Resource Spotlight | The Jaap Kunst Collection
The Jaap Kunst Collection is part of the sound archive of the former Etnomusicologisch Centrum Jaap Kunst (ECJK) at the University of Amsterdam. This Center was named after the Dutch ethnomusicologist Jaap Kunst (1891-1960). Kunst’s recordings, photographs, silent film footage, field notes, and correspondence from the Indonesian Archipelago became the basis for the collection of similar materials from elsewhere in the world, deposited by Kunst’s assistants and successors Ernst Heins and Felix van Lamsweerde, among others, from 1960 to the early 2000s.
Between 1922 and 1934, Kunst recorded more than 300 wax cylinders of music and practices from the Indonesian Archipelago. A large part of the wax cylinders is stored at the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv. They were digitized in the early 2000s but have remained hardly accessible until now.
Kunst’s oldest recordings contain gamelan music, recorded in Java in 1922 and Bali in 1925. A big wealth of the collection dates from the period between 1929 and 1934, when Kunst extensively travelled and recorded all over the archipelago. Katy Kunst-Van Wely assisted in some of the recordings as well as recorded independently. At Kunst’s request, Father Verschueren, a missionary in Merauke, recorded in West Papua in 1933. In many of his publications about West Papua, Kunst relied on the recordings made in 1926 and 1939 by the Dutch army officer and teacher C.C.F.M. Leroux during his anthropological expeditions. On his own account, Pieter Middelkoop, a pastor in Kapan, made recordings in Central Timor that also ended up in Kunst’s collection.