Transcript of interview with Sarah Weiss (conducted by Gavin Lee), 1 June 2017, 3 pm, via Skype
Sarah is an Associate Professor and Rector of Saga Residential College, in Yale-NUS [National University of Singapore]. She is an American music scholar of Southeast Asian performance and culture. As a scholar, Sarah is interested in exploring music that involves different cultures and the impact of colonialism and imperialism on today’s globalized world. Sarah thinks that the music scene in Singapore is doing fine but that there could be more synergy between music of different cultures. The synergy of cultural hybridization is possible because of Singapore’s unique geographical location and the interaction of the different ethnicities. However, Sarah feels that various governmental policies have resulted in a kind of rigidity between the cultures of Southeast Asia, which (she hypothesized) has affected the possibility of creating more inter-ethnic music because of the distinct boundaries drawn against each culture. Sarah hopes that concert venues like the Esplanade – Theaters on the Bay could organize a series of programs that are organized around themes (e.g. sacred music), involving multiple musics, rather than around a single ethnicity. Sarah once taught in a class at Yale-NUS where instead of a Chinese majority, there was a fairly equal mix of students who were Chinese, Malay and of other ethnicities, and this created a space where students could articulate opinions that veered from a predominantly Chinese perspective. Sarah believes that cultures evolve over time. Consequently, preservation of cultures cannot be “imposed,” for a preserved culture is a “dead” culture.
Perspectives on ethnicity and culture in Singapore before arriving…
“I would say that before I came to Singapore, I had a sort of knowledge about the cultural mixture that was present, and also the knowledge of Peranakan culture as something which tied Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia, and indeed the Chinese Diaspora.”
“And so, from my imagined perspective, the “Chinese-ness” that was here in Singapore before I got here, really was this already hybridized thing had generated its own performance genres and it was supportive of bangsawan [traditional Malay opera or theater] and was deeply embedded in the cultural world of the Malay region.”
On cultural isolation and racism…
“I think that somewhere between the 1950s and the late 1970s, certainly by the 80s and 90s, a certain rigidity has set in. There is a rigidity between cultures which may or may not have been there in the past, of putting them into silos: If you’re Indian, you speak Tamil even if you’re a Sindh speaker, or you speak Tamil even though you’re Gujarati.”
“And if you’re Malay, your “Malay-ness” is supposedly impermeable: You can’t exchange it with anybody because you’re Muslim, and you’re Malay and you don’t speak Chinese.”
“If you look at manuscripts from the 12th Century, where people are already bumping into one another, there’s plenty of racism that already exist well before any large-scale global interaction with Europe.”
“The idea that people noticed differences and made decisions based on visual difference rather than anything else being a European construction is a falsehood.”
“I know that’s not a popular position inside globalism studies, but actually, if you go back and you read manuscripts from China and you read manuscripts from Java, it’s just clear that everyone was noticing difference.”
“So, racism, and or race, the idea of difference in race, is not a purely European concept. Nor is racism I think solely located in global discourse or in global flow.”
On attendance at events designated as being associated with a particular cultural group in Singapore…
“Why wouldn’t your average Singaporean of every ethnicity be at those culturally themed concerts? But nope, you find only people of particular associated ethnicities at the concert.”
On performing groups intentionally mixing up genres from different cultures…
“I wonder if they feel that they can’t do it more because much of their funding comes from the government. Not entirely – I don’t actually know the structures and the percentages, but I assume that they get public funding to mount a certain percentage of programs from each one of the four major cultures each year, I’m assuming.”
On ethnicity and the efficacy of mediums…
“When it comes to dealing with the supernatural, people don’t assume the supernatural is owned by a particular religion. And if there’s some guy who’s got the ability to communicate with the supernatural, then people of all ethnicities avail themselves.”
On ethnomusicology and imperialism…
“I think that once ethnomusicology got over its guilt about its roots in colonial endeavour, it’s gone through these various stages of embracing globalization, pointing out that it’s sort of patronizing to suggest that cultures shouldn’t have access to forms of modernity that are not necessarily from their own culture but have come from other places in the world.”
On preservation and cultural change over increasingly shorter time spans…
“And being a realist, I think that you can’t impose the preservation of cultures, because a preserved culture is a dead culture in my opinion. A sustained culture is an alive one, but a sustaining culture is not one that is necessarily going to stay the same. They haven’t – cultures don’t stay the same.”
