The First Sound of the Sape

The longhouse was larger than I had imagined. The air inside was warm and close, carrying timber and something older underneath, the particular smell of a building that has been lived in continuously for a very long time. Light came through gaps in the wood. Somewhere further inside, someone was moving around. Outside, close enough that I could hear it without trying, the forest was making its constant sound.

I had been travelling for most of the day to reach this place in Sarawak, and I was tired in the way that travel makes you tired, which is different from ordinary tiredness. My body was present but my attention was still somewhere over the South China Sea. And then I saw the instruments.

Four sapes leaning against the wall of the open shelter, their carved bodies facing outward. I had seen photographs of the instrument before. I had listened to recordings. But standing a few feet away from them, I understood that I had not yet encountered the sape at all. The carving was not decoration. It was the first thing that told me this clearly. The spirals and interlocking forms covering the bodies were a kind of writing, patient and deliberate, the work of hands that understood the instrument as something that existed inside a larger order of things, not simply as an object to be played.

I stood there for a while. I did not touch anything. I just looked, and listened to the forest behind the wall, and tried to understand what I was in the presence of.

I had written to Mathew Ngau Jau months earlier, telling him simply that I wanted to learn the sape and asking whether he would teach me. I had found him through research, through recordings, through the kind of gradual accumulation of information that eventually produces a name and an address and a decision. He had agreed, with a brevity that I took as a good sign. So I had come.

What I had not entirely anticipated was the place. The hill that rose behind the longhouse was dense with trees, its peak wrapped in low cloud that morning as though the forest were producing its own weather. Hibiscus grew along the road. The whole landscape had a quality of abundance that was almost overwhelming, as if the earth here had never been persuaded to hold anything back. I had grown up in Singapore, had spent years in Rome, had moved through many environments, but this particular combination of humidity, greenery, timber, and birdsound was something I had no existing category for. I felt, very specifically, that I was somewhere entirely itself.

The first time I heard Mathew play was not a performance. He was simply playing, in the bamboo clearing behind the longhouse, in the early light, and I came upon it by accident. Morning light was coming through the canopy at a low angle and landing on him in fragments. The sound of the sape moved through the clearing the way sound moves through open space, not contained, not directed at anyone, simply present in the air alongside everything else.

What struck me immediately was that the music did not seem to begin. It was already happening when I arrived, and it felt as though it had been happening for some time before that, and would continue after I left. The melodies did not announce themselves and did not conclude in any way I was accustomed to hearing. They moved and rested and moved again, the bass string sustaining underneath while the melody found its way through the upper strings with a patience that felt almost geological. I stood at the edge of the clearing and did not move for a long time.

This, before a single lesson, before I had even touched the instrument, was the first real sound of the sape. Not a recording. Not a photograph. The actual thing, in the place it came from, played by the hands that had spent decades learning its logic. I understood in that moment that I had not come simply to learn a new instrument. I had come to encounter a completely different understanding of what music is.

The lessons happened downstairs, in a makeshift studio space that Mathew had assembled with the same practical ease with which he seemed to approach everything. A Roland Cube amplifier sat on the floor. Cables ran across the timber. The sape, plugged in, acquired a slightly different voice, the acoustic warmth still present but the sound now larger, more able to fill a room.

The first time Mathew placed the instrument in my hands, what I noticed was the weight. It was heavier than I had expected, and wider, the body broader across than it looks in photographs, designed to rest against the chest rather than be held away from it. The wood was smooth from years of handling, but the carved surface on the back had a different texture, raised and deliberate under the fingertips. When Mathew plucked the bass string to show me how to hold it, I felt the vibration move through the body of the instrument and into my sternum. That was the moment the sape stopped being something I had heard about and became something I was inside.

Mathew was patient in a way that had nothing to do with temperament and everything to do with understanding. He had been teaching for a long time. He knew that the sape could not be transmitted through explanation. It had to be transmitted through repetition, through listening, through the slow process of the body learning something that the mind cannot access directly. He would play a phrase. I would listen. He would play it again. He never corrected me in any explicit way. He simply played the correct version, again and again, until my version began to move toward it.

I play guitar and bass, and I had wondered before arriving whether that background would help or work against me. In the end it was neither. The sape occupied a completely different relationship to time and touch than anything I had played before. The way the thumb moves across the strings, the way the bass drone is held underneath everything else, the way a melody can seem to pause without ending, these were not things I could map onto existing knowledge. I had to begin again, which is not as easy as it sounds when you are not young and your hands already know too much.

What surprised me was that it came. Not mastery, which takes years and which I do not claim. But something. A recognition. As if my hands were finding something they had been looking for without knowing they were looking. I have thought about this many times since, and I keep returning to the same idea: that some instruments find you before you find them. The sape had been in my ears for years through recordings, had been a presence at the edge of my musical thinking, and when I finally held it, something in my body recognised it before my mind had caught up.

The evenings in the longhouse were unlike the mornings. The formality of the lesson dissolved into something more continuous, meals and conversation and music folded into one another without clear edges. Mathew would pick up the sape and play, not as performance but as presence, the way a fire is present in a room, giving heat and light without asking for attention. Others moved around the sound, gathered near it or drifted away, and the music accommodated all of it without changing its nature.

On one of those evenings they organised a birthday celebration for me. I had not mentioned it was my birthday. I still do not know how they knew. The table was covered in food that had taken most of the day to prepare, and the room was full of people I had known for less than a week who were treating me as though I had always been part of the household. I played Leling, the first song Mathew had taught me, the classic melody that the whole community knows, and people listened and talked and went back to eating, and the music and the meal and the conversation became, for a while, completely inseparable. Which is, I think, exactly what music is for.

Mathew had written out the lyrics for me in a notebook — transliterations of the Kenyah words, the chorus first, then the four verses. I kept that page. I still have it. The handwriting is his; the melody it carries was already older than either of us by the time I learned it.

Someone recorded it that evening. Looking at it now, I can still hear the uncertainty in my hands, but I also hear the beginning of something.

On the last morning I watched Mathew carry the Roland Cube amplifier down from the longhouse with the same ease with which he carried the sape itself, one in each hand, cables looped over his shoulder. The instrument and the amplifier, centuries apart in their origins, treated with equal matter-of-factness. The sape had survived the arrival of electricity and recording technology and international audiences not by resisting those things but by absorbing them without losing its essential nature. Mathew carried that understanding in his body. Nothing was in contradiction. Everything was simply the next thing.

The sape has been part of my work ever since. It appears in the compositions I write with Fortressa, in performances across Italy and Morocco, in small rooms where people encounter it for the first time and go quiet in a way that tells me the instrument is doing what it has always done, reaching something before the listener has had time to decide what to make of it. I play Leling still. Something of that first week in Sarawak is always present when I do, not as nostalgia but as orientation, a reminder of where the thread began.

But what I carry most from that visit is not the music itself. It is the understanding of music as something inseparable from the place and people and tradition that produced it. The sape does not exist apart from the forest. It does not exist apart from the longhouse, or the hill, or the oral traditions of the communities who have kept it alive across generations. When I play it, I am not simply playing an instrument. I am in relationship with all of that, however imperfectly, however incompletely. That relationship began in a bamboo clearing in Sarawak, on a morning when I had not yet touched the instrument and was simply standing still, listening to a sound that seemed to come from the wood and the water and the trees, and understanding, before I could have explained it, that this was going to matter.

Every artistic life contains one sound that arrives before we understand why it matters. This was that sound.