ACHAR LASKEWICZ,
Theoretical Work
Paper presented at a conference on popular music in Asia
CONTENTS:
(i) Abstract
(ii) Structure of Paper
(iii) Extended Bibliography
Popular Music
and Integration: New Performance Forms in Bali
Abstract for an article by Zachar Laskewicz
"The future will bring us a diversified and complex world, and not the
uniform cultural landscape which the westerner has dreamt of for various reasons
since the 19th century. . ."
(Pinxten, 1994, pg. 133, translation from Dutch by Z. Laskewicz)
Through the influence of mass communication indoctrinating a certain type of
cultural ideology, many of us are beginning to think that our overbearing
influence will bring about an inevitable movement towards a single world culture
based on a western model. This seems to be particularly evident in the
perpetuation of forms of popular music on broadcasters such as MTV which have
literally taken the world by storm as a common means of cultural communication,
uniting young people regardless of cultural background in a way that has never
before been seen in history. Many of us in ethnomusicological circles lament
this possibility, although the purpose of this article is to demonstrate that
nothing could be further from the truth in relation to Balinese culture. As
Pinxten says, "cultures are tough", and even though it may appear that
they are undergoing a radical transferal towards western ways of thinking and
doing because of the adoption of certain performance forms, this actually
doesn't mean that the essential substance of their original culture is being
lost, merely that they are adapting to change. Anthropology has demonstrated
that culture is not static and is constantly adapting itself to new
circumstances, and this is particularly evident in the Balinese adoption of
western music into new performance forms.
Many myths presently surround Balinese culture, myths which are largely
creations on our part as colonialists or tourists or on the part of the
Indonesian government who have certain advantages in promoting Bali in a
particular way. This certainly affects the way we traditionally approach their
cultural heritage which has to be 'saved at all costs from the dangers of
tourism and western influence.' The fact remains that Bali has its own
remarkable forms of adaptation. They have an ability to adjust to change which
involves absorbing new elements into their world image and changing them in such
a way that it fits their cultural aesthetic. This sometimes gives the misleading
image that the Balinese are open to all cultural influences and threaten to lose
their own cultural identity. Their outward appearance, however, hides a highly
strict way of dealing with the world: reaction and interaction with one another
is based on a complex system of social rules in which they attempt to maintain a
constant balance with their own turbulent inner-selves (see Wikan, 1990). The
result is an outward serenity and a culture which is able to relativise change
in a remarkable way, a particularly 'tough' culture which is able to absorb new
elements but on its own terms.
This ability to change and adapt is particularly evident in their musical
traditions. In the twentieth century alone, the form of contemporary gamelan
known as gong kebyar has developed and since then new music and dance forms have
come and gone, and despite the combined efforts of Western anthropology and the
new Indonesian government to retain a sort of Hindu museum preserving the
remains of ancient Javanese culture, the Balinese have culture has not become
petrified for external observation. My last field-work trip brought many
interesting surprises to demonstrate this. I observed some interesting
performance events set-up on street corners by the local youth which had been
organised by the village community. This included some traditional dance
performances that would suddenly become interspersed with a strange rendering of
disco-dance to the popular music hits which were evidently all the rage, a
strange type of mechanical dancing that seemed to combine Balinese and western
movement aesthetics in a most mysterious way. The main content of this paper is
to discuss these performance forms and how the adoption of 'western popular
music' in this way does not mean that the Balinese are risking in any way their
cultural heritage, but that they are actually enhancing it and making it more
understandable in a dynamically changing world.
Although the primary subject of the paper is the performance forms mentioned
above, a deeper message remains at the base. Music is something more than the
sound it makes, as is demonstrated by the Balinese who use its performance to
interact with the world in a dynamic way. It is through their music that their
world is made sensuous and that they are able to make sense of their changing
environment. 'Music' is more than simply a reflection of a current cultural
situation but through its interactive nature is the organic basis on which
culture lies, and like culture it is prone to constant change. Balinese culture
revitalises itself continually to adapt to new circumstances, and doesn't seem
in danger of 'dying out', at least not as far as they see it anyway.
Major References
Bourdieu, P. (1990). The Logic of Practice. Polity Press. Cambridge.
Kersenboom, S. (1995). Word, Sound, Image: The Life of the Tamil Text. Berg
Publishers, Oxford.
Laskewicz, Z. (1996). "Balinese Music as an Embedded Sign", in
Proceedings of the 5th International Music Semiotics Conference, Bologna
Pinxten, R. (1994) Culturen Sterven Langzaam: Over Intercultural Communication. Hadewijch.
Antwerpen.
Tenzer, M. (1991). Music in Bali. Periplus Editions. Singapore.
Vickers, A. Bali: A Paradise Created. Periplus Editions. Singapore.
Wikan, W. (1990) Managing Turbulent Hearts: A Balinese Formula for Living. The
University of Chicago Press.
