Renewed interest in traditional Malaysian lutes comes with strings attached

An indigenous musician plays a “sape” in front a traditional longhouse in Sarawak.

Photo: Reuters Among the stories Sarawak instrument craftsman Salomon Gau inherited from his elders is one that begins not with wood or strings but with spirits.

He recalled being told how spirits first showed villagers how the earliest forms of the sape – a traditional carved wooden lute from Malaysian Borneo – should be made and played, at a time when the instrument was central to ceremonies, storytelling and social life. “The first one was the two-string version.

The four-string one is already quite new, and the six-string contemporary version is very, very new,” he said.

While a growing number of young musicians across the island have become drawn to playing the instrument in recent years, Gau and others warn the knowledge needed to make them is increasingly at risk.

Closely associated with Sarawak’s Kenyah and Kayan communities, the sape is part of a wider family of boat-shaped lutes carved from a single block of local wood, including Sabah’s sundatang and Brunei’s kesapi.

The sape, a Kenyah boat-shaped lute, is made out of a single piece of wood.

Photo: Tuyang Initiative Revival efforts have brought new performers and wider visibility, but practitioners say far fewer people are learning how to make the instruments, preserve older repertoires or carry forward the knowledge embedded in them.

For Gau, 62, the risk is not only that the instruments may fall silent but also that the traditions that once gave them meaning may disappear.

That ranges from the selection of materials and crafting skills to how older sape melodies are tied to courtship, hospitality, prayer and community life. “We need to know the right moon phase to gather the wood, and when the wood is cut, we need to know which side should be the face or the hollow belly of the instrument,” Gau said.

The orientation of the wood is important as it can affect the instrument’s sound. “If it is reversed, it is not right.

It will not sound right,” he said.

That tension between renewed interest and fading knowledge is being felt across Borneo.

Gau, who has spent the past two decades immersed in dance, song and instrument-making, said a revival could produce performers – but without the makers, the tradition risked becoming symbolic rather than lived. “From the old people, from the old ways, we managed to get about 20 tunes, but so far we have managed to revive only three,” he said.

In Sabah, at the north

原文链接: 南华早报