Gamelan Gong Kebyar: The Art of Twentieth Century Balinese Music by Michael Tenzer (review)

300 LETTERS IN CANADA 2000 formance and acceptance in any given country, including Canada? The importance of the New York German population=s support for the Metropolitan Opera Company suggests as much, but this information is not presented as a conclusion. If the author=s intention is to pique the interest of the reader and send him or her to the reference shelves B there to find his own Music in Canada: A Research and Information Guide B he and this book have succeeded. (MARY S. WOODSIDE) Michael Tenzer. Gamelan Gong Kebyar: The Art of Twentieth Century Balinese Music University of Chicago Press. xxvi, 492. US $45.00 Michael Tenzer=s tome on the Gamelan Gong Kebyar is a most timely and welcome contribution to the literature on Balinese music. Its publication in the year 2000 is apt considering that Kebyar evolved around 1915 from its early roots in northern Bali, and over the course of the twentieth century it became the island=s pre-eminent musical genre. Yet, despite the fact that the Kebyar gamelan (percussion orchestra) and the Kebyar style of composition have attained such importance, they are underrepresented in a literature that has tended to focus more on older musical genres. Whilst acknowledging the value of Tenzer=s other book Balinese Music (1998 [1991]) as an excellent introduction for all levels of readership, nothing approaching the depth and magnitude of the present work has been produced since Colin McPhee=s definitive book Music in Bali: A Study in Form and Instrumental Organization in Balinese Orchestral Music (1966). Interestingly, like McPhee, Tenzer is a composer of Western and Balineseinspired works, and he suggests a >generational continuity= between this book and McPhee=s; however, the present work extends much further into the world of Western music theory and comparative analysis. Tenzer is also a skilled performer of Balinese music who has spent many years in Bali. This translates into the deep experience, knowledge, and, I would say, love of Balinese music which infuses the pages of his book. Although focused mainly on Gamelan Gong Kebyar, this book is in fact quite encyclopedic: it includes sections on virtually all aspects and styles of Balinese music. An introduction, where Tenzer explains his rationale, leads into part 1, >Approaches to Kebyar.= This offers information B both general and specific to Kebyar B on such topics as instruments, scale and tuning, orchestration, social and political history, the dynamics of musical groups (sekaha gong) and the effects of tourism, the media, the conservatories, and government-sponsored competitions/festivals. In addition, there is a summary of Balinese music scholarship (both Western and indigenous) to date, as well as comparisons with the closely related Central Javanese gamelan tradition. The section ends with an explanation of Tenzer=s theoretical approach which, he states, draws on contemporary Western models HUMANITIES 301 of musical analysis that have been applied to European classical music. Part 2, >Structure in Kebyar,= ranges from an historical overview of gamelan genres to scrupulously detailed, mainly Western-based analysis of melodies, different kinds of ornamentation, drum patterns, form, and composition. Tenzer concludes that much of the momentum and interest of Balinese music lies in contrasts between, for example, movement and stasis, continuity and disruption, symmetry and asymmetry, fixed and unfixed melodic elaboration, and cyclic and non-cyclic passages. Kebyar=s frequent stylistic and melodic quotations from older gamelan genres also provide a great deal of musical interest, particularly to informed Balinese audiences. Part 3, >Kebyar in Bali and Abroad,= concentrates on one well-known Kebyar piece,=Wilet Manyura,= composed in 1982 by the renowned Wayan Sinti (who taught both Tenzer and me). Here Tenzer=s imposition of Western concepts onto Balinese music is arguably taken to the extreme by directly comparing aspects of >Wilet Manyura= with sections from a Mozart String Quartet, a blues piece, and symphonies by Lutoslowski and Ives. As well, the social and musical comparisons made between Vienna in the 1780s and Denpasar in the 1980s and equating Ives=s recollections of multiple brass bands in the town square during his boyhood with Sinti=s experience of many gamelans playing concurrently at open-air ceremonies are, like the cross-cultural musical parallels...