Development, Change and Integration:
Popular Music in Balinese Performance in the 20th Century
by Zachar Laskewicz
"The future will bring us a diversified and complex world, and not the
uniform cultural landscape which the Westerner has dreamt of for various reasons
since the 19th century. . ."
(Pinxten 1994: 133, translated from Dutch by the author)
Contemporary anthropology seems to have transcended the structuralist notion of
culture viewed as something existing outside or above the dynamic force of
individuals. It seems in this post-structuralist day and age that viewing
culture as an entity in a constant state of flux is no longer a problematic
issue, just as it is no longer difficult to suggest that the arts are more than
simply a 'reflection' of a given culture but a force which actively brings about
cultural change. Wading through the large amount of material written about
Balinese music one quickly gets the impression that Western theorists-especially
ethnomusicologists-are in their own way attempting to save the Balinese culture
from their own change, be that in their efforts to notate and fix in a permanent
form traditions before they disappear, or through idolising those who were able
to maintain a reliable record of what the old forms of Balinese music were
actually like. From developments in different academic disciplines this may seem
now a paradox: an apparent attempt to protect the culture from its own
development in a world in which we realise that change is the only given fact
cultural studies can offer us. In this chapter the primary purpose is to
demonstrate that-in Bali at least-the dynamic ability a culture has to change,
the factors that enable a culture to bring about that change, and the multiform
products in which that development is expressed, can provide the theorist with
important material that gives a real insight into how culture works. This stands
opposed to the prevailing traditional approach in musicology which provides a
description of music at one particular static point in time, and further,
attempts to generalise that to all music. Tradition as a dynamic entity or force
which-thanks to its art forms-brings about cultural change, is the foundation
point for this chapter. It begins with the conception that through the
performance of or participation in music and dance, the participants are able to
externalise attitudes to their spatial and temporal environment. It is therefore
an essential tool for understanding: as Becker (1979: 197) has noted, music
systems are one of the ways in which people "conceptualise and make sense
of their world."
In this chapter we discuss particular forms of Balinese 'popular' music which
have helped to bring about cultural change and development: examples are
demonstrated of new Balinese performance forms which are influenced by Western
popular music. In this way, we will show how the Balinese youth of today are
finding it increasingly necessary to combine popular music with their
traditional forms so that their environment becomes comprehensible in a rapidly
changing world. I believe that it is through this active interaction with their
environment in the form of music and dance performance that cultural change
takes place. Music has such a strong connection with change because of its vital
temporal and spatial aspects. It is-certainly in terms of the Balinese
culture-embedded in a spatial and temporal environment in performance, and is
therefore in a constant state of adaption in order to provide the culture with
the tools necessary for understanding that changing world. If we are to help
musicology along on its path to a non-transcendent view of culture, we have to
develop a theoretical model which is sensitive to this change. If music is
allowed to become static, a museum piece or an "object" to be studied
as something abstracted from the parameters of space and time-as it has been
done to a large extent in our own culture, especially within the field of
traditional musicology-it simply stops playing a significant role in
perpetuating culture. In this chapter I wish to demonstrate that intercultural
influences, like the adoption of Western popular forms, do not at all have to be
experienced in a negative way (as is the prevailing tendency in contemporary
ethnomusicology). Instead it has to be seen as inevitable, necessary and vital
change which allows the music to retain comprehensible Balinese structures and
still have significance, for example, to a generation of Balinese youth who have
to deal with a whole new series of Indonesian and other external influences,
including tourism and MTV.
In order to discuss these musical developments, a number of important steps will
be taken. First, we begin by discussing in a more general sense the role of the
artist, and in particular the musician, in culture. After this we move on to a
general discussion of interculturality involved with Balinese and Western art in
the twentieth century. The intention of this is to demonstrate that
intercultural experiences occur-both from a Balinese and a Western
perspective-according to particular cultural agendas necessary to the culture in
question and do not necessarily involve the inundation of one culture by the
other (which seems to be the fear of traditional ethnomusicology). We then move
to a brief discussion of the Balinese approach to signification and their
remarkable ability to adapt to cultural change, and then to a discussion of
musical forms in the twentieth century which are, in the author's opinion, clear
examples of popular musical forms which have provided the Balinese with tools to
be used to actively adapt to rapid cultural change. Finally, we end on a
discussion of new music and dance forms which are emerging from the Balinese
youth of today, forms combining Western music and traditional forms. It will be
demonstrated that this adaption is not the inundation feared by
ethnomusicologists, leading to the 'uniform cultural landscape' suggested by
Pinxten (1994: 133), but is a dynamic attempt of the Balinese of today to make
sense of a diverging musical environment and to fit it into a particularly
Balinese cultural agenda. As Pinxten suggests, cultures 'die' slower than we may
like to think.
