PhD Katharine Wakeling - Criticalia [PDF]

Representing Balinese Music: A Study of the Practice and Theorization of Balinese Gamelan

Katharine Elizabeth Wakeling

A dissertation submitted to the University of London, in accordance with the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Department of Music School of Oriental and African Studies

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Abstract The thesis examines how, and with what implications, Western and Balinese musicians and scholars have sought to represent and create theories of Balinese gamelan music. It considers the potential problems that arise from imposing theoretical systems devised for quite different musical and cultural contexts onto Balinese music, and offers an alternative, practice-based account. The thesis is divided into three parts. Part One considers techniques of representing Balinese music in the early twentieth century and positions the era’s surge of Western academic interest within the Dutch colonial project. Examining Balinese and Western accounts, the thesis establishes key assumptions underlying these works and highlights how Balinese were often significant participants in the construction of such representations. Part Two examines how, post-Independence, imaginings of Balinese music have been steered by the Indonesian music education system and by the state’s management of musical creation and performance. It considers the modern Indonesian construct of téori gamelan and discusses how this term has functioned largely as an empty signifier, used to position Balinese music-making in accordance with the various socio-political needs of theoretician, institution, local government and nation state. The thesis then addresses certain aspects of music-making since the fall of the New Order, considering how the era’s political and cultural changes relate to how Balinese have created, imagined and talked about gamelan music, with particular focus on composers’ representations of foreign materials and qualities of kebalian (‘Balineseness’) in their works. Part Three contrasts these representations with a preliminary analysis of certain practices employed by Balinese to create, teach, learn and refine music. By demonstrating the types of practical and fluid musical understanding that Balinese musicians apply, the thesis illustrates how these processes prove incompatible with the rigidity of the various musical theories claiming to account for Balinese gamelan music.

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Table of Contents Abstract…………………………………………………………………………. page 2 Table of Contents……………………………………………………………….. page 3 Table of Figures…………………………………………………………………. page 4 CD Contents…………………………………………………………………….. page 5 A Note on Orthography, Notation and Transcription………………..………. page 6 Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………...page 8 Author’s Declaration…………………………………………………………… page 9 Chapter One (Introduction)……………………………………………………. page 10 ‘Hierarchic Patterns’: Music Theory, Structure and the Black Box

Part One: Colonial Representations Chapter Two…………………………………………………………………….. page 29 Exploring Musicology: An Account of Colonial Musicology and Cultural Interaction in Bali Chapter Three…………………………………………………………………... page 52 Harmonizing Aesthetics: Gamelan music as Art and Social Order in Colonial Bali Chapter Four……………………………………………………………………. page 83 The Majapahit Complex: Theories of Music History in Colonial Bali

Part Two: Composing Tèori Chapter Five…………………………………………………………………….. page 120 Ordering Balinese Music: Introducing Tèori Chapter Six……………………………………………………………………… page 174 Inside Out and Outside In: Representations of the Balinese and the Non-Balinese in Contemporary Composition on Bali

Part Three: Balinese Gamelan as Practice Chapter Seven…………………………………………………………………... page 219 ‘Olah nabuh gén’: Just Practising Gamelan Chapter Eight…………………………………………………………………… page 261 Conclusions Appendix One: Foreign language quotations…………………………………… page 267 Appendix Two: Composition/recording plans…………………………………... page 270 Appendix Three: Glossary of terms…………………………………………….. page 273 Bibliography…………………………………………………………………….. page 277 3

List of Figures and Transcriptions Figure 5.1 Figure 5.2 Figure 5.3

Patutan chart (1959) Taman Sari ‘Patutan’ (1939) Titilaras Dingdong (1960)

Figure 6.1 Figure 6.2 Figure 6.3 Figure 6.4 Figure 6.5 Figure 6.6 Figure 6.7 Figure 6.8 Figure 6.9 Figure 6.10

Bapang, opening “Japang” section Kunjan Jintoyo (sanshin and vocal line) Windu Sara, central section (Dvořák cycle) New World Symphony (second movement theme) Tawur, leluangan drumming Tawur, ‘Pola Gilak II’ jegog line and gong structure Ponggang in gamelan beleganjur Tawur, ponggang ‘salsa’ Chanda Klang, suling ‘canon’ Chanda Klang, octave displacement

Figure 7.1 Figure 7.2 Figure 7.3 Figure 7.4 Figure 7.5 Figure 7.6 Figure 7.7 Figure 7.8 Figure 7.9

Tabuh Gari, opening section Tabuh Gari, polos variants Singsal, extract 1 Singsal, extract 1 jublag variants Singsal, extract 1 nyong-nyong opening figuration Singsal, extract 1 nyong-nyong closing figuration Singsal, extract 2 Singsal, Mulyadi’s notation for extract 2 Singsal, extract 2, jublag variants

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CD Contents 1.

Bapang (I Wayan Sinti). Live recording by the author. Bali Arts Festival, 2007.

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Windu Sara (I Wayan Sinti). Live recording by the author. Bali Arts Festival, 2007.

3.

Tawur (I Komang Mariyana). Live recording by the author. ISI Denpasar, Bali, 2007

4.

Chanda Klang (Sang Nyoman Arsawijaya). Live recording by Andrew McGraw, included with permission. Denpasar, Bali, 2007.

5.

Tabuh Gari (performed by members of Banjar Paang). Live recording by the author. Denpasar, Bali, 2007.

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Singsal, extract 1 (I Wayan Mulyadi). Live recording by the author. Mambal, Bali, 2007.

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Singsal, extract 2 (I Wayan Mulyadi). Live recording by the author. Mambal, Bali, 2007.

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A Note on Orthography, Transcription and Notation

All foreign words and terms are italicized throughout the thesis. For extended foreign language quotations, I cite only the English translation in the main body of the text and include the original language quotation in Appendix 1. All translations are the author’s own, unless otherwise specified. In citations, I reproduce the spelling and format as used in the original source; colonial-era texts in Balinese and Malay use ‘oe’ to stand for ‘u’, ‘dj’ for ‘j’, and ‘tj’ for ‘c’ (pronounced ‘ch’). Indonesian texts often do not distinguish between e and é (the latter rhyming with ‘pay’). However, I make this distinction in, for instance, ‘téori’. In Balinese, I further distinguish between é (denoting the same vowel sound as in Indonesian) and è, which connotes a slightly different sound, closer to the ‘u’ in ‘gut’. For instance, the first syllable of ‘Kètèwèl’ rhymes with something between ‘cut’ and ‘get’. Modified Western staff notation is used throughout the thesis. To highlight the variety of tunings of gamelan ensembles discussed, I individually align each ensemble’s tuning with the Western chromatic scale rather than apply a single, wholesale tuning scheme. However, ensemble pitch and interval relationships are still much approximated and I encourage the reader to listen to the recorded examples while following transcriptions. In analysis, I also refer to transcribed passages using Balinese solfege (ding dong deng etc.) and cipher figures (where Balinese solfege syllables are replaced by numbers). Numbers with dots above represent the tone heard an octave higher, whereas a dot below denotes the tone heard an octave lower. As is standard in contemporary Balinese gamelan notation, a full-stop ( . ) denotes a rest. Due to the considerable range of gamelan tunings, scales and modal groupings used in the musical examples, I assign numbers, solfege and approximate Western tones individually for each work under consideration. Following McGraw (2005), in the transcriptions and analysis the following symbols at the base of the stave represent particular gong/instrumental strokes: G = large gong, P = kempur, t = klentong, J = jegogan tone, C = calung/jublag tone. A calung/ jublag (C) tone beneath the stave indicates a tone an octave below the current gangsa tone. A jegogan (J) tone under the stave indicates an octave below the current calung pitch. When a large gong (G) stroke is marked, this also denotes a jegog stroke (with pitch corresponding as above) unless otherwise stated. Bar lines have not been used, although a dotted line across the stave is sometimes employed to designate division between sections or phrases for clarity of later discussion. 6

Conventional Western repeat markings are also used on occasion, as are Western dynamic markings and the terms rit. and accel. for speed fluctuations. Commentary on Balinese terminology and approaches to dynamic and tempo is included in the text itself. In interlocking lines, sangsih and polos lines are demarcated by polos stems pointing downwards and sangsih upwards, unless otherwise stated. In order to avoid cluttering the stave, rests in interlocking lines are often omitted. For the nyong-nyong interlocking lines in I Wayan Mulyadi’s Singsal (figures 7.3 and 7.5) where division of lines is not relevant to discussion, these two parts are beamed as a single line. Following Tenzer (2000) I also beam interlocking kendang parts as a single line. I employ a five-line percussion stave to notate kendang strokes, as used in McGraw (2005). I notate individual strokes as follows:

‘Filler’ strokes on the kendang are denoted by an empty stem in the transcription. For the tawa-tawa line in figure 7.3, filled note-heads designate a ‘byong’ (ringing on-boss stroke) while crossed note-heads denote a ‘kecek’ (off-boss stroke, using the wooden part of the beater).

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Acknowledgements I wish to acknowledge the financial assistance received from the Arts and Humanities Research Council during my research, and the support of the Lembaga Ilmu Pengetahuan Indonesia which enabled me to conduct fieldwork in Bali during 2006-2007. I would like to thank all the musicians, teachers and friends in Bali who made my research possible. My special thanks go to I Nengah Susila, I Gedé Arsana, I Wayan Dibia, I Nyoman Windha, I Wayan Sinti, I Wayan Rai, Ida Wayan Oka Granoka Gong, I Wayan Beratha, I Wayan Madra Aryasa, I Ketut Gedé Asnawa, I Komang Astita, I Madé Subandi, I Madé Arnawa, Ni Ketut Suryatini, I Komang Sudirga, I Wayan Turun, Sang Nyoman Arsawijaya, I Wayan Sudirana, I Kadek Wahyu, I Komang Mariyana, I Wayan Sudiasa and I Wayan Mulyadi, among many others. My thanks to all at the karawitan department at ISI, to the excellent musicians of banjar Paang, to all at Sanggar Tirta Yasa, and to the ladies of the ASTI Pertiwi gamelan group for many memorable musical experiences. I wish to extend my deepest thanks to Professor Richard and Dr Judith Fox for their support and encouragement throughout my fieldwork and writing-up. My thanks also to Richard for his insightful comments on Chapter Four. I would also like to thank Ni Madé Pujawati and I Nengah Susila for their generous guidance in the Balinese-language translation for Chapter Seven. My thanks to Drs. Andy McGraw and Sonja Downing for many helpful heads-up during fieldwork, and for Andy’s permission to use his recording of Chanda Klang. Thank you also to London’s Lila Cita gamelan group for their support throughout my research. My thanks to all at the SOAS music department, particularly Professor Owen Wright and Professor Richard Widdess for their support and assistance. Many thanks to Dr David Hughes for his guidance and support in supervising my research for the first two years of this project, and for his helpful comments on Chapters Six and Seven. Thank you also to Dr Nick Gray for his support as co-supervisor for the last year, and particularly for his guidance in Parts Two and Three of the thesis. My sincerest and warmest thanks to my supervisor, Professor Mark Hobart, whose insight, dedication and encouragement have made completing this thesis such a rewarding challenge. I wish to thank all my family and friends who have supported me with such goodwill throughout my research. My special thanks to Sholto Kynoch for his heroic kindness. Lastly, I wish to thank my mother, without whose unwavering support this project would not have been possible.

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Author’s Declaration All work presented in this thesis was done in accordance with the Regulations of the School of Oriental and African Studies and the University of London. The work presented in the thesis is my own, with the exception of brief excerpts cited for discussion from other sources. The latter have, without exception, been clearly indicated with full bibliographic and/or other relevant reference. All views presented in the thesis are my own, and in no way represent those of the School of Oriental and African Studies or the University of London. This thesis has not been presented to any other University for examination, or for any other degree, either in the United Kingdom or elsewhere.

Signed:

Date:

28th February, 2010

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Chapter One (Introduction) ‘Hierarchic Patterns’: Music Theory, Structure and the Black Box In this dissertation, I examine Western and Balinese representations of Balinese gamelan music and assess the critical disjuncture which arises between gamelan music’s theorization and its practice. The thesis challenges the ways in which Balinese music has been conventionally interpreted and represented. I propose that various scholarly moves to dislocate Balinese music-making and its theorization from Balinese society, colonial and Indonesian politics, issues of modernization and the global marketplace, have produced a received account of Balinese gamelan which fails to address adequately the complex circumstances in which music and music theory have been produced. The thesis considers the ways that music-making in Bali has been enunciated in terms of music theory since Bali’s colonial occupation, through an examination of how Western and Balinese writers, musicians, patrons and bureaucrats have framed Balinese gamelan music to articulate a range of extra-musical concerns. I shall consider how and why such representations have significant political implications: the thesis addresses how ‘musical theory’ more generally stands as a privileged form of enunciation; it examines how such representations have substantiated particular stances on Bali’s religious and cultural status and heritage; and, in doing so, the thesis notes how music’s slippery status as an object of signification provides its theorizers with a powerfully flexible strategy to substantiate such claims (or counter-claims). The final part of the dissertation highlights the striking disjuncture between these theoretical representations and practical Balinese approaches to music-making, through the analysis of a series of Balinese rehearsal practices. By investigating techniques employed by gamelan musicians in putting together both new and established repertoire, the thesis examines how the types of active musical understanding employed to learn, construct and refine music contrast with the theoretical accounts of Balinese gamelan discussed. My study focuses on a number of under-examined aspects of Balinese musicological history and music-making. By investigating how, why, by whom and for what purposes Balinese music has been variously represented (through text, and on occasion, musical composition) the thesis seeks to highlight several major problems and omissions in much contemporary scholarship on Balinese gamelan music. I propose there to be a lack of critical engagement with the historical circumstances in which musicological representations have been formulated, which has resulted in three difficulties. Firstly, colonial musical encounters between Westerners and Balinese have 10

been subject to a depoliticized, romanticized vision of social accord. While musicological studies considering the period often acknowledge broader issues of colonial subjugation, the domain of musical interaction is usually deemed safely excludable from political purpose, an exclusion this study aims to remedy. Secondly, this lack of concern with political circumstances has resulted in a similar lack of critical engagement with the textual representations themselves. This has seen the continued promulgation in contemporary scholarship of various colonial-era theoretical frameworks, metaphors and historical narratives, despite their marked association with the aims of colonial governance. Indeed, the continued use of many of these ideas within later oppressive Indonesian government arts policy appears to have only increased their popularity and prevalence in Western scholarship. Thirdly, the role of various Balinese figures in guiding and managing colonial-era representations of gamelan music has not been adequately analysed: studies tend to present an image only of beneficent, apolitical interaction between Balinese and Westerners, which a closer analysis of colonial sources again suggests to be far from the case. In summary, each of these problems connects to a broader epistemological question: what kind of implications do the production, organisation and dissemination of musical knowledge hold for relations of power in Bali, particularly when such implications are masked? It is this question which Parts One and Two of the thesis will principally address. In relation to my study’s second object of study—practices of Balinese musicmaking in rehearsal—I suggest a final problem with many scholarly accounts of Balinese gamelan. The thesis proposes that contemporary scholarship’s concern with maintaining the framework and vocabulary of established musicological theory on Balinese gamelan has prevented studies engaging with the techniques and terminology by which Balinese musicians go about making music in practice. The thesis seeks to question a history of analyses which often ignore or cannot account for how Balinese might set about composing, developing, rehearsing and performing music, talking about, changing and refining composition, or commenting on and evaluating performance. When such accounts appear to diverge from, or even counter, the approaches employed by Balinese in musical practice and in attendant Balinese-language commentary, questions also emerge as to what purpose these analyses serve and on what grounds they have been formulated. Part Three of the thesis challenges such analyses by asking how Balinese musicians approach certain aspects of music-making in rehearsal, to produce an alternative practice-based account. Through the close analysis of situated Balinese practices, this thesis investigates some of the precise modes by which particular Balinese musicians operate on particular occasions, and in doing so aims to begin bridging this gap in current scholarship. 11

In this introductory chapter I shall pose the problem that certain theoretical approaches applied in significant contemporary studies of Balinese gamelan music present an inadequate framework with which to engage with Balinese practices. In addressing the problem, the chapter will not present a comprehensive survey or criticism of extant accounts of Balinese music-making; indeed, as Parts One and Two of the thesis primarily constitute a critical analysis of scholarly representations of Balinese music, both colonial and post-colonial, I reserve detailed engagement with these works for those chapters. However, in assessing some of the popular theoretical strategies employed by analysts of Balinese music (and where relevant, Javanese gamelan music), certain tensions emerge between current Western scholarly approaches and a preliminary consideration of Balinese practices. These disjunctures subsequently frame a series of critical questions concerning the idea and implications of theorizing, both with regard to Balinese music-making and in more general terms. In turn, these questions prompt the construction of an alternative theoretical template for this thesis, which I outline below.

Approaches to Analysing Balinese Music In his study of Balinese musik kontemporer (contemporary or radical composition), the ethnomusicologist Andy McGraw notes the following concern: In many ethnomusicological works there is a disconnect between ethnography and analysis, a disconnect in which Western notation and pre-existing methods of analysis seem to take on a life of their own, functioning as a kind of black box (2005: xiii).

This introduction considers some of the problems and implications of the presence of a ‘black box’ in various Western accounts of Balinese music—a field of study which proves to have been oddly predicated on such disconnections. Indeed, a central concern of this thesis is to examine the range of analytical processes which have seen Balinese gamelan music-making decontextualized from Balinese performance as a whole, disengaged from its social and political context, and/or dislocated from the practices and accounts of Balinese musicians themselves. While Parts One and Two consider the historical circumstances and implications of such Western theoretical approaches since the colonial era, this sense of disconnection remains powerfully apparent in many contemporary accounts of Balinese music-making. For instance, a lack of attention has been afforded to processes of Balinese music-making or reflection outside of sites of specific BalineseWestern engagement. For commentary and quotation, ethnographic accounts of Balinese music commonly rely on one-to-one interviews or on the researcher’s solo music lessons with a Balinese teacher, rather than considering musical or verbal interaction between

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Balinese musicians among themselves.1 Meanwhile, this engagement is usually conducted in either the modern, predominantly bureaucratic language of Indonesian or even in English rather than in Balinese, despite the latter standing as the primary vehicle for Balinese musicians’ verbal commentary in rehearsal, and for the majority of conversation between Balinese.2 However, aside from these methodological concerns, this chapter will initially focus on one particularly fertile example of analytical ‘disconnection’. I will discuss how certain notably popular Western interpretations of Balinese music-making have been based on structuralist models in their formulation, the critical analysis of which provides a useful springboard to introduce many of the central issues of this thesis. I first briefly highlight the particular presence of this structuralist approach in various works, before demonstrating some of the immediate disjunctures which occur when structuralist accounts of Balinese music are contrasted with extant practice-centred approaches engaging with Balinese musicians in rehearsal and performance contexts. However, perhaps more importantly, a critical examination of the application of structuralism as a theoretical template for Balinese music generates wider questions about the implications of theorizing Balinese gamelan. The chapter goes on to consider some of the power issues which attend the imposition of Western-devised ‘universal’ theories onto non-Western cultural practices.3 The composer and ethnomusicologist Michael Tenzer makes a clear distinction between types of Balinese musical conceptualization in his Gamelan Gong Kebyar: The Art of Twentieth-Century Balinese Music (2000) by identifying two frameworks of musical understanding held by Balinese musicians. He describes a ‘local discourse of theory, a body of thought comprising terminology and concepts developed in the villages and at the shifting centers of courtly power over many centuries’ plus ‘a further group of structural principles (underlying patterns and principles of melodic shape, figuration and

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Gray’s study of composition and improvisation in gamelan gendér wayang (2006) with its detailed examination of musical interaction between Balinese musicians is a rare exception. 2

Heimarck’s Balinese Discourses on Music and Modernization: Village Voices and Urban Views presents a particularly striking example of this avoidance of Balinese language, where its absence (and the use of Indonesian) is justified to avoid the ‘complex question’ of caste and to allow ‘consistency between oral and written discourses, thereby facilitating a comparison of village musicians’ discourses and institutional discourses’ (2003: 22-23). Despite the book’s central premise to highlight contrasts between bureaucratic processes of state-monitored music education in Bali and Balinese ‘village’ practices, the use of only Indonesian and English language for discussion with all Balinese consultants surely proscribes non-bureaucratic engagement with the supposed ‘village voices’ themselves. 3

Here, I use the terms Western/Westerners in reference to various practices of non-indigenous musical theorizing, but will consider the genealogy of the contrasting approaches which comprise these practices in greater detail in the thesis. 13

drum pattern design)’ (Tenzer 2000: 9). He states these principles to be ‘intuitively understood’, and that such concepts are ‘rarely disseminated verbally since musicians have scarce need to think in such abstractions’ (Tenzer 2000: 9). While the precise historical background to the type of terminology suggested in Tenzer’s first framework is contentious (and indeed will be subject to extensive consideration in Parts One and Two of the thesis), for now I focus briefly on the notion of this second framework of ‘structural principles’, which, it should be noted, are initially presented as distinct from the first, historically-situated set of Balinese approaches. Tenzer’s analytical approach in his Gamelan Gong Kebyar is founded on what he terms ‘a focus on sound’ (2000: 13). This focus sees subsequent analyses in the text based primarily on the assessment of relationships and hierarchies between separated musical strata in gamelan composition. In analysing kebyar works, composers’ deployment of ‘structural principles’ is highlighted through particular consideration of works’ dense figuration (both rhythmic and melodic) and its relation to the ‘underlaying strata’ of larger-scale structures, identified as melody, gong structure and meter, and overall composition organisation (2000: 209 and also Chapters 6 and 7). 4 A primary goal of this analysis is to locate ‘structure’ in its most condensed, stripped-down form: this is most succinctly demonstrated in Tenzer’s 2006 analysis of the kebyar dance accompaniment Oleg Tambulilingan where, writing of the work’s early slow section, he states ‘the whole complex is unified through pitch-class identity and function as reflections of a single melodic concept’ (2006: 214). Such analysis is concerned with demonstrating how music unfolds through its own inner structural laws, the recovery of such laws allowing the development of a ‘comprehensive and systematic model for musical structure and analysis’ of Balinese music (Tenzer 2000: 13).5 While Tenzer openly presents his analysis as strongly shaped by his own Western theoretical position and preoccupations, he also proposes a universal scope for all musical analysis predicated on the location and wholesale application of large-scale structural 4

Such terminology is mirrored in Vitale’s account of new seven-tone music in Bali, where he likewise highlights the notion of structural layers, discussing issues of ‘melodic and metric strata’ and of ‘fore-ground’ and ‘middle-ground structure’ in contemporary works for Balinese gamelan (2002). 5

It should be noted that Tenzer goes part-way in socially situating these ‘musical structures’: Chapter Five of Gamelan Gong Kebyar rigorously indexes the Balinese character and topic associations of melody, gong structure, and meter and so presents what might be termed a more semiotic than absolutist account of structure, whereby compositions might also be considered ‘assemblages of socially meaningful signs’ (Tunstall 1979: 57). However, while Tenzer notes that the Gong Kebyar text would suffer without historical and ethnographical components, he suggests one aim of his work has been to ‘confront head-on ethnomusicology’s corporate reluctance to acknowledge the value of the metaphor of autonomous sound’, and the value of ‘musical structure’ in achieving what Nattiez terms ‘analysis at the neutral level’ (2000: 14, including citation of Nattiez 1990: 194). 14

principles. Tenzer summarises such a structural emphasis as ‘seeing the large reflected in the small’ and suggests that it is likewise found in a Balinese world view, stating that both ‘systematic thinking and the perceptions of interrelated hierarchic patterns––far from being alien to Balinese thought––are actually part and parcel of them’ (2000: 14). As evidence, Tenzer goes on to cite the Balinese ‘doctrine’ of Panca Maha Bhuta which describes the reflective, interactive relationship of macroscosm and microcosm, noting how ‘musically such correspondences are also abundant and frequently evoked by Balinese’ (2000: 14-5). From here, Tenzer states that this relationship of the large reflected in the small ‘belongs to Balinese, Western and indeed virtually all human thought’ and cites structuralist musicologist Meyer to propose it as a ‘bio-psychological universal’ (Meyer 1998: 6, cited in Tenzer 2000: 15). I propose there to be two major problems with this approach, which I shall consider in the following two sections of the chapter: the first concerns a disjuncture with extant accounts that engage with Balinese practices of music-making; and the second concerns the far-reaching theoretical implications of applying ‘universal’ and arguably euro-centric theories derived for quite different purposes onto alternative forms of practice.

Balinese Learning and the Musical Whole: Two Alternative Accounts While the structural musicological interpretation of Balinese music outlined above may make sense to many Western ears encountering Balinese gamelan, how might accounts of Balinese practices of learning and teaching gamelan contrast with this interpretation? Do the claims outlined above––which suggest Balinese conceptions of music to be structured by interrelated strata obeying certain rules of interaction––play out in Balinese interaction? As a preliminary response to these questions, I present two scholars’ approaches to Balinese music which highlight some of the problems in isolating Balinese ‘musical structures’ from situated practices of performing, learning and teaching. A study by the ethnomusicologist Michael Bakan on the processional gamelan beleganjur contains a brief chapter on ‘Learning: Balinese Experiences’ which recounts his observations of a young Balinese musician setting out to study beleganjur kendang drumming with Balinese musician, I Ketut Sukarata (1999: 281-291). Bakan notes how Balinese learning methods ‘engender a holistic conception of the music’ noting how ‘techniques that involve breaking a musical work into discrete, manageable segments, or that are premised on providing students with specific directions on how to solve musical problems they encounter… are totally foreign to Sukarata’s pedagogical methods and 15

sensibilities’ (1999: 288). Indeed, Bakan states that Sukarata is ‘categorically antianalytical when working with Balinese students’ (1999: 288). Working with a definition of analysis as that which ‘draws specific attention to specific aspects of a piece of music rather than the musical whole to which they belong’, Bakan notes that for Sukarata ‘any method [which] privileges the smaller picture over the bigger one is undesirable’ (1999: 289). Indeed, Bakan records how this musical holism was played out consistently through Sukarata’s teaching approach: he describes how Sukarata favoured ‘complete, unmodified demonstration performances’; he comments on how Sukarata emphasized complete runthrough performances during lessons and rehearsals; and he notes how Sukarata fostered ‘ensemble environments’ in all learning situations by encouraging other musicians to attend and participate, even in ‘private’ drum lessons (1999: 289-91). These observations challenge the claim that Balinese musicians might highlight, or indeed even conceive of, the notion of hierarchical strata in musical works, a point made particularly clearly in Bakan’s last point above about ensemble learning. Here, Bakan expands this point to state how ‘the presence of the additional instrumental parts [which other musicians] provide ensures that Wayan [the student] will not internalize the drumming as a distinct musical entity, that he will be compelled from the outset to hear the drumming in context, as one component of the greater musical whole to which it belongs’ (1999: 291).6 It appears that this reflection on the practice of at least one Balinese musician runs more or less directly counter to structure-centred accounts of Balinese gamelan. While Bakan does not frame his commentary as particularly striking or contentious, his approach to Balinese musical conceptualisation is notably incompatible with Tenzer’s analysis technique and suggests a significant discrepancy in scholarly approaches. Another brief account of learning Balinese gamelan by Bamberger and Ziporyn exemplifies some of the tensions which emerge between an attempt to uncover hidden ‘structural principles’ of Balinese gamelan and an engagement with Balinese teaching and performance practices (1992). While studying with Balinese musician I Wayan Rai, Ziporyn wished to learn a correct approach to payasan or the ‘ornamental improvisation’ of the ugal (the ensemble’s lead metallophone) in the kebyar dance accompaniment to Gabor and was frustrated by Rai’s reluctance to ‘say what he does’ (1992: 24). On Rai’s initial reluctance to comment verbally on his student’s playing, Ziporyn begins to play by

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It should be noted that in Bakan’s observations, the idea of a musical whole operates not only ‘vertically’ but also ‘horizontally’: he states that ‘because so much time and energy is spent running through the complete piece, rather than working in detail on selected sections, the entire multipart arrangement is eventually committed to memory as something more like a solid block of musical material than a sequence of distinct musical segments connected by transitions’ (1999: 290). 16

‘getting it wrong’ on purpose, aiming to prompt criticism and an explication of ‘the rules’ which might underlie a player’s choices in constructing a successful ugal part in relation to the sparser pokok (glossed as ‘core melody’). Ziporyn charts Rai’s eventual responses and is pleased to note that certain principles between pokok and ugal melodic contour could be established from probing Rai’s played examples and verbal statements. However, Ziporyn records how Rai’s response was ambiguous about there being any kind of particularly correct or incorrect ugal interpretation based on the kinds of abstract principles the writer was keen to extrapolate from Rai’s playing, conceding that ‘there was no way I was going to be able to reduce the music to mere elaborations of certain hidden rules’ (1992: 37). Despite Ziporyn’s research goal to illuminate the rule-book of Balinese music-making and to explicate the precise structural relationship of ugal to the so-called ‘core melody’ of the pokok, Ziporyn’s interaction with Rai yielded something rather more ambiguous and, when understood in terms of structure, something far more interesting, about this particular Balinese musician’s approach. While acknowledging variations in context and genre of learning and teaching methods, a discrepancy emerges between accounts suggesting a Balinese concern for ‘hierarchic patterns’ in music, and reports of practical Balinese approaches which appear to emphasise a sense of musical whole and participation, and to negate the value of abstracted musical ‘rules’. Considering this discrepancy, a number of critical questions emerge: why might widely received structure-centred theories, which at first glance appear unsuitable for the musical processes to hand, be imposed on Balinese music? Granted their apparent unsuitability, why have such theories been so popular? What are the implications of such an imposition, and what kind of scholarly lineage within Balinese studies do these approaches have? Additionally, if central scholarly accounts of Balinese gamelan have potentially overlooked some of the key workings of Balinese music-making, what might a more detailed study of Balinese practices yield?7

As a brief note on my fieldwork, my research in Bali was conducted over 14 months through a mixture of informal conversations and musical encounters, alongside instrumental lessons and more formal interviews, aided by continued study of Indonesian and Balinese language throughout my stay. Across the year, I attended various undergraduate classes in the karawitan department of ISI, including téori (theory), komposisi (composition) and practical classes (praktek), as well as participating in student performances on and off campus as both a gamelan musician and Western flautist. Alongside private lessons in kendang, I regularly played gangsa and suling in a range of gamelan groups, including regular rehearsals and performance with the ISI staff women’s gamelan group (ASTI Pertiwi) and in ensembles run by Denpasar-based musicians I Gede Arsana, I Nyoman Windha and I Wayan Sinti. 17 7

Issues in Theorizing Balinese Music Having noted some of the immediate discrepancies occurring between approaches, I here examine some of the broader implications which arise from theorizing Balinese music. I begin with an evaluation of the universalist claims of the structuralist paradigm in relation to the specifics of Balinese performance, which subsequently prompts a wider discussion of what Western ideas of theorizing entail. By critically examining the surprisingly opaque notion of Western theorizing, a number of issues concerning power relations emerge, particularly when related to the complex cultural translation involved in applying practices of theory to Balinese music-making. It is informative to note how issues of power are refracted in representations of music, and from here I shall consider existing scholarship which engages with the social and historical circumstances of Javanese gamelan music’s theorization and note the lack of corresponding academic attention afforded Bali. I shall argue that there has been a continuous decontextualization of Balinese gamelan music from its social and political settings, enacted by a range of representative practices since the colonial era, and again note the implications that such detachment entails. Indeed, power relations are demonstrated particularly starkly when considering post-independence Balinese claims to musical theorizing (as discussed in Chapter Five). Amid significant political pressures, the prestige awarded an individual (or institution) who claims to theorize is largely detached from the notional contents of the theory, and the so-called theory’s ‘contents’ is likewise disengaged from the musical practices apparently under discussion. I examine first some of the specific problems that emerge in overlaying Balinese performance (here music-making) with a structuralist framework, before approaching issues of theorizing more generally. Tenzer can be seen to have founded his musical analyses on a principally structuralist approach by seeking to illustrate the presence of a universal ‘large to small’ relationship or structuring principle, and in doing so mirroring the Chomskian linguistic concept of deep- and surface-structure relationships. By claiming to grasp the core ‘structuring principles’ of human cognition, one of structuralism’s appeals is its ability to overwrite alternative accounts as ‘surface’ detail. Ziporyn provides such an example in his account of working with I Wayan Rai. He references a structuralist framework in his research aims through an eclectic reading of anthropologist A.L. Becker, whom Ziporyn cites as summarizing his own desire to grasp ‘a system of rules that somehow maps… a logical deep structure onto a surface structure’ (Becker 1984: 137, cited in Ziporyn 1992: 24). While the article recounts how Rai was reluctant to articulate a ‘system of rules’ or to present any rule as monolithic, Ziporyn is nonetheless optimistic that such structures may still exist: ‘we don’t have to be able to say just what those rules are in order to make the music “meaningful”: we just 18

have to believe in the possibility of shared meaning’, stating in his conclusion that ‘the hidden nature... of musical rules is what gives them their meaning’ (1992: 38, italics in the original). Structuralist analysis claims the presence of ‘deep structures’ through which human activity can be explained (even if those structures remain hidden or indeed appear to be rebutted during the research encounter, as found above). Since Lévi-Strauss, music has been afforded the privileged position of presenting an unmediated account of universal human ‘structuring’ processes. Much ‘ethnotheory’ in ethnomusicology embraces structuralist concepts as a means for academic studies to engage less hegemonically with non-Western musical cultures, led by Feld’s claim that theory is not a ‘special accomplishment of the West’ but that ‘wherever there is music, there is some kind of theory underlying its production and significance’ (Feld 1990 [1982]: 163).8 Yet structuralist approaches are notably predicated on Western-European concepts of cognitive order, specifically reason: as observed by Tunstall, the ethnomusicologist Blacking’s structuralist approach ‘[brings] to musical analysis a desire to illuminate the rational character of musical processes’ (2000: 44, my emphasis). On these grounds, structuralism’s explanatory technique which seeks to establish types of order––be it structure, meaning, reason or all of the above––in (musical) practice, may be linked to Western notions of theorizing more generally. Curiously under-defined, theory’s given meaning since the eighteenth century as ‘a scheme of ideas which explains practice’ sees it likewise framed hierarchically to practice, employed to provide explanatory order to activity (Williams 1983: 316). This ‘explanatory power’ which theory’s intellectual lineage claims assumes powerful implications when allied to New Musicology (and certain ethnomusicological) understandings of musical theories as wholly culturally mediated: no theorist can resist ‘the urge to idealize musical practice in ways congruent with one’s world view’ (Burnham 1993: 77). This point is elegantly argued in Zbikowski’s account of Western ‘conceptual models’ for engaging with music, aptly enough discussed through the analysis of different perceptions of ‘musical hierarchies’ (1997). Zbikowski highlights two principle conceptual models in Western theoretical approaches to tonal and rhythmic organisation and identifies how they appear to be predicated on two distinct strands of Western thought: the Platonic ‘great chain of being’ and Newtonian or mechanistic ‘atomism’ (1997). If it is the case that ‘theory’ is highly contingent on the theorizer’s 8

See Agawu on ‘Representing African Music’ for particularly critical commentary on ‘ethnotheory’, where he notes that ‘since ethnotheory is constructed for “them,” we reinforce the view that they need to be spoken for theoretically’ (1992: 262). Rice’s focus on individual and intra-cultural variation in musical activity also highlights how the notion of musical ‘ethnotheory’ over-emphasises unlikely cultural homogeneity (1994). 19

worldview, which is potentially bound inextricably to his/her intellectual tradition, and that by virtue of theory’s historical lineage, theory (and the theorizer) is granted the apparent privilege to ‘explain’ practice, what might be the implications of the type of complex cultural translation involved in theorizing another culture’s musical practice? Indeed, despite ethnomusicology’s appeals to the possibility of ‘emic’ understanding, how can the theorizer escape the type of theoretical ‘overwriting’ of another’s practice, as appears to have occurred in the conclusion to Ziporyn’s account of learning ugal with I Wayan Rai? A further problem may be located in theory’s traditional status as an entity ontologically distinct from practice. I will address the issue of how knowledge is produced to argue that the construction of theory constitutes a practice, which in turn carries distinct associations of power. Here I shall draw upon Foucault, whose thoughts on the relationship of knowledge and power may be relevant. As he succinctly put it, ‘there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute, at the same time, power relations’ (1977: 27). Indeed, this correlation between power relations and fields of knowledge has been increasingly emphasized in studies of the theorizing of Central Javanese gamelan and issues of Dutch colonial power. While Javanese gamelan has attracted a number of more abstract structuralist-linguistic models of analysis, several studies have presented historiographical accounts of musical theorizing in Java which attend to issues of colonial interaction and subjugation, and to the Javanese construction and maintenance of courtly (and alternative) centres of power through musical and theoretical practices.9 Most notable among these are several studies by Perlman, who has critically situated a range of Central Javanese theoretical issues and practices through examination of their socio-cultural and political context. His studies include consideration of the historical circumstances of Javanese approaches to ‘indigenous analysis’ (1997), modal practice or pathet (1998), and the idea of ‘unplayed melody’ (2004), Perlman’s term for an unheard component of gamelan composition which nonetheless guides a

9

These structuralist-linguistic models include a number of ‘grammars’ of Javanese gamelan music, following twentieth-century models of generative-transformational grammar, including articles by Sutton (1978), A.L and J. Becker (1979) (although, this structuralist reading was substantially revised in a 1983 article), Hughes (1985). Brinner’s Knowing Music, Making Music: Javanese Gamelan and the Theory of Musical Competence and Interaction (1995) provides a valuable practice-based study of Javanese music-making, however through a focus on musical ‘competency’ Brinner likewise invokes a Chomskian linguistic model of cognitive (musical) processes. 20

player’s quasi-improvisatory melodic figuration (garap), rather than the long-assumed balungan, or ‘skeleton’ melody of the saron.10 These studies demonstrate not only that musical theories created by Westerners concerning Javanese music been closely linked to issues of colonial power, but also that Javanese-authored studies and approaches to theorizing are similarly associated with complex relations of power, either concerning colonial interaction or the implementation of the Indonesian state’s ‘cultural policy’. When the histories of Java and Bali––in political, cultural and specifically musical terms––have long been observed to be closely bound, even mutually constitutive, should we not consider whether something similar might be the case for Bali? Indeed, conclusions along these lines have been drawn in a range of recent accounts which consider the idea of Balinese ‘performance’ more broadly: this includes widening the domain of study not only to include detailed contextual consideration of Balinese ‘artistic’ forms, but also to consider a range of ‘non-artistic’ Balinese practices as ‘performance’.11 Despite the popularity of Balinese gamelan as an object of study, where are similar accounts for Balinese music? Intriguingly, as noted in the chapter’s opening, extant literature has largely avoided joining the dots between subjugatory Dutch-Balinese colonial interactions, resultant representations of Balinese music (by Balinese and Western writers), notions of music theory in Bali’s postindependent academic institutions and contemporary scholarly representations of Balinese gamelan. As demonstrated above, theory and attendant practices of analysis stand as a potentially powerful means to overwrite cultural practices. The implications of this become more complex when the theorizer is grounded in a cultural world quite different from that in which the music is situated, composed, performed and evaluated. When these tensions have been examined for Java and shown by authors to have considerable political implications, what is the significance of the notable silence and disconnection in scholarship concerning Bali? My study thus seeks to examine why, how, and with what consequences Balinese music-making and its theorizing have been routinely 10

Other socially-situated studies of Western and Javanese theorizing and theoretical approaches to Javanese gamelan music include Sutton (1991) which includes particularly insightful commentary on issues of theorizing in post-independence, state-sponsored musical academies in Central Java, and Weiss on the construction of gendér performance traditions (2006). Becker’s Traditional Music in Modern Java (1980) and Sumarsam’s Gamelan: Cultural Interaction and Musical Development in Central Java (1992) both consider the implications of intellectual contact between Javanese and Dutch musicians and scholars, although as will be discussed below, while Sumaram also highlights the Western construction of the balungan as the ‘core’ of the Javanese composition, he depicts questionably consensual and politically- innocuous interactions between the Javanese elite and Dutch scholar administrators in generating music theory. 11

Notable examples include Wiener’s account of the construction and performance of ‘historical’ texts on Bali (1995), Hobart’s work on Balinese theatre and dance (2002, 2007) and Fox on religious practice (2002). 21

decontextualized from their historical, social and political settings. In addition, having noted the means by which theory constitutes itself as something external and superior to cultural practice, how might specific approaches to theorizing Balinese music have worked to erase these connections and achieve such decontextualization? Critically, why do Balinese (language) voices seem so markedly absent in such accounts? How might Balinese voices, both past and present, be re-engaged through fieldwork and through examination of source material in order to redress this imbalance?

On Representation: Alternative Theoretical Approaches In considering how the thesis might go about approaching these questions, I refer again to Foucault’s ‘field of knowledge’ to propose the relevance of a broader domain of knowledge production than just self-defined ‘Balinese music theories’. I shall argue in Chapters Three and Four that crucial to the contemporary packaging of Balinese music, which continues to see Balinese voices excluded and which has enabled the continued application of structuralist analyses, were a range of extra-theoretical decontextualizing representative practices working to aestheticize, dehistoricize, and subsequently rehistoricize Balinese music along specific lines. On these grounds, I shall widen the study to consider representational practices of Balinese gamelan music more generally in order to consider how, and as what, Balinese music-making has been represented, through a range of textual (and occasionally compositional) formats which include, but are not exclusively bound to, theoretical accounts of Balinese music. This concern with representations prompts the use of Nelson Goodman’s idea of ‘representation-as’ as a helpful template in the assessment of these materials (1968). Goodman holds that the term ‘representation’ is best considered not to stand alone but when understood as a practice of ‘representation as’: that integral to any representative practice, an agent represents something as something else, to a subject, on an occasion and for a purpose (1968: 27-31). In this vein, critical examination of a representation necessarily involves consideration of what the designated object of representation (e.g. practices of Balinese music-making) has been represented as (e.g. a manifestation of social harmony), also demanding that the analyst situate the process by asking by whom, to whom, where and when, and, perhaps most crucially, for what. While Goodman highlights the purposive quality particular to all representational practice, I supplement this with consideration of two additional theoretical concepts pertinent to this study: articulation and enunciation.

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In Cultural Studies, the idea of articulation was developed specifically to link issues of representation to social, political and cultural considerations: links which, as the thesis sets out to demonstrate, prove central to the development of music theory and to some degree, to the development of musical practice more generally in Bali. As the thesis shall examine, various accounts and theories of gamelan seek to represent Balinese music-making as a manifestation, expression or substantiation of particular religious, historical or cultural ideas. These moves, when carefully situated, assume significant political significance. In this sense, such representation-as practices align with the idea of articulation, in its twin sense of uttering and linking. Hall describes the notion of articulation as the form of the connection that can make a unity between two different elements, under certain conditions. It is a linkage which is not necessary, determined, absolute and essential for all time. You have to ask, under what circumstances can a connection be forged or made? So the so-called ‘unity’ of a discourse is really the articulation of different, distinct elements which can be rearticulated in different ways because they have no necessary ‘belongingness’ (Hall 1996: 141 cited in Hobart n.d.: 21).

Indeed, articulation in Cultural Studies was configured specifically to take issue with structuralism's claims to objectivity and its assertion that certain cognitive structures are ‘necessary, determined, absolute and for all time’. Rather than take structure as given, a stress on articulation highlights questions of who articulated or represented something as something else (here objective structure) and for what purpose. Indeed, such privileged articulation is the definition of hegemony. So, on this account, structuralists, far from discovering structure in Bali, are engaged in a political and epistemological act of imposing it. The implications of any process to suture such ‘different, distinct elements’ are stridently voiced by Laclau (1990). Laclau’s radical negation of the possibility of any stable system of knowledge, or indeed totality of structure, qualifies any attempt to formulate necessary, coherent connections between elements as a precisely political act: by standing as a means to secure the possibility of ‘social order’, articulation is an attempt to suture the irreducible and irresolvable ‘antagonisms’ and ‘infinite play of differences’ at work in practice (1990: 91). While seeming rather abstract, Laclau’s argument plays out with striking piquancy here, for as this thesis seeks to demonstrate, Balinese music-making since the colonial era has been consistently framed as an ‘articulation’ of various visions of Balinese social order, visions which in turn may be connected to broader agendas of gaining power, recognition, status, prestige, or material advantage. The implications of articulation are highlighted in the Balinese instance by the notion of enunciation, which I use in a Foucauldian sense to describe a particularly authoritative form of articulation: it is what happens when articulation is effectively 23

restricted to and monopolized by a small group of people who claim or are recognized as having either the exclusive right to speak or the right to be heard. Foucault’s commentary on nineteenth-century medical discourse highlights what he terms the ‘enunciative modality’ of medical discourse, which again operates through incommensurate ‘distinct elements’, between which is established ‘a system of relations that is not ‘really’ given or constituted a priori’ but is ‘effected by clinical discourse’ (1972: 55). Central to the maintenance of this system of relations is the doctor, who, ‘among the totality of speaking individuals, is accorded the right to use this sort of language… who - alone - [has] the right, sanctioned by law or tradition, juridically defined or spontaneously accepted, to proffer such a discourse’ (1972: 55-56). Just as Foucault suggests that the ‘medical statement cannot be dissociated from the statutorily defined person who has the right to make them’, the same may be said for statements of Balinese music theory and for their enunciators, be they colonial era musicologists, high-caste Balinese patrons or Balinese bureaucrats (1972: 56). The importance of a person’s ‘statutory definition’ is illustrated yet more clearly in the post-independence phase of theorizing in Bali, as discussed in Part Two, where theory grows increasingly abstracted and becomes what may be termed (after Baudrillard) an ‘empty signifier’, created almost exclusively to state, attain or maintain a theorizer’s institutional status. In light of what enunciation entails, my study also aims not only to highlight the presence of such occasions of enunciation but also to consider the other voices and practices which may be overlooked or overwritten, through their not having access or conforming to the ‘enunciative modality’. In light of the widespread exclusion of Balinese in constructing accounts of Balinese practices, the notion of enunciation can be linked to the last theoretical framework on which the thesis draws, a revised historical account of how, why, when, by whom and for whom Bali’s music-making has been represented. The historian R.G. Collingwood clarifies the potential scholarly pitfalls and possibilities that differing historical approaches offer. On the one hand, he outlines the ‘scissors and paste’ historical method which, in a similar vein to Foucault’s concept of enunciation, constructs histories from ‘the testimonies of authorities’ which are selected and arranged to meet the particular epistemological needs of the historian in question and likely excludes those voices which do not concur (1946: 257). Alternatively, Collingwood proposes another method of ‘proper historical study’ based upon what he terms metaphysical analysis, where the analyst must attempt to access and outline the author or enunciator’s frame of reference or ‘absolute presuppositions’ on which any account or statement is grounded (1940: 81). This provides a means both to interrogate and produce historical accounts. Crucial to the historian’s task is the uncovering of those presuppositions through a process of ‘reenactment.’ Here, the analyst considers the various changeable modes of 24

classifying and categorizing by which a particular person or group of people might experience the world––be they Dutch colonial administrators or Balinese conservatory teachers––while engaging in contemporary critical analysis to interrogate those presuppositions.12 Indeed, in discussing those modes employed by different groups, Collingwood conveys a boldly pragmatist philosophy, stating succinctly: ‘whatever is called structure is in reality a way of functioning’ (1946: 222). Collingwood’s historical approach shares much with Foucault’s notion of genealogy, which rejects the notion of substantive objects (e.g. ‘madness’ (1965)) in historical study, and instead proposes a different historical method which seeks to unmask how humans have worked to constitute such objects at various points in history, often through modes of classification and categorizing. The first part of this thesis necessarily constitutes a historical study, where I aim to address the representation of Balinese music-making along these lines, considering how representational practices have constituted Balinese music in various ways as a substantive entity, and in turn, an articulation of various other social, cultural and political concerns. These theoretical arguments or frameworks are thus not intended to be detached from issues in Bali. Rather, their use is driven by the need to account for the conflicts and antagonisms played out in Balinese society and the central role that performance has come to take in defining Balinese to themselves and to others. The notion of articulation, its connection to the ‘representation-as’ concept, the idea of enunciation and alternative historical approaches offer a framework which enables critical examination of these processes. To avoid more theoretical jargon than is necessary I propose to work primarily with ‘representing as’ (which is taken to include the adjoining clauses of ‘as something else, to a subject, on an occasion and for a purpose’) as the central framework of the thesis. Where relevant, I shall employ the idea of articulation explicitly, but the reader should take it that my use of representation-as always involves issues of articulation and the attending idea of enunciation. Through such an assessment of Balinese performance as central to how Balinese (and outsiders) have constructed ideas of Bali, it is crucial to note the relationships and overlaps evident between the performance of music, dance and of theatre in Bali. The necessary limitations of this study see music regularly considered separately from other aspects of Balinese performance. However, my musicological focus is intended only to reflect my own musical training, rather than to suggest Balinese music is, or should be, isolated from these other areas of Balinese performance. In addition, the proportional brevity of the thesis analyses of contemporary Balinese composition approaches (Chapter 12

See Boucher’s introduction to Collingwood’s The New Leviathan (1999 [1942]) for a clear account of the process and purpose of historical and anthropological ‘re-enactment’.

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Six) and rehearsal practices (Chapter Seven) is by no means intended to indicate a relegation of importance or lack of content for Balinese practices. Rather, in order to situate adequately such analyses, it was necessary to account for the representation of Balinese music up to this point, which required a substantial proportion of the thesis and meant it was sadly not possible to include more examples.

Practising Representation and Representing Practice: Thesis Chapter Summary Following on from this chapter’s discussion of historical approach, the second chapter applies Foucault’s idea of genealogy to address the apparent lack of a Balinese precedent for a notional ‘Balinese music’. I present an overview of various colonial-era accounts by Westerners and Balinese which constructed and popularized the term across the period. I focus on the presence of Java as an established centre of cultural refinement for the Dutch, and note the early, unfavourable contrasts drawn between Bali and Java (and in doing so, the chapter sets the scene for the continual drive towards differentiation from Java that has come to define much of Bali’s cultural production). The chapter then examines the circumstances by which Bali came to be associated with and defined by its ‘culture’ (and accordingly, music) and highlights the close alignment of these processes with the agenda of the Dutch colonial government. I then assess various contemporary accounts of socio-musical interaction during the colonial period. I suggest there to be significant disconnection between broader acknowledgment of colonial agenda and the manner in which accounts depict socio-musical relations between Westerners and Balinese. I propose that despite the weight of evidence concerning colonial subjugation and its proven entanglement in cultural activity, such utopian depictions of social interaction firstly dislocate the inquiries and relations of Western anthropologists, musicians and artists and Balinese from the proven, close colonial management of Bali’s cultural practice throughout this period. Secondly, I argue that such accounts profoundly disarticulate those Balinese musicians, informants and patrons who were so central to Western accounts of Balinese culture from engaging in such interactions as anything other than obedient and passive subjects of Western curiosity. The third chapter considers the aestheticization of Bali’s cultural production, by examining how various late-colonial representation practices sought to render Balinese music-making as a decontextualized, aesthetic object, and in turn as a manifestation of Balinese social order. I argue that these aestheticized depictions of Balinese music can be closely linked to the nostalgic, universalizing claims of the American modernism movement, notably through a range of textual and musical works by the Canadian composer, musicologist and modernist proponent Colin McPhee. Discussing the 26

constitutive power of metaphor and synecdoche as applied to Balinese practices, I propose a mutually supporting relationship between the formulation of such representations and various strategies of colonial governance, and question the implications of the retention of various themes and models of these depictions in contemporary accounts of Balinese gamelan. Having addressed the aestheticized, ‘timeless’ qualities regularly bestowed on Balinese gamelan music during the late colonial era, Chapter Four addresses a concurrent series of claims made about Balinese musical history and investigates the complex sociopolitical background to such accounts, many of which continue to circulate. The chapter challenges the scholarly preoccupation with the apparent migration of the royal Majapahit courts from East Java to Bali in the fourteenth and fifteenth century, which is said to support particular claims about the dance drama Gambuh as a source and a theoretical template for much Balinese music. By a critical examination of colonial-era sources, paying close attention to Balinese writers and to the background role of various Balinese musician informants and patrons, the chapter challenges Gambuh’s status as the source of later Balinese music and proposes an alternative narrative to underlie the construction of these accounts. With particular focus on the palm-leaf document the Aji Gurnita, I propose the continued popularity of the ‘Majapahit complex’ (and its attending assertions of an Indic and Javanese provenance to Balinese music) to have been much shaped by high-caste Balinese seeking to bolster their cultural status following the dissolution of courtly power. Study of primary sources also yields a series of counter-claims about musicological history made by pro-independence Balinese activists, and once more demonstrates the political contingency of presentations of Balinese gamelan’s history. In locating this range of accounts, the chapter not only argues for a revision of Balinese musical history but also seeks to challenge the manifold neglect of Balinese voices and their critical role in the determination of Balinese culture and politics. Part Two discusses representations of Balinese music-making since the Indonesian Independence movement. Chapter Five traces the construction of music theory (here discussed in its Dutch/Indonesian form, téori) in Bali’s newly-founded music conservatories, and situates these practices of knowledge construction within the complex mandates—both Balinese and Indonesian—of the state-sponsored arts institution. It argues that in the face of mounting pressures to align Balinese musical practice with various (often contradictory) agenda, the notion of téori comes to constitute an ‘empty signifier’. Téori thus stands more as a nominal stamp or enunciation of academic approval and status than as an account of actual musical practice. I argue that much of the téori to emerge from Bali’s academies were compelled by a need to assert various parallels and distinctions between Javanese (as the centre of Indonesian state power) and 27

Balinese musical and socio-cultural practices. Early attempts to align Balinese gamelan with prestigious extant theoretical accounts of Javanese music shifted following the violent advent of Suharto’s ‘New Order’ government in 1965-6. For various reasons discussed in the chapter, this placed renewed pressure on a ‘unique cultural status’ for Bali which, I argue, resulted in a complex reworking of téori to maintain Balinese interests in the face of increased government domination. Chapter Six examines how these mounting pressures may play out in in the construction of certain new music for gamelan in Bali. The chapter considers issues of representation in a series of contrasting new works by three Balinese composers and discusses how compositional practices and composers’ commentary work to express and substantialize ideas of the ‘extra-Balinese’ and of ‘Balineseness’ (kebalian). Situating the works within a context of performance and the complex network of foreign, state and Balinese patronage, the chapter considers how, why, and with what implications composers go about framing their own works as rich in foreign musical materials or as expressions of uniquely ‘Balinese’ characteristics. The chapter argues that despite the climate of post-Suharto reformasi (reformation), many of the demands placed upon composers to conform to certain cultural remits remain clearly in evidence, and are intensified further by a new complexity of foreign engagement in the so-called era of globalisasi (globalization). In Part Three, the final substantive chapter of the thesis (Chapter Seven) takes a different approach to consider a series of Balinese approaches to musical discussion and rehearsal. The chapter examines a range of Balinese musical processes including learning, teaching, refining and putting together a new composition in order to highlight important contrasts that emerge between a study of situated Balinese musical practices and many of the extant theoretical accounts of Balinese gamelan. Aware of the pitfalls of my own mediated verbal account of such approaches, I endeavour not to represent Balinese music as anything, but rather to represent my fieldwork experiences of Balinese music-making as no more and no less than a series of diverse, situated, verbal and non-verbal practices.

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Part One: Colonial Representations Chapter Two Exploring Musicology: An Account of Colonial Musicology and Cultural Interaction in Bali Bali held scant musicological interest for Westerners in the nineteenth century. Gamelan makes the odd appearance in the literature’s margins: in Friederich’s account of a royal cremation ceremony and the accompanying widow sacrifice, he notes that during the whole time, from the burning of the prince till the leap of the victims, the air resounded with the clangour and noise of the numerous bands of music. (1959 [1849-50]: 97)

However, other than brief commentary in 1899 by Dutch administrator J.L.A. Brandes, nineteenth-century musicological documentation concerning Bali is scarce. Yet, by the close of the colonial era the ‘clangour and noise’ of Balinese gamelan music was a global phenomenon, the subject of discussion from New York to Tokyo, Mexico City to London, celebrated by amateur enthusiast and ethnomusicology pundit alike, and the subject of numerous academic studies (Oja 1990). A late arrival onto the archipelago’s scholarly scene, compared to the already famed Central Javanese gamelan tradition, this chapter traces the formation of ‘Balinese music’ (or, in its Dutch form, Balische muziek) as an object of aesthetic attention and scholarly knowledge. Through a survey of colonial-era textual accounts, the chapter seeks to track this shift in interest and appreciation. What were the earliest musicological representations of Balinese gamelan and how was the idea of Balinese music subsequently formulated and represented? What changes took place in these representations between 1817––the date of Stamford Raffles’ seminal The History of Java, which includes early and rather dismissive commentary on Balinese cultural practices––and 1945, the notional beginning of Indonesian independence and close of foreign occupation?13 This chapter examines the authorship of such representations, asking by whom they were produced, and, critically, begins to investigate the circumstances under which such accounts were formulated.

13

Indonesian Independence was declared on 17th August 1945, following the end of the Japanese invasion of 1942-45. However, Dutch forces returned and remained present on the archipelago until 1949 (see Ricklefs 1993 and Robinson 1995 for detailed accounts). I use the particular dates 1817-1945 as Raffles’ account presents a striking early account of Balinese cultural practice, while representational approaches can be seen to undergo significant changes post-1945, as discussed in Part Two. 29

In asking these questions, this chapter considers the notion of ‘Balinese music’ (as an object of study or appreciation) to be a construct with specific historical origins. As discussed in the introductory chapter, such an approach may be aligned with Foucault’s idea of genealogy. If the genealogical historian ‘listens to history’, s/he finds “something altogether different” behind things: not a timeless and essential secret, but the secret that they have no essence or that their essence was fabricated in piecemeal fashion from alien forms (Foucault 1977: 142).

Genealogy does not aim to trace the evolution of concepts through linear development, but rather ‘to isolate the different scenes where they engage in different roles’ (1977: 142). Rather than seeking a point of origin for Balinese music-making ‘itself’, Part One as a whole considers precisely how, when, where, by and for whom the idea of Balinese music has been produced and written about: how it may have been been fabricated, from what ‘alien forms’, and for what audience. By considering a range of textual sources by both Balinese and Westerners from colonial times through to Independence, I shall, after Foucault, assess the range of ‘different roles’ that have taken shape to consider how certain Balinese musical practice has been rendered variously as a discrete aesthetic, historic, mystic or scientifically-knowable object by different writers. Paying close attention to authorship, the thesis traces how certain themes have emerged between writings and assesses the wider socio-political concerns they highlight to ‘follow the complex course of descent’ of Balinese music (1977: 146). In analysing texts on these grounds I also draw on Collingwood’s historical method of ‘reenactment’ (as discussed in the Introduction), whereby analysis of authorship is conducted by interrogating the classificatory or categorizing modes employed, or, in other words, the ‘recovery of absolute presuppositions’ (see Boucher 1999: xxx). This chapter thus provides an overview of musicological representations of Balinese music, tracing the evident changes in representative approach and highlighting the presuppositions which appear to underpin and motivate various accounts. From here, detailed consideration of the implications of these presuppositions––through critical analysis of the representations they are located within––will follow in the next two chapters. The scholarly interest in the West that Balinese music continues to ignite presents a different problem of chronology, albeit one perhaps more resonant with Balinese approaches to history, where past and present rotate, intersect and interact with rather more fluidity than a linear Western historical model. Since the 1990s, Western studies have begun to fold back on themselves and the musical interaction between Balinese and Westerners, particularly during the 1930s, has received a substantial quantity of scholarly attention. Several studies deal directly with the issue (Oja 1990, Seebass 1996, Harnish 2001), while discussions considering aspects of Balinese music history and development tend to address the idea of cultural interaction to some degree (Mueller 1991a and 1991b,

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Tenzer 2000, Cooke 2001, Heimarck 2003, McGraw 2005, 2009). Recent radical revisions of certain aspects of Balinese and Javanese cultural history (e.g. the development of shadow plays, literature, religious discourse) have begun to examine the colonial process and cultural interaction in greater depth, applying a bolder set of theoretical approaches and paying sharper attention to indigenous Balinese and Javanese understandings of the era (see Robinson 1995, Wiener 1995, Florida 1995, Sears 1996, Hobart 2000, 2007 and Fox 2002). The results of these studies have been startling. Each proposes there to have been a far more insidious process of colonial inculcation than previously acknowledged, and that certain problems at its core, notably a reductive view of how Balinese and Javanese have participated in colonial society, may still, uninterrupted, pervade much contemporary Western scholarship on Bali and Java. Part One considers the question of whether current musicological understanding of Bali must answer to this same criticism. Therefore, rather than solely analyse colonial-era primary sources, in this chapter I shall juxtapose my commentary on colonial texts with a preliminary critique of these contemporary accounts of the period, noting the emergence of certain themes and perspectives that may be seen to thread across the body of writings on Balinese music. The chapter begins with a chronological account of colonial-era primary musicological sources, produced by Western and Balinese writers to assemble a history of the notion of ‘Balinese music’ up until Indonesian independence. I shall first situate these works within their historical contexts in order to try and establish the era’s various scholarly climates, and consider the types of questions writers appear to have been asking in their studies, noting the assumptions and presuppositions found to underpin the writing. I shall subsequently align this commentary with various contemporary interpretations of the era currently on offer, noting some of the repetitions and absences that begin to emerge. This paves the way for the third and fourth chapters which consider in greater detail the colonial-era texts themselves, addressing them thematically and assessing the wider political implications of their contents, authorship and reception.

Antiquated Beginnings: Pre-‘Balinese Music’ One of the earliest texts to provide detailed mention of Bali is Stamford Raffles’ commentary on his 1815 visit found in his History of Java (1817), researched during the British interregnum of Java. Predictably enough, considering the work’s title and mandate, his description of Bali is concerned with situating the island in relation to Javanese historical process: 31

[Bali is] perhaps the most striking and interesting vestige of antiquity which is to be found in the Eastern Seas… where the persecuted Hindus took refuge on the destruction of Majapahit, and where the Hindu religion is still the established worship of the country (1830 [1817]: 65).

The cause of this ‘destruction of Majapahit’ and the subsequent exodus is credited by Raffles to the arrival of the ‘Mohammedians’ in 1475, said to have driven the Javanese courts east to settle on Bali. Bali’s significance is thus established as a depository of bygone Javanese civilisation, an assertion which comes to underpin commentary on Balinese cultural practice throughout this period (and indeed beyond). Most important to the assignment of this connection is Bali’s religious practice, a theme which Raffles expands in the text’s dedicated appendix on Bali: On Java we find Hinduism only amid the ruin of temples, images and inscriptions; on Bali, in the laws, ideas and worship of the people. On Java this singular and interesting system of religion is classed among the antiquities of the island. Here it is a living source of action. The present state of Bali may be considered, therefore, as a kind of commentary on the ancient conditions of the natives in Java (1830 [1817]: cxliii).

Raffles’ enthusiasm for Bali’s ‘historic’ religious value is however tempered by his disparagement towards Balinese everyday life: he is ‘struck with the unceremonious, rude and uncivilized habits of the people’ and proposes that ‘in the arts they are considerably behind the Javans’ (1830 [1817]: cxxxix). Not only is Bali here depicted as the reliquary of a civilization now obsolete in Java, but the island is also deemed deficient in how it might render Java’s ‘deposit’ in practice. In contrast to the sustained scholarly attention received by the Central Javanese court gamelan tradition, musicological commentary on Bali remains limited for much of the nineteenth century, bar the kind of brief asides found in Friederich’s The Civilisation and Culture of Bali (1849-50), as quoted above. It was not until some years after the Dutch 1849 entry into the northern port of Singaraja that musicological writing on Bali resurfaced, this time in 1899 through the work of Dutch philologist J.L.A. Brandes (1875-1905). J.L.A. Brandes had already been active as a colonial scholar-administrator on Java before working on Bali. He is cited as instigating the very first archaeological research on Java and was known to be a close associate of fellow countryman, philologist and colonial administrator, Roelef Goris (Waardenburg 1997: 70). Brandes was a key member of the nineteenth-century Dutch school of Javanese philology, a group committed to demonstrating the pinnacle of Javanese cultural life as that of the Majapahit era, through the analysis and interpretation of Java’s textual tradition (Sears 1996: Chapter Two). Guan’s account of early Dutch scholarship in the Dutch East-Indies, emphasises Brandes’ scholarly priorities through his efforts to salvage Majapahit heirlooms: 32

It was a nineteenth-century Dutch colonial government philologist, J. L. A. Brandes who discovered in the courtyard of a temple on Lombok, when it was overrun by Dutch forces in 1896, the only copy of a manuscript, the Nagarakertagama, which described the greatness of this east Javanese realm of Majapahit (Guan 1998: 6).

Brandes’ brief musical work may understood as part of the same project: an emergent Dutch focus on the study and documentation of ‘golden era’ cultural relics. His 1889 short article is focused primarily on Javanese musical notation, but includes his ‘discovery’ of the Balinese notation system: aksara script scored on lontar (palm-leaf manuscripts), which record the basic melodic line of kidung sung poetry (Seebass 1990: 208). Brandes provides brief commentary on the notation of these heptatonic melodies, describing how they are notated via solmisation syllables, the manuscripts supplying a succession of pitches indicated by figures derived from normal language script (Seebass 1990: 201). While Brandes’ approach is philological rather than musicological and consequently more focused on issues of Majapahit cultural transmission than musical practices themselves (as demonstrated above), he nonetheless displays a research goal to establish Balinese cultural practice as a Javanese analogue, as effected through European classificatory techniques. However, detailed discussion of musical activity (particularly instrumental) and the notion of a distinct ‘Balinese music’ was not to occur until the 1920s with the emergence of a new brand of cultural policy and the arrival of a new generation of scholar-administrators, a development which the following section considers in greater depth.

Administrating Balinese Music The twentieth-century flood of cultural interest and enthusiasm to sweep Bali, new-found artistic haven, is no secret to modern scholarship. Vickers’ Bali: A Paradise Created (1989) rightfully claims significant standing as one of the most strident historical accounts to unpick the ‘Bali as cultural paradise’ myth. He attends carefully to the role of the Dutch government in the production of a ‘Balinese culture’, revived and preserved by the Dutch ‘Baliseering’ policy which was executed from the mid-1920s until Japanese occupation in 1942. This section examines how Bali came to accrue its new artistic status following the securing of Dutch control, and highlights the expanding techniques of European classification visited upon Balinese cultural practices throughout the period. It also demonstrates the continued scholarly focus on establishing a Hindu-Javanese precedent for Balinese musical activity. In doing so, it is important to note that while a shift in appreciation occurs from Raffles’ declaration that Balinese are ‘considerably behind the Javans’, the notion of a time-lag in Bali is implicitly restated in such accounts. As will be discussed in Chapter Four, such a theoretical stance on Balinese cultural history proved to have important socio-political implications. 33

Vickers suggests the roots of this policy lie in the ritual suicides of the Puputan (‘ending’) episodes that met Dutch consolidation of power over Bali. Having steadily gained control of Bali’s northern territories since the mid-nineteenth century, the Dutch made a final push to take the south in the early 1900s. However, their troops were met with a remarkable display of Balinese defiance. In 1906 and 1908 royal families of the Badung and Klungkung kingdoms enacted a series of ritual mass suicides, throwing themselves onto their kris (ritually potent daggers) rather than submitting to Dutch rule. By way of response to the ensuing European outcry at this barbarity, the Dutch were quick to assert that their position would be one of ‘non-interference’ in the realms of religion and culture. The ‘Ethical Policy’, as it was so deemed, was a programme of governance apparently focused on Balinese welfare and minimum intervention, and influenced heavily by those first scholars’ notions of Bali as a living source of ancient Hindu heritage. In the words of senior colonial governor, G.P. Rouffaer, Let the Balinese live their own beautiful native life as undisturbed as possible! Their agriculture, their village-life, their own forms of worship, their religious art, their own literature – all bear witness to an autonomous native civilization of rare versatility and richness…. Let the colonial administration, with the strong backing of the Netherlands (home) government, treat the island of Bali as a rare jewel, that we must protect and whose virginity must remain intact. (Rouffer cited in Damsté 1924: 538, as cited in Robinson 1995: 41).

Music does not yet figure, however. Aside from a 1912 recording project for the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv led by anthropologist and geologist Odo Deodatus Tauern, and assisted by Erwin Stresemann, close attention to musical matters was not to emerge for another ten years. Rather, Bali entered a period of ‘extended crisis’, where Dutch policies nonetheless effected drastic change within religious and governmental practice with centralized control and the freezing of the caste system, creating a social instability soon compounded by bad harvests and a slumping economy (Vickers 1989: 134). It was only in the 1920s, and the beginnings of the ‘Baliseering’ policy or ‘Balinisation’ of Bali that musical interest came to flourish (Picard 1996b: 21). Coupled uneasily with such proven discontent, the image of Bali as the Last Paradise or Garden of Eden came into bloom, generating a tremendous tourist boom from the 1920s onwards. Numbers of visiting Europeans and North Americans increased ten-fold across the decade (Picard 1996b: 25). While these two ideas of Bali initially appear incompatible, further examination of Dutch policy explains their concurrence. Embedded within the Dutch administration’s interpretation of cultural ‘non interference’ ran a drive towards preservation, or as Vickers sees it, ‘a self-contradictory set of imperatives’ which on the one hand saw the need for the conquered society to be changed to fit the needs of the ‘good government’, while on the other upholding a Kiplingesque idea of ‘the noble 34

savage’ whose cultural practices must be respected and preserved (Vickers 1996: 11). However, this notion of preservation in fact employed the ‘reforming’ elements of the first imperative and in actuality took the form of cultural ‘restoration’. Thus, the zealous Dutch-driven religious reform of the era was carried out under the guise of protecting Bali as a depository of precious Hindu heritage, swept from Java by Islam when the Majapahit dynasty apparently relocated to Bali during the fifteenth century. Continuing the work laid down by Raffles and earlier Dutch scholars on Java, Hinduism was understood to be the foundation and inspiration for the celebrated artistry and creativity of the Balinese, and so needed to be restored to its purest form (Picard 1996b: 21). In answer to the international criticism surrounding the puputan, this policy of cultural preservation/ restoration was presented to the rest of the world as exemplary colonial management. The island was sold to European and American travellers with the rhetoric of the ‘ancient exotic’ so favoured by Orientalists of the nineteenth century, guidebooks focussing on ‘its romantic South Pacific image, its Hindu gods and its spectacular rituals’ (Yamashita 2003: 26). The diversionary tactics of the ‘baliseering’ scheme have been noted to carry further implications. Picard notes the Dutch ‘revival’ of ritual and culture to have been instigated not only to defer Western criticism from colonial policy, but devised by the Dutch as a self-serving gesture enacted to stifle political activity generated by Balinese discontent (Picard 1996b: 23). This point is reiterated by Robinson, who judges Baliseering to be a strategy in taming the political aspirations of its Balinese subjects, by suppressing cultural activity associated with any ‘modern’ independence agenda: As a cultural policy, Baliseering entailed the reintroduction of “traditional” styles of dress, architectural forms, dance and rules of speech. According to Dutch authorities, Balinese ought to wear “Balinese” clothes; modern construction techniques, no matter how practical or desirable to those who used them, were determined to be aesthetically “bad,” and therefore to be avoided… As educational policy, Baliseering meant instruction in traditional Balinese dance, sculpture, music, language, and script and near absence of such subjects as world history, mathematics, and “foreign” languages, whether Malay, Dutch, or English. (Robinson 1995: 49)

In the midst of this policy’s implementation (and the sharp focus it cast upon all manner of cultural practices) appears the newly cast ‘Balinese music’, variously termed Balische Muziek or Toonkunst van Bali, and designated a formal object of study. Buoyed by the scientific accreditation being afforded ‘comparative musicology’, particularly though the work of Hornbostel and Stumpf in the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv (see Christensen 1991), Bali’s music-making became a more popular focus of academic attention. Two Dutch musicologists, Brandts Buys van Zipj and Jaap Kunst van Wely, stand as the field’s first major exponents. These scholars not only sustained the quest for Javanese origins in Balinese forms––underpinned by the presupposition that therein lay 35

the secret to Balinese music’s value––but also displayed a new vigour for overlaying Western systems of naming, classifying, quantifying and cataloguing onto Balinese music, largely through the analysis of tonal material. Such practices may be situated within what Foucault designated as various ‘episteme’ of European knowledge production, where episteme is defined as ‘something like a world-view… which imposes on each one the same norms and postulates… a certain structure of thought that the men of a particular period cannot escape’ (1972: 191). The practices of classification and categorisation related here align with the ‘Third’ (or ‘Modern’ or ‘Anthropological’) Episteme which, by Foucault’s account, ran from the early eighteenth century to the start of the twentieth (see Munslow 2006: 93). However, it is interesting to note that in these European studies of Balinese music such practices lag behind Foucault’s epistemic cut-off point of the nineteenth/early twentieth centuries. Rather like the presupposition that Bali was the depository of now bygone Javanese culture, musicological approach here displays a similar time delay.14 To illustrate this approach, the remainder of this section focuses on the administrative practices applied in formulating representations of Balinese music-making during the era. Trained composer and organist Johann Sebastian Brandts Buys (1879-1937) arrived in Batavia in 1919 as a newspaper correspondent with the Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant. Soon setting to work as an ethnomusicologist, his prime interest lay in the music of central and eastern Java and Madura and he wrote a number of texts (in collaboration with his wife) on their various musical traditions, including that of Banguwangi in Muziek in het Banjoewangische (1926), and the Madurese in De Toonkunst bij de Madoereezen (1928). However, while his focus largely rested west of Bali, Brandts Buys nonetheless touched on various issues concerning Bali’s musical activity in his writing, including the 1922 article Aatenkeningen Betreffende Enkele Indonesische Muziekinstrumenten (‘Notes on Certain Indonesian Musical Instruments’). Working to assemble a comprehensive organological picture of the archipelago, he includes comparative charts of solmisation techniques and tuning systems and applies the cents quantitative approach to pitch measurement, as pioneered by ethnomusicologists Ellis and Hipkins (1884, 1885) and Stumpf (1901) (see Schneider 2001). Brandts Buys was also keen to trace the roots of various Balinese instruments, including gambang (Balische bamboegambang), réyong (rejong) and angklung (angkloeng), back to their ‘Javanese origins’ through the study of various representations of these instruments in Javanese temple reliefs, and by combing lontar manuscripts for references to indicate when and where instruments were once extant on Java.

