American Gamelan and the Ethnomusicological Imagination

Elizabeth A. Clendinning

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780252052262
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Musica

Gamelan and American academic institutions have maintained their close association for more than sixty years. Elizabeth A. Clendinning illuminates what it means to devote one's life to world music ensemble education by examining the career and community surrounding the Balinese-American performer and teacher I Made Lasmawan. Weaving together stories of Indonesian and American practitioners, colleagues, and friends, Clendinning shows the impact of academic world music ensembles on the local and transnational communities devoted to education and the performing arts. While arguing for the importance of such ensembles, Clendinning also spotlights how performers and educators use them to create stable and rewarding artistic communities. Cross-cultural ensemble education emerges as a worthy goal for students and teachers alike, particularly at a time when people around the world express more enthusiasm about raising walls to keep others out rather than building bridges to invite them in.

CHAPTER 1

Interlocking Sounds, Interlocking Communities

The first note shimmered and shone like molten sonic gold. The notes of the gangsas, small keyed metallophones, flowed like rivulets over the melody played by their lower-pitched cousins, the calung and the jegogan, which repeated cyclically over the great booming tones of the gongs. The drummer initiated a new musical sequence on his loud, double-headed kendang, and the Barong—a large, lion-like creature embodied by two dancers—toed its way onto the stage. Its shaggy beard waggled as it clacked its teeth, its furry torso bristling as it danced in battle against the demon queen Rangda, the music of the Balinese gamelan ensemble mirroring its every move. Above the fanged visages of the bhuta-kala (protector spirits), scenes from the Hindu epic the Ramayana, and depictions of animal fables that were carved into the wooden bodies of the instruments, the hands of the musicians flew at seemingly superhuman speeds. Finally, both the Barong and Rangda departed the stage. The musicians’ hands went still. No one moved until the final gong faded into silence. Then the crowd burst into applause.

As the audience members collected their belongings, the artists began to remove costumes and pack up instruments and supplies backstage. By the time of this performance in 2013, Packard Recital Hall at Colorado College had hosted concerts of the college’s gamelan (Indonesian percussion orchestra) consistently for two decades. However, this concert—the capstone of a weekend-long celebration of the ensemble’s twentieth anniversary—felt special to performers and audience members, Indonesian and American alike. “It almost felt like being in Bali,” I heard an audience member gush as I pushed the keyed gangsa that I had been playing to the back of the stage. Putu Hiranmayena, who had danced as one half of the Barong in the final number, also recalled feeling a special energy in the air; unusually for a performance in America, he had felt seized by the spirit of the Barong as he danced. His father, the co-founder of this gamelan, I Made Lasmawan, had even felt this spirit bounce off his back as he drummed out the conclusion of the performance.1 The air had felt electrified, alive. Had we just collectively experienced taksu (divine inspiration) in our performance, a relatively rare occurrence for non-Balinese musicians?

For an American audience member experiencing a live gamelan performance for the first time, it might seem as if such a distinctive ensemble must be rare outside Indonesian contexts. The United States, for example, is home to an Indonesian expatriate community representing a fraction of 1 percent of the nation’s overall population, and gamelan music has never topped the commercial music sales charts. At most, gamelan in America can be considered what Slobin (1992) called a micromusic: a musical practice with limited but passionate adherents. First-time audiences might be surprised to learn, however, that approximately five hundred gamelans have sprouted roots in communities outside Indonesia, of which about 150 reside in the United States. It is striking that half of these are primarily supported by institutions of higher education. Though rich musical relationships have been formed between Indonesia and many areas of the world—including Australia, Japan, and Great Britain, all of which are deserving of extended study—this book focuses on the particular and in some ways peculiar academic ties forged through gamelan between Indonesia and North America, specifically between Bali and the United States.

The association between gamelan and American academic institutions is neither coincidental nor inconsequential. The first gamelan established in North America, the central Javanese gamelan Khjai Mendung (The Venerable Dark Cloud), began as a faculty-student study group at the University of California, Los Angeles in 1958; the initial Balinese gamelan at the same institution, Gamelan Sekar Anyar (New Flower), began rehearsals in 1959.2 Since that time, more than a thousand other “new flowers”—new academic ensembles representing musical genres from around the world—have been planted across the continent. In aggregate, such ensembles are frequently referred to as “world music ensembles” to distinguish them from the orchestras, choirs, and wind bands that constitute more standardized Western classical music offerings at the same institutions. As the European-American artistic canons taught across the Western world were fractured and reassembled in more globally inclusive forms in the decades following World War II, it was gamelan—a versatile evocation of the world’s “other orchestra”—that found itself at the heart of this self-consciously diversified new order.

