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Chapter Title: Deterritorializing and Appropriating Gamelan

Book Title: Javanese Gamelan and the West Book Author(s): Sumarsam Published by: Boydell & Brewer, University of Rochester Press. (2013) Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7722/j.ctt31nh98.11

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Part Two

Gamelan as Intercultural Object

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Chapter Four

Deterritorializing and Appropriating Gamelan

Sir Thomas Stamford Raffl es, British colonial governor of Java from 1813 to 1816, published The History of Java in 1817.1 This two-volume work contains a rich discourse on many aspects of Javanese life, complete with many lavish illustrations. The book celebrates Java for its pomp and glory, incorporating descriptions of court life, the royal family, performing arts, weaponry, architecture, antiquities, the life of the commoners, the animal kingdom, and more.

It is commonly held that Raffl es’s book is inextricably linked to his political goals. As James Boon suggests, the book “is designed to convey in print and illustration a concrete model of his policies’ ideals, a portrait of the wonder that Java promised, had his administration endured.”2 Anthony Forge confi rms this line of thought in his study of the book’s illustrations. Analyzing the color plates, he asserts that six of them “are in twisted perspective, the heads being shown in profi le, the bodies more or less full on and the legs and feet again in side view, moving to the left or right. At fi rst sight this suggests Javanese work, as these conventions are characteristic of wayang kulit yet to me these drawings do not feel Javanese at all.”3 After examining several other drawings, Forge concludes: “Raffl es used his illustrations to reduce facile exoticism and pres- ent the Javanese as ‘civilized’ in a European sense.”4 He goes on to argue that “Raffl es’s visual material can be said to have minimized, almost domesticated, the genuine ‘exoticness’ of Java. Partly in order to justify himself and his poli- cies, he presented the Javanese as having the same sort of bodies, albeit with different clothing, as the English.”5

This reminds us of Edward Said’s Orientalism, wherein he argues that dis- course on non-Western culture by Western scholars tends to result in a kind of essentializing project and the domestication of the exotic. Said identifi es ways in which Western formulations of non-Western culture “were integral to Western ideological, political, and colonial domination, and this observa- tion has provoked a tremor of critical self-refl ection through the entire ‘Asian studies’ profession.”6 In 1994, a conference proceeding entitled Recovering the Orient was published, countering Said. In the preface, the editors write that

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78 g a m e l a n a s i n t e r c u l t u r a l o b j e c t

“Said’s Orientalism has encouraged a sense of embarrassment among those scholars concerned with the investigation of culture. In drawing attention to the essentializing tendencies of some writing about Asia and to its potential political consequences, he made us wary of delineating cultural differences. This wariness is not merely moral in origin: indeed Said’s stress on the con- structed character of the Oriental ‘other’ brings into question the theoretical basis of all cultural analyses.”7 Following James Clifford, the editors assert that Said’s Orientalism “communicates an homogenizing view of humanity.”8

Do the images used by Raffl es fi t Said’s line of thought? Probably, but instead of exoticizing the “other,” Raffl es made his illustrations to fi t European perspectives; the images attract his European readers not because of their exotic otherness, but rather their familiarity.

I will now examine the response of Western audiences, artists, and schol- ars toward the presence of gamelan in their lands. In light of the above argu- ment regarding Said, does gamelan represent “the strange Orient,” “exotic Otherness,” or an object made “strangely familiar”? The answer is all of the above. Heterogeneity, not homogeneity as suggested by Said’s Orientalism, is the salient character of intercultural encounters.

The Earliest Interaction

Thomas Stamford Raffl es was the fi rst European to introduce gamelan to the West in a signifi cant way. After completing his term as governor in 1816, he returned to England bringing tons of items, including two sets of gamelan. What motivated him to do that? What type of gamelan did he bring? How did Raffl es represent gamelan to Europeans? To address these questions, I would like to begin with a brief historical background.

Javanese contact with European traders began in the Mataram period in the seventeenth century. From the mid-eighteenth century to the early nine- teenth century, power confl icts within the royal family and the interference of Europeans (especially the Dutch, and only briefl y the British) caused, in 1755, the permanent partition of Mataram into two major courts and two minor courts: the major courts were Kasunanan of Surakarta and Kasultanan of Yogyakarta, and the minor courts were Mangkunegaran of Surakarta and Paku Alam of Yogyakarta. From this point on the Javanese rulers were under the control of the Dutch, and full colonization eventually took place in the 1830s. Throughout this period, Java was the headquarters of the colonial gov- ernment. It is no wonder, therefore, that European interest in Indonesian cul- tures was fi rst focused on Java.

As a consequence of the Napoleonic wars, the Dutch relinquished Java to the British in 1811. This period marked the beginning of European scholarship on Indonesia, thanks to Raffl es. Raffl es includes in his History a rather lengthy

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d e t e r r i t o r i a l i z i n g a n d a p p r o p r i at i n g g a m e l a n 79

description of Javanese music and theater, indicating his keen interest in the Javanese performing arts. It seems that Raffl es’s gamelan were mostly used for exhibition, not for playing: only once does he mention that the Javanese chief Raden Rana Dipura, who accompanied him to England, played “several of his national melodies before eminent European composers, all of which were found to bear a strong resemblance to the oldest music of Scotland.”9 Writing in 1828, Charles Wheatstone refers to a sketch of gendèr taken from Raffl es’ gamelan.10 The instrument also became a subject of the study of musical scales by Alexander Ellis, who examined the gamelan while it was on a display at the Royal Albert Hall, and produced an article entitled “On the Musical Scales of Various Nations.”11 William Crotch also examined Raffl es’s gamelan while the set was at the Duke of Somerset’s residence, and found that the gamelan scale can be “produced by the black keys of the piano-forte, the scale that can also be found in many of the Scots and Irish, all the Chinese, and some of the East Indian and North American airs.”12 Raffl es’s gamelan became objects to be studied and displayed.

There is not much known about the extent to which Raffl es was interested in gamelan music. We do know that he commissioned a gentleman from Semarang to notate a couple of gamelan compositions.13 His lavish illustra- tions of gamelan instruments and wayang puppets show that he thought of Javanese culture as highly civilized. His comparison between Javanese soci- ety and those of two other islands makes his point clear: “Of the three chief nations in these islands, occupying respectively Java, Sumatra, and Celebes, the fi rst has, especially by its moral habits, by its superior civilization and improve- ments, obtained a broader and more marked characteristic than the others.”14

One set of Raffl es’ gamelan is now in the British Museum; the other is at Claydon House in Buckinghamshire.15 From today’s perspective, the size of the instruments in the British Museum set is larger than usual, and each of the instruments features ornate carving and lavish gilding. The frames of many instruments are shaped and carved in exquisite zoomorphic designs, such as dragons and peacocks, a motif that is—and was—atypical. Raffl es probably commissioned the gamelan: as Sam Quigley shows us, a list of instruments is attached to the 1861 document of sale and transmittal of the gamelan.16 The list includes a brief note: “Javanese Band of Musical Instruments made to the order of Sir T. Stamford Raffl es and brought by him from Java 1816.” That Raffl es commissioned these instruments helps explain many questions: why were they so exquisitely made? Why is the decoration so appealing to Western eyes? Why are they in such an extraordinary condition? Why is the instru- mentation not complete?17 And why is the gamelan tuned to a diatonic scale? Quigley’s answers deserve to be presented fully here:

Owing to his political position, his military supremacy and his comparative wealth, Raffl es would have been viewed by the Javanese as the most powerful

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80 g a m e l a n a s i n t e r c u l t u r a l o b j e c t

lord of the land. He was known to speak and read Malay and Javanese and, for a Westerner, to have an unprecedented interest in Malay traditional cul- ture. Thus, when he ordered a gamelan, we can assume that the fi nest arti- sans were approached to carry out the work and that, as if for a royal patron, the set would be lavish and impressive. Further, as is the custom, he would have been expected to specify elements of the carved decoration, the paint colors, and the character of the tuning, the latter being not as standardized in Java as it is in the West. Raffl es seems not to have left much to chance. This inveterate collector traveled widely within Java and, as a keen observer, might well have assembled a portfolio of decorative schema which could be referenced when commis- sioning a gamelan. It is quite possible that he specifi ed indigenous decora- tive vocabulary, which appealed to his European taste; he may even have suggested some Westernizing alterations and then left it up to the artisans to incorporate his ideas. Among the traditional motifs he could have easily stipulated are: the intersecting fl ower-petal grillwork (common to many batik designs) and the upholstery-like decorative beading on all the instruments, the undulating C scrolls, and spiral-fl uted precious treatment of the fi nial at the end of both the gong stand and the gendèr key holders. The care with which the decoration was planned as an integral part of each case piece and the quality of its execution are stunning. The carved decoration is restrained but opulent; its gilding has great depth and complements the deep ochre- painted ground. The heavily patinated bronze keys silently convey the great age of the set, while the superb condition of the teakwood (Tectonis grandis) cases leads one to wonder how much, if ever, the gamelan had been used before it was brought to the more temperate climate of Great Britain.18

Raffl es’s gamelan, with its ornate decoration that seems to be designed accord- ing to his European tastes, the highly zoomorphic design of the frames, and the lavish illustrations of the gamelan in his book, all confi rm an essentializing ten- dency when presenting Java and Java’s compatibility with civilized Europe.19

Raffl es also presents us with a counterpoint to Java’s glory. His description of gambang (wooden xylophone) is a case in point. As mentioned earlier, after a demonstration of Rana Dipura’s gambang playing, the eminent composers in attendance commented on a strong resemblance between gamelan music and the “oldest music” of Scotland. Raffl es elaborates by saying that both gamelan and Scottish music, and also Indian music, are similar to their “being deter- mined by the want of the fourth and seventh of the key and of all the semi- tones.”20 He continues, about the gambang playing: “By reiteration several of the sounds are artfully prolonged much beyond their noted length, which produces an irregularity of measure that might both perplex and offend the edu- cated ear of an accompanying timeist. The rhythm of the sections (from extension and contraction) appears very imperfect.”21 His comment may have been based only on Rana Dipura’s playing, but the digression shows that he could also see fl aws in Javanese arts.

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The initial encounter of Europeans with Javanese music took place more than two centuries before Raffl es became governor of Java. The arrival of British explorer Francis Drake in Cilacap (a port on the south coast of Java) in 1580 is considered the earliest encounter between Javanese and Europeans and their respective music. Although the authenticity of Drake’s report is somewhat sketchy,22 it seems clear that there was an exchange of musical pre- sentations between locals and Drake’s musicians. Ian Woodfi eld summarizes this encounter as follows:

Drake’s fi nal port-of-call in the Far East was the island of Java, where he stayed for two weeks in March 1580. His musicians were in greater demand than ever before. After an initial meeting on shore during which Drake pre- sented his “musicke,” the Golden Hind received frequent visits from Javanese, anxious to view the curiosities on board the English ship: “Few were the dayes that one or more of these kings did misse to visit us.” Drake showed the commodities on board and demonstrated the weaponry, “his musicke also, and all things else whereby he might do them pleasure, wherein they tooke exceedingly great delight with admiration.” On 21 March one of the local chiefs came aboard and “in requitall of our musick which was made to him, presented our Generall with his country musick, which though it were of a very strange kind, yet the sound was pleasant and delightfull.”23

There is no record of whether the music played for Drake and his group was gamelan, and indeed there is not much evidence of gamelan ensembles at all in this period. Evidence of an ensemble consisting of gongs and metallo- phone instruments was reported by a Dutch expedition to Banten in 1595–97. The report includes a drawing of an ensemble consisting of both horizon- tal and hanging gongs and a metallophone-type instrument (gendèr type) accompanying female dancers. Two other accounts from the same period corroborate the existence of this type of gong ensemble: Edmund Scott, the fi rst Englishman to oversee a factory in Banten, describes local music as fol- lows: “Their musique, which was ten or twelve pannes of Tombaga [Tembaga, brass?], carried upon coulstaffe between two; these were tuneable, and every one a note above another, and alwayes two went by them which were skillful in their Country musique, and played on them having things in their hands of purpose to strike them.”24 This evidence suggests a processional gong ensem- ble, but it is possible that the ensemble performed in a stationary position, as shown in a contemporary drawing of a similar ensemble in Tuban, accompany- ing a horse tournament. Contemporary evidence of this type of gamelan—cara balèn ensembles in the courts of Surakarta and Yogyakarta—also shows that these were performed in either stationary or processional settings.