14

See also Boon on early colonial practices in Bali of ‘concerted documentation’ here termed ‘Balipedia’, which give way to the ‘twentieth-century systems’ of ‘Baliology’ in the 1920s (1977: Chapters Two and Three). 36

Brandts Buys worked alongside the more renowned Dutch musicologist, and indeed ‘father’ of modern ethnomusicology, Jaap Kunst (1891-1961). Touring with a string trio in the Dutch East Indies at the close of the 1910s, Kunst decided to settle on Java, gained a government post in Bandung, and worked as a colonial administratorturned-musicologist until his return to the Netherlands in 1936. Often working with his wife Katy, Kunst produced an impressive quantity of text on Bali, completing numerous articles on Balinese Music and the weighty two-volume tome De Toonkunst van Bali (1925) from fieldwork conducted on Bali in 1921 and 1924. De Toonkunst van Bali was the first comprehensive study of Balinese organology and tuning systems, also building on Brandes’ work on Balinese notation by presenting the pre-colonial origins of the system in greater depth, as well as discussing its local variants (1925: 47-68, tab. iii, see Seebass 1990: 208). Kunst offers a meticulous, methodical approach to his studies. The prime of Kunst’s attention is paid to tonal material: he is keen to identify patterns and connections in tuning systems and modal organisation, with close attention to their historical derivation, and their compositional usage over a range of styles. McPhee describes the work to offer ‘a valuable outline of Balinese music at that time, but [it] is largely devoted to a musicological discussion of Javanese-Balinese instrumental scales, their origin and evolution’ (1966: xiv). Through this dense catalogue of systematised musical material, Toonkunst van Bali presents a largely static picture of Balinese musical life: indeed, Seebass characterises the work as providing ‘a general sense of a stable, traditional corpus of music genres and styles’ (1996: 76). This perspective appears a rather unlikely conclusion to the Kunsts’ fieldwork, considering the explosive rise of gamelan gong kebyar at precisely this moment in history, and suggests a rather willful denial of the central focus of musical life during this era. In his article on the rise of gong kebyar in the 1920s and 30s, Seebass notes that the Kunsts do make a brief mention in the work of what may be deduced as kebyar (in terms of its instrumentation) and that they concede it may be ‘special’, but assert it is ‘without consequence for other musical genres’ (Kunst 1925: 441-4, in Seebass 1996: 76). Soon after this publication, Jaap Kunst co-wrote Hindu Javanese Musical Instruments (1927) with Dutch administrator and philologist, Roelef Goris. The work is focused largely on Javanese organology, but makes substantial reference to a quantity of Balinese instruments and ‘charters’. In the vein of Brandts Buys, Kunst once more appears to seek out citations in support of the idea that Java’s erstwhile Hindu cultural heritage may still be found alive, just about present and correct, on Bali. This approach governs much of the work’s commentary on Bali: for instance, on the subject of metallophone terminology, Kunst notes,

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It should be kept in mind that present-day Bali, to a greater extent than Java, has successfully preserved the old forms and refers to these metallophones not as saron but as gangsa jongkok. (Kunst 1968 [1927]:79)

Alongside the need to demonstrate a stabilised and systematised Balinese musical life, the quest for locating Javanese origins in Balinese gamelan appears to have been retained, or even strengthened, as a major research target. Such a goal can be noted as allied to the presupposition that the demonstration of ‘Javanese origins’ ensured value for Balinese music and by now appears to have been a means of establishing credibility for the musicological study itself. The dual role of administrator and musicologist is mirrored in the two Balidwelling individuals cited as prime informants for Kunst’s work: J.C. Heyting and Cokorda Gedé Raka Sukawati. Dutch Assistant Resident Heyting is credited with assisting the Kunsts’ various European recording projects, and also appears in Kunst’s Hindu Javanese Musical Instruments as suggesting a number of gamelan references in lontar documents, as well as offering ‘various remarks and additions’ to the work (1968 [1927]: 72, 76). Heyting is also found to pursue his own individual interests, producing a survey of gamelan gambang across the island and collecting various musical recordings during his stay. Cokorda Gedé Raka Sukawati, the district ruler (punggawa) of Ubud, also appears with notable regularity in the era’s texts and is often present in a behind-thescenes capacity with various projects. He is credited as assisting in the Kunsts’ extensive 1925 recording project, as ‘an enthusiast and patron of art and music in his region’ and, alongside the Dutch Government, was a major sponsor of the 1931 European tour of the newly-formed sekaha gamelan featuring musicians and dancers I Made Lebah, Gusti Kompiang, Gusti Pancung and Wayan Utuh (Stepputat 2004: 2). The Cokorda was also directly involved in colonial administration itself, standing as the sole Balinese member of the ‘Raad van Indie’, the Dutch Council of the Indies (Robinson 1995: 42). Cokorda Gedé Raka Sukawati also occupies the notable position as the first Balinese to author his own text on Balinese music, De Sanghyang op Bali (1925). The text, in Dutch, was published in the Dutch-sponsored journal Djåwå. ‘Javanology’s favourite organ’, Djåwå was published by the Java Instituut from 1921-24 and dedicated to the documentation of cultural life and heritage of Java (and by association, Bali) (Pemberton 1994: 103). Sanghyang, meaning godly being, is a type of trance possession ritual, which is usually accompanied by a male chorus rapidly chanting a single syllable (usually cak: ‘chak’) in a range of interlocking patterns. The article describes the various ritual processes that comprise a Sanghyang ceremony, and discusses its sacred origins and purposes, including lengthy quotations from an assortment of religious texts and the inclusion of some musical passages. Fuller analysis of the implications of Cokorda Raka 38

Gedé Sukawati’s concentrated involvement in both musicological research (particularly that concerning Ubud) and colonial government (particularly in the construction and management of caste relations) are discussed in Chapter Four. However, an association is immediately evident between the Cokorda’s attainment of both a political and academic platform from the Dutch government: administrative involvement saw the Cokorda entitled to enunciate on Balinese cultural practice. Working in Bali somewhat later, but very much part of the community of scholaradministrators, was Swiss chemist Ernst Schlager, who carried out extensive field research throughout the early 1940s. He produced two technical volumes on ‘ritual Balinese music’, Rituelle Siebenton-Musik auf Bali (published 1976), that examine older gamelan forms such as gambang, selonding and gong luang.15 As one of the last Europeans left on the island during the war––departing only in 1945––Schlager combined musicological work with government work, and was noted by Robinson to have sent regular reports back to Dutch and British intelligence agencies on the island’s political situation (Robinson 1995: 130). Schlager demonstrates the same systematised approach to Balinese music as his predecessors Kunst and Brandts, including a first emphasis on tonal material. Rituelle Siebenton-Musik auf Bali opens with an extended chapter providing commentary on abstracted theoretical elements (Ableitung einer Theorie der altbalischen Musik) which comprise: the solfeggio system; the modes (die Modi); the role of auxiliary tones and modulation (die Rolle der Zusatztone - Modus-wechsel); the emergence of melody (die Entstehung einer Melodie); and the emergence of rhythm and figuration (die Entstehung des Rhythmus und der Figuration). Further to the demarcation of discrete musical particles, there follows intriguing analysis in the work’s introduction, where Schlager provides a distinction between the ‘musical’ and the ‘unmusical’ in Bali (again based on analysis of tonal materials). Discussing the role of Bali’s palm-leaf documentation, lontar, as a source of melody or ‘cantus firmus’, he describes how syllables within kidung poetry (previously sung alongside older gamelan forms and, notably, regarded to be more of an indigenous ‘Balinese’ form rather than of Javanese origin) are automatically affixed to certain musical tones (Fox 2002: 47-8). Intriguingly, Schlager suggests that the configuration of these tones from the text may result in ‘strangely “unmelodic” shapes in the melody’ which are ‘not at all musical’ (1976: 31). 16 Discussion begun implicitly by Brandes on the relations between text and music in Balinese sung poetry and on where ‘music’ may be 15

I include discussion of Schlager in this chapter as his fieldwork was conducted primarily during the colonial occupation and as described, he provided a range of information for the colonial administration. 16

See Appendix 1, note 1.

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seen to begin and end, is extended in Schlager’s analysis, with further delineation between Balinese music and not-Balinese music, or Balinese music as not-music taking shape. Here, it is striking that a form which was perceived to be more Balinese than Javanese also fails to accrue the label of ‘music’. Indeed, the ‘indigenous’ Balinese practice of sung kidung has suffered a number of harsh comparisons with the Old Javanese form of sung poetry, kakawin, with the latter regularly depicted by scholars as an expression of ‘quintessential Javaneseness’ (Fox 2002: 47). As put sharply by Hooykaas: in terms of poetic and literary value, ‘the kidungs are, on the whole, inferior to the kakawin’ (1975: 484, cited in Fox 2002: 48). It appears that such a stance is very much mirrored in early musicological accounts of Bali.17 Indeed, while the administrative agenda of early musicological accounts sought to order and classify Balinese music (with particular focus on the Balinese organisation of tonality), threaded through each account is the will to assert a clean historical lineage for Balinese gamelan as a depository of ‘classical Javanese culture’. More significantly, where such lineage is less apparent (as in Schlager’s account of Balinese Kidung poetry), the status of the form becomes ambiguous (here deemed rather bluntly to be ‘not musical’). However, as the following section discusses, alongside the administrative imperative to classify and categorize Balinese music emerged a new injunction shaping Western accounts: an urge to assert the flair and creativity of Bali’s ‘arts’.

Romanticizing Balinese Music 1927 marked the arrival of German modernist painter Walter Spies (1895-1942) to Bali, which in turn saw the beginnings of a new Western community forming on the island. The ‘Baliseering’ policy’s careful orchestration of Balinese culture formed the hook that drew the now famous Euro-American community of artist-scholars to Bali from the late 1920s. Musicians, painters and anthropologists including Colin McPhee, Miguel Covarrubias, Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, were to gather, captivated by the notion of Bali’s cultural wealth as disseminated by the Dutch and apparently eager to enter into cultural and artistic dialogue with Balinese. Texts covering Balinese music snowball, ranging from the ‘strictly’ musicological to the first-person travelogue, such as Hickman Powell’s The Last Paradise (1930), Vicky Baum’s A Tale From Bali (1937) and Frank Clure’s To the Isle of Spices (1940). As is

17

See Fox for a critical account of the presumed ‘inferiority’ of the ‘indigenous prosody’ of Balinese kidung sung poetry by much early twentieth-century European scholarship, as opposed to the refinement and ‘Javaneseness’ perceived of Old Javanese kakawin (2002: 48). 40

evident from their titles alone, these latter works set out, transparently enough, to describe a land of ancient mystique and sensuous fairy-tale. Accounts suggest Bali to be overflowing with the helplessly fecund artistry of its people, with references to music running along similar lines. Frank Clure’s commentary on the 1930s innovative form Kecak, presumably based on his witnessing a tourist performance, is a fine example of the era’s explosive literary style: ‘the ketchak dancers of Bedulu, under the leadership of their sorcerer, have built a bulwark of paganism against modernism,’ Clure suggesting the dance to be ‘one of the last remaining primitive orgies to be seen on the face of the earth’ (1940: 245). A number of more academically-weighted works on Balinese art and culture of the period include discussion of music, including Miguel Covarrubias’ encyclopaedic account of life on Bali, The Island of Bali (1937), and Walter Spies and Beryl de Zoete’s Dance and Drama in Bali (1938). The presumed objective standards of Western scholarship found here present a tougher analytical challenge, but one in no way removed from the problems noted above. As will be examined in greater detail in the following chapter, there existed an almost universal ‘anti-progress’ stance towards Bali among artists and scholars on the island in the 1930s, which stands as an intriguing contrast to the progressive nature of many of their works produced ‘outside’ the Balinese experience. Walter Spies, with his breadth of cultural interest, embodies these contradictions in the contrasts between his personal artistic projects and his wider ‘philanthropic’ activity. Described by Vickers as ‘a modernist painter who rejected modernism’, Spies enacts two levels of paradox within his interactions on Bali (1996: 23). For one, his rejection of what he understood as modernism in favour a Bali idealized against the background of German romanticism, nonetheless located him within a strand of Western modernism, where nonWestern aesthetic properties were seen as a source for artistic experiment and innovation (Yamashita 2003: 31, Born and Hesmondhalgh 2000: 12, see the following chapter). Secondly, his gestures towards cultural preservation can be seen as indirectly contributing to the type of new-found Balinese aesthetic self-consciousness. He played a key role in the establishment of ‘The Cooperative Society for the Advancement of Balinese Art’ known as Pita Maha, which was designed ‘to counteract the vulgarizing effect of the tourist trade on Bali’s art products’ (Holt 1967: 179). However, Holt describes Pita Maha as simultaneously introducing the idea of ‘critical selection’ and artistic analysis into Balinese practice, with all the attending associations of modernist artistic selfconsciousness: an issue which will be dealt with in greater depth in the following chapter. Welcomed into Spies’ fold during the 1930s was Canadian composer Colin McPhee (1900-1964), soon to become the central figure in pre-war musicological study of Bali. Trained as a concert pianist and composer, he went on to figure as an important 41

exponent of neo-classicism in the thriving modernist scene of 1920s New York. However, after hearing a gramophone recording of Balinese music with Henry Cowell in the late 1920s, McPhee was infused with enthusiasm for this ‘strangely sensuous, and quite unfathomable art, mysteriously aerial, aeolian, filled with joy and radiance’ (McPhee 1944: 40). It was a decisive event and inspired McPhee to voyage to Bali himself, where he lived intermittently from 1931-35 and 1937-38, exploring the island, carrying out musical research, producing Balinese-inspired texts and compositions, and sponsoring a number of gamelan ensembles. Carol Oja’s 1990 biography supplies McPhee with the epithet, ‘composer in two worlds’. However, while the geographical location of these two climates is clear enough, McPhee’s oeuvre also bridges worlds of composition, literature and academic musicology. He composed a number of works based more or less explicitly on Balinese themes and/or techniques, most notably the large-scale work Tabuh-Tabuhan: Toccata for two pianos and orchestra (1936), plus a set of performative transcriptions, Balinese ceremonial music: transcribed for two pianos, four hands, published by Schirmer in 1940. He produced two light-hearted and colourful first-person accounts of his Balinese experiences: A House in Bali (1944), and a follow-up, covering work with children’s gamelan groups in Club of Small Men (1948). As composer-academic, McPhee also published a number of articles in Europe and America, as well as in the Java Instituut publication Djåwå, covering a range of musical aspects including: specific forms (‘The Balinese Wajang Koelit and its Music’ (1936), ‘Angkloeng Gamelans of Bali’ (1937)); compositional technique and musical philosophy (The Absolute Music of Bali (1935)); and general ‘aesthetic’ accounts (‘A Musician Listens to Balinese Music’ (1938), ‘FiveTone Gamelan Music of Bali’ (1949)); plus his single most important musical legacy, the large-scale theoretical work Music in Bali (1966). Much of McPhee’s academic work bears the same hallmark of earnest, administrative ethnomusicological research as the Kunsts and Ernst Schlager. He produces numerous grids of tuning systems and regional variations, pays close heed to organology, and provides extended glossaries of terminology, with the same administrative dedication as his forebears. However, arriving in Bali as an active composer, McPhee’s purposes in coming to Bali deviate from the scholar-administrators before him, and appear to be bound particularly tightly to his needs as an individual artist. Aspects of McPhee’s approach towards Balinese music may be illuminated by examining his musical coming-of-age, which centred on experiences in New York in the 1920s. James M. Keller and Michael Steinberg identify a ‘maverick streak’ breaking out in America in the twentieth century, as the nation’s composers sought to assert their individuality and discover an identity apart from the country’s European heritage (2001: 18). Oja draws on New York’s distinctive role in the history of America’s musical modernism, suggesting it to be an acute ‘cultural crossroads’ for those composers who 42

arrived and ‘could stand, with all their belongings in one suitcase, free to roam in whatever direction their imaginations might lead’ (2000: 6). The city saw the birth of a cacophony of modernist experiments. One of modernism’s most violent exponents, Edgard Varèse (a teacher of McPhee’s throughout the late 20s) was to reject the idea of music itself in favour of the notion of a liberated ‘organised sound’ carried through first in such works as Amériques (1922) (which he wished to stand for ‘all discovery, everywhere’) and later into bold new soundscapes and instrumentation in the shape of Rene Bertrand’s Dynaphone. However, coupled with the kind of radicalism headlined by such figures was the allure of alternative sound worlds from other cultures, representing another pathway at Oja’s ‘cultural crossroads’. A chain of ‘discovery’ can be mapped from the 1889 Paris Exposition Universelle where the inclusion of gamelan ensemble saw Claude Debussy so famously smitten with the Indonesian sonorities and what he perceived as the freedom of ‘whole tone’ scales. As a pupil of Debussy, Varèse celebrated the liberation his teacher had found through rejecting the European harmonic tradition of distinct, identifiable keys and helped propagate these ideas in New York to pupils and audiences (Rich 1995: 83). Compounding these influences came the infiltration of West Coast internationalism into New York. Berkeley’s Charles Seeger is understood to have been ‘one of the first classically trained musicians to accept non-western music as no less interesting than European’ and through his teaching of Varèse and also Henry Cowell, he added a more probing quality of scholarship to the Debussian fantasy of Far East sonorities (Keller and Steinberg 2001: 28). This aspect of scholarship was manifest perhaps most significantly in Cowell’s lecture courses given at the newly founded and highly radical New School for Social Research, where his lecture series included ‘A World Survey of Contemporary Music’, ‘Music of the Peoples of the World’ and ‘Primitivism and Folk Origins of the World’. Thus, two major themes emerge from this period of musical history which quickly begin to blur; a notion of discovering the ‘new’ and of exploring the ‘other’, both with the aim of creating New Musical Resources (incidentally the title of Cowell’s first book which summarized his new system of musical organisation, published in 1919). From the brief cultural overview above, Spies and McPhee’s approaches to Bali resonate distinctly with the wider artistic and intellectual preoccupations of the era. However, their legacy stands to this day. McPhee’s deft combination of musicological rigour and literary charm continues to secure him as the figurehead of ethnomusicological discourse on Bali: Michael Tenzer notes him to have ‘cast a formidable shadow’ for decades after his death and, as late as 1999, states that there exists a ‘curious postMcPhee silence about Balinese music’ (1999: 182). In the following chapter I consider how Spies and McPhee can be seen to have articulated Bali for Westerners, and indeed 43

for Balinese themselves, examining some of the implications of their presupposed moral and aesthetic high-ground in their appreciation of Balinese music. Assessing its consequences, what has been the impact of these presuppositions on Balinese musicians, or, conversely, what roles might Balinese individuals have had in guiding these approaches to the music?

Balinese Musicians on Balinese Music The 1930s saw not only the flourishing of Western musicology on Bali, but also sustained academic attention from Balinese writers themselves. However, these journals represent a marked division in direction, in the differing ends musical theorizing was put to: either working towards independence, or in support of or in conjunction with Dutch officials. A major source for the latter was the Malay/Balinese-language journal Bhawanagara, published between 1931-1935. Two Balinese-run journals in Malay preceded Bhawanagara in the 1920s: Surya Kanta and Bali Adnyana. These papers grew out of a single publication, Santi Adnyana, its editorial team eventually beset with conflict between sudra and triwangsa (low- and high-caste groupings) over whether the paper ought to be concerned primarily with ‘Balinese Hinduism’ or ‘Bali’ in general. The sudra faction claimed the paper placed too strong an emphasis on Hinduism and its associated caste hierarchies, and so broke away to form Surya Kanta, a publication calling for the relaxation of laws on marriage, language and dress code, and a ‘demystification of religious knowledge’ (Robinson 1995: 34). Meanwhile, the triwangsa formed the exclusive Bali Adnyana in praise of Dutch efforts to ‘retraditionalise’ Bali. Bhawanagara yielded strong support from a selection of Dutch officials, having been conceived by the colonial administration ‘with the intention of calming the caste debate’, and was set up under the auspices of the prestigious institute of Balinese culture, the Kirtya Liefrinck van der Tuuk, with noted Bali expert Roelef Goris as editor till mid 1933 (Robinson 1995: 35). The journal contains a selection of writings by Balinese and Dutch scholars on various aspects of cultural life, including analysis of particular gamelan styles and compositional technique, and gamelan and vocal music cipher notation with accompanying commentary. An as-yet mysterious Balinese writer, ‘Balyson’, wrote a number of substantial theoretical articles on gamelan gong gedé and gong kebyar in 1934, which form the basis for parts of McPhee’s commentary on interlocking technique in Music in Bali (1966: 332). Meanwhile, the same Cokorda Raka Gedé Sukawati discussed above, a high-caste Balinese—and by now a seasoned go-between for a number of Western administrator-scholars and Balinese musicians—regularly featured on the editorial panel throughout the journal’s publication.

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The other journal to contain significant work by Balinese on musical life was Djatajoe, published 1936-1941 by the Bali Darma Laksana, an organisation devoted to improving education systems and the ‘advancement of Balinese culture’ (Robinson 1995: 48). ‘Thoroughly modernist in orientation’, the magazine includes various debates on music education, preservation activity, and assessment of Western models of music teaching (Robinson 1995: 48). While apparently dedicated to the independence cause, some unusual crossovers in authorship occur between Djatajoe and concurrent colonialsponsored projects: a set of anomalies that will be dealt with in greater detail in following chapters. I Wayan Djirne and I Wayan Roeme (or Ruma) both contributed to the journal, but are also responsible for the two-volume edition of notated vocal music Taman Sari (1939), an influential work cited by contemporary Balinese theorists Parma and Tantri as the source of modern Balinese gamelan notation (1985). However, the original manuscript was prefaced with a Balinese-language introduction by Dutch government official H. Te Flierhaar, and, according to a 1940 Djatajoe article by Djirne, the project as a whole was led ‘perfectly’ by P.T. Ambtenaar. There thus emerge a number of problems when attempting to ascribe authorship and motivation in the production of Balinese writings. Having identified possible tensions between author and editor, plus potential discrepancies between Balinese and Dutch priorities, and between different Balinese castes, on what grounds were Balinese permitted to participate in and create these representations? How stringent was editorial control, and by whom was it managed? For what type of audience was this work produced? While the above passage is focused on ‘Balinese representations’, how far, if at all, do these accounts demonstrate an ‘indigenous Balinese approach’ to musical practice? The complexities of authorship, readership and the management of political and religious factions will be considered in greater depth in the coming chapters.

Contemporary Accounts of Baliseering and Cultural Interaction: Some Preliminary Objections Analysis concerning the production of pre-Baliseering colonial musicology is scarce, bar the work of Tilman Seebass (1990). However, some of the implications of the ‘Baliseering’ process and Balinese-Western cultural interaction have been attended to in a number of studies, and the idea of cultural refraction and the feedback loop is now widely accepted in the topic’s scholarship (including Holt 1967, Picard 1996b, H. Geertz 1996). Hildred Geertz’s account of the period offers a particularly critical and complex interpretation of interactions, considered the series of Balinese paintings commissioned by Mead and Bateson during their time in Bali (1996). Yamashita’s investigation into tourism on Bali goes so far as to consider contemporary Balinese culture as a ‘Creole’ or 45

hybrid culture, newly created by the encounters between Bali and the West in the first half of the twentieth century, subsequently essentialised (by the West) and then transformed into the ‘real’ Balinese culture, in the context of tourism (Yamashita 2003: 37). However, a substantial quantity of the scholarship covering this period tends to depict Elysian scenes of artistic cooperation and reciprocation: a ‘mutually stimulating process’, suggests Clare Holt on describing the artistic encounter of Walter Spies and Balinese carver I Tegelan (1967: 177) (see also Harnish 2001 and Oja 1990). A certain disconnection emerges between analysis of Dutch cultural policy and how the work of Western artist-scholars is depicted. While the Dutch effort to publicise ‘Balinese culture’ is noted as a key factor in the arrival of the arts-focused Euro-American community, the sustained impact of Dutch administration on their perception of Bali tends to fade out in discussion. Vickers chooses to emphasise primarily the positive intentions and outcomes of these cultural interactions. Writing of Jane Belo, wife of Colin McPhee in the 1930s, Vickers notes her keen involvement in Franz Boas’ ‘anti-racism’ school of cultural anthropology, suggesting she was not just a ‘simple orientalist, fashioning stereotypes’ but part of a movement engaged in sensitive interaction with Balinese who ‘did more than simply find in Bali an ‘other’ of Europe, but were prepared to enter into a dialogue, were willing to learn from Bali’ (Vickers 1989: 22-23). Robinson, in an insightful account of political violence in Bali, The Dark Side of Paradise (1995), criticises this marked discontinuity in Vickers’ approach to historical process. He proposes that Vickers has ‘described the changing image of Bali as a product of the free interaction of the impressions of a series of politically disinterested visitors’, and has consequently failed to take into account adequately the role of the colonial state in the formation of Bali’s cultural identity (Robinson 1995: 21). I wish to extend the criticism that ‘political disinterest’ has been falsely attributed to general accounts of the island’s colonial interaction, to a number of contemporary musicological accounts of colonial Bali. The stances upheld by the ethnomusicological community tend to fall into one of two positions: either ‘minimum intervention’, where the musical results of Dutch input into Balinese life either go without mention, or are deemed relatively limited with emphasis placed instead upon the independent artistry and creativity of the Balinese; or else a complex but positive feedback loop, where the Europeans take an unconscious but ultimately productive role in the creative life of their Balinese consultants. Both stances seem to minimise the type of Dutch engagement in cultural management which has been made evident in a number of non-musical accounts of the period.

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A number of works tracing the development of twentieth-century Balinese musical forms in Bali provide almost no mention of the Dutch government as taking a role in cultural life and policy (see for instance Herbst 1997 and Heimarck 2003, while Bakan 1999 includes only limited commentary). Meanwhile, Tenzer’s account of the twentieth-century form gamelan gong kebyar makes only the sparsest references to Dutch participation in the form’s genesis. There is a brief mention of the possible ramifications of Dutch presence: Certainly the confrontation with European modernity and the daily proof of the impact it was having on Balinese life was a general factor in creating an atmosphere of receptivity to the unfamiliar (2000: 89).

However, Tenzer steps back from direct acknowledgement of Dutch intervention, or designation of agency in signalling change, instead deferring to the abstraction of ‘European modernity’, here functioning rather passively as a ‘general factor’. Indeed, Tenzer is eager to follow up the statement above with a Balinese corrective, that ‘even [kebyar’s] bolder aspects were not without Balinese precedent’ (2000: 89). Tenzer maintains this position elsewhere in the work, explaining how kebyar ‘adopts an assertive and self aware stance of independence’ (2000: 4). The form is empowered further by music’s ability to state this message in its own vernacular; for ‘unlike most other musics innovated elsewhere in the world during the past century, gong kebyar crystallizes the vital spirit of the age without recourse to the dominant Western musical idioms and instrumental technologies of the period’ (2000: 4). Tenzer’s message is of Balinese creative resilience. The Dutch military incursion suffices as a vague backdrop, while analytical emphasis rests on Balinese artistic daring. This image appears to proffer an answer to an unasked question, namely: what did the colonial presence do to Bali? However, being as the analysis does not address the question of what occurred in Bali during this time in any depth, such an account appears to be rather evasive. Tilman Seebass offers an alternative account of the emergence of kebyar, with greater emphasis on the role of the Dutch in its creation. Contrary to Tenzer, he considers the period to be one of great turbulence and uncertainty, and also states early kebyar competitions to have been instigated by the Dutch government who were eager to see court prestige diminished and were keen to support the village-based kebyar (Seebass 1996: 84). However, when considering the role of Balinese and Dutch individuals in musical research and patronage during the colonial era, Seebass assumes a tone of uncritical reportage and lists specific localities and actors but without analysing potential connections between the colonial process and the musical scene he describes (1990). Such an omission appears to overwrite the political complexity evidently unfolding throughout the era, with the result that academic musicological interaction is somehow 47

privileged to be dislocated from the concerns of prestige and power which Seebass insightfully noted as key to kebyar’s inception. When addressing interaction between Balinese and the Western artist-scholar community, the idea of a ‘productive feedback loop’ also emerges which similarly depicts a wholly benign backdrop to exchange between scholars and musicians. One of the most focused accounts of Balinese-Western ‘dialogue’ on musical matters is David Harnish’s examination of Colin McPhee’s relationship with musician I Made Lebah, McPhee’s longtime driver, guide and musical informant (2001). Harnish suggests that the contact not only allowed McPhee to gain an insight into Balinese music for his own creative and analytical output, but simultaneously generated in Lebah what Harnish, (after Rice 1994) terms ‘“productive distanciation”: a process necessary to explanation and critical interpretation of one’s own culture’ (2001: 34). Harnish suggests that Though [Lebah] often thought McPhee’s questions were odd and wondered about his notational scribbles, he saw the logic in McPhee’s systematic study which resonated with his own approaches to learning Balinese music…. Due to McPhee’s frequent questions about musical techniques, elements, and overall description, Pak Lebah learned to abstract and verbally articulate about gamelan music, a skill unique even today for most musicians. Pak Lebah once told me that McPhee ‘bertanya mengenai musik yg saya belum pikirkan’ (‘asked questions about music that I had not thought before’), which required thought, inquiry and reflection to answer. Thus, McPhee inspired Pak Lebah to conceptualize music in new ways (2001: 29).

Harnish claims this ‘distanciation’ to have informed Lebah’s use of the hermeneutic concept of relating parts and whole, enabling him to transfer musical competency and material from one gamelan to the next, and allowing Lebah to construct and control a long and illustrious musical career: It was Pak Lebah’s ability to build on his knowledge, and then to bring his considerable memory to bear on the music, reapplying his disposition as a student and observations derived from his work with McPhee, which led him to success (2001: 35).

As a consequence of this type of new conceptualization, Harnish suggests Lebah to have gained in status and ability as a musician, a process shaped by his experience of working with McPhee. However, in the vein of Vickers’ ‘disinterested visitors’, Harnish’s depiction of McPhee sees him positioned in a socio-political vacuum, disconnected from the circumstances of colonial governance and its control over the island’s cultural production. As discussed throughout this section, there appears to be a substantial neglect of the implications of such colonial interaction which, as stated in the introduction, various other contemporary studies considering Balinese performance have powerfully emphasised. Not only do such musicological texts present a particularly fragmentary 48

picture of the era’s musical practices, but more importantly they overwrite or enunciate Balinese involvement in musical exchange as similarly disengaged from such concerns. As the next two chapters highlight, Western musicological accounts of Bali have a long history of decontextualizing music-making and of enunciating Balinese gamelan for Balinese people, and rather alarmingly, prove to be demonstrable components of colonial strategy.

Concluding Thoughts In this chapter I have begun to assemble a series of textual representations of Balinese music, as produced and disseminated during the colonial era. I have noted the steady surge of interest afforded Balinese music across the period, and the term’s various different phases: from a footnote in discussion of Majapahit Java during the early colonial era, to being channelled through the Dutch administrative process, and finally subject to the romantic popularizing of artistes Spies and McPhee. While Balinese music emerged as an apparently coherent term, and a proper object of study and appreciation, it has been subject to a broad range of representative approaches. Changing tides in scholarly approaches go part-way in explaining this diversity. However, rather than attempting to account for such variation as simply due to more or less adequate theoretical frameworks, I suggest the problem of this variation requires further critical examination, for the issue lies at the centre of this thesis. Instead of treating representations as just more or less accurate mirrorings of a fixed reality, it may be useful to reconsider what is at stake in such acts of representing. Expanding Nelson Goodman’s work on ‘representation-as’ in The Languages of Art, we may consider there to be a number of necessary components in any representative act: that someone represents something as something else at a particular time, for a particular purpose, with some outcome (Goodman 1968: 27-31). Likewise, an audience’s reception of a representation is moulded by situation, shaped by expectation, prior experience and ‘regulated by need and prejudice’ (1968: 9). In other words context, the purposes of description, the intended readership or audience, and the intended effects are an integral part of any critical analysis of representations of Balinese music, and as discussed in the introduction, the notion of ‘representation-as’ carries important political-epistemological implications. On this account, it is also not possible to describe in language Balinese music ‘as it is’. For one, there are the evident problems of trying to translate or render alien musical forms to an audience who have no frames of reference for understanding, and instead have at their disposal only those which underpin Western classical music. The assumption that Western music’s modernist theoretical bases, through its techniques of classifying 49

and quantifying, should be capable of subsuming any indigenous approach to music, carries with it obvious problems of power seizure and assumed hierarchy, an idea I shall develop further in the coming chapter. Secondly, the idea of representing Balinese music ‘as it is’ relies upon music as a coherent and static object fit for description, which is not to be taken for granted and stands as a problem in itself. In line with the work of Collingwood, this may be termed a substantialist mode of thought, where the existence of an a priori theoretical entity is presumed (here ‘Balinese music’, as predicated on ‘Javanese music’) and deemed to exist independently of historical circumstance, untouched by observation or description (1946: 42). Considering Balinese music in such a way thus emerges as rather essentialist, confining the musical activity to a fixed abstraction, external to social and historical context. Taking into account a representation’s purposive political undertone (this ‘for some purpose, with some outcome’), its articulation then takes on important implications of power, Goodman’s approach highlighting the role of a specific agent in the construction of any representation. Who was authorised to articulate Balinese music in the various phases of its representation? And how, when and where do Balinese musicians figure in the construction of Balinese music? Why are Balinese initially so markedly absent, or disarticulated, in musical accounts, and when they do appear, from the 1920s Baliseering era onwards, was their work with Euro-American researchers quite so untempered by colonial governance as contemporary depictions suggest? Many current theoretical accounts fail to address these issues. The post-structuralist Orientalist critique (one through which colonial Bali has often been analysed) sees Balinese themselves theoretically disavowed in the process. Said maintains that Western ‘discursive formations construct an Other out of the Orient’, based on the essentialising of imaginary and amplified characteristics, which are subsequently used ‘to control and manipulate what was manifestly different’: all of which is activated by the West (Said 2003 [1978]: 78). Meanwhile, an alternative standpoint already outlined above, one which claims to highlight a kind of Balinese ‘agency’, characterises Balinese participation as apolitical, bound into a utopian cultural exchange and abstracted from the circumstances of Dutch administrative control. Both these stances appear to close down some of the complexities of the era’s interactions, omitting possible Balinese involvement in the manufacture of a notional Balinese music. Thus, in the given accounts of the era there appears to be a dimension missing, namely the issues of power involved in describing, representing, classifying and labeling music forms. While appearing to privilege the object of description, these instead neatly hierarchize the object of study within a frame of reference which is at once alien and implicitly superior to the frames of reference of those whose music it is. As a result, a 50

curious silencing takes place in which people become spoken for. In cultural studies this is known as articulation and is central to understanding how colonial and other forms of power work. In the coming chapter I set about examining how various techniques of power might be found to thread through the era’s reframing of Balinese music as an aesthetic object, providing a critical analysis of these works through discussion of their representative approaches.

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Chapter Three Harmonizing Aesthetics: Gamelan Music as Art and Social Order in Colonial Bali Now out of the silence drift faint sounds of drum and cymbal... The world is wet with moonlight and the honeyed dripping of the stars, and vacant aisles among the palm trees yearn for non existent lovers. The warm scented air is throbbing. It is singing the Song of Songs. “I am black but comely,” sings the night. But now upon it bursts the boom and tinkle of brass, like a cold astringent douche. (Powell 1930: 28) Aesthetic behaviour is the ability to see more in things than they are. (Adorno 1984: 453)

The crowding of imagery found in many late colonial-era writings on Bali neatly mirrors perceptions of the island bursting at the seams with a surplus of culture and exoticism. Sentences are packed as tightly as the weekly tourist ferry from Surabaya must have been. Having traced the broad progression of Western representative techniques which constituted Balinese gamelan music as an object of study and appreciation during the colonial era, this chapter scrutinizes the production and implications of one particular and important strand of representation: how, why and by whom was Balinese music-making rendered as an aesthetic object? Following on from issues raised in the previous two chapters concerning the overwriting or ‘enunciation’ of Western concepts in the interpretation and evaluation of non-Western practices, the chapter considers various Western approaches to ‘aesthetics’––notably its widespread interpretation as ‘universal’––and asks what might be the implications of affixing such a label to Balinese music, or indeed, in determining Balinese music to be self-evidently ‘aesthetic’? In approaching this question, I consider the various moves made by EuroAmerican scholars and artists in designating Balinese music as art: the chapter examines how this process of aestheticization may be connected to the changing definition of another ‘universal’ concept apparently located in Balinese practice– the idea of ‘culture’: it considers how scholars sought structural and so-called ‘absolute’ attributes in Balinese music, asking how this may be linked to ideas of modernist nostalgia; and it examines how writers’ techniques of metaphor and synecdoche succeeded not only in describing but also constituting the object under discussion. As will be illustrated below, key colonial metaphors to describe gamelan music, and Balinese life more generally, included ideas of ‘harmony’, ‘unity’, and ‘balance’ (metaphors which continue to thread throughout contemporary accounts of Balinese gamelan). How might these genial descriptions compare with the broader socio-economic and political circumstances under which they were produced? What purpose might the articulation of Balinese music-making as 52

harmonious, unified, or balanced have served, and what implications did such depictions hold for the Balinese (musical) community described as such? Indeed, how might Balinese musicians, patrons and informants have been involved in their construction? In this chapter I first consider the issue of aesthetics, particularly the anthropological idea of ‘cross-cultural aesthetics’, and outline some preliminary problems in the application of Western-derived ‘ahistorical’ and ‘universal’ concepts and categories onto foreign practices, using examples drawn from studies of cultural interaction in Java and in Japan. Having noted the application of metaphor as a key technique in the aesthetic categorizing of Balinese music, I subsequently address the more general theoretical implications of metaphor in musicological and anthropological studies. The chapter then tracks the development of the various colonial period representative practices (and practitioners) to render Balinese music-making as aesthetically valuable. I consider how and why modernist nostalgia came to settle upon Balinese gamelan as a site of bygone ‘artistic’ values, and discuss how such identification effectively dehistoricized (and consequently decontextualized) Balinese gamelan music. From here I assess the wider of implications of such representative techniques: I consider how Balinese music (notably the modern form gamelan gong kebyar) was positioned and privileged as a synecdoche, or articulation, of colonial projections of ‘harmonious Bali’ as a whole; and in discussing accounts of Balinese gamelan music as the apparent embodiment of Balinese unity and balance, I assess how such representations came to mirror and potentially enable broader strategies of Dutch governance. Lastly, I pose the question of whether certain Balinese figures may themselves have been active or complicit in such techniques of representation, a theme which will be developed in the following chapter.

Issues in ‘Cross-Cultural Aesthetics’ As discussed in the main body of this chapter, during the 1920s the popular claim arose among Westerners that ‘every Balinese is an artist’, supported by a new-found appreciation for Balinese ‘culture’. Evaluating the use of the concepts ‘art’ and ‘culture’ to describe or translate Balinese practices hinges on an assessment of the terms’ universal claims: do ideas of aesthetic value and the notion of culture stand as self-evident objects or categories to be analyzed and filled unproblematically, or, conversely, might such labels claim a distinct, Western history and present a more unstable frame of reference, or even a site of struggle in their application? Cultural Studies has argued powerfully for the latter while, as discussed, a range of scholars have tackled Western claims of timeless, universalist categories, notably Foucault’s concept of genealogy and Collingwood’s ‘metaphysical analysis’ which urges the analyst to engage with the often radically 53

different presuppositions held by different groups of people at different times. With these approaches as a foundation, the following discussion focuses on the issue of ‘crosscultural aesthetics’ and the theoretical implications of such a cultural translation which unproblematically designates certain Balinese practices to be ‘aesthetic’. Critical to the possibility of ‘cross-cultural aesthetics’ is a presumed universality: that the artistic or the aesthetic is deemed ‘a natural category of human activity and experience’ (Dutton 2005: 279). This universalism, begun in Aristotle’s principle of art as mimesis where humans by nature are impelled to imitate, is continued in Kant’s sensus communis: the shared, universal human sensibility which determines our ‘judgements of taste’. While anthropology has more readily addressed cultural diversity and the contingent social construction of reality, ‘art’ and ‘aesthetics’ have endured as classificatory terms, fit for global application. Justified as ‘experience-distant’ concepts by Clifford Geertz, such abstractions have been deemed the necessary analytical tools of the experimenter or ethnographer, in order ‘to forward their scientific, philosophical or practical aims’ (1983: 57). Such a view suggests, however, that it is possible to suspend such terms over another’s cultural practice without imposing in any significant way on its content. An argument noted in Sperber’s work on terminology in interpretive ethnography suggests otherwise. Rather then simply describing, the ‘interpretative generalization’ entails a more active, and potentially invasive process on the part of the ethnographer: the anthropologists’ technical vocabulary is a medley of words to be used where straightforward translations are wanting: ‘sacrifice’, ‘divination’, ‘priest’… ‘symbol’, ‘marriage’... When they seem to be developing a theory of sacrifice, they are, actually,pursuing [the] work of second (or nth) degree interpretation. (1985: 25, 27, cited in Hobart 2000: 157).

Further to issues of classification and appellation, anthropology on art has focused on how far art may be seen as a part of, or distinct from, other forms of social practice (see Hughes-Freeland 1997 and Weiner 1994). The notion of art as embedded within social functions, particularly religious practice, is certainly at the core of most studies of Javanese and Balinese gamelan ‘aesthetics’. As discussed in Becker’s commentary on Central Javanese gamelan traditions, the question of aesthetic appeal or beauty in Javanese music is often considered to be bound tightly to music’s religious ‘efficacy’ (Becker 1980: 103). Herbst’s work on the ‘intrinsic aesthetics’ of Balinese musical performance, while praising approaches such as Becker’s which ‘avoid seeing all human cultures in terms of ethnocentric Euro-American aesthetics’, suggests however, that such a delineation of beauty and ritual efficacy ‘relies upon a distinction that does not exist in practice’ (Herbst 1997: 122). Herbst instead aims to show an aesthetic appreciation as ‘intrinsic’ to Balinese function, drawing on the Kawi Old Javanese concept of alangö, defined by Zoetmulder as, 54

‘enraptured’ or ‘rapturing’. It can be said of a beautiful view as well as of the person affected by its beauty. It has what we might call a ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ aspect, for there is a common element—the Indians would say a common rasa—in both subject and object which makes them connatural and fit to become one (1974: 173, cited in Herbst 1997: 122).

Pivoting on the dual definition of aesthetics as either ‘of or pertaining to sensuous perception’ or ‘of or pertaining to the appreciation or criticism of the beautiful’, Zoetmulder (and subsequently Herbst) conflate extended sensory appreciation with the term ‘beauty’. Rather like alangö’s double power both to describe and to enact, beauty in Bali is deemed by Herbst not an abstract and passive property in opposition to efficacy, but ‘a basic ingredient’ of it (1997: 122). According to Herbst, beauty’s functional qualities are expressed in a range of Balinese maxims, which foremost invoke the notion of balance or equilibrium, apparently ‘appreciated as an aesthetic property’, and expressed by the Tripramana threefold unity of bayu, sabda, and idep: ‘Bayu is wind, breath, energy, activity; sabda is vocalized expression; and idep is thought, perception’ (1997: 122). Herbst declares this threefold principle to indicate ‘an intrinsic aesthetic concept and idea of beauty’, a concept and idea applied daily by the Balinese, states Herbst, for ‘the means of achieving an efficacious relationship with the world is to maintain a standard of beauty (balance, harmony)’ (1997: 123). Herbst’s work is a good example of an attempt to see ‘aesthetics’ as embedded in their broader situations of social practice: in this instance going so far as to present all social activity as effectively governed by an ‘aesthetic’ principle. However, HughesFreeland suggests that while such accounts are a positive opposition to the idea of the aesthetic as a ‘transcendental and universal realm’, they nonetheless ‘over-emphasize cultural purity and authenticity’ (1997: 473). Surveying Herbst’s ahistorical account of a pure and unchanging Balinese aesthetic, this seems very much the case. Research reconsidering ‘authentic’ Javanese aesthetic terminology underwrites this. HughesFreeland suggests that Zoetmulder (on alangö) ‘invented an Old Javanese aesthetic which has gone on to influence many subsequent researchers of Javanese culture’ through his description of a ‘courtly transformation of the aesthetic canons of classical India’, a standpoint assuredly supported by Pemberton’s work on the colonial construction of Javanese culture (Hughes-Freeland 1997: 482, Pemberton 1994). Pemberton demonstrates how many contemporary Javanese practices are far from long-established, but rather a product of colonial encounters, the discursive figure of ‘Java’ inscribed in contrast to Dutch presence on the island. Relevant to processes of aestheticisation on Bali is the aesthetic or stylistic point of origin of this process in Java, where

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its initial lines of distinction were drawn from wardrobe option: having identified a certain “Dutch ‘fashion” or “Dutch style” (cara Walandi), Surakartans then fashioned themselves in what came to be thought of by the turn of the nineteenth century as cara Jawi, “Javanese style”(1994: 23).

From a single detail regarding dress, recalling as it did ‘a “Java” ideally beyond the colonial administrative reach of Netherlands East Indies’, Pemberton notes how the process of distinction flourished (1994: 23). This idea of style, or cara, was steadily reified ‘to convey a sense of, in a word, “culture”’, and expanded ‘to articulate a world of difference in terms of custom, language, literature, and so on, all the essential lines of an identity that by the early twentieth-century would be recognised, in retrospect, as a typically cultural identity’ (1994: 66, 23). Pemberton goes on to explore at length the connections between this constructed cultural identity and the processes of colonial subjugation. Returning to Herbst’s account, the core of Balinese aesthetics sees a transformation of Zoetmulder’s analysis of the Old Javanese alangö’ into a story of harmony and balance: a precise echo of the colonial position on Bali’s social and political stability, most famously expounded by Gregory Bateson in Bali: The Value System of a Steady State (1949) as will be discussed below. It appears there may be more complex and insidious historical background to Bali’s apparently timeless, ‘intrinsic’ aesthetics. The conflation of cultural identity and aesthetics, and their recent construction in Asia through Western engagement, may be exemplified sharper still by a brief detour to Japan. Dutton’s article on ‘Aesthetic Universals’ cites how Japanese writer Okakura Tenshin designates the Japanese tea ceremony an art-form in his 1906 The Book of Tea (2005: 279). Dutton posits this as a good indication of how core aesthetic principles may be applied cross-culturally, commenting on how the tea ceremony has been described as ‘art’, despite its having ‘no clear analogue in European tradition’ (2005: 279). Work by Japanese thinker Kojin Karatini, co-incidentally also focused on Okakura, neatly pulls apart Dutton’s claim. Karatini describes Okakura as one of the first Japanese to ‘use aesthetics politically’, situating his work to ‘aestheticise’ Japanese craft amidst the SinoJapanese War of 1894 and burgeoning Japanese imperialism (1998: 154). Karatini describes how Okakura was ‘introduced to Western notions of art’ by American scholar Ernest Fenollosa, and how Okakura’s role in the aestheticisation of Japanese handicrafts as ‘art’ in turn allowed ‘Japanese art’ to represent Japan on the global stage, paving the way for Japan’s later imperialist rise (1998: 154). Far from an isolated movement in Japan, Karatini considers this transformation of craft to art as possible there only through the pre-existing boom in enthusiasm for ‘folk art’ and handicrafts in Europe. In turn this was generated, broadly speaking, by the rise of Western industrial capitalism and the demise of, and subsequent nostalgia for, individual craftsmanship. Okakura’s work in reconfiguring craft (or indeed tea ceremonies) as art, is seen thus to have been directly prefigured by Western aestheticism: Okakura counterposes Eastern handicraft with

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Western industrialisation to mirror the sudden reverence for traditional workmanship of craft-aesthetes Ruskin and Morris (1998: 155). Karatini goes a step further in terms of the significance of aesthetics’ crosscultural application. He suggests the process of aestheticentrism, of presupposing and then reifying the supposedly ‘aesthetic’ qualities of another culture, to be an integral element of Orientalist colonial subjugation. This [Orientalist] stance goes hand-in-hand with an aesthetic worship of the very inferior Other. This worship, in turn, produces an uneradicable self-deceit: Those with an Orientalist attitude come to believe that they, unlike others, treat non-Westerners more than equally- they treat them with "respect"… Aestheticentrists always appear as anticolonialists. In the same way, they always appear as anti-industrial capitalists, although their aesthetic stance was produced by the advent of industrial capital (1998: 147, 153).

Taking on board both Karatini’s critique and the recent scholarship on Java, rather than going about my own assessment of ‘Balinese aesthetics’, I aim to tackle the issue through a more constitutivist approach. I shall consider not what might be termed ‘aesthetic’ in Bali, but examine the various ways the idea of the aesthetic has been invoked and applied with regard to Balinese gamelan music by Westerners. Drawing on Goodman’s idea of ‘worldmaking’, we may view art and aesthetic formations not as substantive entities, but instead as the constructions of realities, dependent on the frames of reference at play for their makers and audiences: ‘How an object or event functions as a work [of art] explains how, though certain modes of reference, what so functions may contribute to a vision of —and to the making of—a world’ (1978: 70). Goodman suggests we re-conceptualise the question ‘what is art?’ to consider instead the circumstances under which one deems an object or event to be art, and so ask: ‘when is art?’ (1978: 66). Acknowledging the act of designating objects to be artworks as embedded in a wider patterns of social life chimes with Bourdieu’s sociological account of art’s function. He demonstrates that aesthetic judgments of taste can never be innocent, but are conditional on, and keenly associated with, social relations, the establishment of hierarchies and an economy of cultural capital: ‘Art and cultural consumption are predisposed, consciously and deliberately or not, to fulfill a social function of legitimating social differences’ (Bourdieu 1984: 7).

A Note on Metaphor Examining the aestheticisation of gamelan music through text returns us to the question of representation and particularly the use of metaphor. As illustrated by Herbst’s assertion of ‘harmony and balance’ as Bali’s ‘intrinsic aesthetics’, metaphor assumes a key role in enabling this type of cultural translation. A range of persistent metaphors litter early 57

accounts of Balinese practices which likewise concentrate on ideas of harmony, balance and also unity. In accounts by McPhee, gamelan music’s composition and performance is designated to be the embodiment of ‘perfect balance’ and ‘mysterious unity’, while de Zoete and Spies expand musical metaphor into synecdoche to depict Bali as a whole: the opening of their Dance and Drama in Bali makes numerous references to ‘the harmony of the Balinese’ (McPhee 1966: 111, 1944: 41, de Zoete and Spies 1938: 1). As the following passage will discuss, metaphor is far from an innocent means of description but stands as a particularly powerful mode of representation, with corresponding constitutive potential. Indeed, the power of metaphor in structuring our perceptions of the world around us has been the subject of a range of studies (Lakoff and Johnson 1980, Salmond 1982, Sweetser 1990, Gibbs 1994). Lakoff and Johnson demonstrate that far from metaphor being a discrete component of literary creativity, a ‘rhetorical flourish’, it is in fact ‘pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action’ (1980: 3). Salmond’s work on cross-cultural conceptions of knowledge in Western and Maori society, further examines the properties of metaphor, showing how metaphorical structure and application must be understood as culturally particular (1982). The implications are clear for anthropological study: that applying one’s own set of metaphors to another’s thinking immediately delimits the possibilities of engagement. This applies equally to music. As introduced in Chapter One, Zbikowski’s examination of conceptual models and cross-domain mapping in music theory can also been seen as highlighting the role of metaphor in shaping our musical perception (1997). Examining approaches to Western classical music, he traces the lineage of two distinct theories of musical ‘hierarchy’: a chain-of-being hierarchy, based on neo-Platonic thinking, and used to characterize pitch organisation through the metaphor of an organism ‘pervaded by a mysterious force’; and an atomistic hierarchy, founded on the work of sixteenth-century thinker Bruno Giordano and used to characterize metrical organisation through the metaphor of ‘an extended mechanism’ (1997: 204-209). Zbikowski clarifies how particular conceptual models, formulated through metaphor, ‘condition and constrain theories of music’: an idea particularly resonant with ethnomusicology’s quest to understand different cultures of music-making ‘on their own terms’ (1997: 200). Indeed, Goodman illustrates his own notion of ‘frozen metaphor’ with a specifically Western musical metaphor: the spatialisation of pitch that renders a note ‘high’ or ‘low’. Goodman’s notion of ‘frozen metaphor’ illuminates not only how metaphor pervades our construction of worlds, but that as a metaphor become stale or ‘frozen’, ‘it becomes not less but more like literal speech. What vanishes is not its veracity but its vivacity. Metaphors, like new styles of representation, become more literal 58

as their novelty wanes’ (1968: 68). The conscious and unconscious role of metaphor in people’s capacity ‘to make their worlds’, is echoed powerfully in Inden’s work on colonial representations of India, here with careful attention to its potential for generating or restricting power and agency (1990: 5). Inden examines how certain Western imaginings have seen India kept eternally ancient by various Essences attributed to it, most notably that of caste… One of the major purposes of Indological discourses was to give the impression that the world was ordered in a natural, stable way. Scholarly writing achieved this by building essences into its metaphors (1990: 1, 2).

Inden locates a particular set of essences, expressed through metaphor, to dominate representations of India: India as a female; Indian thought as a dream; caste society as a centrifuge; Hinduism as a jungle or a sponge. He states that such metaphors are to a large extent constitutive of the phenomena they describe, and not merely figures of speech... that can and should ultimately be dispensed with. Each of them is, furthermore, loaded with implications for action (or inaction) (1990: 1-2).

Inden’s critique of the Western world’s scholarly accounts of India demonstrate that not only is representation through metaphor key to the conceptualization of phenomena, but constituent of them, and thus central in forming structures of power and subjugation. In light of these accounts, colonial-era studies of Bali (and indeed many of their contemporary revisions) need to be evaluated through careful attention to the application of metaphor, to which Bali has often been subject. Music can be seen to function two-fold in the proceedings. Not only is Balinese musical activity essentialized to demonstrate certain perceived aesthetic qualities, but, as will be demonstrated, certain musical features were deemed to illuminate an otherwise inaccessible Balinese essence, and so expanded and projected back onto Bali as a whole. This chapter thus considers not only how Balinese music has been variously represented as an aesthetic object, but how depictions of Balinese music have, in turn, been used to represent wider imaginings of Bali.

Introducing Aesthetics in Bali You will be told that the Balinese are the greatest artists of this age, and still more that every Balinese, man or woman, is an artist (Roosevelt 1930: x).

This section considers how Balinese music came to be rendered as art through a range of constitutive metaphors applied to Balinese practices as a whole, notably achieved through the flexible interpellation of Western visions of ‘culture’. I briefly trace the early representation of Bali first as a religious depository (culture as religion), before noting the 59

arrival of the Dutch, the Baliseering policy, and, crucially Walter Spies, who adjusted the mode of cultural translation to accredit Bali as a land of artistry (culture as art). I note how Balinese music-making came to be formulated as music for aesthetic appreciation, observing how Balinese music was particularly slow to receive artistic validation from Westerners, even on first hearings from its later champions. From a brief survey of colonial sources which include Western writers’ early perceptions of gamelan music, it emerges that early twentieth-century audiences revealed initial bewilderment on encountering gamelan performance. Only through a concerted endeavour to locate connections between what was ultimately a Kantian account of form and beauty and what they heard, did gamelan’s assume its status as an art-form for these writers. The sudden revelation of Bali’s self-evident musical ‘artistry’ appears to be mediated not only by the deliberate introduction of metaphors concerning structure and form, but accordingly by what Europeans and Americans expected of exotic others. Prior to Dutch conquest, according to Western eyes, Bali as a hotbed of artistic production did not exist: it was the arrival of the ‘Baliseering’ process which saw the beginnings of Bali identified primarily through a new interpretation of ‘culture’ as aesthetic. Early depictions of the island depicted a Bali that was ‘savage’ yet pleasant, describing a propensity for warring among the inhabitants well compensated for by the generous hospitality of its rulers. However, this was revised following the failed Dutch attempt to forge a slave-trade from Balinese citizens in the mid seventeenth-century, and Bali was deemed a land of marauding barbarians through a fresh discovery of its true ‘savagery’ (Vickers 1989: 16). As reported above, during the Dutch consolidation of control over Java in the nineteenth century Bali was seen to gain in cultural status. However, this status was initially indexed by religious practice alone. In contrast to Islamic Java, Bali was considered as ‘the only remaining preserves’ of the Hindu religion in the East Indies, where ‘the two great Indian creeds, the Brahmanical and the Buddhist, exist’ (Friederich 1959 [1849-50]: 2, 102). However, other ‘cultural’ facets of Bali were otherwise disregarded: It cannot, indeed, be said, that the whole population of Bali, in arts (wherein they are clearly behind) or in science, stand above the Javanese, but the priests bring before our eye the stage at which the Javanese stood before the introduction of Muhammedanism. (Friederich 1959 [1849-50]: 2)

This sentiment was similarly shared by Raffles. Among the derogatory commentary cited in the previous chapter concerning the ‘rough’,‘uncivilized’ quality of the Balinese people, Raffles also states abruptly that the ‘the arts are little practised’ (1830 [1817]: 234).

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On assuming political control in 1908, Dutch scholar-administrators set to work on cataloguing Bali’s customs and habits, while a surge of publications praising the beauty of Bali’s people and landscape hit Europe and America. However, emphasis on Bali’s cultural aesthetic awaited a catalyst. Picard notes: By the early 1920s, Bali had found a place in the Western imagination thanks to the beauty of its women, but it had yet to find someone to communicate to the world the profuse diversity of its cultural riches. That role would be filled by the German painter and musician, Walter Spies. (1996b: 32)

By this account, Spies can be accredited with freshly calibrating Bali’s previous constituent metaphor of ‘religious culture’ to newly frame Bali as a place of ‘artistic culture’. Having spent several years living and studying music in the Sultan’s palace of Yogyakarta in Central Java, Spies’ arrival in Bali in 1927 proved a revelation. As a homosexual, Spies discovered Bali to be enticingly free of Europe’s moral strictures, homosexuality on Bali regarded merely as ‘a pastime for young unmarried men’ (Vickers 1989: 106). He was to remain there until the onset of the second world war, leaving only through forced departure following his arrest for paedophilia by the Dutch. Spies’ Bali was both socially and artistically refined. In Dance and Drama in Bali (1938), coauthored with Beryl de Zoetes’, he describes the ‘exquisite politeness of the Balinese’, with Bali as the ‘home of a peculiarly gifted people’, going on to offer a distinctly romantic picture of Bali’s cultural wealth (1938: 3, 2). Spies occupied a central position in Western perceptions of Bali, not only as famed cultural connoisseur, but as a gatekeeper for European and American understandings of Bali. Spies’ written, photographed and filmed interpretations of Bali were produced for an audience which mostly had no experience of Bali, forming the first contact that many readers in the West ever had with the island. He also shaped the personal experiences of visitors who themselves journeyed to Bali. According to Covarrubias, also resident in Bali in the 1930s, Spies was ‘familiar with every phase of Balinese life,’ the first port of call for any new foreign arrival on Bali, and on-hand to provide ‘a constant source of disinterested information to every archaeologist, anthropologist, musician or artist who has come to Bali’ (Covarrubias 1937: xxii). Spies’ personal vision of Bali thus had a powerful role in shaping others’ impressions: Vickers suggests ‘many of his friends were so impressed by him that they tended to read his personality into Balinese culture’, while Hobart states that not only was Spies ‘a complex and ambiguous figure in the romanticisation of the island’ but central in forging ‘the hegemonic account of the island that subsequent works recount—largely uncritically’ (Vickers 1989: 106, Hobart 2007: 108). Spies’ interest in Balinese visual arts and dance forms is well reported. However it is interesting to note that among the accolades attributed to Spies by Covarrubias, he is also hailed as the ‘first to appreciate and record Balinese music’ (1937: xxii). This is not 61

strictly true, considering the 1912 recording project for the Berlin Phonogramm Archive, led by Odo Deodatus Tauern. However, Stepputat’s work on early recordings of Balinese gamelan music claims that all the other pre-war private and commercial collections produced were ‘mostly based on Walter Spies’ knowledge and relations’ (2004: 5). While Colin McPhee is usually celebrated as the preeminent scholar of Balinese music, it is worth bearing in the mind the potential control Spies held in managing both the musical output exported from Bali and in guiding those figures around him. Indeed, in McPhee’s case it was specifically the 1928 Odeon/Lindström recordings (as organised by Spies) ‘that were to change my life completely, bringing me out here in search of something quite indefinable—music or experience, I could not at this moment say’ (McPhee 1944: 9-10). However, while Spies’ musical enthusiasm is noted by Covarrubias, Spies’ own brief accounts of the recording work suggest a more prosaic and functional style of involvement. In a letter to his mother, dated 1st July, 1928, Spies notes that ‘if I had not solved that gramophone-affair, I would never have been able to build the house’, and in another letter, dated 4th September 1928, writes simply ‘Odeon-people were here and made gramophone recordings’ (cited in Stepputat 2004: 5). 18 In relation to music, it is not until McPhee’s arrival in Bali that gamelan music finds specific and sustained Englishlanguage enthusiasm and investigation. Balinese gamelan music assumed a complex relationship with what we may term aesthetics for McPhee. His early experiences on Bali present McPhee with a range of enticements and obstacles in his appreciation of gamelan sounds as music. Writing for a Western audience that he could not presume to be knowledgeable about either music or Bali, A House in Bali (1944) provides helpful insight into McPhee’s personal perceptions. It is narrated with a revealing and incautious lyricism, as opposed to the academic formality and many years of rumination underpinning Music in Bali (1966). In A House in Bali, McPhee’s initial Balinese encounter with gamelan takes place soon after his disembarkation at the northern port of Bulèlèng, and he first situates gamelan within a cross-sensory blur of taste and smell: Arabs, Chinese and Balinese… sat peacefully in tiny restaurants, smoking, drinking synthetic pear juice coloured that seductive pink... The town gave forth the faint scent of all Eastern cities, of nutmeg and aromatic cigarettes, coconut oil, gardenias and drying fish. From somewhere came the sound of sweet crystal music; of a gong, and above it thin chime-like melody, commencing, stopping, commencing once again (1944: 10-11).

Distant and disembodied, the sounds are sweet and musical. However, on locating the rehearsal space, he finds the players ‘in the midst of a confusion of gongs and instruments’, while the sounds themselves ‘clashed, rang and echoed, and beneath it all

18

See Appendix 1, note 2.

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was the persistent beat of drums that rose at one moment to fury, fell to the next to an almost inaudible throb’: gamelan as music is temporarily lost (1944: 11). Appreciation is, however, rapidly restored and indeed enhanced, not only through the players’ ‘serene and unified gestures’ and ‘infinite gentleness’ (a propensity for frenzy duly tamed), but also through the beginnings of a comparative, structural account: ‘the melody unrolled like some ancient chant, grave and metallic, while around it wove an endless counterpoint of tones’ (1944: 11, 12). With this established, the music is now ‘even more incredible than I had imagined’ (1944: 13). McPhee’s first hearing of gamelan pelégongan displays some similarities to this sequence. Contrast between the tame and wild remains: the ‘swift, chiming sounds… rose and fell above the agitated throb of drums’, but there also follows the tension between unstructured sound versus musical design (1944: 40). Initially gamelan is ‘simply delicious confusion’ and, through its not being ‘personal and romantic, in the manner of our own effusive music,’ gamelan is ‘rather, sound broken up into beautiful patterns’ (1944: 40). McPhee continues, it was however more than this, as I was to find out. Already I began to have a feeling of form and elaborate architecture. Gradually, the music revealed itself as being composed, as it were, of different strata of sound (1944: 40).

Sound becomes music, through the unveiling of formal design. While beauty is, for McPhee, already present in small-scale pattern, it is finessed and expanded by its role in greater structure. As will be discussed in greater detail below, McPhee’s most substantial and final theoretical work, Music in Bali (1966), is centred around issues of musical form in gamelan, particularly in connection with the ‘classic’ repertoire of the gamelan gong/ gamelan gong gedé, the ceremonial orchestra used for temple ceremonies and festivities, and once the province of the royal courts. McPhee states that such works ‘impress the listener with their spacious and varied metric proportions, their melodic structure and solid formal balance’, noting how even seemingly asymmetric organisation of palet (smaller-scale metrical units within larger cycles) in gong gedé repertoire is countered by large scale repetition so that ‘perfect balance is achieved’ (1966: 112, 111). 1930s travelwriter Hickman Powell similarly locates specific form as the key to aesthetic appeal in Balinese gamelan: It falls pleasantly, but at first incomprehensibly, upon my occidental ear. But as I listen intently I know that this is highly developed counterpoint, based on the simplest of melodies, simple things exquisitely interwoven, like the pattern of an oriental rug. From the simplicity of x and y are built all the intricacies of quadratic equations. And no matter how much you may loathe it, algebra is beautiful (1930: 28).

Powell’s distinction between pleasure and beauty, where the pleasant is transformed into the beautiful only via structural design, provides a neat summary of Kantian formalist 63

aesthetics. For Kant, the aesthetic judgement, as opposed to the agreeable, must concern itself only with form (shape or arrangement) in the object presented, and not with sensible content (colour, tone etc.) (Burnham 2000: 7). This sentiment is echoed by McPhee, in his declaration that Balinese music has ‘a beauty that depends upon form and pattern’ (1935: 169). It is further emphasised by his commentary of other ‘Asian music’: Balinese music’s value is defined through its strict contrast to ‘the perfume and sultriness of so much music in the East’ (1944: 40). This generic ‘music of the East’ is thus deemed too rich in Kant’s ‘sensible content’ alone. Without form, it cannot appeal aesthetically to its designated receptor, the ear, but is so abundantly sensuous it must be described through metaphors of scent and climate. However, this location of form and structure, particularly the idea of ‘perfect balance’, as the central component of Balinese aesthetic merit, or indeed the aesthetic target of Balinese music, can also be seen to resonate with the specific artistic needs and origins of Balinese music’s Western commentators, as well as connecting to wider issues of colonial-era governance. From here, I seek to situate and examine the series of interweaving models and metaphors surrounding the designation of musical form as the key component to colonial era representations of Balinese gamelan music as an aesthetic entity. Central to many colonial commentaries on Balinese music was the attribution of the term ‘absolute music’ to Balinese gamelan, and so the chapter examines the particular association of the absolute music concept with American modernist composition, a musical movement in which McPhee was a key figure during his early career as a composer. Having noted the historical origins of this designation, I then discuss the associations that the absolute music label engendered, particularly how such a label enabled and nurtured particular feelings of nostalgia in the perception of Balinese music. This nostalgic sensibility can also be demonstrated as closely associated to McPhee’s gradual shift of attention and approval from gamelan gong kebyar to classic ceremonial forms such as gamelan gong gedé, the latter form later declared by McPhee to bear the true hallmark of Balinese aesthetic value. Leaving the implications of McPhee’s historical focus until the following chapter, I then address how nostalgia was a key catalyst in the modernist aestheticization of gamelan music, and subsequently contributed to a particular process of essentialization of Balinese gamelan music, where musical practice was depicted as a transmaterial, ahistorical expression of Balinese ‘spirit’. Indeed, such representation not only reframes musical practice through particular metaphors, but sees musical practice––or rather, its representation thereof––employed as a metaphor to represent various other Balinese social practices. Amid this discussion, the chapter then introduces the particular political valence that these such metaphors (particularly ideas of 64

balance and harmony) assumed in the colonial management of Bali. Lastly, as an introduction to the following chapter, I offer a preliminary analysis of potential Balinese involvement in the aestheticization of Balinese music and culture, a topic to be developed subsequently in the thesis.

Balinese Music as Absolute Music We who have written about music have adopted a jargon of stereotypes to approximate its idioms… We may condescend towards program music and affect to despise it, and render homage to the creators of fugal patterns, but how we thank the muses when Prokofiev exorcises devils… The Balinese musician gives no such aid. He plays pure music, which by its very existence is romantic, but has in it not one jot of romanticism. (Powell 1930: 31) A canon, in this sense, is to seek mastery over the apparently bewildering diversity of some domain by discovering some implicit, unifying principle—to reduce the many to the one and little… the principal and most consistent canon of our Western aesthetic is that successful works of art… exhibit unity, coherence or “organic” integrity. Music theory upholds this canon in its seminal commitment to the presupposition that musical unity is to be found not exposed the complex… “surface” of a composition, but rather hidden in some “underlying” structural simplicity (Cohn and Dempster 1996: 156).

Designation of musical ‘form and pattern’ was key not only to formulating a general aesthetic account of Balinese music, but was the central component in how Balinese music came to be represented as ‘absolute’ by modernists such as McPhee, a designation which came to have specific and potentially pernicious implications for certain Balinese cultural practices.19 By glossing Balinese music as absolute music, Western interpreters united ideas of the primacy of (timeless) structure and a faux-universalism in a single move to deny the conditions of musical production, thus denying or disarticulating the role and practices of Balinese in making the music itself. This section considers the various scholarly moves which saw Balinese music popularly framed as absolute music in the late colonial era. As discussed in Chapter Two, McPhee’s musical life in New York prior to the Balinese departure saw him defined as an unequivocally modernist composer (as illustrated by the production of neo-classical works such as Invention (1926) and Concerto for Piano with Wind Octette (1928)). This section examines McPhee’s transposition of modernist aesthetic values onto Balinese gamelan. It considers some of the verbal and compositional means by which Balinese gamelan was represented by McPhee to Western readerships and audiences as an analogue of Western modernist music, notably absolute music, before discussing the wider implications of such a move.

19

The term ‘absolute music’ was created and applied during the nineteenth century as part of the Romantic movement, describing music that was perceived to refer to nothing other than itself. Despite the proclaimed Modernist rejection of Romanticism, the notion of ‘absolute music’ endured as ‘music of pure form’, and was employed most notably in the works of the serialists and neo-classicists. 65

McPhee’s changing relationship with gong kebyar is critical to this topic. His shifting stance––from initial enthusiasm to concerned criticism and occasional contempt––highlights the deep subjectivity of McPhee’s responses to the form, responses which appear much governed by the composer’s personal and professional circumstances. In agreement with Lechner (2005), I propose the designation of Balinese music as ‘absolute’ to be highly dependent on McPhee’s will to bolster the North American modernist movement (and, I would add, his role therein), on occasion at the expense of analysis of Bali’s actual musical practices. However, in addition I would suggest that the particular formal/aesthetic qualities attributed to gamelan (as ‘absolute’), worked not only to further the cause of the modernist movement, but can be seen to chime with various other potentially more insidious colonial representations which aestheticize Balinese social and cultural practices. This passage first traces some of McPhee’s responses to gamelan, exploring ideas of absolute music and his changing representation of kebyar, then discusses how such representations may support and align with various other colonial era commentaries on ‘Balinese culture’. As recounted in numerous periodicals from the era, notably the New York journal Modern Music (published 1924-1946), America’s modernist movement was a powerful force in producing new music of the 1920s and 1930s. Driving many of the new works by composers such as Edgar Varèse was a vigorous support for ‘absolute music’: music which it is claimed has no ‘expressive’ qualities but governed entirely by form or, as the composer (and McPhee associate) Henry Cowell put it, music understood purely as ‘organised sound’ (Cowell, undated citation in Gerschefski 1946: 258). Modern music was to be kinetic, physical, energetic with ‘discursive links between music, biology, the fury of the machine’ and, most significantly for this study, what was perceived as ‘the raw physicality of a non-Western “primitive”’ (Lechner 2005: 3). Henry Cowell was a leading figure to advocate the study and compositional use of non-Western materials as part of a mission to construct what he termed ‘New Musical Resources’. Cowell’s goal was to access and contribute to a new, universal musical language, declaring his own compositional mission ‘not as an attempt to imitate primitive music, but rather to draw on those materials common to music of all the peoples of the world’ (1933: 151, 150). However, amid assertions of the possibility of a universal musical language through Cowell’s idea of ‘primary musical elements’, new world modernism was also driven by an outright rejection of certain extant musical values, notably the Germanic orchestral tradition and the perceived emotional excess of Romantic music: Cowell called for a ‘strong new counter movement, full-blooded and vital’ to ‘react against sentimentality and pomp of later romantic music’ (1933: 150). Whatever the enthusiasm for accessing ‘new’ materials, the movements’ various responses to non-Western musical material were doubtless shaped by this antagonism: composers were searching for new musical 66

resources to validate the specific claims of their rejection, thus seeking to rebuff programmatic musical associations, to question the long-standing emphasis on tonality as the core of compositional technique, and to challenge the symphony orchestra as dominant musical medium. As a prominent figure in the 1920s New York composition scene and a promising student of Varèse, McPhee’s produced representations of Balinese music which can be seen to align with certain elements of the modernist polemic: indeed Lechner goes so far to state Balinese music as being used here as ‘ammunition in a modernist battle’ with McPhee formulating a representation of gamelan in his texts and compositions as a ‘defence of modernist beliefs’ (Lechner 2005: 2). Many of the qualities attributed to Balinese gamelan music sit comfortably with modernist musical principles, their apparent presence in a foreign musical culture justifying modernist claims to the musically ‘universal’. In McPhee’s 1935 article ‘The Absolute Music of Bali’, Balinese gamelan is represented as the apotheosis of modernist ideals: ‘impersonal and non expressive’, a form so full of ‘rhythmic vitality at once primitive and joyous’ that ‘the original nature of music reveals itself with ever greater clarity as a phenomenon of sound rather than of language’ (1935: 163). McPhee’s musical representation of gamelan in his composition work mirrors this concern with aligning gamelan with modernist values. McPhee’s largescale orchestral work for Western orchestra Tabuh-Tabuhan (1936) highlights how Balinese composition process might be in accordance with modernist ideals of impersonality, illustrating kebyar works’ extensive quotation and borrowing, an approach highlighted in his 1935 article which stated that Balinese ‘music is not composed but rearranged’, each piece presenting ‘a parade of transcriptions’ (1935: 165). TabuhTabuhan is likewise structured principally around the arrangement of various fragment of Balinese musical materials, based on a mixture of reconstructed gamelan works, sonorities and idioms: ‘I decided to write Tabuh-Tabuhan with the idea of using part of this fleeting material in a form similar to that of kebyar, and thus to create something Balinese in its manner of expression, if not in all its details’ (McPhee 1936, cited in Mueller 1991a: 129). Mueller’s detailed and informative study of the work considers McPhee’s approach as an example of ‘stylisation’, describing McPhee’s use of structural principles derived from ‘favoured effects as elements of style’, drawing on ‘Balinese musical relationships as principles of structural organisation’ (1991a: 132, 1991b: 67). Such a description of McPhee’s extraction of structural principles illustrates the composer’s modernist position that music may be broken-down into partial elements of structure, and Mueller comments on how McPhee’s approach was comprised of a hunt for ‘abstract relationships’ which would allow the composer to ‘reach across cultural barriers’ in 67

creative process and musical understanding (1991a: 142). Indeed, McPhee’s early academic writing frequently exhibit a similar approach, for instance in his illustration of apparently shared rhythmic divisions in Cuban cross-rhythms and in Balinese rhythmic groupings in gamelan angklung (McPhee 1937: 343). However, within McPhee’s quest for universal musical connections, Mueller’s detailed study of intercultural composition methods in Tabuh-Tabuhan highlights various misunderstandings of Balinese music which McPhee held at this stage in his career, mistakes which originated principally out of a will to align elements of the music he encountered in Bali with his own pre-Balinese compositional approach (Mueller 1991a, 1991b). Mueller notes how McPhee appears to have afforded unwarranted attention to Balinese musical features which happened to chime with his own compositional work prior to hearing the Odeon Balinese gamelan recordings, particularly as heard in his Concerto for Piano with Wind Octette (Mueller 1991a :133). 20 Among other features, Mueller notes that McPhee’s use of a 3-3-2 rhythmic pattern (heard persistently in Tabuh-Tabuhan) fails to take notice of other types of Balinese syncopation and rhythmic organisation; he states McPhee’s emphasis of gong dissonance fails to take into account that many gongs are arranged to follow the tuning system of the ensemble in their choice of pitch; and suggests that McPhee applied undue emphasis to the significance of ‘accents’ created by harmonic intervals in the rhythmic effect of figuration, at the expense of the cross-metric grouping of each of the interlocking parts themselves (1991a: 138). Mueller’s study goes on to defend McPhee’s later theoretical text Music in Bali (1966) as displaying a more precise consideration of Balinese musical practices. As one example, on the last of the theoretical positions of McPhee’s noted above, Mueller illustrates how McPhee retreats from discussion of ‘harmonic accent’ as central to the musical affect of interlocking figuration, to state in Music in Bali that its role is only ‘secondary’ in the provision of ‘cross-rhythmic accentuation’ (McPhee 1966: 235, Mueller 1991a: 140). Lechner and Mueller both seek to contextualize McPhee’s representational approaches to Balinese music, the former situating McPhee within modernist musical ideals, while Mueller, albeit less explicitly focused on McPhee’s application of general modernist values, astutely examines links between McPhee’s own compositional preoccupations and his early musical and theoretical representation of Balinese gamelan. While both accounts aptly illustrate how McPhee sought to reframe Balinese music as comprised of musical features resonant with modernism, particularly composition driven solely by abstract form and structure, neither writer considers the wider implications on Balinese cultural politics of such a move. In contrast, I suggest these approaches may

20

This also echoes a long-standing ethnomusicological position on musical ‘syncretism’, as proposed by Merriam, that suggests composers are often been attracted to foreign musical elements that have a ring of familiarity to them (Merriam 1964: 315).

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have significant implications for general practices of the representation and aestheticization of Balinese music and culture during this time, and in addition may have had a critical role in supporting or even shaping broader issues of governance and political power on the island. More specifically, I suggest the attribution of the term ‘absolute’ has important implications for how Balinese gamelan music has been perceived, particularly in relation to issues of timelessness and nostalgia, the latter state arguably increasingly governing McPhee’s representation of Balinese music during his lifetime. While McPhee initially revered Balinese music, particularly kebyar, for its apparently ‘modern’ qualities of rhythmic and structural drive, the assignation of absolute music invokes very particular narratives of history and also of timelessness, with the notion of Balinese gamelan as absolute at once denying and valorizing certain ideas of the ‘past’.

Balinese Music as Counterpoint and Nostalgia The designation of gamelan as absolute allied Balinese music to the golden aesthetic standard of the Western music historical canon, namely J.S. Bach, with a popular commentary emerging in the 1930s which compared Balinese (‘absolute’) musical sensibility to the rigorous structures of Baroque contrapuntal composition: Covarrubias describes a kebyar work he heard as ‘an Oriental ultra-modern Bach fugue, an astounding combination of bells, machinery and thunder’ (1937: 207). Meanwhile, Powell recounts a musical interaction as told to him by Walter Spies, the painter having played a group of Balinese villagers a Chopin prelude and ‘one of those little things of Mendelssohn’s’ to which the Balinese responded with admirably modernist sensibilities: they said both sounded like Malay opera- you know, those sentimental, yowling, westernized tunes that you hear on the Chinamen’s phonographs up at Bulèlèng. Then [Spies] played them a Bach prelude. That, they said, sounded like music. That was something they could understand (Powell 1930: 230).

Powell states how he listened to Spies’ account ‘with a delighted shock, for it proved to me that I was catching at least some of the spirit of this exotic music’, a sentiment he follows up with an account of the following uncanny coincidence: A few days previously I had written in my notes: “It is my belief, which I have not been able to test, that the Balinese musician would listen unmoved to a prelude of Chopin, find naught but nonsense in the Mendelssohn concerto, but find affinity in a fugue of Bach” (1930: 232).

The association with Baroque counterpoint assists in validating Balinese musical practice within Western aesthetically-proven terms, succeeding in sidestepping the 69

romantic orchestral tradition to return instead to the hallowed era of J.S. Bach, master of immaculate musical form. The Powell quotation included above neatly summarizes the cautious modernist nostalgia governing such representations, claiming Balinese gamelan music’s ‘very existence is romantic, but has in it not one jot of romanticism’ (1930: 31). Musicologically, the counterpoint association is a surprising move, for while much Balinese gamelan music tends to be divided into distinct metric levels across the ensemble, it is absent of contrapuntal imitation or of distinctly independent melodic lines: indeed, as discussed later in Chapter Six of the thesis, the current popularity of the idea of creating imitative ‘canons’ in contemporary gamelan works is employed and celebrated by its users specifically for its having no long-standing Balinese musical precedent. However, such a framing constructs a chain of mutually-supportive associations. In connecting Balinese gamelan to Baroque counterpoint, New World composers endorsed their own work through reference to a musical ‘other’, but here can be seen to bolster this association through reference to a music widely held to be an artistic pinnacle of the Western canon. McPhee’s position on this point is interesting. McPhee’s works contain numerous analogies with Western classical music, Music in Bali references the pokok or ‘nuclear melody’ as a ‘cantus firmus’ while writing of gendér wayang, for instance, that ‘I could only think of them as four perfectly co-ordinated little pianos’ (1966: 66, 1944: 37). However, despite his occasional reference to gamelan sonority as ‘counterpoint’ or indeed ‘embryonic polyphony’, McPhee was explicitly skeptical about the Bach association in his depiction of Balinese musical sensibility (1944: 12, 1966: 205). Instead, McPhee draws on a modernist vocabulary of musical order that entirely transcended the Western classical canon to state that tourists have brought back romantic tales of the Balinese taste for Bach, but this was quite impossible. Nyoman [Kaler]’ s reaction to Western music was typical. It was a complicated noise without order, tempestuous and baffling in its emotional climaxes, dragging on and on and leading nowhere (1944: 46).