We begin, then, with a brief discussion of the role of the artist in society. I
Wayan Dibia, an important composer, choreographer and academic based at the STSI
in Denpasar, Bali (the Indonesian College of the Arts), suggested that the
composer plays a critical role in culture by bridging two opposing poles. [1] I
have extended his image of the composer to that of the artist in general. On the
one hand, the artist plays the role of the innovator in that he or she actively
creates new forms and structures from his or her own experience of the old to
adapt to new and changing environments. Thanks to terminology adopted from
language education (Nunan 1991: 63), I shall refer to this as the 'bottom-up'
approach to artistic creation, involved with 'inside the head knowledge' (Nunan
1991: 18). On the other hand, the artist has an important role to play in the
perpetuation of his or her culture, in Dibia's case 'Balinese culture', which we
could refer to as 'outside of the head knowledge' (Nunan 1991: 18), in other
words knowledge which is perpetuated for purposes not under the artist's own
control, i.e. for the Indonesian state. I shall refer to this as the 'top-down'
approach. According to Dibia, the composer retains a strategic position between
perpetuation and innovation, a relationship which is never entirely easy to
balance: if an artist's work has a tendency towards innovation, then he or she
will have difficulty finding an audience. If, on the other hand, the artist has
a tendency towards perpetuation, this will lead to staticity and eventual
stagnation. We finish up therefore with two important areas: to what extent does
contemporary (Balinese) art take a 'top-down' approach, i.e. as a sociocultural
imposition on the artist who blindly perpetuates a certain way of thinking and
experiencing reality, or from the 'bottom-up', with the artist as a dynamic and
active individual who questions the surrounding systems and presents his or her
own image of that reality which gradually leads to cultural change. It will be
suggested that cycles have taken place in contemporary Balinese art dependent on
particular sociopolitical situations: forms emerging fromthe 'bottom-up', often
with enormous popular support because of their dynamic nature, end up under the
control of institutions and the state and become increasingly more influenced
from the 'top-down', losing therefore their popularity and becoming elitist. It
will be suggested that the cycle is continuing and that new forms emerging from
the 'bottom-up' are being created by the Balinese youth of today.
In a world which is being made increasingly smaller by continually improving
travel possibilities, as well as the inevitable influence telecommunications,
internet and television have had, interculturality is an unavoidable issue. In
this day and age, cultures are able to understand one another by interacting
directly with other cultures, a possibility which is becoming increasingly
easier and increasingly more a living reality. As mentioned, many
ethnomusicologists fear intercultural influence, especially from the West, being
only interested in preserving what they can of the 'real' culture which may
remain in outposts which still haven't been reached by twentieth century
technology. Intercultural influence, however, has been a strongly present factor
in both Balinese and Western art in the twentieth century, and in this
discussion I would like to briefly demonstrate that the Balinese culture and our
own have both used intercultural influences for particular epistemological
purposes.
For a start, at the beginning of the twentieth century Westerners had economic
and political concerns in Asia: colonialism dictated an epistemological approach
to Asia which defined it in terms of its contrast to Western culture. Where
"Eastern society [was] static and timeless," for example, Western
society contrasted by being in a constant "process of economic
transitions" (Robison 1981: 97). This 'orientalism' (Said 1985), this
epistemology with regards to Asian culture, was inevitably to filter down to
Western art, which unknowingly would in its own way perpetuate these exotic
images of a static and timeless Eastern culture, and these epistemologies would
be used in their turn for particular artistic purposes. The first concrete
example that comes to mind is, of course, French impressionism, particularly
impressionism in music. Impressionism was a term applied to a movement in art in
France in the late 19th century, consisting mainly of non-narrative paintings
demonstrating an attention to momentary effects of light, atmosphere or movement
(Turner 1996: 151). A particularly strong example of the influence of oriental
'exoticism' was in the work of Paul Gauguin, initially a patron of the
impressionists and an important painter in the later stages of the movement. He
was drawn by the "lure of the exotic", just as it was the 'primitive'
of the orient which "fuelled his art, became his life and ultimately his
death" (Hodge 1996: 142). In this movement, orientalism was to have a
similar influence in music, expressed perfectly in the music of Claude-Achille
Debussy (1962-1918). After a brief experience of Eastern music-in this case
Javanese gamelan-at the 1889 Paris exhibition, many of his compositions were to
adopt vague and gentle pentatonicisms, something which was ultimately unrelated
to Javanese musical form, connected instead to a Western conception of what the
Eastern world was like at that time in history. Although his seeming adoption of
Eastern forms reflected an extremely superficial knowledge of 'oriental' music,
"Debussy's orientalisms, so perfectly wedded to his seductive,
expressionist idiom, became an integral part of French music" (Brindle
1987: 133). This is a clear example of influence from Eastern culture on the
West according to a Western cultural agenda.