It is not my intention to proceed further with the history of the ensem- bles drawn and described by European visitors to Java: what is relevant to the

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82 g a m e l a n a s i n t e r c u l t u r a l o b j e c t

present study is the presentation of cultural differences. As mentioned ear- lier, Drake seemed delighted to hear Javanese music, but he also perceived the music as “strange.” A number of reports from the sixteenth through eigh- teenth centuries show more intolerant responses to Javanese performing arts.25 The report from Banten mentioned above also describes the daughters of high nobility dancing in a “disgusting” manner, “pulling their arms and legs about, and twisting their whole bodies, like dogs when they creep out of their nest.” Valentijn, author of the encyclopedia of the Dutch East Indies, describes Javanese music as a “horrible rumbling of gong and drums.” He also says that “all of their music as merely consisted in bawling out the tones re mi re . . . and in cadences in fourths, thirds and fi fth, in a most disagreeable manner, and with a drawl that irritated me beyond words.”26

However, not all reports show an unreceptive response. I have previously described Rijcklof van Goens’s rather lengthy description of dances and a number of ensembles during his residency in the Mataram court in the eigh- teenth century.27 Jaap Kunst describes him as “the keenest observer of, and most receptive to, Javanese music.”28 From these earliest responses to this cul- tural difference, we fi nd heterogeneous views of Javanese music.

Gamelan in the Early World’s Fairs

World’s Fairs were an early arena for introducing gamelan to the West. Historians, musicologists, ethnomusicologists, anthropologists, and other scholars have examined these events, especially as postcolonial studies have grown in popularity.29 As a new mode of communication in the nineteenth century, the fairs “aroused high expectations, in much the same way as the arrival of the internet at the end of the twentieth century.”30 World’s Fairs had the same role and signifi cance as today’s Olympic Games and World Cup tournaments: they were concerned with nationalism, rivalry, ethnographic dis- play, and commerce on a global scale. Studies such as Marieke Bloembergen’s “Colonial Spectacle,” Corbey’s “Ethnographic Showcase 1870–1930,” and Burris’s “Exhibiting Religion: Colonialism and Spectacle at International Expositions,” to mention just a few, discuss the importance of World’s Fairs as ethnographic and anthropological displays of civilization and representations of cultural difference.

Corbey concludes his essay, in part, by saying that the context of World’s Fairs involves “complex interdependencies between the colonialist, scientists, and visual appropriation of cultural others” in which “Person[s] from tribal cultures, on show in the West, were commodifi ed, labeled . . . , scripted, objec- tifi ed, essentialized, decontextualized, aesthetisized, and fetishized. They were cast in the role of backward, allochronic contemporary ancestors, receivers of true civilization and true religion in the stories told by museums, world fairs,

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d e t e r r i t o r i a l i z i n g a n d a p p r o p r i at i n g g a m e l a n 83

and imperialist ideologies, thus becoming narrative characters in the citizen’s articulation of identity—of Self and Others.”31 An elaborated form of Corbey’s last point can be found in Breckenridge’s essay, in which she sees nineteenth- century World’s Fairs as

part of a unitary, though not uniform, landscape of discourse and practice, that situated metropole and colony within a single analytic fi eld, through precisely such cultural technologies as the inter-national exhibition. Such technologies created an imagined ecumene (in much the same way that Benedict Anderson [1983] talks about print media creating imagined com- munities underlying the nation-state). I will call this the Victorian ecumene. This Victorian ecumene encompassed Great Britain, the United States, and India (along with other places) in a discursive space that was global, while nurturing nation-states that were culturally highly specifi c. One condition for the construction of cultural specifi city, particularly in relation to the develop- ment of the nation-state, was a concept of the cultural other, for these new technologies, routines and rituals of rule were frequently developed in rela- tion to this imperialized or imperializing other.32

International expositions were thus about more than the display of colo- nized peoples and cultures; they also tell us how images of indigenous culture were related to the host’s self-image, the development of its nation-state, and economic development. In the mid-nineteenth century Europe had moved toward the development of capitalist societies in urban complexes, accompa- nied by the appearance of the modern entertainment industry. Breckenridge continues: “Trains, the latest in transport inventions, facilitated the temporary movement of people for leisure, and advanced the idea of the excursion as a sign of an accomplished middle-class person.  .  .  . Advertising, a term coined in this period, enlarged and recontextualized the world of the object, and patronage relations became entangled with transnational practices in which the accumulation, display, and admiration of objects from near and far came to be highly valued.”33

One of the points of the studies is that World’s Fairs were designed to show the evolution of humankind from a so-called primitive stage to the modern world. There are exceptions, though, and a gradual shift of emphasis in repre- senting indigenous cultures at these exhibitions, from “a single all-embracing, ‘primitive’ and exotic entity, as presented under the collective label of ‘eth- nography’ in the 1880s,” to “a range of more complex artistic products on the Hindu-Javanese ‘civilization,’” in the 1890s fairs.34 In fact, the display of Indian cultural objects in the fi rst World’s Fair, the 1851 Great Exhibition at London’s Crystal Palace, featured not primitive India, but rather a modern court of India and its glory. “India was characteristically represented by regalia including such transport and enthronement paraphernalia as palanquins, elephant trappings,

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84 g a m e l a n a s i n t e r c u l t u r a l o b j e c t

thrones, crowns, scepters and vestments. . . . The elaborately carved throne was upholstered in green velvet and embroidered with gold.  .  .  . The throne was accompanied by fi ne carpets, shawls, saddles, and parasols.”35 The presence of court gamelan and dances in the 1879 National and Colonial Industrial Exhibition at Arnhem is another case in point: the music and dance repre- sented not primitivism, but a contemporary “high culture” of Java. For another example, in 1882 Javanese gamelan from the court city of Yogyakarta was per- formed daily in the Royal Aquarium in Westminster, England.

Before a detailed examination of gamelan in the early exhibitions, it is worth mentioning the degree to which the European public understood gamelan prior to fi rst hearing it at the 1879 Arnhem exhibition. The mid-nineteenth century witnessed the development of a liberal policy by the Dutch colonial government, which considered local rulers to be close allies rather than enemies: it was there- fore necessary to seek a better understanding of their customs and traditions. Before taking up their postings, Dutch offi cials were required to learn the local culture and language, a learning experience which led to the emergence of a number of prominent scholars of Javanese art and literature. It was from them that knowledge about the gamelan circulated in the Netherlands. Jan Willem Terwen has written about these scholars, and the following discussion is drawn largely from his Gamelan in the 19th-Century Netherlands.

Cornets de Groot, the Dutch Resident (governor) of Gresik (in East Java) in 1825, was the fi rst scholar-offi cial to write a rather extensive report on gamelan in its cultural context.36 He describes different gamelan ensembles and a list of the pieces they performed, with a description of the individual instruments and their playing techniques. In addition, he provides drawings of the instru- ments in six different types of gamelan, and a chart showing nine ensembles with a list of pieces and their usage in performance. For example, thirty-three gendhing are listed in the Salendro gamelan used for accompanying way- ang. The nine ensembles in the list are gamelan Senen, Kodok Ngorek, Tjara Bali, Bonang Renteng, Salendro, Mentaraman, Pelog, Soerabayan, and Salompret. Elsewhere in his report he mentions gamelan sekaten, a large and loud gamelan tuned in pelog and used for the Islamic festival commemorating the life of the Prophet Muhammad. His work became a reference for later authors.

J.  A. Wilkens was another Dutch scholar-offi cial to write on gamelan, pro- ducing an essay entitled “Sewaka” which appeared in the Dutch journal Tijdschrift voor Nederlandsch-Indie and provided elementary but rather insight- ful information about the sléndro and pélog tuning systems, pathet (the modal system), and Javanese poems.37 Wilkens’s information came partly from Prince Pangeran Harya Kusumadilaga, who had unsurpassed knowledge of gamelan and wayang and was the author of a manuscript on the subject entitled Serat Sastramiruda.38

In addition to these scholar-offi cials, two Dutch missionaries, H. Smeding and C. Poensen, also contributed to the knowledge of gamelan in the

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Netherlands in the early 1860s. Having encountered gamelan in the village of “Kepanjen” (Kediri?), East Java, Smeding observed the importance of sing- ing in the ensemble, and also mentioned bonang and gambang. He noticed that the rebab is the leader of the ensemble, playing the same melody as the singer and followed by the rest of the group; this is interesting since in today’s practice, rebab is rarely used in East Javanese gamelan. Poensen provided a lengthier account. He lived in Kediri for 27 years as a minister, schoolteacher, and community worker, and authored a number of articles, including a forty- page essay on wayang which describes different kinds of ensembles and the tuning system of the gamelan.

In the Netherlands, the Koninklijk Nederlands Aardrijkskundig Genootschap (Royal Dutch Geographical Society) committed in the 1870s to researching and disseminating knowledge about the Dutch East Indies. One of the society’s projects was to send three of its members on an expedition to Sumatra, where they collected and studied musical instruments, among other ethnographical objects. One of them was C. D. Veth; the experience pre- pared him to later plan and mount the display of cultural objects at the 1883 International Colonial and Export Trade Exhibition in Amsterdam. His father, Professor P.  J. Veth, was known for his intensive studies of the Dutch East Indies; he wrote an essay on gamelan, attempting to compare it with European music and bemoaning the poor reception that gamelan generally met with from Europeans.

On two occasions in 1857 students of the Dutch Royal Academy of Engineers and Civil Servants of the Indies reconstructed a processional gamelan—with the resources at their disposal and a certain amount of imagination—to simu- late a religious procession of the Yogyakarta court, the garebeg. It happened that the Royal Academy owned a gamelan set, and they performed along the streets of Delft, with two dancers (a female and a masked male) preceding the ensemble. The two engravings depicting this procession suggest that the ensemble was a simulation of a special processional gamelan, perhaps cara balèn and kodhok ngorèk.

Gamelan and other ethnographic objects were collected at the Rijks Ethnographisch Museum (built in 1837; now the Museum Vokenkunde) in Leiden. It was from this museum that a gamelan was sent to the 1878 Exposition Universelle in Paris and to the 1880 exhibition in Berlin.

Gamelan in the 1879 Arnhem Exhibition

Intellectual circles in the Netherlands thus must have had some knowledge about gamelan. The imagined sound of gamelan became a reality when it was heard for the fi rst time at the 1879 Nationale tentoonstelling  van Nederlandsche en  koloniale nijverheid (National Exhibition of Dutch and

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86 g a m e l a n a s i n t e r c u l t u r a l o b j e c t

Colonial Industry) in Arnhem. Discussions with the Dutch Resident in Surakarta, central Java, led the committee to invite a group of musicians, sing- ers, and dancers from the minor court of Mangkunegaran to the exhibition. Prince Pangeran Hario Gondo Siwojo and his son escorted the troupe. They were well received by the members of the fair’s board, and met the king and queen before their journey continued to Paris and England.

