Gamelan Performance Outside Indonesia “Setting Sail”: Babar Layar and Notions of “Bi-musicality”

Contemporary gamelan performance outside Indonesia—and more broadly speaking, the discipline of ethnomusicology—owes a largely unacknowledged debt to a group of Dutch teenagers, who formed the first long-term European gamelan group, Babar Layar, in the prohibitive circumstances of Nazi occupation. In this essay I discuss the establishment and subsequent activities of Babar Layar, also examining the group’s historical significance, particularly the impact it had—however unintentionally—on the incorporation of performance into the discipline of ethnomusicology.