Rong ngeng The transformation of Malayan social dance music in Thailand since the 1930s
Item
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Title
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Rong ngeng The transformation of Malayan social dance music in Thailand since the 1930s
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:1c9612fe374c:11101
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identifier
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11360
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Creator
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Ross, Lawrence N.,
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Contributor
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Stephen Blum
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Date
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2011
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Music | Asian studies | Asian history | dance | history | Malaysia | ronggeng | Thailand
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Abstract
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This is a historical and musicological inquiry into how rural performers, at the confluence of two distinctly different cultural and linguistic areas, created traditional repertoires from multiple sources. It examines the migration of the well-known ronggeng social dance music of Malaya and Indonesia to southwest Thailand in the 1930s, and the distinctive song and dance genre, called rong ngeng, that subsequently developed there. Rong ngeng was sung and danced to violin and hand-drum accompaniment in public dances where male patrons paid a token fee for an approximately three-minute round with a professional female dancer. It was a popular medium for rural courtship, and performing it was a rite of passage for many young men and women.;This dissertation chronicles rong ngeng history from the 1930s until the present, exploring how island communities took up the form, and propagated it throughout the lower Andaman Sea coast. During the genre's golden age of the 1940s and '50s, new Thai-speaking performers adopted rong ngeng and transformed its Malayan repertoire (itself a fusion of music from urban theaters, dance halls, and rural folk songs), adapting it to a local Thai poetic form, lullabies, courtship songs, and folk theater tunes. This study traces the development of rong ngeng's two distinct forms: a Malay-language, Malayan-repertoire style of the islands, and a Thai-language, hybrid, coastal mainland style that came to be known as 'tanjong song.';Rong ngeng is a case study of a cultural form's transformations as it moves through different social, economic, and linguistic zones. It is also a window into movement and migration of individuals and communities in the twentieth century. Its history provides a local perspective of social developments in a region situated at the confluence of two modern states and the types of changes that took place as political and cultural dominance shifted from Malay to Thai.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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Music
