This volume describes the adventures of two central characters - John, an American student who travels to Java, and Joko, a Javanese musician. Their adventures and exploits lead them through Javanese society and as they travel they explore the variety and range of instruments and performance styles throughout central Java.

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.

In "old-style" Central Javanese wayang, still known to many shadow-puppet performers and musicians in Java today, the male dhalang and his primary accompanist, usually a female gender player, are gendered embodiments of a Javanese aesthetic that has its origins in early Java. Analysis of the musical tradition known as "female style" grimingan—melodies played on the gender as the puppeteer sings, narrates or describes a scene—makes it possible to "listen back" to and reconstruct aesthetics for Javanese performance that can be felt in literary sources as early as the 12th century and that has endured into the present through cultural and political upheaval and globalised change during the colonial and postcolonial periods. Ethnomusicologist Sarah Weiss, herself a gamelan musician who has directed ensembles in Australia and the United States over many years, examines for the first time the musical practices, concepts, stories, changing historical circumstances, and myths that have shaped "female-style" gender playing into a uniquely significant mode of artistic practice. This study is the first large-scale treatment of gender issues in Indonesian music. Integrating the analysis of gender and music with that of aesthetics, this study of the musical synergy between the puppeteer and his female accompanist describes the ways in which shifting gender constructions have helped to shape and change Central Javanese music and theatre performance practice while throwing new light on the history of Javanese gender relations and culture, as well as on the aesthetics of Central Javanese shadow-puppet theatre. PLEASE NOTE that the accompanying CD-ROM is no longer available due to the incompatibility with current file formats.

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

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.

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.

Javanese Gamelan and the West studies the meaning, forms, and traditions of the Javanese performing arts as they developed and changed through their contact with Western culture. Authored by a gamelan performer, teacher, and scholar, the book traces the adaptations in gamelan art as a result of Western colonialism in nineteenth-century Java, showing how Western musical and dramatic practices were domesticated by Javanese performers creating hybrid Javanese-Western art forms, such as with the introduction of brass bands in gendhing mares court music and West Javanese tanjidor, and Western theatrical idioms in contemporary wayang puppet plays. The book also examines the presentation of Javanese gamelan to the West, detailing performances in World's Fairs and American academia and considering its influence on Western performing arts and musical and performance studies. The end result is a comprehensive treatment of the formation of modern Javanese gamelan and a fascinating look at how an art form dramatizes changes and developments in a culture. Sumarsam is a University Professor of Music at Wesleyan University. He is the author of Gamelan: Cultural Interaction and Musical Development in Central Java (University of Chicago Press, 1995) and numerous articles in English and Indonesian. As a gamelan musician and a keen amateur dhalang (puppeteer) of Javanese wayang puppet play, he performs, conducts workshops, and lectures throughout the US, Australia, Europe, and Asia.

With the ongoing development of algorithmic composition programs and communities of practice expanding, algorithmic music faces a turning point. Joining dozens of emerging and established scholars alongside leading practitioners in the field, chapters in this Handbook both describe the state of algorithmic composition and also set the agenda for critical research on and analysis of algorithmic music. Organized into four sections, chapters explore the music's history, utility, community, politics, and potential for mass consumption. Contributors address such issues as the role of algorithms as co-performers, live coding practices, and discussions of the algorithmic culture as it currently exists and what it can potentially contribute society, education, and ecommerce. Chapters engage particularly with post-human perspectives - what new musics are now being found through algorithmic means which humans could not otherwise have made - and, in reciprocation, how algorithmic music is being assimilated back into human culture and what meanings it subsequently takes. Blending technical, artistic, cultural, and scientific viewpoints, this Handbook positions algorithmic music making as an essentially human activity.