Diversification in music education has proved to be a complicated and fraught process, sparking practical and ethical debates about what musical genres and skills are crucial for students to learn in order to prepare for careers in music or to be musically literate citizens, which professional qualifications and types of lived experience teachers need in order to educate students, and how and to what extent college music programs should engage with local, national, and international music communities. This rise in diversification efforts has developed alongside the academic discipline of ethnomusicology, a field that, despite developing vast topical, theoretical, and methodological breadth in the past seven decades, has most centrally concerned itself with researching and teaching about the world’s musics from an anthropological perspective. World music ensembles, which are often taught by or in collaboration with ethnomusicologists, have at many educational institutions been treated as add-ons to a more Western-focused musical education with the intent of increasing the diversity of music course offerings and music faculty, and to connect with local communities. Yet the burdens that individual instructors and ensembles bear as beacons of diversity are large because they must navigate practical challenges in creating compelling learning experiences, produce artistically satisfying products at appropriate levels, and use musical practice and their own lived experiences to provide students with insight into different ways of being musicians. Because of its longstanding and widespread nature, the American academic gamelan community provides a compelling case study for examining these issues as they affect systems of education and performance, as well as the lives of the teachers and students involved.

This book examines how gamelans came to be a cornerstone of American world music education and the academic discipline of ethnomusicology and how the creation of college gamelans has impacted the lives of participants. I approach these issues by examining the career and community of one performer-teacher, I Made Lasmawan of Bali and Colorado, as a key case study among others to show how teaching gamelan in the United States fosters local and global musical communities, creates transnational musical lineages, and affects teachers and students in the United States and in Indonesia. I argue that participation in gamelan and world music ensembles more broadly is a powerful means for students to increase musical and cultural competence, engage in critical modes of self-discovery, and make rich interpersonal connections that can transcend age, race, gender, ethnicity, and national origin. Ensembles such as collegiate gamelan can also substantially impact local and transnational musical ecosystems, providing new opportunities and challenges for musicians, teachers, and scholars in American and global educational institutions and broader artistic communities.

Such global communities can be fragile, however, because their continuity, growth, and fruitfulness often are contingent on the continued work of a handful of dedicated supporters. I therefore highlight issues concerning educational and artistic sustainability that have emerged in tandem with introducing world music ensemble education to American curricula, and I demonstrate how individual artists and educators continue to address these issues in order to create stable and rewarding artistic communities. Finally, I consider the impact on individuals of living a life devoted to gamelan and why—in a cultural climate in which many people around the world express more enthusiasm for building walls to keep others out than for building bridges to let them in—cross-cultural ensemble education is worth pursuing, both for those who are taught and those who teach.

An American in Bali and a Voice for Transnational Communities

How did you first encounter gamelan? Was it from a record or a CD that you had bought or a YouTube video that a friend had shared? Was it from investigating the instruments after learning about Western compositions purportedly inspired by them, such as piano works by Claude Debussy? Was it from seeing this foreign word gamelan in print and then seeking out the instruments’ sounds? Was it from watching a live performance of a local or touring ensemble? Was it in a class in school? Or were the sounds of gamelan an integral part of the fabric of your childhood, the aural backdrop to hours spent watching your relatives in rehearsals and performances until you, too, were old enough to hold a mallet and begin to play?

In Indonesia and in twenty-first-century North America, all those routes are common entry points to discovering gamelan. For myself, it took several encounters with gamelan—in my formal education and in casual listening—before it became a part of my musical idiolect (Nettl 2015, 66). I had my first encounter with Balinese gamelan through participant-observation as a middle school student: I chose the gamelan class as my daily one-hour elective during one session of summer band camp at Florida State University (FSU). Half a decade later, before I became a music major at the University of Chicago, I chose a world music survey course to fulfill my undergraduate arts credit requirement. One of our first assignments was to visit the neighborhood Javanese gamelan, Friends of the Gamelan, during their Sunday evening rehearsal. Although the ensemble captured my interest, the rehearsal time did not fit in my schedule; I focused my music making on the Middle Eastern Music Ensemble and early music groups instead.

