Indonesian music has been reaching American ears for over a century, though it has never had the visibility of African, Latin, or even Indian music. In part this is because it was a purely musical import-it was not carried here by waves of immigration, and was not nurtured in small urban cultural enclaves (there are no Balitowns in America’s major cities). Nor did it have its own George Harrison to feature gamelan instruments on his albums. (Stewart Copeland visited Bali, but the island’s music got little publicity as a result.) Indonesian music in general has no "name recognition" in the West: when bits of it appear in a Fellini soundtrack, a Public Image Ltd. album, or an episode of Star Trek, people notice the "exotic" sounds but don’t recognize the source.
Sekar Jaya, a California-based group of Americans playing the music of Bali, is trying to change all that. They will soon visit New York, Boston, Providence, and other New England cities on their first East Coast tour. They perform on a gamelan, an orchestra of drums, bronze gongs, metallophones, cymbals, and flutes. Joined on this tour by one of Bali’s most respected musicians, they will present a program of traditional and modern pieces, and they will accompany both Balinese and American dancers in powerful and beguiling traditional dances and masked drama.
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Bali is a volcanic island in the archipelagic nation of Indonesia. It is densely settled and intensively cultivated: most Balinese are rice farmers, and their meticulously-maintained terraced rice fields cover the island’s mountains and valleys. Bali is also an island of temples: its Hinduism is the only living testimony to millennium-old Indian religious influence in the Indonesian archipelago.
And Bali is an island of the arts. In particular, music, dance and theater are practiced with startling intensity and inventiveness, and not by an isolated fraction of the population, but by the same men and women who work daily in the rice paddies.
For an island the size of Rhode Island, Bali maintains an extraordinary variety of music. In part this is because the Balinese like variety in all things: traditions vary from region to region, and village individuality is prized. Many little hamlets have their own musical ensembles or genres found nowhere else on the island. There are ensembles of flutes longer than a person’s arm, ensembles of wooden xylophones, ensembles of tiny jaw’s-harps, ensembles of bamboo percussion tubes three meters long. And there are a cappella ensembles of interlocking voices.
Occasions for music are equally varied. A great deal of music, is made for ceremonial purposes, to honor the deities. But there are also musical competitions, "battles of the bands" that draw a enormous crowds. This friendly artistic rivalry stimulates new composition and ever-higher levels of virtuosic brilliance. Year after year, ancient ensembles closely tied to ritual repeat their sacred repertoire. But they coexist with others that live off a constant competition-driven wave of new pieces, rapidly replacing each other in the popular mind almost at the pace of the Top Ten.
Sekar Jaya plays on the most popular and brilliant type of Balinese orchestra, known as gamelan gong kebyar. It includes bronze gongs, drums, and flutes, but its main melody instruments are various sizes of metallophone (somewhat like a marimba, but with metal keys).
The gong kebyar ensemble is tuned to a five-tone scale known as pelog, and its total melodic range covers four octaves. At the bottom of that range is the gong, which signals the beginning and end of each time cycle. Near the bottom is the 10-key metallophone called the ugal, which usually leads the melody. Five-key metallophones, calung and jegogan, punctuate the melody in the low register. Similar to the ugal but tuned in higher octaves are the pemade and kantilan which often play interlocking figurations. The reyong, a rack of twelve kettle-gongs, is played in interlocking fashion by four performers. Two drummers lead the group, and a squat kettle-gong, the kempli, beats time. The bronze instruments are built in pairs; each pair is deliberately detuned slightly, so that aural beating (at a precisely calculated rate) is heard when the instruments are played in unison-this produces the distinctive shimmering sound of the gamelan.
As is true of most types of gamelan, the music of the gong _kebyar is largely based on repeating time cycles. It also makes extensive use of interlocking (two instruments’ parts are dovetailed together so that, by alternating strokes and rests, they combine to form a single rapid melodic filigree). There is little or no improvisation.