This appeal to transcendent musical order links to the second and perhaps more pernicious implication of reframing Balinese musical practice as ‘absolute’: a potential negation of Balinese music’s history. In reference to the Western classical music canon, Chua notes that ‘absolute music’ has “no history”. It denies that it was ever born. The fact that it emerged out of the nineteenth-century was not a birth, it claims, but an emancipation, a discovery unveiled… as if absolute music has always been there, eternal and absolute’ (1999: 3). Just as Bali was declared a forgotten eden, a last paradise having somehow escaped history, so the depiction of Bali’s music as absolute can be seen to deny its historical origins, a gesture that once more aligns with the perceived timeless qualities ‘aesthetic’ value as discussed above. Critical to McPhee’s changing 70

representation of Balinese music was his eventual rejection of kebyar as exemplar of Bali’s absolute music, in favour of Bali’s so-called ancient, ceremonial musical forms such as gamelan gong gedé. McPhee’s enthusiastic account of kebyar in the 1935 Modern Music article can be connected closely to his endorsement of musical modernity both in the West and in Bali. However, as his own standing within the modernist community dwindled, it appears his nostalgia for a stable, timeless Balinese musical tradition intensified. The nostalgic appeal of a timeless Balinese music nonetheless saw McPhee invoke modernist, aestheticizing strategies in order to endorse the music’s value, notably through the celebration of musical structure. As discussed below, in an echo of the modernist assertion of centrality of form in the ‘absolute’ artwork, McPhee in turn began to reject kebyar aesthetically due to its apparent lack of structural cohesion, while the balanced formal structures that McPhee perceives in the gong gedé repertoire secure its artistic merit. McPhee’s challenge of kebyar surfaced amid a period of personal and professional gloom (see Oja 1990: Chapter Seven). Returning to New York following his second and final Balinese trip with little money, dwindling support and few commissions, he produced the heavily nostalgic article ‘The Decline of the East’, where with marked dismay McPhee describes kebyar as ‘feverish’ and ‘melodramatic’ (1939: 160-167). A year later, in ‘The Technique of Balinese Music’, McPhee writes: ‘the young Balinese show an impatience with the older, restrained forms, but are unable to create satisfactory new ones,’ and, once more invoking a metaphor of cheap scent, describes the most recent Balinese compositions as ‘simply potpourris of the classics, illogically put together’ (1942: 4). However, this disappointment contrasts with an earlier sentence in the text, on an unspecified ‘Balinese music’, which he describes an alternative Balinese structural sensibility where ‘musical form is clear and logical, and inclined to be squarecut’, describing ‘Balinese compositions [to be] constructed according to set forms which date from a past of which much remains unknown, but they have some definitely Chinese characteristics’ (1942: 3). From McPhee’s discussion of drumming technique, the use of cymbals and the layout and length of works, it becomes evident that he is specifically discussing gamelan gong/gong gedé throughout the majority of the article, an emphasis amplified further in Music in Bali (1966) which examines gong gedé as Bali’s principal form, and relegates analysis of gong kebyar works to a brief, closing passage of the book. Indeed, recognition of ‘form’ in older Balinese music is consistently linked to the music’s aesthetic value in McPhee’s writings from the 1940s onwards, the ‘structural beauty’ of Bali’s ‘traditional forms’ contrasted with the ‘lack of solidity’ in kebyar works (McPhee 1949: 277). This celebration of Bali’s older, classical forms, principally gamelan gong gedé, appears tied not only to their apparent formal rigour, but also their related ancient (and religious) stability, McPhee noting in A House in Bali that ‘anonymous, unwritten, 71

the music on these occasions was ancient as the rites themselves, unchanged, apparently, for centuries’ (1944: 31). Such appreciation is also tied to a increasing anxiety concerning the music’s vulnerability, what Clifford would term the ‘salvage paradigm’ (1988). McPhee states (of gong gedé) ‘how much longer it can survive is impossible to say’, and also later wrote (of gamelan music more generally) that he was seized with ‘inner compulsion to preserve in some way this fugitive art… [for] a thousand forces were at work to destroy it’ (1942: 3; 1944:78). As noted earlier, the idea of nostalgia, and the anxiety of the vanishing craftsman is identified by Karatini as a key feature of what he terms ‘aestheticentrism’. Karatini describes arts and crafts movement figureheads William Morris and John Ruskin having been drawn into a specifically nostalgic veneration of lost craft (subsequently reified as ‘art’) following the introduction of industrial technology (1998: 152). This mirrors McPhee’s later identification of Bali’s ceremonial music as quintessentially absolute and as the music of ‘ancient rites’, the music here bound to a dedicated social function that would seem to exclude it from the category, while he simultaneously grew cautious in applying the term to kebyar, which Covarrubias aptly term Bali’s new ‘concert orchestra’, here absolved of ritual purpose (1937: 211). Even in his earlier writing, McPhee demonstrates a similar yearning towards Balinese music as a type of craftsmanship that he laments as now bygone in the West. He regards the ‘Balinese process of composing’ as ‘something very different from our own. Music is not emotional self-revelation; it is before all, functional, an accompaniment to rite or drama. Composing is evolving rather than creating, and these days a new melody was rare’ (McPhee 1935: 164). His field notes make the personal connection clearer still: ‘I feel the artist must strive more and more towards for anonymous expression, to be first of all a good craftsman, and to try and negate all that cries from within for self consciousness and egotistical declaration’ (field notes c.1934, cited in Oja, 2004: 206). Despite venerating Balinese musicianship as an alternative to Western artistic practice, as noted by Karatini such a stance was in fact a key feature of aestheticization, not least as ideas of artistic impersonality were translated into the production of artworks by a range of modernist composers: the apparent denial of Western artistic sensibility nonetheless drove the production of Western artworks, and alongside, artists of the era can be seen to have cultivated an appreciation of non-art which was distinctly aesthetic. As kebyar continued to progress as a free-standing concert form, it moved closer and closer to the nineteenth-century Western projection of the artwork as ‘disinterested’ or free from function, designed for aesthetic appreciation and personal expression alone. Kebyar also saw the creation of the ‘composer’ in Bali, a development for which McPhee was perhaps partly responsible through his close association with and patronage of musicians such as I Wayan Lotring. Rather like Spies’ reluctance to publicise his role in the creation of kecak, McPhee was similarly reticent 72

about his involvement and it is possible to see his own cautious rejection of the form and his subsequent reverence for the allegedly timeless religious efficacy of Bali’s ceremonial forms in this light.

Balinese Music as Balinese Essence The theme of Balinese gamelan as timeless, as connected to deployment of the term absolute music, also held important implications concerning the essentialization of an otherwise ineffable ‘Balinese character’. As will be discussed in the following chapter, McPhee’s representation of Bali’s Majapahit-era ceremonial music as the centrepiece of Balinese musical tradition is attached to the construction of a particular, imagined historical narrative. However, McPhee’s invocation of abstract and timeless musical structures, both in his discussion of ceremonial music and certain aspects of kebyar, nonetheless means he regularly sought to represent Balinese musical life as founded upon an unchanging, ahistoric aspect.21 In turn, the representation of a timeless, fixed essence to Balinese gamelan came to function as a synecdoche: music was expanded by colonialera sources to stand as a mysterious but vital manifestation of a more general Balinese essence. A paradox of signification thus emerges: writers have represented Balinese music as autonomous, expressing nothing other than itself, while also suggesting that Balinese gamelan is uniquely able to articulate certain Balinese essences. Indeed, this paradox has been noted as part of the philosophical basis of absolute music itself. Monelle proposes that the term ‘embodies not only music which expresses itself without the aid of words, but also the implication of the philosophical “absolute”, and thus the idealist notion that music goes to the heart of something transmaterial’ (Monelle 2000: 8). I here analyse a series of texts which discuss the apparently ‘transmaterial’ quality of gamelan music as a manifestation of Balinese character or spirit or essence, and note how music-making here functioned for writers as a synecdoche for wider aspects of Balinese social and cultural practice. I also argue how this use of music constitutes another aestheticizing act: glossing other non-musical activities as artistic in character. Interestingly, for a number of other 1930s writers on Bali, this musical expression of ‘transmaterial’ Balinese essence was a particular feature of modern kebyar music, above all Balinese musical forms. Even McPhee’s late 1930s rejection of kebyar saw him soften when it came to discussing the form in relation to Balinese character. Whatever its structural failings, McPhee still regarded it to articulate something innately ‘Balinese’ and

21

Indeed, emphasising the self-evidence of ‘structure’ in Balinese music corresponds to what Collingwood would term a substantialist viewpoint, substantialism endorsing any entity that is ‘unchanging and consequently stands outside history’ (1946: 43).

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in ‘The Five-Tone Gamelan Music of Bali’ (1949) states that ‘here [in kebyar] Balinese imagination finds its truest musical expression’ (1949: 277). Although he cannot resist declaring that the ‘compositions lack the solidity and classic balance of construction in the old music’, and that ‘purists may lament this breakdown which means the end of traditional forms and their structural beauty’, he celebrates kebyar as a popular art; like jazz, it is an intense form of musical expression in which young Balinese musicians of today put all their creative energy. It has that rarest of musical qualities integrity. While Balinese pictorial art has been sentimentally nursed and corrupted by romantic Westerners, Balinese music is still something created for a Balinese audience alone, uncontaminated by foreign suggestion (1949: 277).

Kebyar may not adhere to the structural design that would qualify the works to be of the highest artistic order but here, crucially, McPhee values kebyar’s immunity to foreign ‘contamination’ to suggest kebyar offers a certain cultural purity: Balinese music by the Balinese for the Balinese. Covarrubias’ first musical in Bali encounter, a kebyar music and dance tourist performance, sees him initially doubtful about how authentic a ‘Balinese’ expression it will be: It is customary to hold a concert of Balinese music in the hotel gardens the night before the weekly boat arrives from Surabaya bringing new visitors. We had experienced disappointments on such occasions elsewhere and we were fully prepared to hear another of the denatured versions of native entertainment usually concocted for tourists. We distrusted the twenty-five or thirty young men who, nude above the waist and wearing sashes of blue silk, sat cross-legged around a square formed by impressive instruments in elaborate carved frames (1937: 206).

Yet, as soon as the performance begins he is delighted by ‘its subtle beauty and vigour,’ which ‘came to us as a revelation on our first night on the island’ (1937: 206-7). Kebyar’s ‘absolute’ credentials are clearly expressed by Covarrubias, in his description of the work as ‘pure music’, followed up by the ‘ultra-modern Bach fugue’ commentary, but crucially, the music also apparently manages to depict a series of defining Balinese traits which also distinguish the Balinese from the Javanese, for the compositions were simple, but rich and alive, violent and at the same time refined, having little in common with the spirit of the over-refined, somewhat precious music we heard in Java. (1937: 207)

De Zoete and Spies develop the idea of Balinese gamelan music and dance, particularly kebyar, as a manifestation of a particular Balinese spirit, with Balinese music depicted as both entirely abstract but uniquely expressive. Describing kebyar music in the context of the dance, they suggest that ‘kebyar’s interest lies in the revelation of personality, the capacity to project abstract musical emotion, added to a singular sensibility and intuition of space’ (1938: 235, my emphasis). Yet these relations and essences are ‘impossible to analyse’ (1938: 235). All that can be articulated by de Zoete 74

and Spies is the music’s infinite mysteriousness. Writing generally about Balinese gamelan music, they refer to the unfathomable world of tone and rhythm which is continually being revealed in the rare and complicated texture of the Balinese gamelans. It is the most direct yet mysterious expression of the Balinese temperament and genius, as impersonal as nature and as sensitively alive. One has the the feeling as one listens that something of the brilliance and depth of the infinitely varied Balinese landscape vibrates in the resonance of metal, cowhide, and bamboo, by some intense sympathy which becomes articulate in rhythm. (1938: 7)

McPhee too participates at times in representing Balinese music as a mysterious and elusive expression of ‘the Balinese’, which he mainly describes in the negative or impossible to access but nonetheless perceives to exist. In a letter written to Aaron Copland while on Bali in 1938, McPhee reveals misgivings about his previous earlier understanding of Balinese music. He writes: ‘all that I studied before was the outer surface, the beautiful shell’, adding that ‘the inner meaning of the music seemed to recede the more I knew it’ (1938, cited in Oja 1990:123). This sentiment is echoed in a House in Bali, where McPhee recalls how he felt he had ‘come into possession of a new set of [musical] rules and principles’, but that as I listened to the delicate, nervous drumming of Lebah or one of the radiant compositions of Lotring that seemed to burn with new creative life, the essence of music, its nature, its final meaning, seemed elusive and indefinable as ever (1944: 204-5).

Balinese music comes to be represented as an articulation of a particular, ineffable Balinese essence. However, critical to this study is a converse process apparent in colonial era representation, which saw writers attempt to substantialize notions of this mysterious ‘Balinese spirit’ through recourse to a range of metaphors, including explicitly musical metaphors (namely the idea of ‘harmony’). Through the modernist discourse of absolute music as a manifestation of ‘transmaterial’ essence (of Balineseness), alternative occasions saw musical metaphors deployed as a means of accessing, describing and, in line with Inden, constructing a coherent cultural and social identity for ‘the Balinese’. As demonstrated, writers had already aestheticized musical practice in Bali, meaning that the wholesale application of musical ideas to unrelated domains of Balinese life subsequently effected a grand-scale process of aestheticization. As the latter part of the chapter discusses, this role of Western aestheticization was far from removed from colonial practices of political subjugation. I consider first the means by which a range of non-arts practices of Balinese people were subject to aesthetic scrutiny (and commendation), noting the enthusiastic deployment of the musical metaphor ‘harmony’ in Spies’ colonial representation of a variety of Balinese practices. I then note the social implications of the idea of harmony, 75

now situating McPhee’s emphasis on musical structure as not solely concerned with modernist musical values, but also linked to themes of colonial governance, particularly allied to the idea of ‘balance’, organic ‘unity’ and to Bateson’s notion of ‘steady state’ Bali. In making these connections, the chapter examines some of the broader political implications of this range of aestheticizing processes, before a preliminary consideration of how certain Balinese may have been participants in the construction of such imagery, an idea to be examined in greater detail in the following chapter.

Mixed Metaphors: Harmony and Balance in Bali In Greek Music, from which derive both the concept and appellation, harmony signified the combining or juxtaposing of disparate or contrasted elements. (‘Harmony’, New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2001) Bali has long been famous as an earthly paradise in which a favoured race of men live in Utopian harmony with their own kind, with nature and with their gods. (de Zoete and Spies 1938: 2)

Yamashita’s work on tourism in Bali discusses the transformation of everyday activity into ‘Balinese arts’ as an example of what James Clifford terms the ‘’modern art-culture system’ in which the West or the central power adopts, transforms, and consumes nonWestern or peripheral cultural elements, while making ‘art’ which was once embedded in the culture as a whole, into a separate entity’ (Clifford 1988: 223, cited in Yamashita 2003: 178). While this may certainly be the case in the designation of numerous Balinese practices as ‘art’, I contend that the implications of Balinese ‘aestheticisation’ reach further. Rather than writers ignoring Balinese ‘culture as a whole’, I suggest that in the same vein as Lyotard’s ‘nostalgia for wholeness’, this too has become an object of fantasy (Lyotard 1984: 81). Indeed, an aesthetic perspective has been applied as a grand explanatory concept to bind together all aspects of Balinese life. The colonial era’s popular notion that ‘every Balinese is an artist’ was applied to a much broader domain of activity, with Balinese were lauded for the grace and artistry with which they were deemed to complete specifically ‘non-artistic’ tasks: Squatting naked on a rock in the river in the act of making offerings to the stream, the Balinese is perfectly in harmony with his surroundings and so graceful in his poise that we have almost the impression of a dance (de Zoete and Spies 1938: 5).

Dutch travel writer, Louis Couperus, is similarly overwhelmed by Balinese poise in everyday life: ‘As we gaze at these amazingly graceful figures we find it hard to understand they are really alive, walking on the roads, past the village walls’ (1921, cited in Vickers 1994: 22). Likewise, Covarrubias’ description of women preparing offerings applies a distinctly aesthetic criteria, invoking the golden standards of taste and form. He 76

praises their ‘intricate structures’ which are ‘arranged with splendid taste’; ‘they are masterpieces of composition in which the relative form of the elements employed, their texture and colour are taken into consideration’ (1937: 161). De Zoete and Spies’ introductory chapter to Dance and Drama in Bali (1938) refines this approach through the application of a single, musical metaphor, or more accurately synecdoche, which establishes all aspects of Balinese life to be ‘harmonious’. Combining commentary on the arts with aspects of social order, they describe the ‘harmony of Balinese life’; how ‘one must indeed have lived in a strange disorder before coming to look on the harmonious body as a dancing body’; the ‘harmonious disposition of the Balinese’; how ‘the energy of the village finds harmonious expression in the order of the village law’; how the Balinese is ‘perfectly in harmony with his surroundings; and, how the Balinese world-view allows that ‘the whole of life fits into this religious frame, and somehow all crudities are harmonized’ (1938: 1-11). Musical harmony thus stands as ‘part for whole’ of Balinese life, and performs as a grand, explanatory concept for de Zoete and Spies who aptly depict Lyotard’s ‘nostalgia for wholeness’. As noted the notion of harmony has its roots in the bringing together of disparate elements, customarily to comprise a single, aesthetically-pleasing entity, which is here translated as Balinese life as a whole. Returning to McPhee’s preoccupation with Balinese music’s formal structure, the metaphors he employs may be situated within the general production of explanatory principles that aim not only to describe single Balinese practices, but to unite part and whole. In this context, McPhee’s emphasis on ‘musical balance’ as aesthetic goal for Balinese gamelan becomes a key example of the type of musicological gesture described by Cohn and Dempster as an attempt ‘to seek mastery over the apparently bewildering diversity of some domain by discovering some implicit, unifying principle’ (1996: 156). ‘Harmony’ in de Zoete and Spies’ account of Balinese social values seems to hold the same overriding explanatory power as ‘balance’ does for McPhee in his assessment of Balinese musical values. Examining McPhee’s Music in Bali, the primacy of ‘balance’ as aesthetic goal of Balinese gamelan for McPhee may be located throughout the work, particularly in his discussion of Bali’s ceremonial orchestra the gamelan gong (gedé). While McPhee presents an admirable body of analytical work on the genre, his text is threaded with stated Balinese aesthetic goals in managing musical structure which go unsupported by Balinese commentary. McPhee describes how gending (compositions) for the ensemble ‘draw heavily on the principe of repetition for form, balance and continuity’, stating how the specific repertoire of the gending ageng (large-scale compositions) exhibit a certain ‘tonal 77

balance’, present a ‘homogenous whole’ in their textural organisation, and display ‘finely balanced proportions’ of compositional structure (1966: 99, 79, 96). While discussing the gamelan gong’s Tembung compositional form (one-movement works based on recurring alternations of two separate, contrasting melodic sections), McPhee notes how the works are of particular interest for ‘their free yet balanced form’ (1966: 109). He concludes the chapter on this ‘imposing collection’ of works by noting how the compositions must ‘impress the listener’ with their ‘spacious and varied metric proportions, their melodic structure and their formal balance’ (1966: 112). McPhee likewise locates balance as the key target to trompong performance practice. His account describes the ‘nice balance’ which the solo trompong player must attain in his melodic embellishment of the pokok line (1966: 67). Here he positions the trompong player as a rather romantic animateur of the ensemble, noting that the performance of ‘pokok tones is a simple almost mechanical act, requiring little more than the application of the collective memory of the group;’ while the trompong is ‘the one free spirit of the gamelan gong’. It is this sought-after balance between ‘his own improvisational playing and the fixed pokok tones of the composition’ which elevates mastery of the trompong playing to ‘a highly developed art’ (1966: 67).

Steady State Bali: Music as Social Order These designations of ‘harmony’ and ‘balance’ (as both expressed in and through musical practice) can thus be seen to resonate beyond music, to chime with general colonial era representation of Balinese polity as stable, unified and peaceful. This idea was expressed most famously in Bateson’s depiction of Bali as a ‘steady state’ (1949). In an intriguing history of ethnography on Bali, Boon accredits Bateson’s (and Mead’s) account of Bali to be formulated through particularly personal sensibilities following arduous anthropological fieldwork in New Guinea: ‘[Mead] and Bateson needed something whole, less fraught with vicissitude, even beautiful. They needed Bali, or what they thought Bali might be’ (1990: 180). Amid this fantasy, Boon describes Bateson to have ‘beknighted Bali as “balanced”’ (1990: 181). However, such assignations of Bali’s cultural and social harmony and balance assume a darker hue in the context of Dutch governance. Research into Bali’s precolonial history has significantly undermined images of a peaceful, bounteous state. In the late seventeenth century, the last vestiges of centralised rule dissolved and Bali was thrown into constant poverty and warfare, ruled by tyrannical, competing overlords. With the arrival of the Dutch came the need to establish rule, and governance was achieved through extracting and then propagating those elements of Balinese society and culture 78

which already adhered to Dutch ideas of what was deemed ‘proper’ (Hobart 2008: 4). The Dutch government sought ‘peace and order’ (rust en orde) and so set out to establish this as a ‘natural’ state for Bali too (Robinson 1995:8). Religion had already been promoted as Bali’s most charming cultural asset, but as tourism flourished so did the need to package the exotic into a more readily consumable form, namely the arts. As noted in Chapter Two, the propagation of an image of Dutch government as supporting and preserving Balinese arts was designed not only to defer Western criticism from colonial policy, but devised by the Dutch as a self-serving gesture to stifle political activity generated by Balinese discontent, by instead encouraging artistic engagement (Picard 1996b: 23). Returning to Inden’s thoughts on constitutive metaphors, by representing Balinese as ‘cultural’ beings these accounts succeeded in disarticulating Balinese as ‘political’. Indeed, Balinese were not only depicted to be cultural but such a culture was predicated on specifically peaceful and ‘politically-neutral’ terms. Colonial-era representations of Balinese music nurtured these terms particularly effectively. Accounts promised that music was not only a manifestation of current balance and harmony but, through the attribution of the ‘absolute’, that these qualities were rendered timeless and constant, unaltered and unalterable: both Balinese past and present were overwritten. In addition, musical activity was allied not only with harmony and balance in abstract as discussed above, but texts sought to represent musical practice as an explicit mirror of a particular harmonious and balanced social order. Writers depict an innate, organic unity to play out on every micro-level of the musical ensemble. Of Nyoman Kaler’s gamelan pelégongan group, McPhee writes, the tones merged and blended so that the gamelan sounded like one great instrument... Without effort, with eyes closed, or staring out into the night, as though each man were in an isolated world of his own, the men performed their isolated parts with mysterious unity (1944: 41).

This intuitive, organic ‘togetherness’ is reiterated by McPhee: As I listened to the musicians, watched them, I could think only of a flock of birds wheeling in the sky, turning with one accord, now this way, now that (1944: 42).

Covarrubias, meanwhile highlights the unity of kebyar réyong players at his tourist performance, who, in perfect unison, as if moved by a single impulse, beat the inverted bronze bowls with padded sticks, ringing out the rippling chords (1938: 207).

According to such accounts, the Balinese preponderance for unity and unified expression flows effortlessly between musical practice and social life. As suggested by 79

Cohn and Dempster’s account of the canon and Western art music, locating ‘unity’ in Balinese practices constitutes another means of aestheticization by formulating order in what the analyst is presented with (1996). However, within such depictions of utopian social cohesion is a representation of gamelan music not only as an expression of Balinese unity, but also as a sublimation of a potentially otherwise chaotic or disharmonious temperament; what Covarrubias depicts as a Balinese musical capacity to be ‘violent and at the same time refined’ (1937: 207). In the kebyar performance he witnesses a ‘furious climax’ and as opposed to formal rigour he hears ‘rhapsodical ornamentation’, but the music is eventually tempered and stabilised by the ‘measured basses’ of the gongs (1937: 207). The latter ideas holds the key to the colonial aestheticization of Balinese practices: a notional taming of Balinese political valence or protest, which is here explicitly accomplished through the Western celebration of Balinese participation in ‘art’.

A Balinese Account? While study of those sources seeking to represent Balinese gamelan practices as the apotheosis of the absolute and/or social order reveals a complex and often insidious Western heritage, such an account of representative practice omits some of the era’s most significant figures. Indeed, much can be deduced that suggests Balinese had a far more active role in the production and articulation of their newly discovered ‘culture’ than often supposed. This approach undermines two visions of Balinese performance and ‘culture’: it revokes the claim that Balinese were bearers of a pure cultural or artistic tradition, gradually uncovered by Westerners; it also challenges later Orientalist critiques of scholarship on Bali, which depicts Westerners as the sole creators or representers of Balinese culture. Mark Hobart’s article ‘Rethinking Balinese Dance’ (2007) proves instructive in assessing assertions that kebyar (here referring to the dance form) is a unique and pure expression of Balinese essence, or a principally Dutch-led innovation. He suggests that The Balinese were far from passively compliant in the creation of dance. From their first encounter with the Dutch, Balinese rulers had been preoccupied with how to deal with these alien beings. Conquest shattered the Balinese vision of the world and left them urgently seeking a suitable medium through which to relate to the new rulers with their mysterious wishes. Put this way, kebyar becomes partly a complex act at cultural translation (2007: 115).

Hobart goes on to provide an account given by the late Cokorda Gedé Agung Sukawati in 1971 of the work carried out by Balinese in managing Dutch predilections in the 1920s. Living opposite the Hotel Bali in Denpasar and working as a guide, the Cokorda 80

inferred what the Europeans wanted was art. Realising that Balinese could neither yet appreciate nor deliver what the colonial masters wanted, the family decided to lure to Ubud the only foreigner they knew who seemed to have the right qualifications, the then bandmaster to the Sultan of Yogyakarta, a certain Walter Spies (2007: 115).

Such an account prompts a revision of how and why certain key Balinese musical informants of the era (such as Cokorda Gedé Raka Sukawati and I Nyoman Kaler) may have set about guiding writers such as Kunst and McPhee. The following chapter examines a key area of musicology where Balinese figures participated with considerable effect in the manufacture of Western representations of Balinese music: in the construction of Bali’s musical history.

Concluding Thoughts This chapter demonstrated some of the complex processes whereby Balinese gamelan music has been represented by colonial-era writers as an aesthetic object and–– through a series of complex associations or articulations––as a manifestation of supposedly inherent Balinese social order. By examining the specific roots of many of the claims made about Balinese gamelan during this era, notably the role of the American contingent of the modernist movement, it is clear that these representative practices were shaped significantly by Western commentators’ subjectivity, including the quest for proven universal (absolute) musical materials and the nostalgic location of an artistic utopia free from the ego or the industrial. However, the abiding metaphors that came to dominate aesthetic representations of gamelan––notably ideas of balance and unity––can be seen not only in light of Euro-American artistic movements but also embedded within specific Dutch strategies of colonial governance. Critically, this vision of Balinese music-making stands in marked contrast to the rest of Balinese society, which, according to various broader accounts of Balinese history, is predicated on a long tradition of violence and political rupture, followed by crushing economic blows and the fragmentation of indigenous political power. These musical accounts can be illustrated to work two-fold to deny these conditions of Bali’s cultural production. Firstly, music is decontextualized in the range of ways examined in the chapter: through interwoven metaphorical depictions of gamelan’s aesthetic, timeless, absolute, formal and ordered attributes, and through music’s extraction as a separate entity from Balinese performance practices more generally. Secondly, this vision of music is treated to stand for Bali as a whole: having imagined Balinese gamelan to be a manifestation of order, so this image is projected back onto Balinese life in its entirety to substantualize the claim that Bali has enjoyed a long, uninterrupted history of harmonious social (and artistic) order, of which the Dutch are then framed as the peaceable preservers.

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On these terms, the problem of cultural translation here concerns not just the imposition of Western presuppositions in determining Balinese music to be ‘aesthetic’, but furthermore, the metaphors of balance and harmony (after Inden) become ‘loaded with implications for action (or inaction)’ (1990: 2). In this case, it appears to be ‘inaction’, whereby Balinese are disarticulated as active political beings both within practical Dutch policy and in broader Euro-American representation. Crucially, the close interaction between the Euro-American community of artist-anthropologists and the Dutch colonial administration, and the ensuing representations produced, can also be seen to have had a powerful effect in shaping contemporary understandings of Balinese cultural practices: Herbst’s recent assertion of the Balinese ‘intrinsic aesthetics’ of ‘harmony’ and ‘balance’ offers one such example. Amid nostalgic references to Balinese music’s ‘timeless’ qualities, a series of more technical representative practices also sought to bolster these metaphors through tracing origins and constructing imaginary history and antecedents for Balinese music. While Balinese musical practices may have been represented as an image of social harmony, largely according to Western imaginings and motivations, it is important not to disarticulate Balinese musicians further by proscribing the possibility of their being involved in the construction of such representations (albeit for different purposes). Accordingly, the following chapter shall focus on the construction of Bali’s ‘musical history’ to consider how and why Western writers were keen to locate a ‘source’ for Balinese music and to examine how a number of Balinese musicians, informants, patrons, and writers came to be actively, if often covertly, involved in this domain.

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Chapter Four The Majapahit Complex: Theories of Music History in Colonial Bali It soon became clear to me that the music of the highlands of West Java had virtually no “history”… There was a great number of local differences and theoretical knowledge was sketchy and very diffuse. Later I found that in contrast the music of Java proper showed a much more uniform pattern. There were complete bronze orchestras in large numbers (apart from various bamboo instruments), and gradually a picture emerged of a many centuries old history, and of a well-founded musical system and theory… The central and eastern parts of the island were areas of lowland cultures and proud dynasties, where great power, sometimes controlling the entire Archipelago, had its seat, and where, from at least the beginning of the eighth century to the beginning of the sixteenth century [the end of the Majapahit dynasty in Java] – i.e. over a period of eight hundred years – Javanese cultural life had its centre (Kunst 1927: 1). The representational theory of knowledge rests on the assumption that the order it sees in the world is unitary, objective, determinate, or complete… Taxonomic or typological knowledge, it claims in its braver moments, simply mirrors what exists there… [The counter- argument, following] Goodman (1976: 7-8)… holds that the knowledge of the knower is not a disinterested mental representation of an external, natural reality, it is a construct that is always motivated by practices in it. What is more, the process of knowing actively participates in producing or transforming the world that it constructs intellectually (Inden 1990: 33).

The previous chapter established how colonial era accounts came to represent Balinese music as a manifestation of social order and harmony, despite the marked contrast between these descriptions and Bali’s ongoing political turbulence. This chapter considers how such incongruous metaphors of balance and harmony were subtly substantiated by historical accounts which, rather like Kunst’s association between ‘proud dynasties’ and ‘well-founded musical systems’, claim theoretical order through a particular courtly lineage for Balinese gamelan music. Indeed, certain historical narratives have proved central in formulating and structuring theoretical understandings of Balinese gamelan music, notably the Hindu-Javanese Majapahit realm in Bali. I here examine imaginings of Balinese pre-colonial history produced by Westerners and Balinese and consider how these imaginings may play out in colonial and post-colonial musicological representations. The chapter analyses how certain theoretical tenets are associated with particular historical accounts, and, by assessing the circumstances of their construction and, through comparative study of Java, considers what kinds of presuppositions they involve, and what uses these histories may have been put to by their various authors. In turn, following Inden, I shall begin to consider how the making of these histories and how various approaches to knowing and systematising gamelan may have ‘produced’ or ‘transformed the world’ of Balinese music, a topic I shall consider in greater detail in Part Two. 83

This chapter poses a number of questions: were the designated historical courtly forms really as prevalent in Bali as documentation preserved in the colonial era suggests, and as contemporary accounts maintain? If not, why might they be presented as such? Are their alleged religious characteristics––particularly their association with Hindu mysticism––as ancient and indigenous to the forms themselves as this literature proposes, or are they a later addition? If a later addition, what kind of presuppositions are these insertions founded on, and what might have been gained by these new interpretations? By whom were they made, and whom might they benefit? In line with the kind of bold reworking of Balinese historical text and colonial history found in Wiener’s Visible and Invisible Realms (1995), I suggest the production of these histories perhaps more likely occurred in conjunction with or in relation to Dutch occupation. I propose Hobsbawm’s concept of ‘invented tradition’ to be applicable here, in this instance through an intriguing collaborative effort between seemingly disparate parties, working together to construct Bali’s past (Hobsbawm 1983). Approaching Bali’s relationship with the Majapahit realm thus, there is also scope to consider in detail the role of certain Balinese individuals and groups in manufacturing, or at least being complicit in, certain perspectives of Balinese musical history and development, albeit histories ostensibly authored by Westerners.

Some Thoughts on Historical Approach Collingwood’s distinction between historical methods provides some helpful guidelines for assessing scholarly approaches to formulating histories. This chapter will attempt to highlight the ‘scissors and paste’ approach prevalent in various accounts of Balinese music history, locating those instances where an author has settled on a topic and sought fragmented statements which pertain to it, which are subsequently ‘translated if necessary and recast into what he considers a suitable style’ to form the author’s ‘own history’ (1946: 257). Such histories are comprised of ‘the testimonies of authorities’ and, crucially, reveal more about the author’s frames of reference and presuppositions than they do about the topic under historical investigation (1946: 257). I propose to approach such accounts following Collingwood’s notion of ‘metaphysical analysis’, whereby the analyst locates and subjects these presuppositions to thorough examination. The issue of authority as manifest in the authorship of history is likewise emphasized by Foucault. Termed ‘the anti-historical historian’ by Poster, Foucault’s work has sought to [unmask] the epistemological innocence of the historian... for Foucault, history is a form of knowledge and a form of power at the same time; put differently, it is a means of controlling and domesticating the past in the form of knowing it (Poster 1984: 75).

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This chapter deals with both these potencies of history-making: the possibility of gaining control through the creation of certain histories is a theme that will recur in both Balinese and Dutch presentations of music history, particularly through the use of the ‘golden era’ of the Majapahit dynasty on Bali; similarly, the issue of knowing as ‘domesticating’ or taming comes into play, for history quickly becomes bound into processes of theoretical classification and systematizing. Inden’s work on Western Indology powerfully examines the political implications of a particular and privileged knowledge system being imposed upon a differing set of practices, and how these constructs come to impact upon the subjects and practices under scrutiny (1990). Such critiques offer a helpful framework for looking at how history was made in Bali during the colonial era—a time of tremendous disruption and transition with a range of opportunities to grasp or assert power suddenly up for grabs. Balinese citizens could gain or lose a great deal depending on how they played history. The sudden proliferation of babad (palm-leaf manuscript ‘genealogies’ declaring lineage and setting up land ownership claims) produced during the colonial period aptly demonstrates this. But how do contemporary commentaries on Balinese music history account for these periods? On training the above theoretical critiques upon more recent studies, certain gaps and tensions emerge. For one, it is interesting to note that Balinese music history concerning pre-colonial times has very rarely been the central focus of ethnomusicological research on Bali. A certain number of writings concerning older vocal music have been completed by Wallis (1980) and Vickers (1992). However, very few studies cover instrumental forms in any detail, largely because as is often noted there are very few indigenous sources bar the interpretation of the iconography of Javanese temple reliefs, which provides rather problematic and ambiguous evidence for the consideration of music on Bali, as discussed below (see also commentary on Ramstedt 1993). Yet, while this presents an obvious obstacle to a research project, the majority of works addressing more contemporary aspects of Balinese music still tend to offer some kind of historical reading of Balinese music, usually founded upon a similar set of presuppositions. A brief analysis of the received history, its presuppositions and its associated theoretical tenets sees a number of problems emerge in historical content and, more crucially, method. Contemporary Western histories of Balinese music tend to maintain three main assumptions. Firstly, there is the idea that ‘Balinese music ultimately traces its origins to Java’ (and originally India), with the Majapahit arrivals bringing a host of musical forms which had a tremendous impact on Balinese musical practice (Tenzer 1998: 19). Secondly, the conduit for this transmission is the gamelan gambuh, the musical ensemble to accompany Bali’s dance drama, featuring drums, gongs, cymbals, a spiked fiddle (rebab), and metre-long end-blown bamboo flutes (suling gambuh), and claimed to be ‘a 85

fourteenth-century ensemble of Javanese derivation’ (McGraw 2005: 358). Bandem and de Boer note it to be the ‘point of origin for much of modern Balinese music’, and the complete Gambuh package is described as, A tradition of foreign, rather than native, origin coming directly from Java and possessing indirect roots in India… In Gambuh aspects of the manners and ideals of the sophisticated courtiers of the Majapahit era are preserved, as well as the musical repertoire, choreographic ideas, and highly refined literature of the period… It is the source and prototype for the more modern forms of dance-drama (Bandem and de Boer 1995: 27).

Tenzer asserts a similar message in terms of Gambuh as a source for later forms and suggests that it provides ‘a good sense of the ancient origins of Balinese gamelan’ and that ‘the musical architecture of Gambuh melodies is a crucial precursor to nearly all Balinese music of the last several centuries’ (1998: 20, 21). Tenzer’s later work on Gong Kebyar (2000) introduces more nuance into this account, but he nonetheless maintains Gambuh’s position as the ‘earliest Majapahit-based performance genre’ (2000: 154). This point is upheld by Hood too, who writes although the dance style of Gambuh has by now received some scholarly attention there is still the need to state emphatically that this is indeed a living continuation of the dance styles performed in the courts of Majapahit… Any attempt in future studies at historical reconstruction of the development of dance throughout Sunda, Java and Bali must begin with Gambuh. It is generally accepted that not only dance but also stories, singing, lyrical melodies and especially various scales used in tuning different forms of Balinese gamelan have been generated by the seven-tone pélog of gamelan gambuh (Hood 1984: 89).

Thirdly, as found at the close of the quote above, the shared heritage of Gambuh and Java holds distinct theoretical implications, and sees the application of the distinctly Javanese term, pélog onto much Balinese seven-tone music. This transposition is echoed by Tenzer, who likewise declares how ‘pélog is a seven-tone system that, in Bali, originates with the gamelan gambuh’ (1998: 31). None of the writers above provide information on any sources which establish this historical picture. Evidence that points to the longevity of Gambuh, its derivation in Java and how it came to transmit this series of musical practices and structures (particularly a new and coherent tuning system) to Bali is omitted. Indeed, proof to date Gambuh as a substantially pre-colonial form does not yet appear to exist. Likewise, sources to demonstrate its derivation in Java cannot be found. In contrast to a Foucauldian or Collingwoodian approach, the current received music history of Bali rests upon a series of assumptions asserted largely without context or critical discussion. If there is no extant material evidence bar a small number of highly contested temple engravings, where do these histories come from? By whom have they been enunciated and why? If we are to take seriously the post-structuralist viewpoint that any historical utterance is bound inextricably to issues of power, might these accounts require more detailed 86

examination? While I make no claim as to be able offer any kind of definitive account of pre-colonial music, and appreciate that most ethnomusicologist studies of Bali do not themselves claim to be focused primarily on history, I suggest modern scholarship’s reassertion of this narrative holds serious epistemological and political implications, founded as it is upon the same series of historical presuppositions and systems of classification (covering both tuning and organology) as most colonial era musicological representations. The following section charts how the Majapahit myth has been used by Balinese and Europeans in historical representations. It highlights how the myth functions in the Western imposition of a pélog and sléndro tuning taxonomy onto Balinese music, and begins to illuminate some of the far-reaching implications of this application.

Fine-tuning Balinese Music History In this section, I discuss how various tuning schema devised during the colonial period can be seen to align with certain presuppositions about Bali’s history, particularly concerning the idea of China, India and Java as cultural ‘sources’ for Bali. These schema and their attending terminology have become central to received accounts of Balinese gamelan theory in circulation today. Aside from the theoretical issues raised by the ‘quest for origins’ here in evidence, this section demonstrates that close analysis of the processes by which musicologists Kunst and McPhee formulated Balinese gamelan tunings reveals that the systems they propose both support and are derived from a particular ‘scissors and paste’ historical narrative—and, as will be later discussed, this historical narrative assumed an important role in both sustaining and re-organising certain social hierarchies in Bali. Creese’s article ‘In Search of Majapahit’ notes the significance of ancient Java and the Majapahit myth in the construction of Balinese culture, suggesting that ‘both indigenous and Western discourses have created a definition of Balinese culture and identity in which links to the high culture of Java––epitomized by Majapahit––are central’ (1997: 1). The story runs that the Balinese inherited their court tradition and culture from the Hindu-Buddhist realm of Majapahit on Java. Bali acquired these riches first from the Majapahit kingdom’s conquest of Bedulu in 1343, and subsequently when the realm’s noblemen and priests fled the influx of invading Muslims on Java in the fifteenth century, an event often pinned to the ‘rather fanciful date’ of 1478 (Wallis, 1980: 18). Not only Western imaginations, but also Balinese, have fashioned an idea of Balinese history to complement, contrast with, but always refer to, neighbouring ‘Jawa’ (Vickers 1989, Creese 1997, Wallis 1980). I address the implications of some of these associations below, but shall first consider how musical theory conceived in the late colonial era aligns 87

with this telling. The role of Java-Bali relations, and particularly the idea of the Majapahit arrivals prove to have been central to early Western understandings of Bali’s tuning systems and organology. Following on from the gaps found in contemporary accounts of Balinese music history noted above, I shall trace Kunst and McPhee’s early systemization of Balinese organology and tuning and note how their conclusions are indexed by their presupposing certain historical processes and frameworks. Jaap Kunst was particularly emphatic about the Javanese heritage of almost all Balinese gamelan music and was keen to position Bali as a cultural off-shoot which sturdily preserved ancient Javanese forms through its enduring Hindu faith: Bali was the place where ‘old forms and old names have a so much greater chance of continuous existence’ (1927: 72). De Toonkunst van Bali immediately situates Balinese music in relation to both Javanese and North Indian systems with significant reference to Fox Strangways’ Music of Hindustan (1914) and the idea of a shared past. Java and Bali’s subsequent musical associations are made clear in Kunst’s approach to tunings (toonstelsels) where he refers to Javanese and Balinese traditions as belonging to a single system, ‘Javaansche-Balische toonkunst’, sub-divided into the two Javanese tunings of pélog and sléndro (1925: 16). Both these scales are described by Kunst in HinduJavanese Instruments to have arrived first in Java on entering the archipelago. Pélog came via Chinese musicians from the Yunnan province ‘many centuries BC’ who settled in Java, while sléndro, the other modern Javanese tonal system, was presumably still unknown to them. This was possibly introduced by the latest arrivals, the ancestors of the present Javanese... Not until the middle of the eighth century, when the Çailéndras dynasty took possession of a part of Central Java, (possibly with the wayang purwa) did it become the dominant system in Java… Subsequently it reached Bali, still inseparably linked with the wayang purwa. (Kunst 1927: 2-3)

Alongside this apparently historical account, Kunst maintains that sléndro is ideally comprised of five equal intervals of 240 cents each: in De Toonkunst van Bali he differentiates pélog and sléndro by noting that only the former is comprised of unequal (ongelijk) steps, while charting the latter as an ideally equidistant scale (aequidistant schaal) (1925: 16, table I, no.16). Kunst was certainly not alone in this theory. Associate ethnomusicologist Curt Sachs presented similar ideas of a theoretically equal sléndro in his The Rise of Music in the Ancient World, East and West (1943: 130ff). The equidistance of intervals of Javanese sléndro tuning has now been wholly discredited and proved to be neither physical reality nor craftsman’s goal in Java, yet it is interesting to note that Kunst’s construction of this mathematically-perfect, mythic scale is accordingly aligned with the regal status of the Çailéndras royal family (c.725- c.850) in his story of origin, one of the ‘great powers’ and ‘proud dynasties’ celebrated in the chapter’s opening quote 88

above. As a good example of the ‘scissors and paste’ historical construction, for Kunst there emerges a correlation between political power or legitimacy and the imagined elements of this ‘well-founded musical system and theory’ (1927: 1). Yet Bali’s rendering of sléndro is not thus: Sléndro itself [referring table I, no.16, showing an equigrade five-tone scale] is not to be found on Bali. And we ask ourselves: why? For the Hindu-Javanese of Java ... in the Majapahit period… indeed have sléndro, for in, among others, our evidence of the measurement of the four engravings of gendér key-sequences, at least two are certainly… with very great likelihood, from East Javanese soil and originate from that era (1925: 35q, with Kunst’s own emphasis). 22

There is a sense that in failing to use an equidistant sléndro, contemporary Balinese practice is an aberration of a bygone Majapahit ideal. This sentiment is echoed in Kunst’s organological theories of Java and Bali which consistently locate the Javanese origins of Balinese instrument forms and examining genealogies, while neglecting to mention their current practical usage. His style of classification in Hindu Javanese Musical Instruments (1927) is concentrated almost solely on individual historical positioning. Kunst addresses only the rudiments of playing style, in favour of greater emphasis on individual instruments’ inclusion in ancient visual and textual sources, and he prefers to identify their position within instrument derivation rather than function within ensembles. Kunst’s work on Bali’s gambang, the wooden xylophone played together with a range of metallophones in the Balinese ensemble gamelan gambang, demonstrates this quest for origins. Kunst locates the gambang to be present in a ‘number of representations from the Majapahit period’, slowly tracing the instrument back to Java with reference to Brandt Buys’ study of the depiction of instruments on the temple reliefs at Panataran, East Java (1927: 74). Likewise, Bali’s now uniquely ten-keyed gamelan gendér wayang metallophones are mentioned above by Kunst in Toonkunst, and discussed again in Hindu-Javanese Instruments as having been excavated in East Java. The tuning of these ‘fossil gendér’ duly complies with Javanese systems, for their ‘scales belong exclusively to the sléndro key series’ (1927: 77: fn 187). The notion of Bali as a depository of a bygone Javanese civilisation is continued in McPhee’s later theoretical work, where Kunst’s presuppositions concerning equidistant sléndro and their connection to Javanese courtly order are pasted afresh onto Balinese gamelan. McPhee mentions the idea of how Javanese culture is found to be ‘surviving on Bali’ and suggests that ‘most Balinese nobles and high-caste families of today are descendants of refugees from Java who arrived some time before the final collapse of the Majapahit Empire in 1478’ (1966: 62, 4). He is keen to demonstrate the role of Balinese

22

See Appendix 1, note 3.

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in making gamelan music their own, but nonetheless asserts that the Balinese scale systems are generally simpler than the intricate systems of Java today, they not only serve as the basis for a music which has become distinctly Balinese, but throw light, especially in the more archaic ensembles, on musical methods once known in Java but now completely forgotten (1966: 37).

His approach to organology reads similarly, and the importance of the East Java Panataran temple reliefs figures once more. On the réyong (pot gong) in the gamelan angklung, he writes we know that the réjong was in use in Java at least as early as the 14th century, since réjong players can be seen in the reliefs of two different temples of that period – the tjandi Panataran and the tjandi Ngrimbi. The Balinese réjong of today is apparently only slightly modified, and is still played in the same way as depicted in the old sculptures. This instrument is the point of departure for a series of derivative and more elaborate instruments which are found in the larger and more modern gamelans (1937: 326).

Theoretically, McPhee’s upholds a substantial portion of Kunst’s work. While it is ambiguous whether he follows Kunst in the theory of pélog’s Chinese derivation, he otherwise gradually concurs with Kunst’s account, eventually maintaining the notion of an abstract pélog and sléndro on Bali and so setting Java as the musical compass-point in Music in Bali (1966). In the earlier 1937 article ‘Gamelan Angklungs of Bali’, McPhee places gendér wayang within the sléndro system, but when discussing that the notion that angklung and gendér wayang scales may derive from the same system, states ‘there are certain discrepancies in the two scales… which make this hard to accept’ (1937: 327). However, by the time of Music in Bali (1966) McPhee has moved towards Kunst’s more distinct, apparently Javanese-derived framework of pélog and sléndro. McPhee notes the regular usage of the term saih (row, or series) in Bali, which appears to have been the long-established indigenous term in use, and is applied to each specific gamelan genre’s tuning approach, e.g. saih wayang, saih angklung. However, he nonetheless adds that all Balinese instrumental scales may be considered as belonging to one or other of two different tonal systems which in Java are known as pélog and sléndro. These names are not familiar to most Balinese, who have their own terminology. They are used in these pages for sake of reference to the two systems as found in Java (1966: 37).23

In accordance, gamelan angklung is re-classified as ‘sléndro-like’ in the chapter on tuning systems, and a selection of regional angklung tuning tables are included in chart headed ‘Four-tone sléndro’ (1966: 53). 23

Indeed, commentary by Balinese musician ‘Balyson’ in his 1934 article on gong gedé and kebyar, confirms the idea that the Javanese term pélog on Bali may be more Western than Balinese construction. As an aside in his discussion of five-tone Balinese music, Balyson writes ‘purportedly our music is pélog: see the work of Kunst’ (konon musiek kita pélog: lihat kitabnya Kunst) (1934: 164). 90

Music in Bali’s chapter on Balinese tuning provides a similar historical account of tuning systems as Kunst’s; indeed, McPhee cites Kunst’s 1934 lecture ‘The Music of Java’, which again suggests the presence of a coherent double system of sléndro and pélog on Bali, as derived from Java (McPhee 1966: 37, fn 4). McPhee subsequently offers a significantly more nuanced account of Balinese tuning practice, and takes great pains to acknowledge regional variety and local naming practices. However, presumably following Kunst, he maintains that Balinese sléndro tuning strives to be equidistant. In the chapter ‘Scale Systems, Scales, and Tuning’, McPhee includes a chart which maps an idealized equidistant Balinese sléndro tuning across an octave. Below the diagram, he writes: While Chart 8 may prepare the reader for the strangeness of the sléndro system, it cannot be said that it is ever approached in Balinese practice. When Balinese sléndro tunings are examined, each is found to create a scale composed of intervals of recognizably different size. While each interval in itself never appears to be too far from the abstract “ideal” interval of 240 C., the scale steps follow in such a way as to produce a contrasting series of larger and smaller intervals. (1966: 50)

A subsequent chart compares this “ideal” equigrade five-tone sléndro, with an “actual” gendér wayang tuning from Kuta, the systems plotted side-by-side. Although McPhee is sensitive to the breadth of tuning practices on Bali, Balinese gamelan music is here measured against an imaginary Javanese paragon. The historical classification of seven-tone music is more complex for McPhee. As will be discussed in Part Two, the received taxonomy of seven-tone scale schema/ historical period currently pronounced by Balinese and Western scholars has begun to introduce a clearer division between the kuna (ancient), pre-Majapahit gamelan and the madya (middle), Majapahit-introduced ensembles. Madya (middle) era courtly forms such as gamelan semar pegulingan and gamelan gambuh are considered to use pentatonic subsets of the seven-tone scale of pélog, loosely derived from Java, while compositions for ancient gamelan gambang, and selonding are said to use various subsets derived from an indigenous seven-tone scale, termed saih pitu (row of seven) (see Rembang 1973: 4 and Tenzer 2000: 149). The variation in tuning between any two ensembles renders meaningless attempts to quantify the difference between these two systems of pélog and saih pitu, if indeed any such delineation exists. Leaving the issue of these divisions until subsequent chapters, McPhee’s own method of differentiation appears to change over the course of his writings. In ‘Gamelan Angklungs of Bali’ (1937) he notes there to be a “mother” scale, a quasi-diatonic scale of seven unequal intervals, known as saih pitoe [pitu] (series of seven), and which is to be met with in the only most ancient type of gamelans. From this scale, various modes can be created… Today nearly all the gamelans in Bali limit themselves to only one or another of the five-tone scales, whose origin nonetheless derives from the saih pitoe (1937: 326). 91

Pélog does not figure in his description of any of the ensembles in question and the primary source of all seven-tone (and indeed all non-sléndro five-tone) music is considered to be Bali’s oldest gamelan ensembles. However, by the time of Music in Bali (1966) McPhee applies pélog interchangeably with saih pitu, while also introducing a stronger differentiation between pre- and post-Majapahit forms. In the chapter ‘Scale Systems, Scales and Tuning’ McPhee writes, the Balinese themselves consider all five-tone pélog scales as originating in the saih 7 of the gamelan gambuh... In this form the scale is commonly known as the “saih gambuh,” to distinguish it from the “saih gambang”, the seven-tone system of the gambang and other sacred ensembles (1966: 38).

The ‘source’ is no longer gamelan gambang, but the middle-era gamelan gambuh, the musical accompaniment to Bali’s classical dance drama, featuring the drums, gongs, cymbals, and metre-long end-blown bamboo flutes (suling gambuh). The remainder of McPhee’s passage on seven-tone music focuses exclusively on the various five-tone modes formed from subsets of pélog, as used in the courtly forms of gamelan semar pegulingan and gambuh: gamelan gambang is explicated only in the following chapter on ‘notation and terminology’. No doubt the slim numbers of ‘ancient’ ensembles present in Bali in part shaped their lesser role in McPhee’s construction of theory. However, having once been understood by McPhee as the source of seven-tone music, it is interesting to note how he went on to confer the theoretical core of Balinese seven-tone music to an apparently Majapahit, court gamelan, while older forms are here left largely untouched. 24 It is not until the later chapter, ‘Four Sacred Ensembles’, that McPhee examines the repertoire and playing techniques of the ‘ancient’ forms: gamelan gambang, selonding, charuk, and luang. McPhee notes the forms’ ‘pre-Hindu heritage’, and how they have been found ‘surviving from an unknown past’ (1966: 267). However, he goes on to state that Balinese claim the compositions themselves, when not of divine origin, ‘more often are considered to have “come down from Majapahit” – the last HinduJavanese empire’ (1966: 256). Indeed, the power of Majapahit soon figures again in the commentary, where McPhee notes how

24

I Made Lebah, renowned Balinese musician and McPhee’s chauffeur and prime musical informant, is found to offer an alternative system of both terminology and historical classification, according to a discussion held in 1992 (Herbst 1997: 37). Herbst maintains that Lebah still thought of ‘pélog as specifically referring to the seven-tone saih pitu system employed by gamelan gambuh and gambelan luang. Otherwise he refers to tekep selisir when speaking of gambelan gong kebiar or the five-tone semar pegulingan’ (1997: 37). Lebah thus distinguishes between seven- and five-tone systems, and groups gamelan gambuh and luang together as sharing a single system. He implicitly relates the selisir mode of kebiar and five-tone semar pegulingan as incarnations of the gamelan gambuh system, by use of the term tekep (to cover), referring to how the fingers cover different sets of holes on the gambuh suling to achieve different tones. 92

legends surround the gamelan selundèng [selonding] with romance. In Kayubihi, a small mountain village in the Klungkung district, the gamelan is known by the title Ratu Maopahit, Lord Majapahit, and was a gift from the sea god (dewa laut) (1966: 257).

The klian dèsa (village headman), subsequently narrates to McPhee how the selonding instruments emerged mysteriously from the ocean’s waves, and were eventually gathered up by the community and carried to the Pura Panataron, Temple of the Kings. For a long while the villagers did not dare or know how to play the precious instruments, before an utusan, messenger, came from heaven in the form of a white raven and taught them seven melodies (1966: 257). McPhee does not appear to have been able to gather much more information from this Klungkung community and notes how the musicians at Tenganan, a community usually famed for their secrecy and musical exclusivity, ‘made investigation easier than at Kayubihi’ (1966: 257). This reference to Majapahit proves fascinating, when in combination with such a colourful origin myth, and particularly located as it is in Klungkung, the central site of Bali’s erstwhile royal power and bloodiest colonial contest (Wiener 1995). At this point this point, it may be helpful to reconsider Majapahit’s position in Javanese, Balinese and Dutch ideas of history. In assembling these taxonomies, Kunst and McPhee implicitly and explicitly framed their accounts with a presupposed theory of origins and transmission: Bali was represented as a later manifestation of musics from a range of sources including China, India and Java, despite minimal evidence to support such claims. These accounts follow the Kulturkreis school of cultural ‘diffusionism’, a particularly popular approach in early twentieth-century ethnomusicology (see Nettl 1983: 229-233). Such an approach presents epistemological problems through the quest for origins and the enunciation of Balinese practices as a later relic of other cultures (see Fox 2003). In addition, accounts which seeks an Indic and Javanese origin for Balinese gamelan (as explicated through tuning systems) had specific resonance in terms of colonial relations and caste hierarchies on Bali in their validation of certain historical narratives. McPhee displays an interesting shift in approach, moving from a less systematized account of Balinese terminology (saih) to the later formulation of gamelan gambuh as Bali’s validating source of Javanese Majapahit connection and of theoretical order. In doing so, McPhee relegates any Balinese music excluded from this connection to an ‘unknown past’, a move which mirrors Kunst’s declaration that West Javanese music had ‘no history’ while the bronze gamelan traditions of Central Java were apparently grounded not only in theory but political prestige. Both accounts paste theoretical conformity onto a particular historical narrative of Hindu-Javanese courtly power (and vice versa). In unpicking these connections, I shall first examine contemporary scholarly re-workings of the IndicJavanese ‘origins’ of the Majapahit courts on Bali, which in turn illuminate some of the 93

uses that reiterating the Majapahit story of origins assumed for Westerners and, perhaps more importantly, Balinese during the colonial era.

Rewriting the Majapahit Myth on Java and Bali A number of works have offered fresh perspectives on the so-called golden era of Majapahit, suggesting a large part of the reverence it has been afforded may have been driven by the socio-political imperatives of nineteenth-century Europeans (Pemberton 1994, Florida 1995, Sears 1996). Java’s tangled relations with Europe began with the sustained presence of Dutch traders in the archipelago from the seventeenth century, the Dutch accruing their first political capital through commercial activity. Throughout the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, Java was characterised by constant warring between kingdoms, a state that fueled the possibility of a role for the Dutch as ‘peacekeepers’. Indeed, on his deathbed in 1749, Susuhunan Pakubuwana II supposedly ceded his entire kingdom of Mataram to the Dutch, signalling the beginning of major European political involvement in Java’s governance. This position was sealed by the Dutch overseeing the 1755 partition of Java between the courts of Yogya and Solo. The partition marked a milestone in increased colonial control while also billing the Dutch as the beneficent arbiters of this ‘Pax Nederlandica’. However, resistance mounted and following the brief interregnum of British rule (1811-1818), Javanese militants eventually came together in the 1825-1830 Java War for a last stand against Dutch control, led by the rebel prince, Dipanagara. Conducted under the banner of Islam, the war marked a final attempt to reclaim the island under Javanese rule only to be crushed by Dutch forces. As the war died down, the Dutch administration recognised the need for an alternative colonial strategy which withdrew from conflict and sought instead to isolate and co-opt the cultural practice of the indigenous elite. There followed the period of high colonial control on Java; concurrent with the forced agricultural cultivation program, the government ‘worked to contain Javanese subjects within an ideological construct that would later become “traditional Javanese culture”’, a definition of ‘culture’ which was founded upon the delineation and identification of high Javanese culture as an entity standing in opposition to Islam and as the exclusive and conservative preserve of a hyper-refined elite class (Florida 1995: 24-25).

Crucial to the formulation of this ‘high Javanese culture’ was the work of the Dutch philologists, who demonstrated the discipline’s classical roots in their quest for ‘golden ages’: ‘periods of alleged literary fluorescence succeeded by periods of decline’ (Florida 1995: 26). They located the noblest peak of all to be in the distant, pre-war and apparently

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pre-Islamic past of Majapahit, a period of history still accessible through classical HinduBuddhist literary culture, particularly kakawin, the East Javanese poetic texts composed from the ninth to fifteenth century. As is made clear in Pemberton’s work on ‘Java’, this scholarship reverberated not only in the isolation of the European academic domain, but carried weighty hegemonic implications in how its Javanese subjects came to view themselves (1994). Islam in Java is often presented as arriving over the course of the fifteenth century, a consequence of Muslim traders arriving and settling on Java’s northern coast. The coming of Islam supposedly marked the sudden decline of the Majapahit realm on the establishment of the Mataram dynasty as supreme power. However, Sears notes the presence of Islam in Javanese courts as early as the eleventh century, and, as far as cultural activity such as literary practice and wayang shadow play performance, states there to have long been a relatively easy continuation between Islamic and Indic stories and traditions (1996: 45). Indeed, Sears indicates that it was only following the Java War and the display of Islamic militancy that the Dutch began to repudiate the idea of Islam as ‘intrinsic to Java’ (1996: 47). This repudiation was supported by the philological drive to assemble catalogues and archives of Hindu-Buddhist texts, said to demonstrate an apparent cultural purity which had been crushed only by the coming of Islam in the fifteenth century. The contemporary manuscripts of kakawin came to be understood as the closest things to the genuine originals in Javanese literature. The real origins, however, were deemed not to be found on Java but in the Indian subcontinent which produced the Sanskrit prototypes on which the Old Javanese poems were based (Florida 1995: 26). Bali’s relation to the ‘golden age’ of Majapahit is complex. There is the obvious significance that Bali (as Hindu-Buddhist depository) carried for Dutch colonial scholars, eagerly seeking ancient, ‘authentic’, counter-Islamic culture. The location of an apparently living Hindu heritage on Bali strengthened the image of a pure Hindu past for Java, in turn offering a foil to claims that Islam had any position in Java other than latterday impostor. However, Creese also suggests that certain imaginings of the Majapahit realm may have assumed a longer standing mythic status in Bali, particularly in Bali’s own texts dealing with the establishment and projection of kingship from the eighteenth century (Creese 1997). This notably entails a potentially centuries-wide lacuna between the fall of the Majapahit realm itself, and the emergence of marked Balinese “Majapahit fever”, as Hinzler terms the phenomenon (Creese 1997: 1-2; Hinzler 1986: 157). Creese goes on to suggest that certain idealised images of the Majapahit empire were formed in around the eighteenth century, when, following the fall of the Gelgel line, Bali was divided into warring fiefdoms each with their own royal court. Creese proposes that the 95

establishment of these new court centres ‘acted as a spur’ in the production of such texts, ‘in which links to a glorious pre-Islamic Javanese past were central’ (1997: 2). This position is supported by Wallis’ work on the early history of Balinese vocal music (1980). Wallis makes a similar point suggesting how despite the much-publicized Javanese presence in Bali from the fourteenth-century (if not earlier), many of the texts discussing the era, e.g. much kidung poetry, date much later and were most likely ‘products of court writers looking back over the previous era, attempted to glorify the status of their present royal patrons’ (Wallis 1980: 43). Indeed, Schulte Nordholt (1992) went so far as as to coin the phrase ‘negara building’ to refer expressly to those Balinese writings created specifically to bolster the political legitimacy of a state. Vickers too pays close attention to this first peak of Majapahit enthusiasm to hit Bali through his studies of the Panji stories. Similar to Creese, he notes the concurrence of disruption between Bali’s divided and warring kingdoms following the dissolution of Majapahit, and the onset of reverence for the Malat, a set of texts recalling the halcyon days of noble Majapahit princes and courtly honour (Vickers 2005). Vickers’ study of the Panji stories demonstrates the political usage and moulding of their themes and narrative, proposing Panji to be the ultimate model for any post-Majaphait reigning Prince. This political efficacy and the power of retrospection in the Panji stories, in light of the close association between Panji and Gambuh, raise some important questions for this thesis: for gamelan gambuh, as the perceived ‘source’ of much Balinese music, has had a central role in the production of ‘Balinese music theory’. The question of how and why such association may have come about, and what its implication may be for contemporary musical practice, shall form later sections of this chapter and thesis. Work by Wiener on Balinese approaches to narrating the past suggest there may be much more to Balinese ideas of history than often indicated (1995). Wiener demonstrates different historical sensibilities or ways of using the past, as well as unsettling the idea of a Balinese linear historical model. Indeed, on the topic of using Balinese textual sources as an unmediated historical reference, I note Creese’s salient point about the limitations of ancient Balinese text as representation of Balinese worldviews: Since a significant number of the works that have been preserved owe their survival to nineteenth-century Dutch collectors, they represent European rather than Balinese concerns. It is therefore important to remember that any description of pre-colonial Bali textual interests is at best a partial one (1997: 2).

With this thought in mind––that the Balinese texts cited above have largely been selected and preserved by colonialists, and so necessarily demonstrate certain Western preoccupations––I intend to make a concerted effort to reengage with some of the sources

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available, and shall attempt very gently to tease out some ‘Balinese concerns’, if not precolonial then at least of the colonial era, where another set of uses for a Majapahit heritage emerged. Indeed, ideas of history and the role of ‘historical texts’ in Bali (and beyond) may be regarded as operating according to quite different laws and motivations when compared to apparently analogous Western forms of historical writing. Errington’s analysis of the classical hikayat proves instructive in approaches to history, or the ‘past’, in Malaysian writing (1979). Examining both the modern Western historical model of tracing events to their causes, and Malaysian approaches to chronicling, Errington opens up a ‘gap’ between hikayat and history in both style of narration and practical usage (1979). Florida’s work on Javanese colonial texts likewise discusses alternative approaches to history (1995). While it is clear that ‘the writing of any historical text takes place in history and is itself, then, a kind of historical event’, Florida considers Javanese historical writing to be a practice more self consciously aware of this truism than is the practice of writing history in post-Enlightenment West... Traditional Javanese historical writing appears to have a significantly different project with a significantly different relation to the past. Recognizing the presence of living pasts in the historically becoming presents in which they wrote, the writers of traditional histories in Java understood the inscription of these texts as historical events and the texts themselves as potential contexts. Recognizing their own historical agency, these Javanese historians could then self consciously employ traditional conventions of writing to effect a transformation of tradition itself (1995: 52).

The following section examines a number of colonial-era Balinese texts, authors and informants who may have shaped accounts of Balinese music history, and begins to assess their possible motivations, and their consequences.

Balinese Informants, Caste and Agency Tackling pre-colonial Balinese history is not the object of this thesis. Rather than attempting to ‘straighten’ the story of what really happened in pre-colonial times, I confront the colonial era to assess some of the sources concerning Balinese music history, produced by Balinese or suggestive of significant Balinese intervention in their production. Rather like the question of conjuring Balinese music as ‘art’, certain figures emerge with more or less definition from the range of musical informants working with Euro-American researchers. Having established the purposive quality to any representation and highlighted the particular scope for political machinations that any enunciation of history holds, I suggest the involvement of Balinese figures in articulating Balinese music history to be no less beholden to these issues. The question of agency also returns, and I introduce the possibility that the figures discussed below demonstrate a powerful role in the formation of Western accounts, where the researchers themselves 97

beginning to look more like instruments of Balinese will, rather than vice versa. I begin by considering some of the central figures in early twentieth-century Dutch-Balinese relations. While Cokorda Gedé Agung Sukawati of the raja-puri of Gianyar has been acknowledged as a significant figure in the construction of Bali’s ‘artistic’ fame, the Punggawa of Ubud, Cokorda Gedé Raka Sukawati appears to have been an equally critical agent in the world of scholarship. As mentioned in Chapter Two, it is he who is listed as the Kunsts’ prime informant for De Toonkunst van Bali (1925), as well as supplying a range of photographs for the appendix. He is credited with providing further information and photographs for Kunst’s Hindu-Javanese Instruments (1927), wrote his own Dutch language piece on Sanghyang in Dutch-sponsored journal Djåwå (1925), and also took a principal editorial role in the Dutch-Balinese journal Bhawanagara (1931-34). The Cokorda also played a significant political role in the late colonial period, standing as the sole Balinese member of the Dutch Raad van Indie (Council of the Indies) where he exercised ‘a highly conservative influence in debates concerning Bali’ (Robinson 1995: 171). While he was a supportive figure in the restoration of rights for the Balinese negara-bestuurders, it is noted that the formal request for self-rule made by Balinese in 1935 was ‘remarkably similar in tone and content to that of the Dutch authorities’ (Robinson 1995: 42). This ‘restoration’ resulted only in the legislation of certain privileges for the upper echelons of Balinese aristocracy, rather than handing over political power to Balinese as a whole. Indeed, according to Robinson, the restoration document (of which the Cokorda was at the helm) ‘revealed the extent to which the Balinese had learned to engage in the discourse of the colonial state in order to be effectively heard’ (1995: 43). Returning to the Cokorda’s work on Sanghyang, certain self-interested preoccupations emerge in his representation of the form, while his willingness and ability to comply with Western academic writing style is also notable. The article fits comfortably into the journal, with its confident use of Dutch language, Western musical notation and through reference to other Western scholarly works (including P. de Kat Angelino’s text on the Balinese leyak (1921)). The style is both formal and dramatic, presenting a stirring account of Balinese witchcraft and mysticism. The text opens with a colourful picture of the Sanghyang ritual’s association with the protection of men from the malign spirits (booze geesten) and the practice of black art (zwarte-kunst) (1925: 320). The Cokorda describes a ‘typical’ Balinese banjar at night, depicted as deathly still (doodstil) apart from the sounds of Old Javanese poetry recitation that may come from the balé banjar (the village meeting house), but full of growing dread (vrees) when the ‘tjääk’ sound of the kelik-kelik night bird is heard – followers of Balinese superstition 98

(volgens den bijgeloovigen Baliër) believing the call to foreshadow death in the neighbourhood (1925: 320). The article returns to Sanghyang itself, making explicit its potential to maintain community safety and outlining the various sacred associations of the chants and the necessary ritual processes to be conducted in the temple. In his vignette, the Cokorda succeeds in dramatizing Balinese village life for his Western audience through the evocation of dreadful witchcraft and superstitious villagers. However, it is also notable that he emphasizes the presence of Old Javanese recitation (kakawin) in Balinese life and articulates Sanghyang as embedded in complex temple procedure. As will be discussed below, the Cokorda’s emphasis on the continued Balinese use of Old Javanese texts and his publicized access to esoteric knowledge concerning religious rites has important associations in the maintenance of caste status. The article includes brief discussion of music which both demonstrates the Cokorda’s Western academic credentials and briefly frames an association between music and the royal courts. The Cokorda presents a short passage of Western stave notation covering the sung melody to introduce the chant, plus a number of photographs of the trance dancers and their accompanying chorus. Cokorda Raka Gedé Sukawati also provides some discussion of ‘gamelan-muziek’. He describes how when the singers are tired, they may be replaced by the gamelan playing, usually gamelan semar pegulingan, notably a gamelan ensemble associated almost exclusively with Bali’s royal courts. He follows by discussing how the sanghyang dance itself must follow the vocal line or gamelan music: if a pelégongan piece is played (gending pelégongan) the Sanghyang dancer must perform légong, and likewise if the music of Baris is played, the dance must also be Baris (1925: 324). 25 The most striking element of the article, however, is its emphasis on an association between the sanghyang tradition and the légong genre, one of Bali’s most famed and lucrative dance traditions and, significantly, a form closely associated with the Punggawa’s own realm of political power, Ubud. This is suggested not only through the Cokorda’s comments on musical accompaniment, but also dress. The punggawa writes how the two dances feature costumes which are ‘just about identical’ (ongeveer gelijk), although he suggests sanghyang costume is somewhat simpler with a great deal less prada (gold leafing) (1925: 323). The kain (cloth) of sanghyang is plain white, but he indicates the usually gold-leafed costume of the légong is nonetheless here ‘foreseen’ (voorzien) (1925: 323). The connection between sanghyang and légong is reiterated in the Cokorda’s mention of the village Kètèwèl, intriguingly the oft-cited mythical source of the sanghyang légong, the dance which is claimed to be the forerunner to the modern légong dance (1925: 320, see Hobart 2007: 112). The usual origin story 25

See Appendix 1, note 4.

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runs that between 1775-1825 a descendent of the Southern Gianyar court in Sukawati, Cokorda Made Karna, moved to Kètèwèl where in the midst of a yogic meditation he dreamt of heavenly nymphs dancing. Unable to find the dancers to replicate the dance, the Cokorda had two masks fashioned in the nymphs’ image which is said to have formed the prototype for the contemporary légong (Hobart 2007: 112). In the discussion of evil spirits attacking from Nusa Penida, the Punggawa cites Kètèwèl as the sole named example of such a spiritually-charged place, mentioning how a siege of sparks has been known to attack Kètèwèl’s coastline (vonken de kustplaats Kètèwèl binnendringen) (1925:320). By drawing out these connections between Kètèwèl, sanghyang and légong, the Cokorda thus hints at a long-standing shared sacred history. Ideas about the lineage of légong is currently proving a considerable bone of contention for contemporary scholars; more radical contemporary readings have begun to suggest that far from légong standing as an expression of classical Balinese culture, its current incarnation may have emerged at precisely the time that tourism was developing in Bali (Hobart 2007: 114). The Cokorda appears to be making a shrewd claim to ownership of this increasingly profitable form, through the assertion of a historical lineage that binds légong not only to his own geographical domain of power, but also to the sacred and ancient: a key component of Bali’s Euro-American appeal. [Anak Agung] Gusti Putu Djlantik (or Djelantik) (1880-1945), ruler of the northern kingdom of Bulèlèng under the Dutch, appears as guide, informant, curator, and editor in a number of European studies and projects throughout the late colonial period. In Kunst’s De Toonkunst van Bali (1925), Djlantik relates the history (der geschiedenis) of the gamelan gong of I Gusti Ngurah Panji Sakti to Kunst, his transcribed account forming a single chapter of the work (1925: 183-186). Djlantik was also active in the preservation of musical manuscripts. In the Gedong Kirtya (Bali’s manuscript museum) I encountered only one lontar bearing Djlantik’s name as the source: Paputan Suling (IIIc.21.1467). However, there are a large number of other manuscripts both transcribed from lontar to paper/Roman script, plus others preserved in original palm-leaf form, which are all sourced from the same small village community, banjar Liligundi, located in Bali’s northern region, Bulèlèng.26 These all state only the name I Gedé Dangin below the manuscript title, but the fact they originate from the same centre, and that Dangin is low caste and noted as the translator of the single lontar sourced expressly from Djlantik, suggest the entire series may well have been donated by Djlantik himself. Hooykaas

26

Mostly comprising gamelan notation, these documents include: Pupuh gending gong: IIIc. 859-11 (1932); Pupuh gending suling: IIIc.873-11 (1932); Pupuh gending légong: IIIc.886-11 (1932); and Untitled: IIIc.1237-11 (1937).

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supports the idea of Djlantik as a major source of documents in his article ‘Preservation and Cataloguing of Manuscripts in Bali’, where he references a 1922 catalogue of Djlantik’s collection: ‘Bijlage L. Lijst van lontar handschriften in de bibliotheek van I G. P. Djelantik te Singaradja’ (Hooykaas 1979: 353). Djlantik’s interest in manuscript and his cooperation with Dutch quest for historical manuscripts goes further than this, however. Hooykaas records the process of the creation of the Gedong Kirtya, driven by the enthusiasm demonstrated by foreign tourists for Balinese ‘ancient’ documents. Both Djlantik and eventually the Dutch administration were quick to respond to the tourist demand, for the visitors proved eager buyers for the palm-leaf MSS which the Balinese offered for sale. In 1928 the Government, waking up to the situation, created a foundation (Kirtya) for the preservation of local MSS. A three-room building was erected in a corner of the grounds of the puri [palace] of the Anak Agung of Bulèlèng, himself a keen collector of MSS. In one room the copyists worked, in the second their copies were stored, and the third was reserved for interested readers, who came in a steady stream, as I witnessed almost daily for over two years (1979: 349).

Vickers provides a darker backdrop to the Anak Agung’s manuscript collection. He writes of the large Djlantik family library, noting how many of the documents must have been sourced either from the Anak Agung’s immediate ancestors, or collected while he was on Lombok, where he and his father before him acted as administrators for the Dutch (1985: 149). Vickers states how, as a key figure in the Dutch administration at the beginning of this century, Jlantik also played a role in the Dutch takeover of the Southern states, especially the kingdoms of Badung and Klungkung… Members of one of the royal families accuse him of participating in the sacking of the palaces which followed the suicidal fight to death of the kings, so it may be that some of the other manuscripts in the collection come from those courts. Van Stein Callenfels, researching some 15 years later, was told that Klungkung palace in particular had many illustrated manuscripts before its destruction (1985: 149).

Djlantik appears to be one of the figures who managed to negotiate colonial control to work very much in his favour, albeit at the cost of other islanders’ respect and loyalty. This is clear enough from his work with manuscripts where he profited financially, and presumably politically through close cooperation with Dutch mandates of manuscript preservation and scholarship. In the case of musical documentation and representations of Balinese musical history, for both Djlantik and the Cokorda Gedé Raka Sukawati the profits appear less immediate, but are nonetheless present. It is often stated that the conquest by the Dutch, the subsequent dissolution of courtly power and Dutch policy on caste eventually had a significant impact on musical practice and the social position of gamelan both within and without palace walls (Tenzer 101

2000, McGraw 2005). Vickers’ account of pre-colonial Bali suggests that the production of art prior to the twentieth-century well reflected the complex way in which the courts related to the rest of society (1985: 145). He notes how Brahmana had a strong position in court as teachers of literature, scribes, judges and priests, many of them also musicians and dancers. Jaba or sudra (‘commoners’) could be involved in three ways: as live-in or out servants (parekan or panjeroan); state officials involved in administration; or as villagers working as labourers (roban or pangayah). The Brahmana and other aristocracy were able to maintain their cultural hegemony by demonstrating their innate artistic ability in artistic achievements. This position was reinforced by their strategic position in the networks of patronage and teaching, and their control over social, ritual, and political institutions on the state level. Only the courts had the wealth to support large numbers of people who could teach literature and the arts together (1985: 145).

Vickers notes the playing of gamelan to be one of the domains that saw the most practical transgressions of formal boundaries between court and outsiders. He suggests that in contrast to painting (which was practised for the courts but studied in the village), music and dance saw not only intellectual but also physical interaction between jaba and the triwangsa/court, with many of the non-triwangsa musicians who played for village ceremonies and friends having themselves trained within the court system (1985: 146, 148). The dissolution of court financial power saw the end of this system of patronage. The village-led innovations gamelan gong kebyar inaugurated new structures of artistic production, involvement and evaluation. In the breakdown of court finances, valuable items of property, including precious heirlooms such as gamelan, were sold off, often to be bought up by low-caste community organisations. Ensembles such as the gamelan semar pegulingan or gong gedé previously heard primarily in court settings, found their way into the village setting. The craze for gamelan gong kebyar which swept Bali from the North saw the need for new bronze to cast the instruments, so many of these older ensembles were melted down and refashioned into the kebyar groups by enthusiastic sekaha or community groups. Vickers himself acknowledges the subjectivity inherent in attempts to account for pre-colonial artistic patronage. He notes McPhee and Kunst to be the only major sources writing on the topic, through their ‘still having access to firsthand accounts of the place of music in the courtly milieu,’ and he concedes that ‘our knowledge of this kind of musical activity comes from their interpretations, and from the remnants of courtly tradition handed down over two or three generations’ (1985: 146). Vickers attempts to broaden our picture of the era and gamelan/caste relations through study of apparently pre-colonial texts such as the Aji Gurnita, a document I shall address below. However, it is worth first putting these ideas of pre-colonial artistic production and systems of court and caste in 102

the context of colonial-era Dutch imaginings of Balinese power structures. In line with Creese’s statement quoted above, most current accounts of pre-colonial Bali have been significantly mediated by European concerns. Indeed, the idea of Bali conjured by first European visitors to the island such as Crawford and Friederich, ‘who viewed Bali principally as an example of a Hindu society, or a living museum of old Java, before its “corruption” by Islam’, can be seen to have molded official Dutch policy, which in 1910 declared the intention to ‘uphold the caste concept’ (Robinson, 1995: 30, 33). This saw the upper castes (or triwangsa) given a range of privileges, the Dutch on Bali following the line of the nineteenth-century scholars on Java in mistaking the Hinducentric ideology of the higher castes—the centrality of an immutable four-tiered caste system in which the highest three (the Brahmana, Satria, Wesia) held an automatic political and social superiority—for the social reality of the Balinese, which was considerably more flexible (1995: 32).

