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GAMELAN: CULTURAL INTERACTION AND MUSICAL DEVELOPMENT IN CENTRAL JAVA by Sumarsam (The University of Chicago Press, 1995)
Gamelan is the first major study of Central Javanese gamelan music in English by someone who is both a practising Javanese musician and an academic employed at a Western University (Wesleyan). This book is, in fact, a revised version of Sumarsam's 1992 Ph. D. dissertation (Cornell). I have no doubt that this carefully researched and insightful study will become one of the standard texts on Javanese gamelan.
Gamelan are large-scale ensembles, dominated by bronze or iron gongs and metallophones, which play cyclically-based, polyphonic music in a variety of ceremonial, social and theatrical contexts. In this book, Sumarsam traces the evolution and development of this musical tradition in relation to a number of cultural forces, including Hindu, Islamic, Chinese, European and Mestizo.
Sumarsam is a happy example of the harmonious confluence of "insider" and "outsider" perspectives in ethnomusicology - a difficult achievement if the on-going debate on emic-etic approaches within the discipline is any yardstick. This author has successfully brought together the best of Western academic scholarship with his own "insider" performance knowledge and intuition as an established practitioner of Javanese music.
This book is not designed primarily as a descriptive study of gamelan music in which the various elements of the tradition (instruments, performance techniques, musical structure and style etc.) are presented and discussed. Although the focus of the study is certainly gamelan music (especially in Chapters 3 and 4), and these aspects are, in fact, covered in the course of the book, the author rightly considers gamelan contextually both in relation to other closely related art forms - literature, puppetry, dance and theatre - and as interaction between various internal and external cultural forces in Java.
Sumarsam's work is a valuable synthesis of existing source material and scholarship on the development of Javanese gamelan which informs, explains and generally demystifies many aspects of contemporary practice through its many...