Cokek: Sino-Javanese Syncretism on the North Coast of Java
Location: Cirebon, West Java
Sound: Cokek (also called pat im or cokek Losari)
It’s not yet Imlek, but the air in Cirebon’s Dewi Welas Asih temple is already thick with incense and music. As Chinese-Indonesian (often called Tionghoa - I’ll use the terms interchangeably) families stream in to usher in the Year of the Rat, a humble crew of Javanese musicians sits on the floor playing an assemblage of Chinese and Javanese instruments. This combo, cokek, was once the soundtrack to Tionghoa cultural life across a wide stretch of Java’s north coast, but it’s a tradition that’s fading fast.
Java’s north coast has been a cosmopolitan hotspot for centuries. The island’s southern coast, fiercely battered by the Indian Ocean and famously guarded by the Queen of the South Seas, is notoriously inaccessible. The north, meanwhile, blends gently with the Java Sea, with dozens of easily accessible harbors dotting the marshy coastline. For more than a thousand years, these harbors have welcomed traders and merchants from around the world, including streams of Indians, Arabs, and Chinese. In the Dutch era, north coast cities like Batavia, Semarang, and Surabaya remained diverse but were ghettoized, with different ethnicities parceled up into neighborhoods like Kampung Arab, Kampung Melayu and Pecinan (Chinatown.) Despite this separation, people and cultures continued to mingle and intermarry, with all sorts of syncretic traditions emerging as a result.
The most famous musical result of this mingling is gambang kromong, a syncretic style which emerged on the outskirts of what is now Jakarta, in places like Tangerang and Bekasi where already hybrid populations like the Cina Benteng (Benteng Chinese) and Betawi people rubbed shoulders and made music. Gambang kromong is the prototypical cosmopolitan music of the Javan coast, with Chinese folk melodies and instruments like tehyan mingling with local instruments like the gambang xylophone and kromong gong chimes.
Cirebon is a natural spot for similar syncretic musics to emerge: an important port and site of centuries-old sultanates, its position at the borderland of Javanese and Sundanese cultural spheres has given it a distinct identity as a place where cultures meet. In comparison to other north coast cities like Semarang and Surabaya, though, Cirebon’s Tionghoa population and culture is relatively obscure: the city’s famous megamendung batik motif, inspired by the puffy clouds of Chinese figurative art, is perhaps the only well-known sign of centuries of Chinese influence in the area.
Cokek is, like so many musical traditions, a place where we can zoom in and enhance these Big-H Histories to see the personal small-h histories that they’re built on. It’s also a place where Tionghoa stories mingle (sometimes merging, sometimes dividing) with the Javanese stories alongside them. It’s a confusing, often ambiguous story, but one which deserves telling.
Like gambang kromong, cokek seems to have arisen out of an older tradition of Chinese ensembles called orkes yang khim or pat im (or, variously, pa’ im or fat in - the name likely comes from Hokkien and means “eight voices/sounds,” a reference to the eight instruments of diverse material which once made up these groups). Similar ensembles were (and still are, especially in East Java) used to accompany the Chinese glove puppet show called wayang potehi (see Josh Stenberg’s wonderfully in-depth work on that tradition and its roots in Southern China.)
We can follow the trail of pat im five generations back to the mid-nineteenth century, when a Tionghoa man named Babah Heng Liam moved from Semarang to Cirebon. An illuminating turn-of-the-(21st)-century article from Kompas connects us to this oral history via Wastar Rucita, the musician who almost single-handedly carried the cokek tradition across the centuries. It was Wastar Rucita’s father, Warcita Gender, who first transmitted the tradition from Babah Heng Liam to his extended family in Dukuhwidara, a village in Losari, a region east of Cirebon which straddles the border of West and Central Java.
