The official account of Singapore’s history, commonly referred to as the Singapore Story, serves as a crucial unifying founding myth for the state to promulgate peace, harmony, and productivity amongst its multicultural citizens. The state not only invokes the Singapore Story in history textbooks and speeches, but embeds it in the very fabric of daily life in Singapore, from place names to popular media and music. “Telok Blangah Song: Our Bicentennial Version” (2019) is a song that communicates the Telok Blangah region’s history and strategic significance in the colonial entrepôt of Singapore since the nineteenth century, while urging youth to sustain the momentum of the nation’s progress. Blangah Rise Primary School's reworking of Singaporean singer-songwriter Kevin Mathews’ original song “Telok Blangah” (2017) writes over Mathews’ reminiscence of his childhood in Telok Blangah in the 1960s with a more explicitly nationalist account of the place, transmitting and reifying the Singapore Story for a new generation of Singaporeans. The palimpsest of stories encapsulated by the song negotiates various nostalgias, from Mathews’ personal nostalgia to the broader national nostalgia enshrined within the Singapore Story. This culminates in the manifestation of a phantom nostalgia (Emoff 2002) that creates for this new generation a transhistorical relationship to place in the service of nation-building. The story of “Telok Blangah” adds a new perspective to the important and growing body of scholarship concerning (re)constructions of memory in postcolonial nation-states. It also has broader implications for music’s function as a key apparatus in engendering nationalism in Singapore.

This paper will analyze performances by three aging female langgam Jawa singers in Central Java, namely Waldjinah, Nurhana, and Sunyahni, to examine the distinct ways that the staged performances these singers are a potent site for invoking nostalgic meanings among Javanese musicians and listeners. These three women are connected through their performances of a repertoire called langgam Jawa across the genres of kroncong and campur sari. Many Indonesians closely associate Waldjinah (b. 1945-) with langgam Jawa, particularly in kroncong arrangements (Skelchy 2015, 6). Although Waldjinah also performed campur sari arrangements of langgam Jawa later in her career, Nurhana (b. 1978- ) and Sunyahni (b. 1976- ) are better known for their performances of campur sari. Nurhana and Sunyahni occupy a generation distinct from that of Waldjinah and each woman has navigated aging, of both the body and the voice, in a unique way. At present, most of Waldjinah’s performances are lip-synced while she is seated in her wheelchair. Nurhana performs in public very rarely, preferring to stay away from media gossip. Meanwhile Sunyahni has continued to be an active performer and has started her own record. This paper joins a small but growing set of studies investigating the intersections between popular music and aging with an aim to continue expanding these studies beyond the United States and Europe (Bennett 2006, Bennett and Taylor 2012, Forman and Fairley 2012, Jennings and Gardner 2012, Twigg et al. 2015).

In 2023, during two evenings in November, Jeolla Gamyoung (Joseon Dynasty Provincial Government Complex), a newly restored historical site, and Gyeonggijeon Shrine, erected in 1410 within Hanok Maŭl (Traditional House Village) in, Jeonju, Korea, became bustling spaces; this had been in stark contrast to their usual image of tranquility. Local residents and visitors gathered at these sites, where these presentational ruins had been transformed into living museums, urging more active participation during the event titled “Night of Jeonju & Heritage Story.”

Most local festivals target visitors for economical purposes, by utilizing geographical characteristics, promoting locally produced products, or organizing cultural performances. However, during “Night of Jeonju & Heritage Story,” participants not only physically immersed themselves into the past by walking inside of the historical buildings, but also allowed themselves to emotionally engage with narratives created by the surrounding cultural producers. This study explores how and why these producers creatively develop cultural scenes and expand the implications of 'K' in K-culture, particularly in the music field, encompassing both popular and traditional genres.

Therefore, I argue that this narrative event not only modernizes traditional culture but also presents an invented form of culture through a contemporary lens, adapting to the creative industry and appealing to nostalgia. Thus, the narrative strategy of combining historical heritage with traditional music has been instrumental in developing the identity of these young cultural producers, as well as re-inventing the identity of Hanok Maŭl as another form of K-culture.