From July to October the fi fteen musicians and singers and two dancers remained in residence in Arnhem, performing almost daily in an outdoor bandstand specially designed for gamelan performance. The musicians wore attire not commonly wore by today’s musicians in Surakarta: European-style jackets, with openings in the front so that their white shirts were exposed. A few musicians wore traditional sampir (a scarf-like cloth worn around the neck) with a European vest; one musician wore a necktie. The European-style jackets made one reporter speculate whether this un-Javanese garment was meant to protect the musicians from cold weather, but in fact Javanese courts had adopted European attire by the second half of the eighteenth century, wearing them for formal occasions “to share in the strange power that the persistent presence of the Dutch must have represented to Javanese rulers by the late eighteenth century.”39 Even in Java the Javanese found themselves between two worlds.

It is possible that the gamelan dispatched to the exhibition was chosen for its portability: it was a sléndro-pélog set, which in contemporary gamelan practice is called gamelan klenèngan. The absence of the main loud instruments (bonang and demung) typifi es this set, allowing the musicians to focus on softer pieces featuring elaborate melodies. The sléndro-pélog set consisted of: three kend- hang, one rebab, gendèr barung, gendèr panerus, gambang, celempung, suling, slenthem, two saron barung, peking, kethuk-kempyang, kenong, a set of kempul, and gong kemodhong.40 The two programs reprinted in Terwen’s book mostly show pieces in the ketawang and ladrang forms (16 and 32 pulses per gong cycle), except gendhing Lobong (64 pulses per gong cycle). But the program also mentions loud pieces suitable for accompanying dance or dance drama: pieces in the gong structure of srebegan (srepegan), sampak, and lancaran.

Questions were raised about a dancer wearing a costume with exposed shoulders. The dancer in question was a ronggèng,41 a dancing-girl in tayuban (a dance party at which the males in attendance take turns dancing with pro- fessional ronggèng dancers, who are also known to be prostitutes).

Only two Javanese dancers were present at the exhibition: eighteen-year- old Warsi and fi fteen-year-old Reki, and the dances they were to perform were bedhaya or serimpi. It is possible that the dancers performed a fragment of serimpi, although usually this dance is performed by four dancers. The two photos available to us indicate that the dancers wore serimpi dance costumes.42 Another newspaper mentions that the dancers sang, although “their songs might not be that fi tting to us Europeans, who furthermore do not understand

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a word of them.”43 This mention suggests that the dancers were dancing as well as singing.

The reporter from Algemen Handelsblad condescendingly wrote: “They played a battle song: Srebegan. If our shooting clubs ever need a war song, then this calm, monotonous, frequently repeated melody (if there were such one), repeated ad nauseam would be highly recommended.”44 About the dance, he says: “They call the ronggengs dancing-girls. I would like to refer to them as walk- ing-girls. Their distorted way of moving is not dancing. They walk while they are bending in all kinds of snake-like curves, making sounds in the process that seem to pass for singing, constantly repeating the same tune.”45 Rejecting this, an old Dutch colonist named Kehrer pointed to the fact, as he understood it, that tandak dancing is “a preeminently important issue to the Javanese peo- ple.” It seems that Kehrer knew the importance of tayuban in both village and court tradition at this time. He was happy when a native ruler offered him the opportunity to enjoy some good tandhak dancing and to hear a good gamelan: “often I have picked up the offered slendang and participated myself.”46 Kehrer goes on to explain that the word “squatted” is an inappropriate translation of the term “sila,” describing the cross-legged sitting position of the musicians. His explanation of sléndro and pélog tuning—not slindo as meaning a double orchestra differing from a pilok gamelan, as stated by one reporter47—demon- strates his intimate knowledge of this music.

Upon hearing gamelan for the fi rst time, Daniel de Lange, of the Nieuws van de Dag, declared: “What I did suffer at that occasion is diffi cult to describe. I think I can give the best description by saying that the Cacophony brought about by the simultaneous performance of two different pieces on two Pianos that are not wholly in tune with each other, which I witnessed when I walked through the main building of the Exhibition, seemed to be even more bearable than the miserable ‘tick-tock’ mixed with heavy beating of kettles of the music played by my Javanese fellow artists.”48 De Lange’s comment is sarcastic and condescending indeed, but there was something in the music that led him to desire to know more about gamelan. Upon a second listening, the pieces with singing were still “awkward” to his ears, and the nasal singing was unbearable, “And yet I cannot say that this music is without meaning,” he says. Repeated listening led to the progression of his understanding of gamelan, to the extent that he describes the music using as a metaphor the abstract patterns of cash- mere scarves, in which “great order” and “method” are undeniably present.49 His questions about gamelan deserve full mention:

I do feel I need to ask a few questions. The rebab (. . .) plays the motifs, like a leader, the other instruments, such as the suling (.  .  .) and the gambangs (harmonica with wooden metal sticks) play the same motifs, but in a fi gured way, each on their own in a different manner; the saron provides a summary of the motif. Add the idea of a kind of ‘basso ostinato’ (ground bass) and a

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rhythmic movement of the drum, everything divided in regular sections and sub-sections by the periodical beats of the gongs and the kenong; and now I wonder: does this music need to be considered as melodic music exclusively? It is true that all these instruments only play the same motifs in a varied way, and that these variations sometimes result in often barbaric discords, but this does not alter the fact that a kind of simultaneous sounding exists which, however hard on the ear, may be considered a harmony. The second ques- tion is: should I not presume that the harmony created by the variations of the motif is bound by certain rules? To prevent a misunderstanding, I add that I do not refer to an arrangement of the tones sounding together, but an arrangement of the variations played by each instrument in the various pieces, of which a harmonic (read ‘often in harmonious’) arrangement is the natural result.50

At last De Lange understood how gamelan music works organizationally, but his European musicality bound him to listen to gamelan in its vertical rela- tionship. It seemed that he was able to grasp the concept of motifs or melodic patterns in gamelan, was amazed that musicians did not use notation, and admired the melodious sound of the gongs. Gamelan had a defi nite impact on Lange’s musical life, spurring him to theorize and lecture about the gamelan tuning system, and to compose a cantata which was somewhat infl uenced by his gamelan experience.51

From Court to Kampong Culture

The evidence shows that in the earlier fairs, the Royal Aquarium in 1882 and the 1879 Arnhem exhibition, Javanese dances and gamelan represented not primitive art, but contemporary cultural performances of the high art of Javanese court culture. Then there was a shift in focus in the representation of culture from court to village, from high art to folk art. Below I will discuss three of these later fairs: the 1883 International Colonial and Export Trade Exhibition in Amsterdam, the 1889 Exposition Universelle in Paris, and the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

Enhancing industry and trade was one of the main objectives of all World’s Fairs. This is why life in villages (the producers of goods) became a spectacle of the fairs. Another main objective of the fairs was to introduce the colonies and its people to Europeans. Combining these two objectives, especially begin- ning with the 1883 Amsterdam exhibition, the fairs displayed the colonies as ethnographical and anthropological objects in which the village represented a primitive life style, that of the lower strata of society.

The village spectacles also related to colonial policy in the Dutch East Indies. In 1830 the Dutch government stepped up its exploitation of the natives and their resources, and a policy called cultuurstelsel (cultivation system)

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was launched by the colonial government. Basically, this system forced the villagers to use their lands to grow crops for the benefi t of the colonial gov- ernment. In 1870, as Dutch liberal policy gained momentum, the Cultivation System was abolished, but the village nevertheless remained important as a producer of crops and export goods such as tea, coffee, and spices. In this regard Bloembergen asks the following question: “Was the spectacle of the Javanese village designed to lay bare the splendid origins of the Cultivation System, or did this informative display refl ect changing attitudes to the culture and social institutions of the colony’s local population?”52 In either case, the importance of the village as the producer of economic goods remained. The question, then, was: what kind of music and dance should be presented in this village spectacle? We should begin by examining performing arts at the 1883 Amsterdam exhibition.

The exhibition took place on the grounds behind the Rijksmuseum, and twenty countries were represented. In the Eastern part was the colonial pal- ace, displaying colonial products. Then there was a complex of houses from the Dutch East Indies in a section known as a kampong (village), and a hall (pendopo) where gamelan performances were held.53 Next to the hall was a replica of a European residence in a mixed Padang-European style, and a replica of a Tegal restaurant from where exhibition spectators could enjoy listening to gamelan.54

Bloembergen provides a nuanced interpretation of the kampong: “A diminutive apparition beside the Aceh monument, a rather awkward-looking arrangement of small bamboo and wooden houses from different parts of the Dutch East Indies constitutes the ‘East Indies village,’ complete with inhabit- ants who lived, we may assume, correspondingly awkward lives.”55 With regard to the hall for gamelan and dance performance, Bloembergen describes it as “a baroque summerhouse on the side of the exhibition grounds nearest Ruysdaelkade canal, [where] the musicians among the imported Javanese played gamelan between midday and 6 p.m. every day.”56

This gamelan hall was actually an intriguing architectural hybrid of “eclec- tic curiosity, a mishmash of European and Arabic styles, and as such was a fi t- ting byproduct of the main colonial palace, a grandiose edifi ce in Islamic style by the architect A.  W. Storebeker.”57 The presence of the statues of Euterpe, Melpomene, and Queen Semiramis in the corners of the pendopo, standing in niches crowned with small Hindu domes, made this hall even stranger.58 According to Terwen, this pendopo, so uncharacteristic of the East Indies, was built because the organizer thought that the native architecture was not “a fashionable exhibition hall: indigenous construction was too inferior and the compact forms of ancient Hindu temples made them unsuitable for use as exposition space. Islamic architectural forms were the next best thing, all the more so because one could point to the impressive secular structural design in the Islamic world.”59

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A kampong was chosen as the main ethnographic display to represent the early development of human life and dwellings. What performing art should accompany this idea? Evidence shows an interesting dimension of the kind of gamelan and its repertoire presented in the exhibition.

Some of the gamelan instruments used for the village gamelan perfor- mances (still in Leiden) exhibit unusual designs or size.60 A few instruments resemble Raffl es’s gamelan: the stand for the rebab has a unique design, depicting two roosters standing back-to-back. The bonang is remarkably large, so much so that the musician cannot reach the farthest pots from his position. The kendhang is also extremely large. The kempul stand is also uncommon, in that it has two horizontal poles to which fi ve kempul are hung, with the knobs facing the player. A set of fi ve European bells hung on a stand similar to the kempul’s was also found in the collection.

Unfortunately, no documentation can be found regarding the origin of the gamelan. It is likely that C.  D. Veth, who was sent to the East Indies to select ethnographic objects to be displayed in the exhibition, ordered the gamelan to his own specifi cation. That some of the instruments were modeled after Raffl es’s gamelan is a possibility, since Raffl es’s book on the history of Java was well-circulated and quoted in nineteenth-century gamelan literature. De Vale, who compared this 1883 gamelan with the gamelan displayed at the 1893 Chicago exhibition (the subject of her research), concluded that the colors of the stands and resonators of the 1883 gamelan—bright blue and gold accented in red—“appear to be modeled after European furniture designed with their legs turned in spirals, and the stands carved with ordinary serpents.”61 De Vale also suggests a Chinese infl uence on the decoration.

