Time to Sing. Musical Practices and Perception of Time in Eastern Indonesia (Lamaholot, Flores Island)

If it goes without saying that music is an art of time, we rarely question the way in which music participates in the perception of time. In the Tanjung Bunga peninsula (island of Flores, Indonesia), populated by ten thousand farmers, agrarian work constitutes one of the privileged moments of vocal practices. Two types of music repertoires punctuate the rituals related to rice cultivation: narrative and non-narrative. These two types refer to various temporalities: the ancient time, the annual time, the diurnal time. This differentiated marking of time by music produces a variety of affects and representations, awakening the memory of a past time, vague and distant, punctuating the seasons of the cyclical calendar, and finally, in periods of collective activity, “sounding” different moments of the daily routine, from dawn to dusk – the practice of singing thus building three types of temporality

Ancient history · Art · Geography · Literature · Musical · Perception · Asian Studies and History · Cultural and Artistic Studies · History · Neuroscience · Pacific and Southeast Asian Studies · Psychology