This resulted in severe sudra (‘commoners’, Bali’s lower caste) frustration and resentment, which was to prove a significant force in the Independence movement. As noted by internal critic of the Dutch administration in Bali, V.E. Korn, there had been more sudras in positions of political authority before the imposition of colonial rule (1932: 288, cited in Robinson 1995: 32). In addition, at the same time as the Balinese triwangsa were revered as supreme bearers of authentic, aristocratic Hindu-Balinese culture, the rajas themselves held only the thinnest vestiges of working political authority, and much of their income was lost from land concessions and taxation to the Dutch. Thus, while the upper castes gained certain forms of privilege, for the kings of court certain benefits were removed. A series of tensions here emerges: fractions between newly defined ‘caste’ groupings; financial pressures; change in artistic patronage systems as musical instruments changed hands; and a further slippage of trust between courts and populace, characterised by the burgeoning Independence movement among the ‘commoners’. For many high-caste figures, paradoxically, the best way to cement their own political power in Bali was to ally with Dutch colonisers, who at least assured them a modicum of privilege and authority. A beneficial alliance was not limited to Dutch administrators alone, but extended to other Euro-American figures who promised similar financial rewards and renewed status. Likewise, while such benefits were most easily extended to high-caste figures, a number of low-caste Balinese managed similarly to reap rewards through their courtly associations. A notable example is the musician I Nyoman Kaler, on whom more will follow. Alliance often meant the supplying of information, especially for inquisitive anthropologists and musicologists, which provided opportunities for the informant to represent Balinese history and culture howsoever they chose. In this vein, it is possible to suggest that just as ‘Majapahit’ served a political purpose in the 103

warring Bali of the eighteenth-century, so articulating an imagined, purely Hindu past for Bali benefitted certain Balinese in the colonial era. Once more, the representation or enunciation of Bali’s history as bound to a particular narrative, here the Majapahit myth, can be seen as a powerful strategy for enabling one’s status in the present. This kind of alliance between high-caste figures and Euro-Americans, and the hostility such alliances garnered from the remainder of the sudra community, is well illustrated in an incident recorded in Coast’s post-Independence Dancing out of Bali (2004 [1953]). Coast records a meeting with the Anak Agung Gedé Agung, the former raja of Gianyar, who had set up a lack-lustre djanger dance troupe for tourist performances. Coast is dismayed and embarrassed by what he perceives as the Anak Agung’s over-eagerness to please foreigners. He is also startled to find that the former raja carries a revolver with him when attending meetings, the Anak Agung replying, ‘Yes, I’m sorry Mr Coast; but you see, if anyone tries to shoot me, I have every intention of shooting him first’ (2004 [1953]: 34). Coast is perplexed, until some days later a postcard arrives, addressed to a member of his staff, the intended husband of Rantun (not insignificantly the long-serving cook of Colin McPhee in the 1930s). Now the message is unequivocal: “Traitor to your race,” it read. “You, at the time when you were chauffeur to the Anak Agung Gde Agung, were cruel and oppressive in your conduct against your own people, who were then struggling for their Independence. Beware now for your life! Signed: With Pistol and Sword Unsheathed” (2004 [1953]: 35).

How might such tensions as these have shaped colonial representations of music on Bali, particularly historical accounts? I suggest that during the late-colonial era there emerged a penchant for supplying grand historical narratives, and for applying an associated quasiHindu mysticism to gamelan practice. These narratives can, in turn, be seen to link directly to the maintenance of elitist caste privilege, while also excluding sudra from commenting on Balinese music for Westerners (and likewise excluding them from the rewards such commentary won). On these grounds, following Goodman and Inden, the representation of Balinese gamelan’s musical history and attending mystical valence can be seen to have important implications for action.27

27

The Balinese Music in Context series (1992) includes an essay on the role of caste relationships in musical settings. However, it is notable that while Sanger’s account of Bali’s ‘caste structure’ and its impact on music-making is an interesting study of local musical politics, it is predicated on a historically uncritical or indeed de-contextualized account of Bali’s ‘Hindu caste system’ (see also Sanger 1989). Meanwhile, Ramstedt’s 1993 essay on Balinese pre-colonial music-making is based principally on the researcher’s contemporary discussion with high-caste Priests (pedanda) and Kawi scholars. While the essay presents an intriguing account of Balinese performance and ideas of kingship, Ramstedt similarly dislocates this narrative from the complex relationship between caste construction, political control and Balinese performance evident since the colonial era. 104

Returning to Gambuh and the Gamelan of the Courts: History and Mystery As stated, I do not attempt to give a definitive account of pre-colonial music history, rather to consider how others have represented Balinese music history over time. What I offer is thus necessarily contingent. However, what may be noted over the colonial era, is a marked increase in the definition of and reverence for Majapahit era genres, most particularly the emergence of the idea that Gambuh originated from Java and was the source of much Balinese performance culture. Curiously, the significance and appeal which gamelan gambuh holds for later writers, is lost on earlier commentators. Brandts Buys’ earlier discussion of Javanese origins for Balinese gamelan in ‘Aateenkeningan betreffende enkele Indonesische muziekinstrumenten’ (1922), via detailed analysis of temple reliefs at the Javanese Panataran temple, makes no mention of Gambuh. Meanwhile, Kunst provides a colourfully negative depiction of Gambuh in De Toonkunst van Bali, referring to its ‘confusion’ (dooreen), diabolic cacophony, and describing the wild and hysterical sounds (wild en hysterisch geluid) of its ‘great flutes’ (1925: 112). Kunst’s tone is more subdued in the later Hindu-Javanese Musical Instruments. He discusses the gamelan gambuh only briefly and refers to the form alongside gamelan arja as one of the ‘smaller and less sophisticated ensembles’ of Bali, making no mention of Gambuh having any specific historic lineage (1927: 84). Yet for the later generation of writers including de Zoete, Spies, McPhee, Covarrubias, the dance and music of the Gambuh theatre came to be established as the foundation for classical Balinese culture imported direct from Java, a theoretical tenet which is maintained in much contemporary scholarship. As suggested in an earlier section of this chapter, Gambuh assumes a theoretical and historical centrality for McPhee’s study of Balinese gamelan. De Zoete and Spies are similarly keen to cite Gambuh as ‘the source’ of much Balinese culture, stating that There broods over Balinese dance an ancestral shade; every dance form, one is often told, is ultimately derived from Gamboeh; all dance technique originates from its movements, all scales and melodies from its peculiar gamelan (1938: 134).

Noting that this ‘ancient fossil of Balinese dance’ is apparently now less popular on the island, they assert that it is nonetheless of the highest pedigree, going on to state, For us it has interest if for no other reason than that it mirrors the costumes, language, and gesture of the great courts of east Java during the fourteenth century, when they were at their height of splendour and of their influence of Bali; as they are also portrayed in stone on the reliefs of east Javanese temples and the sculptured figures of Balinese temples from medieval to modern times (1938: 135).

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While this chapter does not aim to offer a corrective history, Wallis’ detailed study into early Balinese vocal forms is instructive in revising some of these ideas about Gambuh (1980). Wallis endeavours to blur the neat historical delineation of cultural forms in Java and Bali. He notes a long period of exchange and engagement between islands and cultures, and is cautious to cite any particular genre as the direct source of another. He also contends that the idea of Gambuh as a direct and ancient import from Java is false, stating that while Gambuh appears ‘to epitomize Javaneseness’, much of it must be regarded as distinctly Balinese, including dance style, costuming and dramatic form (1980: 43). He also notes that no single genre called Gambuh was known in the last Hindu kingdoms of East Java, concluding that the genre appears to be ‘a purely Balinese creation’ (1980: 43). With origins thus blurred, the musical histories offered above begin to feel more flimsy, inviting questions into the origins of these histories themselves. I Made Lebah and I Wayan Lotring stand as perhaps the most significant musical informants for McPhee, and the extended discussions held between them and McPhee on the internal workings of composition structure and process are well recorded (Oja 1990, Harnish 2001). However, I Nyoman Kaler, while eliciting far less warmth from McPhee in his writings, emerges as a critical figure in shaping McPhee’s first responses to gamelan on Bali, particularly his early understanding of such extra-musical factors as the history of courtly music-making. A House in Bali narrates how Kaler as a young man trained first as a court nandir (male légong) dancer, ‘brought up at the old court of the Prince of Blahbatu’ (1944: 29). Kaler’s father had been a parakan, a ‘feudal retainer’ of the Prince and also a member of the palace gamelan. Kaler eventually turned away from dance to gamelan, but retained a strong affiliation with the court. McPhee recalls, In these early conversations with Nyoman I caught glimpses of ancient and brilliant courts, of palaces forever ringing with actors and dancers. For at one time the princes of Bali had been great patrons of the arts. Many of them had come from Java to escape the wave of Islamic culture that had begun to spread through the land… [Now], with their concubines, soldiers, craftsmen, actors and musicians, they continued to live in a splendour half barbarous, half provincial, patterned on the great and luxurious courts of the Javanese rajahs (1944: 29-30).

It seems that it is largely based on Kaler’s narratives that McPhee builds up images of the majesty of court musicianship. Kaler describes the Blahbatu court to McPhee with its gamelan gong gedé: ‘the massive gamelan with the Great Gongs,’ while in the inner palace, an assembly of little gongs and keyed instruments more delicately formed, sweeter in tone, played a far more romantic music. This was the gamelan Semar-pagulingan, the Gamelan of Semara, God of Love, God of the Pillowed Bed. The music, said Nyoman, soothed and rejoiced the heart with its sweetness. Every night it began; off and on the musicians played, late into the night… Where is the gamelan now? I asked. 106

It had been pawned long ago, said Nyoman, and later bought by the men of Sukawati and transformed into gamelan for légong (1944: 30).

However, the ‘Great Gong’ remained unsold, and Kaler takes McPhee to see these now retired state Blahbatu gong gedé instruments. Indeed, Kaler appears eager to impress upon McPhee the importance of much gamelan music’s long-standing courtly heritage; accordingly, following the notes of their excursion to Blahbatu, McPhee describes the core repertoire of the gong gedé and the semar pegulingan, (which he notes as now ‘democratically adapted’ for the légong ensemble), alongside the gamelan angklung, to be ‘anonymous, unwritten... The music on these occasions was ancient as the rites themselves, unchanged, apparently, for centuries’ (1944: 30). It appears that Kaler’s commentary may be least part responsible for McPhee’s at times decidedly romantic approach to Balinese music. This is not to say that McPhee was always in easy agreement with Kaler. Their split over the training of McPhee’s dance protege, Sampih, and Kaler’s jealousy over McPhee’s contact with other musicians is recorded in the latter parts of A House in Bali. McPhee also comes to prize the information supplied by his other informants over and above the ‘cultural background’ which he notes as Kaler’s particular strength (1944: 145). Indeed, McPhee formulates a clear distinction between the types of commentary musicians such as Lebah, Lotring and Lunyuh were able to provide, as opposed to Kaler’s narratives. Of Lebah, McPhee declared there to be ‘a clarity and precision’ to his information, ‘which delighted me for it was before all practical, based on experience, very much up to date and not blurred by theory’(1944: 145). A footnote in Harnish’s work on Lebah and McPhee’s relationship supports this, suggesting ‘McPhee had trouble relating to information offered by Pak Kaler, for example, and felt he was arrogant, and to musicians of higher caste who often linked musical ideas to more abstract ideas’ (2001: 39). The association Harnish makes between Kaler’s information and the approach of higher caste musicians is interesting, when combined with McPhee’s own narration of Kaler’s approach. While I cannot yet find a direct record of this in McPhee’s own writing, the idea of a Balinese high-caste tendency to link the practical to ‘abstract ideas’, chimes with both Robinson and Wallis’ commentaries on the role of esoteric knowledge as a means of securing caste status on Bali.28

28

Despite being of sudra origin, Kaler’s part in such knowledge production is perhaps explained by his prolonged and rewarded loyalty to Bali’s court structure, which he consequently sought to replicate with the Dutch administration and other Euro-American powers on the island. John Coast’s record of an encounter with Kaler in 1950s post-Independence Bali, suggests the musician to have been particularly ambitious and canny at engineering profitable relations with Westerners (Coast 2004 [1953]: 109). 107

Wallis records the long-standing links between exclusive religious knowledge and the preservation of certain power structures in Bali (1980). From the eleventh century, sanskrit was preserved by the pedanda (priest) of the Brahman caste, their knowledge of the sanskrit language forming ‘the key to the central tenets of a religion mysterious to its mass of congregants’, gaining them a ‘symbolic hold’ over a major source of power and prestige in Bali (1980: 10). Wallis goes on to suggest how priests and scholars’ ‘control of texts and rituals made them indispensable to rulers wishing to legitimize new dynasties in the context of Indian or Javanese historical traditions’, and how royal scribes were on occasion ordered to ‘recreate history to accommodate subsequent local events within those traditions’ (1980: 11). In turn, Robinson emphasises how during the colonial era the association between the high castes and esoteric knowledge were played upon to some advantage by those in possession of it, particularly through Bali’s burgeoning print culture (1995). In the midst of the Dutch baliseering campaign, a number of Balinese newspapers appeared, staffed by both high and low caste Balinese. However, the earliest publication, Santi Adnyana, eventually collapsed in a tumult of conflict between sudra and triwangsa, the sudra claiming that the paper was placing too much emphasis on a ‘Hindu Bali’ which in turn stressed an unjust caste hierarchy (notably, a hierarchy much supported by the Dutch administration) (Robinson 1995: 34). The sudra editorial team then set out to form their own paper, Surya Kanta, which called for a relaxation on the laws of marriage, language and dress and, alongside a critique of the Dutch government’s support of the caste system, demanded a ‘demystification of religious knowledge’ (1995: 34). Meanwhile, the remaining triwangsa (including none other than Anak Agung Gusti Putu Djlantik) created another publication, Bali Adnyana, termed by Korn ‘a newspaper exclusively for the aristocracy’ which praised the Dutch attempts to re-traditionalise Bali and sought to counter the ‘red peril’ of Surya Kanta (1995: 34). Piecing this information together, it emerges that the preservation of exclusive esoteric knowledge was an important source of power for high-caste Balinese, particularly in the formation of profitable relations with Westerners, themselves eager to gain access to the inner reaches of Bali’s ‘Hindu mysticism’. As will be demonstrated below, Balinese musical practice was certainly not excluded from this realm of knowledge. However, what remains to be seen is whether the associations that turn up between musical form and ‘Balinese-Hindu’ cosmology were long-standing, or a more recent product of colonial interaction. Returning once more to Gambuh, we find it to be one of the gamelan forms most often associated with the courts, Hindu cosmology and the esoteric, a connection which was formed primarily through the Aji Gurnita, and through various Balinese poetry collections, including a set of translations by famed Javanese scholar R. M. Ng.

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Poerbatjaraka.29 I begin with the latter’s Smaradahana: Oud-Javaansche tekst met vertaling, an edition of kakawin (poetry in Old Javanese) translated into Dutch and published in Bandung, West Java in 1931. Poerbatjaraka’s edition also includes a number of lontar prasi, manuscript illustrations, which, as discussed in Vickers’ informative article ‘The Realm of the Senses: Images of the Court Music of Pre-Colonial Bali’ (1985), make certain suggestions about nineteenth-century Balinese gamelan gambuh practice. The Smaradahana manuscript presents three images of music, each potentially linked to Gambuh: 1. a demon playing a long end-blown flute; 2. two men playing music while the prince makes love to a girl; and 3. women playing various Gambuh-associated gamelan instruments (see Vickers 1985: 149-157). By way of a précis of Vickers’ extensive work based on Poerbatjaraka’s translations, the images and their captions can be interpreted to show how the presence of Gambuh in pre-colonial courts demonstrated and enhanced regal magic power and courtly sexual pleasure, while enticing the blessings of Smara, the Love God. The third prasi illustrates this combined power most aptly. The women Gambuh musicians and dancers—two of whom are regaled with elaborate costumes and the long hair of princesses—are inscribed with the caption: ‘there were many lovely musical instruments, which were magically dangerous if played by one who was unqualified’. 30 Vickers notes the word-play involved in the accompanying text: for instance, the term masarik means both ‘magical power’ and also ‘to strike’, used to mean both physically hitting, and the sudden onset of falling in love (1985: 157). These images and texts are thus understood to convey connections between Gambuh musical activity, sensuality, royal stature, and the potential might of the court’s magical power. While at this point it would be empty speculation to counter Gambuh’s regal role and long-standing mystic potency, two details about the derivation to the Smaradahana manuscript must be noted. Firstly, the lontar manuscript itself originates from the library of Anak Agung Gusti Putu Djlantik, already shown to have close involvement in Dutch administration. Secondly, the work’s initial and most influential translator, R. M. Ng. Poerbatjaraka assumes a not insignificant political standpoint too. A Dutch-educated aristocrat, Poerbatajaraka was Indonesia’s foremost scholar of Javanese texts and went on to become a major patron of Indonesian scholars studying their own traditional literature. At this stage he appears to be working to the Dutch philological model of hunting for Javanese origins in Balinese cultural production, a point supported by Vickers’ later work on the use and history of the Malat in Bali (2005). Here Vickers notes how Poerbatjaraka’s 1945 study of the Malat combines ‘Western Orientalism with a scholarly 29 Another

well-known lontar document, the Prakempa also discusses Balinese musical mysticism with some reference to the gamelan gambuh. However, as its claims to a pre-1980s provenance are dubious, I reserve discussion of the Prakempa until the second part of the thesis. 30

See Appendix 1, note 5.

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attempt to bolster Indonesian identity through searching out the roots of a common culture’ (Vickers 2005: 6). In turn, this led to Poerbatjaraka omitting ‘textual lineages and directions shaped orally and aurally that did not fit the single line of development dictated by the Western model of nationalism’, an outlook which also ‘did not leave much room for sympathetic participation in Balinese cultural variations on the Indonesian theme’ (Vickers 2005: 7). While Poerbatjaraka’s latterly powerful nationalist sentiment ultimately counters Dutch supremacy, his location of ‘Indonesian identity’ in specifically Javanese tradition nonetheless concurs with the Dutch philological model he was trained in, and potentially unsettles the idea of his presenting an ‘objective’ reading of Balinese texts.

The Aji Gurnita We call the practice of speaking powerful words “magic” if the speaker himself believes that his words bring about the desired effect... The object of a priest who performs an act of verbal magic is to influence the course of events. Events may imply human activities, and human activities may imply speech; priestly magic, therefore, may be intended to bring about a change in the utterances of the community concerned, the members expected to conform to the priestly statements. These statements presuppose, therefore, utterances of the speech community which were disagreeable to the priests or their employer. Thus, a priestly doctrine is likely to invert a prevailing picture of the present. The broader the gap between the popular picture of the present and the priestly doctrine, the more impressive must be the priestly statement as the instrument of inversion; the use of Sanskrit, of allegories and chronograms, etc, should be seen in this light. It goes without saying that the inversion of historical facts by means of priestly statements is by no means confined to Java (Berg 1965: 89, 91).

There is as yet insufficient evidence to make any substantial counterclaim against Gambuh’s particular, intrinsic mystic powers, but consideration of the Aji Gurnita lontar raises some further questions. It is an intriguing document, appearing to be the first known treatise to deal with gamelan music with an esoteric/cosmological focus, very much distinct from the selection of notated vocal and gamelan gambang melodies or ensemble layouts which are the subject of most other lontar manuscripts on gamelan.31 Summarised by Seebass as a ‘holy text about sound’, the twenty-folio lontar elaborates on gamelan scale systems, instrumentation, and tuning, linking their characteristics to various cosmological phenomenon (Seebass 1990: 203). It distinguishes four types of ‘court’ gamelan: the semar pagulingan (Smara, the God of love, sleeping); the semar patangan (Smara rising, the orchestra which accompanies the légong); the semar palinggihan (Smara seated, the orchestra for jogèd performance); and the semar 31

Various other lontar documents held at the Gedong Kirtya include text on aspects of gamelan: Paputan Suling (IIIc.1467); Gong Wesi (IIIb.6458; IIIb.6442; and IIIb.250); and Tutur Lebur Gangsa (IIIb.6458). However, apart from the Paputan Suling, donated by I Gusti Bagus Jlantik in 1938, the remaining documents only surfaced in the 1970s or later and are of questionable origin. I reserve discussion of the Prakempa—Bali’s current premier music theory lontar as translated into Indonesian and published by I Made Bandem in 1986—until Chapter Five. 110

pandiriyan (Smara standing, the barong ensemble). As well as mention of the ancient and sacred orchestras selonding and gong luang, the text also discusses the gamelan gong and bebonangan, before finally addressing the gamelan gambuh (here referred to as the melad prana), decreed as the source orchestra from which all other ensembles sprang. 32 Several forms of the lontar are said to exist, plus various translations. A transcription in roman characters may be found in the current Gedong Kirtya collection (numbered IIIc.4766): this edition is dated 1979 with the roman script transcription produced by I Gusti Ngurah Gedé and donated by Puri Satria, Denpasar (the current residence of the area’s original royal family). Another type-written edition is listed in the Leiden collection (Or 11.121-Or. 11.515), offered by Putu Magelung of Sibung Kaja in 1940 and typed-up by Putu Geria.33 Vickers’ commentary on the Aji Gurnita is based on three available manuscripts from the Hooykaas collection: one from the Puri Kaba-Kaba, an important royal house in the kingdom of Mengwi; Puri Satria, Denpasar (as listed above), and the Geria Ngurah, Pemaron (the three documents listed as HKS no. 1976, 2320, and 2855 respectively) (Vickers 1985: 146). My own consultation of the ANU Balinese manuscript database yielded a slightly different result for the third manuscript, here listed as from Griya Tamansari, Intaran, Sanur, Badung and numbered 4656 in the Hooykaas collection. As discussed below, Seebass forms his commentary on another Aji Gurnita edition still.34 Information on the Aji Gurnita’s authorship is sparse. While being a major source in Vickers’ article on pre-colonial music practice, the manuscript can only be dated as ‘perhaps written prior to Dutch rule’ (1985: 146). Indeed, Vickers has now revised this statement, suggesting that being as it doesn’t feature in Van der Tuuk’s catalogues it was most probably written post-1890, thus placing it, at the earliest, within the first stages of Dutch conquest (pers. comm. 2008). Seebass describes the Aji Gurnita to ‘exist only in one example, which turned up after the second world war, but must go back at least to the time of the selfbestuurders, i.e., before the second world war when courts were still intact’ (1990: 203). Seebass also notes that the manuscript he had access to contained a

32

Gamelan gong refers to the gamelan of the ‘great gongs’: the gamelan gong gedé. The gamelan bebonangan is another term for Bali’s four-tone processional ensemble of drums, gongs, pot gongs, and cymbals otherwise known as the gamelan beleganjur. See discussion of I Komang Mariyana’s Tawur in Chapter Six. 33

This edition is also noted in Pigeaud’s Literature of Java (III), here listed as no. 2390 in the Kirtya collection (1970: 119). 34

For the purposes of this discussion, I am working from a combination of the Puri Satri/I Gusti Ngurah Gedé 1979 edition, and a version translated from kawi aksara to roman script by I Gusti Bagus Sugriwa and included in I Wayan Madra Aryasa’s Perkembangan Seni Karawitan Bali (1976/7). All quotations here are taken from the Sugriwa/Aryasa transcription as the most widely available of the two editions. 111

colophon reading: Sinurat dè sang anama, Ida Ketut Anom ring Gerija Lod Pasar, kala dina, su u, warigadèan, tan, ping, 6 sasih, ka, i, isaka 1884 (pers. comm. 2008). The document was thus offered by an Ida Ketut Anom (Ida connoting a Brahmana, high-caste figure), from the Griya Lod Pasar, which, according to the ANU Balinese manuscript database, is located in Intaran, Sanur, Badung. Following the Balinese calendar system, the isaka/caka of 1884 dates this particular manuscript to c.1962. This raises some additional questions about the role of such esoteric music theory in post-Independence Bali, issues to be dealt with in the following part of the thesis. Analysis of the Aji Gurnita prompts some serious questions about its authorship and about the role of Gambuh as a long-standing sacred, mystic and courtly form untouched by contact with foreigners. Firstly, bearing in mind Berg’s quotation on the “magic” inversion performed by texts, the emphasis the Aji Gurnita places on an exclusive form of musical-mystic knowledge and its affixation to caste status points to a certain anxiety on the part of the author in establishing his authority. Seebass suggests the author to have been a Balinese high priest, who intended the treatise exclusively for his successor at a particular court in South Bali, as well as for the ruler of that court and his Prime Minister (1990: 203). He suggests the document’s esoteric themes, plus the much stressed exclusiveness of the readership, mark the treatise as the theoretical product of a non-musician and priest whose main goal was to create the proper embedding for the court gamelans and to justify court music through an extra-musical system of values, symbols and genealogies. Balinese music is made fit to enter the hieratic [of or concerning priests] cosmos of the court (1990: 204).

Indeed, the title itself suggests a specific, privileged audience: while Gurnita (or Ghūrnita) translates as sound: ‘resounding, loud, boisterous’, Aji refers to ‘holy writ’ or ‘sacred or authoritative text (containing e.g. rules of conduct for a Brahman...); sacred or magically powerful formula’ (Zoetmulder 1982: 33, 561). The idea of musical knowledge as the preserve of the elite through its contact with other esoteric realms of understanding, available only to certain initiates, is firmly stated. While not explicit on caste, the text nonetheless suggests gamelan to require a similar level of rarefied knowledge, as religious practice, a knowledge traditionally bestowed only on Brahmana caste.35 To go against these decrees is deemed by the text to be not ‘yogya’: suitable, fit or proper, a Sanskrit term customarily adjoined as a suffix to rāja, meaning ‘befitting a king, princely’ (Zoetmulder, 1982: 1488). Likewise, severe punishment is on offer to anyone fails to register the gravity of the undertaking to be a teacher of music, the text sentencing them to an afterlife in a gohmuka (cauldron from hell) (Aryasa 1976/77: 76).

35

See also Hood (2005).

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The text’s discussion of various ensembles also makes clear connections between the sacred and the courtly, as mediated via musical ensembles. In the section entitled Catur Muni-Muni (loosely translated as ‘The Four Sounds’), the text looks first at the four Semar orchestras, as were listed above, noting their various usages in the court setting and relating each ensemble not only to Smar (or Asmara), God of love, but also to individual gods of the four quarters: Indra, Yama, Kuwera and Baruna. Vickers is able to translate the instruments listed for the four ‘semar’ orchestras into still well-known Balinese groups: gamelan semar pegulingan; gamelan pelégongan; gamelan jogèd; and gamelan bebarongan. Seebass is less convinced, and again suggests numerology to have been the motivation, suggesting that the author adds – I am inclined to say “invents” – three gamelans as sisters to the well known gamelan Semar Pegulingan in order to create the “fourness” important in Balinese numerology (Seebass 1990: 204).36

However, I am inclined to agree with Vickers’ analysis, for the components of contemporary forms of these gamelan and the given instrument specifications align well, the Aji Gurnita thus aptly cementing a religious pedigree for each ensemble. The cosmological associations of both gamelan bebonangan and gamelan gong are established: gamelan bebonangan linked to the demons of the earth (bhuta kala) and gamelan gong to the priestly beings and nine gods of the sky (resing langit mwang watek dewa nawa sanga) (Aryasa 1976/7:79, see also Vickers 1985: 146-7 for a more detailed summary). The more musicological aspects of the Aji Gurnita are fascinating. The document appears to demonstrate not only another concerted effort to align musical practice with the religiously esoteric and exclusive, but also provides a theoretical system that is redolent of a distinctly Western approach to Balinese tuning and is notably similar to that expatiated by Kunst and McPhee (as outlined above). Following the lontar’s opening dedications, the text moves swiftly to divide sounds into the two tonal systems of pelok (pélog) and salendro (sléndro). However, pelok here refers to a specific five-tone form, panca lima, comprising the five tones of dang, deng, dong, dung, and ding which are ascribed the five aksara syllables: sa, ba, ta, a, and i, and five gods: Iswara; Brahma; Mahadewa; Wisnu; and Siwa. Salendro is treated similarly. Its five tones: ndang, ndeng, ndong, ndung, and nding, are ascribed the syllables na, ma, çi, wa and ya, and the gods Mahadewa, Çaraswati, Gayatri, Çridewi and Umadewi. This passage makes only one mention of a specific gamelan ensemble, ‘the sounds accompanying Gambuh dance’ (gurnita solah Gambuh), described as a blend of these two sets or rows (jajar), each of five tones. 36

See also Vickers 1985: 146.

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Several writers have commented on this aspect of Aji Gurnita. Seebass focuses on the text’s numerology, suggesting that the ‘equal footing’ afforded pélog and sléndro is done so only ‘for the sake of dualism’ (1990: 204). Richter’s commentary, grounded in fieldwork with contemporary Gambuh musicians in Batuan, suggests that this idea of a ten-tone system for Gambuh in fact accords with suling practice, whose main register is indeed comprised of ten tones (1992: 208). He goes on to suggest that the system espoused in the Aji Gurnita may help to support the idea that Gambuh music has its roots in vocal practices. Richter notes the presence of the juru tandak (a male singer) in ‘earlier times’, who would have sat among the instrumentalists and carried a line similar in contour to the suling and rebab, but with great tonal flexibility from a wide palette of tones (Richter 1992: 217). 37 While Richter’s account of a vocal basis for Gambuh and various other forms of gamelan makes much sense, and his expansion of the gambuh suling tonal system beyond a seven-tone structure is a useful re-conceptualisation of current practices, I suggest the application and systemisation of pélog/sléndro in the Aji Gurnita is still problematic. While Richter supplies a strong argument as to the complex conceptual processes at work in the modal practice of gambuh suling musicians, there is little evidence to suggest that these processes are founded on any kind of labeling or division of tones into discrete pélog and sléndro systems. I tentatively propose the general application of Javanese scale appellations on Balinese gamelan to be a Western device, therefore suggesting the authorship of the Aji Gurnita potentially to have much closer links to colonial era Bali than previously supposed. Finally, the text addresses the melad prana (or simalad prana), an ensemble whose combination of gongs, drums, suling flutes and rebab (spiked fiddle), suggest it to align with the gamelan gambuh. The text having discussed Smara and Ratih, the sound of the melad prana is introduced as a site of their godly mingling (through the blend of suling and rebab). The text suggests that on the creation of melad prana’s music, the gods of the four quarters (Indra, Yama, Baruna and Kuwera), plus the priests and gods of the sky and the earthy demons liked to listen (suka angrungu), are moved to create their own individual ensembles in replica (see Aryasa 1976/77: 82 and Vickers 1985: 147). All the court gamelan listed in the Aji Gurnita: gamelan semar pegulingan; gamelan pelégongan; gamelan jogèd; gamelan bebarongan; gamelan gong [gedé]; and gamelan bebonangan, are thus said to derive from a single source, gamelan gambuh, explained in practical terms by an apparent dependence on a shared tuning system (a combination of five-tone pélog and sléndro), and cosmologically, by the origin myth of Semar and Ratih. In doing so, a court-based religious authority is stamped on much Balinese music-making, clothed 37

For further discussion of possible relations between gamelan tuning systems and vocal music, see also Herbst 1997: 32-37. 114

in a type of cosmological music theory. The gamelan instruments themselves are inscribed with spiritual potency, for the tones they produce are connected to sacred Indic aksara syllables, and in turn, to various godly and demonic beings. These theoretical associations are then shown to have practical consequences: for instance, the text makes much of the need for certain offerings to be performed, and the penalties to be faced should they be ignored. However, it is also explicit that the ability and lawful right to access this theory is reserved only for specific groupings of people: learned and highcaste priests, and state rulers plus their ministers. While gamelan may be played in a wide range of situations, it is apparently only a select few who are authorised to conduct the spiritual proceedings. The return to Gambuh for all the forms listed is striking. Vickers’ discussion of Gambuh performances in nineteenth-century court settings (2005) sets the scene for the ensemble’s regal history and status, yet evidence as to the long-standing presence of Gambuh in pre-colonial Balinese life has not appeared. Rather, more recent revisions of nineteenth-century arts practice suggests that Gambuh performances were perhaps far rarer than previously thought, with performances happening only occasionally to tell a single story over a week (pers. comm. Hobart from discussion with Vickers, 2008). With the current evidence to hand it is impossible to say for certain, and indeed the reconstruction of pre-colonial Balinese music practice is certainly not the object of this chapter. Instead, I am focusing on how colonial-era texts and informants chose to represent cultural history. What is striking about the accounts of Gambuh given by de Zoete, Spies and McPhee is that they describe the form as finding no substantial new performance contexts in the twentieth century. Instead, Gambuh is represented as a symbol of court practice alone, something which chimes very much with the message of the Aji Gurnita. Ensembles such as a semar pegulingan which are also depicted as closely associated with the court, are described as taken out to be played in the village, or else melted down into gong kebyar ensembles (or, as in the case of McPhee’s project to restore and re-invigorate the Sayan semar pegulingan, preserved by conscience-pricked Westerners). However, by Balinese and Western accounts, Gambuh’s image alone remains exclusively bound to the court. By tracing contemporary musical practices back to the resolutely court-based Gambuh, might the Aji Gurnita have been a device for securing a modicum of courtly/high-caste cultural authority over music at a time of political crisis on Bali? In line with the kind of projects seemingly designed to present a self evident highcaste authority, as headed by figures such as Djelantik or the Cokorda Gedé Raka Sukawati, might the enunciation of Gambuh as both the preserve of the elite and also the progenitor of almost all other ensembles, be another strategy in securing political control over arts practice? 115

Alternative Accounts: History and Democracy in Gamelan Gong Kebyar By way of contrast, I juxtapose these courtly tales with some differing historical accounts of gamelan gong kebyar. Here we find some disparity in how writers have chosen to configure kebyar’s historical background, which again align with issues of social hierarchy. On the whole, contemporary writers have noted how kebyar marked the breakdown of boundaries and hierarchies between court and village, and the arrival of an apparently newfound and extended democracy in musical practice (Tenzer 2000: 84-5, Seebass 1996). Covarrubias too commented on a general social fluidity surrounding the production of kebyar. Writing of Bali’s ‘village orchestras’ and specifically the gamelan gong [kebyar] ensemble of Belaluan, Covarrubias states that usual caste hierarchies were not adhered to: the strict rule that a man of low caste must always sit at a lower level than a nobleman is completely ignored; in an orchestra, at least as long as performance or a rehearsal is in progress, a prince becomes democratic (1937: 209).

Yet contrasting accounts suggest it proved necessary to counter ideas that kebyar may stand as a signal of democracy. The most extended Balinese-authored colonial era account of gamelan gong kebyar is found in a 1934 edition of Bhawanagara and appears set to accomplish just this rebuttal.38 The substantial Malay-language article entitled ‘Gong-Gedé (Kebijar)’ by mysterious Balinese writer ‘Balyson’ ran across three issues and is also referenced by McPhee in Music in Bali (1966: 332). Balyson discusses a number of the technical issues raised by in gong kebyar performance, largely concerning the Balinese terminology for various types of interlocking figuration found in the gangsa (ten-keyed metallophone) and réyong (pot gong), but he also approaches the ensemble from a distinctly historical angle. While excited about certain developments in musical composition, the author suggests some anxiety about the emergence of kebyar and—by locating ‘kebiar’ as a sub-genre of gong-gedé—Balyson sets up a largely unfavourable comparison with what is here deemed its courtly progenitor. The first part of the article considers the idea of classic (klassiek) and modern in Balinese music-making, lamenting the reduction in the use of gamelan gong gedé. Balyson suggests that nowadays it is usual for a cremation ceremony (ngabèn) to proceed without the ensemble, which the author registers as down to the influence of decline (pengaruh melèsèt) (Balyson 1934a: 162). Through gong gedé’s apparent use of toekang 38 As

outlined in Chapter Two, the journal Bhawanagara was founded by the institute of Balinese culture, the Kirtya Liefrinck van der Tuuk, and ran from 1931-1935, edited by a mixture of Dutch officials and Balinese. Although specifically designed to enlist opinions from both sides of the caste debate, only three of the fifteen Balinese names in the editorial and production team are sudra, and the journal’s emphasis on traditional cultural matters position it on the whole towards triwangsa concerns. 116

tandak (singer), Balyson also states that the ensemble stood as an important means of ‘preserving’ (memelihara) the island’s literature, thus allowing the culture of the Balinese race to remain fertile and thriving. He is also insistent about the importance of the historical characteristics (sifat “historisch”) of gong gedé, and how it has not been changed by passing eras (tidak dirobah oleh zaman) (1934a: 163). In contrast to the longevity of gong gedé, Balyson suggests that the new modern kebyar works may be compared to dance music of the West which quickly becomes old and no longer beautiful, soon to be forgotten (1934a: 164).39 Balyson also draws an interesting distinction between the melodic elaboration or flowering, which he describes as ‘kembang’, as played by the gangsa, and what he terms the ‘lagoe (gending)’, which can be glossed alternately as melody or ‘composition’, but here seems to refer to a ‘core melody’ of music upon which the elaborations rest.40 Balyson suggests that if one attempts to listen to all of the gangsa ‘kembang’, it will not be possible to hear the gending itself (kita tidak mendengar lagoe (gending)), suggesting a sense of loss (1934a: 164). This is emphasised in the second section of the article, where having illuminated various different forms of the elaboration figuration (ojèt-ojètan) for the gangsa he writes that the Bulèlèng public are suffering from a ‘boredom sickness’ (penjakit bosen) which he terms “Caprice Boulèlèngais”, through reference to the style favoured by violinist Fritz Kreisler, where each section is of a different character (tiap-tiap bagian berlainan sifatnya) (1934b: 191). He suggests a typical Balinese response to be bewildered too: djani kèné njanan kéto, toesing enteg, tjeliak-tjieloek, ngelioenang bikas’: ‘now like this, then like that, it’s not steady but diving up and down, the pattern is crowded’, before noting that similar to Kreisler, the people are of Bulèlèng are likewise capricious, so little can be done (1934b: 191). However, another Bhawanagara article of the same year, ‘Soeling, rebab and gènggong’ by ‘KWN’ presents a very different account of the chains of influence between court and village music production, again presented via tackling music history. Rather than locating kebyar in Bali’s courtly past, as achieved by Balyson, the author proposes a grass-roots story of origin as a counter argument to Balyson’s account. The article considers first the rebab and suling and their long standing associations with the court and a bygone era (zaman dulu) through their use in gamelan gambuh ensemble (1934: 146). However, KWN then states their usage to be in decline, and suggests that when we would do better to attribute the origins of kebyar, not to these courtly forms but 39 40

See Appendix 1, note 6.

Various definitions exist for these pieces of Balinese terminology. In this context, gending appears to function as an analogue of the contested Javanese theoretical tenet of ‘core melody’ as played by the saron. Gending in Balinese usage may also tally with the verb magending: ‘to sing’, thus linking to forms such as gamelan gambang, where a ‘melody’ was not only played on the saron but also sung to the text of kidung poetry. 117

rather ‘let us listen carefully to the situation in the villages!’ (marilah kita mendengardengar keadaan desa-desa!) (1934: 146). KWN suggests it is not so much the sounds of gamelan gambuh and semar pegulingan that have formed the basis for these new compositions, but that it is the technique of the village-based gènggong, the bamboo mouth-harp which has been imitated (ditiru). He notes the use of bamboo in instrumentmaking by the Balinese race (kita bangsa) well before the coming of bronze gamelan technology (krawang), and so emphasises a long-standing, pre-Majapahit precedent to Balinese music-making. KWN thus applies his music history to a very different goal: locating the source of Bali’s culture to Bali’s own soil and to the activities of the villagers and not the courts. With the quest for Independence and revolution afoot, framing kebyar in the right way enabled it to be powerful tool in the enunciation of Balinese ‘essence’ and civilian power. I return to this issue in the coming section, where I address the role of the Independence movement in the formation of gamelan music theories in greater depth.

Concluding Thoughts Shaping the musical past thus proves to be a powerful strategy in gaining advantage for the present. While it is impossible to know much of the practice or function of gamelan in pre-colonial times, by snapping to survey Bali’s current musical life and the complex network of bodies which control it, it seems inevitable that Bali’s musical and political lives have long been entangled and mutually constitutive. Likewise, representations of the musical past, as with all other aspects of history-making, appear to be subject to a range of political tensions and strategies. The contrasts evident between the two Balinese accounts of kebyar’s derivation, as noted above, clearly demonstrate the malleability of any practice through representation, dependent on the author and audience’s available frames of reference. More importantly, and in line with the theoretical implications of authoritative history-making previously discussed, these contrasts also highlight how authors’ motivations played out in the articulation or representation of Balinese music as the source or fruit of a particular historical narrative. Indeed, considering the lack of pre-colonial sources, it appears to be impossible to write about the origins of music in pre-colonial Bali without inventing tradition or without articulating Balinese music-making as an embodiment of certain imagined historical narratives. On these grounds, it seems that any text claiming to account authoritatively for Balinese pre-colonial musical activity is rather more informative about the presuppositions and preoccupations of the author and their urge to articulate Balinese music (as for example, courtly, mystic, of primarily Chinese, Indic or Javanese origins and so on) than it is about the music itself. As the chapter has sought to demonstrate, 118

representing Balinese music as aligned with one or other of these narratives was by no means a politically neutral act, but held important implications within the Western framing of Bali’s cultural status, and for the maintenance and re-organisation of hierarchies among Balinese. These implications become further complex in light of close interaction between Balinese and Westerners in the forging of these theories. It appears that various historical taxonomies and classificatory practices of tuning systems and organology may be seen as distinctly Western approaches in the manufacture of ethnomusicological knowledge, practices which continue to the present-day. At the same time, certain Balinese informants set to profit from this type of order and historical narrative can be seen as instrumental in their production. As gamelan music emerges to be an important component of Bali’s newly lauded ‘culture’, an entity suddenly proving so very profitable in otherwise bleak and shaky times, the potential benefits available to one who can enunciate what music is, where it came from, and what it is for extend sky-high. As to be discussed in Part Two, the uses music history may be put to, the objectifying of musical practice by the application of theory (or tèori), and the feedback loop between Western expectation and performing Balinese were all set only to intensify further with the coming of Indonesian independence.

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Part Two: Composing Téori Chapter Five Ordering Balinese Music: Introducing Téori Every music has a theory. So what is theory? We are talking about seen and unseen… sakala [the tangible, visibly ‘manifest’ world] and niskala [the intangible, ‘un-manifest’ world]. The theory is niskala, the music itself is sakala. (I Wayan Rai, ISI Denpasar director, pers. comm. 2007) [In simulation] images precede the real to the extent that they invert the causal and logical order of the real and its reproduction. (Baudrillard 1987: 13, cited in Heryanto 1999: 152) Now is the time of knowledge. As a life-activity, knowing is continual presence and process. But knowledge can be known, our dominant tradition seems to feel, only through re-presentation and re-production, through sign-systems, models, law relations, or at least taxonomies whose common mission is to create order. That which is to create order demands chaos, disorder, confusion as its raison d'être. (Fabian 2000 [1985]: 191, emphasis in the original)

Part one assessed a range of ways in which colonial era Balinese gamelan music has been articulated by both Westerners and Balinese. In line with a pragmatist critique of representation, Part One addressed the idea that a representation (of music) cannot reproduce a reality independently or unproblematically but takes a formative role in constituting the reality it represents. In turn, this creates a power relation, one well illustrated by placing the representation of gamelan as a manifestation of courtly prestige or social democracy in the context of complex interactions between Westerners and Balinese and the management of administrative power during this period. Part Two specifically examines the idea of theory as applied to music, or rather, the phenomenon of Balinese-authored ‘téori’ of gamelan which gained currency from the Independence movement onwards. This chapter considers how the social, cultural and political imperatives driving bureaucratic (both Balinese and Indonesian) responses to Balinese gamelan music have been predicated upon often contradictory visions of what performance is, can, or should do on Bali. The chapter asks how the enunciation of téori gamelan might function within this complex framework. How might the deepening connections between bureaucratic control and arts practice, notably through the institutionalization of arts education, play out in representations of gamelan musicmaking? How can gamelan music be articulated to serve the seemingly incompatible agenda of Indonesian state and Balinese interests? Does téori, rather like Western ideas of theory, function as a means of attempting to classify and systématize musical practices, to re-form, reify and fix Balinese musical practice into an object of knowledge? Or, in 120

answer to the often incommensurate tensions between Indonesian and Balinese cultural imperatives, might téori also need to operate at a further stage of remove from the practices it purportedly explains? In approaching these questions, the chapter traces the production and authorship of various Balinese texts produced under the rubric of téori gamelan (notably concerning scale and tuning systems, the development of musical notation, ideas of composition structure and of gamelan’s religious valence) and charts the creation of texts alongside the major developments in Balinese and Indonesian political situation and arts policy from the Independence movement of the 1930-40s to the close of Indonesia’s repressive ‘New Order’ government in 1998. Before addressing the issues specific to theorizing Balinese gamelan music during this period, I return briefly to the problem of knowledge production and theory more broadly. Following the Fabian quotation above, ‘knowledge’ in the West can be seen to operate through the act of re-presenting, a fixing of process into order which stands in opposition to the active process of knowing. However, Fabian continues by dissolving such an opposition between knowledge as object (a representation) and the act of knowing (a practice) by considering representation itself to be a practice. It is an active process of, in Goodman’s words, representing something as something else (1968). By acknowledging the constitutive power of representation, for Fabian ‘[representation] may not only be only be ‘thought of as praxis but it is praxis’ (2000 [1985]: 209). It is an activity in itself. Alternately, ‘knowledge of is always knowledge for’: the construction of knowledge is always carried out for a purpose (Downey and Rogers 1995: 271). What then of theory? Theory as a set of explanatory principles has come to stand for conditioning knowledge into its most ordered form: knowledge’s perfect foundation and distillation. From the term’s Greek roots, theoria (‘spectacle’), theoros (‘spectator’) and thea (‘sight’) (Williams 1983: 316), the notion of theory also constructs distance, the gap between viewer and object viewed, or knower and object known. Theory is lodged between the spectator and spectacle, a means of creating and conceptualizing a distance between them. In doing so, theory becomes a particularly powerful mode of representing. Given to mean ‘a scheme of ideas which explains practice’ since the eighteenth-century (Williams 1983: 316), as discussed in the introduction, theory is defined as hierarchic through its ability to transcend and encompass all of practice. As in Fabian’s distinction between knowledge and knowing, theory as a totalizing structure is predicated on ‘the basis of closure [and] the fixation of meaning’ (Laclau 1990: 92). In addition, and perhaps most importantly, by being privileged as an entity ontologically distinct from practice it denies itself active properties and so escapes association with human power relations. Yet by registering theory as representation, as a means of constituting and framing a particular type of gap between a knower and a thing known, theorizing emerges as a 121

practice with all the attending implications of power. The fact that theory and theorizing is often intent on disguising itself from being a practice as such has been one of its most powerful and pernicious properties. Indeed, writing of representation as praxis (but equally applicable to theory as practice) Fabian notes that ‘all the attempts to make [this connection] unassailable… would then be so many practical moves designed to preserve its hegemony’ (2000 [1985]: 209). These issues resonate with particular intensity for Balinese music-making, the subject of considerable colonial-era scholarly interest. However, Balinese producing their works under the banner of Western loan-word téori is a yet more complex issue, with a particularly complex history. This chapter considers the various situations and personnel that have invoked the term téori: for if the idea of theory is representation and so practice, it constitutes an act or performance which requires actors and audiences (Fabian 2000 [1985]: 209). In examining téori gamelan in Bali, a wide range of different actors and audiences have been active in its construction. Its various forms of usage owe not only to the impact of colonial-era interactions between Balinese and Western musicologists but are also dependent on Javanese and Western colonial encounters, as the Independence movement marked a notably intense period of cultural and academic exchange between Javanese and Balinese musician-activists. Subsequent to this the establishment of the Indonesian Republic was underpinned by the raging polemik kebudayaan (‘cultural polemic’) where various different approaches to education methodology and managing ‘Western influence’ loomed in and out of academic focus. Tensions mounted until the devastating political upheaval of the alleged communist coup of 1965 and the establishment of the new and repressive governmental regime termed the ‘New Order’, bringing with it new mandates for scholarly activity regarding the arts. Continued cultural upheaval and exchange, including the impact of Bali’s continued interaction with Western tourists and scholars, and the consequences of recent terrorist acts for Balinese cultural activity all find expression in Balinese academic representations of gamelan. On each occasion the idea of téori, as a mode of fixing and/or idealising processes of music-making, constitutes a practice with a range of power implications. Particularly important to this chapter is the notion that while téori shares certain traits with Western music theory in how it manufactures various types of order, it is in other ways fundamentally different. To quote Cohn and Dempster’s work on canon once more, the ideal of structural coherence that drives Western music analysis is shared to some extent by the compositional tradition it examines: ‘the principal and most consistent canon of our Western aesthetic is that successful works of art… exhibit unity, coherence or “organic” integrity,’ with both composition and music theory to a point ‘uphold[ing] this canon’ (1996: 156). As Chapters One and Three have discussed, certain ideas of 122

structure as applied to Balinese music-making can be challenged as totalizing theories and the product of Western imaginings about Balinese aesthetic temperament and social order, ideas which (more or less profitably for certain Balinese) have found their way into Balinese thinking. However, if Balinese makers of téori aim to apply particular learnt Western techniques of structuring and classification yet are simultaneously active in music-making practices which operate and are organised quite differently, the results of this enterprise promise no minor confusion. In this way, téori can be seen as an activity even more abstract from music-making than its Western partner, as the diversity and contradiction embedded in téori texts testify. This abstraction is equally attributable to the diversity of ideologies which came to surround Balinese performance during this period, and for which téori was somehow expected to account. As will be discussed below, theoreticians working in Bali’s arts academies faced complex mandates in how they represented Balinese performance, mandates which were often internally contradictory as well as incommensurate with performance practices themselves. In examining how Balinese musicians, scholars and bureaucrats navigated these tensions, I shall extend Heryanto’s work on the imaginings of the ‘Communist threat’ in New Order Indonesia to suggest that téori may be understood as an ‘empty’ signifier, which from ‘no stable origin’ creates an imaginary order to legitimise certain political pathways and also, in this case, to escape otherwise theoretical (and professional) dead-ends (1999: 152). Téori’s various kinds of imaginary order can be seen as an example of Baudrillard’s simulation, the idea of a certain image ‘preceding’ the real.41 Following Baudrillard, simulacra do not only mirror but also construct. I begin to touch on this matter in discussion of the New Order and téori and in the following chapter consider téori’s role in shaping contemporary Balinese composition. In order to chart the increasingly complex agenda facing makers of téori since Independence, the chapter approaches the topic chronologically. I trace the construction and management of ideas of téori in Bali during the Independence movement and President Sukarno’s reign of government, before examining how the construction and application of téori can be seen to function within the broader practices of political ‘ordering’ central to Suharto’s New Order. The chapter firstly considers the distinct political agenda affixed to early use of téori as part of Bali’s Independence movement, noting strong affiliations with Javanese theoretical practices, which in turn were much shaped by interaction with Dutch musical scholars. From here I assess how Balinese 41

See the chapter’s opening téori quote from ISI director I Wayan Rai. His neatly-packaged distinction between the tangible and intangible (sakala and niskala) as analogous to Balinese music and theory hints at how Bali’s current arts education and patronage has seen to the construction of a rather intangible téori, which in turn has created a canon of composition in its image: téori as a simulation of Balinese gamelan precedes the real.

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scholars began to cultivate their own interpretations and uses for téori in Bali following Independence. The chapter then considers some of the complex ways the invocation of téori gamelan functioned in New Order Bali, where I emphasize the role of téori practitioners in the normalising of Bali’s religious practice and in building Balinese gamelan music’s global status.

Making Progress: Téori in Bali’s Independence Movement This section considers the derivation of Balinese usage of the term gamelan téori (or theorie) and examines the cultural and political mandates which drove its invocation and application during the 1930s Independence movement. Why did the Dutch loan-word theorie appeal to certain Balinese writers, and how was it applied to Balinese musical practices? How might the term’s connection with Dutch-Javanese scholarly relations have played out on Balinese soil? As discussed in Part One, Western representations of Balinese culture have from their earliest conception been tied to imaginings of Java. The idea of ‘Traditional Javanese Culture’, as formulated by contact between Javanese and Dutch officials, was central to how Westerners came to constitute Bali’s purported Hindu heritage. Before assessing the use of theorie/téori in Bali and their alignment with ideas of political Independence, progressive education and modern scientific technique, I briefly consider the role of the largely Javanese-led Independence movement in structuring Balinese approaches. Indeed, the role of early Javanese theory-making on Balinese approaches should not be under-estimated. Java’s more prolonged contact with the Dutch, and the Dutch scholarly and political enthusiasm for constructing and promoting an idealised ‘high culture’ of the adiluhung (the ‘noble sublime’) in Java, resulted in more sustained theoretical interaction and the larger-scale production of academic materials (Florida 1995). Sumarsam has covered this period of late nineteenth-/early twentieth-century musical theory-making in some detail in his Cultural Interaction and Musical Development in Java (1992). In light of the critical work by Pemberton (1994), Florida (1995) and Sears (1996) on cultural politics in colonial Java, Sumarsam’s description of amicable early musical exchange between Javanese musicians and their ‘sympathetic Dutch colleagues’ in the early twentieth century now appears to give a rather idealised account (Sumarsam 1992: 111). Nonetheless, Sumarsam provides a thorough catalogue of Javanese works produced, demonstrating the relatively long heritage of indigenous musicians working alongside Westerners to produce theoretical texts concerning gamelan.

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Driven by contact between Dutch Javanologists and priyayi (the ruling class of minor aristocrats and civil servants), theoretical works on Javanese gamelan proliferated in the twentieth century. Through the creation and application (by both Dutch and Javanese) of advanced theoretical tenets—particularly concerning how melodic structures of gendhing are determined and the introduction of new notation systems—Javanese gamelan was deemed equivalent to a Western ideal of ‘high culture’. Theory set out to reify Javanese music according to specific Western standards of structure and complexity as part of the mission to maintain a proudly ‘traditional’ (and so politically manageable) Java. Yet at the same time, Perlman notes how the early twentieth century marked a ‘gradual lowering of barriers’ regarding access to musical knowledge between Javanese musicians themselves, with the first substantial Javanese-authored articles about music and compilations of notation appearing in print as early as 1901 (Perlman 2004: 119). By 1920, Javanese-led courses of gamelan instruction were on offer, including most famously the Prime Minister’s Radya Pustaka foundation from 1923-1942, plus programmes of study for vocal music and courses specifically designed for Javanese children (Perlman 2004: 119). As discussed in the preceding chapter, certain theoretical tenets corresponding to Java were exported and applied to Bali by Western scholars in the later colonial period, including classification of tuning systems and the historical framing of certain genres: ideas which chimed agreeably with certain Balinese high-caste preoccupations of the era. However, it was in fact amid the burgeoning Independence movement that direct theoretical engagement between Javanese and Balinese musicians themselves began to take shape. The notion of music theory was deployed not so much to gild tradition but to awake political activism. I here assess how téori was used to articulate gamelan music not as the preserve of elitist royal courts but as an accessible subject which could be readily taught and understood via ‘progressive’, Western education methods. Ki Hadjar Dewantara (1889-1959), Javanese nationalist, educationalist, arts commentator and music theorist, stands as perhaps the foremost figure in this shift in application and was heavily involved in the establishment of Taman Siswa, an educational system begun in Java and expanded to Bali and beyond during the late 1930s. The success and fame of the system demonstrates the central role assumed by education and culture in the nationalist movement. The Taman Siswa schools offered a rigorous Western-style education, which was considered a breath of fresh air to Balinese students who had been offered only the ‘Baliseering’ regressive education of the Dutch, increasingly felt by many Balinese intellectuals to be patronising, restrictive, and dedicated only to the sustenance of high-caste privilege (Robinson 1995: 50). Setting the scene for the paradox of Western educational ideals shaping protest against Western 125

intervention which recurred throughout later Indonesian policy, Taman Siswa established a strong network of nationalist activists across the archipelago and did much to secure the eventual victory of the Independence movement. Dewantara’s approach to education and scholarship (including that corresponding to music) accordingly drew heavily upon Western models of progress and modernity; a conference paper on Javanese music given by Dewantara in 1935 stated that musical knowledge based on scholarship (kasardjanan) and teaching methods founded on scientific (wetenschappelijk) pedagogy were necessary to reverse the decline of the art and ‘reassert the progress of the people’ (Perlman 2004: 122). Likewise, the publication of Dewantara’s Sari Swara (1930) set out to align Western and Javanese music, and through comparison between Javanese gamelan modal practice and Western music’s key changes sought to demonstrate their musical compatibility (Sumarsam 1992: 135). This kind of articulation stands as a curious inversion of Javanese music theory’s earlier incarnations. In the nineteenth century, Central Javanese gamelan was reified by Javanese and Dutch scholars as the preserve of the elite and as ‘High Culture’ through the application of theoretical frameworks, much infused by Dutch scholarship. Still framed by Western models, now explicitly, the Independence movement’s musical theorizing was here presented as a means of widening gamelan’s social accessibility, and of accruing a different kind of cultural kudos for gamelan via its Western ‘scientific’ interpretation—both of which were seen to promote political Independence. Early instances of Balinese-authored theorie correspond to Dewantara’s ideals. Two articles by Balinese author ‘GPM’ in Bali’s liberal journal, Djatajoe (published 1936-41) offer an example of the educationalist’s impact on Balinese thinking (1939a, 1939b). In contrast to the close guarding of esoteric musical knowledge by Bali’s high caste, the text marks the start of an alignment between open-access, ‘scientific’ musical theory and the jaba (‘commoner’) nationalist project in Bali. In his discussion of educational policy, GPM provides a mixed account of ‘Baliseering’ which suggests the term’s radical redefinition. He rejects the idea that ‘Baliseering’ must mean a return to the ancient era (zaman purba) and instead proposes it to rightfully encompass ‘national feeling’ (perasaan nasional) (1939a: 146). He suggests, it is a great error if people consider the issue from a narrow perspective (lit. with tight glasses)… that we are not permitted to study and find out about other races: [that] if we wish to sing, there is already enough with the songs of Sangiang or Djangger, and so Western sol-fa notation [noot do re mi fa sol] need not be known, as it is not our possession… With narrow opinion and consideration, one hurries to deliver the verdict that the meaning of Baliseering is nothing but the desire to return Bali to the ancient era, so that we are like ‘frogs under a coconut shell’ [i.e. trapped] (1939a: 146).42

42

See Appendix 1, note 7.

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GPM is thus emphatic about the need for change, utilising distinct Indonesian nationalist vocabulary: ‘our race desires to take a new form’ (bangsa kita menghendaki bentoek jang baroe), with the ‘new era’ (zaman baroe) set to bring about a ‘new order of society and nation’ (soesoenan masyarakat dan negara jang baroe) (1939b: 214). Characteristic of many Independence movements’ reactions to Western colonisation, the notion of ‘the new’ often appears to be synonymous with ‘the West’: in musical terms GPM advocates such advancement not only through support of Western sol-fa notation, but also of various other approaches to musical research and education based on Western models, which he cites as disseminated in Bali through the work of Dewantara. All bracketed under the Dutch term theorie, the text includes notes on both the Steiner educational method and how Dalcroze eurhythmics might be concertedly employed in Balinese schooling systems (1939b: 216-7). In turn, the effect on children of playing and moving to organised rhythm is noted as an aid to character formation (budiperkerti) (1939b: 215). In discussing Dalcroze methodology, GPM assembles his terminology shrewdly. The first word he chooses to depict what the children ‘move to’ is ‘wirama’. This term is associated with Balinese kakawin singing and poetic meter but also (more often as ‘irama’) heavily linked to Java as a means of describing the complex organisation of metric levels specific to Central Javanese court gamelan. It is also present in the title of the seminal Javanese musical treatise Serat Pakem Wirama (1934), a work produced with the close support of Dutch scholars on Java five years earlier.43 Shortly afterwards GPM goes on to gloss this same term as the Dutch ‘rhythme’, now identifying the Balinese/Javanese term as an analogue of rhythm. Translation here smoothes over the terms’ significant variations in order to appropriate prestige. In doing so, theoretical terminology thus functions to re-position Balinese/Javanese practice as a viable component of the apparently acclaimed Western Dalcroze programme. GPM’s use of theorie thus appears to suture a number of potential contradictions or conflicts of interest. He applies theorie directly only to Western approaches––the Steiner and Dalcroze educational systems––using the term to highlight their academic and scientific credentials and thus, akin to Dewantara, their potential value in creating a ‘new culture for the important advancement of our race and island’ (keboedajan baroe oentoek kepentingan kemadjoen bangsa dan noesa) (GPM 1939a: 149). However, he also uses this theorie to align already extant Balinese practices (Balinese children’s games that include participatory singing and the idea of wirama) with these apparently progressive, Western approaches (Dalcroze eurythmics) (GPM 1939b: 216). In order to effect this 43

This text and notation is renowned as a major effort in preservation, notating the ‘melodic basis of the old Mataram gendhing’ (Sumarsam 1992: 111). In doing so, it was the first text to cite the middle density saron line as the melodic ‘core’ (later to be known as balungan) of Javanese gamelan, a move that has had a considerable bearing on how Central Javanese gamelan has been conceptualised to this day. 127

alignment, I suggest GPM uses ‘wirama’ to establish Java as a kind of theoretical intermediary. The strong Javanese pedigree of wirama/irama, heightened through its recent appearance in high-profile Javanese/Dutch collaborative scholarship, boosts Bali’s own use of the term by suggesting long-standing, traditional Balinese practices to be academically legitimate. By connecting Bali and theorie thus, GPM creates a middle ground between his endorsement of a new and progressive kebudayaan, the nationalist neologism for ‘culture’, and the need to maintain elements of Bali’s traditional ‘cultuur’, the Dutch term which GPM also applies on one occasion to discuss Bali’s art, literature and spiritual progression (kesenian, kesastraan dan kemajuan batinnya) (1939a: 147). The use of the two terms points to a tension between progressive, anti-colonialist arts rhetoric, and a certain deference on the part of Balinese to retain the Dutch-created image of the island as of ‘unique’ cultural value. GPM demonstrates again how theorie might work to dissolve contradictions between nationalist cultural progress and Balinese cultural preservation in his discussion of the work of theorists I Wayan Ruma and I Wayan Djirne, whose collection of Balinese vocal music Taman Sari (1939), was going to press at the time of his article (see below for a more detailed examination of this work). GPM describes the writers’ theoretical exertions to formulate musical notation (menoesahkan memboeat nootnja), and makes explicit reference to the system’s potentially modern, European derivation through use of the full Dutch term notensijsteen (1939a: 149). However, through this new application of Dutch-informed notation, GPM applauds how Ruma and Djirne’s innovative efforts will prevent Balinese culture from ‘vanishing just like that’ (beroesaha agar keboedajaan kita ta’ lenjap begitoe sadja) and so ‘protect our art’ (memelihara kesenian kita) (1939a: 149). GPM’s work thus sets up a critical tension between two cultural mandates: aligning Balinese music with national cultural development and maintaining a uniquely ‘Balinese’ cultural identity. The creation and application of theorie (or téori) to music-making is here established as a helpful technique for those Balinese who wished to frame Balinese music as achieving both objectives. As the chapter goes on to examine, these objectives were set to become ever more incompatible. Using téori to articulate gamelan music as at once progressive, traditional, Balinese, Indonesian, spiritual and scientifically-knowable became an increasingly necessary, albeit challenging, means of negotiating these incommensurate cultural agendas.

Notes from Java: Téori Gamelan in the Old Order Following the Japanese interregnum of 1942-45, the end of the war, and further struggle for Independence, Sukarno was installed as president of the Indonesian state in 1949, with 128

the nation’s centre of power in Java. Debate as to how education and the arts might best be employed to support political causes continued with renewed vigour. Within the newly-formed state, creating téori gamelan on Bali continued to be one strategy to suture gaps between the expectations of an urgent but unstable nationalist arts policy and Balinese interests within the new nation state. I first give some brief background to the ‘Old Order’ arts policy and the creation of Indonesia’s first performing arts academies on Java and subsequently Bali. Why were such academies formed, and what tensions did they face in terms of often inchoate and inconsistent cultural policy? How did they navigate this field? What particular issues confronted Balinese musicians in constructing Bali’s own arts institution? What implications did the institutionalising of music hold for Bali and how did Balinese participants understand the process? How might téori function amid these concerns? In promoting a stable and cohesive Indonesia, central to government strategy was the continued endorsement of ‘culture’. As during colonial occupation, culture continued to hold considerable power as a conduit metaphor for certain specified and unspecified values which were set to be promoted, preserved and developed. While the nature of this ‘culture’ was subject to considerable debate, rarely in question were the assumed ‘educative values of culture itself as a civilising agent of human behaviour, and, as such, a source of pride and sense of [Indonesian] identity’ (Lindsay 1995: 659). As such, it was enshrined in the constitution that ‘the government will advance national culture [kebudayaan]’ (Zurbuchen 1990: 113 in Hough 1999: 233). However, Hough notes how the term kebudayaan was here applied not in the broad anthropological sense of culture as ‘all encompassing world view’ or ‘beliefs and practices’, but refers to a range of ‘attributes such as language, customs… arts and architecture’, a delineation none too distant from Dutch colonial policy and which once more saw ‘culture’ asserted as an appropriate realm of governmental intervention (1999: 232). Yet while assured of its value in abstract, the ‘polemik kebudayaan’ (‘cultural polemic’) of the Independence movement continued, with opinion much divided as to how this ‘culture’ should best be formulated and promoted. A range of opposing parties championed contrasting definitions and strategies in promoting the idea of local and national culture through performance. The ‘progressive’ faction echoed Dewantara in calling for Indonesia to relinquish its feudal past and forge a new national identity through the creation of non-Western innovative art forms based on collaboration of regional styles. Neo-traditionalists supported the preservation and revival of indigenous ‘classical’ dance and drama, while other critics trained in Western music (such as J. A. Dungga) advocated a new Indonesian music that was Western-based (see Sutton 1991: 175). These divisions were demarcated politically. Bali’s two main parties— 129

the PNI (Partai Nasional Indonesia, The Indonesian Nationalist Party) and the PKI (Partai Komunis Indonesia, Indonesian Communist Party)—were opposed not only on political issues of feudalism, caste privilege and land claims, but also on how performance practice should function within the new nation. Both parties initiated ‘cultural wings’: the PNI formed LKN (Lembaga Kebudayaan Nasional, The League of National Culture) while the PKI established LEKRA (Lembaga Kebudayaan Rakyat, The League of People’s Culture). Through these bodies, performance presented not only a site of conflict but also of publicity: ‘music, dance, and theater became propaganda tools in this battle’ (McGraw 2005: 27). Musical practice was thus clearly embedded in the debate. Ornstein describes strong divisions among musicians in the early 1960s: gamelan groups often received patronage only by demonstrating close allegiance to one or other of the PNI/LKN or PKI/ LEKRA factions and considerable hostility developed between ensembles on opposing sides (1971: 53). However, presidential policy was marked by contradiction and uncertainty as to the benefits or pitfalls of supporting Western musical models or indigenous ‘cultural traditions’: indeed, Sukarno is reported to have pledged support for both LEKRA and the LKN during his presidency (McGraw 2005: 28). Certainly, Sukarno’s political position displayed a marked anti-imperialist, hostile stance towards the West, mirrored in his strong opposition to Western popular music (which intermittently saw the ban of Western rock music) and his promotion of gamelan music. However, in Sukarno’s support for the idea of the homogenized Indonesian blend of musik nusantara (music of Indonesia), the loan of the Western term ‘musik’ apparently presented no obstacle (McGraw 2005: 26). The President similarly promoted Dewantara’s educational policy despite the latter’s support for distinctly Western models in arts education. In this respect, the establishment of arts education programmes in new institutions in Java and Bali can be seen as a neat realisation of Dewantara’s initiatives. However, just as McGraw identifies Sukarno’s cultural policy to have been ‘marked by paradox, contradiction and dilemma’, so these institutions struggled to balance conflicting agenda (McGraw 2005: 27). Syllabus presented one such area of tension. The first formal centre of music education in Indonesia, KOKAR (Konservatori Karawitan, Conservatory of Music) opened in Solo in 1950. Staff were largely drawn from the kasusunan suryakarta (the Solo court), yet Lindsay notes that while Javanese music was central to the syllabus, ‘teachers at the conservatory were timid about overstating the Javaneseness of the subjects they taught’ and, pointed out that the courses included all kinds of subjects related to the music of Indonesia (‘musik (karawitan)-Nusantara’), and that the establishment of the school was 130

a step towards ‘building up and perfecting the development of national art’ (‘pembinaan dan penyempurnaan perkembangan kesenian bangsa’) (1985: 30).

Notwithstanding public statements subscribing to national arts policy, practical emphasis nonetheless rested on Javanese court forms, the staff being ‘so deeply versed in the court-derived gamelan tradition that there was little real attempt at assimilation between styles’ (Sutton 1991: 176). Likewise, Sumarsam states ‘the fact is that from its beginning to the present, the focus of the curriculum of the KOKAR has been Javanese gamelan’ (1992: 123). The use of the term karawitan in the conservatory’s title highlights this. Sutton describes the ‘slippery usage of karawitan in official circles’, writing that the term ‘can refer more broadly to indigenous music that does not use the Western diatonic scale’, but ‘is generally understood to refer to gamelan music’ (1991: 174-5). Indeed, the term karawitan’s pre-Independence origins are firmly embedded in Javanese court music, only later extended to cover Balinese music and various other Indonesian musical traditions. Its application presumes the same universality attributed to ‘musik’, that it is somehow a neutral template with which to frame other musics in the archipelago. The construction of Bali’s own KOKAR was likewise born amid the uncertain emphases of Sukarno’s arts policy but also aided by the president’s particular favour towards Bali, support which is usually attributed to the fact that Sukarno’s mother was Balinese (see Vickers 1989: 175 and Hough 2000: 94). Despite Sukarno’s desire for the new arts academies to construct a new and distinct national culture he maintained a soft spot for Balinese tradition and accordingly, the only Indonesian regional music taught at KOKAR Solo outside of Javanese styles (students were taught Sundanese as well as Central Javanese gamelan) was Balinese gamelan. The classes required Balinese musicians I Nyoman Rembang, I Wayan Lotring, I Nyoman Kaler and I Gusti Putu Geria to travel to Solo in 1952 to join the teaching staff. On returning home, it was this team of musicians who instigated the founding of Bali’s own institution in 1960. As the following personal accounts by Balinese writers and musicians illustrate, the motivations for Balinese musicians to construct their own musical academy went beyond the mandates of centralised government and were also structured by a range of local agenda. In describing these, Balinese commentators also cite a mixture of often contrasting objectives and curriculum emphases for the conservatory. A culturally conservative account by A.A.M. Djelantik describes the institution’s focus thus: our Balinese artists had to be made aware of potential dangers of deteriorating influences on their art by what they might see as “progress”… Fortunately, at that time... [KOKAR] had just been opened in Denpasar as a branch of the Conservatory of Solo, in Central Java. The Government felt the need for this institution of Javanese music and dance to 131

have a branch in Bali for the preservation of classical Balinese dance and music (1997: 250).

A focus on the preservation of classical Balinese dance and music is mirrored in the central involvement of musician I Nyoman Rembang, Bali’s foremost theoretician of the era. A notable gamelan gambuh musician, Rembang was also a founding member of the staunchly anti-communist LKN. However, alongside more traditionalist interests, Rembang presented the claim that KOKAR was the product of a drive towards developing academic methodology on Western lines, seeking to intellectually rationalize Balinese music: Hough states that according to an interview with Rembang in 1991 on the institution’s foundation, ‘regarding the period from 1945 to the early 1960s … [Rembang] commented there had been for some time the feeling that Bali required ‘artists of intellect’ (seniman intelek)’ (Hough 2000: 118). Musician I Wayan Sinti emphasises how KOKAR Denpasar was the initiative of the Balinese teachers in Solo who became aware of Bali’s own cultural assets and, keen not to be outdone by Javanese, set out to found their own conservatory: ‘for in Bali there was art too’ (karena di Bali juga ada kesenian) (pers. comm. 2007). This emphasis on KOKAR as Balinese-driven is supported by musician and scholar I Wayan Aryasa, who when asked about the role of Java in KOKAR’s early years also stressed that it was a Balinese initiative supported by Balinese funds, only to be ‘later owned by the Jakarta and education ministers’ (nanti dipunyai Jakarta dan mentri-mentri pendidikan) (pers. comm. 2007). Such accounts highlight the institution’s contrasting motivations: KOKAR operated as a branch or continuation of the Javanese KOKAR; the academy sought to train musicians through various Western academic models; and aimed to preserve and celebrate ‘indigenous’ Balinese musical forms which were framed as both distinct from, but also analogous to, Javanese gamelan. How did this mixture of aims play out in the musical téori published under the auspices of KOKAR? Early theoretical work on Bali appeared primarily concerned with presenting Balinese gamelan as analogous to a Javanese counterpart. Sinti, a student in KOKAR in 1961-64, describes his experiences of the institute’s early work thus: At that time it was very much practical (praktek). They also taught theory (téori) like notation, tuning systems (laras), and knowledge of karawitan- my teachers said that they got that syllabus from Solo. Go ahead (silakan): Bali did not have one . (pers. comm.2007)44

According to Sinti, the act of making téori in Bali was structured by Javanese practice, even the idea of applying notation despite Balinese precedents in the gambang tradition. Indeed, the early work of Bali’s first theoreticians appears primarily focused on rationalising and reframing Balinese gamelan music through charts and tables as a

44

See Appendix 1, note 8.

132

coherent system, and as an analogue of Javanese gamelan. It is however notable that Balinese scholars’ initial object of study was Bali’s seven-tone gamelan gambuh and semar pegulingan, hailed as ‘the music of the courts’ and, as discussed in Chapter Four, often held to be the source of much of Bali’s musical tradition by Bali’s musical (and political) conservatives. The potentially incompatible approaches blended in Balinese téori is well demonstrated by the patutan chart produced by Rembang, Kaler and Griya in 1959, published shortly before KOKAR opened (see below)

[7-tone ascending scale]

1

2

3

Selisir

ding

dong

deng

Tembung

dung

dang

4

ding

Sunaren

dung

dang

Baro

ding

dong

deng

dong

deng

deung

Lebeng

ding

5

6

dung

dang

dong

deng

ding

dong

deng

dung

dang

dang

daing

dung

7

Figure 5.1 Patutan Chart (1959) The table names and classifies a series of five-tone modes labeled patutan, which are apparently drawn from the seven-tone scale of the gamelan gambuh/semar pegulingan repertory. It identifies five fixed modal subsets comprised of combinations of adjacent and skipped tones. Excepting lebeng, each patut is based on three adjacent tones, followed by a skip, followed by two more adjacent tones. The formation of the five-tone tone modes are labelled with moveable Balinese solfege, which designates the three consecutive tones as ding, dong, deng, and the latter two tones as dung, dang. Lebeng, the seven tone mode, follows this model by filling in the ‘gap’ between deng and dung with ‘deung’, and between dang and ding with ‘daing’. Previous to the chart’s introduction, patutan in Bali was used as a more general term for varying tuning systems (see the discussion below of the term ‘patutan’ in the 1939 Taman Sari text). However, here patutan as a system of modal subsets very much echoes the complex Javanese modal system of pathetan. Indeed, as reported by musical scholar and early KOKAR student, I Wayan Aryasa, ‘ideas about Javanese pathet were brought by Pak Rembang, Kaler and Griya: they found them in Java’ (pikiran pathet di Jawa dibawa oleh Pak Rembang, Kaler, Griya: di Java menemukan) (pers. comm. 2007). Javanese pathet was by the mid-twentieth century a highly refined theoretical principle and referred to pitch subsets within a tuning system, connoting not only the tones used but also which tones to stress or accent within the subset (see Hood (1977 [1954]), Becker (1980) and Martopangrawit (1984)). In constructing this association, the chart 133

managed both to validate Bali’s classical repertoire as a rightful topic of academic enquiry, while by association profiting from the academic respectability already granted Javanese ideas of pathetan. It is interesting to note that Aryasa’s account of this early Balinese téori bolsters the idea of its practical application in Bali: ‘In Java there was kepathetan… nem, barang… and yes, Bali also had this, named patutan: we wrote it down, organising it in the form of its connection to instruments’ (di Jawa ada kepathetan… nem, barang… dan ya, Bali juga punya: kita catat ini- kita susun itu dalam bentuk kontak alat’) (pers. comm. 2007, with Aryasa’s own emphasis on ‘alat’/ instruments). Despite Aryasa’s claims of practical ‘kontak’ with Balinese instruments to create the chart, if these basic theoretical structures were primarily formulated for Javanese music, how relevant did they prove for Balinese practices? How far the early theorists engaged with practical usage while theorizing is difficult to assess but appears limited. For one, producing a chart to cover both gambuh and semar pegulingan poses major problems, for as observed by McPhee ‘when the saih gambuh is transposed to the gamelan semar pegulingan, the relationship is found to change’: indeed, McPhee’s studies highlighted significant contrasts in the positioning and naming of modes on the seven-tone scale (1966: 38, see also Richter 1992). In addition, despite presenting generalised mode charts, McPhee illustrates the presence of considerable variation in usage among the ensembles he observed (McPhee 1966: 140, see also Rai 1996: 6).45 It is interesting that even with a limited number of operating semar pegulingan groups, McPhee and Rembang’s charts show considerable variety, particularly in the positioning of tembung and selisir which are coincidentally the two modes which McPhee declared to have a fixed relationship in the semar pegulingan groups: while Rembang’s selisir and tembung ding are located on tones 1 and 4 of the scale respectively, McPhee’s commentary on semar pegulingan modes places selisir and tembung ding on tones 5 and 1 (1966: 39). This variation is presumably due to Rembang et al.’s integration of selected Gambuh conceptualizations, but demonstrates the strong subjectivity of Bali’s modal practice which has here been all but overlooked or indeed, overwritten. On these grounds it appears that the patutan chart is at several stages of remove from practices of Balinese music-making. Musician I Wayan Sinti has spoken powerfully about the implications of this approach to modal classification in Balinese music. According to Sinti, such classification has gone on to deny Bali its wealth of tonal variety, noting that ‘in Bali we are extremely rich in saih or intervals’ (di Bali kita sangat sangat

45

However, at the time of his research, McPhee claimed that only two seven-tone gamelan semar pegulingan ensembles were active (in Tampakgangul, Denpasar and in Kamasan, Klungkung) before KOKAR’s efforts to revive the form in the 1960s. 134

sangat kaya dengan saih atau interval) (pers. comm. 2007). Sinti holds a firm belief that Balinese gamelan’s roots lie in vocal music, which sees Bali possessing a wide range of possible interval configurations or wirama not limited to five-tone subsets (wirama here used to connote ‘general musical pattern’: see Vickers 1992: 229). Sinti states ‘there are [groups] which possess modes quite different from others, which are a little different or very different… until now, these saih or intervals did not have a fixed name or a fixed technical description. “This saih is this!” “This saih is named this!” We end up with a “handbook”’(pers. comm. 2007).46 By Sinti’s account, Balinese music-making is predicated on its very variety of tuning and modal practices, a variety which Sinti sees as not only denied but also threatened by such theoretical overwriting. Indeed, while the work on patutan is notable for its dislocation from actual musical practices, such codes can be seen to filter into later musical practice. As the chapter later discusses, the 1959 fixed modes came to be recognised and applied with increasing regularity in later seventone composition practice, particularly in the works produced for I Wayan Beratha’s new seven-tone gamelan semara dana, created in 1987. At this early stage however, téori’s association with its assumed referent of Balinese music-making is already fragile. As a representative practice, the earliest creators of téori on Bali appeared less concerned with explaining Balinese practices than with validating Balinese music as theoretically consistent, and therefore at least equal to Javanese music. However, having earlier addressed the power issues which attend any enunciation of theory, what other possibilities might statements of téori hold for their authors? As discussed, Bali in the 1950s and early 1960s was characterized by volatile political factions, which in turn defined themselves through performance. How did Balinese musician scholars, working alongside government policy which was often in support of both factions, navigate these oppositions in their work? And, as téori emerged to be a particularly flexible way of representing musical performance and heritage, how might accredited theoreticians have used the articulation of téori to establish their own status amid this uncertainty? I here consider these questions through discussion of the standardization of Bali’s musical notation as an important site of academic status on Bali, which also serves to illustrate how téori’s functional flexibility allowed it to meet a range of opposing goals.

