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Came to UBC after work to get a book that finally came in for me from remote storage lol. 🥸📖 Amir Pasaribu was an Indonesian composer and music critic who unfortunately lived much of his life in exile in Suriname. I was preparing for a talk I'm giving in June and when he came up in some citations I couldn't resist going and looking at what he himself said.

I found the passage I was curious about. Unfortunately there's not a lot more than was already in the translated quotes, although it's interesting. He is talking about interviewing old timer musicians about the waves of European classical and art musicians who arrived in Java in the 1910s and 1920s.

Unfortunately this anthology doesn't give specific dates for these essays, just that they were published in magazines in the 1950s (that is, before he was blacklisted).

Daniel Carkner🥀

There's also a comment in the preface that they edited his essays to remove a high number of "foreign" words which would give difficulty to the reader. (Which I guess the average Indonesian reader in 1987 would be less comfortable with than mid 1950s ones who may have been educated in Dutch schools)

@carkner
ugh, that kind of thing *really* annoys me as a reader—footnotes are appropriate if you think a reader today is unlikely to know some vocab (or to misunderstand something if meaning has drifted), but I hate it when editors just alter what someone had written

@tkinias Indonesian publishing norms then and now weren't great, but hey, it was the writings of a blacklisted & ambiguously maybe exiled writer published 10 years before the fall of the Suharto, so at least it was out at all