Abstract
In this chapter, I analyse NADI’s collective identity by examining certain fundamental factors and processes in group formation and cohesion. These include some important shared characteristics and experiences, which constitute and maintain the unicity of NADI as a group, as well as the processes through which NADI constructs its notion of tradition, which is at the core of the group’s vision and mission. The chapter is made up of three parts: the first focuses on the formation of group unity, the second on conceptions of tradition and questions related to preservation, and the third on the ways in which NADI reconstructs, reimagines and reinvents tradition. Read all together, these features and processes help us to understand NADI’s contemporary collective identity.
Takkan Melayu hilang di dunia. [The Malay people will never disappear from the earth]
— Hang Tuah
The roots themselves are in a constant state of flux and change. The roots don’t stay in one place. They change shape. They change colour. And they grow. There is no such thing as a pure point of origin, least of all in something as slippery as music, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t history.
(Hebdige 1987, p. 10)
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Notes
- 1.
Communal spirit in which people help one another.
- 2.
A luxurious and prestigious traditional brocade textile.
- 3.
A traditional form of musical theatre from northern Malaysia.
- 4.
The Hindu kingdom that reigned across Southeast Asia from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries.
- 5.
A respectful title for a master or highly skilled person in Mandarin.
- 6.
Unsatisfied with the use of Western notation to systematise and teach Malay traditional music, Abdullah and Blackburn (2015) have proposed their own method to identify the “acceptable sound” of musical instruments through Spectromorphological Timbral Notation.
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Lizeray, J.YM. (2018). NADI Singapura: A Case Study of Group Identity and Tradition. In: Semionauts of Tradition. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-1011-9_4
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