46

‘Ada yang punya mode tersendiri, ada yang sedikit beda ada yang beda sekali. Jadi, sampai saat sekarang, belum ada nama tertentu, istilah tertentu... “Ini saih ini!” “Ini namanya saih ini!” Sehingga kita ada pedoman.’ (I Wayan Sinti, pers. comm. 2007) 135

Developing Balinese Notation Among the most prevalent of [musicology’s] measuring devices [is] notation, which fixes the musical text as a permanent value (Bergeron 1992: 5).

As noted above, notation has long assumed a powerful position in the Western musicological canon to ensure music’s ‘permanent value’, combatting its transience and bolstering its status. Following the establishment of KOKAR Denpasar, a major Balinese work was rapidly produced by Balinese musicians Rembang, Kaler, Griya and Semadi in 1960 to extend and standardise extant Balinese gamelan notation, entitled Titilaras Dingdong.47 What were the motivations and the implications of this work? Sumarsam highlights the role of the European typographic tradition in the nineteenth-century formulation of Javanese gamelan notation, noting how its construction by the Javanese elite was a key means of promoting the idea of Central Javanese court tradition as ‘High Culture’ (1992: 107). In addition to the types of cultural status accrued by Java’s newly developed notation ‘technologies’, Sumarsam identifies how notational practices (informed by the Western stave) came to identify the saron line––the ‘middle density’ of the ensemble’s metric levels––as the core (later named the balungan) of the musical composition (1992: 111). This assumption came to shape the academic interpretation of Javanese gamelan for much of the twentieth century until closer scholarly engagement with Javanese musical practices revealed quite different approaches to melodic ‘elaboration’ previously thought to centre primarily on the balungan (see also Perlman 2004). What kind of presuppositions might Bali’s revised and standardised notation reveal? How does it relate to Balinese musical practices? Or, as found on closer examination of the 1959 Balinese patutan chart, might this notation be devised for purposes largely abstracted from the practices it supposedly illustrates? Through a comparison with the early notation system formulated for Djirne and Ruma’s Taman Sari collection in 1939, I consider the new practices of notation introduced on Bali following Independence and note how Balinese notation is often less concerned with representing Balinese musical practices than managing various contemporary expectations of Balinese cultural practices. As an addition to the 1939 Taman Sari work, Titilaras introduced a series of non-aksara symbols into the legend to connote gong and jegog tones plus key drum strokes, thereby ordering Bali’s colourful naming of gong and drum strokes (the ‘sirrr’, ‘purrr’, ‘tut’ or ‘dag’ customary among

47

Titi refers to ‘bridge’, often taken to mean ‘order of notes’ or scale, while laras in everyday Javanese means ‘fitting’ but refers in a technical sense to the tuning systems (pélog and sléndro) of Central Javanese gamelan. ‘Dingdong’ refers to Balinese solfege syllable names which, in fivetone music, customarily ascend as follows: ding, dong, deng, dung, dang. The title Titlaras Dingdong thus frames the work as encompassing both Javanese and Balinese musical concepts. 136

Balinese gamelan musicians) into a series of geometric symbols.48 Furthermore, the 1960 document re-systematized the naming and numbering of tones within various tuning schema, and in doing so enacted a substantial revision of how tuning systems were divided, labelled and, accordingly, historically positioned. As previously discussed, earlier developments in notation and modal description contained in Taman Sari (Djirne and Ruma 1939) divided Balinese tuning into what it termed three ‘patutan’. Here patutan is applied as analogous to saih, or the tonal resources of a particular gamelan type or ensemble, rather as a parallel to the Javanese usage of pathet as a modal subset. Taman Sari ascribed Balinese aksara symbols, tone numbers (not angka), and names to each of these patutan systems, as indicated below. Aksara: Number:

3

4

5

7

1

Solfege:

Ding

Dong

Deng

Dung

Dang

Number:

1

2

3

5

6

Solfege:

Ding

Dong

Deng

Dung

Dang

Patutan Gong Aksara:

Patutan Gendér Aksara: Number:

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

Solfege:

Ding

Dong

Deng

Deung

Dung

Dang

Daing

Patutan Gambang Figure 5.2 Taman Sari patutan (1939) As shown, the Taman Sari system comprises: the five-tone Patutan gong to represent tones used in gong gedé, kebyar and pelégongan; the five-tone Patutan gendér which uses largely the same symbols, but marks a distinction between this five-tone music and the ‘gong’ genres; and Patutan gambang, a seven-tone scale apparently drawn from gambang. Djirne and Ruma’s numbering of tones also suggests gambang to encompass or stand as progenitor of the other forms, for as may be observed in the tables, the numbering of tones does not isolate each system as a discrete entity (whereby the

48

See Tantri and Parma (1985: 18-19) for a full illustration of these symbols.

137

tones would logically be numbered 1-5), but instead numbers the groupings from differing selections of tones 1-7, as plucked from the gambang’s seven-tone palette: Patutan Gendér is thus 1 2 3 4 5, while Patutan Gong is 3 4 5 7 1. As shown above in figure 5.3, the new notation system of Titilaras Dingdong of 1960 formulated a different approach, marked by a stronger distinction between theoretical pélog and sléndro.

Number:

-

-

-

-

Laras Sléndro empat nada (four-tone sléndro) 49 Aksara: Number:

2

3

5

6

1

Solfege:

Dong

Deng

Dung

Dang

Ding

Laras Sléndro lima nada (five-tone sléndro) Aksara: Number:

2

3

5

6

1

Solfege:

Dong

Deng

Dung

Dang

Ding

Laras pélog lima nada (five-tone pélog) Aksara: Number:

2

3

4

5

6

7

1

Solfege:

Dong

Deng

Deung

Dung

Dang

Daing

Ding

Laras pélog tujuh nada (seven-tone pélog) Figure 5.3 Titilaras Dingdong (1960)

49

The four-tone sléndro is unusual in not including tone numbers. According to the other tables in the scheme, the four rows of aksara (from the top) correspond to tones: 2 3 5 6 ; 3 5 6 2; 5 6 2 3; 6 2 3 5. 138

This scheme both compressed previously inferred historical origins and firmly aligned Bali’s tonal resources with those of Java, not least through the inclusion of the Javanese term laras to connote a tuning system. The scheme also moved away from the naming of patutan according to the ensembles to which they apply (which echoed Bali’s longer-standing application of specific saih to designate tonality e.g. saih gambang or saih gendér wayang) and instead named the tonal systems in abstract without reference to their practical usage. Using a combination of aksara symbols and note names, four systems are outlined which cover the whole gamut of Balinese gamelan music-making: a four-tone sléndro (laras pélog sistim empat nada) and a five-tone sléndro (laras sléndro sistim lima nada), followed by a five-tone pélog (laras pélog sistim lima nada) and a seven-tone pélog (laras pélog sistim tujuh nada). In line with Java’s long-delineated sléndro and pélog binary division—one readily seized upon and applied by Western scholars of Balinese music—Balinese are here seen to codify their music in the same way: any particular form of gamelan music is conditioned to be either pélog or sléndro. Titilaras Dingdong also presupposed a different type of correlation/independence between the tonality of the two systems. Unlike the Taman Sari system of differing numbers for the varying five-tone forms, both sourced from gambang, Titilaras Dingdong makes no distinction between intervallic qualities. Instead, the tones of both five-tone sléndro and five-tone pélog are named with exactly the same configuration of digits, solfege and aksara symbols. Although maintaining Balinese aksara script, here the idea of an older heritage of gambang music as a source of tones, and an emphasis on the longstanding role of aksara script in practical gambang music-making is relegated in favour of alignment with the Javanese system. While this notation maintains a strand of longerstanding Balinese practice through the basic use of aksara script, Titilaras implicitly excludes the idea of Bali’s pre-Javanese musical heritage by rejecting Taman Sari’s previous emphasis on gambang. In doing so, it further aligns Balinese music with contemporary Javanese theory through standardizing tuning/scale terminology to fit Javanese approaches. As noted with the patutan, such scale terminology and grouping of seven-tone and five-tone forms fails to account for Bali’s fluidity of approach to gamelan tuning, and overwrites the longstanding ‘saih’ which emphasised practical usage. However, in addition to these concerns, the 1960 titilaras notation system was, according to Sinti, also devised not only to overwrite the ‘pre-Javanese’ and so theoretically-incompatible gambang, but primarily to represent later forms, particularly the modern ‘democratic’ gamelan gong kebyar. Here is one aspect of Titilaras that appears to have a more active engagement with surrounding contemporary practices, albeit practices that Sinti is cautious to celebrate. He proposes that 139

the new notation that my teachers made was limited to and oriented around five notes, because of the gamelan which was popular, gamelan gong kebyar – although they also used it for five-tone gendér wayang, it was only that the way you sang it was different. So, notation was dominated by five-tone music, the same as popular music. Aside from that, the possibility of gamelan luang or gambang... for a long time was buried (terpendam)… [Pak Kaler] said to me that he had studied dance and almost all types of gamelan in Bali, except for gamelan gambang (pers. comm. 2007).50

For Sinti, the emphasis on gong kebyar grew to be all-consuming in this era and emerged directly out of the pace and excitement of innovative gamelan pelégongan pieces. He notes how since the 1920s many elements from gambang works were converted into newer forms, particularly in the compositions of I Wayan Lotring, who famously reworked gambang pieces such as Panji Marga into pelégongan forms. Sinti notes how their popularity lay not in their heritage but in the vigour of their re-interpretation, and he ruefully observes how the community (masyarakat) were more interested in pelégongan than gambang... these compositions were different from the ‘classical’, so they made the audience more interested… energetic! Then after pelégongan, gong kebyar emerged and spread (pers. comm. 2007). 51

Sinti’s account reiterates the idea that kebyar (via the bold innovation of pelégongan) came to be seen as the ultimate popular entertainment with wide appeal for the community at large, the masyarakat. How best the masyarakat could be managed and guided likewise stood as a popular topic of nationalist debate. The idea of kebyar functioning as a modern music of mass appeal but of indigenous origins, and of holding the potential to mobilise the masyarakat with its ‘energetic’ properties, well matches Sukarno’s general ideal for the arts and the state. However, while overwriting the antiquated gamelan gambang, the celebration of Bali’s own democratic ideal of gong kebyar was also accredited with Western and Javanese theoretical value and with a degree of classical heritage through the invocation of the Javanese pélog. As noted throughout the thesis, the application of fixed tuning systems to Balinese gamelan attempts to reify what appears to have been a longstanding flexibility in gamelan tuning. However, what implications did the general production of a standardised system of notation, including new symbols for drums and gongs, hold for Balinese practices? There has been a range of thoughtful commentary on the potentially stultifying impact of notation upon the practice of gamelan music in general (see Becker 1980). Yet despite Sinti’s commentary above and Ornstein’s observations on the increased use of notation in early Balinese KOKAR teaching, it is hard to believe notation served a particularly powerful role in practical musical learning (Ornstein 1971: 41). For one, 50

See Appendix 1, note 9.

51

See Appendix 1, note 10.

140

while gong structure and slower melodic lines may be followed from a score, any more intricate interlocking material on gangsa or kendang cannot be processed in time from the page, a restriction that holds true for current Balinese gamelan students at Bali’s tertiary arts institute, ISI (Institut Seni Indonesia, Indonesian Arts Institute). While pieces are frequently notated in advance by composers, its usage is highly flexible and I have not yet seen players of more complex parts learn in any way other than oral/aural transmission. Indeed, one recent graduate of ISI, I Kadek Wahyu, who was generally a strong advocate for Western theoretical approaches and achieved the top mark in the class for his research-based thesis, was adamant that notation was ‘primarily created just as some ‘notes’ [a reminder]. It isn’t able to be read [played from]: that’s not possible’ (Membikin notasi terutama itu hanya sebuah catatan saja jadinya... tan dadosne angguan untuk kal dibaca: nika tak mungkin) (pers. comm. 2007). With this disconnection between notation and musical practice still in place, I suggest that the Titilaras notation system was almost purposefully abstracted from the practices it supposedly represented. I propose the system may be understood pragmatically, but on quite different grounds: Titilaras appears to have been organised in order to imagine and position Balinese music as meeting a wide range of agendas. However, in terms of its practical application musically, Titilaras may be deemed an empty term, largely produced for its own sake. It does not have the valence to work productively and actively alongside current music-making but instead assumes pragmatic value only in terms of its ability to conjure a ‘Balinese music’ to mediate the various clashing demands at work on 1950s and 1960s Bali. Being as téori appears to serve a complex range of outside interests, might it be possible that the construction of these early téori texts also sought to benefit those musician-scholars producing the works themselves?

New Hierarchies in Balinese Music Sutton presents an insightful argument as to how the creation and development of notation may assist in constructing and upholding an individual and institution’s authority. In relation to Java, he suggests that Teachers who compile books of notation do so primarily for their students, so that it is their artistic progeny that may bear the authoritative message and not just anyone who happens to be shopping at a local bookstore. Government officials who sit with cabinets full of undisturbed pamphlets and studies resulting from their research can claim knowledge of many genres others may never even have heard of. In the contests they organize, then, their authority may often go unquestioned (Sutton 1991:197).

141

This commentary also chimes with the idea that téori operates as an empty signifier, suggesting that an academic label—albeit with vacant contents—can nonetheless win prestige and authority for its authors. The ‘undisturbed pamphlet’ of notation (or the unrelated modal chart) assumes symbolic power purely through its being framed as theoretical enunciation, regardless of its practical irrelevance or, in Sutton’s description, dormancy. Bergeron’s discussion of the musical canon and the Western academic ‘disciplining’ of musical practice includes insightful commentary on the systems of power embedded within various Western structures of music education and performance (1992: 1- 9). She suggests that the institution of a musical ‘canon’ of composition and performance within a community (notably, I would add, in the musical conservatoire) enables those figures in power to assume a particular brand control by their ‘stand[ing] for a “higher” authority, a “standard of excellence”, all ideals embodied in what we call the canon’ (1992: 4). 52 Not without significance to Bali’s first practices of téori, Bergeron proposes the notion of canon to be predicated on the musical scale: the scale is the most ‘elementary unit’ in disciplining musical practice (1992: 1). Whether or not Balinese notated constructions of scale and mode bear a resemblance to Balinese musical practices, they nonetheless open up a new field of authoritative possibility. While early notation and theoretical charts appear to be a principally abstract exercise, they may also be connected to the creation of a new standardised code of authority, discipline and prestige in Balinese music-making and evaluation. Perlman’s work on correct and canonical pathet usage in Java as a bastion of social status is a useful model (1998). Perlman records Java’s ‘court-centric ideology which holds power, moral fiber, and accomplishment to exist in their purest forms in palace society, and to decay in direct proportion to one’s distance from the capital’, one index of which being the ability ‘to express pathet properly in their garap’ (1998: 57). I suggest the much more recent assertion of a formal modal scheme in Bali meant that patutan knowledge’s social valence operated in a different way. Unlike Java, where such hierarchies were configured primarily during colonial times and continued into Independence, Bali did not experience such fluidity between the court and the conservatory as centres of musical authority. Rather, Bali in early Independence saw village musicians such as Rembang ascend to the top of the musical hierarchy not only through their practical musicianship but through gaining status as theoreticians, a role established through balancing support of classical forms with adherence to ‘democratic’,

52

See Nettl 1995, Cohn and Dempster 1996 and also Attali’s Noise: A Political Economy of Music (1985 [1977]) which includes an intriguing history of Western classical music’s ‘confinement in the conservatory’. 142

‘scientific’ music theory. In this way, works such as Titilaras and the 1959 Patutan chart validated Bali’s new conservatory personnel: graduates were demarcated from seniman alam (village artists) by having gained access to the idea of a specific kind of knowledge attainable only by attending the institute, which was labeled valuable whether or not it bore any relation to actual musical practices. Meanwhile, those authoring and authorizing téori were established as the jury to determine musical taste and technique, which in Bali’s climate of musical competitions and renewed opportunities to travel abroad presented a profitable position to hold. Assuming the role of a theoretician allowed one’s prestige to self-propagate, as it positioned the theoretician as an arbiter and enunciator of performance quality, notably in the judging of contests. As noted by Ornstein, performance contests proliferated as important sites of political sponsorship and publicity: both the PKI and PNI regularly provided patronage for musical festivals whose themes might concur with each party’s broader aims (1971: 53). The role of the academy and the theoretical validation of a canon of certain performance practices is notable in Rembang’s account of the 1960 island-wide Festival Gambuh. The contest and Rembang’s report mark the increasingly centralized standards of judging (and the ensuing establishment of conformity) in Balinese performance, as produced by academically validated musicians. The competition also continued the colonial bias towards the south-central performance styles as a ‘norm’ or indeed canon of Bali’s traditional culture. The region is notably home to the vast majority of Bali’s practising Gambuh groups, and was also the location of the newly-founded KOKAR Denpasar.53 In turn, the canon was now indexed theoretically: Rembang frames his account of Gambuh with emphasis on how ‘patutan’ stand as one of the major difficulties (kesulitan-kesulitan) in its study (1973: 13). Rembang’s account subsequently highlights how cultural distinction might be defined by the theoretical norms, as prescribed by an adjudicator. Rembang notes how the West Balinese entrants from Jembrana––renowned primarily for its robust bamboo gamelan rather than bronze ensembles––performed the dance of the refined prince, Perabu Lasem to lagu bapang (music which employs fastmetered gong structure), accompanied by gupekan tunggal (a solo drummer) (1973: 11). Rembang then states that Perabu Lasem is manis (sweet, refined) and that it is customary in Gianyar, Badung and Tabanan to accompany the dance with lagu lasem, classed as lelambaten (‘slow’ music), and with a pair of drummers (1973: 12). While not directly criticising Jembrana’s choice, applying the accolade of ‘manis’ only to southern and 53

Ornstein also notes how the Denpasar location of the conservatory continued the colonial bias towards south-central Bali as the foremost site of the island’s art practice: any student who lived outside the region and could not afford to travel to Denpasar each day was prohibited from attending (see Ornstein 1971: 40-1). 143

central Bali’s Gambuh performance practices comes close enough. Here academic status, in conjunction with the more general south-central cultural hegemony in Bali, enabled individuals to establish norms of performance in both adjudication and publication. While téori itself emerges as rather vacant, the notion of having access to téori nonetheless authorized certain individuals to evaluate performance and so to affirm personal and regional hierarchies. Charting early Balinese practices of téori under Sukarno’s government highlights the various Balinese efforts to present standardised, ordered representations of gamelan musical practice. As noted, such attempts were closely connected to a range of Javanese practices of theorizing, in turn structured by Dutch scholars and officials. Crucial to this era of Balinese téori-making is the precedent for a disjuncture between the contents of the téori and the musical practices they claim to account for. Various ‘New Musicology’ commentaries have sought to unpick the hegemonic construction of the Western musical canon (of both repertoire and performance practice), noting how the music conservatory has sustained the prestige of the canon, and in turn accredited certain types of people as more or less qualified to uphold it. In many ways, Bali’s new academy can be seen to function in a similar way, elevating those able to construct or gain access to téori to new positions of authority. In this early period of theorizing, how far this was by design is impossible to say. Yet the critical abstraction of Bali’s early téori from much of the musical practice it concerned––largely because the theoretical structures overlaid were derived from quite different musical forms––created a mode of téori-making that was to assume potent implications in the subsequent political period. For one, certain elements of téori can be seen to inform and construct actual practices of music-making, as musicians become alert to new codes of evaluation. Conversely, as an ‘empty signifier’ and so dislocated from its object of signification, making téori presented a powerful means of making statements which needed little grounding in reality, yet stood by an actual practice which, it could be claimed, perfectly substantiated them. Music’s slippery relationship with signification meant it was particularly apt for such a role. In the coming New Order regime, as the next section shall discuss, the political valency of such a tool was not to be overlooked.

The Rise of the New Order The remainder of the chapter considers practices of téori gamelan during the New Order period (1965-1998). I chart the ascent of General Suharto’s government and the charged political climate through which the party came to power. From here, the chapter considers the role of cultural production and policy in establishing the new government and in 144

overwriting the bloodshed which enabled Suharto’s rise to presidency. Bali was a principal site of this bloodshed and the island subsequently assumed a vulnerable and ambiguous position within the New Order governance. As will be discussed, in this context the correct framing of cultural practice proved essential to safeguarding Balinese interests. The chapter briefly considers the circumstances and implications of the 1965 coup d’état on Java and the subsequent rise to power of President Suharto, before highlighting some of the key themes of New Order cultural policies. What implications might these policies have held for Bali? And how might the management of these policies have played out in the enunciation of téori gamelan on Bali? In answering these questions, the chapter considers how Balinese performers and scholars have navigated their way through the complex and contradictory demands of general New Order cultural policy while protecting Balinese concerns, and examines how the production of téori gamelan presented one possible means of managing these antagonisms. The mounting tensions between opposing political and cultural factions of the 1950s led to tremendous social unease in 1960s Bali. Division between progressives and traditionalists became further polarised, while performance came to play an increasingly potent role in articulating political division: ‘public speeches and performances, such as choirs, janger dances, poetry readings (declamation) and modern drama, became the sites of a battle between LEKRA and LKN’ (Putra 2003: 74, cited in McGraw 2005: 28). Warring between parties intensified until 30th September 1965, when it was claimed that the PKI had staged a coup in Jakarta to overthrow Sukarno’s government. The operation failed but in the political mayhem that followed, military leader General Suharto wrested power from Sukarno to establish himself as the head of Indonesia’s New Order regime, holding office from 1967-1998.54 Despite the failure and brevity of the alleged coup events, a violent and vengeful siege was unleashed on PKI supporters by the military and, it is claimed, by civilian members of the PNI. In Bali between 80,000-100,000 people were killed, a great many of whom were artists, performers and intellectuals. Musicians were in no way exempt; whole gamelan clubs were killed and their instruments burned should they be known Communist supporters or sympathizers (Ornstein 1971: 53). Djelantik provides a grave account of his close-call with one of the killing-squads, describing how such happenings, under circumstances of a mysterious vague terror, occurred almost every day and everywhere in Bali, some of them ending terribly. No one who had been, or was supposed to have been, associated with the Communist Party, or with its social or cultural organisations, was sure of his life (1997: 300).

54

See Roosa (2006) for a striking analysis of the period, particularly how presenting the opening sequence of violence as a Communist offensive was a key ‘enabling myth’ of Suharto’s regime. 145

It is impossible to know the full implications of this ‘mysterious vague terror’ that pervaded Balinese life in the late 1960s and beyond, not least because it is only with great reluctance that artists speak about the period. What can be known is that the practice and representation of performing arts in Bali were altered irrevocably. The cultural battleground of previous years was closed down, and to some extent erased from memory. While Suharto’s cultural policy in certain respects mirrored Sukarno’s in its constant calls for cultural development (perkembangan), the New Order’s emphasis moved from the innovation of a new ‘national form’ to the promotion of regional cultural traditions. In doing so, it labeled particular regional forms as peaks (puncak-puncak) of established cultural value, albeit in diluted and decontextualized incarnations. By highlighting the idea of ‘tradition’ within development, the New Order regime sought to embed contemporary arts practice in an imaginary and sanitary history. Indeed, the obsession with tradition is noted by Pemberton as part of a project to ‘recuperate the past within a framework of recovered origins that would efface, for the sake of cultural continuity, a history of social activism from the late 1940s to the mid-1960s’ (1994: 9). Central to enacting New Order cultural policy was continued state control of performance and arts education in Indonesia. Shortly prior to Suharto’s presidency, Java had already established two tertiary-level arts institutes able to confer degrees on their students: in 1964, the Yogyakarta-based ASTI (Akademi Seni Tari Indonesia, the Academy of Indonesian Dance Arts) had been formed, followed quickly by the musical institution, ASKI (Akademi Seni Karawitan Indonesia, Academy of Indonesian Karawitan Arts) in Solo. These became central in the realization of New Order arts policy through the academies’ research projects and creative output. Notably, the impetus for Bali’s own tertiary institution (ASTI) came in 1967 soon after the cessation of violence on Bali.55 Hough indicates how the academy was primarily founded to serve local Balinese interests as an initiative of Bali’s arts council and the conservative Udayana University, only later taken under official state control in 1969 as a satellite of the Yogyakarta conservatory (2000: 119). 56 As with KOKAR, ASTI Denpasar was grounded in tensions between Balinese and national interests, although here with yet more serious political stakes.

55 Although

nominally a dance academy, the centre did teach music from the offset but only had sufficient funds and resources to found a dedicated karawitan program in 1973. 56

Since then, the institution’s status has gradually been boosted in the eyes of central government: in 1983 ASTI Denpasar was entitled to issue its own degrees; in 1988 it was upgraded to ‘college’ status as STSI (sekolah tinggi seni Indonesia, College of Indonesian Arts); and finally, in 2003 it was promoted to ISI (Institut Seni Indonesia, Institute of Indonesian Arts). See Hough (2000: Chapter Four) for a detailed account of ASTI - STSI - ISI bureaucratic transitions. 146

Indeed, while writers discussing Bali’s arts institutions have addressed the impact of the massacre to an extent, I believe the presence of this ‘vague terror’ in all of Bali’s state-managed arts from 1965 onwards has been under-represented. Not only in the aftermath of the uprising but throughout Suharto’s office, the regime preserved a constant state of political emergency due to the ‘latent threat of communism’ (Roosa 2006: 13). Heryanto’s work into the New Order’s manufacture and management of the ‘Communist Threat’ is a sharp reminder of the period’s continued brutality (1999). Heryanto illustrates just how pervasive and fear-inducing Suharto’s systems of surveillance, accusation and punishment were felt to be and highlights how micro-practices of ‘culture’ were key in determining who was deemed loyal and who was an object of suspicion. The production of téori of gamelan on Bali was one such micro-practice, much bound to the threats of the nation-state. Parker’s work on Indonesian education has focused on the New Order’s implementation of mass-schooling to create ‘Indonesian citizens’, where messages about the state could be purveyed and internalised (2003: 225). Likewise, the staff of Bali’s arts colleges created and disseminated téori as part of this project. Central to the creation and application of téori by staff was the conflation of education and civil service duties, leading to the requirement that Bali’s tertiary level institution employees act as both instructor and civil servant (pegawai negeri), latterly bound to governmental policy such as the Tri Dharma Perguruan Tinggi (the three duties of higher education): research, education, and community service. Meanwhile, within the increased bureaucratization of musical performance in general, téori increasingly came to stand as the appropriate new index for the formal, public adjudication of examinations and competitions. However, in addition téori as a micro-practice has been embedded not only in the political requirements of the New Order but also in juggling Bali’s own struggle for cultural autonomy and kebalian (“Balinese-ness”) within Indonesia. The following sections consider some of the contrasting and often incommensurate ‘cultural’ directives which performance on Bali was supposed to encompass and embody. I ask how those figures representing Balinese gamelan managed to bridge these gaps and contradictions and, on occasion, to profit from certain articulations of gamelan. I also consider what impact these dislocated representative practices may have had upon musical practices themselves, a topic which will be considered in greater practical detail in the following chapter.

New Order Cultural Policy: Problems of Preservation and Development In considering how and why Balinese theoreticians set about formulating téori during the New Order, I first address the two major themes of government cultural policy, namely 147

the dual drive to ‘develop’ and to ‘preserve’ performance forms. Many studies have explored the tensions embedded in a policy promoting both the preservation (pelestarian) or excavation (penggalian) of forms, alongside their development or innovation (perkembangan). Writers have noted that the policy’s dialectic resulted in both the ‘updating’ of traditional forms and the compulsory inclusion of ‘traditional’ elements into innovative work (see Sutton 1991, Sumarsam 1992, Hough 2000, Heimarck 2003 and McGraw 2005 among others). A brief sketch of these directives as employed by Gendhon Humardani, a central figure in the creation and Javanese application of this policy, highlights a central antagonism in this dualistic policy. As head of KOKAR Solo and later ASKI Solo, throughout the 1960s and 70s Humardani pushed Solo to the forefront of the preservation and documentation of court music while simultaneously encouraging the creation of radically modern and experimental forms (Lindsay 1985: 76 cited in Sumarsam 1992: 126, see also McGraw 2005: 33). Furthermore, Sumarsam notes that Humardani justified the classical status of Javanese seni tradisi (traditional arts) by trying to establish their universal quality (Sumarsam 1992: 126). It was Humardani’s conviction that gamelan had a ‘classical and universal status’ and should play an integral role in the cultural life of modern Indonesian society, to be achieved by the contemporizing or ‘Indonesianization’ (peng-Indonesiaan) of the traditional arts (Sumarsam 1992: 126). However, these accounts of policy presuppose a clear distinction between what constitutes a ‘traditional’ artistic process or object and an ‘innovative’ one, which in the case of Java and Bali’s cultural history proves complex. For instance, McGraw paraphrases Sumarsam in suggesting that ‘the rhetoric of preservation within the [Javanese] arts schools partially stemmed from the classical Javanese concept of adi luhung, literally “high art”’ (2005: 33). However, looking back through Florida’s work on the coinage of adi luhung (1995), it is far from a stable or ‘classical’ concept especially in application, but was specifically reworked and reapplied to serve the political interests of Dutch scholar-administrators and elite Javanese civil servants during the late colonial era. Distinguishing ‘traditional Java’ from a modern, international Java proves a highly subjective task. On these grounds I propose a central problem to emerge in designating (and substantializing) what constitutes the innovative and the traditional, a problem equally applicable to Bali where the notion of ‘classical’ or ‘traditional’ art forms has a similarly complicated genealogy. Indeed, it emerges that the ability to render something as ‘innovative’ requires a firm and relatively reified vision of that which came before. As an example of how deploying téori presented one means to resolve this issue in Bali, I discuss how the late 1960s ‘development’ of new normative codes in the composition of gong kebyar works enabled the notional definition of what constituted tradition and 148

innovation, from which Bali’s musical ‘development’ may be better highlighted, moderated and evaluated. From here, I turn to issues of ‘preservation’ to consider the complex question of how and why Balinese theorists were compelled to re-define ideas of music in ‘traditional Bali’ following the rise of the New Order.

Téori Gamelan I: Asserting Development As noted by Hough, Bali’s New Order arts programmes continued to approach performance on ‘rationalist, modernist terms’ (Hough 2000: 119). Various téori texts rationalised Balinese music-making into an academically tenable system, streaming Balinese music through various extra-Balinese theoretical models (predominantly Western, but also post-colonial formulations of Javanese and Indian musical systems) to produce academic texts. Under the rubric of academic development (perkembangan), works produced by KOKAR/SMKI and ASTI/STSI/ISI faculty demonstrated an adherence to Western models of formatting knowledge: see, for instance, the stillfavoured comprehensive text book by I Wayan Aryasa’s Perkembangan Seni Karawitan Bali (‘Developments in the Art of Balinese [Gamelan] Music’) (1976/7), rich in tables and glossaries, plus a number of tuning charts closely comparing Balinese, Javanese (central and Sundanese) and Western diatonic systems, or I Made Bandem’s Ensiklopedi Gamelan Bali (‘Encyclopedia of Balinese gamelan’) (1983). However, despite the idea of téori publications as an obvious public indicator of academic sophistication or ‘development’, published Balinese musicological texts from the early period of the New Order are scarce. Yet, the early years of Suharto’s regime have often been deemed a site of rich creative and technical innovation in Bali for ‘established’ Balinese forms such as the gong kebyar tabuh kréasi.57 Concurrently, it is noted by Noszlopy that this same period saw rapid decrease in previously independent and small-scale gamelan contests following the establishment of an annual island-wide administered gong kebyar contest in 1968, adjudicated by a jury almost exclusively drawn from the academies (2002: 106-7). These circumstances raise questions about how official statements of téori might have functioned within New Order kebyar production, evaluation and scholarly representation. If musical ‘development’ was a key criteria in such state-sponsored music-making, what criteria might juries have used to establish what constituted development? Or put another way, how might the enunciation of retroactive musical ‘norms’ for Balinese gong kebyar have cooperated with Suharto’s drive towards artistic innovation? What other implications for their enunciators might these retrojected 57

The gong kebyar ‘kréasi baru’ or ‘tabuh kréasi’ is a free-standing, through-composed ‘concert’ work for gamelan gong kebyar. 149

claims have had? In addressing these questions, I present a brief overview of scholarly portrayals of ‘musical development’ in gong kebyar in the early New Order. From here, I subsequently consider how the New Order-era imposition of musical norms provided crucial support to the notion of Bali’s musical ‘development’. I first consider the work of Bali’s arguably foremost gong kebyar composer of the twentieth century, I Wayan Beratha, who was also a prominent figure in Balinese scholarship. Beratha’s gong kebyar tabuh kréasi or kréasi baru (‘new creations’) of the late 1960s are described by Western and Balinese scholars as exemplary of the inventive ‘development’ of form and integration of irregular metric cycles (Tenzer 2000: 308, Tantra 1996: 18, 23). The composition Palguna Warsa, winner of the first official Festival Gong in 1968 (where each region selected and sponsored a club to represent the area) featured a five-beat cycle and the apparently unusual insertion of the pengecet (a term associated with a rapid, short-meter cycle heard towards a work’s close) immediately after the opening passage (see Tantra 1996: 19, 23).58 Purwa Pascima (1972), composed as the tabuh kréasi for the Badung entry to the Festival Gong, is again depicted as innovative through the use of a 3/4 meter, seen as both an inventive and a daring nod towards Western music theory (see McGraw 2005: 318). Indeed, Beratha’s works from this era exhibit great dexterity and a complex, innovative management of lines at both micro and macro levels. Addressing these works in detail, Tenzer identifies Beratha’s insertion of a ‘newly invented ubit empat’ ( a form of melodic figuration) in the tabuh kréasi Kosalia Arini (1959) and describes how Beratha’s gong kebyar accompaniment for welcome dance Panyembrahama (1971) includes an irregular series of successive repeated tones and an unusual sequence of empat intervals struck (2000: 224). Meanwhile, the opening passage of Panyembrahma is constructed from what appears to be a new complexity of melodic and rhythmically determined cycles. Within the section, three cycles of an extended melody on the jublag are heard, elaborated by standard norot kotekan (oscillating figuration on adjacent tones) in the gangsa and réyong. However, the system of angsels or ‘rhythmic disruptions’ governing the gangsa/réyong and kendang line operates on a shorter cycle, recurring four times over this same period. The two sets of cycles are organised so as to finish simultaneously, through the latter ‘rhythmic’ cyclic system beginning eight beats before the entry of the jublag melody. However, critical to the designation of musical innovation in composition is definition of what constitutes the regular, the old or, critically in this instance, the traditionally ‘Balinese’ in a work. This widely acknowledged additional complexity and

58

The Festival Gong Kebyar was initially organised independently but at the establishment of Bali’s annual Arts Festival PKB (pesta kesenian Bali) in 1979, it was subsequently run in conjunction with the Arts festival.

150

playful manipulation of Balinese forms and genres which accompanied the arrival of institutionalised kebyar competitions would suggest a strengthened theoretical approach and vocabulary establishing the forms to be ‘developed’ in the first place. As Tenzer puts it, ‘before the revival of the Festival Gong in the late ‘60s, form was freely cast, experimental and most definitely uncodified’, subsequently suggesting that the music of this 1960s period grew formalized and encoded, with ‘compositions soon [coming] to resemble one another closely in form and style, though over time the style has continued to develop rapidly’ (2000: 365, 368). Yet while writers cite Bali’s first official gong kebyar contest and Beratha’s Palguna Warsa as a prime example of codes being broken, these codes had barely been established. Rather it appears transgressions were occurring at precisely the same time as the codes being transgressed were produced. In fact, they can only be defined as transgressions when viewed retrospectively in light of increasingly standardised theorizing. To take just one example, the notion of Palguna Warsa breaking a structural code through Beratha positioning the pengecet section ‘unusually early’ only stands as an anomaly if viewed in the context of kebyar compositions functioning according to the four-part structure of gineman, gegendéran, bapang and pengecet or the KPP (kawitan pengawak pengecet) structure, the latter form only normalized considerably later if indeed ever, as discussed below. Without wishing to detract from the tremendous skill, invention and sensitivity of Beratha’s works, I suggest that his position as ‘primary architect’ of kebyar form and its development (Tenzer 2000: 308) owes not only to his compositions, but is in part due to the concurrent work of theorists to enunciate normalized theoretical accounts of what ‘regular’ Balinese gamelan music might be like, authorized by their official administrative positions as civil servants in education and contest juries. Sandino’s insightful work on the development of tabuh kréasi highlights Beratha’s official role in this ‘constructed tradition’, noting how the influx of Bali’s formal music education was a major factor in ensuring that by the first Festival Gong tabuh kréasi was no longer the “no rules” free-for-all of the early twentieth century. By the late 1960s Wayan Beratha, pre-eminent composer and senior faculty member at the academy, created a more or less standard four-part formula for the style, which to this point was still largely an amorphous medley of melody cycles interspersed with kebyar passages (2008: 3).

In this example of kebyar composition, Beratha stood as both code-constructor and code-breaker. He was able both to regulate and to constitute ideas of musical ‘development’ in the context of early New Order directives on Bali and in the evaluation of the centralized musical contest, whilst also, to an extent, shaping how his own works might be viewed critically. Characteristically, téori was applied to overwrite a history of structural fluidity to represent gamelan music as governed by a code of ‘normative’ rules, 151

albeit rules expressly designed to be challenged by the more daring and inventive composers of the period. However, while using and transgressing these formulae appears to have been a defined and necessary part of a Balinese composer’s kréasi toolkit, as well as being familiar to the musician-juries adjudicating the contests, the téori produced by Bali’s arts institutions from the early 1970s appears guided by a quite different emphasis. Indeed, McGraw notes that amid the late 1960s heyday of Beratha’s kebyar composition, the composer steadily began to prioritize the excavation and preservation of so-called classical and traditional works and repertoires over the creation of new forms (2005: 58). Was Balinese concern for musical preservation shaped only by New Order mandates? What other concerns may have framed attempts by Balinese scholars, musicians and bureaucrats to highlight Bali’s classical forms in their representations of Balinese music? In light of the 1965-6 political violence on Bali and the role that performance took in demarcating the opposing political factions, what was at stake in the articulation of certain Balinese musical forms as ‘classical’?

Téori Gamelan II: Sounding Agama In addressing these questions, I first consider the central themes of Balinese-authored téori which related to classical forms and their documentation: how were certain forms of Balinese gamelan music rendered as classic through representations? What other ‘Balinese’ cultural properties were animated and articulated in the documentation of Bali’s classic musical forms? The majority of Bali’s early to middle works of New Order téori display striking conservatism. Some of the key texts include: Masalah Gambelan Selonding (‘The Problem of Gamelan Selonding’) (1971) by a ‘survey team’ of KOKAR staff (including Aryasa, Beratha, Rembang, and Sinti), which gives a breakdown of this ‘ancient’ form’s tunings, instrumentation and repertoire; a series of composition notations in Tabuh Bali Klasik Pegongan (‘Classic Works for Balinese Gamelan Gong’) (1973) by KOKAR faculty members Aryasa and Beratha; Rembang’s Gambelan Gambuh dan GambelanGambelan Lainnya di Bali (Gamelan Gambuh and other Gamelan of Bali) (1973), which gives a general account of Balinese gamelan, but with emphasis on the styles, techniques and history of gamelan gambuh, also published under the auspices of KOKAR; Aryasa’s 1976/7 general textbook concerning Balinese gamelan, Perkembangan Seni Karawitan Bali (Development in the Art of Balinese [Gamelan] Music) which pays considerable attention to Balinese music history as related through kawi texts, and to music’s role in agama and adat (‘religion and traditional custom’); a survey by Aryasa tracing the extent to which Bali’s ‘classic’ repertoire could be seen to influence contemporary kebyar works 152

(Meninjau Perkembangan Tabuh Klasik dan seberapa jauh Pengaruhnya Terhadap Tabuh-tabuh Kréasi) (1979/80); and a 1984/85 commentary and notation catalogue of Pegongan compositions by Rembang (Hasil Pendokumentasian Notasi Gending-Gending Lelambatan Klasik Pegongan Daerah Bali), which is still a compulsory text for all firstyear ISI karawitan students. This sudden surge of works was primarily focused on establishing a series of classic (klasik) genres of gamelan (only partly excepting Aryasa’ Perkembangan (1976/7)). The texts work together to produce a canon of what constitutes ‘traditional Balinese gamelan music’, outlining its history, purpose and core musical components. This is well evidenced in Rembang’s 1973 work on Gambuh. Following a passage locating gamelan gambuh references in lontar documents including the Aji Gurnita and various Malat tellings, the author schematizes (mengschemakan) Bali’s gamelan history into three eras: the tua (old) includes selonding, gambang, angklung and gendér wayang; madya includes pegambuhan, semar pegulingan, gong gangsa jongkok [gong gedé] and pelégongan; and baru (new) includes gong kebyar, pejangeran, pengarjaan, 7-tone angklung, and joged bumbung among others (1973: 4). The chart is also followed by a note on how instruments of the pre-Majapahit ensembles classed as ancient (yang golongan tua) are nonetheless found to be very similar to images found on Javanese temple reliefs at Panataran and Borobudur, so stressing a courtly connection through their alignment with the earliest Hindu-Buddhist dynasties of Java (1973: 5). This chart is still replicated in ISI lectures and in contemporary Balinese (and Western) scholarship; see for instance Asnawa’s detailed essay on ‘The Diversity and Complexity of Balinese Gamelan’ (Kebhinekaan dan Kompleksitas Gamelan Bali) (2007) which classes tua ensembles as created from the ninth to the fifteenth century and madya from the sixteenth to the late nineteenth century, a period much shaped by kepurian (the royal palaces). Rather like the Kunst quote which heads Chapter Four, Asnawa stresses a connection between madya gamelan as a direct product of Balinese courts, and the organisation/arrangement (susunan) of music itself as ‘increasingly clear’ (semakin jelas) in this era. Asnawa also hints at a strengthened internal political order through the kendang’s new role in madya-era gamelan: the drum is deemed ‘the controller of the composition’ (pengontrol gending), which Asnawa supplements with the English term ‘leadership’ (Asnawa 2007: 4). Indeed, this idea of political and formal order as the defining feature of the classic gamelan groups is found earlier in Rembang’s work on Pegongan (1984/5). Not only does the collection’s very conception highlight the emphasis on ceremonial courtly forms (gathering together and notating Bali’s surviving gong gedé works), but it also works to 153

position modern forms such as kebyar as firmly within this gilded lineage. Rembang’s introduction states that, Although nowadays a large part of gambelan gong gedé has undergone fluctuations in form to become gamelan gong kebyar, the gending mentioned have not changed their special characteristics when heard used in gamelan gong kebyar. A ceremonial atmosphere of glory and greatness is constantly felt and carried by man, and the tranquillity of ancient times will be imagined (1984/5: xi). 59

Rembang’s text highlights a key theme that emerges among these theoretical/historical works: a connection between madya forms and the specific idea of beauty, which is an idea still upheld in contemporary Balinese commentary. Balinese musician and scholar I Komang Astita cites madya gamelan as having specifically ‘aesthetic’ qualities, stating that it is through our appreciation of their aesthetic value that we can enjoy semar pegulingan, gambuh and pelégongan (menilai estetika jadi kita bisa menikmati gambuh, menikmati semar pegulingan [dan] pelégongan) (pers. comm. 2007). Indeed, as opposed to what Astita deems the ritual function (fungsi sakral) of kuno forms, he stresses an aesthetic role assumed by the kings of Majapahit as ‘giving their support to bring art to life’ (memberikan pengayoman menghidupkan seni itu… adalah raja-raja) (pers. comm. 2007, with my emphasis). In considering works from the early New Order onwards, a chain of aestheticsocial values appears to be established, ideas clearly prefigured in colonial texts. The idea of stability or order is expressed practically through the idea of musical ‘balance’ (keseimbangan), which in turn is linked to the notion of beauty (keindahan), a chain of effect that also works in retrograde: not only does balance create beauty, but beauty enables balance and stability (or Rembang’s ‘the tranquility of ancient times’). This connection is effected largely through the idea of structure and correct formal engagement; for instance, see Rembang’s discussion of the idea of ‘tabuh’ in gamelan gong gedé, here using tabuh to connote both a work’s form and its proper performance. Rembang writes, Special in the understanding of Balinese gamelan music, that which is intended by tabuh is the result of capable artists aiming for balance (keseimbangan) in their playing to shape the repertoire until it is appropriate to the spirit (jiwa), feeling (rasa) and direction (tujuan) of the composition. To play gamelan (menabuh) originally means to strike the gamelan [and] to follow the melody, but [also] to play with all the rules (aturan) or [with] proper order (tata cara) established, so that the music of the gamelan is beautiful to be heard (terdengar indah) (1984/5:8).60

59

See Appendix 1, note 11.

60

See Appendix 1, note 12.

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Rembang states how this formal engagement with and quest for balance must be enacted in, for instance, the detail of how the trompong player selects his elaborating line by following these rules or aturan, and also in the large-scale ‘structure of composition’ (bentuk komposisi) as a whole (1984/5: 8). In outlining the various forms of gong gedé works or tabuh—the various categories of which are dependent on the number of the small gongs kempur and kempli strokes between the great gongs (gong [ageng])— Rembang describes how the number and period of places where the kempur and kempli fall is arranged is based on the artist’s sense of beauty (rasa indah seniman)- the creator (pencipta) attains beauty by succeeding in a balance of form, to make harmonious the composition of each tabuh (1984/5: 10). 61

Here classical gamelan repertoire, its history, aesthetics and the idea of political order are clearly articulated through one another. How might these works relate to the complex demands placed on Balinese musicians and scholars following the establishment of the New Order? In light of the 1965-6 violence, Bali’s long history as a ‘site of tradition’ meant that the recovered origins of arts practice, particularly the ‘source’ forms of légong and gambuh, were deemed the most effective way to overwrite the political ruptures of the recent past. With low echoes of colonial-era cultural politics, once more the notion of artistic tradition was sutured to religious conservatism on Bali. According to McGraw, the massacre left ‘an unchallengeable consensus as to what Balinese culture should be like, [which] insured that ostensibly traditional Balinese values, rooted in a religion centred around “ancient” ideas of caste would be maintained and unchallenged for years’ (2005: 29). Central to managing this vision was the bureaucratization of performance on Bali. This was effected by heightened intervention from central government in the form of monitoring bodies such as the Indonesian Ministry of Culture (Depdikbud), and also by Balinese administrative institutions, notably the newly-founded Balinese arts council, Listibiya (Majelis Pertimbangan dan Pembinaan Kebudayaan Daerah Propinsi Bali, The Consultative and Promotional Council for Culture of the Province of Bali) established, not insignificantly, in 1966. The council was closely linked in personnel to the LKN and accordingly dedicated to arts conservation and the protection of ‘endangered genres’ (kesenian langka). The council was also highly active in establishing and adjudicating performing arts contests, including the Festival Gong Kebyar in 1968 (Hough 2000: 282, Tenzer 2000: 102). 62 Meanwhile, further bureaucratization was enabled by the instatement of large numbers of civil servants

61 62

See Appendix 1, note 13.

See Rubenstein (1992) on the role of Listibiya in reinvigorating Bali’s kekawin or poetry reading tradition in the 1960-70s through the creation and sponsorship of reading contests. 155

(pegawai negeri) in the arts academies to replace those artists and scholars lost to the 1965-6 violence (see Hobart 2008: 13). On these grounds, the works described above––which were published and sponsored by various administrative cultural bodies on Bali––construct a musical canon which much aligns with Pemberton’s idea of a ‘framework of recovered origins’ (1994: 9). The creation of a canon works to highlight certain musical features or forms as central, while correspondingly marginalizing and disarticulating others. Writing of Western classical music, Scott notes how the linear paradigm inherent in the construction of any musical canon succeeds in implying an autonomous cultural development, which can be used to defend the notion of ‘a single authentic culture’ (Scott 2000: 6). Keen to overwrite Bali’s tempestuous political past, such a single authentic culture is here predicated on the court music of a glorious, imagined Majapahit past, the madya (middle) era, with Bali’s religious sensibility heightened by a new emphasis on the ancient (tua/kuno) preMajapahit sacred gamelan selonding. Crucial to this vision of history is the notional political stability of Bali’s past. As highlighted in Chapters Three and Four, the articulation of imagined political order through Bali’s alleged cultural practices was crucial in constructing an idea of contemporary social harmony to tally with the needs of colonial governance. In light of the perceived ‘communist threat’, the New Order required an image of Bali that operated along similar lines, where Balinese were represented as a people preoccupied with order and with beauty (as found in the ‘classical arts’) and not with political sedition. Such was the threat of violence that those Balinese musicians and artists who survived the massacre appear to have been bound into promulgating such an image themselves. One such articulation of Bali’s ‘social harmony’ through musical representation occurs in a striking echo of colonial-era approach to gamelan: once more, the idea of balance is cast as Bali’s central ‘aesthetic’ tenet in musical composition. Indeed, balance in New Order texts functions very much like the idea of ‘steady state Bali’ to establish an artistically-driven social order, here re-glossed with the Indonesian expression keseimbangan. The term stems from imbang (balance, match, equal) and is regularly cited as a central goal of the Balinese artistic process and, as with colonial accounts, aligned to a ‘uniquely’ Balinese sensibility. This target is also reiterated uncritically in contemporary scholarship: see, for instance, Tenzer’s account of Beratha stating that ‘balance’ constitutes Bali’s central aesthetic determinant in composition (2000: 174). However, the word itself appears to have no analogue in Balinese language.63 In discussion with ISI 63

I am grateful to Richard Fox for pointing out the absence of a direct translation for keseimbangan in Balinese to me.

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alumnus I Kadek Wahyu, the problem of keseimbangan as a core Balinese artistic principle surfaced. In differentiating between the idea of ‘academic process’ (proses akademis) and ‘Balinese feeling’ (rasa Bali), Wahyu had noted the presence of taksu as a key determinant of Balinese sensibility, defining taksu with highly-Westernised Indonesian vocabulary as ‘the connection between the inner power and the technical skill which one possesses’ (itu pengabungan antara ‘inner power’ dengan teknik yang mereka miliki) (pers. comm. 2007). When I asked in Balinese if he would mind offering such a definition again, also in Balinese (Yan mabaos konsep niki ring Basa Bali: sapunapi?), Wahyu nonetheless almost immediately switched back to Indonesian in his response, stating that Taksu… its meaning is… the blend between… in Bali it’s called the concept of balance (keseimbangan). Yes, balance. [Taksu] is known by the technical term or concept of balance in Balinese gamelan: this is what it is most characterized by. 64

When I then asked how Wahyu might describe keseimbangan in Balinese he was hesitant, saying: ‘in Balinese... What is it? [laughing] I’m Balinese and I don’t… Try looking in the dictionary!’ before stating in English that keseimbangan is “balancing’’ (Ring basa bali... Keseimbang... Apa ya? Saya orang Bali.. tidak... coba cari di kamus! “Balancing”). He then gave a practical example of how the idea might function, noting that when a musician is playing kotekan he must listen keenly to his interlocking partner, and this awareness will enable a feeling of balance between players and musical line: ‘kené keseimbangan’ (this is balance). However, in terms of keseimbangan as a large-scale explanatory concept in musical structures he struggled to find Balinese words to incorporate it. Despite this lack of Balinese precedent for such a concept, rather like colonial depictions of steady-state Bali, New Order téori nonetheless made substantial progress in normalizing the idea of ‘balance’ as a central component of the Balinese aesthetic, with several pieces of Balinese terminology (istilah Bali) concerning ideas of musical structure making a formal entry into téori throughout the 1980s. I discuss the use of terms jajar pageh and the tri-angga structure of ‘KPP’ (kawitan, pengawak and pengecet) by way of illustration. While the terms themselves can be shown to have long-standing roots in Balinese everyday usage, I propose their formalized application to gamelan music-making––especially to modern composition processes––to be a recent invention that can be shown as a particular product of New Order Bali.

64

See Appendix 1, note 14.

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Finding Form: Jajar Pageh and the KPP Complex This section first examines the issue of meter and jajar pageh, considering how they may have been employed to articulate certain imaginings of Balinese tradition, history and political order. Meter relates to the internal structuring principles of a gong cycle: how many beats and punctuating smaller gong strokes (kempur and kempli) are contained within two strokes of the great gong, as mentioned in the Rembang citation above. Meter, as a means of classifying, also ‘extends to include any drumming and changes in intensity, dynamic and tempo that are linked to the meter generically, as opposed to being a feature of a specific composition’ (Tenzer 2000: 254). This system is now routinely referred to as jajar pageh: jajar meaning ‘in rows’ or ‘lined up’, while pageh is ‘firm’, ‘resolute’, or ‘fixed’. During my fieldwork, jajar pageh was invoked by a number of Balinese musicians in discussion of Balinese musical principles (including from musicians Arsana, Asnawa, Aryasa, Astita, and Terun).65 Jajar pageh may refer specifically to the metric organisation of a work’s central slow pengawak section (McGraw 2005: 53), or can refer more generally to the ‘operative meter’ governing a gong cycle found anywhere within a work (see Tenzer 2000: 354). However, while invoked as a long-standing term, it is difficult to trace jajar pageh’s usage very far. Unusually for a technical term of such presumed structural importance, to my knowledge it does not feature in McPhee’s detailed chapter on tabuh form and gamelan gong [gedé] in Music in Bali (1966). Likewise, it appears to be absent from Rembang’s 1984/5 discussion of pegongan structures, and while the idea of ‘jajaran’ appears in the Windha, Asnawa and Mustika 1985 work on composition (penggarapan) of karawitan, the text makes no reference to jajar pageh. I Nyoman Tantra’s discussion of the term is, however, illuminating. He suggests that the ‘composition of Balinese gamelan cannot be free from connection to patterns, which bind the entire structure of a composition’, before noting that the use of the term jajah pageh in relation to musical composition was formally agreed upon by a group of ASTI (STSI/ ISI) karawitan lecturers in Denpasar in 1987 (Tantra 1996: 16). Tantra’s text implies that this agreement was the first application of this terminology to gamelan, although it remains to be seen if this was the very first instance. However, the absence of the term in earlier works suggests this may well be the case and, if so, does much to undermine the assumption that jajar pageh operates as a long-standing piece of ‘traditional’ musical terminology. Commentary from I Wayan Dibia, a former STSI director who has come to speak increasingly openly about Bali’s complex institutional politics, supports this claim. 65 Asnawa’s

translation and interpretation of the jajar pageh worked differently. He maintained jajar to be ‘row’ or ‘the thing you put together’ but suggested pageh (in English) to mean ‘like a fan… from one side to one side’, presumably to mean how a composer assembles rows of music to create a piece (pers. comm. 2007). 158

He states that ‘jajar pageh is still problematic for me… the definition is not quite clear’, and suggests that ‘representing music with this kind of generalisation is a little bit dangerous, [for] although Bali is a small island it is complex in the number of local styles’ (pers. comm. 2009). The implications for the term’s deliberate and later-than-expected insertion (in terms of how madya gamelan music’s social role has been evaluated) is well illustrated by Tenzer’s presentation of Balinese gamelan meter. Discussing the various meters found in Balinese gamelan which he includes in a two-page chart, the author describes how apart from a single pegambuhan meter, only five tabuh pegongan are ‘fully systematised’ (2000: 255). Discussing the function of jajar pageh in the gong gedé repertory, he states: ‘because their rigorous architectonics suggest a learned approach that the courts are held to have provided, these meters’ abstractions… are felt to embody court values in a worthy way’ (2000: 255). However firmly these structures and cycles may or may not have operated in pre-colonial times, it is interesting to consider that the terminology to highlight structural order, or ‘permanence’, appears to be a late-1980s construction. It is also intriguing that jajar pageh was then so readily seized upon as an ‘indigenous’ musical term by both Balinese and Western theorists. However, the establishment of jajar pageh as a piece of authentic Balinese musical terminology is significant predominantly due to the springboard it provided for the increased formalization and application of the triangga structure of kawitan pengawak - pengecet (introductory passage - slow tempo, extended middle section - faster concluding section, henceforth collectively termed KPP) as a model for composition. These formal links made between jajar pageh and the KPP are noted by Tantra. He describes how jajar pageh classified (tergolong) different ‘aspects’ of composition: firstly, he defines the main sections (aspek pokok/ bagian-bagian utama) which form a work’s skeleton (kerangka) as comprising these three KPP sections; secondly, he suggests jajar pageh controls the ‘additional aspects’ (aspek tambahan) of a work, such as its shorter sections like the penyalit or peralihan (1996: 16). The KPP form is widely depicted as originating in court genres, Tenzer stating that the form was ‘originally applied to lelambatan in pegongan and pegambuhan repertories… [It] evolved during the golden age of court culture and was handed down orally and though propagation in compositional practice’ (2000: 354). However, the model also assumed valency as a (theoretical) form for newer gong kebyar works. Asnawa ties together the idea of jajar pageh, the KPP and modern tabuh kréasi, stating that new composers ‘still want to maintain... the skeleton of the form: kerangka. So, [they use] jajar pageh: this is the structure of the composition, this is KPP. And it’s still there’ (pers. comm. 2007). 159

Certainly McPhee’s documentation of pre-Independence era gong gedé works, particularly of gending ageng, demonstrate the existence of the KPP’s basic labels for musical sections (1966: 82-3). However, I suggest the precise formulization of this threepart structure to be a later development. McGraw suggests its arrival (as an articulated construct) to coincide with the advent of Bali’s music institutions in the late 1960s, understood as deriving from gong gedé but becoming a widespread compositional tool for gong kebyar through the works of I Wayan Beratha (2005: 53). However, as discussed in my brief analysis of Beratha’s tabuh kréasi, McGraw proposes the concept to be ‘only partially supported by actual musical evidence’ (2005: 54). Indeed, the location of three discrete parts is regularly contradicted in the analysis of professed KPP works, be they ‘classic’ lelambatan or new tabuh kréasi. Returning to Rembang’s seminal Pegongan text (which one might expect to stand as the cornerstone in KPP theory), in his discussion of composition form he does not isolate a three-part structure or make any mention of tripartite divisions, but instead stresses a large range of potential sections used to construct classic lelambatan forms. For instance, within tabuh telu (tabuh ‘three’, which therefore must contain three kempur and kempli stokes within each gong cycle) he states there to be two main forms (bentuk): the tunggal or ‘single’, which has just a kawitan and a pengawak, where the pengawak is repeated without ever changing the melody; and the ‘ganda’, which comprises two sections following the kawitan: a short but repeated pengisep section, followed by an extended and slower pengawak (1984/5: 11-12). Meanwhile, Rembang also provides a diagram depicting a ‘theoretical’ tabuh pisan of the longest structure possible for this composition type, consisting of the following nine sections: kawitan; pengiba; pengawak; penyalit; pengisep; penyalit; pengawak; pengiba; pengecet (1984/5: 15-16). Likewise, writing in 1985, Windha, Asnawa and Mustika state the major formal components which make up ‘classic Balinese gamelan works such as in pegongan, pegambuhan and pelégongan are generally comprised from a [four-part] pengawit, pengawak, pengisep and pengecet’ (1985: 1). 66 I Wayan Dibia supports the idea of a more fluid approach to determining musical structure, stating that since the 1980s composition has become more ‘rigid’ and that ‘sometimes they force it, to fold the music into three’ (pers. comm. 2009). He questions the over-application of the concept: If you consider lelonggoran in Bulèlèng- where’s the kawitan? It just goes on, on and on. If without a kawitan, without pengawak, without pengecet there will be no tabuh? Is it [lelonggoran] a tabuh or not? Yes! This is why the application of the three sections of the KPP in gamelan- they shouldn’t do it in a rigid way. Some tabuh have that structure but that doesn’t mean that without these three parts we cannot call something a tabuh. (pers.comm. 2009)

However, the KPP structure receives much attention and credibility and continues to exert a powerful role in the creative and analytical processes of Balinese (and Western) 66

See Appendix 1, note 15.

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composers and scholars. McGraw proposes that much of the academic enthusiasm with which the model has been propagated at ISI has to do with it representing ‘a theory in a scene which was striving to develop modern, rational analytical tools in order to compete on an intellectual level with the comparatively complicated and numerous music theories developing in Javanese schools, especially STSI Solo’ (McGraw 2005: 53-4). This is doubtless part of the issue, and I discuss Balinese analogies with Western theory found in Balinese téori in the following chapter. However, I suggest another converse issue is at stake in musicians’ support for this template—the will to represent Bali’s ‘authentic’ tradition as one of spiritual balance and mystic order. Despite the manner in which new works use the KPP to function as a broken theoretical mould, a way to communicate ideas of innovation, this process nonetheless presents a nod towards Balinese tradition. Indeed, it is this aspect of religious ‘tradition’ in the KPP that has appealed to Western writers. While Tenzer stresses the ambiguity of the KPP form in its practical application in kebyar, he nonetheless proposes it to have a powerful spiritual pedigree in Bali. Tenzer cites the KPP’s association with the triangga concept, and describes its tripartite division of the body into the head, torso and legs, which each bear respective properties which in turn relate to a wide range of other spiritual and material realms in Bali (2000: 356). In turn, Tenzer cites a strong association between KPP and the three divinities of the trimurti: ‘the Hindu deific trinity of Brahma, Vishnu and Siva’ (2000: 356). As a challenge to interpretations which articulate Balinese music through apparently timeless religious doctrine, and following Foucault and Collingwood, I propose to investigate these claims historically. What was at stake in cementing associations between Bali’s musical and religious practice and ‘philosophy’? Did these associations go beyond a realization of New Order mandates of preservation? Why might the use of téori to represent gamelan music as a manifestation of Balinese religion have proved a useful tool in managing Bali’s status within Indonesia? While the assertion of religious lineage appears to lend the KPP significant cultural and historical weight, a brief analysis of Bali’s postIndependence religious organisation and the origins of ‘agama Hindu’ reveal otherwise.

In Search of Balinese Hinduism Despite the fame Bali’s ‘Hindoo’ faith had garnered over the years, following the founding of the Indonesian Republic in 1949 the Ministry of Religion resolutely refused a department for Hinduism. Various Balinese appeals were made (lack of state recognition meant non-disclosure of funds for religious administration among other disadvantages for Bali), and in 1950 a delegate of Jakartan officials travelled to Bali to assess the matter but were steadfast, citing the island’s polytheism and lack of a holy book as prohibiting 161

factors (Bakker 1993: 226). Several organisations were then founded in Bali to work to legitimise Balinese Hinduism according to these criteria, including renewed contact with India and careful interpretation of Balinese texts to establish an official ‘agama Bali’. Eventually, after considerable work to standardise and normalise Bali’s religious practices, Hinduism on Bali was recognised in 1959 and a formal organisation Parisada Dharma Hindu Bali established to regulate, promote and develop ‘Agama Hindu Bali’ (Bakker 1993: 230-1). In 1963 the Parisada founded an educative centre, Institut Hindu Dharma, for the orthodox religious training of priests, teachers of religion and other scholars. Interestingly, two of Bali’s major music theorists of this era, Aryasa and Sinti, were trained at the institute in the midst of their musical scholarship.67 The role of the Parisada became even more prominent following the establishment of the New Order and the declaration that every citizen be an adherent to one of Indonesia’s five officially recognised agama (including agama Hindu). Indeed, both Wiener and Fox have noted the intensifying of work under the New Order to regulate Balinese Hinduism to serve a range of governmental and Balinese agendas and Weiner observes how the Parisada has been particularly active in establishing textual doctrine, particularly of Indic origin, for Balinese religious practices (Wiener 1995: 381 n.8, cited in Fox 2002: 18). Returning to the links writers have made between KPP musical form and the trimurti or ‘traditional’ tripartite arrangement of Hindu deities, Fox notes that a principal means by which Balinese religious practice has been normalized by the Parisada is ‘through the rendering of local deities as manifestations of the three great Hindu gods— Brahma, Wisnu and Siwa’ (2002: 18). In turn, I propose that these policies have seen gamelan music’s presence in upacara (religious ceremonies) cemented in doctrine along similar lines. While composers and theorists have juggled the mandate of perkembangan and their own explorations of musical material, the need for gamelan to articulate religious orthodoxy has been a powerful force in shaping theoretical representations of gamelan, a force bolstered by the cultural/religious conservatism which came to dominate Balinese affairs in the wake of the 1965-6 violence. Turning back to these early New Order theoretical works, I propose their most striking feature to be the concerted alignment between musical and religious practice, a feature notable by its absence from the Old Order texts already discussed. Assessing the KOKAR research on Gamelan Selonding (1971) conducted by Rembang, Beratha, Aryasa, Sinti, Pande Putu Martha and Javanese scholar Poedijono, the work demonstrates 67

Sinti studied at the IHD between 1964-68. Aryasa entered in 1966 to study there intermittently until 1983 when he gained his S1 or Bachelor’s degree. 162

a continued Old Order reverence for researching and producing academic knowledge (ilmu pengetahuan) with reference to formal ‘methodologies’ (methologi), plus the positioning of Balinese forms amid Central Javanese and Western diatonic and chromatic tuning systems (1971: 7, 8, 11 and 26). However, the text also displays a new emphasis on locating selonding within its social and religious context. The writers note that in these Bali aga ceremonies (atji) the function of gamelan selonding is ‘extremely urgent’ (sangat urgen) and that the ensemble’s vital socio-religious role sees the community grant its dedicated players additional land for farming (1971: 6a). 68 In highlighting this role so, the writers also endeavour to provide analogues of Tenganan’s Bali aga (old or ‘pre-Majapahit’) practices within the newly orthodox Balinese Hinduism by stating, for instance, ‘here also it is known that the carrying out of worship (yadnya) is like that of Hindus’ (disini djuga dikenal pelaksanaan yadnya seperti pada Hindu), and noting that burial ceremonies are likewise ‘almost the same’ as Hindu practices (Upatjara penguburan majat hampir sama dengan upatjara pada Hindu) (1971: 6a). In addition, while the Tenganan community is cited as not following the Hindu high caste (di Tenganan tidak dikenal sistem Triwangsa seperti pada Hindu), here a system termed Sekte is adhered to, a system that also apparently emphasises the existence of a single God, manifest in the form of ‘Indra’ (manifestasi Tuhan diwudjudkan sebagai Indra), a statement that thus positions Tenganan as conforming to the Indonesian state’s key ‘One God’ religious stipulation enshrined in the Pancasila (1971: 6a). The Masalah Gamelan Selonding project and publication date of February 1971 resonates further still when placed alongside early New Order plans for Bali’s ‘development’. Picard’s work on tourism and nationalist cultural policy on Bali is illuminating. He describes how Jakarta established that Bali would be the pilot region for the development of international tourism in Indonesia as part of its ‘Master Plan’ to cultivate tourism in the archipelago (1996b: 119). The Master Plan, which proposed a devastating over-development of Bali’s landscape and heightened external control of the island, was formed through a series of meetings in 1967 in Java, none of which involved consultation with Balinese authorities. Eventually these plans came to light among Balinese, who subsequently held their own meeting in early 1968 where countermeasures were proposed, appealing that Bali’s attraction lay in its long-held cultural and religious ‘assets’ and that any move to place these in jeopardy would see tourism collapse. Balinese officials determined that contrary to Jakarta’s brash plans for the region, ‘Bali must be developed on the basis of culture, which is founded on the religious character of the Balinese community’ (Mukerda 1968: 1, cited Picard 1996b: 119). However, the Jakarta plans continued unabashed, and it was not until 1971 that a second, more decisive meeting was called, named the Seminar Pariwisata Budaya Daerah Bali 68

The manuscript includes two adjacent pages both numbered ‘6’: I label them 6a and 6b.

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(Seminar on Cultural Tourism on Bali) and organised under the joint auspices of touristic, religious, cultural and academic authorities of the island. Picard describes an ‘alarmist tone’ as governing this meeting and the continued appeal made by Balinese officials that touristic Bali’s allure lay in its culture. If the nation wished to profit from Bali as a tourist destination, it must nurture the tenets of Balinese culture that drew visitors there, principally its natural beauty and its thriving arts culture. As the report of the proceedings succinctly put it: ‘if you want to gather golden eggs, don’t kill the goose that lays them’ (Seminar 1971: 11 cited in Picard 1996b: 129). This connection between Bali’s tourist charms and cultural heritage was however re-crafted by fears of not only political but also religious dominance from Java. Indonesia’s increasing Islamic identity saw Balinese afraid that Hinduism would be subsumed. By bolstering mutual dependency between religious and artistic activity, Balinese preserved freedom for their own religious practices by associating them with well-recognised lucrative arts activity. This type of formal connection-making is exemplified by the 1971 LISTIBIYA-run ‘Seminar on Sacred and Profane Dance’, which defined varying degrees of the sacred (wali), semi-sacred (bebali) and the secular (balibalihan) in Bali’s performing arts, codifying spatially suitable performance contexts for each of these levels and determining their appropriate audiences (see Noszlopy 2002: 51-2, Picard 1996b, Bandem and de Boer 1995). While this is usually depicted as a move by Balinese to preserve certain arts from the sacrilegious effects of the tourist gaze, an alternative analysis can invert this to be viewed as a shrewd tactic employed by Balinese to embed their religious practice securely within the arts, and so support the stillvulnerable Hindu Bali with the proven monetary power of seni Bali. A brief survey of other texts produced in this era demonstrates similar concerns. Aryasa’s perkembangan text (1976/7) includes limited commentary on contemporary composition, instead offering thoughts on the origins of Balinese music among various literary references and dedicated sections to the ‘connection between Balinese vocal music (tembang) and gamelan, and religion and local customs’ (1976/7: 11-21, 38-41). Aryasa’s inclusion of the Aji Gurnita as an extended 23-page appendix to the text in both Balinese and Indonesian translation also serves to re-root Balinese gamelan within a religious context, here supported by lontar doctrine.69 Meanwhile Rembang highlights and endorses shared connections between Balinese and Indian music in his work on Laya (1986), which discusses possible Balinese applications of ideas of metric levels as theorized in Indian classical music. Returning to Rembang’s 1984/5 Pegongan text, his provision and analysis of a Gamelan gong gedé canon can be seen not only to embed the 69

The lontar’s kawi aksara is transcribed here into High Balinese and also Bahasa Indonesia by I Gusti Bagus Sugriwa. 164

form within history, but also to establish its key role within Bali’s Agama Hindu. The work’s opening wastes no time in making this point: Balinese gamelan, in particular the pegongan form, comprises a special part of Balinese culture with very close connections to the activities of Hindu religious ceremonies and functions as a support to ceremonial worship… Many people are of the opinion that the gending mentioned ‘breathe’ religion, because it is probable that at their very beginning, the compositions were inspired by religious settings. So, every time classical gending lelambatan are performed, the listener feels him/herself as though within the context of temple ceremony worship (1984/5: xi). 70

This combined emphasis on unique (khas) Balinese practices is expressed via more Arabic-nuanced Indonesian, e.g. the use of the root ilhami for ‘divine inspiration’ in the discussion of lelambatan works’ creation. In doing so, it lightly positioned a specific Balinese religious-musical experience within a more acceptably Indonesian vocabulary. 71

Thoughts on Composition in the New Order: The Téma and the Prakempa By contextualizing New Order theoretical representations of Balinese gamelan in this way, téori emerges as a strategy to articulate a wide range of extra-musical concerns, themselves frequently driven by contradiction and inconsistency. Rembang’s text discussed above is characteristic of carefully positioned New Order téori, produced to balance assertions of ‘Balineseness’ or kebalian with pan-Indonesian referents, while also engaging with Western scholarly formats. Such attempts to blend these diverse interests result in téori which is largely detached from actual practices of music-making. However, how might practices of téori have gone on to shape composition processes themselves? In line with earlier discussion of how the simulacrum may eventually come to precede the real, how might these representations have assumed constitutive power in the production of new works? I consider this question in greater detail and in relation to contemporary composition practices during the following chapter. However, by way of foundation to this discussion, I here briefly consider the question in the context of the STSI/ISI directorship of I Made Bandem during 1981-97. As an important proponent of New Order policy through active membership of the ruling Golkar party, how might Bandem’s work

70 71

See Appendix 1, note 16.

See also A.A.M. Djelantik’s two-volume Introduction to the Basics of Aesthetics (Pengentar Dasar Ilmu Estetika) (1990) which includes a reproduction of a 1987 essay by Ida Bagus G. Agathia on the teachings of the Balinese Brahman priest Ida Pedanda Made Sideman concerning agama and seni (1990: 22-24). The text proposes the ‘total integration’ (kemanunggalan) of religion and art, evoking the Javanese religious-aesthetic concept of Lango (a variant of Alangö: cf Chapter 3 for the origins of this term’s usage in Javanese/Dutch interactions) and the idea that Bali’s key deities Siwa and Buddha be considered as Dewa Keindahan (Gods of beauty). 165

as institute head have shaped actual Balinese composition processes as well as their representation? Bandem’s appointment at STSI came amid dramatic musical development on Bali in the musik kontemporer scene, with a large number of exploratory works produced in 1979 and the early 1980s, albeit strongly tied to ideas of Balinese religious ‘tradition’. The 1979 Young Composer’s Week held in Jakarta had provided a platform for Indonesian student composers to present new works, and Bali’s I Komang Astita produced the still-celebrated composition Gema Eka Dasa Rudra. This work depicted Bali’s largest religious ceremony (carried out only every 100 years) and used semar pegulingan instruments but also featured new playing techniques (certain instruments hung rather than sitting on frames), a range of gongs drawn from gong kebyar, gong gedé and angklung ensembles, and a highly theatrical performance style. Astita himself credits the work as a ‘milestone’ (tonggak) in Balinese composition, in the transition from more traditional creations (kréasi tradisi) to the advent of musik kontemporer on Bali (pers. comm. 2007). The work featured a range of innovative modal shifts for the seven-tone ensemble. However, I Wayan Dibia notes that while the work was ‘one important innovation, at that time [Astita] was not too aware of what he was doing, he just used his talents to explore’ (pers. comm. 2009). Indeed, according to Dibia, another Astita work of the same period, the 1978 Kembang Rampai (‘Mixed Flowers’) which featured a combination of gamelan kebyar, angklung and semar pegulingan instruments likewise highlights an intuitive rather than theoretically-led approach to composition. Dibia, as one of the work’s performers, describes how the piece emerged from practical experimentation on the ensembles, and how it was really falling apart, in the performance too. But we learnt a lot from that failure because we didn’t know what to do to match the tuning because the tumbuk is not there. Pak Beratha, he learnt from that experience, knowing his students were confused. He said: ‘I have to help them out’, and finally we discussed and searched and found the solution [locating the tumbuk] (pers. comm. I Wayan Dibia, 2009).

Dibia describes the pragmatic approach taken by Beratha in assisting his students’ experiments, resulting in the theoretical tenet of locating the ‘tumbuk’: that in order to combine differing gamelan sets, the composer is advised to locate a shared tone (of reasonably matched tuning) within all the ensembles which can then act as an anchor for further tonal exploration. In contrast to the emphasis on Balinese compositional fluidity suggested by these individual accounts of the period, Bandem’s tenure appears marked by attempts to rejoin bureaucratic accounts of musical ‘creativity’ with the musical processes and products themselves. As such, this saw a close alignment of the idea of creation (penciptaan) with 166

research (penelitian), which theoretically allowed the two processes to share similar formalized procedures (and funding). Bandem’s account of this process highlights the pressures mounted by central government to structure arts practice as a bureaucratic or scientific process (here cited as the only means to receive basic government patronage): It is this creation (penciptaan) which is valued in the same way as the other type of research - in theory, this creation should follow a scientific process (proses ilmiah) - from the choosing of a theme (téma garapan) they should undertake an exploration (explorasi), read studies (buku kajian)... [and] test the theme out... only once they’ve done this can they put together the piece. Because this process makes use of a scientific process (proses ilmiah) it is considered to be the same as other research - so it is not only allowed but also required by the Directorate General of Higher Education that research done by artists (seniman) should be considered the same. (Bandem pers. comm. 1995, in Hough 2000: 151)

On these grounds, not only is the representation of musical practice at stake, but also the processes by which it is created. Rather than use téori as empty strategy to represent musical practice howsoever was necessary, I suggest Bandem’s directorship served to substantiate bureaucratic ideals within Balinese music practice (within institutions), despite the core antithesis between Balinese arts practices and the rigidity of the proposed ‘scientific model’ (see Chapter Seven). This is illustrated in the development of the student dissertation. ASTI Denpasar had been holding examinations (ujian) for students since 1973 which included the production of a small dissertation (skripsi) on a general research topic in Balinese performance and a work of ‘new creation’ (kréasi baru) to be performed to a faculty panel. However, as these examinations developed first into ujian seniman or sarjana lengkap (‘artist’s examination’ or ‘complete scholar’) degree examinations first held in 1983, followed by S1 (Sarjana 1, ‘scholar’ examinations) in 1989/90, performance candidates’ skripsi developed into descriptive and explanatory accounts of the work produced. These skripsi were focused on the téma or theme of works. 72 To illustrate attempts to marry bureaucratic process with Balinese composition, I briefly consider Bandem’s promulgation of téma in composition strategy and skripsi production (which provides an interesting contrast with Javanese theorizing). As a further example of how téori has been formulated to structure musical practices along bureaucratic lines, I consider Bandem’s production of the lontar edition The Prakempa. In turn, these two topics provide some background to developments in Balinese musical composition which set the scene for the coming chapter.