Pak Wastar seems to have been a remarkable man: an illiterate farmer and musician born in the early 1900s, he became enamored with the music of cokek at a young age: “To my and my father’s ears, ‘Chinese cokek” was beautiful,” the KOMPAS article quotes Pak Wastar. “Why shouldn’t we learn it?” In those days, Wastar reminisces, ethnic divisions were inconsequential when it came to art, with mutual patronage and collaboration commonplace. Soon, in addition to mastering Cirebonese gamelan, Pak Wastar was excelling at instruments like the bamboo flute, suling or seruling, and suona, a Chinese double-reed (the not-so-distant cousin of Aural Archipelago faves like saronen, sarunai, and tarompet.)
Futher west along the North Coast, new syncretic traditions were developing on the outskirts of Batavia (what is now the greater Jakarta metropolitan area). In a tradition borrowing from Malay, Javanese, and Sundanese dances like ronggeng and tayub, Chinese land barons were throwing parties featuring women, cokek, who would dance flirtatiously with their wealthy guests and sing. The music was an early permutation of gambang kromong, rich with Chinese spike fiddles and old Hokkien melodies. This cokek tradition soon became popular in a busking format, with bands and dancers circling the outskirts of Batavia, playing for tips.
Folks in Losari must have been in touch with this tradition, as Pak Wastar and his family band were soon busking across West and Central Java, mostly heading east along the coast to busk in front of Chinese-owned shops in Brebes, Tegal, and Pekalongan, but sometimes dipping south into the highlands to play in Purbalingga, Wonosobo, Temanggung, and Magelang. This busking tradition was integral to Losari-style cokek (which seems to have grabbed the name but ditched the dancers) up to the 21st century, when interest (and tips) from Chinese patrons eventually petered out. Zooming out, this downturn makes sense: Suharto-era bans on Chinese culture and language ostracized Chinese-Indonesians from their heritage for decades. It’s unclear how directly these bans affected the cokek tradition, especially because of its multi-ethnic nature (Pak Ahmat, a fourth-generation cokek musician, says they played as usual throughout that era but often in more private circumstances.)
Throughout the decades, the music of cokek began to be filtered through the instruments and sensibilities of its Javanese performers. The busking format changed the least: suona and suling winds played with the Chinese spike fiddles called tehyan and kongahyan, together with handheld percussion (called, onomatopoeically, tonglik) like sam’in (small handheld cymbals) and trokdok (a wooden fish.) An extended format soon emerged, though, for events like funerary rituals, weddings, and celebrations tied to Imlek, the Chinese Lunar New Year. The role of the yang khim or yangqin, a kind of Chinese hammered dulcimer central to the older orkes yang khim ensemble, was replaced by gambang, a substitution perhaps influenced by the popular gambang kromong tradition further west. This seems to be a trend starting in the pre-Independence era, with Chinese-Indonesian traditions like gambang Semarang in Central Java and gambang in Padang, West Sumatra popping up as well.
Gambang musicians in Batavia, c. 1870-1880. Collection: Tropenmuseum
The gambang is a xylophone usually at home in Sundanese and Javanese gamelan ensembles. While the instruments in these various gambang-featuring ensembles were redesigned with a Chinese-inspired aesthetic (bright red paint and a mirrored-trapezoid kind of base), they maintained the scales associated with Sundanese and Javanese gamelan. In Jakarta, Semarang, and Padang, this scale is arguably slendro, itself a spectrum of equidistant pentatonic scales which varies a bit from place to place (some suggest that gambang kromong uses a Chinese variation called slendro Cina/Tiongkok [“Chinese slendro”] or slendro mandalungan.) In Losari-style cokek, though, the gambang, and thus the whole ensemble, is tuned to a pentatonic selection of tones from the Javanese pelog scale - seventeen or eighteen keys span three octaves with a few notes tacked on. This really sets the music apart, as while slendro is not wildly different from the common Chinese pentatonic scale, pelog, with its odd intervals, is a musical world away.
Mas Surip plays suona, January 2020.
