Tan: Music and the arts are a way of bringing different ethnic groups together — they can learn about each other’s cultures (Photo: SooPhye)
Prof Tan Sooi Beng studied Western music at school in Penang before being exposed to world music in the US. Back in her hometown after her master’s, she faced the reality of knowing little about Chinese or Malay culture, the latter when she started teaching at Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM).
How Tan set out to do something about that and, along the way, decolonise music education could very well be a modern-day story for the Chinese opera and glove puppet theatre (potehi in Hokkien) that her grandmother used to take her to watch as a child.
In the decades since, she has dedicated her life to research on ethnomusicology, the study of music across cultures, and worked with traditional practitioners open to sharing what they know, as well as youngsters eager to be a part of projects aimed at making the arts available to everyone.
Besides developing the bachelor’s music curriculum for USM and pushing for local Malaysian music to be included in primary and secondary school syllabi, Tan composed music — such as Pulse, Suara Rimba and Penjual Sayur — as well as authored and co-wrote many articles and books on performing arts from the region, among them Bangsawan: A Social and Stylistic History of Popular Malay Opera and The Music of Malaysia: The Classical, Folk and Syncretic Traditions.
She worked with young participants to recreate Penang’s history in Ronggeng Merdeka, Ceritera Kebun Bunga and George Town Heboh — Streets Alive, using an engaging approach that combines local languages, music, dance and theatre.
Tan’s quiet enthusiasm and dedicated efforts have not gone unnoticed. This academic and scholar-activist was bestowed Lifetime Achievement honours at the 20th Boh Cameronian Arts Awards, held in Selangor over the weekend.
Tan, who is honorary professor of ethnomusicology at USM, says the recognition will help her continue with her work as president of the International Council for Traditions of Music and Dance (ICTMD), a fine way to end her career as an academic.
“When I do my research, I feel the ordinary people have so much knowledge we can learn from. I want to promote knowledge production and historical narratives from the communities themselves, because we cannot just rely on the history books given to us in school. “The common people [know so much more], especially regarding multicultural interaction. I want to promote that as an academic and, at the same time, introduce it to the younger generation through my musical sound activities.”
Now, in her work with ICTMD, Tan is trying to decolonise, internationally, the field of ethnomusicology, which is the study of music, dance and the performing arts not based on Western classical music.
“I want to show there’s no one way of producing knowledge or disseminating it. We have to learn from the communities because they have the experience in history.”
Tan’s single-minded career can be traced back to her love of Chinese opera and glove puppetry, which sprouted in the rural Air Itam neighbourhood she grew up in during the 1960s. These shows were staged to mark festive occasions, temple ceremonies and birthdays of deities. She did not understand the stories but liked the glittering costumes and, more so, the food sold at pop-up stalls in the venues.
Grandma was a midwife who had women come and deliver their babies in her home. Her mother was one, too, at a government clinic.
Life changed for Tan when she went to primary school in Convent Light Street, in the heart of George Town. “I started being exposed to Western culture, literature and music and became very Westernised.”
A cousin who had returned from the US began teaching her to play the piano. “I excelled in it and became, like, ‘colonised’.”
She was offered a scholarship to study at Cornell University — “I wanted to be a concert pianist” — where a good teacher taught her technique and repertoire. “But I had to practise eight hours a day by myself, in the basement, where all the practice rooms are.” Loneliness got her asking what she was doing there.
The answer came when she signed up for Cornell’s courses on Southeast Asia and joined an Indonesian gamelan group on campus. “I became active in the group and found a community I could identify with. I also began taking courses on Chinese opera and world music and decided I was not going to do piano anymore.”
Wesleyan University in Connecticut, where she did her master’s, is famed for its world music programme. It had Indian, African, Japanese and Chinese musicians in residence teaching the students and Tan got into programmes that exposed her to music traditions of different countries. “They were so different and lovely.”
Chinese opera studies led her into Chinese culture, and one of the celebrations she was drawn to was Por Tor, or the Hungry Ghost Festival, which attracted large crowds that gathered to pray and watch the stage shows. “I began to attend some of the meetings of the organisers and discovered they were actually using the [festivities] to promote the culture and collect money for Chinese schools and hospitals. There was this sense of community: If we do not get help from anyone, we have to help ourselves.”
When she joined USM as a lecturer in 1980, there was a lot of debate about what constituted Malaysian culture. To find out what those on the ground thought about the issue, Tan learnt to play Malay musical instruments, and did wayang kulit and bangsawan (Malay opera), taught by the late Prof Ghulam-Sarwar Yousof, an eminent academic-cum-writer who was also a mak yong expert.
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She became friends with practitioners who took her around, taught her and fed her, like an anak angkat, she recalls. “I found that the arts were very eclectic, unlike what the government was trying to tell us. People on the ground were very open to mixing cultures, costumes and food and these mixed very well.”
While doing her PhD on bangsawan theatre in Australia, Tan learnt that the Malays of the Malay Archipelago in the early 20th century used stories, music, dance and language from anybody they met, so they could create the best content and attract the multi-ethnic audiences in Malaysia.
Bangsawan artistes were receptive of other cultures because they had to perform all over the country, under tents they set up. If the audience was mainly Chinese, they would perform Chinese stories and dress accordingly, she says.