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See Hough (2000: Chapter Four) for a detailed account of various changes in the institution’s examination criteria.

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The Téma Particular to this new emphasis on aligning bureaucratic and composition processes was the development of the composer’s ‘theme’. Bandem’s enthusiasm for the téma suggests that locating and following a theme presented a powerful possibility of shaping musical composition according to New Order ideals. The idea of téma is striking in the context of wider Indonesian arts policy in the New Order. Humardani, since his early years as STSI Solo director, was emphatic that artists must strive towards ‘non-representational’ expression, a quality which he recognised as central to the strength of the classical Javanese arts and which—through use of the Javanese phrase tan wadag—resonated as an ‘indigenous’ concept (see McGraw 2005: 81). Halim’s account of 1980s artistic circles in Solo also discusses this academic emphasis, but in a very different light: The majority of artists were of the opinion that ‘art had to be pure’ and that the creative process could only be set by oneself, through one’s own questing and arising from one’s own expressions and intentions. Artists holding these opinions were perhaps influenced by Javanese traditions such as the concept of pulung or ketiban ndaru (receive a flash of divine inspiration/blessing), a burst of light indicating heavenly blessing for those destined to be king. And it became a myth and credo in their life and art. For them, ‘social space’ and historical process did not have any connection: artistic creation and art works had no relation to their environment (1999: 288).

For Halim this stance was a way of muting the arts’ potential to comment on or challenge the artist’s circumstances. He describes this standpoint as a direct consequence of the ‘political trauma’ undergone by those associated with political artistic organisations such as LEKRA and thus involved in the political and ideological conflicts of Sukarno’s era, tensions which were felt yet more strongly throughout the New Order: ‘It seemed likely to me that they had been influenced by the depoliticisation process that was rapidly affecting Indonesian society’ (1999: 288). The kind of compositional process endorsed in Bali over Bandem’s tenure sees the idea of abstraction both enforced and reversed. Certainly throughout the 1980s and 90s, tabuh kréasi created for the Festival Gong presented the kind of apparently abstract or absolute Balinese music so eulogized by McPhee (1935), with compositions largely disengaged from dance, drama or narrative structures. Indeed, McGraw notes how the tabuh kréasi form maintained a strict adherence to standard gong kebyar orchestration and predominantly employed traditional gong kebyar musical syntax. These works often took themes so abstract as to be meaningless: “love,” “beauty,” “unity,” or purportedly drew inspiration from nature. (2005: 82)

Yet Bandem’s policy at STSI required the theme, often highly programmatic, to be made clear in its musical rendering, and set out to revise the layout of the student skripsi (undergraduate dissertation) accordingly. Under Bandem’s directorship, the skripsi format was formalised with particular emphasis on the statement and explanation of a 168

[non-musical] theme (téma) or concept (konsep), with each student document opening with a discussion of their own thematic choice (see the following chapter for a worked example of the relationship between skripsi and composition). In part, the insertion of a particular rationalised order into the composition process suggests Bandem’s approach was fashioned around a Western model, as mediated by Javanese academia. This is explicit in the Alma M. Hawkins dance choreography model used in almost all performing arts student skripsi, which comprises ‘exploration’ (penjelajahan), ‘improvising’ (improvisasi) and ‘forming’ (pembentukan). Appropriate to the tradition of Java as theoretical intermediary, the text used by Balinese students on campus is an Indonesian translation produced by Javanese scholar Y Hadi Sumandiyo, published in 1975 by ASTI Yogyakarta. However, arguably the principal goal of Bandem’s emphasis on the téma was to cement or close works’ alleged meanings: students became increasingly aware that compositions were expected to reflect and uphold ‘traditional Balinese values’ and that any ambiguous rendering of ‘meaning’ could be misconstrued as potentially disloyal or seditious. Téma was one attempt to break down an oblique relationship between a work’s interpretation and its musical content. Indeed, as the following chapter identifies, despite the fall of the New Order, the importance of substantializing the theme through musical reference (thereby securing a minimal gap for interpretation) remains an important aim in many institutionally-sanctioned works.

The Prakempa Bandem was himself instrumental in authoring theoretical texts which bridged ideas of musical experimentalism, Balinese tradition, and New Order ideals and which, perhaps most importantly, were designed to shape new musical works. Concurrent with developments in Bali’s seven-tone music, Bandem translated and published an edition of the Prakempa, a lontar document which dealt with tonal expansion and Bali’s religious filsafat (philosophy). The text achieves a blend of high-calibre Western theoretical syntax and an extension of the Balinese musical mysticism. Indeed, the work’s careful advocacy of both gamelan music’s development and its preservation helped to settle a debate concerning musical experimentalism and the new gamelan genta pinara pitu and semara dana (seven-tone hybrid ensembles created by I Wayan Beratha in 1983 and 1987). In turn, as discussed in the following chapter, various philosophical and numerological ideas expressed in the text have shaped scores of Balinese compositions since its public release. I first discuss the context of the publication, before assessing the lontar’s provenance and its significant implications for composition practice. 169

The apparent decline of Bali’s classical seven-tone ensemble, the gamelan semar pegulingan saih pitu, had been steadily countered by Bali’s arts academies since the beginning of the New Order, with the creation a new set of seven-tone instruments for KOKAR in 1968 and an additional ensemble produced for ASTI in 1974. 73 In 1980, KOKAR’s group was retuned by Beratha in order to create a tumbuk or common tone to match the school’s gamelan gong kebyar, allowing them to combine into a single hybrid ensemble to perform Beratha’s musical accompaniment to that year’s epic dance-drama sendratari. 74 The success of this dual ensemble prompted Beratha to create a set of instruments which combined the tonal forces of both ensembles, whose gangsa (kebyar’s principal melodic metallophones) include the full semar pegulingan seven-tone range plus a partial series of gong kebyar’s lower tones, later named the gamelan genta pinara pitu.75 However, the lack of lower kebyar tones in the gangsa posed a problem when transferring kebyar works onto the ensemble, limiting its flexibility. In response, Beratha solved the matter in 1987 by extending the range of keys to include the full pitch and tonal range of both semar pegulingan and kebyar groups, creating an ensemble termed the gamelan semara dana. As discussed in detail by McGraw (2000) and Vitale (2002) the creation of new seven-tone ensembles has seen a considerable increase in tonal experimentation. This invention encouraged the kind of structured innovation previously reserved for kebyar and included new possibilities of modulation between patutan, and quotation from other gamelan ensemble repertoire (e.g. gamelan semar pegulingan and angklung): see for instance I Nyoman Windha’s innovative ASTI graduation piece Kindama, composed for genta pinara pitu. In addition, the new semara dana lent itself to seven-tone kréasi works that expanded the conventional modal subsets of semar pegulingan, such as Nyoman Astita’s kréasi style work, Semara Winangun for semara dana. For more kontemporerleaning composers, it has provided a chance to radically expand the tonal possibilities of gamelan composition such as in Dewa Ketut Alit’s Gregel and numerous contemporary ISI student works (see McGraw 2000: 78-80, and Vitale 2002: 37-57). However, such developments were also regarded with uncertainty as to their validity within Balinese

73

See Rai (1996: 11-23) for a detailed account of gamelan semar pegulingan saih pitu ensembles manufactured since 1968. 74

The sendratari, derived from the Indonesian terms seni (art) drama (drama) and tari (dance), was originally created in Java but saw its first Balinese production staged at KOKAR in 1962. The form has gained huge popularity as a spectacle, ideally featuring huge numbers of dancers, musicians and stage effects and a particularly large-scale production is now mounted each year at the Bali Arts Festival. See Bandem and deBoer (1995: 86-88) and Picard (1996b: 143-146) for information concerning the rise of sendratari in Bali. 75

See McGraw (2000) for extensive discussion of Beratha’s creation of the gamelan genta pinara pitu and gamelan semara dana, and for analysis of various works for the ensembles. 170

tradition, and seen as part of a widening, ‘dangerously experimental musical landscape’ (McGraw 2005: 73). Perhaps not coincidentally, Bandem’s esoteric publication concerning seven-tone music also appeared in 1986. The text is the secondary publication and translation of an apparently ‘traditional’ lontar document, and concerns the religious origins and significance of various Balinese gamelan ensembles, not dissimilar in contents to the Aji Gurnita. Produced under the auspices of STSI, it is still one of the most widely circulated and cited texts on the ISI campus and had wide implications for the Balinese musical scene, serving to unite musical innovation with religious conservatism. Both Heimarck (2003: 186-202) and McGraw (2005: 70-83) have considered the document in some detail. Heimarck highlights the edition’s Western scholarly presentation, but suggests the Balinese text itself to be ‘concerned with topics of a traditional nature and does not indicate Western influence’, and states that it affirms ‘close ties between Balinese music and religion’ (2003: 188). Heimarck addresses how the translation might relate to issues of religious reform in Bali since the 1950s, with Bandem’s Indonesian-language translation endeavouring to align Balinese religious ‘tradition’ with Indonesian state requirements (e.g. what she deems a politically judicious rendering of ‘the auspicious Sanskrit mantra’ Om Awigham Astu Nama Siddham into the Indonesian Tuhan Yang Masa Kuasa ‘All Powerful God’) (2003: 188). However, Heimarck presents her argument through the assertion of a mystic, ahistorical Balinese tradition (as encapsulated for her in the original document itself) which must be protected from the corrosive force of the Indonesian government. For Heimarck, the Prakempa’s publication is foremost ‘an important step towards preserving some of the traditional values that underlie Balinese gambelan’ (2003: 202). She states that, the Balinese have maintained their culture through the onslaught of the Dutch colonial forces and the tourist industry, but now the subtle yet powerful demands of the Indonesian republic are challenging their resolve on new and untried levels… Will the Balinese lose the mystical quality of their Hindu-Buddhist texts and rituals, as contained in sacred Sanskrit mantras and manggalas, or will their reforms merely allow them to gain more sympathetic followers throughout the Indonesian archipelago? (2003: 202)

McGraw presents a more critical overview, challenging particularly the idea of ‘traditional universal Balinese conceptions’. He contests the authorship of the text to suggest its contents may well be a more recent work, possibly taken from the notes of I Madé Geria, but inscribed with greater authority through its presentation as an ancient text (2005: 72). McGraw also notes the work’s precise coincidence with the arrival of the gamelan semara dana, suggesting that the text’s focus on seven-tone music and the combining of tonal series is used (and may well have been created) as a ‘justification for

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modern experiments’ (2005: 77). Indeed, the text’s blend of religious esotericism and ambiguous musical reference has potentially been used to forge a sense of connection between Bali’s new flourishing and, some have warned, almost dangerously experimental musical landscape of today and the pre-colonial musical ecology of Bali (2005: 73).

While Beratha’s gamelan genta pinara pitu and semara dana creations seem to lie at the heart of Bandem’s work (the 1986 edition includes a photograph of the genta pinara pitu ensemble), Beratha himself is reticent about any relevant relationship between the lontar and his construction of the new gamelan. Indeed, despite the attempt to suture composition practices and bureaucratic justification, Beratha’s own account of his new gamelan ensembles is resolutely detached from this approach. Returning to Dibia’s account of the idea of Beratha’s notion of the tumbuk as a practical solution to a challenge laid down by his students, Beratha is equally pragmatic about his creation of the semara dana. On being asked about connections between the document and the semara dana, Beratha’s response was concise: ‘Bandem made use of the Prakempa… [on Beratha creating the ensemble] there was already that book. It was just writing... but for which note was which, it was nothing other than it fitted’ (Prakempa penggunakan Bandem… sudah ada buku itu. Cuma tulisan itu… tapi nada yang mana, semata-mata cocok’) (pers. comm. 2007). However, while Beratha may see his own works as dislocated from the Prakempa, as the following chapter discusses, a large number of contemporary composers now draw sincerely upon the text as an impetus to create new music: despite the text’s potentially dubious provenance and motivation, a range of contemporary Balinese works have been practically informed by the Prakempa. As such, the carefully orchestrated blend of Balinese, Indonesian and international ideals which defines Bandem’s text, has become newly animate through contemporary musical practices.

Concluding Thoughts The production of téori has thus been tied to a complex series of political, cultural and religious concerns. The chapter has traced the construction and application of the idea of Balinese téori from its roots in the Independence movement, through its development amid the growth of the new Indonesian state, concluding with discussion of its increasingly sophisticated use within New Order cultural policy (also considering distinctly Balinese responses to this policy therein). Téori can be seen as a means of projecting the progressive and modern onto Balinese musical practices, while simultaneously reifying Bali’s ‘classical’ culture and religious doctrine amid political uncertainty. It is evident from the routine, decontextualized usage of these theoretical 172

models in student skripsi and faculty laporan penelitian (research reports) that much of téori often operates predominantly as a score-marker, an empty signifier to demarcate academic authority. However, while téori may regularly be dislocated from the practices it claims to describe, this gap has enabled those positioned as enunciators of téori to reframe musical practice in a range of strategic ways. In addition, as enacted through the work of Bandem, governmental demands placed on Bali’s arts institutions have also seen a reverse scenario where musical practice becomes increasingly restructured according to the simulacrum of téori itself. Indeed, while téori may have been principally a product and enabler of various cultural and political policies, many musicians’ relationships with these concepts––both in discussion and in compositional applications––now involve a more dynamic interaction between the practice of making music and of making téori. The following chapter considers Bali’s situation post-Suharto, looking at the issue of representation within contemporary practices of gamelan composition. I focus specifically on how notions of the ‘Balinese’ and the ‘non-Balinese’ have been represented in a range of contemporary works, considering composers’ responses to ideas of téori, and examining some of the ways téori may currently be used to support, reframe, stifle and inspire new musical works.

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Chapter Six Inside Out and Outside In: Representations of the Balinese and the Non-Balinese in Contemporary Composition on Bali The previous chapter considered the ways in which téori enabled Balinese musicians and scholars to articulate a range of incommensurate cultural practices. Téori was largely dislocated from the music-making it claimed to represent, theoreticians drawing instead on models derived from a range of other cultures and scholarly approaches. Despite this dislocation, the New Order saw the gradual reshaping of institutionally-sanctioned composition through these representations. This chapter examines interaction between certain composition practices and issues of representation in greater detail, here in the context of post-Suharto Bali following the fall of the New Order government in 1998. What changes have the cultural directives accompanying Balinese music-making undergone? How do the era’s political and cultural changes relate to the ways Balinese have since created, imagined and talked about gamelan music? How do Balinese composers frame their works—through both verbal commentary and musical devices—to manage certain tensions currently at work in Bali? The chapter presents a brief overview of some of the key events to shape Bali’s political landscape during the so-called era of reformasi, and sketches the major musical developments to occur over this period. I subsequently examine a selection of Balinese contemporary works for gamelan which I consider particularly illustrative of two major themes currently animating much contemporary musical composition in Bali: the assertion and construction of notional ‘Balinese-ness’ (kebalian) and the increased use of ‘extra-Balinese’ musical resources in composition. How does the former compare and contrast with New Order era concerns to express kebalian through representations of Balinese music-making? How might composers consider it to be achieved? What constitute extra-Balinese resources for Balinese composers? The musical resources framed in this chapter as ‘extra-Balinese’ range from the insertion of specific nonBalinese musical quotations, impressionistic evocations of another (musical) culture and various applications of non-Balinese theoretical precepts. The use of extra-Balinese resources has been present as a long-standing compositional technique. The insertion of Javanese melodies, Western meter and other extra-Balinese playing techniques is well documented in the development of the kréasi baru, and materials external to Bali have been a major component in the development of Indonesia’s contemporary composition scene. However, in light of Bali’s heightened interaction with the rest of the world during this era, what are the ramifications of Bali’s new intensity of cross-cultural musical interactions? How might fresh assertions of kebalian in musical composition relate to this 174

renewed enthusiasm for ‘cross-cultural’ contact? How (and why) do Balinese musicians variously frame, publicize or veil these associations in their works? The complex issue of outside musical resources and ‘foreign influence’— particularly in Balinese and Javanese music-making and contemporary composition—has concerned a number of writers since the 1970s.76 However, rather than attempt to untangle or intercept the rather hazy idea of ‘influence’, I draw on Miller’s idea of ‘ethnological valence’ which withdraws attention from the object borrowed, appropriated or assimilated, but emphasizes the ‘logic of the way that ethnicity is perceived or attributed to things’ (Miller 2006: 5). Crucial to my engagement with these compositions is the idea that this ‘valence’ is not a fixed entity. The meaning associated with or ascribed to a particular borrowing is fluid and contingent, and may be reconfigured as composer, audience or circumstance prescribes, possibly well after a piece has been crafted, disseminated and performed. Rather than attempt to formulate a single theory to explain or negate the business of ‘foreign influence’ in modern Indonesian composition, I address the circumstances specific to each composition and composer under discussion. My study shall thus focus not only on providing musicological analysis of techniques found in certain Balinese contemporary works, but will consider the ways composers and various other Balinese commentators have subsequently represented such moves in conversation and in publication. This builds towards discussion of how these composition practices may be situated within the broader context of Bali’s post-Suharto landscape. A Brief Account of Post-Suharto Bali Following increasingly mobilized political opposition and the humiliating crush of the Asian monetary crisis in 1997, Suharto resigned from office in spring 1998. The New Order had fallen and Indonesia’s promised reformasi notionally began. 77 Yet despite over a decade passing since Suharto’s fall, the lay of the land in terms of Bali’s political and social policies and perspectives remains uncertain. While the breakdown of the New Order saw a devolution of Jakartan power, the 1999 decentralization laws failed to deliver effective regional autonomy and have resulted only in sustained confusion and fragmented administrative control in Bali (see Schulte Nordholt 2007). In addition, the era has also been marked by the need for Balinese to address two unsettling and inescapable sets of occurrences: the first being the necessity to reflect upon the

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For discussion of contemporary composition and the issue of ‘foreign influence’ in Indonesia see Diamond (1992), Warde (2003), McGraw (2005 and 2009) and Miller (2006). Becker (1972, 1980), Sumarsam (1992) and Sutton (1996) address specific issues of borrowing and ‘influence’ in Javanese gamelan including notation, amplification and conceptual ideologies of music-making. 77

For accounts of the breakdown of Suharto’s New Order and the onset of alleged political reform, see Budiman, Hatley and Kingsbury (1999), Vickers (2001) and O’Rourke (2002). 175

consequences that tourism (as managed increasingly by Jakarta-based investors) has visibly had on the island's economy and society; the second, the impact of the two bombing campaigns and its dissolution of Bali’s long-cherished image of stability and serenity. Both these events have, in different ways, brought home the extent to which Bali had now become part of a ‘global’ world, for good or for ill. Balinese attempts to articulate these issues through religion have often been noted (see for instance, Couteau (2003), Allen and Palermo (2005) and Fox (2007)), but how might performance and its representation be implicated as ways of articulating these concerns? This set of circumstances comprises a very particular backdrop to Balinese contemporary composition, notably in musical engagement with certain non-Balinese resources and with ideas of ‘Balineseness’. Concerning Bali’s position on the ‘global stage’, musical production is a powerful strategy for managing tensions between the oftperceived corrosive and invasive forces of international interaction in Bali (often termed ‘globalisasi’) and its apparently benevolent counterpart: gentle yet profitable cosmopolitanism (frequently labeled the ‘global’).78 Gamelan has emerged as a commodity in maintaining apparent Balinese cultural identity in the face of encroaching globalisasi, while it is also available for flotation as a Balinese asset in the global marketplace—an agreeable and profitable subject of academic study, performance promotion, and, increasingly, collaborative and cross-cultural composition. However, globalisasi’s incursion has been deemed further pressing by the bombings of 2002 and 2005 and the corresponding rise of the ‘Balinese identity movement’ of Ajeg Bali (often glossed as ‘Bali stand strong’). Headed up by the Bali Post Media Group, the movement has made strident calls for a ‘return’ to Balinese tradition in the face of perceived external threats, principally from foreign immigrants and Jakarta-based investors. As will be discussed below, many contemporary works (including those engaged with extra-Balinese musical resources) show some of the complex ramifications of Ajeg Bali-tinged rhetoric, itself bound into issues of Bali’s global interaction. Writers have suggested that the values endorsed and propagated by texts and speeches which fall under the rubric of Ajeg Bali are an echo of New Order policy, in their appeals for a return to traditional customs and values, a preservation of Hindu faith, and, as stated in the Bali Post in 2004, the goal of achieving ‘balanced development’ (terbangan secara seimbang) (cited in Allen and Palermo 2005: 6). Indeed, the movement’s invocation of ajeg (often translated as ‘steady’) suggests reiteration of late-colonial anthropological representations of ‘steady-state Bali’, in turn re-conjured during the New Order in terms of balance and harmony (keseimbangan). However, recent work by Fox on religious heterogeneity in

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See Connor and Vickers (2003) for an examination of ideas of local and global citizenship in Bali during the economic crash and in the early post-Suharto era.

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Bali questions the notion that Ajeg Bali stands as a straightforward replication of earlier configurations of Balinese religion, culture, and tradition, re-disseminated by the mass media on Bali (2007). Fox proposes much contemporary scholarship has ignored the critical category of mediation, the precise channels by which Ajeg Bali has been created and voiced. In turn, this has seen scholarly representations uncritically presume a continuity between past and present, negating what Fox terms the ‘irreducible disjunctures’ which Ajeg Bali has attempted to suture (2007: 2, 20). While the majority of current studies acknowledge Bali’s media as a powerful force in mobilizing the movement, writers have nonetheless presumed Ajeg Bali to be formed around a rather steady core. Such accounts either propose there to be a stable traditional frame of reference for ‘Balinese values’, or, trace ideas of kebalian from colonial times to the present (with particular reference to New Order policies) to manufacture a coherent, albeit historized, set of attributes which settle to produce ‘Balineseness’. Rather, I suggest Balinese commentary on a musical work’s Balineseness (or otherwise) during this era demonstrates how composers are subject to a set of strictures which are in fact distinct to the period. Accordingly, I will address with care the nuances of these new, if often cumulative, formulations of what such ‘Balineseness’ might entail in certain contemporary works. What then are the particular strictures under which Balinese composers are working in the post-Suharto period? How do they compare and contrast to the policies and expectations managing contemporary composition produced during the New Order? What role do the assertion of kebalian and the use of extra-Balinese resources play in this new landscape? How are structures of patronage affected by changes in governance and what impact do these changes have on the contents and commentary surrounding new works for Balinese gamelan? Before examining a series of compositions in detail, I sketch a preliminary outline of some of Bali’s musical developments since the fall of the New Order to highlight some general trends in the era’s musical production in Bali. An Outline of Balinese Musical Developments since 1998 I shall consider changes in Bali’s musical production since reformasi with particular reference to the two major realms of exploratory composition in Bali: tabuh kréasi as created for the Festival Gong Kebyar competition, and Bali’s small but vibrant musik kontemporer (‘contemporary music’) scene.79 My survey is by no means complete: I merely offer an overview of some of the more distinct musicological developments by way of context and foundation to following individual work analyses. 79

See Sandino (2008) for a more in depth musicological summary of recent structural developments in tabuh kréasi. McGraw (2005 and 2009) offers detailed study of Bali’s musik kontemporer since the 1970s.

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It is widely acknowledged that throughout the 1990s, composers of gong kebyar tabuh kréasi moved towards greater structural complexity and demonstrated increased use of materials outside the longer-standing parameters of ‘Balinese music’ (Tenzer 2000, McGraw 2005, Sandino 2008). However, following 1998 a fresh wave of compositional daring along these particular lines has emerged within the tabuh kréasi form. Indeed, without reference to any external social events Sandino (2008) divides his analyses of tabuh kréasi works into the eras 1988-1998 and 1999-2007. Sandino justifies this division through musicological observation alone. He notes how a number of adventurous emerging musical practices in the 1990s tabuh kréasi—which would ‘usually appear locally within an otherwise conservatively structured section’—began to take hold across a wide range of compositions since 1999 and increasingly obscured the textural and formal qualities of Beratha’s tabuh kréasi mould, as maintained since the 1960s (2008: 54). Among others, these techniques include the use of a full, densely-textured melody or cycle within the gineman section, the addition of suling ‘pemero’ tones outside of the gong kebyar mode of selisir, and the insertion of ternary or odd-numbered (ganjil) beat cycles in the work’s bapang section (see Sandino 2008: 54-65). In part, this post-1998 period sees the normalizing of such features: the shock on the ear of non-selisir suling tones in a kebyar work, heard as startling innovation in Windha’s Jagra Parwata (1991) is now a familiar and anticipated composer’s device. However, the post-Suharto period has also seen the advent of a new enthusiasm for music adventure, not least as since c.1998 a new generation of composers has been granted more prestigious opportunities to compose. Gianyar has for the most part retained the services of the prolific composer and ISI faculty member I Nyoman Windha for its Festival Gong Kebyar tabuh kréasi entries, but academy-trained younger composers have increasingly been commissioned to compose for the contest—perhaps cutting their teeth on composing a region’s fragmen tari (a short section of a sendratari) accompaniment or Sandhya Gita (choral composition with gamelan accompaniment) before graduating to create a tabuh kréasi entry in a following year. In turn, the period has seen a range of other developments, including the increased popularity of inserting Western theoretical precepts such as ideas of harmony (using closer, non-ngempat intervals to construct layers of tones as ‘chords’), counterpoint (specifically canon, as discussed below) and the occasional use of instruments drawn from outside gamelan gong kebyar. Bali’s musik kontemporer scene, while in personnel a relatively tiny group, is nonetheless a potent centre of musical creation. Performances created for ISI examination recitals (ujian) and sponsored or commissioned by the PKB continue to explore a range of musical resources. These resources include instrument combinations, extended playing techniques, extra-Balinese music theoretical precepts and more dramatic, ‘conceptual’ 178

performance styles. Detailed examination of some of the issues of musical borrowings and representation will be given close consideration in my composition analyses below. However, a general composition trend (present since the 1980s) of drawing on Western pop idioms and instruments has extended to Western classic compositional techniques. In addition, the use of so-called etnik (‘ethnic’) music, in terms of instruments and abstract musical resources, has grown substantially in popularity.80 Many recent ISI recital works demonstrate this growth, examples including I Gedé Arsana’s Moha for keyboard, electric guitar, erhu (Chinese spiked fiddle) and instruments from the gamelan gong luang; I Wayan Sudirana’s Kembang Rampé (‘Mixed flowers’) (2002) for mandolin, erhu and kecapi (a plucked zither, usually found in West Java) or I Ketut Gedé Rudita’s accompaniment (iringan tari) for kontemporer dance Wastu (Hope) which featured didgeridoo and djembe drum (2006). ‘Mixed’ ensembles have been in use in Bali since Astita’s Kembang Rampai [sic] (‘Mixed flowers’) (1978), but the period has seen continued exploration in this field. Notable examples include combining pélog and slendro instrument sets (see I Made Arnawa’s Pendro (2004) which combines pélog and sléndro tones to make a single ‘pendro’ scale composed from a mixture of kebyar (‘pélog’) and angklung (‘sléndro’) instruments), and mixing Bali’s older and rarer ritual ensembles, such as gamelan selonding and gong luang with more popular and widespread ensembles (see I Ketut Mudarsa’s 2006 ISI ujian piece Awang-awang (‘Atmosphere’) for gamelan selonding and gendér wayang).81 Experimental works exploring more ‘conceptual’ performance techniques have continued. While theatrical modes of performance have been established in Bali for some time though works such as I Ketut Gedé Asnawa’s Kosong (‘Empty’ or ‘Zero’) (1984), the period sees a digression from theatricality based around the evocation of ‘traditional Balinese scenes’ to the exploration of more controversial themes and materials, including 80

McGraw’s discussion of musik etnik in contemporary Balinese composition (2005, 2009) highlights variety in the usage and understanding of the term. He suggests the idea of etnik to have been first in use on Bali in the 1980s in conjunction with the new musik kontemporer scene, and proposes it to connote three types of ‘ethnic’ (musical) resources: firstly, cultural elements borrowed from non-Balinese (and, I would add, specifically non-Western) sources, such as instruments like the tabla or kecapi, or abstracted musical elements such as Sasak (Lombok) melodies or Taiko drumming patterns which are translated onto Balinese instruments; Secondly, etnik is used to refer to Balinese subcultures which do not inhabit Bali island-wide, such as gamelan selonding from the East or gamelan jegog from the West, McGraw noting that etnik in such a context is not used by members of the subcultures themselves, but from those ‘in positions of cultural hegemony centred around STSI Denpasar’; Thirdly, etnik refers to ‘a category of consumption, usually foreign consumption’, where the form is employed self-consciously as form of advertisement ‘directed towards the market, specifically towards the tourist economy’ (McGraw 2005: 66). 81

It is important to note that Arnawa is explicit that his work was much shaped by his time studying for a Masters (S2) in Solo, Central Java, and particularly through discussion with Javanese musician-scholar Suka Hardjana (pers. comm. 2007). It should also be noted that there is a longer Javanese precedent for combining slendro and pélog ensemble instruments, both traditionally in the gamelan kodok ngorek (‘croaking frog’), and in experimental works since the early 1970s (see Diamond 1992). 179

works using junk percussion and the exploration of sexual themes. Sang Nyoman Arsawijaya’s Geräusch (German for ‘noise’) (2006) produced for his ISI ujian, presents as a work of fabulous iconoclasm. The work’s climax features the composer applying a hammer and furiously loud electric grinder to what is widely held as the gamelan’s most sacred component, a gong. However, the performance whipped certain ISI faculty members into such moral outrage that subsequent years have been subject to considerably stricter censure in their production, although other more liberal performance events and spaces, such as I Wayan Dibia’s Festival of Contemporary Music and Dance at his Singapadu GEOKS venue, continue to play host to controversial musical performances. Finally, loosely within the kontemporer field, recent years have seen a move towards creating new and permanent ensembles, engineered with carefully organised or flexible tuning and instrument combinations to allow new forms of kolaborasi (collaboration). A bold new example is found in ISI faculty member I Nyoman Windha’s Gamelan Jes Fusion (2006), a seven-tone ensemble comprised of gamelan jegog and semar pegulingan (Jegog + Semar pegulingan = Jes) instruments but also featuring several non-gamelan instruments including bass guitar, piano, djembe, viola and flute, and performing a range of newly composed upbeat works based on a range of cited styles including ‘Salsa’, ‘Blues’ and ‘Pop’. How might this range of developments be situated within broader arts policy and funding in Bali over the era? In general and rather simplistic terms, it is possible to view the increased structural freedom in kebyar and radicalism in kontemporer works as corresponding to a release of the governmental control discussed in Chapter Five. Meanwhile the various uses of Western and ‘etnik’ materials can be plotted as musical experimentation in the context of an era of globalisasi or ‘going global’. Yet other accounts suggest that Balinese have been subject to a new set of pressures in managing and funding many of the island’s performing arts, which may also have shaped such musicological changes. For example, Noszlopy notes a sharp decrease in available resources for Bali’s official arts projects during early reformasi, which in 1999 resulted in cutting the length of the Bali Arts Festival (PKB) by a week to save on funds, while I Wayan Dibia (director of STSI 1997-2002) recounts a sudden and corresponding lack of financial support for the school (Noszlopy 2002: 126, Dibia 2009 pers. comm.). What have been the Balinese strategies to manage these new financial pressures? I suggest a twofold approach to this problem has come to characterize certain strands of the period’s musical production. The assertion of unique ‘Balinese cultural value’ (as distinct from Indonesia) has been promoted with renewed vigour in Balinese music. To increase tourist revenues amid the financial and political turbulence following Suharto’s fall, Putra and Hitchcock note how Bali worked to publicize further cultural 180

separation from Indonesia (2007). They cite a Balinese tourism spokesperson’s instruction that ‘consulates and embassies must differentiate between Bali and the rest of Indonesia’ (in Spillus 1998: 2, cited in Putra and Hitchcock and 2007: 111). Compounded by attempts to reinvigorate Bali’s global image following the Bali bombings, such policy has induced the increased promotion of ‘uniquely Balinese’ tourist performances: well illustrated by the fashion for ‘colossal kecak’ [vocal chant] e.g. the ‘Kecak 5000’ in 2006 performed by (five-thousand) Balinese chanters outside Tanah Lot temple. Meanwhile, as will be discussed below, the annual PKB/Festival Gong Kebyar contest has seen ensemble composers and managers increasingly encouraged to promulgate ideas of ‘Balinese tradition’ in contest entries (see Noszlopy 2002: Chapter Six). In addition, funding from abroad became an increasingly important means of securing patronage for music-making (through sponsorship, tours, recording contracts and residencies). These sources have been accessed not only through Balinese engagement with extra-Balinese forms, as illustrated above in much ISI musik kontemporer, but also through restatement of Bali’s own cultural value, here promoted on the global stage. World Bank funding for Indonesian academies in a series of grants termed ‘DUE batch’ (‘development of undergraduate education’) has enabled Balinese students and faculty to produce a range of kontemporer works, but Balinese faculty also placed increased focus on rekonstruksi (reconstruction) of ‘lost’, ‘classic’ Balinese repertory, notably légong. This blend of concerns in managing Bali’s arts funding in difficult times is neatly articulated in various STSI/ISI disseminated texts: see, for instance Balinese anthropologist I Wayan Geriya’s 2001 article ‘Creativity and Endurance of Balinese Arts in the Midst of Rapid Communication Between Ethnicity and Race [Boundaries ]’ (Kreativitas dan Ketahanan Kesenian Bali di Tengah Laju Komunikasi Lintas Etnik dan Lintas Bangsa) in the STSI Denpasar arts journal Mudra. Geriya stresses the importance of maintaining Bali’s ‘traditional art’ and continuing to strengthen the ‘Balinization movement’ (gerak Balinisasi), while considering the various ways in which Balinese arts might be encouraged to ‘go international’ (Geriya 2001: 29, 26). Once more, performance and arts education on Bali appears driven by rather contradictory mandates. On these grounds, contemporary composers’ representation of works as embodiments of traditional Balinese philosophies may have more complex implications than just a ‘continuation’ of colonial and New Order cultural policy. Meanwhile, the framing of non-Balinese materials in Balinese works may be inspired not only by curiosity and exploration, but by broader concerns of patronage and the corresponding management of Bali’s global status. Before assessing these issues through worked musical examples, I shall first consider how Western scholarship has approached musical representation and issues of cross-cultural borrowing in Indonesian composition. 181

Return to Representation Much of this thesis has been concerned with the issue of representation and I continue this theme in my consideration of recently composed works, looking particularly at the incorporation of apparently ‘extra-Balinese’ elements featured, specifically Western classical and Japanese/Okinawan musics. The issues of musical appropriation and musical ‘hybridity’ have been the subject of ethnomusicological deliberation for some time. Kartomi’s work on musical culture-contact, particularly between musics of Western and non-Western descent (1981), is a central source and underlines the need for new perspectives and terminology in engaging with the processes and products of certain musical interactions. Kartomi carefully addresses the range of metaphors that have been applied to such ‘mixed musics’, noting how processes of contact have been articulated through analogies drawn from an unusual and potentially degrading array of disciplines including agriculture and animal husbandry (‘hybrid’) and botany (musical ‘transplantation’ and ‘cross-fertilization’) (1981: 228 ).82 Kartomi tentatively endorsed the terms transculturation, synthesis or syncretism as more positive, but suggests they be applied only to processes or intercultural contact not to the varying types of results. In doing so, she places a much needed emphasis on musical practices as opposed to musical objects. The question of scale or scope also emerges, and Kartomi suggests that transculturation denotes the process whereby a group of people adopt new ‘organising and conceptual or ideological principles—musical and extra-musical—as opposed to small discrete alien traits’ (1981: 224). Crafting a distinction between Bali’s intercultural contact with the West as manifest in ‘organising and conceptual or ideological principles’ or in ‘small discrete traits’ is nigh-on impossible, given that all Western attempts to engage with an ‘original Balinese music’ and with Balinese notions of performance have been formulated simultaneous with, and informed by, highly-charged cultural and political interaction, as Part One examined. In light of this, and amid a new complexity in Bali’s national and ‘global’ relations following the fall of the New Order, examining these contemporary musical interactions is complex. However, an assessment of current accounts by Western scholars on ‘foreign influence’ in contemporary Indonesian works yields a different

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Despite the widespread citation of Kartomi’s analysis in ethnomusicological studies of musical ‘culture contact’, choices of terminology in the field continue to be illuminating regarding scholarly position. Allen’s work on vocal jive in 1950s South Africa examines how musicians’ eclectic borrowing may have been an important strategy for generating commercial success and political efficacy, also stressing more generally how ‘contemporary African realities are addressed and expressed through the selective appropriation of elements of foreign cultures’ (2003: 228, 241). However, Allen notes that contemporary scholars have referred to these processes in a range of more or less pejorative ways, including “hybridization” (Comaroff 1985), “shock absorption” (Diawara 1997: 46), and most strikingly of all “cannibalization” (Jewsiewicki 1997: 103) (all cited in Allen 2003: 246). 182

emphasis. Writers are open to the question of ‘foreign influence’ and usually provide colonial and post-colonial histories of foreign interaction while upholding, for instance, Becker’s position that ‘influence’ in Javanese gamelan music must be defined more broadly to include issues of notation, technology and Western conceptual models and not ‘limited in interpretations to mean only simplistic adoption’ (1972: 3). Nonetheless, recent work has been focused on reassessing the specific potency of ‘Western influence’. Writers have discussed the issue that Indonesian experimentalism seems to share a great many characteristics with Western avant-garde composition (Diamond 1992, Miller 2006, McGraw 2005, 2009). However, commentators have rightfully asserted that this does not betray a straightforward ‘Westernization’. Miller terms ‘unqualified invocations of “Western influence”’ to be an ‘insidious problem’ (2006: 2). McGraw (2009) likewise challenges the notion of ‘Westernization’ as an explanation for the development of musik kontemporer, drawing on Mitter’s work on Indian Modernism to suggest ‘influence’ has been used as an oppressive epistemic tool in studying ‘Western art’ in the ‘non-Western world’, a paradigm which condemns the artwork whichever way it turns. McGraw cites Mitter’s observation that ‘if the product is too close to its original source, it reflects a slavish mentality; if on the other hand, the imitation is imperfect, it represents a failure’ (Mitter 2007: 7, cited in McGraw 2009: 129). Seeing musik kontemporer to be caught in this trap, McGraw describes how Indonesian experimentalism has been criticized by Western and Indonesian commentators as derivative, inferior or even inaccurate versions of Western forms of composition, rather than as authentic expressions in and of themselves (2009: 129).

I am in full agreement that discussing musik kontemporer as the inferior product of a single, abstract processual agent (‘Westernization’) is an inadequate framework. Indeed, McGraw states that theorists have ‘typically used “Westernization” (or globalization) rather than “representation” as a model to discuss change in local musics’, and proposes that by looking at how Balinese musicians themselves represent alternative musical material, the analyst then ‘accounts for composer’s agency in the creative process’ (2009: 128). While I very much support the notion of representation as a model, I would question if the model functions with adequate strength in these analyses. Rather than address the significant power implications of any representation, the article moves to a discussion of ‘creative misunderstanding’ in the usage of non-Balinese materials by Balinese composers—an interesting passage in itself, but one which, by my account, sidesteps the political issues of Bali’s cultural production amid contemporary global relations. McGraw discusses the types of partial understanding of non-Balinese precepts often held by composers and draws on Lipsitz’s theorization of ‘intercultural 183

miscommunication in music’ (1994) to suggest that such ‘creative mishearings’ have resulted in new and musically exciting works, and have undermined what might have been a presumed superiority of the (Western or otherwise) source material. Writing of Ida Bagus Widnyana’s Trimbat (a conflation of the Balinese ‘tri’ (three) and ‘embat’ (tuning)), McGraw discusses how Widnyana’s partial understanding of Western harmonic structures led the composer to experiment and produce ‘a radically innovative sound within the gamelan, creating a texture that only vaguely recalls Western tonal harmony’ (2009: 131). McGraw suggests this partial understanding—of not only Western but also Indian, Javanese or Japanese musics, for instance—allows Balinese musicians to ‘forge connections, comparisons and appreciations, placing musics that would not normally be considered equivalents on a level playing field’, de-valorizing what might be the presumed hegemony of certain musical forms (2009: 130). This same point is made by Miller, who also notes how the kind of musical curiosity characteristic of kontemporer composers ‘manifests in an openness to whatever music they happen to encounter, rather than the privileging of a specific Western-oriented canon’ (Miller 2006: 5). While McGraw’s article is a highly informative musicological study, I suggest the assertion that Balinese are engaged in representative practices when they transform or recontentualize a musical phrase, theory, or instrument external to Bali, raises further questions. How do these activities relate to the complex field of global relations, systems of patronage and local expectations in which contemporary Balinese composers may find themselves? McGraw states insightfully that ‘a central impetus for new modes of composition in Bali has been rooted in the need to represent and come to terms with an ever-increasing array of others’ (2009: 138). However, within the musical analyses presented, this ‘coming to terms’ is described in terms of rather abstract musical adventures, or as a heroic surmounting of the cultural hegemony to which Bali has been subject. I question such an approach, to suggest that critical to the value of the model of ‘representation’ (in Goodman’s sense) is that any representation must considered ‘representation as’: an agent represents something as something else, to a subject, on an occasion and for a purpose (1968: 27-31). Thus, analysis of representation should focus not on evaluating the finished object but must consider it a series of practices performed on a given occasion, which must accordingly be carefully situated. If we are to ascribe these composition practices as acts of ‘representation’, the analyst must assess what material has been selected for transformation, and often more crucially, what has been omitted. As will be discussed below, the implications of these choices in Balinese compositions are of some significance when discussed in the context of composer patronage and Bali’s global relations.

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McGraw shows keen critical engagement with Balinese cultural politics elsewhere in the text. However, his account tends not to pinpoint specific representative musical practice as purposive action in the broader context of Bali’s political situation, because the text does not always address precisely what these cultural others are being represented as. In doing so, a critical component and implication of representative practice—as a powerful way of shaping ‘realities’—is omitted. Additionally, I would that argue that not only are the musicological processes clearly part of this ‘representation as’ process, but that here ideas of representation are doubly complex as the issues hinge not only on how material might be recontextualized, transformed, or eliminated within a composition, but on how subsequent or concurrent Balinese (and non-Balinese) verbal accounts have represented them. As discussed below, the disparities that emerge between various accounts highlight the different emphases and standpoints held by creators and evaluators. These disparities demonstrate how any representation is dependent on its context and on the modes of reference at work in makers and audiences, some of which may be determined deliberately, to deliberate ends. By considering all these processes as examples of ‘representation as’, in the following composition and discussion analyses I shall place due emphasis on how and why composers engaged in such composition practices have sought to reframe certain musics in certain ways, for certain audiences, and how, why, by whom and for whom these practices have subsequently and variously been verbally represented. The latter collection of voices is particularly important as such accounts often determine the modes of reference through which audiences can experience a work and so delimit other possibilities. How musical process is voiced (and by whom) is important, for, as discussed above, the types of association or signification assigned to Balinese musical performance have often proved far from innocent of political manoeuvring. Thus, while my study continues to provide scope for the kind of composer agency which many contemporary commentators endorse, I do not wish to do so at the expense of addressing the very real, pressing and often contradictory tensions which I suggest may shape the work of many Balinese musicians. Rather, I aim to address these representational practices—both musical and verbal—with due sensitivity and awareness of Bali’s increasingly complex socio-political situation and of how music-making may once more be a powerful strategy in managing some of these tensions. In order to address these issues, I consider in detail four contemporary works by three Balinese composers. Each work reflects one or more of the issues discussed above in the composer’s integration of extra-Balinese musical material and/or declarations of kebalian. Critical to composers’ engagement with these themes is each composition’s context of creation and performance: the works selected thus also present some of the 185

range in modern composition performance platforms, including a PKB concert, a foreign university residency, an ISI examination and the annual Festival Gong Kebyar contest. My analysis accordingly focuses on how the expectations and constraints particular to each work’s circumstances of production may have impacted on the pieces and on the composers’ subsequent framing of works. 83

Composition and Commentary Analyses Bapang and Windu Sara by I Wayan Sinti (CD Tracks 1 and 2) I begin with discussion of two works (Bapang and Windu Sara) by the esteemed and established Balinese composer, I Wayan Sinti, which illustrate issues of extra-Balinese ‘borrowing’, assertions of kebalian, and the role of composer commentary in framing works’ significance, all with particular piquancy. In turn, strong connections emerge between these musical and verbal representations and the debut performance context of both works: a North American university (Windu Sara) and a well-publicized performance at the PKB (Bapang). The pieces were produced for Sinti’s newly created gamelan siwa nada, an ensemble featuring specially-made bamboo and bronze instruments derived from gamelan gambang and pelégongan respectively and tuned to a highly unusual nine-tone scale.84 The ensemble was manufactured in America during Sinti’s professional residency in 2005 at the University of Washington, Seattle and the group performed works from the

83

Owing to lack of space here, Appendix 2 includes more detailed plans of each of the four pieces analysed, with corresponding points in the recordings noted. 84

The tuning of nine tones to the octave was previously unheard of in Balinese gamelan. The ninetone instruments of the ensemble include: single pairs of bronze gangsa jongkok, calung and jegog, each with nine keys; two pairs of bamboo gambang (also occasionally referred to as rindik in rehearsals) in higher and lower octaves, each with nine keys (but keyed from tones 5-4); a single 20-keyed bamboo gambang named the cili functioning as a melodic leader; and a number of specially-made suling (bamboo flutes). In addition the gamelan also uses regular forms of Balinese kendang drums (including different sets for krempengan and gupekan hand-drumming styles), gong, kempur, kemong, kempli, gentorak (shaken bell-tree), ceng-ceng cymbals and rebab (spiked fiddle). To provide an idea of the ensemble’s pitch resources and to make sense of later transcriptions, the chart below aligns gangsa jongkok keys with Western tuning (approximately) as follows: 1

2

Eb E [D] [Eb]

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

F

G

Ab [A]

Bb

Cb

C

Db

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gamelan angklung and pelégongan repertoires.85 In addition, Windu Sara was the group’s first original work, created by Sinti and performed by the composer and students and staff at the university. The work notably employs a Western classical melody in its central section: the theme from the slow movement of Dvořák’s New World Symphony. Following Sinti’s return to Bali, the Seattle group planned a trip to Bali in 2007 and Sinti manufactured a second siwa nada ensemble, having applied for and obtained a prestigious PKB performance for the group. For this second premiere, Sinti composed another new work entitled Bapang, which makes close reference to an Okinawan song (Kunjan Jintoyo). This performance was given not only by Sinti and the Seattle group, but the ensemble also comprised a number of experienced Balinese musicians of Sinti’s acquaintance plus several other Western musicians on Bali (the author included). The group performed to an equally international audience at the PKB. The colourful circumstances of the ensemble and compositions raise a number of questions. How and why did Sinti musically re-present these two melodies within his new gamelan compositions? How did he verbally frame his choice of resources and their musical representation within the work? How might the particular circumstances surrounding the production and performance of the works (and indeed the new gamelan ensemble) have played out in Sinti’s approach to these compositions? In turn, how do the compositions and Sinti’s commentary relate to broader issues of patronage, Bali’s global relations and the need to assert kebalian in contemporary Balinese performance? The gamelan siwa nada ensemble comprises an unusual breadth of instrumentation and tonal resources. This wide range of tones allows the gamelan to perform renditions of works associated with variously tuned other Balinese groups, including angklung (in ‘sléndro’) and pelégongan (‘pélog selisir’) works, while the scale was also formulated to allow for incorporation of materials outside Bali, including Western diatonic and Japanese/Okinawan pentatonic music.86 The ensemble must be understood in the context of another gamelan created by Sinti in 1994, the ‘inclusive’ ensemble named gamelan manika santi (‘jewel for peace’) which combined newlycrafted instruments characteristic of a range of extant Balinese gamelan ensembles. These instruments were tuned to a carefully structured seven-tone scale which allowed the group to play the repertoire of wide-ranging Balinese styles (with various additional instruments) including rarer archaic forms such as gamelan gambang, caruk and gong luang as well as gamelan angklung, batel, gendér wayang, gambuh, semar pegulingan 85 86

These works were Segara Madu and Lotring’s Liar Samas’ respectively.

In relation to expanding Indonesian tonal systems, see Weintraub (2001) for an interesting account of Sundanese (West Javanese) mixed-laras (tuning) groups—including a seventeen-tone gamelan—produced during the New Order. 187

and gong kebyar. The construction of manika santi’s tuning was based upon Sinti’s research into various renowned Balinese village groups and calculated so that the group could comfortably perform this variety of repertoires. In creating gamelan siwa nada Sinti moved away from a predominantly preservational agenda. Sinti aimed instead to produce a group capable of playing not only Balinese gamelan genres but also able to realise Sinti’s wish ‘to transfer music of the world’ (ingin mentransfer musik of the world), achieved primarily through the extended tuning flexibility of the nine-tone scale (pers. comm. 2007). This process of ‘transferring’ is demonstrated in both works to be analysed: Bapang references an Okinawan sung melody while Windu Sara draws on a passage of Dvořák. I examine below how Sinti chose to represent these musical resources, looking at the manner by which they were domesticated through being transformed for gamelan usage (particularly rhythmic and metric arrangement, approaches to tonality, and to melodic and rhythmic accompaniment), and note the ways these materials were treated in order to highlight ideas of ‘Balinese’ musical expression. As discussed previously, the notion of including extra-Balinese musical materials (notably Javanese melodies) has been a long-standing technique of Balinese musical creation. However, I argue that the manner by which Sinti approached this ‘foreign’ material, perhaps requires a different analytical model and I shall draw on Fiske and Hartley’s notion of ‘clawback’ (1987) to discuss issues of ‘dominant frameworks’ in representation. Bapang’s title aptly summarises Sinti’s stated aims for the work of transferring other cultures’ music into Balinese forms; the name was selected by Sinti as a verbal splicing of Bali and Japang (‘Japan’ in Indonesian) into Ba-pang, but also refers to the familiar Balinese musical form/metric cycle bapang (typically eight or sixteen beats long, comprising the gong structure ‘P t P G’). In this way, Sinti’s Bapang is a composite of apparently Balinese and Japanese musical materials but enclosed within an ultimately Balinese form.87 The work comprises two contrasting collections of material arranged in a ternary ABA structure (see appendix 2 for an extended plan of the piece). The work opens and closes with a statement of the Japang theme based on Sinti’s ‘transfer’ of the Okinawan ‘folk song’ (lagu rakyat) named Kunjan Jintoyo onto gamelan (see figure 6.1 below for a skeleton score of this section, as heard from 0.00-01:55 of CD Track 1). This performed either side of an extended ‘Balinese’ section which features a range of conventional Balinese melodic and rhythmic techniques and materials.

87

The distinction between mainland Japanese and Okinawan music did not pose a concern in Bapang’s creation. For the purposes of the composition, Sinti considered the Okinawan melody to be ‘Japanese’. 188

Figure 6.1 Bapang opening “Japang” section

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Sinti’s treatment of Kunjan Jintoyo draws on a conflation of the song’s lilting but rhythmically-regular sanshin (a long-necked, three-stringed plucked lute) accompaniment and the melodic structure of its vocal melodic line (see figure 6.2).88

Figure 6.2 Kunjan Jintoyo (sanshin and vocal line) In Okinawa, this vocal line is performed with ornamentation and flexibility of pulse and pulls gently against the sanshin’s regular 2:1 ‘long-short’ accompaniment. Figure 6.2 presents the sanshin introduction followed by the entry of the vocal line (beneath which the sanshsin continues with similar figuration). In Bapang, Sinti removes the sanshin’s triplet-based/long-short figuration and instead applies a sharp dotted-rhythm to just the first beat of the introductory refrain. He then applies the sanshin’s general metric regularity to the basic contours of the vocal line and creates a single melody, performed by all tuned instruments of the gamelan (apart from jegog and calung). Kunjan Jintoyo’s two vocal phrases are, in Bapang, interspersed with two rather twee vocal refrains sung by all members of the ensemble to the words ‘Bali Japang’ and so presenting a clear statement to the audience about the work’s cultural reference points. Sinti’s re-presentation of the Kunjan Jintoyo melody within a Balinese setting is also interesting in its adherence to certain phrase ‘irregularities’ while adjusting others. In Bapang, the first three cycles of the ‘complete’ melody occur over 32 (+ 3 as closing 88

I was aware that Sinti had a tape recording of the song featuring a sanshin and female vocalist, but its origins are unclear. For the purposes of this discussion and transcription I use a recording of Kunjan Jintoyo performed by Noborikawa Seijin (2001). I have compared this recording with a number of other Okinawan and Japanese recordings of the song, including performances by Ôshiro Misako, Kadekaru Rinshô and Yohen Aiko and have consulted with Okinawan music specialist David Hughes, who asserts ‘variation between versions to be minimal… a question of whether and how much of a mini-second one delays a syllable after a sanshin pluck’ (pers. comm. 2009). 190

rests) beats, while Kunjan Jintoyo (minus up-beat) lasts for 32 (+ 5 as closing rests). Sinti maintains the Okinawan phrase length in the rendition of the first melodic phrase (albeit excluding Kunjan Jintoyo’s up-beat). Both versions last 13 beats, with the final melodic tone landing on beat 11 (the ends of the phrases marked at

in figures 6.1 and 6.2).

However, while the end of the second phrase of the complete Kunjan Jintoyo effectively lands on beat 31 (marked at

figure 6.2), Sinti creates a curious variation in order to

create a 32 beat structure (as marked by the gong at

in figure 6.1). Here Sinti adds an

extra beat of syncopation to the start of second phrase (at the close of the second stave of the skeleton score) which extends the melody to one beat longer than the Okinawan vocal line. However, in order for the kempli pulse to match this addition (and maintain what feels like the correct rhythmic emphasis) Sinti skips a beat, as shown in the kempli at the start of the third stave. Sinti then adjusts the space between restatements of the melody as a whole. The Kunjan melody has an ‘uneven’ space between the repeat, equivalent to the melody re-entering on an ‘offbeat’, as shown in the insertion of an irregular 3/4 bar. If this were reproduced in Bapang it would amount to an ‘offbeat’ entry for what had previously been an ‘on-beat’ melody (according to the kempli), and so would require another adjustment in kempli stroke placement to accommodate this. However, Sinti here maintains an even pulse by reducing the gap between melodic statements and so enables the melody to recur firmly on the ‘on-beat’. Here Sinti reconfigured the melody’s spacing to assist in maintaining a more even pulse within the cycle, creating a more stable gong structure at this juncture. 89 As I formulate this kind of comparison, it is worth paying heed to Born and Hesmondhalgh’s thoughtful introduction to Western Music and Its Others (2000), which asserts much preceding scholarship on musical appropriation to have been too focused on ‘the accuracy and authenticity of the appropriated material’, an emphasis which they propose should be countered by addressing instead the power implications of re-framing a music within a new context (2000: 8). These power implications come into play as Western composers seek ‘to enrich their compositional frame’ through appropriating material from non-western sources, ‘transforming that music through incorporation into their own aesthetic’, because, crucially, ‘by putting it into their own aesthetic, they intend not only to evoke it but to also create a distance from it and transcend it’ (2000: 15). Born and Hesmondhalgh propose that such distanced representation of the ‘other’ may construct an unequal relation between aesthetic subject (the composer and later the audience identifying with the composer) and object (the music or culture being

89

See Hughes (1992) for an interesting account of how the creator of Javanese gamelan composition Ladrang Siyem ‘regularized’ a Thai melody in order to include it within a typical Javanese gong structure.

191

represented), an act which the writers claim may attempt ‘aesthetically and discursively to subsume and control the other’ (2000: 16). Thus, while I have pointed out contrasts between Okinawan practices of performing Kunjan Jintoyo and Sinti’s transformation of the material, these variants are not important for their own sake or mentioned as a musical ‘mishearing’ by Sinti. Rather I consider them to be part of Sinti’s musical strategy to identify this material for the audience as ‘representative’ of Japan (as done so explicitly in the sung “Bali Japang” refrain), while also in a sense ‘domesticating’ the material. The latter was achieved by embedding Kunjan Jintoyo in clear Balinese performance practices. These include: replacing the stable, continuous 2:1 lilt with sharper dotted patterns and straight duplets; using the kempli as a beat keeper; inserting standard kendang gupekan drumming patterns which also signal conventional Balinese practices of tempo and dynamic fluctuation (heard, for instance at 01:22-01:30); using jegog and calung punctuation; and a cyclical structure pinpointed by gong and gentorak. In more general terms, this technique may also be linked to Fiske and Hatley’s notion of ‘clawback’, used to describe the process by which news broadcasts’ inclusion of live eye-witness accounts from bystanders and reporters are nonetheless wholly structured and contained by studio commentary (1987: 86-7). Similar to Born and Hesmondhalgh’s commentary on the implications of musical appropriation, ‘clawback’ describes the process whereby one set of material is filtered through a dominant or privileged frame of reference, thus being altered and subordinated. In this case, the main features of Balinese colotomic gong structure act as a dominant structure to determine a new, apparently Balinese character for Kunjan Jintoyo. It is interesting to compare the management of the Okinawan material with the central section of Sinti’s earlier composition for gamelan siwa nada, entitled Windu Sara (CD Track 2). 90 Windu Sara was the first new work composed for the ensemble, produced while Sinti was based at the University of Washington (and also performed again at the group’s 2007 PKB show). The piece stands as a showcase for the ensemble, opening with a kebyaran passage employing the ensemble’s full nine-tone scale, effectively illustrating the group’s extended tonal capacity. As a reverse of Bapang, which opens and closes with the introduction of ‘foreign’ material, Windu Sara uses a passage from the second movement of Dvořák’s New World Symphony for its central section. Sinti was largely reluctant to discuss the the specifics of the piece; he was preoccupied by the creation of Bapang and would usually answer questions about Windu Sara only with reference to Bapang and to the continued development of the ensemble. 90

Windu can refer to the symbol of a circle, the idea of cycles and also to the notion of emptiness. Asnawa also glossed the term as ‘like the globe…global’, an interesting definition in light of Sinti’s approach to composition resources (pers. comm. 2007). Sara in Balinese commonly means a conversation or interaction. 192

Sinti replicates the soft dynamic and steady tempo of the Dvořák in contrast to the boisterous opening passages of Windu Sara. However, Sinti’s representation otherwise identifies the Dvořák passage solely through its basic melodic outline, the melody stripped down to a set of skeleton tones which are rearranged into new phrase structures and organised with a new uniformity of rhythm; apart from the first phrase, Sinti’s passage is comprised primarily of melodic statements of four single-beat notes followed by a sustained four-beat tone. As figures 6.3 and 6.4 demonstrate, this selection and placement of tones shows some variation from the Dvořák, for instance, in the first and second phrases of the Windu Sara passage marked on figure 6.3 at

and

.

Figure 6.3 Windu Sara central section (Dvořák cycle)

Figure 6.4 New World Symphony (second movement theme) The first ‘phrase’ of Windu Sara similarly adjusts rests as found in the Kunjan Jintoyo section of Bapang. Having landed on gong tone 9 (Db) at the close of the ‘quaver’ lead in, the melody then enters two beats later after the musical texture has cleared. However, rather than closing the four-beat melodic fragment with a sustained four-beat tone, as heard through the remainder of passage, Sinti makes up this later entry by waiting only one beat before beginning the phrase at

. This adjustment allows the

emphasis to fall on the first tone of the repeated melodic fragment and assures the regularity of eight-beat and four-beat divisions across the passage. The choice of tones which comprise Sinti’s melody (as compared to the Dvořák) also shows interesting 193

variation. Here the quavers heard in the third and fourth beats of bars 1, 3 and 9 of the Dvořák are augmented in Sinti’s version to uniform one-beat tones, producing a more even rhythmic emphasis. Overall phrase structure shows some interesting variation between works. Comparing the Dvořák melody with the small melodic ‘phrases’ of Windu Sara (as numbered on figure 6.3), some repetitions and omissions emerge. Certain features are maintained by Sinti. For instance, Dvořák’s augmentation in bars 14 and 15 (where the note values of bar 13 are doubled) is mirrored by Sinti’s own repetition of ‘phrase 12’ an additional two times. In doing so, Sinti creates a similar type of emphasis in this final material. However, the phrase layout of the Windu Sara Dvořák passage shows certain variation. Sinti repeats the first bar of the Dvořák but omits bars 7 and 8: Sinti instead moves directly to an equivalent of ‘bar 9’ in Windu Sara’s ‘phrase 8’. 91 These alterations are intriguing as they do not comply directly with a particularly conventional Balinese metric structure. The deployment of the melody appears to take 48 beats, but this is then increased to 52 with an additional four beats which feature a tempo acceleration leading to the following section of lively kotekan. However, the approach to the melody sees it framed in Balinese musical technique, including being underpinned by standard Balinese kremepengan hand-drumming patterns and framed by gong strokes at each end. In both Bapang and Windu Sara, Sinti was eager to signpost the presence of these extra-Balinese materials in his commentary and the work’s titles, yet in compositional approach it appears the composer was keen to subsume them within nominally Balinese musical formulae. Why was Sinti so enthusiastic to articulate these compositions as based on foreign materials––be they Japanese [Okinawan] or Western melodies––yet simultaneously keen to domesticate these materials within the works? How might such framing relate to the circumstances of the group’s creation and what might be gained in this mixture of approaches? I address these questions through a consideration of Sinti’s approach to tuning practices and his public presentation of how siwa nada’s tuning scheme was devised. Indeed, Sinti’s subsequent representation of his tuning approach illuminates tensions between integrating ‘foreign’ ideas and asserting ‘Balineseness’ in Balinese gamelan performance, but also demonstrates how managing both aspects proved an important means of promoting the ensemble and Sinti’s work within the specific performance contexts.

91 Another

possible interpretation is that phrase 9 in Windu Sara stands as a conflation of bars 5 and 6, and so by its repeat in phrase 10 something of the original effect is maintained.

194

In Sinti’s careful and skillful preparation of the ensemble in Bali, it was clear that the composer spent a great deal of time thinking through and polishing certain specific intervallic configurations. This was particularly the case for the four-tone subset which the group used to perform the angklung piece of the PKB set, Segara Madu. In conversation, Sinti was reluctant to disclose that this was the case but I gathered from the other accounts of players in the group that the tones used in the group’s angklung performance were tuned and selected very deliberately: indeed, the angklung tones were generally declared sweet (manis) and enjoyed by all performers. However, over the rehearsal process for Bapang, the choice of tones for the ‘Japang’ section changed considerably, settling only after several variants had been explored and casually discarded or forgotten. The first rehearsal used tones 1 3 5 6 8 (Eb F Ab Bb C) with the Bapang melody beginning on tone 5 (Ab) and the group only later settled on the subset used in performance: 1 3 4 6 8 (Eb F G Bb C), with the melody beginning on tone 1 (Eb). In contrast to the deliberate creation of a suitable angklung tuning, there was a sense that the pentatonic scale needed in order to perform Kunjan Jintoyo would have to be selected from what was already available. This same ambivalence for these ‘transferred’ tunings can be heard in the 2007 performance of Windu Sara. As can be heard on the Windu Sara Dvořák section of CD Track 2, tone 9 of the siwa nada scale (very roughly equivalent to ‘Db’) is considerably sharper than its Western diatonic equivalent. However, it is interesting to note that if this same section is compared with the original recording of the Seattle ensemble performing the piece on campus, tone 9 is considerably lower in pitch and provides a more accurate match to Western tuning. Consideration of Sinti’s more public verbal accounts of siwa nada’s tuning system contrasts significantly with my experience of Sinti’s approach, and highlights just how complex articulation siwa nada and its compositions came to be. In discussion, Sinti was keen to present a very particular formulation of how the tuning came about which sutured a variety of contradictory interests. He combined the ideas of encountering North America and ‘Western science’ with an account of agama Hindu philosophy, alongside stressing his own Balinese feeling or rasa. In doing so, Sinti engaged with the musical background of the Washington faculty while promoting an account of both an institutionally-sanctioned and also a personal ‘Balinese’ sensibility. Versions of this account were disseminated to various parties, all of which were potential or actual sponsors of the group. The account was initially presented to the first patrons of the group at Seattle (who also funded parts of the later Bali-based ensemble). In 2007 (in relation to the PKB performance) it was then issued to a number of foreign researchers, the island’s Bali Post newspaper and to the PKB performance’s international and Balinese audience 195

through the group’s sinopsis (‘synopsis’), the short passage of text read out before a performance which accompanies PKB presentations and ISI examinations. In an interview with the author, Sinti articulated siwa nada’s tuning system as follows: When I was in America, I had inspiration… before, in Bali, artists usually made things [which were] limited by rasa (‘feeling’). But, when I was in America, I made the composition of its intervals... I took as a starting point or began from mathematics (pers. comm. 2007). 92

This ‘mathematical’ approach was then connected to an evocation of agama Hindu and associated numerology, drawing on Suharto-era constructions of mystic formulae. However, while this construction mirrors a style of téori prevalent during the New Order, rather than articulating Bali in relation to its status in Indonesia, Sinti here framed the group for more global consumption. He continued: So the order of the notes or intervals are the ‘tones of Siwa’ [Siwa nada]: in one octave… so, in Bali we are very sure that the value of three possesses a “spiritual charisma”, or taksu. In Bali, in keeping with the Hindu religion, we believe that three possesses a power... We are familiar with the term Trimurti: Brahma Wisnu, Iswara. We know the term Triguna: birth, life and death. Many ‘three’s’...So I transfer that idea, it forms the composition of the intervals of Siwa Nada. So [tones] 123456789, after then is an octave. Now, if it’s counted in cents, [tone] one to [tone] two is 132 cents, [tone] two to [tone] three is 132 cents, [tone] three to [tone] four is 136 cents: this is repeated, three times. Perhaps Kate asks: why aren’t they the same: 3 and 4 are 136 cents? If in total it is 400 cents, why is this one bigger? Why are they not all equal?’ It’s like this: according to our belief in Bali and the term trimurti: Brahma, Wisnu and Iswara or Siwa… we believe in Bali that Siwa has a slightly higher position that Brahma and Wisnu… that is the reason. 93

However, Sinti followed this detailed account of scientific and agama Hindu synthesis with a new opposition to be synthesized: the scientific and rasa (often translated into English by Sinti as ‘the feeling’). Then, after using mathematics, after it was finished, I played it and it felt to me that there was something that maybe didn’t quite fit with my own sense. Oh, I felt awkward a little bit! Here [points to heart]. There is a lack of rasa, so then I played [and tuned] it again with rasa. So, I combined [mathematics] with the Balinese system: rasa (pers. comm. 2007). 94

Moving from an articulation of siwa nada through agama Hindu, here Sinti arguably sought to emphasize his own personal and individual contribution to the musical process, as grounded again in his ‘Balineseness’ and his access to the apparently ‘Balinese system’ of rasa. Rather than publicly outlining the pragmatic and technicallyrefined approach to tuning which I witnessed during the PKB rehearsal period, Sinti

92

See Appendix 1, note 17.

93

See Appendix 1, note 18.

94

See Appendix 1, note 19.

196

instead deemed it judicious to frame the ensemble’s construction (and his role in its creation) with a potentially more marketable narrative. These accounts also contrast with I Komang Astita’s review of the group published in the Bali Post newspaper shortly after the group’s PKB performance. Having been at the forefront of Bali’s compositional innovation and having studied extensively abroad, Astita is a major cultural commentator in Bali, regularly called upon to provide the academic seal of approval to events and performances. Astita cited Sinti’s account of the tuning largely as above, but in addition Astita rather boldly claimed that Sinti’s initial plan for the ensemble was drawn from the Second Viennese School, stating that ‘Sinti’s efforts to develop the nine-tone system of siwa sada are inspired by Western music’s twelve-tone system, [as] developed by Arnold Schoenberg’ (Bali Post, 22nd July, 2007).95 Further to this, Astita proposed that ‘the tonal structure of gamelan siwa nada can be said to be close to the diatonic scale, begun from do, re, mi chromatically (rising by half a note) fi mol (going down by half a tone), which is organised in the order from tone 1 to 9’ (Bali Post, 22nd July, 2007). 96 How do we account for this discrepancy? Sinti certainly never mentioned an alignment with twelve-tone serialism and indeed when I asked Astita some weeks later about this topic in his article, he only laughed saying ‘did I write that?’ I suggest that the radicality of Sinti’s move (a single ensemble tuned to a nine-tone scale was certainly an intrepid innovation) opened up a fresh space to heap with interpretation which suited the situation at hand. Astita’s articulation of the group presented an opportunity to exhibit apparently prestigious academic knowledge, just as Sinti’s account had positioned him as sympathetic to Western ethnomusicological systems of his American hosts while also promoting the group as an expression of two highly marketable ideas: Bali’s agama Hindu and the composer’s own unique and personal ‘Balinese feeling’. Beyond Sinti’s concerns to highlight siwa nada’s global and Balinese status through the enunciation of tuning system narrative, how else might these works and commentaries be understood in the context of Bali’s contemporary socio-cultural concerns? Central to the composition practices outlined above appears to be an attempt to domesticate the foreign into a Balinese framework. Sinti is famed as a conservative and his efforts to find novel ways to preserve and re-popularise decaying Balinese musical forms are well publicized. While gamelan siwa nada initially appears at odds with this musical mission, more detailed consideration of Sinti’s compositions for the ensemble begin to suggest otherwise. Japan and North America stand as the two largest foreign

95

See Appendix 1, note 20.

96

See Appendix 1, note 21.

197

musical patrons for Balinese gamelan in terms of foreign visitors and researchers attending and sponsoring performances and seeking teachers and guides, and in offering recording contracts and international tour and residency invitations. 97 Sinti was always positive about his various experiences in America and frequently expressed the hope to make at least one more international trip in his lifetime, possibly to Japan. The integration of ‘foreign material’ thus resonates on this level, as not just as a display of competence and a source of novelty but also as a means of commercial engagement with patrons: North America through Dvořák’s ‘New World’ and with Japan, here identified not insignificantly through its minority island culture of Okinawa, a possible analogue of Bali’s Hindu minority to Indonesia’s Muslim majority. In ‘borrowing’ from these musics (a notably mercantile metaphor), Sinti sought to secure Bali’s position in the musical marketplace and so preserve a supported musical future for Bali. In addition, I suggest that in the current fractious climate of cultural reclamation and conservatism discussed above, Sinti’s works also potentially function as a way of claiming other musical cultures for Bali: the ‘extra-Balinese’ is subsumed by musical emblems of the ‘Balinese’ and so transformed into an apparently Balinese expression. The issue of the ‘Japanese’ melody is particularly potent here. Sinti steadfastly did not talk about the Japanese occupation of 1942-5, but certainly lived through its occurrence. It is difficult to say what role the memory of the invasion, if indeed any, may play in this music. However, Nick Gray’s study of gendér wayang practices of composition and improvisation includes an intriguing account by musician I Wayan Locéng, who describes how ‘there were Japanese tunes included in the Pemungkah [opening music of a wayang] in the 1940’s’, Locéng going on to state ‘Oh, we got to study Japanese tunes at that time at school’ and how ‘a little bit can be brought to here [Pemungkah]’ (pers. comm. 2002, cited in Gray 2005: 244). Again, the nature of the appropriation is unclear, Locéng’s account emphasises a rather whimsical approach to musical borrowing. However, I would suggest that in light of Sinti’s earnest concern for how the group was perceived publicly, it is unlikely he was unaware of this potential resonance of the choice. Indeed, his concerted effort to represent the gamelan’s tuning in such a particular way suggests he was alert to the idea that public perceptions may need to be managed. Rather than discuss

97

While exchange between Balinese and American groups and individuals is often reported, the role of Japanese patronage in Balinese cultural activity has been underrepresented in Western accounts. At the peak of Indonesia’s tourist boom, Japanese visitors are recorded as the second largest group of incumbent tourists to the country (after Singaporeans) (Mansfield and Pizam 2006: 261). Japanese have also been long-standing and prominent patrons of Balinese arts, particularly instrumental in developing the popularity of West Bali’s giant gamelan jegog bamboo ensembles (notably the Suar Agung group of Jembrana), for which various Japanese institutions have arranged performing and teaching tours and residencies since the 1970s. The Japanese focus on Balinese rather Central Javanese or Sundanese gamelan traditions is reflected in the catalogue of the Japanese recording label ‘JVC World Sounds’. Of seventeen ‘Indonesian’ music recordings commissioned, all but two are Balinese. 198

the tuning as the result of conventional Balinese practices of adjustment according to practical demands (e.g. the reported angklung tuning process), Sinti was anxious to represent his work as compelled first by Western science as shaped by agama Hindu, to be corrected by drawing on an idea of mystic Balinese essence, his rasa Bali. Despite the contradictions embodied by the ensemble, compositions, and the verbal accounts which support it, Sinti is unwavering in his attributing Balinese ‘ethnological valence’ to siwa nada. Such a move can be seen as indicative of the current cultural-political scene on Bali. As the Ajeg Bali movement flags in enthusiasm, asserting ‘Balinese identity’ remains potent but with new parameters. Schulte Nordholt’s work on identity politics in Bali (2007) concludes with the assertion that ‘the problem… with essentialist concepts that express hegemonic ambitions such as Ajeg Bali, is that they are based on post-colonial models that refer to closed and homogenous societies’ and states that ‘one of the biggest challenges facing Balinese administrators and intellectuals is to develop a more dynamic idea of their culture that offers room for hybridity and transnational dimensions’ (2007: 83). Sinti’s work suggests that contemporary ideas of cultural politics may perhaps be more complex than the opposition Schulte Nordholt proposes: Sinti represents siwa nada as ripe with ‘transnational dimensions’ but he subsequently seeks to overlay this engagement with a framework of Balinese essentialism, as required for a successful 2007 PKB performance and to obtain future international invitations. ‘Balineseness’ has been redrawn. While the process of essentialising Balinese practices into ‘Balinese cultural identity’ may owe much to colonial tactics, precisely how that this cultural identity is configured remains a practical strategy, accordingly rooted in the here and now.