This jumble of decorations on the instruments, the large size of the bonang and kendhang for the sake of a visual impression, and the inclusion of bells (traditionally not part of a gamelan ensemble) are all in line with Veth’s intent to display objects that would catch the eyes of European spectators. Like the mishmash of the pendopo, a combination of perspectives Eastern and European, ancient and modern, it was meant to make “exotic otherness” become “familiar strangeness”—similar to the drawings that appear in Raffl es’s book, discussed in the opening of this chapter.

The performance of “Wien Neêrlands Bloed” (the Dutch National anthem at that time) on the gamelan to herald the arrival of King Willem III was another realization of this hybrid perspective; the gamelan was reportedly tuned to a Western diatonic scale.62

Whereas the musicians were most likely also regular workers in the planta- tions, playing “Wien Neêrlands Bloed” on the gamelan must have been a chal- lenge for them. But based on the repertoire presented by the group, they were very fl exible in what they could play. Clearly, the musicians and dancers of west Java would have been most familiar with Sundanese music and dance, but the repertoire they performed included a Javanese wayang purwa shadow

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Figure 4.1. Gamelan and musicians at the 1883 Amsterdam Exhibition. Reproduced with permission from Museum Volkenkunde, Leiden (RMV A-52-1-56).

puppet performance, wayang krucil, and a mask dance telling the story of Negri Blambangan. It is also said that the dancers Amsa and Eno performed serimpi instead of West Javanese dance.

The group’s performances at the 1883 Amsterdam exhibition received much criticism from people who had heard gamelan from the court of Mangkunegaran at the 1879 Arnhem exhibition. De Lange, mentioned earlier, had nothing posi- tive to say about the performance at the Amsterdam exhibition:

I encountered only confusion and even note relationships that were com- pletely out of tune. I waited eagerly for the beautiful rhythmic alterations, of which I remember more than one. In vain: I indeed heard many tempo changes, but coarsely and sloppily executed; here and there a kind of con- ductor even had to give signals. I anticipated the various sound effects, those representing joy or sadness, passion or intimacy. In vain: I heard them not. After hearing the gamelan a number of times here, I could not bring myself to return, as I was utterly disappointed.63

Even more frustrating to de Lange was the playing of the national anthem on gamelan. “I do not doubt that some listeners found it pleasurable, but hope I will be permitted to express my unmitigated horror. What kind of satisfaction indeed can a music-lover possibly experience from hearing ‘Wien Neêrland’s

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92 g a m e l a n a s i n t e r c u l t u r a l o b j e c t

Bloed’ or the ‘Wilhelmus’ performed on this type of instrument, while any boy singing these songs will elicit more enjoyment than these players?”64

Paris Exposition: Rethinking Gamelan and Debussy

The 1889 Paris exposition and the 1893 Chicago exposition both had as their theme human evolution and social progress. Regarding cultural performances from the Dutch East Indies, the two exhibitions shared the same confi gura- tion: a gamelan and a dance troupe from the same plantation in western Java, with the addition of a few dancers from the court of Surakarta. Here I will focus on the 1889 Paris exposition, mentioning the 1893 Chicago exposition whenever comparison is necessary.

Taking place in the center of the city on the banks of the Seine, the Paris Exposition Universelle was an event held to coincide with the centen- nial of the French Revolution, a fact which made the Dutch government and other European nations (those that were controlled by the French as a result of the French Revolution) reluctant to participate. The eventual Dutch participation was largely backed by private institutions. At any rate, the ethnographic display of the Dutch East Indies was a success. The Dutch organizers built a pavilion and a kampong (East Indies village), which proved to be a tremendous attraction. The admission, fi ve times more costly than the nearby Annamitic (Vietnamese) theatre, did not prevent 875,000 visitors entering the kampong over the six-month duration of the fair.65 An average of four to fi ve thousand visitors attended daily, closer to ten thou- sand on Sundays.66

Not unlike the 1883 Amsterdam exhibition, the theme of human evolution was part of the planning of the exposition. This was the era when the evolu- tionary theory proposed by Darwin was debated not only for its explanation of the natural world but also the human one, especially as regards religion and other aspects of culture.67 There is no question that racism was the norm in the nineteenth-century European worldview, and music served to illustrate this. The exclamation of the journalist for La Vie parisienne about Arabic music accompanying the Egyption belly dancers that he saw at the Paris Exposition is one of the best examples of this perspective:

Hey! Is this the dance of the Egyptian? Could it be such rude spectacles that the potentates of the crescent-moon relish in the secrecy of their harem? . . . How far from the smallest oriental ballet in the Opera, how vulgar, how unlike the descriptions of writers or the striking images of the painters are these obscene calls of girls moving rhythmically to a barbaric motive, the pre- cise opposite of those accents that our Western musical language applies to express the infi nite voluptuousness of the fl esh.68

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The notion of the evolutionary process had infl uenced the planning of the 1878 Paris exposition and was fully realized at the 1889 event,69 with the 1883 Amsterdam exhibition as an intermediate step. In the case of the 1889 Exposition Universelle, organizers gathered anthropologists, ethnographers, archeologists, and scholars in the fi eld of prehistory to assist in the plan- ning.70 “They helped, in special thematic and retrospective expositions, to chart existing knowledge regarding human nature and the age of humanity, and regarding humanity’s physical features and states of civilization, as these had developed over time in a variety of circumstances, according to prevailing ideas, and as allegedly still visible among the earth’s diverse ethnic groups.”71 But in what way did this conception infl uence the choice of performing arts to be presented?

I should remind the readers that economic interests remained an important aim of World’s Fairs. This was especially true with respect to the participation of the Dutch, since private interests largely fi nanced the Dutch pavilion and kampong. Another important aim of the exhibition was showing the culture and civilization of the colony. Taking the two themes into consideration, it must have been a challenge for the organizers to fi nd the most appropriate performing arts to be presented at the exhibition. As a way to display economic interest, they decisively chose performing arts from areas where trading inter- ests were located, namely the village plantation. However, knowing that their colony also produced well known performing arts created by the “high cul- ture” of Javanese courts, they felt compelled to add the attraction with Javanese court dances. The Paris exposition followed this format—the format that was also carried out at the Amsterdam exhibition, as I discussed earlier. The kam- pong at the Paris exposition thus featured village life and the performing ensemble of the Parakan Salak plantation, but four dancers from the court of Mangkunegaran in Surakarta also joined the performing group.

It is safe to say that the contemporary European public did not fully real- ize that there are two distinct forms of gamelan music in Java: (1) Javanese gamelan, from the court cities of central Java and their vicinities, and (2) Sundanese gamelan, from west Java.72 Both Javanese and Sundanese music (also Balinese, for that matter) are governed by four functional layers: (1) colotomic foundation in which the stroke of different gongs defi ne cyclical structure of the music; (2) abstracted melody or melodic skeleton played by a group of instruments; (3) elaborate melodic form, and (4) drum patterns that reinforce the cyclical structure, regulate temporal fl ow, and synchronize its pat- terns with dance movements.

The most noticeable difference between Javanese and Sundanese gamelan is the drumming. Using three drums (a large drum and two small drums), with the manipulation of the sound of the large head of the large drum (by press- ing it with the drummer’s heel), the Sundanese drummer produces dynamic and lively drum patterns, more lively than the Javanese drummer.

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In Javanese gamelan, the music is rather clearly defi ned: one group of instruments plays the melodic skeleton of the piece, while the other instru- ments elaborate or make reference to that skeleton to express their melodies. In Sundanese music, the boundary between meledic skeleton and melodic elaboration is not as clear as in Javanese gamelan. In fact, in Sundanese music “all melodic instruments (except kenong) involve some kind of elabo- ration upon the piece’s core melody. Core melody is an especially abstract concept in Sundanese music,”73 more abstract than the core melody in Javanese music.

Gendèr, one of the leading instruments in Javanese gamelan, is absent from Sundanese gamelan. Singing and rebab stand out musically and textur- ally in Sundanese gamelan, more so than in Javanese gamelan. Larger than the Javanese rebab, the Sundanese rebab produces a louder sound. It plays in a freer rhythm than the Javanese rebab does. The practice of the rebab and singer to superimpose an alternative, pélog-like tuning system to the sléndro gamelan tuning is another distinctive feature of Sundanese music; this practice also occurs in Javanese gamelan, but only incidentally. All in all, when Javanese musicians are asked to play Sundanese gamelan, or vice versa, they have to learn a new concept of the melodic structure and new playing techniques for many of the instruments.

Which gamelan and what type of gamelan and dance repertoire were pre- sented in the kampong? Obviously, Sundanese music, dance, and wayang golèk would be the main repertoire, since the musicians and dancers were Sundanese from the Parakan Salak plantation. In addition, a Sundanese pro- cessional angklung, an ensemble of instruments made of bamboo, took part in the exhibition: its function was to call visitors’ attention to the performance, accompanying them while entering and exiting the performance space. But the presence of four court dancers from Java, named Wakiem, Seriem, Taminah, and Soekia, raises a series of questions: how could Sundanese musi- cians accompany Javanese dances? What dances did the four court dancers perform? Did the gamelan group also perform Javanese gamelan repertoire? In other words, what did the visitors to the exposition actually hear and see in the kampong? These are questions that many music scholars have tried to answer, due to the prevailing opinion that gamelan at the exposition infl u- enced the work of Claude Debussy.

Establishing which gamelan was used in the exposition has been one of the challenges for scholars. No photographs of the gamelan can be found, and there are only a few drawings showing some of the instruments on stage. Drawings of bonang, gongs and their stand, rebab, and kendhang were posted in the Dutch pavilion (not the kampong where the gamelan performance was held), juxtaposing them with other objects. In this drawing, the gongs and their stand and the bonang were clearly modeled after the gamelan in the pos- session of the Paris Conservatoire, a gamelan set from Cirebon donated by East

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Indies Minister of the Interior J.  M. van Vleuten in 1887. Given the evidence she was able to gather, Rachel Thompson concludes that the Conservatoire gamelan must have been the one used at the exposition.74 However, based on various evidence, including drawings of the instruments, an archival document from the Mangkunegaran, and photographs of the dancers, Jean-Pierre Chazal concludes that in fact a Sundanese sléndro gamelan from Bandung was used at the exposition.75 According to a document from the Mangkunegaran archive, the gamelan was provided by a certain M. Bernard of Bandung.76 Apparently Bernard had lived in Java for seventeen years, and was the manager of the kam- pong at the exposition.77

Chazal provides the following list of instruments: bonang (probably two), gambang, gendèr, gong, kempul, jengglong, kendhang, rebab, saron, and tarum- pet. The listed instruments, sometimes with a specifi c description indicating their Sundanese type, conform to a typical Sundanese gamelan set, except the gendèr. Chazal acknowledges that evidence for the presence of gendèr is very weak. In a message to me, Chazal mention that “gender” is mentioned in three texts, but (respectively) in a confusing context, a fanciful story, and in the con- text of a general description of Javanese music.78 He is convinced that gendèr was not part of this Sundanese gamelan at the exposition.