Several years later, as an ethnomusicology graduate student at FSU, I began to play Balinese gamelan under the direction of Michael Bakan in Florida’s only such ensemble, Sekaa Gong Hanuman Agung (the Gamelan Club of the Great Monkey-God Hanuman). It was only when I began additional study of Balinese dance with I Gusti Ayu Candra Dewi, a nonprofessional dancer who had accompanied her husband to Tallahassee while he pursued a doctoral degree in education, that my interest in Balinese performing arts and culture began to crystallize. I soon found myself spending ten hours per week with the strikingly blended group of ensemble members—undergraduates and graduate students, pre-professional musicians and those with limited musical experience, English and bilingual Spanish speakers—all of whom had chosen to learn to play and dance together.

At the same time, I noticed that the assigned readings in my history and theory of ethnomusicology courses were generously peppered with works by authors who had lived in Indonesia. Central among them was Mantle Hood, who advocated for bimusicality—the idea that scholars in the West could and should learn to play the non-Western musics that they were studying. Gamelan served as a fundamental example in Hood’s argument, which provoked spirited debates about the nature and aims of American ethnomusicology during the first decade of its existence (Hood 1960; Merriam 1964). Such debates have long since fallen out of fashion alongside the now-archaic presuppositions that certain types of music making were only approachable for individuals of certain racial or ethnic backgrounds and that people in a specific location grew up as natives or insiders in only one type of musical culture. The concept that globalized musical study should be built on a globalized experience of music making, however, remains a core principle of many ethnomusicology programs, including that of which I was a part at FSU. Gamelan was frequently among such ensemble offerings. It seemed that gamelans had not only captured the ethnomusicological imagination but also played a significant role in imagining what ethnomusicology could be.

As the Indonesian performing arts increasingly worked their way into academic, artistic, and personal aspects of my life, I began to question how and why such a coalescence of information was possible. What types of scholarly and artistic exchanges had brought literally tons of carved wood and bronze Indonesian percussion instruments not only to northern Florida but to more than a hundred academic institutions across the United States? How had the adoption of gamelan as a seemingly canonic world music genre shaped and embodied the theory and practice of academic world music pedagogy? What were the individual, institutional, and systematic impacts of supporting academic and cultural exchange between Indonesia and the United States? Perhaps most crucial, what did it mean for my teacher Candra to be teaching Balinese dance in this country? And likewise, what did it mean for other Indonesian teachers—such as two of Bakan’s gamelan mentors, I Nyoman Wenten and I Ketut Gede Asnawa, both of whom held gamelan teaching appointments at American universities at that time—to be essentially devoting their lives to teaching Indonesian performing arts to American students? I also wondered about the meaning of all of this for North American musicians and academics whose work I had encountered—including musician-teacher-scholars such as Michael Bakan, Michael Tenzer, David Harnish, Jody Diamond, Evan Ziporyn, Henry Spiller, Andrew McGraw, Sonja Downing, Lisa Gold, Benjamin Brinner, and increasingly, scholars of my own generation—whose professional and personal lives were deeply intertwined with the Indonesian performing arts.

Early in this period of questioning, I knew that my investigation would need to take me beyond the bounds of my own schooling to a variety of gamelan-hosting institutions across North America and back to the music’s source: Bali and Java. I still remember my initial nighttime arrival in 2010 in Ubud—advertised to tourists as the “artistic heart” of Bali. The warm night air was only punctuated by the sounds of frogs, the music of distant gamelan practices, and the occasional hum of a passing motor scooter—a blissful quiet impossible to experience only a few years later as the streets increasingly thrum with tourist activity until late at night. I traveled a short distance down the road to Pengosekan for intensive study at Gamelan Çudamani’s annual summer institute. The artistic instruction and cultural excursions provided by this internationally renowned performance group inspired me to continue my studies.

The following summer, when I visited Bali for a brief four days while on vacation from Indonesian language studies in East Java, I went with a friend from the program to see I Made Lasmawan, director of the Denver-based community group Gamelan Tunas Mekar. It turned out that Lasmawan—or Pak Made, as he liked to be called—was primarily employed as a gamelan teacher at a number of institutions in the Rocky Mountains, and he had built an entirely new performing arts sanggar (club) within his banjar (village ward) of Bangah in a remote mountainous region of the Tabanan Regency to host his American students. As I began to learn more about his work, I was intrigued by the academic connections that Lasmawan had fostered, in particular how they presented a vision of intercultural exchange that bridged short-term academic study, longtime community gamelan practices in North America, and non-professional Balinese village arts practice. The musicians, teachers, and students from all over North America who made summer pilgrimages to Bangah became the living heart of my own transnational gamelan community.

