Music of the Gambuh Theater: Bali's Ancient Dance Drama (review)

At the root of the amazing variety of Bali's orchestras of tuned metallophones, we are told, is the seemingly ungamelanish ensemble of flutes known as gambuh. This is music that contrasts in almost every imaginable way with gong kebyar, the reigning musical genre. Instead of kebyar's quicksilver contrasts of mood and dynamics, we find in gambuh long-breathed melodies inherited from the royal courts of the precolonial era. Interlocking, which takes myriad dazzling, virtuosic forms in gong kebyar, here plays no melodic role at all. Also unlike gong kebyar, which is a five-tone ensemble, gambuh uses a seven-tone pitch system from which various five-tone modes are extracted. And unlike the universal spread of gong kebyar (and the decades of creative activity that contributed to its ever-growing repertory), gambuh is an esoteric form that has long been confined to a few villages—especially Batuan (Gianyar district) and Pedungan (Badung district).

And yet this music—and the dance-drama it accompanies—is said to be the source for many of the techniques and forms of the modern Balinese performing arts. The character types of its dance roles can be discerned behind those of more recent genres. Its drumming patterns form the basis of all subsequent traditions of dance accompaniment. And although few other ensembles use its full seven-tone scale, one of its derived five-tone scales has provided gong kebyar with its tonal material.

Gambuh is thus both unique and uniquely interesting. But as a relatively rare genre, and relatively challenging for the novice listener, gambuh has not been well represented on recordings available outside Indonesia. Thus it is a pleasure to welcome this disc, a well-chosen selection of gambuh repertoire, beautifully performed and recorded. But beyond its value in documenting this important tradition,Vitale's recording also documents a fascinating moment in the social history of the Balinese performing arts: the gambuh revival.

This revival (at least, in its musical aspect) started about three decades ago, thanks to the efforts of the late I Nyoman Rembang, an extraordinary musician, teacher, and theorist. Rembang was one of the first to bring gambuh to the attention of the state's arts institutions. He was one of the key figures behind the 1973 government workshop on gambuh and was responsible for the first published Indonesian writing on gambuh's music (Rembang 1973). In 1975 teachers at the national performing arts academies learned gambuh and began to teach it to their students. Alongside this upturn in domestic interest came heightened attention abroad. Rembang was one of the first to teach the music internationally—in 1974, Robert Brown recruited him, along with I Wayan Sinti, to teach gambuh at the Center for World Music in Berkeley, California (where I had the pleasure of learning gambuh from him). Tilman Seebass, a Swiss ethnomusicologist who had assisted the state conservatory in some of its original field research, released a short film of gambuh in Germany (Formaggia 2000, I:51). In 1982, I Madé Bandem (who had written his Master's thesis on gambuh dance at UCLA) led a troupe of students on a tour of Japan, the first time this genre had been presented internationally (Ariyanto 1985, 228).

These efforts did not, however, greatly increase performance opportunities for gambuh at home. In part this was because only five gambuh dances were taught at the academies, not enough to allow complete performances. And there was little demand for gambuh among the wider Balinese public: in the mid-1990s performers noted that the genre's elevated language, artistic subtlety, and limited scope for comic improvisation still represented obstacles to its general appreciation (Susilo 1997, 68).

Meanwhile, an artist from yet another corner of the globe was becoming enraptured by gambuh. Maria Christina Formaggia, an Italian dancer...