Improvisation and Composition in Balinese Gendér Wayang

Music of the Moving Shadows

Nicholas Gray

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781351928304
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Ethnomusicology

This book is an examination of the music of the Balinese gendér wayang, the quartet of metallophones - gendér - that accompanies the Balinese shadow puppet play - wayang kulit. The book focuses on processes of musical variation, the main means of creating new music in this genre, and the implications of these processes for the social and historical study of Balinese music, musical aesthetics, concepts of creativity and compositional methods. Dr Nick Gray tackles a number of core ethnomusicological concerns in a new way, including the relationship between composition and improvisation, and also highlights issues specific to Balinese music, including the importance of flexibility in performance, an aspect that has been largely ignored by scholars. Gray thus breaks new ground both in the study of issues relating to improvisation and composition and in Balinese music studies.

PART I
Concepts

Chapter 1
Introduction

Om Awighnam Astu

may it be without hindrance

An oil lamp shines out from behind an off-white screen. Later, the puppeteer’s disembodied voice will issue words of power from this flickering light source. For now, there are just shifting, dancing colours: sometimes brown or orange, sometimes yellow or white. a delicate sound adds to this scene, fragile but intense: the small quartet of bronze gendér wayang instruments playing a tracery of interlocking patterns. Its almost-familiar five-note scale too, seems strangely disembodied – by the vibrations caused by the paired tuning system and the ambiguity of the intervals between the notes. The music itself, like one of Nancarrrow’s player-piano pieces, sounds like one impossible instrument played by four pairs of hands. This is because of the interlocking of two complex parts between the four players. Their hands move in a blur while the counterpoint is so dense and complicated that it seems to shift as fast as you can catch it: cross-rhythms playing against cross-rhythms. All the time, the players’ wrists twist and bend, moving effortlessly as they damp the notes they played previously to prevent the sound ringing on. The overture to a shadow play has begun.

Scope of this book

This book is an examination of the music of the Balinese gendér wayang, the quartet of metallophones (gendér) that accompanies the Balinese shadow puppet play (wayang kulit, or simply wayang). It is about composition in the broadest sense, from small changes made in the course of performance to larger scale creation and re-creation of pieces. I hope that it may contribute in a small way to the cross-cultural study of composition and improvisation. It is by no means a comprehensive or even a partial survey of the music for this ensemble, which remains to be written.

Gendér wayang is perhaps unique in Bali in that, though it has ancient origins, it has remained popular because of its association with the shadow play. It thus represents a link with some of Bali’s oldest musical forms and is able at the same time to adapt to changing musical tastes and styles. In this, it contrasts with some of Bali’s other ‘ancient’ gamelan types such as gambuh or selonding, which (despite recent revivals) are mostly preserved through their use in ritual and have a more limited popularity.¹

1 For descriptions of other gamelan genres mentioned in this book, see Tenzer 1991, or the glossary in Appendix 1 of this book.

Unlike the modern Balinese gong kebyar ensemble, complete new pieces are rarely composed for gendér wayang. However, there is an almost continuous process of reworking old pieces into new versions. Many of the pieces are, themselves, structured as variation forms: the concept of variation seems to be fundamental to the compositional technique. This study examines the scope and limits of such variation through discussions with player-composers, the musical analysis of old and new versions of pieces and of variation as a method of composition within the pieces themselves.

Compositional technique in gendér wayang is also of particular interest because of its remarkably varied principles of musical organization: it is not just built around the regular even note ‘nuclear’ melody of other gamelan types. It also has an unusually close relationship with vocal music as an accompaniment to the puppeteer’s songs.

This study concentrates, first and foremost, on processes of composition and musical change. However, it also necessarily addresses forces in modern Bali that affect these processes and give them shape and direction. Such forces include tourism, urbanization, political change, TV, radio, cassette culture and the local recording industry, government academies and religious reform. I can only, however, touch on these matters, which have been examined at length by Vickers (1989, 1996), Picard (1996), Bakker (1993) Heimarck (1999, 2002, 2003) and others.

It may seem paradoxical to examine composition in a genre in which there is supposed not to be any. I began to look at composition and variation-making in Balinese gendér wayang for three main reasons. Firstly, I became interested in the processes by which the same pieces seemed to change through time, but apparently new ones were rarely written, unlike the modern gamelan gong kebyar. Secondly, although there was supposed to be little or no improvisation in Balinese gamelan, I found that gendér players adopted a very flexible approach to their music and that this spontaneous variation-making seemed to be linked to players’ more ‘worked-out’ versions. Thirdly, there was the shock I experienced when, after several years’ learning, I was finally allowed to take part in a wayang performance and found that completely different versions seemed to come into play in performance. This prompted me to take on a study of the relationship between the conscious composition of pieces and parts of pieces with more spontaneous variation-making in this ensemble.

Though this study is limited to gendér wayang, it has repercussions for examining composition in other Balinese genres. The processes involved in creating new versions of gendér wayang pieces seem to feed into compositional methods for creating completely new pieces in other ensembles and may be reflected in other art forms.

