Javanese Gamelan and the West by Sumarsam (review)

This recent monograph from Sumarsam—the distinguished theorist, historian, and performer of Javanese gamelan music who has taught at Wesleyan University for decades—deals primarily with (1) the impact of Western music and aesthetics on Indonesian performing arts (not only Javanese and not only gamelan) and (2) Western understandings of both the music and the phenomenon of gamelan. He approaches the first topic primarily from the angle of hybridity, while he addresses the second topic first as history (How and when did gamelan come to the West? What did people make of it?) and second as an interpretive issue, focusing on what he calls "metaphorical readings of gamelan" (117). The book takes the form of an introduction and five essays, loosely strung on his two main topics. The essays are full of fascinating details and useful thumbnail sketches of the history and performance practice of various Indonesian genres.

The first three essays consider hybridity as the result of culture contact. Sumarsam poses as a key question, "[H]ow is a particular hybrid music cultivated and developed in reaction to, and as a manifestation of, certain historical, socio-cultural, and regional phenomena?" (11). He maintains that hybridity "brings about both change to and continuity of cultural tradition" and that these changes and continuities "will lead the tradition not only to a happy fusion and synthesis, but also to ambiguity and ambivalence." In general, he emphasizes the less sunny aspects: "feelings of anxiety and ambivalence are always present" in hybridity (17).

The first essay, "Performing Colonialism," discusses three hybrid musical forms, kroncong, tanjidor, and gendhing mares, which developed during the era of Dutch colonial presence in what is now Indonesia (roughly 1620–1942). Kroncongemerged as an urban music in the mestizo lower class of the colonial capital, Batavia, in the late nineteenth century. In its early period it was, in instrumentation and musical idiom, more European than hybrid, though sung in Malay; but later it took on more indigenous features and became a national popular music and, later still, a music with patriotic, nationalistic, and nostalgic connotations. Adducing some surprising passages of the Serat Sri Karongron, a Javanese poem from the 1920s, Sumarsam focuses on an indigenized Central Javanese offshoot of kroncongcalled kembang kacang. ¹ Tanjidoris discussed as a Sundanese (West Javanese) transformation of Dutch military band music that developed as the band instruments filtered out into the local population, eventually becoming so "localized . . . [that] the European music became Sundanese music" (25). ² Gendhing maresis a group of nineteenth-century Central Javanese gamelan compositions created in the palace of the sultan of Yogyakarta; they incorporate European brass and percussion instruments to play along with the gamelan in processional and recessional music for court dancers. Sumarsam proposes that the incorporation of these instruments represented "court attempts to accommodate the diversity of society"—that is, to acknowledge (and, covertly, to "domesticate") the presence of the Dutch colonial power in the Javanese homeland (23).

The three examples in this first chapter exemplify, Sumarsam writes, the heterogeneity and contingency, both musical and cultural, of localization and hybridization processes. "In each region (or even within a region) the process bears quite different results" (24), and all three genres undergo striking shifts in their social/symbolic positions over time: kroncongmoving from the urban lower class to national symbol; tanjidorfrom slave entertainment for the rich to a folk ensemble; gendhing maresfrom colonial demonstration to modern-day incorporation in one of the palace's most sacred dances.

Chapter 2, "Performing the Nation-State," describes a number of "hybrid musical presentations" that are "metaphorical or allegorical representations of society" (26). His examples are the nationally popular music dangdut; a more narrowly Javanese popular music called campursarithat mixes Western and Javanese gamelan instruments and tunings; contemporary...