Another clear example is the attraction of the orient because it answers to
particular Western desires to overcome the stifling cultural conventions which
are characteristic of a Western society based epistemologically on the empirical
sciences. According to Innes, "the point of borrowing from African
sculpture or Balinese dance is that because it is primitive it embodies
an alien value scale, just as the point of exalting the unconscious and
emotional side of human nature is intended to provide an antidote to a
civilisation that almost exclusively emphasises the rational intellectual"
[2] (Innes 1981: 10). Rather than seeing the Balinese as exotic and distant, we
view them as being downright primitive and exalt this state of consciousness in
our own art. A good example of this epistemological approach can be found in the
writings of the famous French theatre director and theorist Antonin Artaud. In
1931 in Paris at the Colonial Exhibition, the first full group of Balinese
dancers and musicians performed in Europe, presenting concerts before
"wildly enthusiastic audiences," (Bandem 1981: 77) which included
Artaud. For him, the production was in an 'archaic tongue' which was apparently
understood by neither the performers nor the priests. It became for Artaud an
incantation, and the Balinese dancers themselves 'three-dimensional heiroglyphs'
(Artaud 1991), where direct emotional states were communicated by their 'highly
formalised codification' (Innes 1981: 16). This conception of Eastern
performances may have been highly important and necessary for the development of
Western theatre which was then stifled in a realism deficient of ritual
symbolism, but if the truth be known, its true relationship to Balinese theatre
is somewhat dubious: he seems to have ignored the basic characters of Balinese
drama-the penasar or parekan-which provide a translation of
ancient texts into an understandable dialogue for the Balinese audience, and was
evidently not aware that the Balinese themselves mostly have a rudimentary
knowledge of these 'incantation-like' languages.
Further influences of Balinese or Indonesian art on the West are many and
manifold, and include the educational experiments of Carl Orff (born in Munich,
10 July 1895) who literally took the Javanese gamelan as a modelling system to
educate children as part of the progressive Güntherschule method. This was in
the form of simplified percussion instruments and the purpose was to demonstrate
that absolutely no one completely lacked musicality: "He simplified his
materials and procedures and drew upon the forms of vocal expression natural to
the child: inarticulate calls, spoken words, traditional rhymes, and the singing
of melodic phrases, many of them based on the pentatonic scales of the
xylophones and metallophones" taken from the Javanese gamelan (Sadie: 708).
Useful, of course, for particular Western purposes, but far distant from a true
understanding of the intricate epistemological approaches to time and space
inherent in the Javanese gamelan.
Another more modern example from contemporary music is the minimalist school,
represented most fully by the likes of Philip Glass and Steve Reich. The school
of minimalism, which began around 1970, "had the specific aim not only of
simplicity and non-cerebralism, but of reducing demands on the listener's
perception and intellect to a minimum. Minimalist music is therefore directed
towards a specific public-listeners who prefer to avoid the stress and turmoil
of our time" (Brindle 1987: 93). Indian and Indonesian music have been
particularly important influences to minimalist composers in their attempts to
cultivate a "simpler style in which subtleties of melody and rhythm could
be exploited" (Grout 1988: 877-879). Steve Reich (born in New York, 1936),
one of the main protagonists of the minimalist school, actually studied Balinese
Gamelan in California (Hitchcock 1986): one of the main features of his music is
the adoption of the Balinese kotekan technique. The intricate complexity
of Balinese music, however, stands in a clear contrast to the intended
simplification of a complex and distant Western musical tradition, and this is
again an example of the the West adopting Balinese forms according to its own
clear agenda.
We can't allow ourselves to forget, however, the influence of the West on Bali
in the first half in the twentieth century, changes which occurred similarly
according to a Balinese agenda. At a time of dynamic change and development,
namely the infiltration of Dutch colonialism and the downfall of the Balinese
feudal system, a number of Western artists and anthropologists found themselves
on Bali, finding there the answer to many of their unfulfilled dreams in the
West, and were inevitably influenced by the Balinese way of experiencing their
world. Here we can mention the names of Walter Spies (graphic artist), Colin
McPhee (composer/ethnomusicologist), Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson and Beryl de
Zoete (anthropologists). Just as Bali was to have an influence on these people,
they in their turn had an influence on the Balinese culture, which is an
interesting area of discussion considering many of those 'scientists' were
attempting to give an objective account of what Balinese culture was like, but
were at the same time helping it to change and develop. Perhaps the most
influential example is Walter Spies, a German artist who helped to found an art
association called Pita Maha-with the help of the Dutch painter Rudolph
Bonnet-primarily because "Balinese painting was suffering from a severe
lack of individual expression" in the 1930s: "Hundreds of Balinese
artists visited Spies's house and with his encouragement they began for the
first time to draw their inspiration from the scenes of everyday life"
(Dalton 1997: 94). Balinese artists learned from Spies about perspective and
human anatomy, and experimented with non-traditional colours. Although this
occurred according to a Western artistic epistemology, the Balinese took
advantage of it to help themselves out of a state of artistic stagnation and
have developed an industry in the new school of Balinese painting, which has
become an important source of revenue among visiting tourists. Walter Spies and
