 Gamelan
: Cultural Interaction and Musical Development in Central
Java (Chicago Studies in Ethnomusicology) 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.
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