Tawur by I Nyoman Mariyana (CD Track 3) Tawur was produced for Mariyana’s ISI degree recital (ujian sarjana) in June 2007. It was an ambitious and complex work performed by an unusually large ensemble of 33 players on a range of instruments drawn from gong gedé and beleganjur (a four-tone processional gamelan) ensembles, and performed synchronous to a projected backdrop of Balinese ceremonial scenes which had been filmed by the composer. The ISI end-ofdegree ujian presents an opportunity to showcase a musician’s performance and composition skills but is also a complex exercise in negotiation. Various personal accounts from ISI graduates attest to the fact that if a candidate wishes to score top marks, they must manage their musical sensibilities to fit the often conservative mandate of the faculty adjudicating panel. This certainly need not delimit all types of musical exploration 199

but, as will be discussed, necessitates an articulation of ‘Balinese cultural values’ through the work in some form. How might the idea of ‘Balinese cultural values’ in academybased composition play out in post-Suharto (and post-bomb) Bali? Released from New Control cultural directives, how do ISI faculty officially determine merit in new student composition?98 How does a student composer’s own representation of their work, notably the accompanying dissertation (skripsi), function within this system? What needs to be signposted for examiners by the skripsi in order for an ujian work to succeed? What scope remains for the student composer to experiment and play within an examination work, despite academy sanctions? I selected Tawur to consider these questions as Mariyana’s composition presents a particularly good example of a critically-successful ISI ujian work: Mariyana scored the top mark of the year for the composition, but the work was also well received by fellow ISI students and by the performance’s public audience. In evaluating how the work came by such official praise, it is notable that Tawur was structurally driven by an attempt to create a particularly vivid representation of ‘traditional Balinese culture’, which included the portrayal of several contrasting ceremonial processes, as well as the musical realisation of various pieces of religious doctrine. Without undermining Mariyana’s outstanding qualities as a composer and player, his choice and deployment of theme (or téma) doubtless contributed to the work’s success. As discussed, programmatic expressions of ‘traditional Balinese culture’, particularly the theatrical portrayal of ritual processes, have governed a considerable quantity of Balinese musik kontemporer work since composers began such work in the 1970s.99 Rather like a socialist realist painting, such literal or concrete portrayals attempt to close down the possibility of unsanctioned, alternative understandings, even though (or indeed, precisely because) such works often combine highly innovative and risqué material and playing technique outside Balinese musical conventions with their ‘enactment’ of ceremonial music performance. While described by Mariyana as ‘kontemporer’, Tawur does not exhibit particularly radical musical qualities but does display a strikingly-thorough attempt to position itself as a concrete musical representation or embodiment of Balinese religious experience and belief. This idea is most firmly embodied by the use of film projection, to which it may be said the composition performs as a soundtrack. However, this aim is also embedded 98

I spoke to a number of ISI faculty who were individually frustrated by and critical of the institution’s internal marking criteria and systems of judgement but felt unable to effect change within ISI’s obdurate bureaucratic structures or, in one more outspoken case, had subsequently been ‘relieved’ of adjudicating duties. 99

Now famous examples include: I Komang Astita’s Gema Eka Dasa Rudra (1979), a musical recreation of scenes from the centennial Balinese rite of the same name; Asnawa’s Kosong (‘Empty’ or ‘Zero’) (1984) which depicted Bali’s silent, ‘new year’ ceremony of Nyepi; and, more recently, the Sanggar Cudamani group composition Tajen (2001) depicting a ceremonial cockfight. 200

within a range of the compositional practices comprising the work and is animated further in some of Mariyana’s discussion of Tawur and in his written account of the piece (the skripsi). I analyse these various kinds of representational practice, considering their relevance not only to the long-standing theme of Bali as a metonym of religious ardour, but to contemporary issues of the public performance of agama Hindu in post-bomb Bali. The term Tawur refers to a large-scale Balinese upacara (religious ceremony) held the day prior to Nyepi (often glossed as ‘Bali’s ‘New Year’). Known fully as Tawur Kasanga, the ceremony is primarily concerned with the placation of the island’s bhuta kala (potent and unpredictable invisible beings) through sacrificial offerings.100 Mariyana’s composition traces a number of ceremonial practices leading up to the Tawur Kesanga, including Mendak Ida Bhatara (the ‘going up’ of the gods), Melasti (the bathing of shrine statues in the sea), and a process Mariyana terms Pengembang, referring to the interim between Melasti and Tawur when compounds prepare processional offerings (prani), pray, and may also perform kidung sung poetry. The work is structured around this sequence of events—the film showing clips of Mariyana’s community celebrations from earlier in the year—while the composition was divided into distinct portions to match the pace and flow of each the filmed scenes. For instance, the forceful kebyaran section and following gilak passage heard from 10:30-11:08 (which includes yells of encouragement and excitement from the musicians) accompanied visibly excited and noisy scenes of people charging through streets carrying giant models of demons (known as ogoh-ogoh) as is customary before Nyepi. However, beyond this narrative thread, Mariyana makes numerous references to music’s power to embody or substantialize external physical (and spiritual) processes, and his skripsi offers a particularly strong blend of Balinese ‘mysticism’ and a range of Western terms and reference points which seek to quantify, contain and assert meaning. In the standard opening discussion of the work’s religious backdrop, Mariyana paraphrases religious authority Luh Nyoman Soka on the classification of Balinese upacara (Klasifikasi Upacara, 2002), to state how ritual activity provides a ‘concrete form’ (wujud konkret) to prayer and devotion (persambahan) (2007: 1). Having described the process of these ‘concretizing’ rituals, Mariyana continues, suggesting that on undergoing empirical experience, the composer’s instinct is stimulated and there emerges an inspiration[al] idea. When one follows the process of [the Tawur] ritual, it is always accompanied by the sound of gamelan… hearing the sounds of musical instruments struck… such as the sound of gamelan and the kentongan [usually known as kulkul: an instrument struck to signal alarm or community gatherings] provokes a longing 100

Tawur means ‘to pay’, used in reference to the offerings bestowed upon Bhuta Kala, while kesanga means ‘ninth’, which refers to the ninth month of the Javanese-Balinese caka calender in which the ceremony takes place. 201

to contain/order them(mengkemasnya) into the form of a musical composition (2007: 13). 101

The religious values which Mariyana described as ‘abstract, imaginative and mystic’ (asbtrak, imajinatif dan mistis) at his essay’s opening, can be made concrete or empirical by ritual, to be re-packaged anew through musical composition. A similar containment through narrative structuring is suggested in later comments. Mariyana describes how ‘the sequence of the ceremony is worked into the musical composition, with the sections appropriate to the ceremony taking place, with the result that the organisation and structure of the composition... offer an impression of ‘figurative art’’ (2007: 98).102 The term of ‘figurative art’ (artfiguratifa) used throughout the skripsi is perhaps as much a buzzword to demonstrate engagement with campus-favourite Djelantik’s work on aesthetics (1990) as anything else (see Chapter Five). However, its usage in the skripsi also signals efforts to represent the ceremonial process not only through musical ‘topic’ reference, but through reenactment of the precise soundworld of the ceremony itself. More or less submerged musical referents are long-standing feature of Balinese kebyar composition (see Tenzer 2000: 153-8), and certainly Mariyana uses certain references in this more traditional manner. His inclusion of a passage of heavy kendang in the leluangan (gamelan luang) style heard at 07:01, operates as a device to invoke a ‘temple feeling’ through the ensemble’s sacred association (gamelan luang is performed principally in temple settings) (see figure 6.5). 103

Figure 6.5 Tawur, leluangan drumming However, shortly afterwards (subsequent to a slow passage for suling and ensemble vocal line) there follows an even more direct representation of extra-musical religious practice through the striking evocation of the ‘suara bajra’ (‘priest’s bell’) (heard at 7:54). The regular pulsing of the bell during prayer is here replicated in a set of freely repeated ostinato patterns on gentorak, gumanak, and chiming ding and dang (tones 1 and 6) on gangsa and jegog, all performed in synchrony with images of such a bell swung as the community engages in prayer.

101

See Appendix 1, note 22.

102

See Appendix 1, note 23.

103

Tenzer quotes I Nyoman Windha as stating that references of leluangan interlocking rhythmic patterns (as used in his offering dance Puspanjuli) in a new composition are ‘a direct way to capture the atmosphere of temple worship in a secular setting’ (pers. comm. 1989 in Tenzer 2000: 212). 202

Ideas of substantializing the sacred and/or the intangible occur on a range of levels in Mariyana’s piece (both in compositional and verbal representations). For one, the choice of instrumentation was conceived as an act of ‘reconstruction’ (rekonstruksi), or realisation of a historical/mythical extended gamelan bebonangan ensemble, as described in Bandem’s publication of the Prakempa lontar (Bandem 1986: 86-87). While gamelan bebonangan is currently used as a term interchangeable with the ‘processional’ gamelan beleganjur, a passage of Bandem’s Prakempa describes how the now obsolete gamelan bebonangan used to comprise not only conventional beleganjur ensemble instrumentation of gongs, pot gongs, kendang and ceng-ceng cymbals but also pairs of bronze gangsa, penyacah, jublag, jegog plus a rebab (1986: 88-89).104 Not unlike much contemporary ritual use of beleganjur, the Prakempa states the ensemble’s specific function is to accompany Bhutayadnya (rituals placating the Bhuta Kala), which thus deemed it particularly suitable for Mariyana’s project. As such, he states the line-up ‘supported the [composition’s] various atmospheres (suasana-suasana) which emerge as “figurative art” in the context of the Tawur ceremony’ (2007: 15).105 While Mariyana makes a compelling case for the reconstructed group’s valence to conjure this sacred ‘atmospheric’ support in his skripsi it is interesting that in musical terms, additional references or topics were required. Leluangan motifs once more evoke the sacred, appearing in a central passage of the work which in theory highlights the bebonangan ensemble itself, used prominently in the passage titled ‘gending bebonangan’ which opens Section Three (heard 5:32-7:00). While the gangsa chime single metrically-stable tones, very much in gong gedé style, the réyong perform a range of exposed syncopations redolent of leluangan patterns, thus once more utilising gamelan luang’s strong ceremonial association to substantiate the desired ‘ceremonial atmosphere’ in the composition. Indeed, later in the skripsi, Mariyana describes this passage as the pengawak, the central, stately portion of his composition created to ‘support an impression of tranquility and submission’ (mendukung kesan tenang dan khidmat) (2007: 91). Another idea of musical evocation, or indeed ‘embodiment’ is found in Mariyana’s use of the Prakempa’s Pangider Bhuwana schema in certain passages of melodic writing within the work. According to Bandem’s introduction to the Prakempa, sound is linked to the five dimensions (Panca Mahabhuta), with sound and colours 104

The ensemble as a whole is thus not dissimilar to a reduced gamelan gong gedé. However, Mariyana’s exposed and more melodic use of réyong highlighted ideas of a beleganjur lineage as opposed to the texturally-submerged role that réyong figuration often assumes in ‘classic’ gong gedé works. Interestingly enough, the Prakempa manuscript does not include a beat keeper or kempli in the ensemble which, for purely practical reasons, Mariyana reinstated to guide and maintain tempi and for its ability to mimic the timbre and rhythmic patterns of the wooden kulkul, as heard at 02:21 (pers.comm. 2007). 105

See Appendix 1, note 24.

203

spreading to each of the protectors of the earth to form a ring known as the Pangider Bhuwana (1986: 13). The diagram itself is characteristic of Balinese New Order iconography by mixing mysticism with geometric graphics through positioning and connecting the gamelan pélog and sléndro tones with syllables, colours, and deities (1986: 41, also reproduced in Tenzer 2000: 36). 106 This encoding of musical tones allows composers to locate a huge number of theoretical associations between specific musical configurations and religious efficacy, and has provided fertile ground for exploring numerology in composition practice.107 Despite Bandem’s edition having been in circulation for over twenty years, this particular Prakempa diagram is still a popular tool for young composers, particularly students eager to bolster their theoretic credentials. Mariyana describes how he sourced both the five metric patterns (pola hitungan) and gong tones which structure his ‘Pola Gilak II’ (heard at 03:58-05:03 of CD Track 3) from their alignment in the diagram, citing their association with ‘urip’. Urip commonly means ‘life’ in Balinese, but Mariyana offered the secondary definition of urip as ‘a number which is linked to the direction of compass points’ (angka yang menurut arah mata angin) (pers. comm. 2007). Mariyana aligned the ‘compass’ position of each of the five selisir pélog tones (e.g., deng is west, ding is south) available on the Pangider Bhuwana diagram with numerical associations, and used the figure to determine the number of beats in the phrases (see figure 6.6 below).

Figure 6.6 Tawur, ‘Pola Gilak II’ jegog line and gong structure For instance, the first phrase of Pola Gilak II, as marked at

ends on gong tone dang

(tone 6 or G) which, according to the Pangider Bhuwana, is linked to the East (timor) and subsequently connected to the number five: thus the phrase occurs over five beats. Moving round the compass and down the score, we find the second phrase ends on gong tone ding (tone 1 or B) as linked to the South (selatan) and the number nine; the third 106

See Fox (2002: 13) for a brief discussion of the similar configuration of cardinal points, deities, syllables and weapons in the ‘pangider-ider’. Fox describes the diagram as an ‘agamic figure’: an example of the authoritative New Order articulation of ‘Hindu religion’. 107

I Wayan Arnawa is considered the first composer to apply the idea. More recent compositions to use the concept include Gong (2003) and Pendro (2004), both of which derive rhythmic and melodic patterns from the scheme (pers. comm. 2007). 204

phrase on deng (tone 3 or D) linked to the West (barat) and the number seven; and the fourth phrase on dung (tone 5 or F#) linked to the North (utara) and the number four. The final phrase lands on dong (tone 2 or C) the tone depicted at the centre (tengah) of the diagram (aligned with Siwa) and linked to the number eight.108 The Pola Gilak II passage emerges out of a boisterous ‘gilak’ section, which closes with a surging full ensemble passage which Mariyana describes as ‘swells of sound’ (ombakan-ombakan suara). Pola Gilak II’s abruptly-thinned texture is a sharp contrast, the clatter of ceng-ceng dying away to reveal a steady melodic line of jegog and suling, initially lightly elaborated by penyacah (and subsequently réyong and gangsa). It is interesting that following his discussion of the Pangider bhuwana, Mariyana’s skripsi states the musical passage ‘to mean that the Melasti procession has already been performed’ and so people ‘begin to arrange their offerings, the priest organising all his equipment for the ceremony’: in keeping with the discussion above, the esoteric source for musical structure is linked to a material event (musikal ini dimaksudkan bahwa prosesi upacara Melasti telah dilaksanakan... mulai menata banten dan pemangku mengaturkan segala perlengkapan upacara) (2007: 58). Indeed, a musical ‘topic’ to ground the passage is found in the continued (if modified) use of gilak gong pattern (‘(G). . . .P.P (G)’). It is interesting that Mariyana characterises the section as gilak, a syncopated metric formula usually associated with masculine power, particularly strong male dance or male processional music, always contained within a rigid eight beats. While much of the passage is structured around the irregular metric framework decreed by the pangider bhuwana numerology, Mariyana maintains the characteristic kempur syncopation (the off-beat ‘.P.P’ leading to the gong) of gilak running beneath. By carefully rearranging the spacing of the longer pause between gong and kempur in the cycle, he is able to position pairs of offbeat kempur strokes across the passage. This is achieved at the end of phrase 2. Meanwhile, the third phrase serves as an extended pause which then allows the fourth ‘north’ phrase of four beats to use the ‘.P.P(G)’ figure. Phrase 5 likewise provides a sense of paired kempur syncopation but, in keeping with the asymmetric feel of the passage, it delays the delivery of the final gong. In this way, the gilak pattern acts as a submerged referent to the previous ‘procession’. The gilak pattern subsequently grows prominent and recognisable 108

In Tawur, tone numbers, Balinese solfege and approximate Western pitches align as follows:

1

2

3

5

6

ding

dong

deng

dung

dang

B

C

D

F#

G 205

as the tempo accelerates at the reprise of ‘Pola Gilak I’ which follows, creating a continuity between otherwise contrasting passages. In performance the piece was extremely successful on all fronts, not least for the composer’s careful and imaginative engagement with the audience. Indeed, while much of the material for analysis above (largely based on the interactions between Mariyana’s composition practice and his skripsi writing) has dealt with the closure of meaning, outside of this official representation Mariyana revealed occasional playful ambiguities in his approach. For instance, at the close of the nyalit or transitional passage (heard at 5:17-5:30), the final phrase of réyong and gangsa seems to draw to a sudden halt at 05:30 on dung (tone 5 or ‘F#’) but then launches into a sudden repetition to finish on dong (tone 2 or ‘C’) at 05:32. To me this felt like a ‘pretend’ or ‘false’ ending with a surprise addition, but I was dubious that I was over-interpreting the move and uncertain if this had indeed been the intended effect. However, in discussion Mariyana was delighted with my suggestion and stated that it was indeed false (palsu), and that ‘it feels already finished but isn’t yet’ (merasa sudah selesai tapi belum), suggesting the resulting surprise would be something like ‘a light slap’ (ceblekan) for the audience (pers. comm. 2007). Notably, this ambiguity did not find its way into the skripsi. Another addition of less than pious material is found at the ‘build-up’ section of nguncang (‘restless’) rhythms heard at 8:47. In his skripsi, Mariyana describes his ‘processing’ of these rhythms as ‘appropriate to the context of ceremony’ (pengolahan tersebut disesuikan dengan konteks upacara) (2007: 67). While he references the Western term polifoni (polyphony) to describe the passage’s cross-rhythms and exciting melodic tensions found between réyong and gangsa lines, only privately did Mariyana mention that they emerged from quite a different source: a salsa cassette borrowed from faculty member I Nyoman Windha (2007: 67). Indeed, at 09:29, an interesting variation occurs on the distinctive two-note ponggang melody played by two small knobbed gongs, which runs throughout conventional gamelan beleganjur music (shown below in figure 6.7).

Figure 6.7 Ponggang in gamelan beleganjur However, here Mariyana maintained the ponggang’s familiar two note oscillation but adjusted the pattern to a rapid Latin syncopation. In addition, Mariyana directed the gangsa alit (small gangsa) to perform the idiomatic broken arpeggio, syncopated 206

figuration of Salsa piano (see figure 6.8 below). 109 Mariyana was relatively covert about the material’s source in public, preferring to maintain that the passage was a response to the Balinese ceremony: in his published verbal representation of the passage, and indeed in the performance style and context, he submerged them within an apparently Balinese vocabulary.

Figure 6.8 Tawur, ponggang ‘salsa’ In terms of cultural and academic prestige, certain Western terms doubtless hold value within a student skripsi, with or without the support of actual inclusion in a composition (for instance a ‘canon’ is highlighted by Mariyana as occurring at 05:01, although the musical effect appears rather more like rapid, imitative voice-leading). 110 Likewise, to gloss the ‘salsa’ section as polifoni (polyphony) was acceptable, whereas to reference ‘salsa’ (as a popular form) was apparently not in the context of this sacredthemed work, despite Mariyana’s sophisticated working of the material. This issue of vocabulary is in part due to the esteemed position that knowledge of Western music theory holds in the Balinese academic world; effective usage is an indicator of prestigious Western education. It is also due to the way Western music theory has established itself as a somehow neutral and universal vocabulary for discussing musical practice (the idea of Western music theory’s ‘universalism’ was often repeated in ISI karawitan lectures while I was on campus). Unlike ‘salsa’ which bursts with cultural context, the presumed neutrality of Western theory does not interfere with Mariyana’s musical representation of the Balinese religious experience. Mariyana’s work in many ways stands as an exemplary student work, not only because skillfully created and performed, but because it contains its musical novelty

109

Windha was engaged that semester in a controversial ‘Salsa gamelan’ project with his newly created ensemble Jes (as described above). As an informal mentor, Windha had encouraged Mariyana to explore this music but Mariyana appeared relatively reluctant to disclose his use of these musical ideas publicly. While the recording is listed in his skripsi discography, he makes no reference to Salsa anywhere else in the document. 110 A canon

may be defined as a contrapuntal device which employs a melody with one or more imitations, each entering after a given duration. McGraw states that ‘recently… basic canonic techniques have been used in Balinese kréasi sandhya gita, the large mixed-sex choruses performed to gong kebyar accompaniment. In the case of sandhya gita the technique has arrived via Javanese koor [choral] works which have long been heavily influenced by Western musical practices’ (2005: 320). 207

within the well-worn theme of religious devotion and Balinese traditional practices. However, particular to the work in the present climate period, is an attempt to make substantial, or ‘concrete’ Bali’s religious ‘philosophy’ (filsafat) within music, here the pangider bhuwana. While various religious tenets may have been extant for some time, albeit often as New Order constructs, the last ten years appear to demonstrate heightened concern to flesh out such principles. Such a switch is notable in discussion concerning Bali’s paired tuning system.111 Accounts in McPhee (1996), Bandem’s Prakempa edition (1986) and in I Wayan Rai’s semar pegulingan thesis (1996) all deal at length with issues of tuning and highlight religious associations of Balinese music-making, but none contain references to paired tuning as a practice with any spiritual resonance. However, in recent years ISI writing has come to consider paired tuning as a direct manifestation of Bali’s ‘dualistic’ foundation, the rwa bhineda. According to a recent discussion with I Wayan Dibia, [paired tuning] implies some cultural principles not just applied in music but it’s a form of expression of culture itself... it’s balancing. For me, I can refer to ngumbang-ngisep as one basic theory in Balinese music: it tells the aesthetic principle of art and Balinese culture in general (pers. comm. 2009).

Here Bali’s popular metaphor of aesthetic and social ‘balance’ is given substance through the new articulation of Bali’s paired tuning, now a popular theme in Balinese téori. Scholar I Ketut Gedé Asnawa likewise states that the most influential (saling pengaruh) principle of Balinese ‘community culture’ (kultur masyarakat) is the ‘dualistic concept’ of rwa bineda, which he notes to form an ‘extremely important’ and ‘basic’ component of Balinese gamelan (dalam entitas gamelan Bali adalah sangat penting dan mendasar), above all through ombak, the sonic beats effect created by paired tuning, noted as the bringing the spirit (membawa roh) to Balinese gamelan (2007: 12). Finally, paired tuning gains its significance because it is unique to Bali: Asnawa states Bali’s ngumbang-ngisep as ‘extremely special’ (sangat khas), citing it at the top of his list of Balinese gamelan’s ‘unique principles’ (prinsep unik) which contrast with the ‘rival’ Javanese gamelan (bereda dengan rivalnya gamelan Jawa) (2007: 12). In conversation I Wayan Sinti often stressed the notion that ‘there isn’t any ngumbang-ngisep in Java’ (tidak ada ngumbang-ngisep di Jawa) (pers. comm. 2007), while Dibia stated how it’s not just different from Javanese but the rest of the world. No other culture. Interlocking, maybe in Brazil, and in African music also a lot… but ngumbang ngisep is a very uniquely Balinese concept- the principle itself is the animating concept. (pers. comm. 2009)

111

Gamelan ensembles’ tuned instruments are in pairs, one of which is tuned higher (‘pengisep’: sucker) and the other a fraction lower (‘pengumbang’: the hummer) to create a sonic beating effect, known as ombak. 208

An article published in ISI journal Bheri by karawitan faculty member Kartawan conflates this ‘unique quality’ of tuning into a matter a ‘matter of “identity”’ (‘iklhwal “identitas”’), Bali’s tuning offering a ‘form of artistic expression that is the most local’ (menuju bentuk ekspresi seni yang paling lokal) (2004: 51). As such, paired tuning offers a new means of articulating Bali’s unique cultural value and, in turn substantializes and promotes the idea of a distinct Balinese ‘identity’. Mariyana achieves a similar end in his piece, substantializing various esoteric concepts in his performance through his use of video, the conjuring of temple scenes, and through the explanations and theoretical concepts invoked in his thesis. In addition to Mariyana’s technical skill in creating and handling musical material, it was the assured management and realisation of his téma which secured him the top adjudication of the exam session and the corresponding recognition and promise of future professional success.112 The work’s conservatism notwithstanding, Mariyana also incorporated a considerable range of extra-Balinese or even ‘irreverent’ resources. Yet Mariyana nonetheless found ways to deploy or represent them as a translation or recreation of Balinese religious experience, an effort that met with unqualified success at his ISI examination.

Chanda Klang by Sang Nyoman Arsawijaya (CD Track 4) The final work to be discussed is an example of arguably the most prestigious, visible and complex composing platform currently available on Bali: the regional tabuh kréasi entry to compete in the finals of the annual Festival Gong Kebyar, held as part of the PKB. The contest and tabuh kréasi entries form a hot topic of public discussion and media coverage, while the reputation of individual composers (and their panels of advisors) is also at stake. Chanda Klang was composed as the kréasi tabuh for the Kodya (Denpasar) entry for the 2007 Festival Gong Kebyar. The work was created by Sang Nyoman Arsawijaya (hereafter named Sauman), already discussed here for his radical ISI ujian work Geräusch (2006). Appropriate to the popular context of the public contest and the constraints of tabuh kréasi musical form, Chanda Klang does not display the same taboobreaking exploration as this notorious earlier work. However, the piece nonetheless generated some minor controversy, largely on account of its being considered by some 112

Indeed, shortly after the examinations Mariyana was commissioned to rework the composition into a gamelan beleganjur piece for a Badung entry into a regional lomba Beleganjur (Beleganjur contest). 209

commentators (including members of the ISI faculty and local followers of the contest) to be ‘too academic’ (terlalu akademis), a quality deemed to pull against the ambiguouslytermed ‘musical feeling’ (rasa musikal) of the composition. What then constitutes the criteria of evaluation within which young (or older) musicians must perform, in composing for the Festival’s tabuh kréasi? How far are these criteria consistent? Are there antagonisms between them? If so, how does this affect the compositions and what are composers’ comments on this? How might the institutional directives governing ISI student composition contrast with the criteria of the Festival gong kebyar finals? Sauman’s discussion of his techniques shares much of the same vocabulary as Mariyana’s, as do several of the musical techniques employed, particularly the representation of Western music theory technique as innovative gamelan composition practice. The contrast in reception to the works obviously highlights the contrasts in performance context: Mariyana’s work was performed within an education institution keen to emphasis its academic and international credentials, while the Festival Gong within the PKB works to construct and affirm a notional Balinese ‘cultural identity’, and has a more ambiguous relationship with ideas of international engagement (see Noszlopy 2002: Chapter Six). However, I would argue that the difference in response is also largely determined by the manner in which these ideas are framed within the composition, particularly within the composition ‘theme’ (téma) and ‘concept’ (konsep). While Mariyana represented these theoretical techniques as in support of traditional religious ritual process in both his verbal accounts and through performance practice, Sauman opted for a more abstract approach. He chose to highlight the cosmopolitan nature of his composition process by including a range of complex theoretical terminology in his sinopsis, while also emphasising compositionally the musical realisation of these ideas in the work itself. It was a strategy that made the work popular with foreign researchers, but did not win huge support from many Balinese audiences. The process of naming Chanda Klang is a good entry point into the piece. While the title was devised retrospective to composition/transmission—not unusual for a tabuh kréasi—the issues raised by the title’s debate highlight some of the contrasting pressures and pulls acting on Sauman throughout his composition process, here notably between generations of musicians who appeared to operate on contrasting criteria as to what constitutes a successful tabuh kréasi work. The deployment of musical canon was central to Sauman’s composition approach (on which, more below) and he stated how he was initially keen to include the device’s new Indonesian form (kanon) in the title (pers comm. 2007). However, a senior relation of Sauman, the esteemed composer I Ketut Gedé Asnawa, assumed the role of mentor across the composition process and suggested an important alteration. He recounted a conversation with Sauman in May 2007 as follows: 210

I said why not modify the term canon or use Balinese or sanskrit, and I told him about kinanti- [it] means a close friend in Sanskrit, a good friend. If you come from one part of a melody, it’s related to the other melody... Expressions from different people... This creates the harmony: this harmony is friendship (pers. comm. [in English] 2007).

For Asnawa, it was sensible to obscure the idea of the canon in some way, best of all with ‘Balinese or Sanskrit’ and so ground the work in a ‘traditional’ concept, superimposing a narrative on the musical process (here, canonic entries as a representation of Bali’s social harmony). As has been previously discussed, Asnawa established himself in the Balinese musical scene as a daring and innovative figure through such works as Kosong (1984). However, like many older musicians Asnawa now takes a more conservative stance in musical creation and has also become one of the key contemporary voices writing on Balinese gamelan as an articulation of ‘Balinese agama Hindu’. To this end, he has produced various works which seek to demonstrate what he terms the ‘philosophic aspect’ to Balinese music.113 Asnawa’s suggestion was posed as a corrective to Sauman’s potentially injudicious or naive abstract approach: ‘[Sauman] created that [piece] without thinking about the title or the theme, he was just interested in using the canon’ (Asnawa, pers. comm. 2007). While Asnawa was open-minded about a range of different compositional practices, he was clearly concerned about how they were to be framed and represented in the final work. For Asnawa, the lack of concrete téma or clearly articulated composer-intent which connected the work to ‘Balinese values’ potentially jeopardized the standing of the work within the judging committee. However, the title was not yet settled. From here, a new working title developed as Sekar Klang, with Sekar meaning ‘flower’ while Klang was drawn from discussion with American musician and scholar Andrew McGraw (who readily acknowledges his more or less intentional involvement in numerous contemporary Balinese compositions, through discussion and through musical participation (2005, 2009)). While discussing of the piece’s various divisions of melodies, McGraw mentioned the term klangfarbenmelodie, the German term used to describe the smooth distribution of a single melodic line between different instruments, and recounts how the word ‘klang’ resonated with the musicians present as an onomatopoetic representation of noisy or chaotic gamelan timbre (pers. comm. McGraw, 2007). 114 From here, Sauman recounts that at one point he wanted to use another music terminology-based title, Klang-di, the latter syllable an abbreviation of melodi (melody), before he decided that this wasn’t ‘tight’ or ‘binding’ enough (kurang serat). Sauman then consulted with a family friend and literature scholar 113 A key

example is Asnawa’s article ‘The Diversity and Complexity of Balinese Gamelan’ (Kebhinekaan dan Kompleksitas Gamelan Bali) (2007). 114

Sauman also joked that sekar klang was a good pun on sekaha klang, which would suggest a rather chaotic sounding gamelan club (sekaa). 211

who came up with the final title Chanda Klang which met with approval on all sides. Chanda is described by Sauman as ‘not Balinese but Sanskrit’, and meaning ‘something that is beautiful, which is capable of being pleasing’ (bukan Bali, basa Sanskrit… sesuatu yang indah, yang bisa mampu enak) (Sauman pers. comm. 2007). Any potentially disruptive association of klang was balanced by an expression of ‘beauty’, the term rooted squarely not even in Balinese but in the reassuringly grand Indic tradition. However, as Asnawa reported, this additional theme was superfluous as the idea of a canon was the first and only point of reference in Sauman’s conception of the piece. Sauman states, I didn’t think that much about the piece actually, I just let it flow, and I didn’t think very much about the structure of the composition. At the beginning I had just had a little bit of a ‘concept’: the canon… I really like it. Various works of mine [which are] ‘contemporary’, most of them have a canon in them. (pers. comm. 2007). 115

Sauman went on to describe various works he’d composed which drew on the idea of the canon, including an ISI-performed kontemporer work Ambisi (Ambition) (2003), and the tabuh kréasi Waskita (2005) created with I Gedé Arsana. As demonstrated by McGraw, Ambisi shows clear canonic structuring, an early passage in the work by two pairs of saron and a pair of kantilan displays a clear three-voice canon, although the third entry from the kantilan subtly adjusts its statement of the saron melody (2005: 322). McGraw reports how Sauman applied these theoretical tenets relatively freely, also noting how the composer learnt these concepts from various English-language texts, which meant he was ‘forced to guess at the exact definitions and constructions of the Western canon, inserting his own creations within the gaps of his understanding’ (2005: 321). The idea of these ‘gaps’ did not appeal to Asnawa, who in conversation noted, When people adopt a system from Western music, probably they just understand only the skin of that. Maybe it’s not [a canon], but then they try to say it’s [a] canon or counterpoint or whatever (pers. comm. [in English] 2007).

Asnawa expresses his disapproval by invoking a Balinese practice of speech interpretation: to register only the ‘skin’ (kulit) of something without unpeeling (melutang) the opaque outer layers may well mean one entirely misses the point (see Hobart 2000: 184, 187). While very much in support of alternative composition techniques and their possible reframing in Balinese gamelan, Asnawa was concerned with what appear to be two opposing ideas of ‘authenticity’: he was concerned about how the technique was best framed so as not to hamper the piece’s position as sufficiently ‘Balinese’, but he was also anxious as to the authenticity of the source itself. Sauman’s own definition of a canon concurs with the Western notion (not least because his canonic 115

See Appendix 1, note 25,

212

writing has been the subject of considerable research scrutiny) and states the device to be where ‘one [melody] begins and another starts at a different time [but with] the same melody’ (satu melodi mulai dan lainnya mulai dalam waktu berbeda, melodi yang sama) (pers. comm. 2007). However, in Chanda Klang Sauman stated that his aim was only to create the impression or ‘character’ (sifatnya aja) of a canon: it was not ‘exact’ (persis) (pers. comm. 2007). This idea of a canon is most clearly heard in Chanda Klang at the opening gineman collection of material, where suling divide into two lines, accompanied an independent jegog line (see figure 6.9). 116

Figure 6.9 Chanda Klang, suling ‘canon’ 117 This passage is heard at 01:02 of CD Track 4, although the uncertain quality of the performance (from a late dress rehearsal) is indicative of how challenging contrapuntal entries remain, particularly for an exposed suling section unregulated by kempli pulse. My transcription of the section is based predominantly on Sauman’s own sung rendition of the passage, as my fragments of notation transcribed from various rehearsals and runthroughs tended not to be consistent and even in the final PKB performance on the Denpasar Ardha Chandra stage the suling passage was, in Sauman’s words ‘broken’ or ‘smashed’ (hancurkan). However, just as the synopsis showcased the work’s inclusion of Western theoretical terminology, so the piece highlighted this technique through an exposed and novel stationing of the canon for suling, emphasised further from their

116 Additional

canonic entries can be found in gangsa and kantilan elaboration heard within the gegendéran (which begins at 02:05) while the penyacah and suling lines here also interact contrapuntally, with occasional imitation. 117

In Chanda Klang tone numbers, Balinese solfege and approximate Western pitches align as follows: 1

2

3

5

6

ding

dong

deng

dung

dang

C#

D

E

G#

A 213

breaking out of an extended unison melody into two distinct parts. As can be seen, the melodic shape of the two suling lines are closely imitative. However, the second entry rapidly alters the melody by omitting elaborating notes and at the second held ‘A’ (dang) deducts a further half-beat to shrink the lines’ rhythmic displacement. This new displacement is then heard clearly at the rapid and distinctive ‘G# E D C# A’ figure (as indicated on figure 6.9), the parts now sitting a crotchet beat apart. The second line echoes this fragment directly after the first line, going on to expand the melodic elaboration for another beat before both parts rhythmically unite to play in empat intervals (Balinese ‘fourths’/‘fifths’) for the remainder of the passage. Aside from the suling the syncopated jegog line also has a strong effect, acting as a third melodic voice and creating a range of uncharacteristically close intervals with the two suling lines (see for instance, the clash of simultaneous ‘C#’, ‘D’ and ‘E’ (tones 1 2 3 or ding, dong, deng) at the fourth beat of the excerpt). The interweaving of melodic lines and the construction of ‘harmonic’ passages exploring non-Balinese intervals in the Festival was pioneered by composer I Wayan Yudane in the 1990s. However, Sauman still considered his work to create a novel effect for his listeners and noted ‘I think it certainly wasn’t so usual for the audience to hear that’ (saya pikir penonton memang mereka mungkin kurang bisa mendengar itu) (pers. comm. 2007). In contrast to the deliberate positioning of a ‘canon’ within the music, two other notable ‘theoretical’ concepts were applied retrospectively to the work, one notionally Western, one notionally Balinese. In discussion including both Balinese and Western musicians following a rehearsal, the term ‘pointillism’ was introduced (possibly by the author), in relation to the passage heard at 01:40. This section combines a recently popular type of staccato playing along with division of the melodic line, note-by-note, between gangsa pemadé and kantilan. Due to the kantilan’s higher pitch (kantilan are tuned an octave above gangsa pemadé) this resulted in striking octave displacement (see figure 6.10 below).

Figure 6.10 Chanda Klang, octave displacement

214

In previous discussion between the composer and myself, Sauman had termed this a version of nyog cag (a common type of interlocking figuration whereby the line is split alternately between polos and sangsih players, with polos consistently on the beat and sangsih filling the gaps between). The composer noted that in this instance it was simply the difference in metallaphone key thickness (perbedaan tebal bilah) between gangsa and kantilan which made the passage sound interesting (menarik). However, following a post-rehearsal discussion where I mentioned the idea of ‘pointillism’ as a possible Western interpretation of this aural effect, ‘pointillism’ duly appeared in the synopsis as a technique applied in the piece, despite the term’s almost total obscurity among musicians and audience and its potentially alienating, ‘academic’ connotations amid the popular contest. The second retrospective theoretical application is quite the opposite, and concerned the pair of Balinese structural models that were loosely applied to the piece after its composition and transmission. The work appeared to follow a standard tabuh kréasi format, following the terms in regular use by musicians: a gineman section of opening fragments including kebyaran passages; a gegendéran with repeated melodic cycles and featuring exposed interlocking figuration from gangsa pemadé and kantilan; a bapang featuring a shorter repeated melody with textural variations; and finally a pengecet, a faster concluding section. Chanda Klang fits relatively comfortably into this model and when discussing the nuts and bolts of the piece Sauman would routinely refer to passages using these terms. However, in discussion of the piece with Asnawa, the terms kawitan, pengawak and pengecet (the triangga format derived from gong gedé lelambatan whose potential origins and usage were discussed in Chapter Five), were solely applied, and with some frustration. According to Asnawa, [Sauman] tells me there is the triangga concept in it, but if you listen the first time you couldn’t find it. This part the kawitan, this part the body [pengawak], this part the pengecet? So, this is now a problem: we should be trying to clarify it. He said the structure is there: he feels it. He uses it, the concept, because he wants to... [have] something as a fundamental idea. But, like I said... the young people try to make such complicated things… (Asnawa, [in English] pers. comm. 2007)

If Sauman did indeed consciously deploy the triangga concept, it is certainly hard to find. For one, if wishing to align the KPP with the alternative model above, (which usually means the gineman and gegendéran are considered to comprise the kawitan, while pengawak is deemed to be the bapang), this would mean Sauman’s pengawak, the supposed core of the work, would consist of just over a minute’s music and include only two short melodic cycles and a series of disjointed melodic statements before the entry of the pengecet (see Appendix 2 for details of Chanda Klang sectional divisions). On these terms, it is interesting to reconsider the apparent clash between Sauman’s academic, and 215

by association ‘complicated’ compositional practices, with Asnawa’s evocation of Bali’s apparently traditional and spiritually-imbued triangga form. In line with the previous chapter’s discussion of the form’s origins and usage, Sandino likewise identifies a specifically academic context for the superimposition of the KPP, noting that it is ‘current [Balinese] academy discourse’ which sees the tabuh kréasi ‘most often framed in the three-part triangga form of classical genres’ (2008: 40). Sauman demonstrated a willingness to practice this terminology, seemingly under Asnawa’s guidance, and when asked about form in abstract would give an account of a KPP structure which located the kawitan from 00:00-05:04, with the pengawak entering at 05:05, while the pengecet was placed at around 06:08. On these grounds, Sauman was disappointed that Asnawa ‘said he still wasn’t able to hear the [different] parts clearly- from section to section he couldn’t see them with any clarity’ (Dia bilang masih bagian kurang jelas itu, dia tidak melihat kejelasan dari bagian-per-bagian) (pers. comm. 2007). The debate concerning Chanda Klang’s structure, and the issue of the canon, draw out the ambiguities or free determination of ‘ethnological valence’. In turn, the issue of ethnological valence assumes grave importance in the context of the adjudication process, as demonstrated by Asnawa’s concern to articulate the work within traditional, religious structures for its public presentation. While the composition remained stable, structural interpretations could be overlaid, attributing differing degrees of apparent ‘Balinese-ness’, or indeed ‘Western-ness’ in the case of the canon/not canon and the nyog-cag/pointillism texture. Asnawa’s concern for locating the triangga as the heart of Balinese composition (albeit here in a tabuh kréasi with a quite different structural heritage) and his emphasis on the form in conversation with the author as foreign researcher, chimes with Schulte Nordholt’s suggestion that ‘Bali is keen to export newly invented cultural authenticities’, noting that ‘middle class leadership seems to be very capable in defining the basic ingredients and core values of Balinese culture’ (2007: 82). Indeed, the authority Sauman was subject to, in terms of heeding the advice of respected elders, appears to have had a considerable effect on his experience of creating (and naming) the work, even though this advice may often have contradicted with Sauman’s own impulses. Sauman’s own hook for the piece was an aim to represent an interpretation of Western music theory as innovative gamelan music technique, a technique which would subsequently be reframed as distinctly Western for added interest and prestige in the piece’s synopsis. The question of representation here stoked problems for Asnawa and his demands for an additional cultural authenticity concerning not only ‘Balinese’ ideas, but also the representation of Western technique: Asnawa held that if you want to call something a canon it should strictly be a canon. The tensions examined in this brief analysis are thus suggestive of a widespread situation faced by the often young tabuh kréasi composers and their senior mentors: contest works are expected to articulate (far216

from-stable) elements of Balinese tradition, while displaying continuous and marked innovation, year-on-year.

Concluding Thoughts This chapter presented an overview of Bali’s political situation following the fall of Suharto. I briefly addressed the intersecting concerns of globalisasi and contemporary ideas of ‘Balinese identity’, as articulated by the Ajeg Bali movement. Surveying theses issues in the context of Bali’s musicological developments, the chapter then sought to situate various contemporary Balinese works within the increasingly complex circumstances of patronage, socio-cultural expectations and institutional mandates which confront many Balinese composers. Each of the analysed works illuminated how a substantial portion of contemporary composers’ success and standing in Bali hangs on their ability to articulate judiciously the background and contents of new work, despite the often incommensurate agendas to govern composition in the first place. This is particularly the case within more formally sanctioned composition contexts such as ISI examinations, the PKB, or the Festival gong kebyar. In addition, a composer’s representation of materials was conducted not only through verbal commentary such as formal interviews, sinopsis or skripsi, but also through the musical techniques used. The chapter thus examined a range of musical devices employed by composers to construct or shroud the ‘ethnological valence’ of certain materials. Examination of I Wayan Sinti’s Bapang and Windu Sara highlighted how composer commentary can powerfully articulate performance to secure support and prestige by linking seemingly contrary causes, here through a téori-style narrative of tuning approach. Sinti’s work also highlighted the issue of domestication. The composer used familiar Balinese musical forms to subsume ‘foreign’ musical cultures, an issue indicative of the intersection of the concerns of globalisasi and Ajeg Bali and the idea of a ‘strong Balinese identity’. I Nyoman Mariyana’s Tawur displayed a different approach to ideas of ‘the Balinese’. Alert to ISI adjudicating process, Mariyana sought to translate particular ideas of Balinese religious practice into a musical form, and (in line with other academic moves of late) substantiated various esoteric religious concepts through positioning them within, or indeed ‘as’ musical practice. Mariyana’s ability to contain musical ideas divergent to ‘traditional Balinese culture’ through careful musical framing and his verbal account of the work, enabled him a certain musical freedom while also securing the work top marks from the ISI jury. Sang Nyoman Arsawijaya’s Chanda Klang was perhaps subject to the greatest external pressures, for contest tabuh kréasi are required to satisfy demands of both innovation and of concerted ‘Balinese 217

expression’ (the latter powerfully articulated by his senior advisor, Asnawa). Here Western technical devices were deployed as a means of demonstrating technical innovation, while debates surrounding Chanda Klang’s musical structure once again highlighted the variety of interpretative accounts which can be superimposed onto a musical work and the continuing reinterpretation and redefinition of kebalian. Having considered a range of compositional representation practices––how material may be framed musically to enable a particular ethnological valence for an audience, and how concurrent verbal representation likewise shapes the way musical material is perceived––I consider an alternative set of approaches at work in Balinese music-making. Examining how Balinese practices of musical understanding and of knowing play out in rehearsal procedures, I analyse a series of situated musical practices to consider some of the ways Balinese might go about teaching, learning, creating and refining music.

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Part Three: Balinese Gamelan as Practice Chapter Seven “Olah nabuh gén”: Just Practising Gamelan The grammar of the word “knows” is evidently closely related to that of “can” or “able to”. But also closely related to that of “understands”… Try not to think of understanding as a ‘mental process’ at all. For that is the expression which confuses you. But ask yourself: in what case, in what circumstances, do we say “now I know how to go on?” (Wittgenstein 1958: 59e, §150; 61e, §154)

This chapter examines Balinese gamelan practice, and considers how ideas of musical knowing and music-making interact as a single series of practices. So far the thesis has addressed how certain Balinese musical practices have been represented since the colonial era, and challenged the validity of imposing rigid meanings—be they aesthetic, religious or historical—through the creation and application of theory (or téori). Earlier in the thesis I addressed some of the important contrasts between practices of knowledge and of knowing: Chapter Five suggested that the production and classification of knowledge inevitably stands as an attempt to impose structure and order upon what Fabian terms the ‘continual presence and process of knowing’ (2000 [1985]: 191). Bali has been an especially popular object of knowledge since colonial times, throughout the nationalist project and beyond. In contrast to Java, many theories generated to account for Balinese music-making have focused less on technical and practical aspects of musical activity, but have instead sought to articulate music-making as a manifestation of agama Hindu, or to trim Balinese music into an exotic analogue of Western music (among other musics) and so fit for forms of Western musical theoretical treatment. Many Balinese contemporary composers have a dynamic relationship with this notional duality. Compositions are expected to deliver distillations of ‘Bali’, while, through circumstances of patronage, education, research, and tourism, composers also engage with ideas of various other cultures and musics, notably European, American, Japanese and Indian. The musical results of this interplay may often be fascinating and rewarding, but also point to a series of tensions which underpin the production of new works, tensions which the previous chapter set out in part to illuminate. Having examined practices of representing Balinese music-making (and certain Balinese practices of representing other musics), this chapter considers Balinese practices of music-making and the attending ideas of musical ‘understanding’. How do Balinese set about making music on particular occasions? What are the modes by which Balinese 219

musicians create, teach, learn, refine and perform gamelan? How might these musicmaking practices compare to the various representations discussed in the thesis so far? And how might an examination of how Balinese rehearse further our understanding of how Balinese musicians set about performing, appreciating and evaluating their music? In addressing these questions, the chapter examines three specific instances of musical/ verbal interaction concerned with creating, teaching and performing gamelan. I acknowledge that my account of such practices is inevitably mediated by my presence and role as a female British researcher and/or musical participant in each of the three situations under discussion. In turn, my production of the following ethnographic text is, of course, another such practice of representation, ‘authorizing’ the Balinese musicians with whom I worked, and so subject to many of the problems that have preoccupied this thesis (Asad 1986, Hobart 1990). Without attempting to dodge these problems, I hope my own stance on how and why I discuss these particular situations offers a sufficient contrast to the previous representations under analysis to make sense of their inclusion. In examining these musical occasions, I return once more to Fabian’s important distinction between knowing and knowledge (an echo of Ryle’s ‘knowing that’ and ‘knowing how’) and flip the coin to consider how Balinese might practise certain types of knowing as part of the practice of making music. This is not in order to construct an apparently abstract or coherent body of knowledge on what or how Balinese know about music—a new, improved gamelan theory. Rather, the purpose of this chapter is to demonstrate that it is not possible to separate the knowing and making of music. As discussed in the introduction, these ideas link to Brinner’s work on Javanese musical competency (1995), although I suggest the invocation of ‘competency’ hints at a Chomskian distinction between ideal and actual performance which sees the former entitled to the privileges of the abstract, thus functioning rather like theory itself. This chapter seeks to avoid the abstract as far as possible. While I assemble some of the evaluative and functional terms regularly heard among musicians, the main body of the chapter comprises three instances of situated musical practices so as to examine how certain types of musical knowing unfold on certain occasions. Within these, I shall highlight particular vocabulary and techniques piquant to the musical processes at hand and seek to draw out links and overlaps where appropriate, but the goal is not to produce a complete, explanatory model. Creating any kind of comprehensive account is beyond the scope of this study, but would also involve producing an inventory of musical abstractions which would critically undermine my central thesis: that Balinese musicmaking must be considered as situated practice, and that attempts to represent it otherwise —in alternative, abstract ways—can be shown to have a long and dangerous pedigree.

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Balinese Practices of Knowing Before addressing music-making directly, I first consider certain Balinese practices of knowing in non-musical contexts to emphasize some of the important contrasts in Balinese epistemological approaches.118 Again, this is not intended as an abstract Balinese theory of knowledge, but precisely the opposite, for certain Balinese speech practices indicate a quite different approach to ideas of knowing, understanding, and interpreting, all of which are determined by the recognition that ‘knowing’ is highly contingent on context, and is a social practice. Indeed, Hobart has argued that in its Balinese sense, knowing is explicitly social practice in that it is commonly understood to entail action which is necessarily socially situated: thinking, knowing and remembering are all referred to as laksana (action) (Hobart 2000: 143). As such, a fixed and abstract account of Balinese ideas of ‘knowledge’ would miss the point entirely, an argument that is particularly relevant in relation to the production of static Balinese gamelan theory. For one, the words commonly used for ‘to know’ (tawang and uning) apply to both knowing and to being aware, and are rarely found in noun form (Hobart 2000: 142). This is not to say Balinese are not able to conceive of knowing in an abstract state, as knowledge. Indeed, a number of Old Javanese (derived from Sanskrit) terms in currency do just this. However, the Old Javanese word in most common usage, pramana, suggests ‘“ways” of knowing’ (Matilal 1986: 97), while another popular term for knowing or knowledge, jnanan (in Balinese, pradnyan) most closely translates as ‘clever, knowledgeable’ and implies a ‘demonstrated ability to be able to do something’ (Hobart 2000: 143). A sense emerges that ‘knowing’ and ‘being able to do’ are far from distinct categories. My discussion of Balinese speech practices is presented primarily as an example of how practice-based models might function best for approaching Balinese ideas of knowing and understanding. However, while still demanding more concentrated study, some interesting links open up between speech practices and Balinese modes of evaluating musical ability. The most commonly applied term used to describe a musician of ability is duweg, which can be glossed as ‘clever’, but which implies a strong sense of being skillful and nimble and connotes the idea of being able to do something well. Critically, Balinese use of duweg does not inscribe any distinction between a person’s physical ability and mental facility in order to achieve this: they are part and parcel of the same process. Another term to denote musical mastery is gegedig wayah. Gegedig is one of the several Balinese ‘striking’ or ‘hitting’ words (which include magambel, nggebug, menabuh) used to mean playing gamelan, and while the term often describes drum 118

In this section I refer extensively to Hobart’s Anthropology as Radical Metaphysical Critique, particularly Chapters Four and Five which deal at length with certain Balinese practices of knowledge and matters of interpretation and meaning, and closely reference specific Balinese speech practices (2000). 221

performance it can also be applied to the playing of any of a gamelan’s percussive instruments. Wayah literally means ‘old’. However, in combination the phrase connotes particular accomplishment and mastery of the instrument or a particular pattern, and is better translated as ‘mature’ or ‘ripe’ playing, and may also be attributed to a young player of talent. 119 The idea of a metaphor of experience as the accreditation of a talented musician is interesting and in turn may be linked to certain Balinese speech practices. 120 Wayah may be used as part of the phrase raos wayah (mature speech), contrasted with raos nguda (immature speech): describing how wiser, more mature people ‘speak less and enfold the point (tetuwuk) beneath the surface, which is what fools and the young will speak’ (Hobart 2000: 86). Balinese performers spoke of gegedig wayah in a way seemingly not linked to technical mastery or virtuosic display but, according to I Wayan Dibia, as about ‘feeling it fully from the inside’ while I Wayan Rai suggested a ‘local’ understanding of the phrase to be ‘already knows “feeling”’ (suba nawang rasa) (Dibia pers. comm. 2007; Rai pers. comm. 2007). The uses, connotations and origins of the term rasa are subjective and complex, with rasa often deployed as a rather esoteric term, possibly through an association with the term’s occasional philosophical presentation in India as a ‘theory of the senses’. However, the word appears often to be applied in a more purposive and active sense in Balinese usage, with possible Balinese definitions including ‘intention’, a ‘sensitivity to how things really [are]’, or even on occasion ‘the need to examine a situation carefully, and to be clear as to all aspects of something, before taking action’ (Hobart n.d. b: 75). This re-evaluation of rasa as potentially less concerned with mystic abstraction but associated more with the practical ability to grasp and digest the details and implications of a situation at hand before action, again supports a reframing of gamelan musical understanding not as an abstract body of esoteric knowledge but as a series of complex, situated practices. This emphasis links to the chapter title’s reference to olah, which is critical to my discussion of musical practice. Early on in my field research I noted that olah was widely used in Balinese musicians’ discussion and in their Indonesian-language téori, mainly in the form of pengolahan which awkwardly translates from the Indonesian as ‘processing’. Composers spoke about the pengolahan of an idea (ide), a melody (melodi) or of a whole composition (komposisi). I was initially disinterested in the term as an empty, ISI filler 119

Various other evaluative adjectives used in Bali refer to notions of ripeness, including the widely-applied luwung which is usually translated as ‘good’ but can literally mean ‘ripe’, while on occasion I heard the musician I Wayan Arnawa use the term kempuh, meaning spoiled, over-ripe or mushy, to refer to what he considered an unsuccessful gamelan composition. 120

Brinner references an often-invoked adage in Java that runs ‘my experience is my teacher’ (1995: 133).

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word, but eventually grasped that the ready use of the term may be linked to particular Balinese senses of olah, an ‘everyday’ word which in the verb form ngolah can be rendered as: to exercise, to put to use; to work at; to make ready; to practice. 121 Rather than being associated with the rather mechanical and abstract idea of processing, ‘olah’ points to a sense of physical and practical activity, and is accordingly related to polah (action) and solah (disciplined activity, physical exercise or dancing). Indeed, the emphasis on music-making ability as primarily about action is mirrored in some of the common metaphors used to evaluate performance and composition: lemuh is used as a positive description, translated as muscular, flexible, supple, or graceful, while singkuh is applied negatively, to mean clumsy or uneven. It is with this emphasis on the practical ability of Balinese musicianship that I examine three examples of gamelan music-making, considering various practices in the teaching, learning, and refining and understanding musical performance. The first analysis focuses on the Balinese application and discussion of various terms in relation to gamelan gong luang, concentrating on how certain aspects of musical understanding might be expressed verbally. I was regularly told, notably by ISI graduates, that many Balinese who are seniman alam (‘natural musicians’ i.e., not academy-trained) are shy or ashamed to speak about gamelan (koh ngomong). This may be seen as another instance of the disarticulation of musicians who function outside the academy programme. This is an imbalance which this chapter in part attempts to redress by examining some of the nonacademy, practical vocabulary employed in Balinese musical processes, which does not find its way into ISI-sponsored texts, Indonesian language research interviews, and which is less apparent in the rehearsal procedures conducted by academy-trained musicians (often characterized by a mixture of Balinese language and Indonesian/Western loanword terminology). 122 However, the idea that gamelan is ‘difficult to talk about’ (sukeh ngorahin) was commonly stated and, indeed, is of paramount importance to much Balinese musical practice which employs various non-verbal communication methods in musical transmission and learning processes. The notion of guru panggul (‘mallet teacher’) and guru [ma]kuping (‘ear teacher’ or ‘listening teacher’)—learning through visually following another’s mallet or ‘by ear’—are central to learning and composition transmission in the majority of musical contexts. Thus, my second and third examples 121 122

It should be noted that the term olah is also employed in Java, with similar connotations.

Musical conversation during rehearsals associated with ISI graduates is conducted predominantly in Balinese, however many Western-based musicological terms denoting structure (strukur, bentuk), sections (bagian), tempo (tempo), designation of ‘melody’ (melodi), and sense of ensemble (for instance the widespread use of pas (pass or fit) as in melodinya belum pas: ‘the melody doesn’t yet fit’) are now customarily expressed in modern Indonesian. 223

focus on how such ideas function in practice. I consider a series of rehearsals of the local banjar gamelan group of Paang, North Denpasar as the musicians tackle the substantial semar pegulingan piece tabuh gari, first learning from their ISI-trained teacher and subsequently attempting to work through a passage without his instruction. Lastly, and by way of contrast, I examine some of the verbal and non-verbal techniques deployed in putting together selected passages of a newly composed musik kontemporer piece Singsal, created by an ISI undergraduate and performed by ISI and SMKI students in 2007. Having highlighted the processes by which particular Balinese musicians on particular occasions go about making music, I consider how these contextualized approaches contrast with the various representations or distillations of Balinese gamelan discussed throughout the thesis. Discussing Gamelan Gong Luang Banjar Seseh in Singapadu, Gianyar In order to maintain connections between speech practices and types of musical knowing, my first example deals with spoken discourse surrounding the organisation and performance of the gamelan gong luang ensemble of Banjar Seseh, Singapadu.123 Discussions were conducted between Anak Agung Aji Anom Suma (henceforth A.A. Suma), the author, a young composer and ISI-graduate, and various other members of the compound and banjar who dropped in and out of conversation, with discussion also continuing during a play-through/rehearsal of the group’s repertoire. 124 The conversations were interesting for the interaction between A.A. Suma and the young composer. The former speaks little Indonesian and is relatively isolated from Bali’s more institutionalised music-making as endorsed by ISI, SMKI or the PKB, while the composer is a highly accomplished musician and scholar who has also toured and studied in North America a number of times. On this occasion, the composer was present both to support the author but also to gather potential research materials for his own academic use in forthcoming overseas study. How did this contrast in musical background play out in spoken discourse (mostly in Balinese) about the gamelan? Following this theme, on later listening to the recorded discussions, I Nengah Susila remarked that several of my and the composer’s questions ‘missed their intended target’ (nyaplir) through our use of terminology which A.A. Suma was unfamiliar with or understood differently. However, as my commentary

123

Gamelan gong luang (also known as gamelan saron) is seven-tone ensemble featuring a mixture of bronze and wooden-keyed instruments, and is widely regarded as one of the oldest extant forms in Bali. The Singapadu ensemble comprises jegog, gangsa jongkok, gambang (a bamboo xylophone, here with eight keys), trompong/réyong plus kendang, gong and kempur. 124

My understanding of the Balinese conversation and rehearsal proceedings examined in this chapter has been much aided by discussion of recording transcripts with Balinese musician I Nengah Susila and dancer Ni Madé Pujawati.

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attempts to demonstrate, the alternative understandings held by these different parties were themselves sometimes illuminating. A.A. Suma highlighted a practical approach to musical learning and musical knowledge, drawing on the term bakat. In Balinese, bakat has a range of meanings including ‘to find’, ‘to obtain’ or ‘to be able’, but the translation suggested by Ni Madé Pujawati to suit this context was ‘to get it’ or ‘to pick it up’. In a musical context the term can refer to a complete process of being able to memorize a passage, perform it to tempo and integrate it within the ensemble.125 A.A. Suma initially used the term in his commentary of a recent visit to the music club from a Balinese man interested to learn to play gong luang, who was also the son of a particularly esteemed and successful musician and dancer. However, despite the visitor’s musical pedigree A.A Suma noted emphatically that he was ‘truly unable to get it’ (tan bakat-bakat, jakti). In response to the story about curious outside visitors, the composer stated that he was not visiting so as to learn to play, but had rather come in order to gather materials for an academic paper. However, A.A Suma’s reply focused again on whether students had the ability to learn practically, stating that an academic background did not mean there was any more chance of the composer picking it up: he said that there was no way of knowing if the composer would be able to ‘get it’ (here using keniyang, switching register to the high-Balinese form of bakat), it was just luck (nak untung-untungan nika) and he couldn’t be sure (tan puruna). I Nengah Susila’s understanding of this exchange was that A.A. Suma was saying that someone could be academic (akademis) but they may not learn quickly (belajar dengan cepat) (pers. comm. 2008). Later in the conversation, A.A. Suma emphasized the idea that physical experience was central to learning, this time in a simple response to my and the composer’s questions concerning the shape of the panggul (beater) used to play ensemble’s gambang. Here he replied ‘If you come again, test the panggul yourself. Truly, you need to [try it for yourself]—only then will you know’ (Yan pacang naenang meriki malih pidan, tes kentene jati. Mangda jati, wawu uningan). A.A Suma’s account of his initiation into the gamelan group highlighted the common Balinese approach of learning gamelan first through aural encounter, and then through observation and imitation. A.A. Suma described how, as a boy, he used to love listening to the gamelan (demen kenten ningehan gambelan) and that whenever it was being played he would pick up [a panggul] and join in with his friends (dija nak megambel jag jemak ampun ajak timpal-timpalé). From here, little by little, he came to ‘get’ the pieces (mawinan prasida niki… bakatlah abedik-abedik nika gendingé). The idea of imitation and of ‘following’ in order to play was referenced a number of times by A.A. Suma. He described the process of nutug (following) among the ensemble, revealing that 125

It should be noted that in Indonesian, bakat is usually translated directly as ‘skill’.

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the players in the group tended to watch and follow his playing on réyong for where and when pieces or sections might begin and end: ‘If the réyong doesn’t finish, the rest are sure not to finish either’ (Kewala tan suud nden di réyong, ne lenan, tan suudanga). This process was clearly evident while observing the group play together.126 A.A Suma also used the term nuut or nuutang (which refers to imitation, specifically of movements) to describe how the saron players might watch and follow other instruments (notably the réyong in this group) to find their own notes, which are ‘given from here’ (saking deriki ngemaang). In addition, Suma provided another example of musical ‘following on’ as operating on a more internal level, noting that the act of playing remains the key to his knowing a piece: ‘Sometimes I forget, but as soon as I start to play, I remember’ (Kala kenten masih dipunapiné engsap. Yan ampun nabuh, inget). This emphasis on practical engagement is reflected in A.A. Suma’s approach to the structural organisation of the group’s repertoire and in his discussion of modal usage. The idea of ‘core melody’ in a range of Balinese gamelan forms is usually ascribed a central role in musical structure and is termed the ‘pokok’ by ethnomusicological writers, in reference to the melody typically produced at the level of calung (a melodic/metric level that would here be akin to the line played by gangsa jongkok in this group).127 Pokok has been a popular theoretical term in the analysis of Balinese music since McPhee’s work, initially applied to the ‘skeletal melody’ often notated in lontar for gamelan gambang (and by association, gong luang). However, it has since been applied to the ‘core melody’ of a range of more modern forms.128 However, A.A Suma applied the term quite differently, using pokok to designate a broader structure, one determined not by melody but by larger-scale metrical repeats. When the conversation turned to the use of kendang in reference to the piece Kinada, A.A. Suma described the tabuh pat form found within the piece as follows ‘the way of tabuh pat: the kendang ‘makes’ (dados) the pokok… there are four jegog notes [and] one cycle [is] four of these [jegog patterns]. Once on the third [of these patterns], the kendang gives a signal (wangsita) to search for [or ‘to prompt’] the gong’.129 This usage connects to Gray’s research on gendér wayang practices of composition and improvisation, which likewise describes common usage of pokok as referring to the ‘core melody’, but also to refer to ‘a basic unadorned version of the whole

126

In our discussion, another player agreed with A.A. Suma’s summary by interjecting that in this ensemble the réyong was the ‘driver’ (réyongé dadi sopir). 127

Pokok can be translated more generally to mean the ‘basis’, ‘core’, or ‘main thing’.

128

For use of pokok as ‘core melody’ in gamelan gambang and gamelan luang see Toth 1975.

129

See Appendix 1, note 26,

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piece, including all melody and elaborating strata’ (2006: 104). Linking this re-calibration to Sumarsam’s account (1984, 1992) of how Western understandings of balungan in Central Javanese gamelan led to ‘an oversimplified conception of its musical organisation’, Gray suggests that pokok may prove to be ‘a much subtler concept’ than a single melodic line and also may have implications as to how Balinese musicians perceive form and melody in the performance of music outside of gendér wayang (2006: 92). Indeed, pokok is regularly translated in musicological texts on Balinese gamelan as ‘core melody’ or ‘trunk melody’, the latter used as the basis of a botanical metaphor where this trunk is decorated with flowers (sekar) in the form of various types of melodic elaboration. A reassessment of pokok as ‘core melody’, is supported by another key piece of terminology used by Balinese gamelan musicians but rarely included in musicological texts: bun gending. Bun may be translated as a climbing plant or creeper, in particular its stem (Shadeg 2007: 52). However, rather than referring to an isolated component of the musical structure, or the idea of this stem linking to a single and distinct strand of the musical texture, bun gending refers to the general contours and flow of the work, inclusive of all its various components. While in need of further study, the idea that pokok may refer rather to a musical whole instead of a single, extracted melodic entity—rather like the reappraisal of the Javanese balungan in the 1980s—has significant implications for the current compartmentalizing of Balinese musical structure currently practiced by musicologists in the field. A.A. Suma’s use of terms to describe what may be designated as ‘modal subsets’ within individual pieces also points to an alternative and perhaps more fluid approach to certain Balinese musical structures. Writing of the gamelan luang of Tangkas, Toth describes approaches to mode and scale in Bali’s ‘older’ genres as follows: ‘As noted by McPhee [1966], there is a great deal of confusion regarding this problem of scale name in the selundeng, caruk, gambang and luang traditions. [In Tangkas], as apparently in Kayubihi and Selat, Pupuh [piece] names and their proper scales appear to be synonymous’ (Toth 1975: 70). Conversation between A.A. Suma and the composer clearly hinged around the ‘great deal of confusion’ asserted by Toth. The composer initially tried to establish the names of particular modal groupings, akin to the apparent modes of gambuh or semar pegulingan, asking of the piece Kinada, ‘what saih is used?’ (yan di gending Kinadaé nika, saih napi kemanten maange?). A.A. Suma was uncertain, saying he had often heard the word saih but did not know what it meant (‘Saih, apa adane… pepes ja ningeh saih’). When the composer explained the idea that saih involved particular groups of keys being used in selected combinations, A.A. Suma replied that this was the case (niki wenten). However, A.A. Suma’s description as to how tones might be processed within such groupings shows several contrasts in conceptualization, as is shown below. A.A. Suma’s attempt to correct his uncertainty in 227

response to our questioning points to a perceived hierarchy of ‘academic’, ‘modern’ or ‘international’ knowing over the musician’s immediate approach. Once more different formulations of musical knowing are hierarchized. However, rather than indexed by the caste connection discussed in Part One, as with Part Two, certain knowing marshals privilege by the invocation of apparently ‘modern’ or akademis credentials. A.A. Suma’s account, albeit grounded in musical experience, was thus overwritten. Nonetheless, A.A. Suma’s later responses to the idea of ‘modal groups’ at the rehearsal came to highlight his contrasting approach. Demonstrating on an instrument during the rehearsal session later on, he answered questions about saih through his instrument, saying he would ‘search first on the réyong’ (rerehang di réyong dumun). He then played the opening phrase of each of the group’s repertoire to establish which tones were in use, noting how each piece had three notes touching (nika ampun telu atepné) and stating that this configuration was described as nyoroh. Nyoroh can mean ‘to arrange as a whole’ (Shadeg 2007: 362), but in this musical context more relevantly translates as ‘to follow in succession.’ It thus refers to the common Balinese modal grouping of three consecutive tones of the scale, followed by an omitted tone (often known as the pemero) then followed by another two adjacent tones and a further skipped tone.130 By locating the nyoroh tones, and through a combination of our rather leading questions and certain group member recollections, a number of modes could be established which followed this format (see below). This is a model which both Toth and McPhee state to be present in Singapadu, describing the group’s use of modal ‘transposition’ whereby moveable solfeggio is applied to a fixed scale (Toth 1975: 70, McPhee 1966: 283). However, it was apparent that A.A. Suma did not immediately conceptualize these groupings in such a way. Earlier in the day his approach to tonality showed a different emphasis, as was also reflected in his ‘searching on the réyong’. A.A. Suma’s sense of tonality within a piece seemed to be located from the first or principal note to be struck, and to be attached very specifically to the piece in question, meaning that tonality was not easily considered in general terms. He stated, ‘What’s important is the first which should be hit, if it is Kinada… it’s ding first’, while in the case of Panji Gedé he stated, ‘this one is the “head”: [key] number three. It is like this, then this is number two and to number one - it makes its way to here’, here reversing the standard ascending progress up the three ‘nyoroh’ tones which seemed more connected to how he conceived the piece’s musical line than in seeking to locate the mode.131 In trying to explain these groupings 130

For example, in the modal grouping ‘selisir’, customarily said to comprise tones 1 2 3 5 6, the nyoroh tones would be the 1 2 3 cluster. 131

Of Kinada: ‘Ya, nah sane penting- kapertama ne ane patut gedig yan napkala Kinada… ding dumum’; of Panji Gedé: ‘Niki dados kepala: nomor tiga. Ampun kenten, niki kalih, niki satu, meriki lakuna’ (pers. comm. A.A. Suma, 2007). 228

and melodic progressions across tones, A.A. Suma also drew on a range of terminology associated with movement and journeying. This terminology included laku, which can translate as ‘path’ or ‘course’, or as a verb ‘to make one’s way’, as well as jalan and [pa] margi which similarly translate as ‘the way’ or ‘to go’.132 Through such terminology, A.A. Suma’s emphasis seemed to fall on the general progress of a piece and how tones slotted into its path, rather than recognising abstract groupings. This emerged clearly when the composer spotted that the same series of tones had been identified for the ‘modes’ Warga Sari and for Panji Cenik (tones 1 2 3 6 7). A.A. Suma’s reply to the composer’s ensuing question to clarify this was instructive: after gauging that the listed tones were in fact identical for both modes, A.A. Suma referred instead to their melodic application, stating simply that ‘they’re the same, but are different in the way they go: it’s like that’ (pateh, kewala niki len jalané niki, kenten’).133 Discussion with Anak Agung Aji Anom Suma highlights the possibility of a more fluid, practical approach to musical understanding than is often attributed to Balinese gamelan. These discussions also served to illustrate the contrasts (and hierarchies) in approach between A.A. Suma’s account and the kinds of academic frameworks that myself and the composer initially brought to the table. A.A. Suma’s discussion emphasised the practical experience of playing as not only the foundation of his idea of Balinese musical pedagogy, but also to inform his own conception of repertoire, musical ‘form’ and tonal organisation: musical knowing is possible only in the process of musical action. The following two examples examine how this notion might play out in specific and situated musical practices, notably in rehearsal rooms where external scrutiny was less overt. 134 How do Balinese musicians in certain contexts create, teach, learn and refine gamelan repertoire? How do these processes contrast with the accounts of Balinese music-making described in Parts One and Two of the thesis? And how might an

132

In discussion I Nengah Susila described laku as a term commonly used in gamelan learning and also associated with ideas of nutug (following) considered previously. Susila mentioned ‘Kija lakuna?’: ‘Where is it going?’ as a common phrase used to describe the not uncommon situation where a jegog player does not already know his part and so must listen to the rest of the ensemble to try and work out what tone the ensemble will reach at the precise point the jegog must be sounded (pers. comm. 2008). Specific musical examples of this process at work (with more or less success) will be included in the subsequent analysis of rehearsals of the gamelan semar pegulingan piece Tabuh Gari. 133

Incidentally, in later discussion with the entire gong luang group about saih, a different sequences of tones were played and described as Warga Sari: 1 3 4 5 7. 134

Both these accounts of rehearsal sessions are with music groups I had played with for several months. Notwithstanding the significance of my presence as a Western and female researcher, I felt a degree of familiarity and informality within both groups through this regular participation and interaction, and only casually recorded rehearsals without initially intending to present them in this thesis. 229

examination of Balinese rehearsal processes further our understanding of how Balinese set about creating, performing and evaluating music?

Learning Tabuh Gari Banjar Paang in Penatih, North Denpasar (CD Track 5) This passage considers the learning processes employed in the teaching, memorizing and refining of the classic semar pegulingan piece, Tabuh Gari, by a group of primarily amateur Balinese musicians playing together in Banjar Paang, North Denpasar. The group featured a wide variety of ability and experience. The group’s leader, I Gedé Arsana, is a highly proficient performer and composer who teaches at SMKI and regularly composes for some the island’s most prestigious musical events, including the Festival Gong Kebyar. However, while the ensemble comprised a small number of players (both older and younger) who played with technical ease and flair and were already familiar with the piece or quick to memorize new passages, the majority of the group were less confident, less comfortable in their playing technique and often uncertain about the musical material. The group plays together regularly, mostly performing standard semar pegulingan repertoire at local temple ceremonies. Over January and February 2007 Arsana worked more intensively with the group to try out two new compositions he had recently created (one of which, Puja Bhuwana, would later be given a more prestigious public premiere at the Sanur Festival later in the year). In addition, the piece Tabuh Gari was formally added to the group’s repertoire, and so was substantially re-learnt by most members of the group, with players of the gangsa pemadé and kantilan metallophones facing particularly long and challenging passages of interlocking figuration or kotekan to memorize (or work out) during the piece’s long slow sections. I chose to focus on the transmission and refinement of Tabuh Gari by this group as it highlights a range of learning techniques. The methods of guru panggul and guru kuping discussed above were employed throughout the group in rehearsal and in performance with players carefully watching and listening to those playing more accurately and confidently. Kantilan often followed the row of pemadé in front, who in turn might follow Arsana patiently inserting figuration on a pemadé when the pattern faltered in rehearsal. However, on occasion Arsana could not be present and the group would persevere without his direct leadership which highlighted additional modes of learning. Most players were familiar with certain aspects of Tabuh Gari: some gangsa players could attempt to work out their parts in accordance with the rest of the ensemble’s progression of tones. This met with varying success, sometimes allowing the group to 230

continue playing through unfamiliar corners, and sometimes resulting in musical collapse where it would be decided to skip to the next section, or to wait until Arsana arrived to fill in the missing melodic turns. As will be shown, language was employed sparingly by both Arsana and the local musicians to guide rehearsals, but on occasion was used to clarify or to direct proceedings and can be seen to operate in conjunction with non-verbal musical practices of learning and direction. I examine here three rehearsals where varying problems and priorities emerged, and consider the different musical and linguistic practices which were accordingly applied to correct or refine the group’s performance.

‘Carrying on’ (tutugan) (29/01/2007) (CD Track 5) The main issue to arise in the first rehearsal under consideration centred on problems of musical memory. These problems hinged on managing melodic repeats without omissions and relating kotekan (interlocking figuration split between pairs of players) in the gangsa to the tones played by jublag and jegog lines. The rehearsal was conducted primarily without speech, with only occasional interjections by Arsana and other members of the group. As is customary, the rehearsal comprised an extended run-through of the piece, returning to repeat a section if it had ground to a halt but otherwise seeking to continue playing wherever possible. I use as my model the specific version of the piece as taught to me and to the group by Arsana (which also largely matches my recording of a performance later given by the group), from which I have produced the skeleton score of the opening sections (see figure 7.1 below and CD Track 5). Against this, I consider some of the mistakes made by players and in turn how the rehearsal process approached these problems, largely without recourse to language or the apportion of individual responsibility for errors. Rather, Arsana guided the group to repeat passages without discussion, the solution usually hinging on Arsana adjusting his role in the group (i.e. playing or singing a line which was struggling) to respond to ensemble members’ difficulties.135

135

In this performance of Tabuh Gari, tone numbers (here relating to gangsa keys), Balinese solfege and approximate Western pitches align as follows: 1

2

3

5

6

[7]

ding

dong

deng

dung

dang

[daing]

C#

D

E

G#

A

[B] 231

Figure 7.1 Tabuh Gari opening section

232

Figure 7.1 (continued) Tabuh Gari opening section

233

Figure 7.1 (continued) Tabuh Gari opening section

This rehearsal featured a range of problems, focused primarily around the placement and repetition of melodic lines. Following the trompong solo entry, Tabuh Gari features a single extended melodic line played by gangsa, jublag and trompong and 234

suling and it was soon clear that a number of players were confused about the order and progression of phrases in this passage. In the first run-through attempt of the rehearsal, the gangsa and jublag players cut out ten beats, leaping from the strong-beat ‘A’ (dang) indicated at

, to the distinct dotted refrain (marked at

). This resulted in a major

disruption to the 8-beat division of the piece, critical to the position of jegog tones which punctuate every 8- or 16-beat phrase. The players were quick to realise the mistake and stopped after just two beats with laughter and cries of ‘ilang!’ (Lost!). The piece immediately began once more and on this second occasion several players made the same mistake again. However, the remainder had corrected the mistake and played straight through with sufficient conviction and volume that those who wavered this time may rejoin. The playing thus continued until majority of players jumping ahead to

. Here, a different phrase was omitted, the , again confusing the lines which open with the

repeated-note, dotted-rhythm figure. However, seemingly because the organisation of pulse had not been disrupted, the play-through continued despite the error and progressed from

to the end of the gongan. Note that while the opening melodic figure for gangsa,

jublag and jegog at

and

is identical, the drumming pattern for the pair of kendang

(lanang and wadon) differs between phrases. As is shown on skeleton score, the line at features a distinctive krumpengan drumming figure of repeated left hand ‘pung’ strokes for the lanang drum (here played by Arsana). In addition, the exchange of interjecting kap-pak strokes between wadon and lanang drums fall in different positions in the two passages. The kendang players were thus doubtless aware of the leap—not least because both players briefly stopped playing as the melodic line diverged—but did not notify the group of the mistake. Instead, they rejoined the ensemble with the gong at the end of the line, aiming to achieve continuation rather than immediate correction. The group continued to play almost until the end of the section, here halting when the jublag line became uncertain and stopped, which was followed by the gangsa kotekan also breaking down. Another member of the group called out ‘it’s not dang’ (sing dang), referring to the ‘A’ (tone 6) which the jublag played instead of a dung (‘G#’ or 5) in the middle of the previous line ( ), an error which had misdirected the remainder of their line to jump to figure

. Arsana, however, said nothing at all, and instead immediately played

the introductory trompong passage on the gangsa in front of him to instigate another runthrough. During this play-through Arsana ensured the continuation of the piece by playing the polos line on the gangsa throughout, while also singing the jublag line where these players hesitated or veered off course (on other various occasions he would also play along with the jublag line on the gangsa). This enabled the group to continue playing without interruption until the final section of the piece (pengecet). Here on the third repetition of the pengecet, the jublag omitted a large passage. The ensemble faltered and 235

players stopped soon after the jublag had switched ahead, not least because the gangsa kotekan which has been oscillating on tones dong/2 and deng/3 (polos) and dung/5 and dang/6 (sangsih) which no longer corresponded to the section of higher-pitched melody in the jublag (which in this Tabuh Gari version should be matched with kotekan on tones 3 5, 6 and 7). The musicians gradually stopped playing and the gangsa players were clearly alert to this disparity between the kotekan and jublag line, one player calling out ‘it’s got a bit separated’ (palas gigis), while a jublag player said ‘I forgot to repeat it’ (engsap bin ulang), referring to the passage omitted. Arsana, however, only stated ‘you’ve got it– let’s do it one more time’ (to ba bakata, ulang besik-besik) and immediately began to play the polos kotekan from the start of the pengecet. The rest of the ensemble quickly joined in to complete the play through to the piece’s close. Despite the breakdown, here Arsana’s direction was focused on securing as many repeats of the piece as rehearsal time allowed, using practical repetition rather than discussion to resolve mistakes.136

Kotekan by Committee (31/01/2007) The second rehearsal to be considered followed a different course, principally because Arsana was delayed and so absent for the first hour of the rehearsal. Without such secure musical direction—Arsana’s assistance enabled the group to continue despite mistakes or memory lapses—here it was necessary for the group to find alternative methods to progress through Tabuh Gari. The group struggled to work through the piece without repeated stops, largely through memory lapses and confusion in either or both of the jublag or gangsa sections. After several attempts to make it through the first section to the pengawak, with the piece stopping and quickly restarting, the piece broke down at the section of kotekan immediately before the pengawak. At the passage marked

in figure

7.1, the polos gangsa players had become uncertain of the kotekan, and various players tried to move from the stable pattern of tones 2 (‘D’) and 3 (‘E’) to work out a variation of the pattern. This new figuration is indicated in ‘variant 1’ in figure 7.2 below.

