In Memoriam: Wim van Zanten
5 February 1942 - 5 March 2026
It's 6:30 PM, and the Faculty of Social Sciences is quiet. Classes are over, students and staff have gone home. But at the Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology, music is playing. Live music. A small group of students has gathered in Wim van Zanten's office, sitting on thin cushions on the floor. Wim, an ethnomusicologist, is teaching a class: he's introducing students to Tembang Sunda Cianjuran, music from Sunda, West Java, on which he has spent years researching. This isn't a typical music lesson: it's part of the Anthropology of Music course, about music as a part of society.
Wim van Zanten worked at the CADS Institute from 1971 until his retirement in 2007. He conducted fieldwork on music in Malawi and Indonesia. Together with Sundanese musicians, including Uking Sukri and Yus Wiradiredja, he worked on transcriptions and recordings of Tembang Sunda Cianjuran, not only for research purposes but also to make this music more accessible to a wider audience and to develop teaching materials. He published two films about the Minangkabau performing arts in West Sumatra, developed innovative methods for analysing music recordings and was one of the first within the institute to work with digital editing techniques. Wim was one of the few ethnomusicologists interested in popular music and published on Indonesian pop music together with Bart Barendregt.
Wim also developed and taught statistics courses, focusing on forms of quantitative analysis valuable in cultural anthropology and development sociology. His influence is still apparent in the curriculum of the current CADS bachelor's programme. Statistics was not a favorite subject for many cultural anthropology students. Nevertheless, he was respected by many students because he took students seriously, because of his passionate way of teaching and above all because of his caring nature.
While most of his teaching focused on research methods, Wim remained primarily an ethnomusicologist. He showed great commitment to the field and supported colleagues in their work. From 1993 to 2007 he was editor of the journal Oideion - Performing Arts Worldwide, and in 1997 he started an online version of the journal in which publications could also include audio-visual material. He was president of the Dutch Society for Ethnomusicology 'Arnold Bake', and (board-)member of the International Council for Traditional Music.
Wim invited Sundanese musicians to cooperate on research, to perform in the Netherlands, and together teach students. In addition to the groups of students he taught every year in his Anthropology of Music course, he founded the music group Dangiang Parahiangan with more advanced musicians - a group that played together for decades, performed at various festivals, and experimented with a fusion of Tembang Sunda and jazz.
After his retirement, Wim continued his research, continued making music with Dangiang Parahiangan, and worked in various other capacities, including for the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage. He was rightly proud of his book on The Music of the Baduy people of West Java (2021), not only because it was the result of decades of fieldwork, but also because, after some effort, he had succeeded in including audio-visual material in this publication.
He will be missed, not only for his warm and caring personality, but also for the way he introduced us to performing arts. Wim made the intangible tangible - through his research, through his teaching and by bringing together students, researchers and musicians.
Igor Boog, on behalf of the Institute for Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology.