Split Centers: Gamelan Fusion Post-Multiculturalism

SPLIT CENTERS: GAMELAN FUSION POST-MULTICULTURALISM PETE STEELE THE PERFECT FUSION USER BELAH (UNSTABLE CENTRE) TELLS the story of a “perfect” fusion gone wrong. In this 2003 work for two complete Balinese gamelan, composer Michael Tenzer dramatizes a tumultuous confrontation between two opposing musical entities. As a work of “fusion,” Tenzer presents this confrontation as an archetypal encounter between a musical “self” and its “Other.” The work blends aesthetic and cultural affinities, combining American modernism, Balinese genres gong kebyar and gong gede, mbira music, and South Indian rhythmic forms. At first, the two ensembles trade phrases delicately. As the piece progresses, their disparate sensibilities eventually merge into a unified musical entity. However, this union is short-lived. Their intercultural entanglement is soon interrupted by a traumatic rupture. As a result, the ensembles spiral off into melodic and rhythmic isolation, playing radically different material at opposing tempi. In traditional gamelan music, the final stroke of the large gong wadon symbolizes both spiritual and cosmological balance. In Tenzer’s work, the gong players leave the stage prematurely, implying a fundamental inability for the two music-cultural systems to reconcile. P 190 Perspectives of New Music Hybrids are often celebrated as the quintessential postcolonial form. Scholars have argued that hybrids confound simplistic binary relationships , and forge an indeterminate “third space” that has the potential to subvert political and cultural hegemonies (Bhabha 1994). In the middle to late twentieth century, musical hybrids emerged as an artistic response to the tectonic shifts in global power and cultural awareness at the end of the colonial era. As such, musical hybrids embody the gradual destabilization of European and North American hegemony, and serve as exemplary symbols of a more integrated postcolonial world. Indonesian gamelan music has long been a source of inspiration for composers of fusion music. Composers Colin McPhee, John Cage, Lou Harrison and Steve Reich were particularly influential in shaping the voice of gamelan in such fusion projects. For many, this newfound appreciation of non-Western music carried the potential to subvert and even undo colonialism’s enduring legacy. McPhee paved the way for gamelan music as a way to reform elitism in Western art music (Wakeling 2010).1 For Harrison, Reich and others gamelan provided alternative modes of composition and collaboration (Alves 2001; Humphreys 2001). Like its predecessors, Puser Belah also frames hybridity and intercultural encounter as highly charged phenomena. But rather unlike its predecessors, it does not focus on the emancipatory potential of fusion. Moreover Puser Belah highlights the destructive potential of fusion to further reify polarized notions of cultural difference. In his own program notes, Tenzer questions whether truly transcendental fusions can even take place (Tenzer in Koskoff 2008, 4). In doing so, his work challenges the humanistic assumption that intercultural interaction inevitably yields greater human empathy. Far from an outlier, Tenzer’s commentary on intercultural incommensurability echoes prevalent themes in several contemporary fusion works for Balinese gamelan. The following article looks at these works as they reflexively interrogate the multiculturalist’s desire to “fuse.” In particular, I focus on recent compositions by composers Wayne Vitale, Michael Tenzer, Evan Ziporyn and Andrew Clay McGraw. These works are deeply intercultural both in form and content. The composers have been deeply steeped in Balinese music and are thus well positioned to raise pointed critiques concerning the ethics and politics of intercultural interaction. In these pieces “fusion” and “intercultural encounter” are framed as complex and often paradoxical acts, demanding simultaneous identification with the “Other,” while remaining ever cognizant of its immanent difference. This tension between identification and alienation is played out to varying degrees. Split Centers: Gamelan Fusion Post-Multiculturalism 191 I interpret these works using several analytical tools. Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek writes of ideology as a discursive form that distorts the true nature of material and social relationships and is structured around the desire for a necessarily impossible objective (Žižek 1989). Žižek describes the object cause of this desire in terms of Lacan’s “objet a.” This object is the ineffable phantasmatic quality that one searches for in the Other and is a primary organizing principle of fantasy. However, objet a is of no inherent substance. It exists only to...