This week's selection comes from Michele Banal, Audio Project Cataloguer for Unlocking our Sound Heritage.

Rinding gumbeng is a style of Central Javanese folk music that, although not widespread, is still common in the rural Gunungkidul area, about 50 km east of Yogyakarta, where it is performed at harvest rituals and other festivals. Both the name of the style and the music itself result from the combination of two main ingredients: the rinding and the gumbeng.

Rinding photo (left) by DAN MOI, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 / cropped from original. Gumbeng photo (right) by Tropenmuseum, part of the National Museum of World Cultures, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0

The rinding is a mouth harp built from a single piece of bamboo, often with a piece of string attached to one end of the instrument’s frame. It is an idioglot instrument, meaning that both the vibrating reed and the main body of the instrument are carved from a single piece of bamboo (mouth harps made of metal, more common in Europe, are generally heteroglot, because the vibrating tongue and the frame of the instrument are two separate pieces that have been joined together). As with all mouth harps, the mouth cavity acts as the main resonator but, unlike heteroglot mouth harps where the musician plucks the vibrating tongue directly, the rinding is played by plucking the frame of the instrument instead (or, where present, a piece of string attached to it). Because the instrument is made of a single piece of bamboo, the resulting vibration is directly transmitted from the frame to the inner reed. The sound-producing vibration is then caused by the very flexible reed as it catches up with the frame, which, being more rigid, stops vibrating much earlier than the reed.

The gumbeng is a tube zither made from a single piece of bamboo (which also makes it an idioglot instrument). A small number of strings (normally three) are carved from the outer layer of the bamboo, and raised from the body of the instrument by means of small bridges. The strings are then struck with a thin bamboo stick and, depending on the placement of the bridges, a limited number of different tones can be produced.

A rinding gumbeng ensemble normally comprises several rinding and at least a few gumbeng, and it can also include bamboo scrapers, large bamboo slit drums and an end-blown bamboo gong (thus called not because of its physical characteristics, but due to its function of signalling the beginning of a music cycle). In most cases, the ensemble is then fronted by a small number of singers.

This week’s recording was made by David Hughes in 1995 at the Indonesian Institute of the Arts (Institut Seni Indonesia) of Yogyakarta, and features a rinding gumbeng ensemble from Duren in the Gunungkidul region. It is an instrumental version of rinding gumbeng, to better showcase its sound, and, judging from the audio, this specific ensemble may also include one or two slit drums carved out of bigger bamboo tubes.

Rinding gumbeng (C1450/27 S2 C1)

The David Hughes Collection holds other performances from the same group, including examples of rinding gumbeng with singing and solo performances on the rinding (see shelfmark C1450/27).

The David Hughes Collection has been digitised as part of the British Library's Unlocking our Sound Heritage project. The digitisation of this and many other recordings in this collection was sponsored by Eddie and Chris Dapré in memory of Eddie’s father Patrick Alfons Dapré, as a reminder of his love for all kinds of music and particularly the zither - an instrument that he played.

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