Antique Flute West Timor Tribal Carved Feko

Antique Flute

Antique Flute – West Timor Feko Flute 18cm long

The “feko” flute serves several functions in village life.

Cattle are free range and the flute is to call the cows home. It is also a good way to signal your hunting partner or once you get close to home.

These flutes are carved from petrocarpus indicus wood.

This is the wood most favored for carving for it’s durability and beauty.

The smaller the flute the higher the pitch. I have seen people perform music with these flutes but I can only extract two notes.

The flute is played by blowing across the top.

We have more timorese artefacts in the tribal section.

Background

feku, a wooden flute that I encountered all over Timor. It seems to be an essential part of any rural Timorese’s everyday carry: just as we might always bring along our keys and smartphone, nearly every Timorese man always keeps their feku close at hand (I never heard of women playing them, but I can’t categorically say they don’t.)

The first time I saw and heard one was in the remote village of Babotin in the rugged mountains that rise from Timor’s south coast. The musician, Yoseph, had a large feku tied to his field machete with a piece of chain. He explained that he used it to call his cows, and demonstrated some simple, bird-call like whistles on it. The instrument was handcrafted by the man himself, a figure of a snake carved along its length. I was smitten.

Only as I continued across Timor did I start to realize that the feku was everywhere. Nearly every man in the bidu band in Miomafo carried one, sometimes wearing it around their neck like a necklace (and, as I wrote in that post, they even used it as a straw to drink palm wine!). As we rode in the back of a pickup after that session, the musicians’ dogs followed happily behind along the dirt road. Ocassionally they’d be distracted by some neighbor dogs, only to be called back to the truck with a short, high-pitched whistle. Every dog knows the sound of their owner’s feku, they explained – each one had a slightly different pitch.

While it’s easy to call the feku a whistle, its actually in the class of musical instruments called ocarinas. An ocarina is what organologists call a vessel flute – that is, rather than a typical straight cylinder as found in most flutes, the interior of an ocarina is curved, even egg-shaped. This interior carving is not possible with the bamboo usually used for flutes in Indonesia, so the feku is carefully carved from kayu merah, a kind of redwood. Timorese count each hole, even the top and bottom, when talking about feku, and so an instrument with a small hole in the front and back of the feku is said to have four holes – this seems to be the most common. Just as with most ocarinas, every hole is fingered (apart from the one used for blowing), including the bottom hole, which is covered with the index finger.