“I think, well if cultures aren’t going to stay the same anyway, what’s the point of trying to preserve cultures?”
“In the past, you could select the bits and pieces that you liked and ignore the rest, and then turn it into your own, right? If you look at the history of the guitar, or the history of the two-stringed spiked fiddle, or the history even of the accordion, much later, different cultures have done incredibly different things with these instruments.”
“But now, there’s not enough time in that interaction process before your own culture is completely inundated by whatever it is that’s new and coming. You don’t have time to select the things that you like and make it your own.”
“Now you just borrow wholesale what has come to you, and then decide if you like it. If you don’t like it, then you chuck it out. But if you do like it, then you might just imitate it, and you may never get past that imitative stage.”
On the history of imperialism and the performing arts…
“I’ve never heard anyone in an official capacity talking about the cultures of Singapore, say what happened here before 1819 except that it was a swamp. When the British got here, it’s true there was no evidence of a city being built or buildings still standing.”
“Cultures use music all the time as sort of as an emissary, a sonic emissary. You know, this is something that is not necessarily political. It’s something that everyone can enjoy. You don’t need always language to understand music, and so I think that’s it.”
“But if you want to talk about imperialism, then there are a lot of ways to do that, which are not theory-based. Like, you don’t have to pull up, I don’t know, whichever theory person you know like the Subaltern Studies School, or whatever.”
“I mean, so many of the things which people think of as specific to Singapore are actually all over the British colonial world.”
“The next time there’s the Commonwealth Games, we could organize a series of associated concerts and bring musicians from Commonwealth countries to Singapore, and then in that process expand the ears but also bring in colonial endeavour and imperialism.”
“But there’s a part of me which is a little bit reluctant to cast this in a negative light, because the agency that individual musicians had in deciding that they are going to pick up this other instrument – irrespective of how that instrument got to them – and then turn them into their own thing is somehow sullied by the perception that the only reason that they encountered that instrument is because of imperialism.”
On program notes and pre-concert talks…
“This is my favorite complaint. I want to see a series of excellent program notes. Nobody writes a good program note, ever.”
“I bet that if you wanted to, you could probably engage with the Singapore Symphony Orchestra [also known as SSO], for instance, to give a series of pre-concert talks that were culturally aware concert talks. Or something similar where the political and colonial contexts or the historical and cultural contexts of the pieces were actually talked about.”
On CMIO and ethnic percentages in classrooms from Primary to Tertiary…
“So, if Singapore wants to change stuff up in terms of actually hearing alternative perspectives, the formula – 74%, 8% and 15% [denoting the relative proportion of Chinese, Indian, Malay respectively living in Singapore] – or whatever it is that they use to distribute students into classes is a bad one, because it always makes for a Chinese majority and a privileging of Chinese perspective.”
“If you actually want to change it up, then you’ve got to pick a few schools where it is absolutely even, even if that means that there are no Indians elsewhere or if there are no Malays elsewhere. And everyone would want to get into the school, because it would be the coolest one, because everyone’s perspective would be respected evenly. That will never happen; it’s just a pie-in-the-sky. I realize that.”
“But in that class, it was palpable that there was an equality of volume and the Malay kids, hands down, had the most imaginative solutions to some of the problems we discussed. I think it had to do with feeling dispossessed of space and land and opinion and opportunity in the community in which they have grown up and so, really they were able to identify with and engage with accounts of colonisation and imperialism in a way that the Chinese kids in the class were not as prepared to, because they didn’t have as much personal experience with it.”
“Let me just say that on the one hand, I’ve spoken in a couple of ways about the problems of integration. On the one hand, integration is, I think preferable to “separate but equal.” On the other hand, sometimes separate is good. I am conflicted on this.”
“I think that if everybody in the class was Malay or if everyone was Indian or if everyone was Chinese, then they might have reverted to form and just stayed inside their cultural world. But the difference for me was that the students were in equal groupings, which meant that no one particular group could claim the centre. And that was what was helpful.”
“Okay, so given that, maybe one day out of five or out of ten, you could have the divison of the classes into even groups. So, one-third Chinese, one-third Malay, and one-third Indian. And instead of meeting for language learning, you have a discussion about an important issue, but there’s no centre and you involve everyone.”
“You do actually have an opportunity to move people into classrooms where you have one-third Chinese, one-third Malay, and one-third Indian, and you talk about what it’s like to live in a HDB flat. Or how do you listen to this music that you have never heard of, or you could have any number of topics.”
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