136

It is interesting that the term tutugan for ‘carrying on’ or ‘continuation’ stems from the root tutug, which also forms nutug (‘to follow’). The latter is often cited by Balinese musicians as the principle means by which new music is learnt, as noted above. Additionally, tutug also can mean ‘to arrive at’. Indeed, the process of following, carrying on and then arriving at—all of which are encompassed by tutug—may be seen as a kind of model for how Balinese approach much musical learning. It should also be noted that tutugan is mentioned by McPhee as a type of alternating polos and sangsih kotekan in North Bali, and also as a ‘technical device in trompong playing’ (1966: 332). 236

Figure 7.2 Tabuh Gari, polos variants ‘Variant 1’ was in itself mostly unproblematic. Even though it differed from Arsana’s taught version (as also indicated on figure 7.2), it maintained the customary relationships between kotekan and key points of the jublag line characteristic of gamelan semar pegulingan. Kotekan tones here aligned acceptably by matching the key jublag strokes, or by leaving space for a sangsih tonal match (e.g. in the 2nd crotchet value, the jublag is on tone 3 or ‘E’ and the polos gangsa seemingly clashes on tones 1 and 2 (‘C#’ and ‘D’), but this in fact leaves space for a corresponding sangsih tone 3 or ‘E’ on the beat), or by forming implied empat intervals (a Balinese fifth formed by skipping two keys above or below a tone), as demonstrated in the 7th crotchet beat where the polos tone 2 (‘D’) heard above the jublag’s tone 5 (‘G#’) corresponds in this way. Indeed, it appears from the closely matching contours of both parts that these gangsa players derived the variation from listening to the jublag line and trying to follow its contours to generate their part, rather than attempting to retrieve the passage from memory. However, while the kotekan ‘variant 1’ fitted relatively well, the divergence in notes struck between polos players proved unacceptable and the group ground to halt with calls of Ilang! (It’s lost!). One player stated ‘that isn’t it’ (sing ento), while another polos gangsa player performed the new variation alone. This example was then answered by various calls of agreement including ‘that’s it’ (to ba ya), ‘it’s going to work’ (nyak ba ya), and ‘it’s solid’ (kental). A more senior polos gangsa player then suggested disagreement by making the corrective statement that the kotekan ‘straightaway goes up’ [literally ‘to the small’] (langsung ke cenik) and played another variation alongside a single jublag, which this time moved directly up to tones 5 and 3 (‘G#’ and ‘E’) (as illustrated in ‘variant 2’, figure 7.2). Having tried this for several beats but without being certain about where to go next, the player faded out with no further commentary. Another gangsa player suggested the group try again one more time (coba lanjutang bin cepok) 237

and assertively played the distinctive melodic fragment at

in figure 7.1, a familiar

signpost for the whole ensemble who rapidly joined in to continue with the piece. This time the whole gangsa section followed the new kotekan variation without incident, however once more struggled and broke down at

, this time with a problem not

concerning the choice of tones (all players were striking tones 2 (‘D’) and 3 (‘E’)) but here disrupted by the kotekan’s lack of rhythmic organisation meaning 2’s and 3’s were being struck simultaneously. This proved highly unsatisfactory. In response, one player ruefully called out that he had managed the repeated part, but ‘now the other section is broken’ (bin ané lenan asak). Debate continued, with various suggestions emerging and players individually trying out different sections from the passage, while others sang along, commented affirmatively or proposed new ideas. Eventually one of the senior gangsa players stated that the group should try to make less of a racket (pang bedikan uyut), implying that the group should get on with some ensemble playing. A number of players then muttered that they just didn’t know it (sing tawang). The same player then suggested that the group ‘try the pengawak slowly as it may be ‘less unlucky’ (or ‘thwarted’) (alih pengawakné adengan... kurang malang) but various players complained that they couldn’t get that either (sing bakat). The first speaker then proposed that they try the pengecet, the piece’s fast closing section. This again met with some disagreement, and an elderly kantilan player suggested that ‘we can’t move on if we still can’t get [the first part]’ (to sing nah lanjut... naler sing bakat). However, by now the trompong player had already sounded the lead-in to the pengecet and so the group continued, managing a complete cycle of this section without needing to stop. Arsana then arrived and the group moved on to rehearse other pieces in their repertoire.

Finding feeling (ngalih rasa) (06/01/2007) The third rehearsal to be considered took place a week later, two days before the group was to make a recording of the new programme. 137 While not organised particularly formally, the recording was nonetheless to be a special occasion for the group and Arsana was focused on refining various elements of the ensemble’s performance. For Tabuh Gari, this refining took the form of increased emphasis on certain nuances of dynamic and tempo change performed by the group, which were discussed either individually or, eventually, under the rubric of rasa. It is important to note that the group displayed a general awareness of variation in dynamic and tempo throughout rehearsals, 137

Here the presence of the foreign researcher within the group structured proceedings more directly, in presenting the opportunity for the group to produce an AV recording for dissemination around the banjar. 238

with or without the presence of Arsana. The crucial importance of sensitive fluctuation in dynamics and tempo in Balinese gamelan performance, particularly in gong kebyar repertoire, has been emphasized by a number of writers (see McGraw 2005: 199-203 and Tenzer 2000: 345-54).138 Likewise, I do not wish to imply that the banjar’s later focus on these aspects suggests that they were ‘bolted-on’ as a nearly forgotten extra, only that it so happened that during this final rehearsal Arsana made particularly clear references to these features. As stated, the group generally followed customary performance practices of semar pegulingan dynamic change, including substantial drops in tempo at the close of gong cycles. However, in this rehearsal Arsana made particularly emphatic attempts to add nuance and subtlety to the group’s performance of tempo and dynamic gradations, and where necessary would occasionally discard his ‘play on!’ approach to correct or refine such fluctuations explicitly. Arsana’s communication of these nuances was effected through a mixture of practical demonstration and verbal suggestion. He began expressing changes through drum signals, body language, practical demonstration and simple verbal injunctions, only resorting to more detailed statements and explanations when the former techniques had yielded insufficient effect. I present a brief description and commentary on how Arsana sought to improve the performance of two sections of the work. Firstly, I consider Arsana’s work on refining the transition between end and beginning of cycles of the first pengawak, and secondly, I examine Arsana’s approach in a later rehearsal to shaping the lead-in from the piece’s opening passage to the start of the pengawak. The rehearsal began with an initial run-through of the first section up to the end of the pengawak (as notated in figure 7.1). At the section’s close, before the group had a chance to move onto the subsequent section, Arsana immediately picked up a mallet and played the gangsa line at the end of the first pengawak with exaggerated dynamic change (here a decrease in dynamic leading to the gong), while matching the sudden diminuendo with the corresponding and customary gesture of lowering the torso towards the 138

McGraw makes the interesting point of gong kebyar performance that ‘it is as if the drumming, elaboration, and melody exist to present the dynamics and tempo, rather than these elements existing as afterthoughts to the “actual” music. Indeed, in performance it is often a more serious flaw to be oblivious to subtle tempo and dynamic changes than it is to flub occasional notes’ (2005: 200). I asked a range of Bali musicians what they looked for in a good Balinese gamelan performance and one of the most popular answers was the clear and unified performance of dynamic and tempo changes by an ensemble. This is covered by the Balinese term pengumbang-pengisep, applicable not only to tuning practices (as discussed) but also to dynamic ‘swells’ and decrescendos, while many seniman ISI applied the Western/Indonesian term dinamika (dynamics). A range of other Balinese terms cover these changes, including: ngucab, a sudden increase in volume; ngisep, a sudden decrease in volume; lung, any sudden ‘break’ or change of tempo; and ngeseh, a sudden increase in volume and tempo. Musicians also noted the idea of ‘kenyang lampeng’—terms most often associated with pelégongan performance practice—as an important model. The phrase demonstrates the customary connection between dynamic and tempo change: kenyang means ‘erect’ or ‘proud’ and describes a rapid upsurge in tempo and dynamic, while lampeng means ‘swollen’ or ‘drawn out’, and is linked to a drop both in tempo and dynamic. Their paired citing highlights how pliant shifts between both modes of playing are essential to a successful performance (I Madé Arnawa pers. comm. 2007, I Ketut Gedé Asnawa pers. comm. 2007). 239

instrument as he played. This series of gestures is particularly associated with the ugal player of the gong kebyar ensemble, who indicates the fluctuations in dynamic through a series of mannered gestures with the torso and beater. Arsana stated to the group that this passage needed a sudden diminuendo (ngisep), before he sang the passage (delivering a composite of polos and sangsih lines) once more with very clear volume gradation. As the group began to play again, here beginning from several beats before the pengawak’s closing gong, Arsana called out that they should play loud here (cabné) and should not stop (playing loud) (madehes) until

, and then led a drop in tempo (and dynamic) from

his own demonstrative gangsa playing. Following the gong and return to the start of the pengawak, Arsana then led the previously rehearsed ngisep by once more employing the ugal gestures, which the ensemble followed to good effect. However, when Arsana switched to kendang the group proved less responsive. There followed several repeats of the piece’s opening, where Arsana employed a number of approaches to try and coax the group to respond more fully to dynamic and tempo directions without his leading from the gangsa. On a run-through from the start, the gangsa section sped through their first passage of kotekan before the pengawak (see

in

figure 7.1). This caused Arsana to call out ‘don’t chase! (da uburé!) and ‘don’t rush!’ (da tomploka!). He employed the performance of various kendang patterns to try and manage the tempo, for instance emphasising his gestures and volume for the exposed ‘pung’ lanang strokes at the start of the last line of this section, which present a particularly audible chance to control the tempo (see the kendang line at

in figure 7.1). 139 However,

the timing was still not satisfactory for Arsana who stopped the play-through and encouraged the gangsa to repeat this section, telling them ‘it’s usual [speed], just louder’ (literally ‘raised’) (biasang… cuma nebelang). The whole ensemble then restarted the passage, but this time failed to play the lead into the pengawak with sufficient gradation of volume and tempo for Arsana’s taste. Stopping the group with a drum stroke, he now played this passage on the gangsa alone with a clear drop in tempo and dynamic as he headed to the gong stroke, but with no added commentary. The group repeated the section but Arsana was still dissatisfied, and called the group to a halt once more. Here he sang the part again, intermittently interrupting himself by calling out the various dynamics changes as they occurred, before suggesting ‘let’s play it like this: it’s good’ (pang ba dini... luwung ba). The group played the passage leading to the pengawak one more time, with Arsana trying to lead the tempo drag from the kendang. However, the tempo change 139

This distinctive device, used in much krumpungan drumming, functions similarly at a number of places in Tabuh Gari, and is usually positioned towards the end of a cycle to signal and direct tempo change, see for example: at the pull back at ‘3’; shortly before the close of the pengawak, marked at ‘9’; and near the close of the pengecet (heard at 9:38 in the recording). 240

before the pengawak now lacked cohesion between players: some pulled back too much while others pushed forward. Arsana was clearly dissatisfied with the result and stopped the group again, now resorting to a verbal injunction to encourage the players to listen and play together, invoking the idea of rasa. Arsana stated that the ensemble, specifically gangsa, needed to ‘find the feeling. Get loud to get to the jegog [referring to the passage at

in figure 7.1], then after the jegog- at the end [of the passage]- be ready to get the

feeling…please, try and feel it after this, feel it... up to here’ (Ngalih rasa. Nguncab ngalih jegog. Né kal ngalih jegog suwud jegog si duri to ba siapang ngalih rasa… durus rasa kala, rasang... ke dini enggih). ‘Feeling’ here is applied to the specific practice of managing the volume and tempo at this transition. Arsana employed the term to encourage the group to play together, his sung and played demonstration clarifying the greater delicacy and care of placement he required from players. However, Arsana’s final words on the matter suggested the refining of such corners cannot be a verbal matter but is ultimately a practical process: laughing, he said ‘It’s easy for me to tell you, it’s easy to say…’ (Ngorahin aluh ja, ngorah aluh), implying that it is the ‘doing’ which is most challenging and most important. 140 From here Arsana gestured for the ensemble to pick up their beaters, nodded at the trompong and the piece began once more. Arsana continued to give prominent visual cues and kendang signals to modify tempo and dynamics throughout the performance. As an example of a series of local rehearsing processes, these brief commentaries again highlight an emphasis on action as the primary Balinese mode of musical learning. In contrast to more static accounts of how Balinese might perceive, learn and organise music, these examples highlighted how processes of following and of ‘carrying on’ are deemed the surest way to master material. When the group lacked strong practical leadership, language might be employed to attempt to resolve problems, while Arsana too occasionally used speech to convey nuances which were otherwise unacknowledged by the ensemble. However, as Arsana suggested it is playing—and learning through playing —which is critical. The final analysis focuses on how an ISI student taught and put together a complex kontemporer composition. In the composition and performance of a new piece, how do processes of musical creation, teaching, learning and refining operate? How might the circumstances of this work’s performance (a prestigious PKB platform) impact on rehearsal approach? What kinds of new understanding about Balinese approaches to music-making do we gain in the analysis of these situated musical practices?

140

I am grateful to Ni Madé Pujawati for suggesting this interpretation of Arsana’s commentary here. 241

Creating Singsal (by I Wayan Mulyadi) Sanggar Tirtha Yasa Mambal in Mambal, Badung (CD Tracks 6 and 7)

This third analysis focuses on the process of putting together the musik kontemporer piece Singsal by I Wayan Mulyadi. It was performed by a selection of young players associated with the sanggar (‘arts club’) Tirtha Yasa Mambal, who were also mostly karawitan students at ISI and SMKI. Singsal (meaning ‘difference’ or ‘not conforming’) was composed by Mulyadi for a performance at the 2007 PKB, the sanggar having been offered some funds for an evening’s showcase of ‘contemporary performance arts’ at the Festival. Mulyadi was at this time a third year karawitan student at ISI and although he was an accomplished composer and teacher, such an Arts Festival platform was a substantial commission for a musician at this stage in their career. Mulyadi faced additional pressure as he was also responsible for composing another work for the performance and for re-working an extant composition of established composer I Ketut Rudita’s for a dance piece, Wastu (also presented by artists at the sanggar). However, Singsal was evidently Mulyadi’s main priority and the intensive rehearsal schedule (which ran for five weeks from May to the Festival performance in June) was primarily focused on the construction of this ambitious and substantial piece. The composition was created for a small ensemble, largely drawn from two seven-tone Balinese ensembles belonging to the sanggar, which were found to have closely matching tuning systems. The instruments used comprised two nyong-nyong (eight-keyed metallophones cast in iron) from the gamelan selonding and two jegog and two jublag from the gamelan semar pegulingan ensemble. The jublag were often employed more like kebyar gangsa, performing high-speed interlocking figuration with wooden kebyar mallets at various points of the piece. Singsal also used a gong ageng (great gong), a gentorak (shaken bell-tree) a number of tawa-tawa (small knobbed gongs customarily used individually as beat-keepers but here employed more freely), and a Western flute (played by the author). The piece was not an especially radical work, but was complex and proved challenging and arduous for the composer to communicate and for the musicians to perform (as heard on the recordings). This was especially the case for nyong-nyong and jublag musicians, particularly the respective sangsih players who were often responsible for constructing their own figuration to fit with Mulyadi’s already complex polos lines.141 141

The two nyong-nyong used in selonding ensembles are known separately as nyong-nyong alit (small) and nyong-nyong ageng (large), the latter tuned two tones lower. For clarity of discussion, and appropriate to much of Mulyadi’s composing for these instruments in Singsal, I refer to the nyong-nyong alit and ageng in the ensemble as nyong-nyong polos and sangsih respectively. 242

The piece was communicated primarily through the repetition, with Mulyadi playing parts himself on the jublag (or singing) plus occasional verbal interjections from the composer and players to question or clarify musical elements. Mulyadi also employed notation to assist him, sometimes as a basic guideline and sometimes for precise detail and I reproduce a passage of this notation below. Singsal is a lengthy work of just under forty minutes, so I examine two key corners of the work, considering two particular passages of the composition that proved most challenging for composer to impart and for players to grasp. The prestigious opportunity potentially led Mulyadi to create a work with sections which were too demanding for the group to master in the rehearsal time available. Problems to occur included confusion of instrumental entries, difficulties in relating melody and figuration to pulse, and challenges in establishing figuration that was both physically playable while achieving the particular effect sought by Mulyadi. I examine how the group worked to resolve these particular problems, noting how in the final example Mulyadi came to make substantial changes to his pre-composed work on presenting it to the players. What were the difficulties which the group encountered? How did certain rehearsal processes function to enable or obstruct progress in learning the work? The first extract demonstrates an important aspect of Balinese music-making, an emphasis on ‘working out’ and ‘working through’ musical problems. It was clear from Mulyadi’s rehearsal approach, from his notation notebook, and from later discussion that certain elements of the passage were fixed and clear in his mind, while other features were to be worked out with the group as a whole. However, even passages which Mulyadi had a fixed conception of were communicated by a process in which players mastered the material by working out for themselves how parts and timings fitted. Criticism or amendment was largely absent, even when errors appear to be apparent to other players. Rather, as above, gestural cues and demonstration were favoured over verbal suggestion and instead of corrections. Mulyadi generally sought to provide specific rehearsal conditions which would best enable musicians to continue playing and gradually realise and correct their own mistakes. The second series of rehearsals discussed (covering a different passage of Singsal) address what happens when this approach did not prove possible. Here, due to the complexity and ambiguity of Mulyadi’s musical material, and to a rehearsal approach which often broke down the musical texture into abstract lines, players then later struggled to perform their parts with the ensemble as a whole. It is notable that despite a number of explanations being offered so that players might better ngerti (understand) their parts, this approach ultimately proved

243

dissatisfactory to all concerned, and the material was eventually substituted with a new line which the musicians were able to grasp and work out through practice alone.142

Working it out (CD Track 6) I first discuss how Mulyadi worked through a passage first half-way through the piece, and consider a learning process which proved particularly interactive for the group both in terms of composition and self-correction. I examine the process by which Mulyadi communicated pre-composed lines, modified parts on hearing them played, and subsequently encouraged other players to construct their own lines. This passage recurred three times in the piece, the first time heard after a rapid, kebyaran-style passage of selonding figuration, the second and third times following a free flute solo. As demonstrated in figure 7.3 below (and heard on CD Track 6), the section itself comprises a syncopated repeated jegog melody, first accompanied by jublag kotekan figuration before the jublag join the melody mid-cycle. In turn, this is accompanied by idiomatic (if unusually rapid) selonding figuration and a complex rhythmic pattern on the tawa-tawa. For the tawa-tawa, Mulyadi employed soft-beater strokes, as well as the hard, wooden end of the beater to produce an abrasive metallic sound (similar to the ‘kecekan’ effect of hitting off the boss in the réyong).

142

In Singsal, tone numbers (here relating to the semar pegulingan jublag keys) and approximate Western pitches align as follows: 1

2

3

4

5

6

7

D

Eb

F

G

A Bb

C

I do not include a fixed plan of Balinese solfege as the piece included a range of modal groupings, so the name/number relationships of tones shifted according to the passage rehearsed. I use the same pitch correspondence when discussing the nyong-nyong parts, therefore the eight-keys of nyong-nyong alit (polos) should be considered as 7 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 [C D Eb F G A Bb C] , while the keys of the nyong-nyong ged (sangsih) run 5 6 7 1 2 3 4 5 [A Bb C D E F G A]. 244

Figure 7.3 Singsal, Extract 1

The rehearsal opened with the composer’s focus trained solely on the session’s early arrivals—the jegog players and the tawa-tawa musician—both of whose lines were firmly directed by Mulyadi. Initially teaching the jegog players their melodic line through repetition (with the composer singing and playing the same melody on jublag for them), 245

Mulyadi then sat adjacent to tawa-tawa player and they worked through the passage by repetition for some minutes. Other ensemble players gradually arrived and started to comment on the process. One musician was evidently impressed enough to ask ‘Did you compose this?’ (Ngae gendingan?) while another wondered if there was another tawatawa or kajar and offered to help ‘fill in’ with a steady pulse (misi kajar). However, Mulyadi was keen to see how this pattern would connect (sambung) to the jegog syncopation, instructing the jegog musicians to resume playing as he continued to rehearse the tawa-tawa. Mulyadi then emphasised (with both accented strokes and nods) the various instances at which jegog and tawa-tawa strokes coincided. Mulyadi decreed the two lines to fit (pas), and after half an hour of rehearsing, the tawa-tawa player was able to play his part without Mulyadi’s playing or gesturing (although the musician ruefully stated ‘By tomorrow I’ll have forgotten this’ (Benjang bisa engsap)). With this rhythmic and melodic pattern established and with the ensemble’s players now complete, Mulyadi commenced work on jublag lines. Here it became evident that Mulyadi was more flexible about this line. Mulyadi began by singing through to himself a composite of the jublag parts from his notebook– a pattern which repeated the following 7 7 6 (C D C Bb) figuration (see ‘voice’ in figure 7.4).

Figure 7.4 Singsal, extract 1 jublag variants

From here Mulyadi played the polos line which repeated 7 . 7 6, while the sangsih player began to try out some interlocking lines.143 Responding to the sung high (‘D’) which is not heard in the polos, the sangsih player first tried the following figuration . 1 . 2 1 . 1 2 (as shown in example

) which would have worked effectively

had the polos followed 7 . 7 6 . 7 . 6, a more standard kotekan progression. However, as the sangsih player registered that the polos pattern would not change from the initial 7 . 7 6 (and that his current pattern meant the pair clashed on a 1-7 interval) he quickly modified his playing to the pattern . 1 2 1 . 1 2 1 which allowed the 1 (‘D’) to sit in the

143

It should be noted that here the higher line of the interlocking pair was designated as polos in the jublag at this section of Singsal, while sangsih took the lower line. This was also the case in the jublag figuration in figure 7.7. 246

space of the polos line for the second half of the figuration (see

). However, Mulyadi

then adjusted the figuration once more, substituting the sangsih tone 2 (‘Eb’) for tone 3 (‘F’), a move I initially assumed was to match the modal grouping used by the jegog (1 3 4 6 7), a modal set which was also indicated and underlined in Mulyadi’s notation. However, after the pair of jublag had briefly cycled this figuration, Mulyadi then suggested an alternative which used another tone outside the given jegog gamut, playing the following figuration 3 5 3 . 3 5 3 . (see 5 3 5 . (see

in figure 7.4) followed by its inverse, 5 3 5 .

). Meanwhile polos stopped playing his part to propose . 3 4 3 . 3 4 3 as a

line. Mulyadi was apparently dissatisfied however, and returned to the sung composite as the jegog cycled their melody. The presence of the sung encouraged the sangsih player to re-introduce a 1 (‘C’) into the line, and so he made an addition to his line to incorporate it, albeit it not in the polos silent beat: 3 5 3 1 3 5 3 1 (see ). While this was not criticised or even commented upon, the fact the addition was not affirmed appeared to halt its repeat, and the jublag sangsih player now maintained the 3 5 3 . 3 5 3 . pattern (as shown at

) for the remainder of the rehearsal period.

Mulyadi then approached selonding nyong-nyong players to propose a rapid series of scale progressions (see ‘variant 1’ in figure 7.5 below). While this is an idiomatic refrain in selonding performance, the players struggled to render it accurately while maintaining the section’s rapid tempo (as clapped by the composer).

Figure 7.5 Singsal, extract 1 nyong-nyong opening figuration

In response, Mulyadi considered an alternative pattern, inserting alternating 7 and 5 (‘C’ and ‘A’) tones (also characteristic of selonding) to offer some technical relief. The rapid-tempo scale passages remained challenging to perform but were more manageable when inserted less often. Uncertainty emerged between the players as to how many beats the alternating tones should continue before the scale sequence. The polos nyong-nyong player shortened the alternating passage by a beat before commencing with the scale passage, an error which the sangsih player began to mirror (see figure 7.5, ‘variant 2’). Mulyadi called them to a halt but rather than singing the line or directly telling the musicians when and where they should change patterns, he indicated with a nod 247

alongside the jegog line the point at which they should must finish each scale figure. Mulyadi then directed the jublag to stop playing, and encouraged the selonding players to work alongside the jegog melody alone, to establish for themselves where the scale passage must go in order to fit the cycle. For some time both players continued to move into the scale passage a beat early, resulting in a seven-beat cycle (a surprising anomaly, but presumably caused by the unlikely syncopation of the jegog line and the high tempo used in rehearsal that made it difficult to maintain a sense of pulse while playing). Mulyadi did not issue further instructions other than that they should repeat the figure. Having cleared the ensemble texture so that the nyong-nyong might hear their figuration and alignment with the jegog more clearly, he left the correction to the players themselves, even though for another two play-throughs they remained confused. In a short break following this section, another player laughed at this confusion and called out that their pattern had been kuwangan (which can mean ‘deficient’ or ‘lacking’ but also ‘too short’) while Mulyadi made no further comment. Mulyadi then moved on, introducing the remainder of the passage to the players (the third and fourth stave of figure 7.3). The syncopated jegog melody, here joined by the jublag, was initially communicated smoothly through played and sung examples by Mulyadi. The continued selonding figuration was initially conveyed easily, this time by Mulyadi giving a clearly sung indication of the polos line to the nyong-nyong, which enabled the sangsih player to process his part with greater ease. However, while the selonding players’ joint rendition of the line was initially successful, at Mulyadi’s request to adjoin it (nyambung) to the syncopated melody, the group struggled, particularly when the tawa-tawa was added. The jublag lost track of their new melody (by not holding all the crotchet-length tones long enough in the last line of the new section) when they affixed it to their previous figuration. They were accordingly admonished by other players with a joking ‘pelih’ (wrong). Likewise, in joining the complete ensemble, the selonding players continued to play ahead of the jegog as discussed above, despite the other player’s instructive joking during the break. Again, Mulyadi did not comment directly on the pattern, only stating that all the players needed to finish this section together: ‘it’s important it ends here’ (pokokné dini tanggurné) while pointing at key 7 (‘C’) of the nyong-nyong polos player. Finally, in the next repeat of just jublag and nyong-nyong sections, the latter pair of players wordlessly changed the pattern to fall on the correct beat. The process of working music out for oneself occurred more specifically later in the rehearsal. For the final 8 beats of the section, Mulyadi asked the nyong-nyong players if they would ‘make up a little bit of their own’ (gae bin nebik ka) to accompany the jublag/jegog line. For the next repeat both nyong-nyong players listened only, before the 248

polos nyong-nyong player proposed a half-speed figure to his sangsih partner (see figure 7.6).

Figure 7.6 Singsal, extract 1 nyong-nyong closing figuration

As the players tried to establish how this should be rhythmically placed in the passage, Mulyadi muttered that he agreed with the idea (lugra, lugra) before then singing a new variation of the figuration (a complete composite of both polos and sangsih lines), which although more complex followed the same melodic contour, albeit at the equivalent of semiquaver rather than quaver pace. Matching the figuration as indicated on the first three staves, the new line introduced the scale passage at unexpected points in the jublag/jegog melody (as notated in figure 7.3). Mulyadi then sang a polos part to this composite while the sangsih nyong-nyong player worked out his corresponding line. It is this figuration which then stood as the mutually-agreed nyong-nyong material to close the passage, albeit performed with some uncertainty. Discussion of this rehearsal process illustrates how musicians were encouraged to work out their parts for themselves. This functioned not only in terms of various levels of group composition (from free additions, to the working out the details of a sangsih part), but also, in this instance, in terms of how a player might gain understanding of their part’s rhythmic position and general relationship to the ensemble. Mulyadi steered away from direct criticism or direction in assisting players, but set up sections of rehearsal to enable space in the musical texture for players to correct their own mistakes and develop confidence to perform their part. Rather than a musical director offering distinct instructions, musical learning was left to occur through practice, echoing the techniques of repetition and continuation discussed in the previous rehearsal setting. The following example discusses an instance where the musical material itself proved too unwieldy for this method, and examines the alternative methods employed in the attempt to devise, learn and perform the passage.

249

‘It comes and goes’ (ilang-ilang) (CD Track 7) The following rehearsal extracts concern the learning, attempted performance, and final rejection and substitution of some kotekan figuration which Mulyadi had devised for the jublag in another section of the work (heard on CD Track 7). The section to be discussed (known in rehearsal as ‘jegogan lambat’ (slow jegogan)) occurs early on in the piece after a high speed and complex opening for the full ensemble and a subsequent seven-tone suling melody. The following passage, which this section analyses, is a repeated 32-beat cycle based around a lyrical, syncopated seven-tone jegog melody underpinned by kempli pulse, and by gong and gentorak at the close of each cycle. The first rendition of the cycle was heard with improvised flute solo, followed by a cycle accompanied by relatively standard selonding nyong-nyong figuration. In rehearsal, this was subsequently followed by the entrance of the two jublag playing a fiendishly rapid and complex passage of kotekan. It was this jublag line which subsequently underwent significant transformation. Several stages of this modification are displayed in figure 7.7, which shows three specific points of the composition process for the passage. One line of 7.7 represents the jublag line as Mulyadi had pre-composed and notated (see figure 7.8 below for a copy of Mulyadi’s notated early ideas for this section of the piece), a second line depicts a contrasting version of this kotekan which the group subsequently established in rehearsal, including the fragments of sangsih line which were collectively worked out. The top line represents the simpler melodic model (supporting the selonding figuration) which the group eventually settled on as a more viable alternative for a confident, cohesive performance (as heard in CD Track 7).

250

Figure 7.7 Singsal, extract 2

251

Figure 7.7 (continued) Singsal, extract 2

Figure 7.8 Singsal, Mulyadi’s notation for extract 2 144

The rehearsal process for this passage initially ran smoothly, with the jegog easily learning their extended melody through repetition of Mul’s playing it on the jublag. However, as Mulyadi came to teach the jublag section their own kotekan passage, 144

I include the notation as a visual guide to how Mulyadi planned his work and transcribe the jublag line in Figure 7.8. However, should the reader wish to follow the score, this notation follows the same system of seven-tone aksara discussed in Chapter 5 (figures 5.2 and 5.3). The corresponding aksara, key numbers and approximate Western tones for Mulyadi’s score are as follows:

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

D

Eb

F

G

A

Bb

C 252

problems began to arise. Having through-composed a composite line of polos and sangsih, the division of this figuration between the two players, the unrelenting tempo, and uncertainty surrounding the position of the pulse in the figuration resulted in a number of practical difficulties. Mulyadi’s approach to dividing the pre-composed kotekan composite was ambiguous and allowed musicians to interpret and extract their lines as they wished, which he would then modify. This worked well for the simple opening passage of figuration, which although rapidly diverged from Mulyadi’s planned notation, was re-worked by composer and players into a compact and flowing line of kotekan. However, in other modifications that were introduced across the passage—particularly during the process of working out the division of the two parts—the pulse and metric structure frequently became compromised as the players worked largely without kempli pulse strokes. Indeed, it emerged that by focusing for such an extended period on jublag kotekan and not enabling players to hear their part in the context of other parts of the ensemble, the musicians struggled to perform with a solid sense of pulse and group cohesion. Without this sense of whole during the learning process, problems in performance emerged. For instance, to work through the passage at

in figure 7.8, Mulyadi initially

sang a composite based on his notation. From here composer and players worked together to produce discrete polos and sangsih lines, but as these lines developed the players gradually moved away from the original metric structure of the composite. I trace the development of the variously proposed kotekan lines in figure 7.9 below.

253

Figure 7.9 Singsal, extract 2 jublag variants While similar to the opening kotekan of the whole cycle, the second part of this partiuclar figuration generated a problem in pulse position. As the jublag alone worked on the passage, the versions shifted seamlessly between an on-beat and off-beat emphasis, creating an ambiguity of pulse relationship which was not easily corrected. Figure 9.7 ‘variant 1’ shows the first polos and sangsih division Mulyadi and players arrived at from his sung composite (shown in the top ‘voice’ line). However, as the second half of the figure was repeated to secure the sangsih line, the polos player happened to make a slight adjustment to the opening. As shown in ‘variant 2,’ polos separated his first two tones rather than striking a ‘double bounce’. On Mulyadi noticing that this had changed, the composer played through the line again. However, in this new playing (‘variant 3’), Mulyadi happened to re-position the alignment of the subsequent tones. This brought the rest of the figuration forward and so altered the rhythmic emphasis bringing the ‘D’-’Eb’ (tones 1-2) progression from the on-beat to the off-beat. The sangsih duly altered his line to fit and this brief passage was then rehearsed several times in isolation until both parts (playing this new variant) fitted more neatly. Mulyadi then added to the pattern with additional notes for the polos line (shown in ‘variant 4’) which the sangsih player responded to, composer and players all maintaining the repositioned rhythmic 254

emphasis. Mulyadi then directed the group to return to the opening of this section of figuration, which evidently begins firmly on an ‘on-beat’. This return to the earlier pattern (the start of ‘variant 1’) reaffirmed the original position of the tones ‘D’-’Eb’ (tones 1-2) pair as occurring on an ‘on-beat’ for polos. The polos player duly performed the pattern on the beat, a re-alteration which left the sangsih player momentarily confused, before he corrected his pattern for the next play-through. Before this had settled, Mulyadi had begun to focus on the end of the pattern, which he was evidently dissatisfied with. He returned to working on this pattern in isolation, apparently aiming to close it on a ‘C’ or 7, as his original notation plan prescribed (which aligned the end of the jublag kotekan with a matching ‘C’ or 7 in the jegog melody). Mulyadi then devised the figuration (‘variant 5’) which introduced the ‘C’ or 7 at the pattern’s close. However, by rehearsing in isolation without the jegog it went unnoticed that the closing beat of the jublag would not concur with the jegog tone. Having committed the part to memory, the jublag players then tried to play the passage through with the jegog, and the gap became frustratingly evident. Mulyadi returned to work on the kotekan, trying out options which would land the jublag on a ‘C’ or 7 at the correct point, but in the course of devising it (still at break-neck tempo) the newly shortened passage (‘variant 6’) continued to overrun, albeit by just one note. The new version also included four notes to be played consecutively by the polos player which was no mean feat at the speed the group rehearsed at, particularly on the large jublag keys. This further contributed to the problem of maintaining an even pulse. Mulyadi then directed the group to return to the beginning of the kotekan run. This did not prove successful, however. For the previous few run-throughs, the polos player had reverted to a small adjustment he had made initially at ‘variant 2’, an adjustment which was not physically possible when connected to the opening (the leap from the ‘Bb’/6 to the ‘Eb’/2 was too large to cover without a gap in the musical flow). So when faced with this connection, the polos player reverted initially to the offbeat version (as at ‘variant 3’) which subsequently threw the sangsih off-kilter. The pair worked alone again together (minus jegog and kempli) and settled on the pattern (‘variant 6’). However, when they came to play this through with jegog again, the staggered stroke of the final ‘C’/7 between jegog and jublag appeared to be dissatisfying for the musicians. However, because of the rapid tempo the players’ kotekan became rhythmically uneven and so it proved difficult for players to know precisely where the problem lay. The rather dense preceding paragraphs only account for a minute fraction of the work that went into the creation of this section of Singsal. However, it appeared that the players were unable to become comfortable with the passage despite intense, continued rehearsals. While the passage contained a few markers that aided the jublag players to 255

maintain the beat (for instance, at the nyog cag (alternate strokes between polos and sangsih) heard towards the end of the second kotekan phrase), the passage otherwise felt rushed, uneven and chaotic. After substantial work on the passage over four rehearsals with very little sign of improvement, at one pause in playing the polos player put down his beater to say ‘[I] can’t get it, it keeps coming and going’ (sing bakat, ilang-ilang). He was followed by the sangsih player stating that the music has ‘dropped’ (or disappeared) from him, ‘just like that’ (plos keto). The jublag polos player replied that his brain was full (otaknya kadung), as a nyong-nyong player jokingly called out ‘cylinder’ (silendar) as he gestured rapid spinning, implying the player had become dizzy with the new music. Mulyadi shook his head and stated that the dizzy musician’s brain had in fact ‘already flowed off [down the river]’ (ba keto anyud tasan). He then picked up a beater to suggest the group try it one more time (ba buin besik). This steady chorus of voices about not being able to grasp the patterns was heard a number of times over the remainder of the rehearsal, with cries of Sing tawang gendingné (Don’t know the piece) and Sing ngerti (Don’t understand) called out, jovially but emphatically. At one point the polos nyongnyong player made an interesting comment to the jublag section, suggesting they need ‘to understand it first, just to understand’ (ngerti malu, gén ngerti) in response to their continual misplacement of the beat. In response to this uncertainty, Mulyadi increased his verbal commentary to try and secure the location and structure of the patterns for the players. Mulyadi regularly asked the group to connect (sambung) in his rehearsals, but in the context of this passage he stated that the players ‘had come undone’ (kelés) and emphatically asked the jublag to play ‘together’ (barenganné) with the jegog. Alongside these more general injunctions Mulyadi also began to try to give clearer verbal indications of how to fit the jublag kotekan to the jegog melody. These included telling the players where they needed to be pausing or ‘staying still’ in the passage. He instructed the polos player to pause (ngoyong keto) and urging them to wait (ngantos! ngantos!) before the difficult second entry of kotekan. He also later employed ‘ngoyong’ again, using the term to try and explain to the jublag that their penultimate entry must enter in the middle of the tied jegog ‘D’/1, here stating ‘When they are staying still, you begin that one’ (Di ngoyong to, ba mulai kéné). However, it emerged that the sequence was unable to be rectified in the time available to the group. I conclude that the insertion of verbal commentary in Balinese rehearsal process functions often as a last resort, and here it was unable to solve the problem. By now, Mulyadi had also tried to introduce similarly paced nyong-nyong figuration in the gaps between the jublag, which was likewise proving highly taxing both technically and in its rhythmic organisation. While the rest of the piece progressed well, cohesion did not seem to develop within this passage. Thus, as rehearsal time became 256

short, Mulyadi settled on a different solution. At the start of a new rehearsal Mulyadi proposed alternative figuration, playing the opening of the passage on the jublag himself, but here with a version of the previous cycle’s nyong-nyong line. Nodding, he stated, ‘Let’s leave it like this to make it easier’ (Depang ba ni pang aluhang). Nyong-nyong players returned to their previous cycle’s slower figuration, while the jublag players were then left responsible for constructing the details of their line. As can be heard in the recording, this new line mirrored the selonding parts while also responding with greater nuance to the contours of the jublag melody. In discussion Mulyadi was reticent about the change in kotekan, noting that his idea for the section was for it to be semarak (glistening)—an effect that he felt was also created by the selonding figuration so he just ‘let it be like that’ (biar gitu) (pers. comm. 2007). Had the group had longer to rehearse, doubtless they would have mastered the original passage, but all seemed in tacit agreement that Mulyadi’s kotekan substitution was advisable for the impending performance. The process whereby the group attempted to master the passage before the substitution was, however, illuminating. Owing to certain compositional ambiguities and technical challenges, the players reached a point where they were forced to try to understand (ngerti) the passage in more abstract terms with verbal cues, rather than through customary processes of repetition and continuation. Here musical understanding was invoked explicitly only at the point when it was felt to be absent. When not so required, to echo Ziporyn, musical understanding need exist only in musical action (1992: 36). This shift in approach proved less successful than the group’s usual rehearsal and musical creation techniques, where players both worked-through problems and worked-out the composition through continued playing. Indeed, analysing these rehearsal processes highlights the importance of continuation, repetition, and working through, but perhaps most importantly illustrates how Balinese musicians here operated through musical context. The kotekan pattern discussed in the latter section of the analysis was certainly challenging but by no means technically insurmountable for these accomplished players. In the context of fiendish gong kebyar gangsa patterns—with which both the jublag musicians were readily familiar—this line should not have presented such an irresolvable problem. Rather, I suggest the problem lay primarily in the unusually decontextualized learning approach, where players absorbed their individual lines over an extended rehearsal period with limited sense of surrounding ensemble. While gamelan kotekan is often learnt separately from the ensemble at first, it is customary that efforts to make sense of the line with regard to pulse and other melodic and rhythmic lines sharply follow suit. In Singsal, a type of musical ‘isolation’ obstructed the musicians’ ability to make sense of the line and, ultimately, to perform it with accuracy or flair. Such an example presents an interesting 257

contrast to the structuralist accounts of Balinese music discussed in Chapter One. Rather than focusing on the division of music into individual strata, as those accounts held, this example suggests that critical to a musician’s grasp of their part was its indissoluble relationship with the ensemble as a whole. As such, the study of active rehearsal reveals certain approaches employed by certain Balinese musicians in musical learning, but also begins to illuminate the complex issue of how Balinese musicians may construct and appreciate gamelan music.

Concluding Thoughts This chapter began by considering contrasting ideas of ‘knowing’ in Bali. The chapter examined Balinese speech practices concerning the conceptualization of knowing, and surveyed some of the customary terminology employed by Balinese musicians to denote musical ability. From here, it emerged that Balinese musicians placed a strong emphasis on the practical grasp of materials, and that players rarely distinguished the idea of knowing about music from its doing. Both are a question of bakat: ‘getting it’. As such, approaching how Balinese might go about knowing how to play, learn, teach, create or refine gamelan music required a different research template from a quest for abstract modes of engagement or indeed, theoretical systems. Rather, in order to begin to gain access to Balinese approaches of musical knowing, it was necessary to examine the modes by which Balinese musicians on particular occasions actually went about making-music—in other words, through the concerted study of Balinese practices. This contrast became evident in my first worked example, which analysed discussion between an older, village-trained musician and his responses to analytical questions from a foreign researcher and a Balinese ISI graduate. A.A. Suma highlighted Balinese musical pedagogy’s powerful emphasis on practical experience as the foundation of musical ability. Suma’s subsequent commentary on his conception of piece structures and how he set about remembering the ensemble’s repertoire once more highlighted ideas of Balinese musical understanding as embedded principally in practical engagement. However, in addition, our interaction also demonstrated the hierarchizing of certain musical ‘knowledge’ on Bali. As an analogue to the types of mystic musical ‘knowledge’ constructed and framed as exclusive to high-caste Balinese during the colonial era, and to the systems of Balinese téori gamelan created post-independence to secure institutional privilege, the research questions posed by myself and the composer which were based on modern, ‘akademis’ knowledge systems came to overwrite Suma’s confidence in his own responses. A.A. Suma appeared compelled to ‘correct’ his more fluid accounts of 258

gamelan tonality in line with questions which were predicated on a more systematized or theoretical approach to Balinese music. The second example, concerning the teaching and learning of Tabuh Gari, demonstrated how the practice of musical repetition and continuation or ‘carrying on’ (tutugan) may be carefully directed and applied in group learning. These technique highlighted the musical importance of grasping and performing the whole, rather than subdividing a performance either ‘horizontally’ or ‘vertically’ in order to learn. The study highlighted how a range of musical parameters—including tonal contours, rhythmic patterns and dynamic and tempo shifts—are ideally managed through these techniques, and noted how terminology was applied only when these initial approaches did not function as fully as wished. The idea of rasa was also used, but here applied pragmatically to manage specific elements of performance practice. Rasa was invoked with no reference to the mystic properties that the term has accrued within academic discourse on Bali, but rather functioned to shape specific types of musical action. The final example considered a young and and ambitious ISI student’s composition and examined a range of group interactions in the putting together of two passages of a seven-tone musik kontemporer work, Singsal. Here, similar approaches of repetition and continuation were employed, and rehearsals displayed an additional emphasis on the idea of working out new music (through various methods of group decision-making) and of working through one’s own errors through playing. The last example of music-making focused on a particularly challenging passage which, owing to various compositional and rehearsal techniques and ambiguities, refused to fall into place. The attempt to surmount these challenges through abstract verbal commentary failed to enable players to work through the material, which in turn prevented the musicians from grasping and mastering the passage for themselves. Central to this last example was the importance of an indivisible musical whole. It emerged that crucial to a player being able to get it (bakat), their own part must be firmly contextualized within the ensemble. When not enabled to do this, the group’s cohesion was obstructed and in this case, required a substitution of material. Counter to the claim that Balinese abstractly conceptualize music through discrete strata, as proposed by various theorists discussed in Chapter One, in this particular instance it appears that musicians failed to grasp their part only when they were asked to try and conceptualize musical processes in such a way. In producing this account of specific Balinese approaches I do not wish to construct a new theory of musical holism or indeed any other kind of grand explanatory scheme. Rather, my purpose in presenting a series of situated Balinese practices was to demonstrate how the application of abstract systematizing runs precisely counter to how 259

Balinese appear to approach the playing of gamelan. Certain traits and themes emerged in the course of these analyses, such as an emphasis on continuation, on repetition, on grasping ensemble context, and on the pragmatic idea of ‘musical knowing’: that knowing largely means getting it and being able to do it, or make it. However, my intention is not to reveal a greater truth, but rather to highlight and examine the various ways that Balinese might set about knowing about gamelan music, as demonstrated through the study of situated practice.

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Chapter Eight (Conclusions) This thesis began by introducing some of the issues which attend the theorization of Balinese gamelan music-making. I highlighted some of the epistemological and practical problems in various received scholarly accounts of Balinese gamelan music which decontextualized Bali’s musical performance in general terms and, specifically, through the imposition of structuralist models. When such representations were contrasted with studies which more readily addressed Balinese approaches to music-making, a disjuncture emerged. This disjuncture then framed the two objects of study to concern this thesis. Firstly, the thesis examined the lineage and impact of dislocated enunciations of Balinese gamelan ‘theory’ from colonial occupation to contemporary Bali and considered the question of what implications the production, organisation and dissemination of ‘musical knowledge’ has held for relations of power in Bali. Through analysis of texts, composition and personal accounts, the thesis traced how Western and Balinese agents have framed ‘Balinese music’ as an articulation of various extra-musical entities through text and composition and I demonstrated how these articulations in turn served distinct social or political ends. The thesis subsequently countered these representations as adequate accounts of Balinese gamelan by analysing a series of situated Balinese practices of music-making. In answer to the question of how Balinese musicians on particular occasions might go about actually making music, I highlighted the pragmatic approach employed by certain Balinese musicians in learning, teaching, creating and refining gamelan music during informal rehearsal contexts. In response to these analyses, the thesis challenged the static and hierarchical representation of Balinese musical ‘knowledge’. Instead, I concluded that Balinese musical knowing operates primarily through lived musical action, and as such is too agile to be enclosed by theory of the kind used to date.

Part One: Colonial Representations Part One focused on colonial era interactions and addressed the construction of a notional Balinese music, principally through the representative practices of a combination of Dutch administrators, Euro-American modernists, and high-caste Balinese. Having established, through Goodman, the purposive quality to any representation, I traced how ‘Balinese gamelan music’ (as a theoretically knowable and aesthetic object) came to be formulated in answer to both Western and Balinese interests. Drawing on Collingwood and Foucault’s approaches to historical study, I investigated the idea of Balinese gamelan 261

music not as a substantive object, but as the product of various complex imaginings and motivations characteristic of the historical period. This ‘genealogical’ approach framed the themes of remainder of the thesis, for as stated by Collingwood, history is the negation of the traditional distinction between theory and practice. That distinction depends on our taking, as our typical case of knowledge, the contemplation of nature, where the object is presupposed. In history the object is enacted and is therefore not an object at all (1939: 21, cited in Boucher 1999: xxix).

As such, Part One investigated the circumstances by which Balinese gamelan music came to be enacted as an object by establishing how (for a range of purposes) Balinese music was articulated as systematized, aesthetic, an embodiment Balinese social order and a depository of Hindu-Javanese heritage. Chapter Two examined some of the earliest musicological accounts on Bali. I outlined how ‘Balinese music’ was formulated as a construct by colonial scholaradministrators, largely out of presumptions of Bali’s Hindu-Javanese lineage, a series of presumptions also closely tied to Western political imperatives. The chapter charted the production of early accounts on Balinese gamelan as bound to the Dutch colonial policy of ‘Baliseering’. Having highlighted how colonial administrative powers came to sculpt public ideas of Bali’s ‘culture’ during this period, the chapter challenged contemporary accounts of the period which uncritically depict a series of politically innocuous interactions between Western scholars and artists and Balinese informants. In observing this analytical shortfall, the chapter proposed such accounts to join a long history of representations which disarticulate Balinese subjects, here by overwriting the tensions of colonial occupation as a site of apolitical creative interaction. In Chapter Three, I established how Balinese gamelan music was framed not only as theoretically knowable, but also as an aesthetic object. The representation of Balinese gamelan as art was conjured to some extent through Baliseering policy but was advanced by the often self-serving enthusiasm of musical modernists, principally Colin McPhee. Through a critical assessment of McPhee’s literary, theoretical, and musical representations the chapter demonstrated how McPhee formulated an aesthetic account of Balinese gamelan as ‘absolute music’ driven by his own artistic imperatives. In turn, the chapter analysed how the representative devices employed in such Western accounts— particularly the articulation of gamelan music as an embodiment of Bali’s imagined social harmony—directly chimed with some of the most oppressive and pernicious aspects of colonial policy. While Chapters Two and Three focused primarily on Western articulations of Balinese music, Chapter Four sought to redress this imbalance through the analysis of 262

historical narratives of Balinese music as shaped by Balinese scholars and informants. I investigated a range of claims made about Bali’s musical and cultural history, noting how the affirmation or negation of the Majapahit dynasty as central to Bali’s gamelan music corresponded to opposing positions on caste status and the Independence movement. The chapter highlighted the particular involvement of high-caste Balinese in establishing Majapahit narratives, and explained how this narrative chimed agreeably with various Western imaginings of Hindu-Javanese heritage, in turn aligned with policies of colonial rule. Through analysis of how high-caste Balinese interpreted and disseminated the Aji Gurnita document, the chapter also established how music theory was articulated principally as the preserve of Balinese elite. High-caste Balinese pronounced themselves the exclusive bearers of ‘musical knowledge’, which bought close links with Western researchers and enabled the preservation of various social privileges in the face of Dutch subjugation. The chapter highlighted how the enunciation of musical theories was not limited to Westerners but was productively employed by Balinese to manage both status of individuals and the island’s newly-framed ‘culture’ as a whole.

Part Two: Composing Téori Part Two examined issues of representation in and of Balinese gamelan music in the context of the socio-political concerns surrounding the establishment of the Indonesian state, the New Order, and ideas of the global and kebalian in post-Suharto Bali. Central to Chapter Five was the idea of the empty signifier: by assessing the musical charts, tables, histories and mystic formulae produced under the rubric of Bali’s ‘téori’, the thesis highlighted how these representations were largely disconnected from the practices they claimed to explain. Instead, ideas of téori were formulated by musicians to navigate the increasingly complex and incommensurate agendas of the nation state, while also protecting Balinese interests and the articulator’s own safety and standing: both often proved mutually incompatible. Many of the ideas and approaches enunciated in téori show roots in the colonial era, but were re-articulated to manage Bali’s gamelan music according to the precise demands of the period, often to secure and promote Bali’s status amid fears of Jakarta domination. The idea of musical harmony and balance notably resurfaced. However, here such metaphors were articulated by téori gamelan in the context of new ‘agama Hindu Bali’ doctrine and deployed to ensure Bali’s peaceful, nonthreatening position. Despite téori’s empty beginnings, in line with Baudrillard’s ‘simulation’ musical composition in the image of téori’s simulacrum was gradually formulated during the New Order. Chapter Six considered how institutionally-sanctioned composition practices may 263

have continued this simulation, while also addressing how approaches have changed since the breakdown of Suharto’s government. Through the analysis of a series of contemporary works, the chapter demonstrated how composers have been granted little relief from pressures to frame their works according to complex mandates as the only way to secure patronage and institutional approval. In light of the bombing campaigns and Bali’s decline in financial resources, the mandates of the reformasi era came to be indexed slightly differently from New Order demands, now with a new approach to Balinese ‘identity’ and to Bali’s ‘global’ position. Accordingly, musical composition shows new emphasis on substantializing ideas of ‘Balineseness’ and the careful management of foreign engagement.

Part Three: Balinese gamelan as Practice Chapter Seven established that Balinese practices of musical knowing operated through musical action. In contrast to the representations of reified musical knowledge on Bali which have disarticulated so many Balinese musicians, the chapter examined a range of live rehearsal settings where repertory was created, taught, memorized and refined. Each example highlighted how the experience of playing—through practices of repetition, mimicry and continuation—was the primary channel by which musicians mastered material. The chapter’s worked examples emphasised musicians’ understanding of lines only within the context of the ensemble, which undermined the structuralist partitioning of Bali’s musical texture into distinct ‘strata’. As such, the rehearsal analyses challenged key tenets of received theories of Balinese gamelan music, notably the widely held idea that Balinese musicians conceive of music principally through ‘hierarchic patterns’. In more general terms, the analyses demonstrated that attempts to provide rigid or abstract theories for Balinese music run counter to the actual musical processes employed by Balinese musicians on these occasions.

New Directions The pressing concern of Balinese gamelan’s decontextualization has meant that a substantial proportion of this thesis has considered practices of representation rather than practices of music-making. It has thus not here been possible to expand my accounts of Balinese learning, teaching, rehearsing and composing practices further. However, this area of research is almost limitless in scope, much under-analysed, and promises rewarding and exciting results, particularly in the investigation of a wider breadth of musical contexts on Bali. A contrast of musical practices within a range of the music264

making contexts currently found on Bali would be one possibility: over the course of a day, a single musician may juggle academy lecturing, group composition among peers, banjar musical duties, and the tuition of a foreign music student. Examining nuances in contrasting modes of musical interaction occurring at each site in detail, and over a sustained research period would be highly informative. Even more emphasis on individual musicians’ distinct pathways in terms of background, motivation, training and patronage would also enrich this area of study. The thesis’ concern with context informs other possible grounds for study. While this study has focused principally on Balinese gamelan music—on the issue of its constitutive, theoretical representation and its practice—the thesis has implications for the study of Balinese and Indonesian performance more broadly. In each of the political orders governing Balinese since early colonial occupation, Bali’s performances practices as a whole have presented a strategy for ruling, opposing ruling, and indeed, surviving. As such, my account of the ‘performing’ of gamelan—in the sense that its judicious representation could enable a range of possibilities for the articulator—potentially extends to all of Bali’s ‘performing arts’. Research which blends critical historical study and practice-based accounts of these various forms are sparse, but promise a rewarding new direction in the study of Balinese performance. In addition, having noted the various ways that Balinese music-making has often been dislocated from its social and political context—for instance, through the articulation of Balinese gamelan as an aesthetic object, through the imposition of theoretical systems, and through narratives of imaginary history—this decontextualization extends to the representation of gamelan as separate from other forms of Balinese performance. While keen to avoid the trap of Lyotard’s ‘nostalgia for wholeness’, gamelan music-making must nonetheless be considered as closely bound to other performance practices on Bali and Indonesia. Indeed, my closing account of musical practices highlighted the vital sense of musical ‘context’ in learning and teaching new repertoire. Ideally, a new approach to the study of context in addressing practices of Balinese gamelan would extend not only to social conditions but would also consider in greater depth the connections and overlapping practices of gamelan and other Balinese performance (notably dance and theatre) both in terms of historical representation and actual practice. While studies of Balinese wayang (shadow theatre) and gamelan accompaniment have readily embraced close interaction between ‘theatre’ and ‘music’, notably through the interaction of puppeteer and musicians (see, for example, Gold 1992, 1998 and Seebass 1993), the aestheticized past of many other gamelan genres appears to have cemented a reluctance in scholarship to address these connections in practice-based 265

study. This thesis’ efforts to contextualize the theorization and practice of Balinese gamelan music-making offers one such step to counter this.

While this thesis has been predominantly concerned with the theoretical articulation of Balinese music (and the consequent disarticulation of many Balinese musicians), it is my hope to prompt further critical engagement not only with this history of representations but with Bali’s musical practices themselves. As the thesis endeavours to show, Balinese music’s long history of complex, foreign musical engagement has had a strong impact on Bali’s musical performance. However, in order to engage with how and what Balinese musicians might know about gamelan, it is vital to address the principal site which Balinese musical knowing inhabits: musical practice itself.

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Appendix One Translations 1. ‘Das eigenartig “unmelodische” Gestalten einder Melodie ist denn auch primar gar nicht musikalisch, sondern textlich zu erklaren’ (Schlager 1976: 31). 2. ‘Wenn ich die Grammophongeschichte nicht geregelt hätte, hätte ich das Haus nie bauen können’ (1st July, 1928). ‘Odeonmänner waren da und haben Grammophonaufnahmen gemacht’ (4th September, 1928) (Spies cited in Stepputat 2004: 5). 3. ‘Sléndro zelf… is op Bali onvindbaar. En wij vragen ons af: waarom? Want de Hindoe-Javanen kenden in de Madjapahit’sche perdiode… wel Sléndro, zooals ons o.a. bleek uit de meting van een viertal opgegraven gendér- toonreeksen, waarven althans twee met zekerheid en de beide andere met zeer groote waarschijnlijkheid uit OostJavaanschen bodem en uit dat tijdperk afkomstig zijn’ (Kunst 1925: 35q). 4. ‘Bij het dansen wordt door vrouen en mannen om de beurt gezongen. Wanneer de zangeressen en zangers moe zijn dan vervangt men de zang soms door gamelanspel. Gewoonlijk gebruikt men voor dit doel de semar pegoelingan... De dans van de Sanghyang volgt den zang of de gamelan-muziek. Speelt men b.v. gending pelégongan, dan dansen de Sanghyang’s net als de légong. Speelt men daarentegen de gending baris, dan dansen ze evenals de baris’ (Cokorda Raka Gedé Sukawati 1925: 324). 5. ‘Kīrnnag tabang-tabang arū ––– m masari ––– k pinupang –––’ (see Poerbatjaraka 1931: 9, 65, cited in Vickers 1985: 157) 6.‘...lekas tua dan tidak lama lagi tidak diperindahkan lagi dan diloepakan oleh oemoem’ (Balyson 1934a: 164) 7. ‘Djadi salah benar kalau orang memandang soal ini dari katja mata jang sempit… kita ta’ boleh poela mempeladjari atau mengetahui keboedajaan bangsa lain: kalau kita hendak bernjanji soedah tjoekoep dengan gending Sangiang atau Djangger, noot do re mi fa sol ta’ oesah diketahui sebab boekan kepoenjaan kita… Dengan anggapan dan pemandangan jang sempit ini, laloe ia tergesa-gesa poela mendjatoehkan vonnisnja bahwa maksoed Baliseering itoe semata-mata hendak mengembalikan Bali kezaman poerba, soepaja kita sebagai katak dalam tempoeroeng’ (GPM 1939a: 146) 8. ‘Waktu itu, lebih banyak praktek. Juga dia ajarkan téori seperti notasi, laras, pengetahuan karawitan- beliau-beliau kata-katakan itukan mendapat silabus buat di Solo. Silahkan: di Bali tidak ada’ (Sinti pers. comm., 2007). 9. ‘Beliau guru-guru saya itu membuat notasi baru batas berperdoman dgn lima nada ... karena gamelan yg popular saya kira gamelan gong kebyar, walaupun ada memakai gendér wayang lima nada, notasinya sama. Cuma cara menyanyi hanya beda. Jadi, itu notasi berpedoman kepada panca nada- lima nada- sama gamelan yang popular. Disamping itu, kemungkinan gamelan gambang, gong luang... Lama terpendam … [Of Pak Kaler] Beliau kepada saya bahwa. Disamping beliau belajar tari dan hampir semua barungan gamelan di Bali sudah pernah dibelajari kecuali gamelan gambang’ (Sinti, pers. comm., 2007) 10 ‘Masyarakatnya lebih tertarik di gamelan pelégongan daripada di gambang… Komposisinya itu lain daripada yang klasik. Jadi membuat para penonton seperti itu, lebih tertarik- energik! Dan setelah pelégongankan, kebyarnya yg muncul... tersebar, ya’ (Sinti, pers. comm., 2007). 267

11. ‘Walaupun kini gambelan gong gede telah sebahagian besar berubah bentuk menjadi bentuk gong kebyar, namun gending-gending tersebut tidak berubah ciri khasnya bila diperdengarkan menggunakan gambelan gong kebyar. Suasana yadnya yang megah dan agung tetap terasa dan membawa orang akan terbayang dengan kedamaian masa purba’ (Rembang 1984/5: xi). 12. ‘Khusus didalam pergertian karawitan Bali, bahwa yang dimaksud tabuh adalah hasil kemampuan seniman mencapai keseimbangan permainan dalam mewujudkan suatu repertoire hingga sesui dengan jiwa, rasa dan tujuan komposisi. Menabuh bukan berarti asal memukul gambelan mengikuti suatu melodi, tetapi memukul gambelan dengan segala aturan atau tata cara yang telah ditentukan supaya suara gambelan dapat terdengar indah’ (Rembang 1984/5: 8). 13. ‘Sedangkan jumlah dan titik tempat jatuhnya pukulan kempur dan kempli itu diatur berdasarkan rasa indah seniman pencipta dalam mencapai keseimbangan bentuk untuk harmonisnya komposisi masing-masing tabuh’ (Rembang 1984/5: 10). 14. ‘Taksu nika artinya... perpaduan antara... kalau di Bali nika dinamakan konsep keseimbangan. Nggih. Keseimbangan. Nika artinya apa yg dibilang istilahnya atau konsepnya keseimbangan dlm gambelan bali apa? Yg paling berkarakter sekali, nepaling genah’ (Wahyu pers. comm. 2007). 15. ‘...Setruktur [sic.] lagu-lagu gambelan Bali seperti misalnya: pada pegongan, pegambuhan. pelégongan dan lain-lainnya yang pada umumnya terdiri dari bagian pengawit, pengawak, pengisep dan pengecet’ (Windha et al. 1985: 1). 16. ‘Gambelan Bali khususnya pegongan merupakan suatu khasanah budaya Bali yang erat sekali kaitannya dengan kegiatan upacara Agama Hindu dan berfungsi sebagai sarana penunjang jalannya upacara Yadnya… Banyak orang berpendapat, bahwa gending-gending tersebut bernafaskan Agama, karena mungkin pada awal mula terciptanya diilhami oleh suasana keagamaan.. Maka setiap gending lelambatan klasik diperdengarkan, orang yang mendengar merasa dirinya seakan-akan sedang berada di dalam suasana upacara yadnya’ (Rembang 1984/5: xi). 17. ‘Waktu saya berada di america, saya mendapat inspirasi... sebelum, di Bali biasanya seniman itu membuat sesuatu itu batasakan rasa. Tapi kalau di Amerika saya membuat komposisi intervalnya saya bertolak atau mulai dari mathematic’ (Sinti pers. comm. 2007). 18. ‘Jadi susunan nada daripada atau interval daripada siwa nada: dalam satu oktaf... jadi, di Bali kita meyakini bahwa perhitungan tiga, itu mempunyai “spiritual charisma” atau taksu. Di Bali, kita meyakini—sesui dgn agama Hindu—bahwa pehitungan tiga mempunyai kekuatan yg kita kenal dengan istilah taksu. Kita mengenal istilah Trimurti: Brahma, Wisnu, Iswara. Kita mengenal istilah triguna: Lahir, hidup, mati... Banyak three. Itu ide saya transfer, itu membuat komposisi interval dalam gamelan siwa nada. Jadi: 123456789 - kemudian oktafnya. Jadi anunya, kalau dihitung berapa cent. Satu dengan dua: 132 cent; dua dengan tiga: 132 cent; 3 dengan 4: 136 cent. Ini diulang, tiga kali. Mungkin Kate bertanya: 'kenapa tidak sama, kenapa tiga dan empat: 136 cents? Kalau seluruhnyakan jumlah 400 cents, kenapa ini lebih besar? Tidak semua rata?’ Begini. Menurut kepercayan kita di Bali, istilahkan trimurti: Brahma, Wisnu, Iswara atau Siwa... Jadi kita meyakini di Bali, bahwa Siwa itu posisinya sedikit lebih tinggi daripada Brahma dan Wisnu’ (Sinti pers. comm. 2007). 19. ‘Kemudian, setelah menggunakan mathematic, setelah selesai, saya mainkan dan saya rasakan ada yg mungkin... kurang cocok dgn rasakan saya. Oh, I felt awkward a little bit! Di sini. Kurang-kurang anu rasanya, lalu saya main dengan rasa… Lalu saya kombinasikan dgn sistem Bali itu: rasa’ (Sinti pers. comm. 2007). 268

20. ‘Upaya Sinti mengembangkan sistem 9 nada pada gamelan siwa nada rupanya terinspirasi dari adanya sistem 12 nada pada musik Barat yang pertama kali dikembangkan oleh Arnold Schoenberg’ (Astita Bali Post, 22nd July 2007). 21. ‘Susunan nada-nada gamelan Siwa Nada boleh dikatakan mendekati nada-nada diatonik mulai dari nada do, re, mi kromatik (naik setengah nada), fi mol (turun setengah nada), fa, sol, la, ti (naik setengah nada) yang disusun berurutan dari nada 1 sampai 9’ (Astita, Bali Post, 22nd July 2007). 22. ‘Naluri sebagai seorang komposer melalui pengalaman empiris telah menstimulir untuk untuk munculnya sebuah inspirasi ide. Dalam mengikuti proses ritual ini selalu diikuti oleh bunyi gamelan… mendengar suara alay-alat musik... seperti suara gamelan, kentongan dan yang lain-lain menyentuh hasrat untuk mengkemasnya menjadi sebuah bentuk komposisi musik’ (Mariyana 2007: 13). 23. ‘Rangkaian upacara tersebut digarap kedalam sebuah komposisi musik dengan bagian-bagiannya tersebut sesui dengan upacara yang berlangsung, sehingga susunan atau strukturnya garap... memberikan kesan secara artfiguratifa’ (Mariyana 2007: 98). 24. ‘Terkait dengan ide garapan maka permilihan gamelan Bebonangan diharapkan mampu mendukung suasana-suasana yang secara artfiguratifa muncul dalam konteks upacara Tawur’ (Mariyana 2007: 15). 25. ‘Saya tidak banyak berpikir tabuh sebenarnya. Saya biarkan dia mengalir itu… tidak banyak berpikir banyak wujud garapan. Awalnya, saya punya hanya sedikit konsep… canon, saya suka canon awalnya. Beberapa garapa saya- kontemporer-- kebanyakan canonnya’ (Sauman pers. comm. 2007). 26. ‘Cara tabuh pat nika, kendangé dados pokok… empat jegogné nika… satu gebug... papat nika, gebug ping tiga, ampun wangsita lan kendang siki, kal ngerereh gong, kenten’ (A.A. Suma, pers. comm. 2007).

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Appendix Two Composition/Recording Plans I include a breakdown of each of the new compositions discussed in Chapter Six, with corresponding points in the CD recording indicated. All terms and sectional divides marked with “ ” correspond to labels used by composers and musicians in rehearsals and subsequent commentaries on the works.

Bapang (CD Track 1) [00:01] 6-beat repeated fragment of Kunjan Jintoyo. Suling followed by full ensemble [00:12] “Japang” Kunjan Jintoyo melody with vocal refrain (ceng-ceng final cycle only). Final cycle includes a repeat of the last 12 beats of the melody. [01:55] “Transisi” (‘transition’) Jublag melody introduces tone 4 (calung, jegog, kendang, kempli) [02:09] “Kebyaran” full ensemble [02:19] “Pengrang-rang” (free-metered passage with ‘improvisatory’ feel) (suling, cili and jegog) [02:45] “Transisi Bali” (‘Transition’ to ‘Balinese’ section) Unison melody followed by gangsa/ gambang kotekan (full ensemble) [03:13] “Pengawak” (“Tembung”) 88-beat melodic repeated cycle which includes slow melody before tempo acceleration into gangsa/gambang kotekan) (full ensemble) [06:05] “Transisi” (calung, jegog, kendang, kempli) [06:21] “Japang” Reprise of Kunjan Jintoyo section as heard at 0:12-1:55, with small melodic variation first cycle. Melody repeated four times (full ensemble, except ceng-ceng final cycle only)

Windu Sara (CD Track 2) [00.02] Siwa nada scale, full ensemble. [00.13] Repeated 8-beat cycle with kotekan [01:10] “Kebyaran”, full ensemble [01:11] “Malpal” repeated 8-beat cycle with gangsa and gambang kotekan [02:04] “Kebyaran”, full ensemble (extended version of 01:10) [02:08] Deceleration and gangsa “modulasi” [02:14] “Pengawak” with Dvořák theme in suling, gangsa and gambang [03:40] “Transisi” 2-beat cycle with kotekan [04:01] Repeated 16-beat syncopated melody in gangsa and gambang [04:27] 56-beat repeated cycle, last only until beat 49 [05:46] “Kebyaran”, full ensemble [05:48] 62-beat repeated cycle [07:22] “Kebyaran”, full ensemble [07:35] Repeat of ascent and descent siwa nada scale, full ensemble

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Tawur (CD Track 3) “Bagian 1: Mendak Ida Bhatara” (Section 1) [00:01] Gentorak, gumanak, ensemble vocals. [00:28] “Kebyaran” (full ensemble) [00:36] Suling, jublag, jegog, ensemble vocal [01:14] Gangsa and réyong melody, plus jublag and jegog [01:33] “Tabuh Telu” (full ensemble) [02:20] Kempli strokes as “kulkul” [02:25] Ensemble vocal and suling slow melody with jegog [02:45] Entry réyong, penyacah, gentorak [02:56] Entry ceng-ceng “Bagian 2: Melasti” (Section 2) [03:30] “Pola Gilak I” (Gilak Pattern 1) Gilak gong cycle: …G P.PG [03:57] ‘Pola Gilak II” (Gilak Pattern 1I) [04:28] Repeat “Pola Gilak I” [05:00] “Canon” (réyong; jegog, jublag; gangsa) [05:04] “Kendangan” [05:17] “Nyalit” (‘transition’) (full ensemble) “Bagian 3: Pengembang” (section 2) [05:32] “Gending Babonangan” (‘bebonganan composition’) (full ensemble exc. ceng-ceng) [07:00] “Kendangan leluangan” (kendang solo in luang style) [07:31] Ensemble vocal, suling [07:46] Freely repeated ‘suara bajra’ (‘priest’s bell’) patterns (gentorak, gumanak, gangsa, jegog) “Bagian 4: Tawur” (Section 4) [08:09] “Gilak” [slow tempo: nyigcig]. Ceng-ceng perform ‘pola keplugan’ (rice-pounding rhythmic patterns) [08:47] Staggered entries of “pola nguncang” (‘restless pattern’) rhythmic refrain (in order of entry: ponggang; kempli, gong; vocal, suling; réyong; gangsa;) [10:13] “Kekebyaran” section plus vocal shouts (full ensemble) [10:30] Repeat “Pola gilak II” quicker tempo (full ensemble) [11:08] Repeated slow melody as heard at 02:25 [11:41] Repeated opening passage of gentorak, gumanak, and ensemble vocals

Chanda Klang 145 (CD Track 4) “Gineman” [00:03] Kebyaran fragments including ‘klangfarbenmelodie’ passage at 00:10 [00:26] Kendangan followed by gangsa fragment [00:41] Gangsa, then suling and jublag [00:50] Suling soli melody [01:02] Suling division into canonic entries (with jegog countermelody) [01:30] Gangsa followed by réyongan [01:40] Gangsa and kantilan “nyog-cag”/”pointillism” [01:51] Suling 32-beat melody 145

See also Sandino (2008) for a more detailed layout of the piece in his survey of tabuh kréasi from 1988-2007.

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“Gegendéran” [02:05] 32-beat melody repeated, with entries from jublag, kantilan, réyong and gangsa [03:45] 18-beat melody introduced [03:59] 32-beat melody returns [04:35] 18-beat melody returns [04:49] Transition in réyong and gangsa leading to suling melody and deceleration [05:05] Slow 12-beat melody (jublag and suling) [05:43] Fast 4-beat melody, followed by melodic fragments gangsa and kantilan [05:52] Kendangan [05:55] Melodic fragments réyong, gangsa, kantilan “Bapang” [06:08] 16-beat melody plus kotekan. Syncopated ‘bapang’ gong structure [06:18] Melodic fragments across the ensemble, plus kendangan/ceng-ceng [06:38] Suling transition (including pemero tone 4) followed by fragmented solos across ensemble “Pengecet” [07:28] Stable tempo, 28-beat melody, alternating textures [07:41] Triplet-meter figuration in jublag [07:55] Suling melody [08:11] Repeated 1-beat figure: building texture [09:19] Kebyaran [09:22] Descending melodic fragments passed across ensemble [09:44] Three short kebyaran passages

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Appendix Three Glossary of Terms Angklung, gamelan Four-tone (occasionally five-tone) bronze ensemble which customarily performs in ceremonial contexts. Angsel Rhythmic disruption or accent in Balinese music or dance. Banjar Neighbourhood association or ward in Bali. Bapang 8- or 16-beat gamelan meter underpinned by the gong structure ‘.P.t.P.G’. Also used to describe the section which uses this meter in gong kebyar tabuh kréasi following the gegendéran. Beleganjur, gamelan Processional ensemble comprised of pot gongs, hanging gongs, ceng-ceng cymbals and kendang drums. Calung Middle-register, single-octave gendér metallophone (same as jublag). Ceng-ceng Small cymbals used in Balinese gamelan ensembles either attached to a fixed base or played as small hand-held crash cymbals (ceng-ceng kopyak). Gambuh, gamelan Ensemble to accompany Gambuh dance drama which features long end-blown suling flutes, plus kendang and gongs and rebab. Gangsa pemadé Balinese metallophone of bronze keys over a bamboo resonator. In gamelan gong kebyar and semar pegulingan, gangsa typically performs interlocking figuration (kotekan) in sets of pairs. Gangsa kantilan Metallophone pitched an octave higher than gangsa pemadé. Typically used to perform interlocking figuration (kotekan) in pairs. Gendér Bronze metallophone with bamboo tube resonators. Gendér wayang, gamelan Ensemble of gendér metallophones used to accompanied the wayang shadow theatre. Gendéran Passage in gamelan gong kebyar tabuh kréasi (usually after the gineman) which showcases the gangsa section of the ensemble. Gending Piece or composition for gamelan. Also to sing (magending) in Balinese. Gentorak Shaken bell-tree used to mark section divides in gamelan gambuh and semar pegulingan. Gilak 8-beat gamelan meter associated with strong male dance which uses the gong cycle (G). . .GP.P(G). Gineman Either a free-metered interlude (usually at the opening) to a gamelan piece, or the collection of opening materials in a gong kebyar composition. Gong [ageng] (G) [Great] gong. Largest of the hanging gongs in the gamelan ensemble. Refers to two gongs used alternately: wadon and lanang. Gong gedé, gamelan ‘Gamelan with the great gongs.’ Large ensemble of bronze instruments plus drums, associated with lelambatan temple repertoire. 273

Gong kebyar, gamelan Five-tone twentieth-century bronze ensemble, associated with virtuosic playing and new composition. Gong luang, gamelan Archaic seven-tone ensemble using bronze and bamboo instruments plus kendang. Institut Seni Indonesia (ISI) Institute of Indonesian arts. Jegog, gamelan Large bamboo gamelan ensemble of West Bali. Jegog[an] Lowest pitched, single-octave gendér metallophone of gamelan ensemble. Jublag Middle-register, single octave gendér metallophone (same as calung) Kakawin Old Javanese sung poetry. Karawitan ‘Indigenous’ music of Indonesia, customarily applied to Javanese and Balinese gamelan ensembles. Kawitan Lit. ‘head’, can refer to the opening section of a gamelan composition. Kecak Modern vocal chant of interlocking ‘cak’ patterns performed by men. Linked to the cak chorus of the Sanghyang. Kempli Small mounted pot gong used as a beat keeper or to mark broader divisions in compositional structure (palet). Kempur Hanging medium-sized gong. Kendang Twin-headed drum used in gamelan ensembles and struck with a mallet or the hands. Typically performed in pairs. Keseimbangan ‘Balance’ [Indonesian]. Kidung Balinese sung poetry. Kotekan Interlocking melodic figuration, produced by pair of players (see polos and sangsih). Krumpungan Style of light hand-drumming on the kendang associated with gamelan gambuh and gamelan semar pegulingan. Lanang ‘Male’. Used to describe the higher-tuned kendang or gong of a pair. Légong Type of female dance, customarily performed by young girls. Lelambatan ‘Slow music’, used to describe the ‘classic’ repertoire of the gamelan gong gedé. Leluangan Music of the gamelan gong luang or music in this style. Lontar Palm-leaf manuscript. Majapahit Medieval East Javanese empire. Ngempat Balinese ‘fifth’. The playing of an interval of four keys (two omitted keys) within a five-tone subset. 274

Niskala Balinese term for the ‘intangible’ world. Nyog-cag Type of kotekan where polos and sangish play rapidly alternating notes. Nyong-nyong (alit/gede) Iron-keyed instruments (small/large) of gamelan selonding performed using two wooden mallets. Olah [ngolah] To exercise; to put to use; to work at; to make ready; to practice [Balinese] Payasan Musical ornamentation, including melodic improvisation as performed, for instance, by trompong, suling, or ugal. Pegongan Music of the gamelan gong [gedé]. Pelégongan, gamelan Five-tone bronze gamelan ensemble used to accompany légong dance. Pengawak Term used to refer to the (slow) central passage of a gamelan composition. Pengecet Fast section of a piece, often closing a composition. Pengumbang-pengisep Refers to the paired tuning of instruments (lower and higher respectively). Also denotes shifts in tempo/dynamics. Penyacah Single-octave bronze metallophone, tuned one octave above the calung/ jublag. PKB Pesta Kesenian Bali: the annual Bali Arts Festival held in Denpasar. Polos Lit. ‘simple’. One of the pair of interlocking parts that comprise kotekan figuration. Typically simpler or ‘on the beat’ than the corresponding sangsih line. ‘Pung’ Distinctive and piercing drum stroke from the kendang lanang, using the left hand at the top of the drum head. Rebab Bowed spiked fiddle with two strings. Réyong Knobbed pot gongs customarily played by pairs of players. Sakala Balinese term for the ‘tangible’ world. Sanggar Local arts education and performance organisation. Sangsih Lit. ‘differing’. One of the pair of interlocking parts that comprise kotekan figuration. Typically more complex, syncopated and mobile than the corresponding polos line. Sanghyang A trance dance (and origin of the kecak chant). Selisir Five-tone mode using tones 1 2 3 5 6 from seven-tone ‘pélog’. Notably employed in five-tone ensembles of gamelan gong kebyar, pelégongan, and gong gede. Selonding, gamelan Archaic seven-tone gamelan ensemble with iron keys associated with East Bali.

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Semar pegulingan, gamelan Seven-tone sweet-sounding bronze ensemble associated with the royal courts (and the royal bed chamber). Semara dana, gamelan Modern seven-tone ensemble created in 1987 by I Wayan Beratha which combines seven-tone gamelan semar pegulingan with five-tone gamelan gong kebyar. Skripsi Undergraduate dissertation. For composition students, the dissertation which must accompany the new work presented at a candidate’s ujian sarjana. Sudra Low-caste Balinese. Suling Bamboo flute. Tabuh kréasi New composition, usually for gamelan gong kebyar. Tabuh Composition. Tawa-tawa Small knobbed gong customarily played with a soft mallet as beat keeper. Téma ‘Theme’. Titilaras Dingdong Revised Balinese notation system created in 1960 at KOKAR Bali. Triwangsa High caste levels. Trompong Horizontal pot gongs. Can be played by one player soloistically in a style of melodic ‘elaboration’ or ‘improvisation’ known as payasan. Ubit empat Kotekan figuration using four notes. Ugal Melodic leader of the gamelan gong kebyar ensemble, customarily played with closely managed gestures to lead dynamic change. A single instrument tuned an octave lower than gangsa pemadé. Ujian sarjana ‘Scholars’ examination’, used to describe the end of degree recital presented by ISI students. Wadon ‘Female’. Used to describe the lower tuned kendang or gong of a pair.

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