his friends were also to commission performances of dances in the villages in
which they had personal contacts, and Spies was even partly responsible for
removing the "cak" chorus from the Sanghyang Dedari
ritual context and combine it with a storyline, precisely for the purpose of
demonstrating this to his friends (Bandem 1981: 65). This, combined with the
Ramayana storyline, was to become one of the most popular tourist performances
and has provided the Balinese with perhaps their most lucrative source of
revenue. Colin McPhee himself, the composer who ended up creating one of the
most 'definitive' volumes on Balinese gamelan (McPhee 1966) was involved in his
research on Bali during this period of dynamic change. Thanks to McPhee, many of
the older gamelan forms such as the Gong Gambuh, Gamelan Semar
Pegulingan and the Gong Gede were 'saved' from being lost in
oblivion. It seems so unusual now when looking back at his writings from this
period. Based in a Western ethnomusicological desire to retain forever musical
forms which no longer communicate to a given generation of artists, he attempted
to form new gamelan groups on abandoned instruments: "I had organised a new
gamelan in Sayan for the sole purpose of reviving the old ceremonial music that
was so rapidly being forgotten. It seemed to me sad that this pure and noble
music, so tranquil, so perfectly proportioned, should be lost forever"
(McPhee 1944: 25). But even McPhee could see the difficulty of his predicament,
someone caught up with Western values in a culture that had no difficulty in
accepting the necessity for constant change: "As for me-I had succeeded in
helping prolong the past. To delay it even for a day, change which brought
inevitable decline, was my one wish. . . Who had benefited? None" (Oja
1990: 133). According to Oja, however, McPhee underestimated the influence of
his work. It is interesting to note that many Balinese composers of today turn
to his work when trying to relate their compositions to older musical forms.
There have evidently been strong influences from both the Western and the
Balinese worlds on one another, and we have to realise that interculturality is
a phenomenon we can't avoid when looking at Balinese contemporary culture,
especially in the case of the influence and combination of popular music on
Balinese contemporary forms. Before we move to this area, I think its important
to discuss the particular Balinese epistemological approach to meaning which
affects the way they take on intercultural influences.
A particular phrase originating from Sanskrit is of particular significance to
the Balinese-Desa Kala Patra-because it reflects an alternative approach
to signification which incorporates environmental change into their model of
understanding. Desa Kala Patra means for the Balinese that the
signification of a given event is dependent on where, when and for whom the
event takes place, meaning that a given 'sign' can mean something entirely
different in a different temporal/spatial environment. Translated from Sanskrit,
Desa refers to 'region' (space), Kala refers to time and Patra
to 'vessel', which can be seen as the impersonation of a given act in a given
context. According to the Balinese, the meaning of something could change
depending on when it happens, where it happens and by whom, suggesting that they
have a model which is much more conducive to sociocultural change, which
explains the Balinese ability to adapt their traditions to a changing world.
This adaption is implicit in their understanding of meaning. We can demonstrate
an example taken directly from Balinese traditional culture. The impact of the
rapidly increasing tourist market after the fear of the bloody massacres in 1965
had died down began to cause unrest in Bali: traditional temple dances which
were usually reserved for sacred purposes in the most sacred part of the temple
(jeroan) were being performed for tourists. In 1971, a team of scholars
came together to determine which dances were to be sacred, and which were to be
secular (Ballinger 1993: 58), so that there could be no more ambiguity, and new
pieces were composed-such as the Panyembrama-which were designed only to
be performed to welcome tourists, and not the gods, even though the music and
the movements were basically a mixture of traditional sources from the the jeroan
collected from contrasting places all around the island. Panyembrama,
composed by I Gusti Gedé Raka in 1967 and reworked by the famous composer I
Wayan Beratha in 1970 (Bandem 1981: 134), was based on the sacred Rejang
dance, and was composed for the specific function of welcoming tourists at the
airport in Denpasar. According to the tenets of Desa Kala Patra, the Panyembrama
welcoming composition is now considered such a beautiful dance composition in
its own right that it has been brought back into traditional Balinese life,
being used "in the context of a village Odalan, where once Mendet or Gabor
might have been done" (Bandem 1981: 135). Here the meaning of a given dance
composition is updated according to environmental circumstances and necessities:
what two years previously may have been invented for a secular context can in
the present have a sacred meaning. Nothing has the permanency of meaning longed
for by Western theorists, and it is precisely through this ability to update its
symbolic forms that Balinese culture is able to retain a living cultural
tradition. This will become even clearer with examples from new forms created by
the Balinese youth of today. The following step, however, is an exploration of
the 'popular' music form-Gong Kebyar-which emerged during the period in
which the classical traditions supported by the royal families gradually
diminished. This form became enormously popular around the time of enormous
change and cultural ferment brought about by a combination of the presence of
Western artists and anthropologists (such as Walter Spies, as discussed
previously), Dutch colonialism which was increasingly undermining the cultural
role of the Balinese feudal system, and the growing tourist trade. This musical
form was to spread across Bali at an incredible speed and although now seen as
'klasik', it still continues to play an important role in Balinese popular life.
