An important collection of writings on Javanese gamelan and vocal music.

This book is a wide-ranging study of the varieties of gamelan music in contemporary Java seen from a regional perspective. While the focus of most studies of Javanese music has been limited to the court-derived music of Surakarta and Yogyakarta, Sutton goes beyond them to consider also gamelan music of Banyumas, Semarang and east Java as separate regional traditions with distinctive repertoires, styles and techniques of performance and conceptions about music. Sutton's description of these traditions, illustrated with numerous musical examples in Javanese cipher notation, is based on extensive field experience in these areas and is informed by the criteria that Javanese musicians judge to be most important in distinguishing them.

Sounding Out the State of Indonesian Music showcases the breadth and complexity of the music of Indonesia. By bringing together chapters on the merging of Batak musical preferences and popular music aesthetics; the vernacular cosmopolitanism of a Balinese rock band; the burgeoning underground noise scene; the growing interest in kroncong in the United States; and what is included and excluded on Indonesian media, editors Andrew McGraw and Christopher J. Miller expand the scope of Indonesian music studies. Essays analyzing the perception of decline among gamelan musicians in Central Java; changes in performing arts patronage in Bali; how gamelan communities form between Bali and North America; and reflecting on the "refusion" of American mathcore and Balinese gamelan offer new perspectives on more familiar topics. Sounding Out the State of Indonesian Music calls for a new paradigm in popular music studies, grapples with the imperative to decolonialize, and recognizes the field's grounding in diverse forms of practice.

The twentieth century has spawned a great interest in Indonesian music, and now books, articles, and manuscripts can be found that expound exclusively about karawitan (the combined vocal and instrumental music of the gamelan). Scholar Judith Becker has culled several key sources on karawitan into three volumes and has translated them for the benefit of the Western student of the gamelan tradition. The texts in her collection were written over a forty-five-year time period (ca 1930–1975) and include articles by Martopangrawit, Sumarsam, Sastrapustaka, Gitosaprodjo, Sindoesawarno, Poerbapangrawit, Probohardjono, Warsadiningrat, Purbodiningrat, Poerbatjaraka, and Paku Buwana X. The final volume also contains a glossary of technical terms, an appendix of the Javanese cipher notations (titilaras kepatihan), a biographical listing, and an index to the musical pieces (Gendhing).

A long awaited study of musical structure and music cognition, using Javanese gamelan and western classical music as the main points of comparison.

Calling Back the Spirit describes how, in the face of Indonesian and foreign cultural pressures, the Makassarese people of South Sulawesi are defending their local spirit through music and dance. The book examines the ways performers in this corner of Indonesia seek to empower local music and dance in a changing environment.

"Music enveloped the Indian's individual and social life like an atmosphere."-Alice C. Fletcher. Anthropologist Alice C. Fletcher (1838-1923) was a pioneer in the study of Indian music. Originally published in 1900, Indian Story and Song from North America came out of her fieldwork and friendship with the Omahas (among whom she lived), Poncas, Arapahoes, and other tribes. Fletcher provides the stories behind these songs and the scores for authentic Indian melodies in native language (which is also translated into English). They run the gamut of experience, from making war to making love. Fletcher writes: "Universal use of music was because of the belief that it was a medium of communication between man and the unseen. The invisible voice could reach the invisible power that permeates all nature, animating all natural forms. As success depended upon help from this mysterious power, in every avocation, in every undertaking, and in every ceremonial, the Indian appealed to this power through song." When hunting, he sang to insure the aid of the unseen power in capturing game. When confronting danger and death, he sang for strength to meet his fate unflinchingly. In using herbs to heal, the men and women sang to bring the required efficacy. When planting they sang for abundant harvest. In their sports, courtship, and mourning, song increased pleasure and comforted sorrow. All occasions for singing are covered in this volume. The achievement of Alice Fletcher is discussed in an introduction by Helen Myers, associate professor of music at Trinity College and ethnomusicology editor of the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians.

The complex notion of "rasa," as understood by Javanese musicians, refers to a combination of various qualities, including: taste, feeling, affect, mood, sense, inner meaning, a faculty of knowing intuitively, and deep understanding. This leaves us with a number of questions: how is rasa expressed musically? Who or what has rasa, and what sorts of musical, psychological, perceptual, and sociological distinctions enter into this determination? How is the vocabulary of rasa structured, and what does this tell us about traditional Javanese music and aesthetics? In this first book on the subject, Rasa provides an entry into Javanese music as it is conceived by the people who know the tradition best: the musicians themselves. In one of the most thorough explorations of local aesthetics to date, author Marc Benamou argues that musical meaning is above all connotative - hence, not only learned, but learnable. Following several years performing and researching Javanese music in the regional and national cultural center of Solo, Indonesia, Benamou untangles the many meanings of rasa as an aesthetic criterion in Javanese music, particularly in court and court-derived gamelan traditions. While acknowledging that certain universal psychological tendencies may inspire parallel interpretations of musical meaning, Rasa demonstrates just how culturally specific such accrued, shared meanings can be.

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.