Translating the Lampung Oral Literature into Music for Educational Purpose: A Case Study of Pisaan on the Indonesian Island of Sumatra

Abstract

A large body of data concerning oral literature around the globe have been reported. Moreover, in Indonesia, a country with multilingual and multicultural contexts, the study of oral literature has become an important aspect of investigation. One of the oral pieces of literature that exists in Indonesia is Pisaan, an oral tradition that can be found in Lampung, a province located on the southern tip of the island of Sumatra. Although a considerable amount of oral literature research has been conducted in the Indonesian context; however, to our best knowledge, little research has been paid to Pisaan oral literature, which plays an essential role in the Lampung community. Therefore, this study aimed to examine the oral literature by translating and transforming the Pisaan oral literature into lyrics and musical elements to educate future generations. This study adopted a qualitative approach using several instruments, i.e., semistructured interviews and recording tools, for data collection. A total of four women who were cultural activists in the age range of 37–76 years of age took part in the current study. The collected data were analyzed using a content analysis and a melody structure analysis. The results show that Pisaan has simple syllabification, which dominantly consists of consonant–vowel (CV) and consonant–vowel–consonant (CVC). The rhythm of Pisaan is categorized into syllabic time syllables, emphasizing the stress word based on its syllables. From a musical perspective, the Pisaan oral literature has been successfully translated and written into musical notation with the aim of preservation, which, as far as we are aware, has never before been done. However, we realize that the Western music notation in this study only serves as the initial stage of analysis and does not aim to replace the distinctive native-cultural values of Pisaan, offering an alternative instructional path for improving Lampung oral literature teaching methods and a valuable strategy to diversify undergraduate courses through comparable interdisciplinary inquiries. Therefore, limitations and suggestions for future research are also discussed.