Kebyar (the musical style which gives the gong _kebyar its name) is a relatively recent style, dating from around 1915. It is fiery and showy, with constantly-shifting moods and sudden dramatic silences. Properly speaking, a kebyar passage is a free-rhythm phrase played in unison by the entire ensemble — somewhat as if an entire orchestra were to play a cadenza. Most kebyar music, however, has a definite beat, often whizzing by at tremendous speed. To get an idea of the pinnacle of kebyar virtuosity, imagine four musicians playing, in perfect unison, at a tempo of 400 notes per minute. Now imagine four other musicians completing the melody line by playing on the off-beats: they, too, play 400 notes in each minute, but because they insert their strokes in the gaps left by the first group of players, the resulting melody emerges at the blinding speed of 800 notes per minute. This music is almost as exhilarating to hear as to play.
But the sonic brilliance of kebyar is not the only sign of the music’s vitality. There is, as well, a seemingly endless demand for new compositions.
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Balinese music first came to the West on shellac, and it first caught the attention of composers searching for new sounds.
In the late 1920s the Canadian-born, French-trained composer Colin McPhee (1900-1964) heard the first 78rpm recordings of Balinese music. They changed his life. He spent eight years on Bali studying the music; forced to leave before the outbreak of World War II, he settled in America, teaching at UCLA, writing extensively on Balinese music, and assisting with the first American tour of a Balinese troupe (1952). McPhee’s fantasia for symphony orchestra on Balinese themes, Tabuh-Tabuhan, won him a Pulitzer Prize for composition in 1936.
With the continuing progress of the recording industry, McPhee’s route to Balinese music has been kept open. Indeed, with the LP and CD, the audiophilic highway has been widened. Interest in Balinese gamelan (and in other Indonesian musics) has burgeoned. Americans are no longer content to merely listen to Balinese music, they want to play it, too. There are now scores of Indonesian ensembles in North America, many of them in use by American students learning from Balinese teachers. It was at one such program – the summer school of the American Society for Eastern Arts, in Seattle – that the composer Steve Reich learned to play Balinese music.
In the 1960s American universities began acquiring Balinese gamelan to give their students hands-on experience with the music of other cultures. These ensembles have proved their value in the classroom, especially since they accommodate players of all skill levels. But most campus gamelan groups lack the stability needed to achieve ambitious artistic goals.
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Sekar Jaya ("Flowering Success") is an independent ensemble that has surpassed all other American groups in endurance, sense of purpose, and acclaim. The group is based in northern California, and has been performing since 1980. The list of its teachers over the years reads like a Who’s Who of the finest Balinese performers and composers: Suweca, Astita, Rai, Tembres, Sinti, Sujana, Partha, and the renowned composer I Nyoman Windha. It has performed widely in California, and also in Canada. It twice toured Bali at the invitation of the Governor of Bali, and participated in the annual island-wide Bali Arts Festival (1985, 1992). It was hailed in the Indonesian press as "clearly the finest Balinese gamelan outside of Indonesia." It is the subject of a television documentary, "Kembali," that has aired widely on PBS affiliates. Its recordings are sold both in Bali and America.
With the advent of Sekar Jaya, Americans have gone beyond a simple fascination with Balinese sounds, beyond the brief excitement of a classroom encounter: they are recreating the central social institution of Balinese music. Balinese music is community-oriented; individual teachers and composers are honored, but the principal focus is the club (seka), whose members train in constant rehearsals until their feelings and instincts unite. Nothing less would satisfy the formidable ensemble requirements of kebyar. Sekar Jaya‘s members learn new pieces the way any seka does: by rote, committing everything to memory. Balinese musicians neither learn nor perform from notation. The long hours of group instruction and constant practice sessions help the players internalize the music, and weld them into a musical unity.