Contemporaneous accounts inform us that the dance performances were famous, but there is no solid evidence indicating what repertoire was actu- ally performed. These accounts also offer a tantalizing, but often confusing, glimpse of dance performances. For example, bedhaya, serimpi, and tandhak are terms used interchangeably to describe dance performances in the kam- pong. Bedhaya refers to a genre of female ceremonial dances in the courts of central Java: considered to be the most exalted (even sacred) dance, it is performed by seven or nine dancers. Performed by four dancers, serimpi is a less exalted female court dance, but its status is close to that of bedhaya. As mentioned above, tandhak or ronggèng refers to female dancers hired for male dance parties in which the men present take turns dancing with them; often the dancers are also prostitutes. These distinctions were not refl ected in documents about the dances at the exposition: for example, some documents indicate that both bedhaya and tandhak were court dancers or dances. Even if these two dancers were under the care of the court, bedhaya had a higher sta- tus than tandhak.79 There must have been much miscommunication between the authors and their Javanese informants, given that three languages were used: Malay, Dutch, and French.

From examining the costumes and postures of the dancers from engrav- ings, I notice that a preference was given to dances other than bedhaya and serimpi. This is strengthened by the fact that, as Chazal shows us, the costumes for bedhaya or serimpi dancers were not listed in the archival document from the Mangkunegaran. The Mangkunegaran document lists mostly dance cos- tumes for the characters of three different wayang dance dramas. The list

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mentions fi ve costumes for dancers of wayang wong, with a specifi c mention of costumes for Baladéwa and Karna (characters from the Mahabharata story); two costumes for a ksatriya or knight dancer; one costume for a female dancer; three costumes for the dancers of wayang gedhog, with two specifi c mentions of costumes for the Panji and Bugis dancers; two costumes for Ménakjingga and Damarwulan (the main characters of Damarwulan story); and one costume for Bondabaya, a dance portraying a military drill. Ten masks and forty-seven way- ang puppets were also on the list. Given that ten masks were listed, it is possible that mask dances were performed in the kampong; similarly, wayang kulit per- formances might also have been staged.

After matching the dance costumes listed above with the costumes in the engravings, I learned that many of the dancers represented charac- ters from the story of Panji and Damarwulan. However, the headdresses of Damarwulan and Menakjingga in the 1889 performance are different than in today’s representations of these characters. Both dancers wore tekes, a large headdress in a semicircular shape, topped with black fur (see fi g. 4.2). I have consulted a Mangkunegaran dancer, Bambang Suryono, who after checking archival documents at the Mangkunegaran court, confi rmed that the engraving represents (see fi g. 4.2, from left to right): Ménakjingga, Princess Wahita, Princess Puyengan (the two captive princesses), and Damarwulan.80

From contemporary dance practice we know that these headdresses in a semicircular (from left to right) are worn only by characters from the Panji story: nowadays Damarwulan wears a similar headdress, but the circular shape is from front to back. Ménakjingga wears a headdress of a different shape, called pogogan. I suggest that there has been a change of headdress design from one era to another. Researching Javanese performing arts in the 1950s, Claire Holt includes a photograph of these two characters in her book; they wore headdresses that differ from both today’s and nineteenth-century cos- tumes.81 Pigeaud reports that, inspired by Bima fi gures drawn on the wall of the Candhi Sukuh temple, Mangkunegara V, monarch during the 1889 Paris exposition, ordered artists to design new headdresses for wayang wong danc- ers: the Bima fi gures wear a circular hairstyle, which presumably inspired the tekes headdress.82

If the Damarwulan story was staged at the Paris exposition, it might well have been in langendriyan style. If they indeed performed langendriyan, how were the Sundanese musicians able to accompany this Javanese dance opera? Unfortunately, no fi rm answer can be found. As I mentioned earlier, there are signifi cant differences between Javanese and Sundanese gamelan; and langen- driyan requires a rather elaborate musical accompaniment, which I explain below. Annegret Fauser suggests that there had been a cultural (and musi- cal) exchange through marriages and trade between central Javanese and Sundanese, making it likely that the Sundanese musicians could play Javanese

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Figure 4.2. The four Mangkunegaran dancers at the 1889 Paris Exposition, representing the characters of (from left to right) Damarwulan, Waita, Menakjingga, and Puyengan. B.H.V.P., Dossier photographique Divers XXI, 364.

music with some modifi cations. However, Fauser does not provide us with any examples of such marriage or trade diplomacy. The only evidence she offers us is Ernst Heins’s speculation: “In those days Sundanese gamelan players could, with some modifi cations, meaningfully perform Javanese music (and sing Javanese tembang macapat).”83 But Heins doesn’t provide any evidence either.84 Following Chazal’s assertion, Fauser maintains, however, that music for langen- driyan must have been performed in the kampong.85 Based on contempora- neous written accounts, she presents evidence of the staging of the story of Damarwulan by four dancers, summarizing the accounts as follows:

On the small stage, Wakiem, Seriem, Taminah, and Soekia were already seated in front of a row of marionettes (used in separate performances of Sundanese marionette theater). The four dancers, aged between thirteen and seventeen, ignited the fantasies of the Parisian audiences: they were perceived as nubile courtesans from the “harem of a sultan,” the Solonese prince Mangkunegara VII [V].86 As the gamelan began the fi rst piece, the four tandak [dancers] rose slowly and began the courtly dance. Their dance

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98 g a m e l a n a s i n t e r c u l t u r a l o b j e c t

represented an episode of the Javanese epic Damarwulan, in which the hero tries to rescue two captive princesses from his enemy, Menakjingga. The dance from the princely court of Surakarta was performed in the charac- teristic formation of four tandak to the accompaniment of the Sundanese gamelan, including a singer.87

In what way the four dancers reenacted the story of Damarwulan is not known, and the accounts do not mention whether the dancers were singing while dancing, as in langendriyan, but the evidence points to the probable presenta- tion of the genre.

As mentioned in chapter 3, langendriyan songs are sung interactively by two or more dancers, representing a dialogue. Langendriyan dancers must thus be able to simultaneously dance well and sing from memory. In addition, dancers portraying primary characters must perform the character’s special introduc- tory dance, and the performers also have to dance in a battle scene. Because of the challenging task of combining singing, dancing, and choreography, a lan- gendriyan dancer is greatly admired for her artistic accomplishment. Because of its appeal, the operatic langendriyan singing style is often incorporated into some scenes of wayang wong panggung and kethoprak.

The search for aspects of gamelan that supposedly inspired French compos- ers has been an important subject in musicology. Fauser has investigated the gamelan sources for Benedictus’s transcription for piano entitled Danse javana- ise. Predating and prompting Fauser’s treatment is Mueller’s essay, in which he links a gamelan piece called Vani-Vani (Javanese, Wani-Wani) with Debussy’s Fantaisie for piano and Benedictus’s Danse javanaise.88

One of the pivotal points of Mueller’s argument is that the ostinato theme of the fi nal movement in the Fantaisie is a realization of Debussy’s remembrance of a repeated section of melodic skeleton (balungan) of Wani-Wani.89 The clue that has led to his proposition lies in passages written by an author and friend of Debussy, Julien Tiersot: “There is one dance, however, that, from the point of view of music as much as of choreography, seems to enjoy the special favor of the Javanese, for it is the one they mention more often and play more willingly as a typical example of their music. It has the name vani-vani. . . . Its principal theme . . . represents one of the more characteristic forms of the music proper to the gamelan.”90 After estab- lishing that, though written in 1889–90, the “Fantaisie” was performed in public for the fi rst time only in 1919, and was published by Fromont in 1920, Mueller explains that “the peculiar fate of the Fantaisie has previously been believed to be the result of Debussy’s dissatisfaction with its orchestration and its conventional form.”91 However, his article argues that “the cyclic theme of the Fantaisie is based on a Javanese melody and that Debussy withdrew the work more because he was not content with its assimilation of Javanese infl uences.”92

But which Wani-Wani did Tiersot transcribe and Debussy hear? Beside Tiersot’s transcription of an excerpt of Vani-Vani, Mueller uses the transcription

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d e t e r r i t o r i a l i z i n g a n d a p p r o p r i at i n g g a m e l a n 99

of the melodic skeleton of Wani-Wani from the court of Yogyakarta, quoted from the work of Groneman and Hood.93 Citing Edward Lockspeiser’s Debussy: His Life and Mind,94 Mueller is wrongly convinced that the music played at the Exposition Universelle came from the court of Yogyakarta. As I have dis- cussed earlier, the gamelan and Sundanese musicians and dancers at the Paris Exposition, in fact, came from west Java, with four additional dancers from the minor court of Mangkunegaran joining the group. But there is no evi- dence to show that the Sundanese musicians performed Vani-Vani to accom- pany Javanese dance. The only evidence at hand is Jean Kernoa’s and Julien Tiersot’s transcription (the later is only an excerpt of the piece). Closer exami- nation reveals that Tiersot’s transcriptions represent Sundanese, rather than Javanese, music. The melodic identity of Jean Kernoa’s transciption is very hard to decipher, however.

Henry Spiller (whose study focuses on Sundanese music and dance) says that Sundanese musicians consider Wani-Wani as one of the archaic or “large songs” (lagu gede), which is rarely, if ever, performed nowadays.95 Spiller men- tions that he found only one teacher, Otong Rasta, who took pride in preserv- ing these older songs and includes them in his gamelan teaching. This makes it diffi cult to fi nd information about lagu gede. The only notation of lagu gede pieces available to me is in a booklet written by Sundanese gamelan scholar Koesoemadinata entitle Lagu-Lagu Gede Sunda, containing 33 songs.96 As can be seen in example 4.1 below, Tiersot’s transcription of Vani-Vani resembles Koesoemadinata’s Wani-Wani. It is most likely, therefore, that Wani-Wani per- formed at the Paris Exposition was a Sundanese, not a Yogyakarta piece. This fi nding does not necessarily negate Mueller’s proposition, however, since his main argument is to prove that certain characteristics of Debussy’s Fantaisie were inspired by the cyclic theme and pitch structure of gamelan composition. But he arrives at a conclusion by using certain pitch structures of Yogyakarta Wani-Wani (which Debussy never heard), although he also makes brief refer- ence to Tiersot’s Vani-Vani.97

Fauser criticizes Mueller for neglecting to mention a version of Vani-Vani from the program of the performance.98 Fauser also suggests that there is no basis for Mueller to assert that the Benedictus piece is a version of Vani-Vani. In contrast, she argues: “Benedictus is offering a version of the fi rst dance from the langendriyan.”99 She cites Jurgen Arndt’s Der Einfl uß der javanischen Gamelan-Musik auf Kompositionen von Claude Debussy, which “to a certain extent,” supports her proposition.

Fauser speculates that one of Tiersot’s untitled transcriptions is music for this Javanese dance opera. However, a thorough examination of the tran- scriptions reveals Sundanese music: the transcription that Fauser identifi es as “Beginning of the piece, melody played by rebab” is typical of the introductory melody of a Sundanese piece. The second example, which she identifi es as “Beginning of melody line (sung?), starting slowly,” is actually a saron part for

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100 g a m e l a n a s i n t e r c u l t u r a l o b j e c t

Example 4.1. Comparison of Julien Tiersot’s transcription of Vani-Vani and Koesoemadinata’s Wani-Wani. Reproduced from Julien Tiersot, Musiques pittoresques: promenades musicales à l’Exposition de 1889; and R. M. A Koesoemadinata, Lagu-Lagu Gede Sunda.

a Sundanese piece called Bendrong.100 The identity of the music she represents as “Melodic fragment played by rebab, and bonang-ageng, with saron-barong, low bonang and gongs” is not as clear, but not in the style of Javanese music.101

Regarding Benedictus’s transcription, the whole piece is a repeated varia- tion of a melodic passage that consists of D, E, F#, A, B in upper octaves (right hand) and lower octave (left hand), with occasional temporal and textural changes and special endings.102 As has been noted earlier, the main presenta- tion of music for langendriyan is the singing of the dancer and highly interac- tive activities of the dancers and the musicians. In what way does this music refl ect music of the langendriyan? Obviously, it is not a refl ection of the music for langendriyan which I have described above and in chapter 3; if anything, it might be a refl ection of a particular gamelan piece composed in a compact structure. The diffi culty of fi nding the answer is compounded by the fact that we do not know what kind of langendriyan was performed in the exposition; this is a topic I will return to later.