It’s a foolish task to try to parse the elements of a style as syncretic as cokek, as even its constituent parts, as far as we can discern them, were never “pure” to begin with. With that said, we can at least consider some of its elements (I should also admit that I’m much more familiar with Sundanese/Javanese music than with the music of China, so I’m more likely to spot those elements which seem “Javanese.”) Nearly all of the pieces in the cokek repertoire are ostensibly Chinese, with titles in Mandarin or Hokkien (nobody seems to know - the titles are hard to parse by Mandarin and Hokkien speakers I’ve asked). The current musicians associate each piece with the various religious rituals of Sam Kauw or Tridharma, a 20th century religious movement combining elements of Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism. “Lai Cung Lai”, for example, is played to accompany the giving of offerings (sesajen); “Cicikin” and “Matincet” are played to accompany prayer (sembhayangan), while the piece “Kong Bun” is associated with funerary rituals. Indonesian songs are not integral to the repertoire but are played upon request: songs like “Dayung Sampan” (a Malay song also popularized as the Mandarin pop tune “Tian Mi Mi”) and “Onde Onde” (a gambang kromong tune - the name refers to sesame seed-covered balls full of mung bean paste, a treat with Chinese roots!)
Much of the instrumentation, as mentioned, also has roots in China: the suona double reed (also called trompet by the musicians), which stands out with its distinctive metallic bell (corongan) stamped with Chinese script, was once the core of thousands of folk ensembles across China. Spike fiddles can also be found in dozens of varieties across China, but the names used in Java point towards Hokkien roots in South Fujian. The tehyan (also called jihyan) likely traces back to the Hokkien jī-hiân, and the larger kongahyan is likely a variant of the Hokkien khak-a-hian. Other Hokkien roots are found in instruments which have been lost from the modern cokek lineup, such as the long-necked lute called samyan (from the Hokkien sam-hiân, aka sanxian.) Finally, small handheld cymbals called ciang kim, a common element in Chinese Buddhist ritual music, were once an integral element in cokek alongside the classic trokdok wooden fish (now exchanged for the small double-headed Javanese ketipung drum).
Unlike the yangkhim hammered dulcimer, these instruments must feel strangely familiar to a Javanese musician, as each has a parallel in the Javanese musical world: the suona invites comparison to the tarompet played by the nearby Sundanese and the slompret popular in East Java, the spike fiddles are not far off from the rebab, and crashing metallic percussion is played across Java, where it’s often called kecrek. With that said, suona players like the late Pak Wastar and the current maestro, Mas Surip, play the instrument with a firmness of tone and general lack of embellishment that contrasts strongly with the wailing glissandos favored by many tarompet and slompret players. The fiddles, too, are played with a no-frills technique which points more towards huqin playing in South China than it does to rebab. These details, while small, seem to show a loyalty to certain Chinese musical preferences even while other elements lean towards the Javanese.
The scale, like I mentioned, seems to scream “Java.” But so, too, do elements of the music itself and its structure: each piece is rigidly cyclical, with a principle melody looped for as long as the occasion requires, with one piece sometimes looping for up to half an hour. This cyclical structure is integral to so much traditional music across Java (and most of Indonesia.) Other, more specific musical idioms point towards Java: two large tuned cymbals, krecek (elsewhere called sio-lo or ningnong), are put on the ground and struck in a high-low-high-rest pattern, an ostinato which is familiar to anyone who’s ever played gamelan. Meanwhile, the gambang playing is essentially Javanese - in fact, the musician who plays here, Pak Rubin, is a gamelan maestro who confessed to an ignorance to the Chinese aspects of cokek music. In fact, he admitted to not even properly knowing the songs: “I follow [the suona],” he explained. “When he goes north, I go north…when he goes south, I go south!” His playing, steady but no-frills, ends up sounding like a simplified take on the gambang you’d hear in Cirebon-style gamelan. These gamelan associations found in cokek are further strengthened with the recent addition of the metallophone called slenthem, which plays an even more pared-down version of the gambang melody.