To be sure, an American seka is a very different creature from its Balinese model. In Bali, many seka exist to provide musical offerings to the deities during temple festivals. In America few temples need the services of a gamelan, and Sekar Jaya has no such guaranteed performance venue. Instead, like many other American musical groups, Sekar Jaya must support its tours by fundraising from local foundations and multinational corporations. But the existence of Sekar Jaya as a self-sustaining, community-based arts organization in itself signals a new level in the ongoing American encounter with Balinese music.
Skeptical Americans sometimes wonder whether Sekar Jaya‘s popularity in Bali is entirely merited. Are they admired for their music, or are they enjoyed as a kind of "freak show"? Are they regarded as peers by Bali’s top performers?
Probably not. No one in Sekar Jaya claims to perform at the stratospheric level of the finest Balinese musicians. No doubt they appeal to the Balinese in part because they are seen as cultural ambassadors, representatives of an economic and military superpower paying their respects to the art of a geopolitically insignificant island.
But this is clearly not the whole story. While they are not "pushing the envelope" in the performance of traditional Balinese music, they do play at a Balinese standard. Even more important, they are making a unique contribution to Balinese musical composition.
Sekar Jaya began as a group dedicated to traditional Balinese music, but it has since become a vehicle for new composition as well. They have commissioned works from several prominent Balinese composers, including the dean of new Balinese music, Nyoman Windha; and their American members have produced some intriguing cross-cultural compositions of their own.
Both sorts of new pieces are in evidence on their current tour. They will be presenting one of Windha’s latest pieces, Gita Giri Jaya ("Song of the Mountain of Victory"), composed especially for Sekar Jaya. They will also perform two works by long-standing Sekar Jaya members.
Banyuari ("Tributary") is by Michael Tenzer, who teaches composition in the Music Department at Yale University. In it, Tenzer maintains traditional Balinese playing techniques and instrumental idioms, but uses them in a consciously un-Balinese way, drawing on Western ideas of musical form and South Indian techniques of rhythmic composition. He wants to strain the ears of Balinese listeners. By introducing the Western concepts of organic unity and linear development, and trying to reconcile them with the basically cyclical nature of gamelan music, Tenzer wants to make a contribution to Balinese tradition that is uniquely his own.
Evan Ziporyn, a composer on the faculty of MIT, is in some ways even more committed to staging anomalous meetings of diverse musics. He has composed for unique combinations of Balinese instruments with mandolin, clarinet, and other Western instruments. On the current tour he is represented by a new piece, Tire Fire. In it, he combines the gamelan (an exquisitely handcrafted product of a pre-industrial world) with the most American of all industrial instruments, the electric guitar. Tires are Ziporyn’s image for the transnational circulation of culture: they are made from third-world rubber by industrial nations, then sold back to third-world countries, where their availability changes life in both pleasant and unpleasant ways. Ziporyn’s piece dramatizes these cultural collisions.
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In today’s era of identity politics, Sekar Jaya‘s musical explorations may raise some eyebrows. These people were not born to Balinese music; they are not returning to their ‘roots.’ Sekar Jaya‘s composers are border-crossers, and as a result their work is potentially controversial: it can be interpreted as homage or plunder. They have themselves struggled with the issue of musical exploitation, refusing at first to ‘meddle’ with Balinese tradition. But the Balinese themselves have proved to be the most enthusiastic supporters of Sekar Jaya‘s innovative, cross-cultural musical experiments. Some of Bali’s foremost composers have supported Sekar Jaya‘s new pieces, and one of them – Nyoman Windha – has even collaborated with Ziporyn on a piece for gamelan and saxophone quartet.
Nowadays, when "world music" can mean long-distance overdubs and quick trips to the rain forest, Sekar Jaya reminds us of the true potential of intercultural musical exchange. Musical borders can be crossed, but the value of crossing them depends on the extent to which you respect them. Sekar Jaya‘s respect for Balinese music is clear — respect spelled out in years of effort and material sacrifice. If their work proves to be a lasting contribution to a richer world of music for us all, it will be because of the love and respect that sustained their dedication and creativity for the past fourteen years.