Bali 1928, Volume 1: Gamelan Gong Kebyar Music from Belaluan, Pangkung, Busungbiu—the Oldest New Music from Bali by Allan Evans and Edward Herbst (review)

This CD, the first of an important series of five (with the possibility of a sixth), remastered from 78 rpm discs made by Beka and Odeon in 1928 Bali (released in 1929), is a musical time capsule.¹ It offers the listener a window into a former time and sonic world. It was the moment in which gamelan gong kebyar, the “explosive” twentieth-century style of composition, was first developing, after its estimated inception in around 1915 in North Bali. Beyond the experience of listening, we are treated to visual images (MPEG-4 files of early silent films and excellent photos from that era) and other informative materials, such as a PDF of an extensive, well-researched, 66-page booklet by ethnomusicologist and Bali specialist Edward Herbst that touches on the contents of all five CDs in the series. Thus, the concept of the compact disc is expanded to become a multidisciplinary ethnography and the basis for an ongoing repatriation and revival project, with Herbst at the helm, that has already produced results (instigating several Balinese groups to revive pieces heard on the recordings). This series began with a prior “sampler” CD, The Roots of Gamelan (World Arbiter, 2001, reviewed in Asian Music [Spring/Summer 33] and in Ethnomusicology 48[1]:149–50), containing some of the same recordings as those that appear on this CD. But the multimedia concept of this new series, its large-scale thematic organization as a series, and the technology developed by recording engineer Allan Evans offering a new sound quality have developed significantly since that CD was made.

In a paper presented at University of California, Berkeley, about this series, Herbst stated,

Allan Evans made his own transfers using custom-made styluses he had found to be especially suited to late 1920s Odeon and Beka 78s. In addition to commonly known digital software restoration, Allan has developed techniques in which he literally gets in the groove, weighing down the tone arm and angling the stylus in unorthodox positions to fully expose sounds left buried in shellac discs. This enabled us to hear much more clearly, for instance, the drumming patterns, or an instrument, like the klintong, a small gong. Such audio information has been essential for my Balinese colleagues to re-conceptualize the elements that went into the creative evolution of music in the 1920s, offering surprising evidence of légong technique during the birth of kebyar.

(Herbst 2012)

Making this CD series must have been no easy task. Herbst spent years tracking down the original recordings from archives and elsewhere (104 “matrices” or sides, some discovered with the help of Philip Yampolsky). One-third of the recordings originally appeared in Europe and America, with the rest intended to be sold in Bali. Due to poor sales in Bali and abroad at the time of issue, most copies were destroyed. The 78 rpm records were melted down, much as many of the early gamelan palégongan and semar pagulingan sets of instruments were melted down in the early twentieth century for the bronze to be reforged into gamelan gong kebyar sets of instruments that are featured on this CD.

In the accompanying PDF booklet, Herbst offers a quote from Béla Bartók’s Essays written in 1937 about the imperative to return recordings to the people from whence they came. Of the melting down of matrices (record sides) Bartók wrote, “This happened with one of the highly valuable Javanese record series of Odeon, as quoted in the bibliography of Musique et chansons populaires of the League of Nations. If matrices of...