The word kebyar can be literally translated as 'bursting' into flame
(like a fire) or bloom (like a flower), which is a relatively correct analogy
for the music itself as it is filled with sudden bursts of sound and
electrifying changes. It emerged in a period of artistic ferment in North Bali,
and then spread at a lightning tempo across the island, replacing the existing
forms: older gamelans were sometimes melted down and reformed into the Kebyar
groups which eventually became the basis for all contemporary Balinese music.
Since colonialism had depleted support from noble houses because of the lack of
taxes on a village level, the gamelan ensembles reverted to the villages which
put the control of the music into the hands of the villagers themselves. The
changes on the island on both a political and a cultural level meant that a new
dynamic form of musical communication was necessary, one that stood against the
staidness of the then existing forms. Gong Kebyar certainly fulfilled
these needs: a musical form accompanied by dance came into existence which was
in a sense 'abstract'. There were no 'stock characters': the function of the
dancer was to present a "kaleidoscope of moods and emotions that
reflect[ed] the rapidly changing character of the music itself" (Ornstein
1980: 24). The Balinese revelled in the excitement caused by the development of
the new form: gamelan groups from across the island began a quest which is
continuing today to out do one another in large-scale musical contests. Balinese
'mega-stars' of the form recognisable in our own popular music, demonstrating
remarkable musical or dance technique, would become popular for a short time
before being lost again into oblivion. Gong Kebyar, and its accompanying
dance forms, was so much more than simply a musical form: it brought with it an
entirely new way for the Balinese to relate to their environment and one
another, and in the author's opinion was used as a tool to adapt to rapid
sociopolitical and cultural changes that the twentieth century brought with it.
In many ways it still plays that role, but unfortunately the form has developed
to such a degree that its 'klasik' status puts it out of the reach of the
average Balinese youth who lacks the specialisation brought about now by the
music academies which have taken the role played earlier by the villages and
have therefore now become the institutions for musical innovation and change.
The Gong Kebyar form itself, being controlled from within the musical
academies which are actually instruments of the Indonesian republic, is now used
for particular Indonesian political functions within both Indonesia and on a
world stage, and in this regard its role as a 'popular' form has been reduced.
The STSI (the Indonesian College of the Arts) comes directly under the control
of the Directorate General of Higher Education within the Ministry of Education
and Culture (Hough 1992: 14), and the institutions's role is "to manifest
at the regional level the current discourse of national culture" (Hough
1992: 15). In the contemporary world, it would seem that the Indonesian state
would like to have complete control over contemporary Balinese musical forms
from within the academies. Balinese performance, as has been demonstrated in the
work of Hough, has became a tool for the perpetuation of Indonesian ideals and
to demonstrate its ethnic diversity and the fact that it was "united in the
common purpose of national development" (Hough 1992: 18). Lavish new
productions were created with casts of hundreds [3] which were clearly political
displays to the rest of the world: the Indonesian state is rich in diversity and
has control over this diversity, and what's more, can arrange mega-spectacles
for international demonstrations. According to Hough, the New Order period
"has been characterised by State intervention in cultural production
throughout the archipelago. The co-option or appropriation of specific ethnic
cultural forms to a national context appears to be a conscious effort by the
state to enhance its own position and promote its economic and social programmes
of development." (Hough 1992: 1). We can see this as being part of moving
in a general cycle: in the past, before the advent of Gong Kebyar,
Hindu-Balinese rulers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries served to
standardise Balinese culture. Now, after a period of independent change and
development, "government-sponsored schools, research teams, and creative
projects" from the Indonesian state itself is again exerting power on
performance forms. It will be demonstrated further in this chapter, however,
that new forms are again developing external to the academies, influenced by or
based on Western popular music which is still not under the control of the state
in the way that the Gong Kebyar of today is. It will be demonstrated that
these new forms are essential for young people, just as Gong Kebyar was
at the turn of the century, to make sense of a rapidly changing world.
According to I Nyoman Wenten, the last twenty years have seen a significant
decline in the overall dedication of people in the villages to the gamelan and
other artistic forms (Bakan 1993: 391). As has been mentioned, Gong Kebyar
is a closed world to the average Balinese teenager of today who is no longer
able to participate because he or she lacks the necessary musical education in
the academies, and participation in the active process of music-making is an
important part of partaking in this type of 'musical knowledge'. It is natural
therefore that other musical forms will arise to fulfil some of the roles that Gong
Kebyar can no longer fulfil. One of these forms, of particular importance,
is known as Gong Baleganjur and is basically a processional ensemble of
cymbal players, drums and gongs. A relatively new tradition known as Kreasi
Baleganjur has arisen around this form, and the reader is directed to an
interesting document on the subject (Bakan 1993). It retains many of the
elements of popular music because of its comparative simplicity and the dramatic
intensity of group performances, as well as the well-known tradition of
competitions and festivals comparable to that of Gong Kebyar. Bakan
discusses the popularity of this form in terms of the Balinese necessity for ramai,
or "crowdedness" as he translates the term. This is a combination
of the crowd, the competition, the noise and the pageantry into which the
individual can briefly escape "from his everyday world of controlled and
constantly evaluated self-presentation" (Bakan 1993: 337). We can compare
this concept of ramai to the crowded vitality at rock concerts or in
discos in the West, something the youth of today evidently need: losing
themselves within a cultural whole in which the individual becomes part of the
mass. In the context of this chapter, however there is not enough space for a
discussion of historical information and contemporary implications for Balinese
society concerning Kreasi Baleganjur in particular, although I would like
to end this chapter with a discussion of forms influenced directly by Western
popular music.
