Change and Identity in the Music Cultures of Lombok, Indonesia

By David D. Harnish

This longitudinal study weaves the complex stories of many disparate musics into an account of quests for identities that illuminates Lombok’s history, its complex religious and ethnic composition, and its current political circumstances. It focuses on agents, musicians and leaders on the ground, and the socioreligious and artistic changes that transformed many music forms. The book outlines the years of political difficulty for music and years of transition and government interventions to remake musics, and identifies the emerging ideologies and developments that laid the groundwork for a diversity of musics – traditional, Islamic, popular – to simultaneously exist in an unprecedented way.