These processes will be examined in two main geographical areas: Sukawati in South Bali, and secondly the contrasting area of East Bali, particularly the villages of Budakeling and Tenganan. Although Gold (1992 and 1998) and Heimarck (1999 and 2002) discuss Sukawati gendér style, my own familiarity with it provides a useful starting point from which to make comparisons with East Bali, an area more remote from current centres of power and modernization. Vonck (1995 and 1997) covers aspects of gendér in North Bali but, to date, nothing has appeared on East Balinese gendér traditions. None of these theses focus primarily on composition, variation and improvisation. I am aware that there are many other regional styles and many more player-composers who could have been consulted and hope that they and other readers will forgive this limitation. I hope, nevertheless, that the material I do present will give insight into the processes I discuss.

David Harnish states: ‘Composition in world musics is a subject sometimes overlooked by ethnomusicologists, who more usually explore musical tradition, performance practices and theories, issues of statehood and identity, or gender and cultural studies. However, a study of composition can unveil rich and profound values within a music culture’ (Harnish 2000:1). Sloboda, however, warns that ‘composition is the least studied and least well understood of all musical processes’ (Sloboda 1985:103).

To attempt a complete analysis of the ‘poetics’ of Balinese gendérwayang, following Nattiez (1990) would be an almost impossible task. However, Nattiez’s description of the scope of such a study depicts the potential conceptual space to be explored:

the link among the composer’s intentions, his creative procedures, his mental schemas, and the result of this collection of strategies; that is the components that go into the work’s material embodiment. (Nattiez 1990:92)

An analysis of this grouping should also include an awareness of the importance of Nattiez’s other element, the ‘esthesic process’ involving the listener or receiver (Nattiez 1990:17). This is the space that I hope to explore, in a limited way, in this study.

Composition and improvisation

Some of the first questions I began to ask myself about gendér wayang, once the unfamiliarity of the genre, the learning process, the musical textures and structures of the pieces had worn off, were about composition. Firstly, how did these pieces work, without a clear gong- and core-melody structure to guide them? Why such a variety of musical textures? I wondered how these pieces had come into being. Did known composers create them, like some kebyar pieces, or were they all ‘old’ pieces, handed down from generation to generation? One answer to the last question seemed to be that gendér wayang was regarded as a very ancient genre, and yet at the same time remained popular and so had obviously kept up with the times. Known player-composers had contributed to the development of the different gendér wayang styles, which were, none the less, passed on as traditional.

To put this in some context, I will now examine some of the models that ethnomusicologists have used to discuss composition, variation-making and improvisation and consider the application of such theories to gendérwayang.

Continuity, variation, selection

Cecil Sharp (1907) identified three principles or forces at work in the shaping of English folk song. These were: continuity (based on memorization and exact repetition), variation (the way a song may change each time it’s sung) and selection (the community’s acceptance or rejection of the variations so that some continue while others are dropped).²

2 They form the core of the International Folk Music Council’s definition of 1954: ‘Folk music is music that has been submitted to the process of oral transmission. It is the product of evolution and is dependent on the circumstances of continuity, variation and selection’ (Karpeles 1955:6).

These terms, of course, were similar to Darwin’s principles of evolution, ‘variation, selection and preservation of traits’ (Darwin 1859). More recent studies suggest that such an evolutionary model of creativity may be misleading (see, for instance, Perkins 1994). According to Sharp’s model, a folk song acquires its qualities through the achievements of many generations of singers:

Individual angles and irregularities have been gradually rubbed off and smoothed away by communal effort, just as the pebble on the sea shore is rounded and polished by the action of the waves. (Sharp 1907:16)³

3 Note the similarity with Lévi-Strauss’s imagery: ‘during the process of oral transmission, these probabilist levels [of myths] will rub against each other and wear each other down, thus gradually separating off from the bulk of the text what might be called its crystalline parts’ (Lévi-Strauss 1981:626–27).

Bertrand Bronson’s ‘Morphology of the ballad tunes’ (1954) reassessed Sharp’s model and suggested that self-selection by singer may be more significant: continuity of a tradition is so ingrained that it acts as an inner check, preventing the ‘unacceptable’ coming into being (Bronson 1954:13). However Bronson did not fully explore whether what is regarded as unacceptable by a society may also be subject to change, nor did he examine the complexity of the relationship between performer and the surrounding community of which he or she is a member.

In Bali, gendér players are acutely conscious of the approval or disapproval of the community. My main teacher, I Wayan Locéng (henceforth: Locéng) told me he was going to try out the piece ‘Segara Madu’, which he had recently adopted from another area, as a petegak, or sitting piece before a wayang, to see whether it met with the approval of the discerning Sukawati audience (personal communication, 1992). A udience approval and disapproval play a large role in Balinese gamelan competitions (Bakan 1999:112–1...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• List of Music Examples
• Contents of the Accompanying CD
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• A Note on Spelling, Transcriptions and Tuning
• Part I: Concepts
• Part II: Explorations
• Part III: Reflections
• Appendix 1: Glossary
• Appendix 2: Tuning Measurements
• Bibliography
• Index