TRIBUTE ABDUL - Perdana Library

A Princely Patron of the Arts
(By Haji Abdul Mubin Sheppard P.P.T., C.M.G., M.B.E., E.D.)
"By hearing the music of a Prince we know the character
of his Virtue".
More than two thousand years ago a great philosopher
made this observation and his pronouncement is still accepted
and honoured even today.
Princes had provided the chief source of patronage both
for music and the Arts in general long before our philosopher
flourished, and in many Asian countries their patronage only
ceased with the advent of colonial "protection" and the development
of democratic institutions.
In Malaya, music was an adjunct of the Arts rather an
individual manifestation, but it played an important secondary
role in Court dances and Court drama, and in the ritual and
ceremonies which were a feature of man's cycle of existence.
We know that many of these elaborate dances and ceremonies
were still performed at the Courts of Malay rulers at the end
of the 19th. century, but the growing influence of Western
civilisation in most of the Malay States, and the absence of
any individual Prince with the determination to revive the role
of a Patron of the traditional Malay Arts, resulted in half a
century of hibernation which might have been mistaken for
complete extinction.
The Japanese occupation and the subsequent state of
Emergency crushed latent artistic initiative and banished the
leisured atmosphere in which the Arts thrive.
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