The Snouck Hurgronje collection at Leiden University Library contains 332 wax cylinders, partly damaged or broken. In 1996 these were digitalised at the Phonogrammarchiv in Vienna and this resulted in 317 audio tracks, mostly between 2 and 3 minutes long. Most of these recordings were made at the Dutch consulate in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, in 1906-1909, and contain music and speech performed by pilgrims to Mecca from the Arab world and other Islamic countries, including Indonesia. The Jeddah recordings were made by others and sent to Snouck Hurgronje in Leiden.

However, before Snouck Hurgronje left the Dutch Indies in 1906 to become Chair of Arabic at Leiden University and his recording machine (phonograph) was sent to Jeddah, he recorded 27 wax cylinders with Indonesian music and speech in 1905-1906. These recordings only include performers from Gayo (9 cylinders) and other groups in Aceh, northern Sumatra, (6 cylinders) and further from Sunda (12 cylinders). This has most probably to do with the interests of Snouck Hurgronje, who wrote a book on the Acehnese and a book on the Gayo. Further, for about three decades his main informant in Jeddah was Raden Aboe Bakar, a brother of the regent of Pandeglang.

A few years ago I was asked to analyse the recordings concerning Indonesia. I wrote a contribution for a book that will soon be published in the Brill series “Leiden Studies on Islam and Society”, edited by Jan Just Witkam and Leon Buskens. In this presentation I would like to discuss some issues raised by these early music recordings that were not accompanied by much other information. In particular, I shall look at musical aspects of Cianjuran singing {tembang Sunda Cianjuran) that changed during the last hundred years, like tempo, pitch level and ornamentation.

Most Sundanese recordings in the Snouck Hurgronje collection are without instrumental accompaniment. Nine cylinders include solo singing of macapat songs, (tembang Sunda) Cianjuran songs and kakawen songs. I shall discuss, for instance, two Cianjuran recordings (Papatet Ratu and a sorog song), macapat (including verses from the wawacan Panji Wulung) and a possible rajah from a pantun story (‘Djampe njawer. Lagoe Galoeh’).

It is interesting to observe that only 3 percent of the non-Indonesian recordings contains female singing, whereas the Indonesian recordings contain 30 percent female singing. Whereas these days female singing is very pronounced in West Java, Sundanese tradition wants us to believe that around 1900 there were mainly male vocalists in Cianjuran and other genres. However, it may be that female singing was already fairly common a hundred years ago.