In spite of this issue, Fauser’s study succinctly synthesizes thirty years of dis- course on the topic of gamelan and its infl uence on Debussy. Fauser notes that scholars have focused on Debussy’s works for piano and orchestra that have com- monly been labeled as being infl uenced by gamelan: Pagodes (from Estampes), the prime instance of such work; the Nocturnes and La Mer, which have been described as a “stylized gamelan,”103 and others. She expands the discussion of Debussy beyond the infl uence of gamelan, asserting that other non-Western music had an impact on his work. In particular, she calls attention to the impact

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d e t e r r i t o r i a l i z i n g a n d a p p r o p r i at i n g g a m e l a n 101

of the music of the Theatre Annamite from French Indochina (now Vietnam) on some of Debussy’s works. Her point is that “Debussy did not transcribe the music he heard at the Exposition Coloniale into an immediate referential piece—not even in the case of the 1890 Fantaisie. Rather, he appropriated structural con- cepts and compositional procedures from his exposure to the gamelan that became amalgamated with other infl uences in the 1880s, such as the music of Mussorgsky and Wagner, both of which he also heard in 1889.”104

It goes without saying that Debussy’s musical background prior to hear- ing gamelan and other music at the 1889 Paris Exposition was essential to his works. In her reexamination of the relationship between gamelan and Debussy, Thompson points to the importance of the collection of memories as a source of his artistic expression.105 “In any of Debussy’s supposedly ‘Javanese’ infl u- enced works, it seems that the composer was not seeking to faithfully incorpo- rate what he heard in the kampong at the 1889 Exposition Universelle; rather, such compositions could be viewed as exhibiting Debussy’s indulgence in his own aesthetic fantasies which involve a fi ltering and creative assemblage of various memories and dreams.”106

But Thompson approaches the subject differently from most of the previous studies. She moves away from the theory of “exotic” infl uence on Debussy, and instead addresses “the idea of a shared aesthetic purpose between Debussy and the music of the ‘Javanese’ gamelan.”107 She proposes that Debussy’s percep- tion of Javanese music is in parallel with his conception of “arabesque” melody, a conception that coincided with certain themes in Debussy’s overall aesthetic outlook, especially its link to the Art Nouveau movement, “whose proponents based their conception of the ornamental on the organic curvature of fl oral lines found in nature.”108

Thompson begins her discussion by laying out chronologically the positions scholars have taken on gamelan. In the beginning, the balungan or melodic skeleton was considered the overarching determinant of melody for the whole ensemble. Later studies recognized the importance of gatra, the constituent four-note units of balungan, as a formulaic ingredient from which a gendhing is composed. Subsequent studies have advanced the notion that there is a mel- ody in the minds of the musicians, called inner or implicit melody, from which other instruments are inspired in expressing their melodies.109 Thompson is correct in stating that Western studies have situated elaboration or embellish- ment as a fundamental concept in understanding gamelan; it is the very life and substance of Javanese music.

Thompson conveys Debussy’s thoughts on music by quoting the compos- er’s own words, written twenty-four years after hearing gamelan at the Paris exposition.

And if we look at the works of J. S. Bach . . . on each new page of his innumer- able works we discover things we thought were born only yesterday—from

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102 g a m e l a n a s i n t e r c u l t u r a l o b j e c t

delightful arabesque to an overfl owing of religious feeling greater than any- thing we have since discovered. And in his works we will search in vain for anything the least lacking in “good taste.” Portia110 in The Merchant of Venice speaks of a music that everyone has within them: “The man that hath no music in himself . . . let no such man be trusted.” Those people who are only preoccupied with the formula that will yield them the best results, without ever having listened to the still small voice of music within themselves, would do well to think on these words. And so would those who most ingeniously juggle around with bars, as if they were no more than pathetic little squares of paper. . . . We should distrust the writing of music: it is as an occupation for moles, and it ends up by reducing the vibrant beauty of sound itself to a dreadful system where two and two make four.111

As Thompson observes, Debussy’s discussion of “a music that everyone has within them” can be seen as an allegory for the development of theories of gamelan. The notion of one’s preoccupation with the formula and juggling around with bars could refer to the idea of the creation of gendhing as a pro- cess of rearranging gatra; the “small voice” of music within ourselves is the inner melody in the mind of the musicians; and the reduction of “vibrant beauty” of musical sound can be seen as the misinterpretation of balungan as the “core melody,” from which other parts are derived, an idea that appeared partly as a result of the introduction of notation for gamelan.

It seems apparent that Debussy’s criticism of certain European composers came about as a consequence of his listening to gamelan. Debussy expresses his admiration of Javanese music, mockingly comparing it to European music.

There used to be—indeed, despite the troubles that civilization has brought, there still are—some wonderful peoples who learn music as easily as one learns to breathe. Their school consists of the eternal rhythm of the sea, the wind in the leaves, and a thousand other tiny noises, which they listen to with great care, without ever having consulted any of those dubious treatises. Their traditions are preserved only in ancient songs, sometimes involving dance, to which each individual adds his own contribution century by cen- tury. Thus Javanese music obeys laws of counterpoint which make Palestrina seem like child’s play. And if one listens to it without being prejudiced by one’s European ears, one will fi nd a percussive charm that forces one to admit that our own music is not much more than a barbarous kind of noise more fi t for a traveling circus.112

Javanese music was only one part of the gamelan repertoire at the Paris exposition. The other part, perhaps even the majority, was Sundanese. This does not negate Thompson’s argument, however, since Sundanese music embodies a concept closely related to central Javanese gamelan. Even if Sundanese music gives more weight to “essential pillar pitches,”113

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elaboration or embellishment is also a key concept in the music. In fact, almost all instrument types in Sundanese gamelan (more so than in cen- tral Javanese gamelan) involve some kind of elaboration of the core of the melody.114 Moreover, the Sundanese repertoire is not limited to music solely defi ned by essential pillar pitches. There is a genre of longer pieces called lagu gede (large tune) or sekar ageng (large song) that use set melodies as a basis from which all the musicians play simultaneous variations.115 As I men- tioned earlier, Vani-Vani falls into this category.

In both Javanese and Sundanese gamelan, rebab plays a leading role. Iconographic evidence of the rebab in the Paris exposition ensemble shows that it is Sundanese. Did the Sundanese musicians play rebab in the style of Javanese music? There is no answer. However, in the case of the gamelan per- formance at the 1893 Columbian exhibition, we know from Gilman’s wax-cylin- der recording that rebab was played in a Javanese lancaran piece, although in Javanese gamelan practice rebab is not played in a lancaran piece performed in the fi rst level of irama.116

Sundanese rebab plays a more important role than Javanese rebab. As I mentioned earlier, one of the features of Sundanese rebab is the player’s abil- ity, when playing a sléndro piece, to perform with ease a scale that deviates from the sléndro. This brings about musical passages juxtaposing a pélog-like tuning of the rebab melody with the sléndro tuning of the gamelan. This prac- tice is also common in Javanese gamelan, but the extent to which it occurs is far more prevalent in Sundanese music. In fact, a Sundanese rebab player might play the entire sléndro piece with this altered tuning.

At the Exposition Universelle, there was deep admiration of the dancers. As reported by Fauser, some eleven years later Judith Gautier recalled that the dancers danced with their “splendid costumes and jewels, the careful makeup, the controlled poses both before and during the dances, together with the young age and exotic beauty of the dancers, created a spectacle which kept the audience spellbound, while ‘the foam of the beer withered and the sor- bet melted under distracted spoons.’”117 Judith Gautier’s estranged husband was inspired to capture the dancing “in a rondel that used most of the images derived from nature and mythology that were associated with the tandak [danc- ers]”; painters used the dancers as models for their works, while musicians were fascinated by the unfamiliar sound of the gamelan.118 These exotic peo- ple provided the audience with an experience of the imagined timelessness of the Far East,119 and its “penetrating and unknown sensations,” allowing them “to breathe a new air impregnated with exotic perfume.”120

What was the music which Wakiem, Seriem, Taminah, and Soekia danced to? Did they dance langendriyan to music performed by Sundanese musicians? Although the accounts summarized by Fauser mention a reenactment of the story of Damarwulan, there are no accounts of the dancers singing while danc- ing—the defi ning feature of langendriyan.

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104 g a m e l a n a s i n t e r c u l t u r a l o b j e c t

Four years later, we fi nd evidence that a fragment of langendriyan was possibly performed at the 1893 Chicago Columbian exhibition. Since the Columbian exhibition had the same concept as the Paris exposition and employed performers from the same plantation, this evidence deserves close inspection. We have access to a set of wax cylinder recordings of the gamelan from the exhibition, intriguing not only because of their content, but also for their implications concerning the issue of langendriyan that we have dis- cussed so far.

The planning committee of the Chicago fair sent two prominent anthro- pologists to Paris in order to seek guidance.121 Like the Paris exposition, the Columbian fair displayed a west Javanese kampong and its people, likely meant to represent a lower level in the hierarchy of human races and dwell- ings according to the social Darwinism of the period. As Robert Rydell writes, drawing on the writings of Edward McDowell in 1893, “Javanese men were described as industrious workers, the women as untiring in their domestic duties. Described as cute and frisky, mild and inoffensive, but childlike above all else, the Javanese seemingly could be accommodated in America’s commer- cial empire as long as they remained in their evolutionary niche.”122

The performances of gamelan, wayang, and dance were some of the most popular attractions in Chicago. Four dancers from the court city of Surakarta joined the performing group. Instead of creating a native environment, per- formances were held in a specially built European-style proscenium stage, with backdrop scenery of mountains and trees. At the rear of the stage, the gamelan instruments were placed on a raised platform in three graded levels, while the front of the stage was reserved for dance or wayang performance.

The fi rst wax-cylinder recording devices came on the market at this time. Benjamin Gilman, sponsored by the Harvard Peabody museum, recorded musical performances at the exhibition. He made 101 cylinder wax record- ings of the Samoan Exhibit, Java Village, and Kwakiutl or Vancouver Island Indians.123 Forty-three of the recordings are from the “Java Village,” and from them we learn much.

Among the ten different performances, cylinders 26–33 are titled by Gilman as a genre of “Javanese wayang,” but he also refers to the dancers as “serimpi.” Here are Gilman’s notes of the order of the dance.124

#26. End of Soendanese Wayang Beginning of Javanese wayang. Entry of first Serimpi #27. Posturing of first Serimpi #28. This is the voice of the first dancer (if audible) Entry of second Serimpi #29. Dialogue between first and second dancers Dispute between first and second dancers #30. One dancer draws a dagger

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#31. Fight: the two dancers arm themselves, one with a stick, the other with a sword; the one with sword is wounded.

#32. Third and second dancers (the wounded one) have a colloquy seated. They go out and reenter.

#33. The fourth dancer sings. End of the native performance. Now American airs.

