Music in Central Java: Experiencing Music, Expressing Culture (review)

This book offers a deep understanding of court gamelan music and wayang kulit in Central Java from the perspective of ethnomusicologist and musician Benjamin Brinner. Though packaged as an introductory textbook, it will provide insights not only to students encountering this style of gamelan music for the first time but also to those already knowledgeable about Indonesian music but without specialist knowledge of Central Java. Overall, this book is less an introduction to the Javanese gamelan than it is a thorough discussion of the musical structures, processes, and legacy of court- influenced Central Javanese gamelan over the last three decades.

The book begins with a brief introduction to the significance of gamelan in Central Javanese society (Chapter 1) focused on the court music traditions of the Kraton Surakarta and Istana Mangkunagaran palaces in Solo. With its brief overview of social occasions for gamelan music and interspersed vignettes on Indonesian history, this chapter provides most of the book’s social and cultural background for gamelan in Central Java. Most of the remaining context is in the conclusion (Chapter 8), an engaging biography that elucidates the legacy of the musician K.R.T. Wasitodiningrat, or Pak Cokro. This biography opens a discussion of the interconnectedness of the arts in Java. The chapter also describes the development of arts academies and conservatories, and the proliferation of Javanese gamelan in the United States.

The rest of the chapters may be divided into two units. The first is an explanation of the workings of Solonese- style gamelan (Chapters 2–5). The second and third chapters introduce the foundations of gamelan music. Concepts are introduced in categories of time (rhythm and irama) and melody, an idea that stems from a “widely cited classification of the instruments of the gamelan” by Martopangrawit, who “recognizes two basic subsets: the instruments that cradle the melody and those that cradle the irama” (28). Following this idea, Chapter 2 introduces concepts of cyclic time, gong cycles, drumming, and the irama concept. Next are introduced tuning systems, instruments, melody, and elaboration (Chapter 3).

These introductory chapters are followed by discussions of more complex musical concepts. Chapter 4 introduces songs and singing, particularly the sindhen and gérong parts. This discussion begins with a short statement about the social relationships between female singers and the usually male instrumentalists. The chapter also discusses macapat songs and meters. The discussion is highly detailed and obscured by the difficulty of pairing the illustration of poetic meters in Javanese (Figure 4.1) with the English translation of the texts provided elsewhere. The fleeting mention of Ki Nartosabdho in this chapter (82) made this reader wish for a more extended portrait that would add an engaging personality to this chapter. Chapter 5 explains in detail the elaboration of melodic parts— particularly the gendèr, gambang, and rebab—and goes on to explain how these are learned and derived. These two chapters are the most technically detailed.

The second unit of chapters offers an engaging and ethnographically rich introduction to wayang kulit (Chapters 6–7). This begins with a discussion of the structure of the performance event, dramatic conventions, character types, and stories (Chapter 6). It continues with a detailed look at a particular performance of the play “Brajadenta Balela” and the way in which music fits into the structure of a wayang kulit performance (Chapter 7). The section offers particular attention to music for “motion” (the flexible and expandable structures of gendhing lampah, 126–32) and “emotion” (the types of sulukan available to the dhalang, 124–26). The vignette describing Brinner’s experience at a wayang performance is an example of the enjoyable and engaging performance descriptions that enrich the book (97–102).

The book also includes a compact disc and useful study activities for readers. The recording contains thirty- eight tracks, most recordings by Brinner that have...