Gamelan: Cultural Interaction and Musical Development in Central Java

by Sumarsam

Gamelan is the first study of the music of Java and the development of the gamelan to take into account extensive historical sources and contemporary cultural theory and criticism. An ensemble dominated by bronze percussion instruments that dates back to the twelfth century in Java, the gamelan as a musical organization and a genre of performance reflects a cultural heritage that is the product of centuries of interaction between Hindu, Islamic, European, Chinese, and Malay cultural forces.

Drawing on sources ranging from a twelfth-century royal poem to the writing of a twentieth-century nationalist, Sumarsam shows how the Indian-inspired contexts and ideology of the Javanese performing arts were first adjusted to the Sufi tradition and later shaped by European performance styles in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He then turns to accounts of gamelan theory and practice from the colonial and postcolonial periods. Finally, he presents his own theory of gamelan, stressing the relationship between purely vocal melodies and classical gamelan composition.

Genres: Music, Nonfiction, History

368 pages, Paperback

First published December 15, 1995

About the author

Sumarsam is a Javanese musician and scholar of the gamelan.

He began his formal gamelan education in 1961 at the Konservatori Karawitan Indonesia (KOKAR, now Sekolah Menengah Karawitan Indonesia) in Surakarta. He graduated in 1964 and began to teach, and in 1965 began to study at the newly opened Akademi Seni Karawitan Indonesia (ASKI, now Sekolah Tinggi Seni Indonesia in Surakarta). He graduated in 1968 and did some co-teaching with Martopangrawit. ASKI participated in government programs to promote Indonesian culture abroad, and in 1970 Sumarsam was invited to Expo '70 in Osaka, Japan, where he worked seven months. In 1971 he was invited to teach at the Indonesian Embassy in Canberra, Australia. Afterwards he moved to the United States to become a visiting artist at Wesleyan University.

Inspired by Western academia, he pursued a master's degree in world music from Wesleyan University from 1974 to 1976. He graduated with the thesis "Inner Melody in Javanese Gamelan." He continued teaching and performing at various universities in the United States, and was made an artist-in-residence at Wesleyan in 1976.

From 1983 he began working on a Ph.D. from Cornell University in ethnomusicology and Southeast Asian Studies. His thesis was "Historical Contexts and Theories of Javanese Music." It was later revised and published as Gamelan: Cultural Interaction and Musical Development in Central Java.

He was made adjunct professor at Wesleyan in 1992, University Professor in 2011, and Professor of Music in 2016, where he now (2017) serves as Winslow-Kaplan Professor of Music. In September 2017, the Indonesian Ministry of Education and Culture is honoring him with a Cultural and Traditional Arts Maestro Award (Satyalancana Kebudayaan).

Reviews

[Nick · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a Javanese who teaches ethnomusicology at Wesleyan, Sumarsam is uniquely situated to write about the bronze percussion ensembles known in Indonesia as gamelan. The function and form of music provide by a gamelan ensemble is radically different from anything we are accustomed to in the West. Notions of melody, tone, rhythm and performance are so different from the Western tradition that even the question of notation has been difficult to settle. The relative importance of the composer and the performers is more akin to jazz than to the classical tradition, although not so prone to improvisation. The other great dimension of this book is to show how gamelan, which in performance can sound like an ancient tradition, has in fact changed radically over the centuries, as Java and it court life, on which the music was dependent, were successively influenced by the cultures brought to it by the trade winds: Hinduism, Sufism, and the colonial powers.

[Carol · Rating 4 out of 5]

Way back in college, I took a couple of terrific courses on Javanese gamelan, which were mostly centered around playing in the ensemble rather than deep musicological study of it. This book helped me fill in that scholarly gap.
Gamelan: Cultural Interaction and Musical Development in Central Java provided a detailed and fascinating examination of the development of the gamelan and its music and the effects of Java's interactions with Hindu, Islamic, and Western cultures. Sumarsam also looks at the ways Western thought influenced theories and analysis of gamelan music, and contributes a counterargument to those earlier theories.
This was an engrossing and very interesting read. I really enjoyed taking a deep dive into the history and workings of music I love, and loved playing.

(Full disclosure: Sumarsam taught those college gamelan courses I took.)

[Jason · Rating 4 out of 5]

A nice anthropological overview of the history of gamelan.

[Emilio PÆsano · Rating 4 out of 5]

classic on the subject... careful, detailed account to the history of javanese gamelan, followed by an even more detailed analysis of its main theoretical components...