The man responsible for that final addition is Mas Surip, the twenty-seven-years-young leader of the last remaining cokek group in Losari. Mas Surip is himself a pretty remarkable character in the history of cokek. When Pak Wastar (who Mas Surip calls buyut or great-grandfather) was on his deathbed around ten years ago, he pleaded with the teenaged Surip: This music is our heritage. Don’t let it disappear.
Surip took these pleas seriously. After Pak Wastar had passed, he tracked down an old cassette of the family band playing at a nearby temple in Brebes. With the sound of his great-grandfather’s suona in his headphones, he practiced for hours each night, memorizing the selection of pieces that had been recorded. Pak Wastar didn’t just visit him through those recordings, though. Sometimes, Surip told me, Pak Wastar would visit him in dreams, repeating his pleas: Don’t let this music disappear.
Surip is trying his best: he’s hand-made new tehyan and kohyangan as the old ones are lost or broken, even carving out new keys for the gambang by hand. He’s recruited his young cousins Sekhudin, Wanto, and Marhendi to take turns on the fiddles, and his father Pak Ahmad to continue filling in on ketipung (Pak Ahmad has played since Pak Wastar’s days, but despite his seniority he probably doesn’t lead the group as he married into the family - the cokek bloodlines flowed through Mas Surip’s mother.)
Mas Surip’s passion for the tradition leads to questions of heritage and ownership that are hard to broach, let alone answer. Cokek has been played by purely Javanese musicians for more than a hundred years now, but the music remains firmly tied to very specific Tionghoa cultural contexts. Whose heritage is it, exactly? In speaking to Pak Yanto, the secretary of Cirebon’s Dewi Welas Asih temple, I was able to hear from the Tionghoa perspective. "Younger Tionghoa wouldn’t play this music even if we forced them,” he told me, shaking his head. “Now they’re expected to become lawyers, to become doctors. The tradition has been left to the Javanese, just like we taught them how to make kecap (soy sauce.)”
Indeed, there was a strange tangling of class, race, and ethnicity at play here: for the upper-middle class Chinese patrons of the vihara, playing ritual music has been essentially deemed below their station, left to the poorer Javanese who still find utility in playing and maintaining folk traditions. The situation was not subtle: as Mas Surip’s family sat on the floor with their bare feet and blue jeans, their patron, Pak Sungkono, stood above them in a crisp batik shirt, praising their loyalty (“every year they play, every year!”) while literally speaking down to them. Pak Sungkono, when asked, could tell me little about the music, it’s history, or it’s specific meaning; Mas Surip, meanwhile, didn’t have a deep understanding of the music’s Tionghoa foundations, but his soul was clearly stirred by the sounds of cokek and his family’s claim to the tradition.
As the temple filled up on the eve of Imlek, Mas Surip and crew set about playing, and essentially didn’t stop for a whole night through. I spent quite a few hours with them (even sitting in on the krecek!) there on the floor, taking in the vibe: colorful disco lights traced across the band, mingling with the flickering glow of hundreds of candles arranged around altars in all corners of the room. Largely ignoring the band, Tionghoa families filtered through and performed the perfunctory rituals, lighting incense and circumnavigating the altars, paying respects to the various gods of the temple, all while taking plenty of selfies.
I began to write this article in the days after, and am only just now finishing it now, in a very different time: at the dawn of Imlek in January 2020, coronavirus was just a news story, another flu across the sea in China. Now it is February 2021, and the world is an entirely different place: Imlek festivities are, of course, cancelled for the year, and Mas Surip and the band staying home. Cokek won’t ring out from the temple this year, but I just heard from Mas Surip - despite having no obligation, the family band continued the annual tradition by playing in their home, seen and heard by almost no one, keeping the music alive for at least one more year.
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Pat Im Langgeng are:
Mas Surip - suona
Pak Rubin - gambang
Pak Ahmad - ketipung
Sekhudin - tehyan/kongahyan
Mahmur - kencer
Wanto - tehyan besar