According to Bakan, "the influx of Western popular music culture into Bali
has created an awareness of a certain kind of musical energy and intensity that
is very appealing to Balinese youth" (Bakan 1993: 335). Bakan goes on to
say that even Gong Kebyar lacks communicative potential for the average
youth of today because of the enormous technical skill required. Western popular
music, however, has had the advantage that it escapes some of the restrictions
imposed by the Indonesian state, and that it is accessible to a more general
public of Balinese youth who have grown up with it in terms of foreign
recordings and television broadcasts such as MTV. In Indonesia itself, the pop
medium has enjoyed a relative freedom when compared to the more traditional art
forms taught in the academies, simply because the Indonesian state considers it
less necessary to suppress because of its non-Indonesian origin. In 1995
Indonesia's Minister of Research and Technology "stunned pop musicians in
Jakarta by declaring rap to be bereft of any artistic value," referring to
this particular popular form as both 'dirty' and 'disgusting' (Hadiz 1995). Pop
music as an industry within Indonesia is a growing phenomenon, and with the
advent of popular figures such as Iwan Fals, the state is beginning to realise
the dangerous potential of this musical form, and as a result has been banning
concerts here and there, especially when political matters are at hand.
Unfortunately for the state, however, youths are bombarded with foreign images
of music via MTV and the like, something which is not easily controlled by
governmental decree. In Bali, just like in other parts of Indonesia, the general
contemporary aesthetics tend towards their Indonesian and Western pop stars.
According to Barth, pop music "radiates the same intensity of attraction
[to the Balinese] as among Western youth" (Barth 1993: 246). An increasing
number of Balinese young people are attending the discos in Sanur and Kuta which
have sprung up to cater to the tastes of tourists, and this has all had an
irrevocable affect on new forms of Balinese performance.
As mentioned at the beginning of the chapter, music and dance are tools we use
to experience or understand our environment, and it is only natural, therefore,
that the Balinese will feel the necessity to combine and mix traditional
forms-which they are familiar with from their ritual lives-with Western popular
music, which is becoming more and more a standard part of Balinese existence.
Recently, a new form has developed on Bali which is known as 'Dansa'. It is a
type of choreographed disco which involves the Balinese adopting Western popular
music blaring out of speakers positioned on the stage and a number of scantily
clad young girls doing what basically looks like 'disco-dancing', but in a form
which is choreographed from beginning to end: something quite unusual for an
uninitiated Western observer. Such events are often organised by village youth
clubs, held as fund-raisers, and Ballinger blames this on the influence of the
music video televised nationally every Sunday afternoon (Ballinger 1993: 67).
This is a clear example of the Balinese moulding external musical and
dance-based influences into an understandable Balinese form. Sequences of
'Dansa' are always interspersed by traditional Balinese dances, and sometimes
traditional Balinese figures-such as oleg or the female bumblebee figure
from the famous Gong Kebyar dance Oleg Tambulilingan-interrupt or
move between the dancers on stage. The author has been told about various
performance experiments held in schools involving traditional figures
interrupting or interacting with disco-dancing. [4] These combined forms allow
the Balinese youth to 'physically' comprehend the musical influences flooding in
from the West, musical influences which are obviously a vital communicative form
for the young people of today and have dramatic epistemological consequences for
how they experience the world in general. This seems to me very much a
'bottom-up' approach to artistic creation: one where the artists are using their
own ideas directly to create an understandable performance environment.
As mentioned, ethnomusicology has a habit of viewing the influence of Western
(popular) music on 'traditional' forms as negative-for example Ornstein
discusses the horrors of Western popular music having gained a foothold on Bali
(Ornstein 1980: 64)-although it is the author's contention that this sort of
change is an obvious necessity and the only way for a culture to survive. The
question is, what is the main attraction of Western pop? According to an
interview held by the author with a young Balinese dancer and musician who sings
for a new 'ethnic fusion' pop group (which will be discussed in more detail
further on), Western music, although lacking the taksu of traditional
dances, [5] has a strong sense of freedom which is not obtainable in the same
way in other musical forms. According to interviews held, it is clear that this
combination of traditional and modern forms is highly popular, but further than
that: they feel that they have a personal obligation to perform these
experiments, to create new performance forms with the surrounding cultural
'tools'. As one feels in cultural phenomena involved with externalised cognitive
phenomena, seeing is simply not enough: Balinese teenagers want to be able to do
it themselves, to experience with their own bodies a cultural interaction with
time and space which creates a new relationship with their environment and leads
inevitably to cultural change and development.
