This paper examines the musical performance of mangongkal holi, the ancestral bone-exhumation ritual of the Toba Batak people of North Sumatra, Indonesia, with particular attention to the role of gondang sabangunan music and tortor dance in mediating memory, cosmology, and social identity. Drawing on hybrid ethnographic fieldwork in Sianjur Mulamula—including audiovisual documentation, musical transcription, and ritual theory, I argue that gondang functions not merely as ritual accompaniment but as a powerful musical compendium that structure ritual processions, sustains kinship and social relationships (dalihan na tolu), and facilitates communication between the human and ancestral realms.

Engaging prior scholarship on Toba Batak ritual music, including Artur Simon (1982), Okazaki (1994), and Mauly Purba (2000, 2004), among others, alongside broader ethnomusicological discussions of music rituals in Southeast Asia, the paper situates mangongkal holi within a dynamic continuum of continuity and transformation. Particular attention is given to the leader pargonsi (musicians), Aliman Tua Limbong, and the negotiation of indigenous cosmology with Christian influences and contemporary social realities. By foregrounding music as a central ritual ceremony, this study demonstrates how ritual music sustains ancestral presence, negotiates cultural resilience, and articulates indigenous identity amid historical and modern pressures.

Commonly defined as the quartet of metallophones that accompanies Balinese shadow puppet theater, gender wayang is widely described as “the music for wayang.” Yet in twenty-first-century Bali, this definition is increasingly partial. Gender wayang now circulates through extracurricular school programs, arts competitions, banjar and sanggar initiatives, radio and television broadcasts of the Puja Tri Sandhya mantra, commercial recordings, and experimental compositions. While these developments suggest vitality, they also raise a central question: what, precisely, is being sustained? Drawing on Huib Schippers’ ecological “Five-Domain Framework,” and engaging scholarship by Lisa Gold, Ako Mashino, and Brita Heimarck, this paper argues that development and sustainability within the gender wayang complex are paradoxically intertwined. Rather than equating sustainability with the number of performers or new compositions, I examine four interrelated domains, systems of learning, musicians and communities, contexts and constructs, and media and infrastructures, to assess how change simultaneously enables and endangers distinct dimensions of the tradition. Standardization in formal education, competition repertoires detached from puppetry, shifting ritual practices, gender inclusion, and expanding media circulation have broadened participation while narrowing regional repertoires and weakening links to dramatic function. By disentangling these processes, this paper reframes sustainability as a multi-layered condition rather than a binary of loss or survival. For ethnomusicology, this case underscores the need to theorize development as both generative and erosive, to interrogate what stakeholders value as “tradition,” and to foreground context, power, and mediation in analyses of musical change.

Hiding in plain sight in Yogyakarta, a city in Muslim-majority Indonesia, the top floor of a clothing store has hosted a twice weekly drag performance called Raminten Cabaret Show since 2014. The shows often begin with performances of traditional Javanese dance and then feature drag acts ranging from American pop stars like Beyoncé and Nicki Minaj to Indonesian popular artists like Dewi Perssik and Inul Daratista, complete with acrobatics and pyrotechnics. Sexual and gender minorities in Indonesia are currently threatened by a criminal code which was passed in 2022. Despite these social and legal threats, Indonesia has a long history of tolerance and recognition of plural gender expressions and this remains evident in sold-out performances at the Raminten Cabaret Show. Audiences are primarily Indonesian and typically range in age from 20-60 although attendees sometimes bring their children to the event. This presentation focuses on the practice of lip-syncing, commonplace in drag but unique in this context in that the performers use live recordings instead of studio recordings for their performances. By providing an ethnographic case study, I extend Philip Auslander’s challenge to the binary between the live and the mediatized by examining how drag queens perform using prerecorded music from live events.