“This changed my attitude towards looking for a Malaysian identity. It was very organic,” says Tan.
“Music and the arts are a way of bringing different ethnic groups together — they can learn about each other’s cultures. Also, when working together, they begin to find many of the stereotypes they have of other groups are not really true.”
Aware that only those who could afford instruments such as the piano and violin and expensive lessons had access to music, Tan introduced Music of Sound to show that anyone can make music using everyday sounds and objects.
It is a fun way of getting those from multi-ethnic origins to connect, cross cultural borders and understand their differences. The project title is a play on 1966 Academy Award winner The Sound of Music, whose songs were hugely popular then.
Tan started by getting her students to collect sounds, objects and conversations from the community, then create their own musical pieces with them. For example, they did one on sounds from Beach Street, with its banks and business environment, and the nearby jetties littered with rubbish thrown by visitors.
In 1994, she developed a bachelor’s programme for USM that encompassed Western and Asian music. “That was how I tried to decolonise music education and explore what [the medium] means to people who perform it in their communities.”
Towards the end of that decade, Tan noticed that after the Rent Control Act was abolished in 1997, rental rates shot up and vendors and historical communities occupying pre-war properties in George Town were forced to move out. As a result, many children lost their sense of place and identity.
Through Music of Sound, she started the Anak-Anak Kota project with Janet Pillai, who does children’s theatre, to bring these kids back to the city again, and go a step further — find out what life was like there in the past.
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Participants visited specific sites to talk to people about their history and culture and gather objects that could make sounds. They were encouraged to find out from family members the way things were before and after WWII and how people lived then. All these elements were then put together with sounds and music to create stories based on life in Penang, a project that made the team feel at home again.
“It was very rewarding and eye-opening for the children because they got to talk to their parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles and hear about how things were like before and various historical events.” Such as people being taken away during the Japanese Occupation, never to be seen again. The children also had a sense of ownership over what they put together, adds Tan, who served as facilitator.
Arts-ED Penang, which provides community-based arts and culture education in rural and urban communities, is continuing some of the Children of the City programmes.
In 2015, Tan formed Ombak Potehi to rejuvenate glove puppet theatre, brought to Malaya from Quanzhou in the early 20th century. Before the war, 10 troupes performed regularly in Penang; today there are only four. Tan roped in youngsters who began performing in their teens and grew up with her music. Some of them have come back as facilitators.
“Potehi was something I really liked to watch when I was very young. People say the art form is dying and is performed only for the temple gods now. Nobody is watching, so the [artistes] don’t really bother to put up good shows to attract younger audiences.”
Ombak Potehi strives to inject fresh elements into this art form and members sometimes invite the elderly aunties from the Beng Geok Hong Puppet Troupe to perform with them. They learn how to manipulate the puppets and manage group positions, character roles and the music, and how the traditional stories came about.
The group has written their own stories for shows, based on interviews with communities and their elders. They made costumes such as sarong sewn from batik, and created characters, among them traders and merchants, who speak in their own dialects during performances.
They also came up with legendary figures, among them Hang Li Po, and collaborated with Japan’s Team ITO to present a localised sequel of the classic Journey to the West. What they found most exciting was, “You can actually do anything with potehi”, Tan says.
Also, with input from diverse people, the shows were a way to tell stories from different communities and disseminate them to a wider audience, the thrust of her efforts.
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Diligent research and documentation are routine in her work. “I study the form first to find out what it was like traditionally, before beginning any project.” To compose and teach, she had to learn most instruments though, unlike a performing artiste, does not excel in any of them. But she plays all kinds of drums because Southeast Asian music is very percussive and it is easier to mix that.
Decolonisation of music education is taking place but it is a slow process, Tan says. In most universities, they are teaching traditional music, which is also in the secondary school curriculum. “We have scholars, and organisations like Aswara”, or the National Academy of Arts, Culture and Heritage.
As for a Malaysian identity in music, she thinks that will slowly emerge. “We always mix our cultures and this is really happening now. There’s a lot of fusion dance, music and theatre being inculcated by communities. We have a lot more to do, but it is quite encouraging to have youngsters interested to learn the old tradition.”
Having held so many roles in music and ethnomusicology, which does she find most satisfying? “It’s very hard to say. I enjoy doing research and teaching students and young people, and these sort of feed into one another. I also like doing activist work.
“In school, the nuns instilled in me this idea of serving society. I am one of the more fortunate ones who managed to go abroad and study and broaden my horizons. So, my goal was to give back to society. I have achieved quite a bit and am quite satisfied at this point in my life.”
Tan is keen to explore Por Tor, a Hokkien festival held during the seventh lunar month, when people offer food to their ancestors to appease wandering spirits, as the gates of hell open then, as some believe. She is amazed by the scale of celebrations in certain parts of Penang and “why the form is so resilient while others are dying. We can learn very much from how the Chinese have created an ecosystem for its survival and resilience”.
Performers often ask about her untiring research and projects. Clearly, she is driven to use what she has gathered for good. “At the end, research must help the traditional musicians in their well-being and survival, and to sustain their art forms,” Tan says.
The BOH Cameronian Arts Awards honour outstanding performing artists and dedicated academics shaping the next generation of talent. For the full list of nominees this year, see here.
This article first appeared on May 5, 2025 in The Edge Malaysia.
