluh, [and] Canang Lagu.” 

The tradition of canang situ remains somewhat common in the Alas Valley, with quite a few villages still maintaining the tradition at weddings in addition to the rare cultural festival put on by the local government. However, the players are almost always middle aged or older, making one question the sustainability and future of the tradition. When asked why they didn’t pick up canang situ like their mothers and grandmothers, the young girls at our recording session just shyly laughed, a common response. 

The word situ in canang situ means “sharp” or “right”, as in “9 o’clock sharp.” I can only speculate that, amongst the sea of sloppily banged gong traditions of their neighbors, the Alas’ sharp accuracy in their playing must have stayed out - this was tight stuff, none of that loosy goosy banging here. It’s an incredible texture, one without parallel in these parts - another musical anomaly in a valley full of them.

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A massive thanks to Ibu Kamrah, Ibu Tinah, Ibu Satunya, Ibu Najiah, and Ibu Siti Rahma for their music and their hospitality.

Extra thanks to Ibu Hamidah, the wonderful Alas scholar who is one of the few to have written about the canang situ tradition.