The "gentlemen" of ethnology

 

Jaap Kunst/Robert von Heine-Geldern

Jaap Kunst (1891-1960) was an official of the Dutch colonial government in Indonesia. Kunst had a law degree, was a musician, and an ethnographer. Robert von Heine-Geldern (1886-1968) an Austrian nobleman carrying the title of Freiherr, a leftover title from the Holy Roman Empire. He was a grandnephew of the poet Heinrich Heine, and a noted archaeologist and ethnographer. Both specialized in Southeast Asian culture. Von Heine-Geldern introduced Southeast Asian studies as an academic field while Kunst coined the term ethnomusicology in 1955 (to this day underlined in red—misspelled—by Google.) Kunst was the first one to record Indonesian gamelan music. The natural companion to Jaap Kunst in this painting would have been a certain Mr. Hobbel, a Dutch army official serving in Indonesia who recorded (or collected) the music of the Moluccas that is featured in the top 100. Kunst, in the liner notes to an album in the Columbia World Library of Folk and Primitive Music series dedicated to Indonesia, suggest to the Barbar song in question, an "extremely ancient cultural connexion [sic]." In the same paragraph he mentions von Heine-Geldern as having demonstrated similar conclusions. Mr. Hobbel's identity remains unsure to me (a photo doesn't seem to exist, not on-line at least.) Jaap Kunst became interested in folk music while, as a young man, vacationing in Terschelling, an island in the North of the Netherlands. He recorded an album for Moses Asch's Folkways label dedicated to the music of the Netherlands. Several tunes I can sing-a-long with including my shower classic Drie Schuintamboers.