Conducting ethnographic research, participating in artistic practice, and building interpersonal relationships became inseparable tasks in the seven trips I took to Indonesia; the more than a dozen site visits that I conducted across North America; and countless conversations that I conducted via email, on the phone, and through social media and messaging applications. As I continued to learn, I also began to teach and collaborate, first as a visiting director for the gamelan at Florida State while I was completing my doctorate, and then at Emory University, as a visiting instructor and director of world music. At my current institution, Wake Forest University, I now lead the Balinese gamelan, Gamelan Giri Murti (Gamelan of the Enchanted Forest), whose membership consists of students, faculty, staff, and alumni from Wake Forest and the North Carolina School of the Arts, as well as members of the local community. Though I am sometimes concerned that my continued attraction to gamelan is simply a method of self-exoticization (Spiller 2015), I find myself more deeply involved in the world of gamelan than I could have imagined only a decade ago. I play, study, and teach gamelan not only because I am fortunate enough to have had it become an integral part of my job but also because it has inspired me, challenged me, and led me to become colleagues and friends with an outstanding collection of artists. The issues of transnational exchange that I examine in this work are not only ones that I have observed from a distance and encountered in the stories of others that I tell, but also have been illuminated in the stories that I have lived.

Gamelan: The Indonesian Icon and Its Sound World

In order to understand the roles that gamelans have played outside Indonesia and how gamelan culture has been adapted to new circumstances, it is important to consider the roles that the ensembles have played in their location of origin. Gamelan music and its associated performing arts, primarily dance and shadow puppetry, are central to the unique social structures and Islamic and Hindu religious practices that define traditional cultural life in parts of Java and in Bali, respectively. Although there is evidence that instrument types such as bamboo flutes and gongs used in gamelan music have been present in the region for more than a thousand years, the earliest forms of gamelan that are still practiced today are at least as old as the period of the Majapahit Empire (the late thirteenth through the early sixteenth century; Bandem 2013; Dibia and Ballinger 2004; Spiller 2008). Ensemble types and playing styles distinctive to different royal courts and their surrounding geographic regions in West, Central, and East Java as well as Bali began to crystallize from the sixteenth through the eighteenth century, with continued development during the Dutch colonial period from the nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century.

The period immediately leading up to and following the declaration of Indonesian independence in 1945 vastly reshaped the political, religious, and cultural structures that had been in place—and artistic practices with them. As Bali’s and Java’s royal courts transitioned from being explicitly political ruling entities to maintaining primarily symbolic power, court ensembles and dance troupes were restructured and classicized (for example, in Central Java; see Sumarsam 1995; Hughes-Freeland 2008) or supplanted by musical production at the village level (in Bali; see Vickers 2012). After independence, the founding of governmental arts conservatories and the dissemination of officially approved arts performances on nationally owned television and radio networks professionalized formal artistic training and codified certain types of artistic practice (Fraser 2015; Hough 1999; Weintraub 2004).

Today, musicians, dancers, and puppeteers regularly decry the decline in quality of performances and the perceived lack of interest in traditional arts among younger generations. Although it is not necessarily popular music in most places, however, gamelan is regularly supported on the institutional level; traditional arts are taught in primary and secondary school settings, as well as in the high school and college-level conservatories in Bali and Java. Private clubs, moreover, offer opportunities for children and adults to play gamelan in social settings. Though all-night events such as shadow puppetry performances are on the decline, public performances of the arts in civic settings still occur regularly. Owing to differences in religious practices and historic political structures, gamelan culture in Bali remains particularly vibrant. The centrality of gamelan to Balinese Hindu ritual practice means that nearly every banjar is host to at least one ensemble. In addition, be...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Interlocking Sounds, Interlocking Communities
• 2 Early Encounters in Bimusicality
• 3 From Bali to America: Teachers and Transitions
• 4 Creating and Conceptualizing a Balinese American Gamelan Community
• 5 Teaching, Learning, Representing
• 6 Americans Learning Gamelan in Bali
• 7 Kembali: To Return or Change
• 8 Bimusicality and Beyond
• 9 Sustainability and the Academic World Music Ensemble
• 10 Cultivating New Flowers
• Glossary
• Notes
• References
• Index
• Back Cover