It is most likely that Gilman used the term serimpi as a generic word for female dancers or dance, a very common use of the term outside of the court tradition. From a close listening of the recordings, I think that Gilman described a fragment of dance drama involving four dancers, consisting of singing or dia- logue and a fi ght with weapons. Was this langendriyan? The order of the appear- ance of the dancers seems to follow a story line of a fragment of langendriyan. The fi rst dancer entering the stage was the villain king Ménakjingga, and the second was the protagonist Damarwulan. They fought, Damarwulan arming himself with a stick (probably a club), Ménakjingga using a sword (the same weapon used by this character in contemporary langendriyan). The one with the sword, Ménakjingga, was wounded. The identity of the third and fourth dancers appearing in cylinders #32 and #33 is not clear to me, but knowing that the third dancer had a discussion with the wounded one (Ménakjingga), she might be one of Ménakjingga’s captive princesses, Wahita. The fourth dancer could thus possibly have been his second captive princess, Puyengan.

This dance and its story remind us of Fauser’s summary of the 1889 Paris exposition. The dance had the same storyline and the same number of danc- ers: Damarwulan, Ménakjingga, and two captive princesses (Wahita and Puyengan). However, in the description of the Paris performance there is no mention of speech or singing by the dancers. This could be a matter of care- lessness on the part of the authors who wrote about performances at the Paris Exposition. The possibility of the performances at the Paris Exposition and the Chicago World’s Fair being the same cannot be ruled out, since the musi- cians and dancers in both exhibitions came from the same places: the musi- cians from Parakan Salak plantation in west Java, joined by dancers from the court city of Surakarta.

As mentioned earlier, the music of langendriyan is quite elaborate, involv- ing gamelan accompaniment to poetic dialogues sung by the dancers. The fea- ture of musical accompaniments and the changing of the temporal and density fl ow (irama) of the music convey the dynamic of the dramatic action. However, in the piece performed at the Columbian exhibition, as Gilman’s recordings show, the accompaniment consisted of only a single piece composed in a short gongan structure, lancaran. Consisting of fi ve gongan cycles, the lancaran Kembang Jeruk in pélog is repeated many times. Occasionally, the irama of the piece changes momentarily to the second level of irama in sirepan or soft-play- ing style. At this point, the dancer sings a few phrases (sirepan followed by the

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106 g a m e l a n a s i n t e r c u l t u r a l o b j e c t

poetic singing of the dancers is a feature of langendriyan). As far as what can be heard clearly in cylinder #32, the singing is in sléndro.125 The two record- ings do not contain more than a few phrases of singing, which ends abruptly due to the two-minute limit of the wax cylinders. I suggest that what we are hearing is a fragment of langendriyan with a simplifi ed musical accompani- ment—a single piece performed repeatedly. The piece was in pélog barang, but the singer sang in sléndro. The simplifi ed langendriyan at the Chicago Columbian Exposition was mounted using whatever resources were available to the performing group.

Did Debussy and others hear the same simplifi ed fragment of langendriyan in Paris? Given the many shared characteristics of the performances at these two exhibitions, the possibility cannot be ruled out. If this was the case, it is worth noting that this confusing musical mixture of heavily simplifi ed dances of the langendriyan have had such a great impact on the works of Parisian writ- ers, painters, and composers. The implication is that the gamelan presented at the World’s Fairs refl ected an intriguing mixture of various elements, refl ect- ing the nature of the exhibitions themselves: a mixture of various interests— trade, national image, ethnographic show, colonialism, human evolution, and so forth. In other words, the music of langendriyan in the World’s Fairs is an allegory of the fairs themselves.

Visitors to the exhibition did not necessarily see the performing arts as aris- ing from the evolution of civilizations. But “a number of the kampong visi- tors, in spite of—or because of—their anthropological and racist prejudices, were impressed by the beauty and refi nement of these [colonized] people, by the fact that they possessed nobility, by the products they made, and by their music and dancing.”126 Listening to and watching the exotic others, in what- ever form, is not so much meant to imagine and construct Orientalism as it is “a way of escaping from the rigid conceptual frameworks of evolutionism and colonial domination.”127 In the next section, I will discuss a new context for gamelan that emerged in the mid-twentieth century: Western academia.

From Orientalism to Interculturalism: The 1931 Colonial Exposition, “White” Gamelan Clubs, and Gamelan Study in the United States

The Exposition was extraordinary. People from the East were being intro- duced to the bourgeoisie of the Western world in order to disclose their civi- lization. But they were displayed in such a manner that in the eyes of Western people they nonetheless looked like savages without manners, except in one or two cases. The Indo-Chinese received a lot of attention because of their dancing and music, as did the musicians and . . . dancers from . . . Bali, from whose sounds Western musicians profi ted greatly.128

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The quotation is from an Indonesian novel written by Matu Mona: a story about a leader of the Indonesian Communist Party, Tan Malaka, who is exiled for decades by the Dutch government. His comrade, searching for him, travels to Paris, where Malaka lives with a leader of the French Communist Party at the time of the 1931 International Colonial Exposition, held in the Bois de Vincennes.

In the eyes of this novelist, the exposition was no more than a form of colonial exploitation.129 The exposition was indeed a celebration of colonial power, but the backdrop to the exhibition became more complicated than at previous fairs. In the fi rst place, the exhibition coincided with the Indonesian national awakening, a movement backed by those Dutch who supported the Ethical Policy.130 The Dutch colonial government also granted more voice and promised better education to the Indonesians, which brought about the founding of Indonesian nationalist organizations such as Budi Utomo and Sarekat Islam. More progressive, anticolonial organizations also appeared, including the Indonesian Communist Party (Partai Komunis Indonesia) and Indonesian Youth Organization (Pemuda Indonesia). In this context, it was necessary for Indonesian voices to be heard in the planning of the display at the exposition. Two Indonesians involved in the initial planning in 1927 were the regent of Serang, Djajadiningrat, and the son of the ruler of the Surakarta court, Hadiwidjojo. They wanted the Indonesian display to be the responsibil- ity of Indonesians.131 Their suggestion was ineffective, however.

After the exposition was postponed to 1931, in 1929, an Indonesian com- mittee was reinstituted, working in collaboration with the Dutch committee in the Netherlands. In spite of this supposedly collaborative effort, however, Dutch consciousness dominated the conception of the exhibition, which sparked opposition from the Indonesian members of the committee. Prince Hadiwidjojo asked to be discharged from the committee, and the courts of Surakarta and Yogyakarta withdrew their pledge to dispatch their dancers and gamelan musicians to the Exposition.132

The idea of presenting court music and dance at the Exposition was also contested by members of the Dutch community. One wrote anonymously to the editor of the Javanese newspaper Het Soerabajasch Handelsblad: “Would such a fi nely tuned soul [referring to court dancers] feel merely embarrassed or truly humiliated [to dance] in front of an endless stream of ‘tourists, who saun- ter from one spectacle to the next, alternating the sounds of African drums with the sights of voluptuous belly dancers and self-lacerating fakirs?’”133 Another author, who had memories of colonized people being paraded in European cities, worried that Europeans would see them as animals in a zoo, and would consider the performance of court dancers and music to be a shameful sideshow.134

Amidst the controversy, the committee dispatched Balinese musicians and dancers to the exposition in the place of Javanese. It seems that the popular

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image of Bali in the West, and the robust development of Balinese arts in this period, made it the obvious choice: the Dutch government had popularized the island through the promotion of tourism.135 Consequently, Balinese artists designed performances especially for tourists. An hour-and-a-half-long program consisting of an assortment of dances with musical interludes was a common program offered to Western tourists who stayed in the Bali Hotel in Denpasar. Picard says that the performance at the exposition was similar in design to the tourist shows in Bali hotels.136 Aside from dances such as kebiar, janger, legong, and a shortened version of a dance drama telling the story of the wedding of Arjuna, the troupe also performed a condensed version of Calonarang.137

Balinese music and dance at the Exposition were received with amazement by the spectators. As Blombergen observes, this was the fi rst Balinese perform- ing group “to perform in Europe, and the huge audiences too were entirely new to them. Journalists and photographers jostled feverishly in their efforts to immortalize the gamelan orchestra .  .  .  , which became renowned over- night . . . The house was sold out every evening, and the musicians and dancers were invariably regaled with the applause and cries of Bravo!”138

The well-known composer Olivier Messiaen was also fascinated by the Balinese music he heard at the exposition, so much so that he incorporated his recollection of it in sections of his Turangalîla Symphony.139 Similarly, the dramatist Antonin Artaud’s intuitive observation of Balinese dance and theater at the exposition led him to deeply appreciate it, calling it a form of “pure the- ater” that embodies a highly metaphysical dimension.140

In the mid-twentieth century the world of academia began to look at gamelan. One proponent of this study was Jaap Kunst, one of two Dutch scholar-offi cials whose interest in and study of Indonesian music had a signifi - cant impact on the development of the fi eld of non-Western music studies as a whole.141 Kunst arrived in Indonesia in 1919 as a violinist, playing light music throughout the archipelago with his trio.142 When he arrived in Java, he was immediately fascinated by gamelan music: his pianist and singer returned to Holland, but Kunst stayed in Indonesia for fi fteen years, studying music and working as an offi cial of the Dutch colonial government. Although he wrote various essays and monographs on music from a number of other Indonesian islands, the focus of Kunst’s work was on Java. His book De Toonkunst van Java (Music in Java), published soon after his return to the Netherlands, became a milestone in the study of Javanese music.

Kunst discussed music with learned Javanese elites and leading court art- ist-intellectuals, including Mangkunegara VII (r. 1916–44), the well-known Javanologist Purbacaraka and his brother Raden Kodrat, and Raden Mas Jayadipura. He consulted the works of Ki Hadjar Dewantara, Raden Bagoes Soelardi of Mangkunegaran, and an early Yogyakarta kraton gamelan manu- script, Serat Pakem Wirama. He also occasionally referred to the great nine- teenth-century Javanese encyclopedic work, Serat Centhini.

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The social structure of colonial Java made it easy for European men of Kunst’s status to have a close relationship with Javanese aristocrats, but his relationship with musicians was less intimate. As one of his closest students, Ernst Heins, observes, “Jaap Kunst never touched [or played] a gamelan instrument except for measuring purposes. . . . Because of the colonial situa- tion it was unthinkable for a European to play in a gamelan and thus become one of a group of Javanese musicians, or even to take private lessons with a tutor. The mutual social barrier . . . were insurmountable, no Dutchman or other foreigner would or could dream of entering the tightly-closed unit of a gamelan-group in those days.”143 Kunst’s return to the Netherlands had an impact beyond gamelan scholarship. He is known as one of the founders of the academic discipline he named “ethnomusicology,” replacing an existing sub- discipline of musicology called comparative musicology. He proposed that the study object of ethnomusicology “is the traditional music and musical instru- ments of all cultural strata of mankind, from the so-called primitive peoples to the civilized nations.”144

Since the mid-nineteenth century a number of gamelan sets had been brought to Europe by the Dutch colonial government and by individuals. A number of gamelan enthusiasts in Europe formed groups to performd gamelan music, including accompanying dances or excerpts of wayang performance. As has been noted, in 1857 Delft Royal Academy students formed an ad hoc gamelan group to perform processional music. In the early twentieth century, other gamelan groups appeared whose players were either Javanese sailors or Javanese students studying in the Netherlands.145 There was also the case of Jodjana, a Javanese student turned dancer, whose gamelan musicians consisted of his Indonesian and Dutch friends, his Dutch wife, and their children.146

However, the fi rst “white” gamelan group was founded in 1946 by Bernard Ijzerdraat Jr., a war orphan whom Jaap Kunst cared for. He became fasci- nated with gamelan after listening to a performance at the Tropen Museum, a gamelan program that had been started by Kunst, and joined the group. Subsequently, he formed his own group, called “Babar Layar,” whose members were Dutch teenagers.147 The group performed regularly at the museum and toured throughout Europe until ceasing to exist in 1950. In 1954 Ijzerdraat left for Indonesia, where he was eventually naturalized as an Indonesian citi- zen, changing his name to Surya Brata: he became one of the most infl uential scholars in Indonesian music. In 1960s, gamelan activity in Holland resurfaced under the guidance of Ernst Heins, another student and assistant of Kunst.