The Balinese, however, are grappling with these new performance forms in that
they are still attempting to find a distinctive Balinese identity within the
popular music genre. There may be many hundred of Balinese 'bands' based on the
Western model, but most copy directly Western models or the current Indonesian
trends (of, for example, singers such as Iwan Fals and his Indonesian
imitators). The author, however, was surprised to find a group with the specific
intention of helping Bali along on the path of finding its own communicative
form within the genre. The group, made up of a well-known Balinese musician and
composer who teaches at the STSI in Denpasar, I Nyoman Astita, and his friends
and family, attempts to combine contemporary Balinese issues with Balinese
musical forms, and of course Western pop, in an effort to set a standard for
Balinese bands in the future. They want to use the music to both perpetuate
Balinese traditional culture and at the same time to adapt its musical forms to
a new musical epistemology inherent in the popular music of the nineties. The
group is called Koka Studio which is a combination of the names of the
two major creative forces behind the group, Komang (a derivative of Nyoman) and
Kadek, and they have called their first tape "Om Swastiastu", which is
a traditional Balinese term for 'welcome'. Nyoman's daughter Tisna explained to
me in an interview [6] that this had the symbolic value of the band's desire to
be welcomed into the Balinese musical world: they see their work as a 'first' on
the Balinese popular music scene, and hope that it catches on. It is also the
name for the first song on the tape. She thinks that Balinese young people are
watching too much Western pop music on television, and that they are hoping to
demonstrate that Bali has its own type of pop music which does not have to
resemble the Western model directly. A video was even made and broadcast in
Denpasar and Jakarta, and this included in addition to gamelan instrument
adapted on a synthesiser, traditional Balinese dance movements and costumes.
As mentioned, the subject matter of the songs themselves are involved with
issues which are of importance to the Balinese of today. These extend from songs
concerning religious issues, such as Canang Sari-involved with the
presentation of offerings to the Balinese spiritual world-to protest songs
trying to cope with the difficult issue of changes to the Balinese environment
brought about by the rapidly growing tourist industry. The song Inguh, for
example, concerns the confusion Balinese people feel because of the continually
decreasing amount of land left for them or their gardens. Having been taken up
by hotels and bungalows, there is no place left anymore for Balinese 'nature',
only a superficial Western tourist world which forces the Balinese to question
their existence and their future. The songs even extend to the reality of the
material world, which is certainly a significant factor to the Balinese of
today: the song Kartu Kredit is a comical account of spending too much
money using a credit card and discovering it at the end of the month. The
collection is an interesting mixture of themes, and the music itself resembles
pretty much a replica of Western pop music forms with the typical addition of a
drum machine and a Western singing style. Despite the idealism implicit in the
band's hope to entirely change the Balinese soundscape, one hopes that such a
venture will at least influence other bands to make similar developments within
their own music in terms of taking on Balinese issues significant to the
Balinese, as well as the recognition of Balinese traditional forms.
Popular music-defined in opposition to 'classical' or 'formal' music-is a
powerful force, one which surrounds us, forcing us to sensually experience the
world in a certain way. It speaks to young people, and is so much more than
simply a reflection of a given age, but is an actual tool used to bring about
cultural change and development. From the contents of this chapter, it is clear
that Bali has seen many different and exciting changes in the twentieth century,
and is evidently continuing to change, as all cultures do and always will do.
The Balinese obviously recognise the importance of these musical forms, and are
adapting to them in a unique way so that their culture doesn't lose touch with a
new generation of young people who are brought up in an entirely different
cultural environment, influenced by various factors such as a new political
regime, a new education system and an abundant and growing tourist industry.
Thanks to their understanding of the importance of change-remember Desa Kala
Patra-the Balinese are protecting their own culture. I'm pretty sure that my
conclusion is the same as many others discussing the Bali of today: having such
a remarkable ability to adapt, the Balinese culture has a promising future, and
certainly not one we have to worry about paternalistically here in the West. In
fact, Balinese music and culture in general is playing a continually more
important role outside Bali. As always, the Balinese are teaching us more than
we may be aware.
Notes
[1] Based on an interview with I Wayan Dibia held at the STSI in Denpasar,
Wednesday 27 August 1997.
[2] Italicised by the author of this chapter.
[3] This form is known as Sendratari: from seni (art), drama, and tari
(dance), a form now used by the Suharto new order for its own sociopolitical
ends.
[4] Interview with I Nyoman Astita and his daughter Tisna, held on September 10
1997 in Denpasar.
[5] Meaning that the music has religious and magical significance inherent in
particular performances.
[6] Interview with I Nyoman Astita and his daughter Tisna, held on September 10
1997 in Denpasar.
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