Mantle Hood, who had moved from the United States in 1952 to Amsterdam to study with Kunst, joined the Babar Layar group, returning in 1954 to UCLA to teach ethnomusicology. In 1956 Hood went to Java for two years to con- duct further research. He studied and learned to play gamelan with promi- nent musicians in Surakarta and Yogyakarta. Returning to UCLA in 1958, he brought with him a complete set of Javanese gamelan from Surakarta named

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Kyai Mendhung (The venerable dark cloud).148 As a founder of the Institute of Ethnomusicology at UCLA, he organized what were called “performance- study groups” of non-Western music ensembles. This experience led him to articulate an important concept in 1960 called “bi-musicality.”149 The con- cept is that Western students should acquire some practical experience of the music being studied. The participation of one or more native musicians or teachers was an important ingredient in the performance-study group. They served not only as a teacher or teaching assistant for the ensemble but also as a resource for research, and in return, they were given the opportunity to enroll as students. Hardjo Susilo is the earlist example of this endeavor, starting his career at UCLA in the late 1950s. The author of this book and a number of his Indonesian colleagues have had the same experience as Susilo, teaching and studying either in American or European universities.

Most of the graduates of the UCLA ethnomusicology program promoted the concept of bi-musicality, which was the root of gamelan activity in the United States. In fact, there is no gamelan group in the United States made up exclusively of Indonesians.150

Non-Western music performance is a relative newcomer to academia. Classical Western music composed between roughly 1720 and 1930 has long been the “central repertory” at American music schools and university music departments, but:

Outside the central repertory, special designations are needed because there are courses on “jazz,” “folk music,” “popular music,” and “ethnic music.” The terms early music and contemporary music are used to separate the “normal” music from others in the art music sphere. It is implied that “normal music” (even in North America) means European music, whereas other kinds of music, both in the college and the library catalogs, are labeled by nation or area: “American music,” “music—India,” and “Indians of North America—music,” for exam- ple. . . . The various musics that are not “central” have had to struggle over a period of decades for entry into the music school. They usually gained admis- sion via the back door of musicology because faculty and administrators felt, on fi rst application, that one should not teach them as fi elds of performance, but that it might be all right to teach “about” them because they could be help- ful in fostering an understanding of the evolution of the central repertory or of the cultures of early, recent, contemporary, foreign, or rural peoples.151

In the 1960s, some universities began to recognize non-Western music performance as an academic pursuit. The introduction of ethnomusicology in universities in the same decade provided for a poly-musical experience. In the 1980s, this diversifi cation of musical experience was considered part of the multicultural movement then in vogue. Originally, multiculturalism devel- oped in response to the growing need to pay attention to minority groups and their cultures. The initial response to this development was specifi c programs,

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such as Afro-American Studies, Women’s Studies, Asian-American Studies, and American Indian Studies. Thus, although gamelan programs seem to be a perfect fi t with multiculturalism, it predates the multicultural movement of the 1980s and has a different aim: the study of music (especially non-Western music) in its cultural context, paying special attention to the notion of music as a communicative device.152

Despite this long history, questions about the appropriateness of per- formance as an academic course still linger. The recent book Performing Ethnomusicology: Teaching and Representation in World Music Ensembles provides an invaluable study of this topic.153 Most authors are forthright in spelling out the dilemma that faces them as ethnomusicologists and instructors of a non-West- ern performing ensemble: “how do we represent the rich cultures we revere while we acknowledge and deal with the culture distance between us and our students, and between both of us and these cultures?”154

As public performance became routine, the boundary between “perfor- mance-study” group (Mantle Hood’s original term) and performance group became blurred. But how is it possible, in just one semester, or one year, for a group to learn the music well enough for public performance? This practice would never happen with a symphony orchestra or jazz ensemble, for example.

Because of its conspicuous presence among academic non-Western music ensembles (not to mention its great appeal due to its size, appearance, and com- pelling sound), gamelan has become an icon of non-Western performing ensem- bles. Ricardo Trimillos lightheartedly says that “the acquisition of a gamelan as part of a ‘proper’ ethnomusicology program in the United States appears as iconic as the establishment of a national airline in a ‘proper’ nation!”155 But gamelan performance on campus does not necessarily engender musical expec- tation on the same level as the university’s orchestra, whose players have had many years of training before joining. As Keith Howard puts it:

While our [non-Western] ensembles are typically classed as equivalents to orchestras and choirs, we readily accept students without audition, with no pre-requirements. While a violinist in a student orchestra will have taken les- sons for many years, passing those indoctrinating and standardizing grade exams that Blacking famously critiqued, and probably competing for a place in the orchestra, the student in a world music ensemble is not expected to have any previous training. Yet, at the end of the semester or the end of the year, our ensemble are expected to perform in much the same way as every choir or orchestra performs. They give a performance before an audience. It is, then, not surprising that both ethnomusicologist and audience will engage in soul searching as they evaluate what has been achieved.156

The criticism does not take into account the different musical practices of gamelan and Western orchestras. While playing orchestral instruments

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requires a student to take lessons for many years, some gamelan instruments offer relative technical simplicity, allowing students who have never played any instrument at all to play quickly. The student might then go on to learn instru- ments which, like violin or piano, will take many years to master.

This does not mean that the problems of public performances by beginning gamelan groups go away. I would say that the original, less presentational model of performance-study groups is still valued. As an instructor of gamelan myself, I always mention this idea to my beginning students; in addition, I inform them that the gamelan class is not goal-oriented, but rather process-oriented learn- ing. That is, the emphasis is on the experience in music-making during class, not the recital at the end of the semester. Solis’s term “experience ensemble” describes this group well: the students “embrace a second (cultural) childhood, akin to the sort of entirely new musical experience most musicians underwent as children with their fi rst piano lessons or sixth-grade band.”157 This differs from the “realization ensemble,” or in Vetter’s term “canonical ensemble,” of Western orchestra, concert band, jazz band, and choral groups, whose student perform- ers have already had years of experience in vocal production or instrumental technique, whose “rehearsal time is dedicated to musical matters; any cultural contextualization of the works is typically relegated to printed program notes. A high standard of musical presentation in public performance and the honing of the performers’ technical skill and expressive potential are the primary goals of most canonical ensemble organizations in the academy.”158

At any rate, a non-Western music ensemble, like any other ensemble on campus, is expected to perform publicly, a practice encouraged by the univer- sity’s desire for good public relations. In the 1980s, incorporating non-Western music into the curriculum refl ected universities’ commitments to multicul- tural perspectives, and continued to apply when multicultural studies evolved into international or intercultural studies. Whether university administrations wholeheartedly support the presence of non-Western music on their campuses is a different story, however. Bruno Nettl observes that the administration “usu- ally makes clear its allegiance to the central music. It is unusual, for example, for administrators to have musical roots that are not in the central music. Some do come from fi elds such as ethnomusicology or composition (viewed with some suspicion by performing faculty), but in each case, some kind of loyalty, in terms of early training or avocation, to the ‘real’ music is characteristic in the administrator.”159 Nettl goes on to say: “In choosing events to attend, deans or heads usually prefer central-repertory performances over performances of peripheral music or nonmusical events such as lecturers.” There is no follow- up study to show if this perspective persists.

Against the marginal but important position held by their ensemble, ethnomu- sicologists and gamelan instructors search for ways that their ensembles can fi t the academic program. For example, Gage Averill observes that “the current praxis of many world music ensembles is based on the aesthetic imitation (mimesis) or,

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in its most extreme form, musical transvestism.”160 He goes on to say that ethno- musicologists involved in non-Western ensembles “unwittingly indulge our student participants and our audience in a form of concert tourism . . . without challeng- ing preconceived notions of acknowledging the noisy clash of cultures, politics, and musics in contemporary world.”161 Averill is intensely critical of teaching and performing non-Western music, but he also offers a solution:

To replace mimesis [the aesthetic of imitation] with a self-conscious distan- tiation; to involve student ensembles in the discourse about cultural repre- sentation; to use our rehearsals and performances as platforms for raising questions; to reimagine our musical performance as spaces of dialogic encounter; to problematize the very nature and existence of these ensem- bles; and to use ensembles to provoke, disrupt and challenge complacency. In this way, we can make the ensemble encounter a part of a student’s intel- lectual, personal, aesthetic, and ethical transformation. Such a transformation in the grounding of world music ensembles would require an embrace of the problematics of performance studies, performance/conceptual art, and cultural studies more broadly.162

Averill challenges instructors of non-Western music ensembles to come up with a suitable pedagogical requirement that leads students to discuss the larger context of the music that they study, including issues of cultural representation, dialogue about cultural encounters, and so forth. Averill is quick to suggest, how- ever, that playing the music should not be less fun or thrilling. This fun aspect might culminate at the end of semester when the ensemble launchs a public performance. During the semester, gamelan teachers must devote much of their time to preparing their group for this end-of-semester performance; this includes lessons for players of lead instruments, and additional rehearsal.

For the performance, the group might also invite “ringers” to strengthen the ensemble. In some university gamelan groups, the teacher organizes a group whose core members might not be students, but employees of the university, mem- bers of the community who happen to have experience playing gamelan during their college years, or alumni of a nearby university. Together with advanced stu- dents, this group is responsible for giving public performances. With the increased number of gamelan on campuses, the number of former students with gamelan experience has increased. This has sometimes resulted in a new kind of gamelan performance group, namely a nonprofi t community group independent from the university program. A few have been able to maintain their presence in the com- munity, notably the Balinese gamelan Sekar Jaya in the Bay area.

To recapitulate: in the context either of World’s Fairs or academia, het- erogeneity marks the reception of gamelan. Following Barbara Kirshenblatt- Gimblett, audience experiences can be grouped into two categories: those audiences who acquire authentic aesthetic experiences, and those who obtain

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114 g a m e l a n a s i n t e r c u l t u r a l o b j e c t

Figure 4.3. Professor Mantle Hood and his American and international students. From left to right: Hardja Susilo, Max Harrell, Viswanathan, Mantle Hood, Hormoz Farhat, Willem Adraansz, and Donald Sur. © 1973 the Regents of the University of California. Courtesy of the UCLA Ethnomusicology Archive.

ethnographically mediated experiences.163 The fi rst category is based on a notion that the audience does not acquire rational understanding of the art they experienced: such a condition will prevent them from receiving authentic aesthetic pleasure. The second category follows the notion of performance as an ethnographic show. That is, the audience’s experience is mediated by infor- mation about ethnographic signifi ers of what they saw. Commonly, visitors to World’s Fairs were given all sorts of brochures about the fair in general, and specifi c information on cultural performances.

Ethnomusicology, through which the presence of gamelan has been expanded in Western universities, required students to be informed about the cultural context of non-Western music. This has gradually brought about cross- cultural perspectives in gamelan discourse. A search for homology between music and socio-cosmological order entered into ethnomusicological dis- courses, and metaphoric or iconic readings of gamelan, the topic of the next chapter, become one of the most important issues in the study of gamelan.

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