Gamelan Girls

Gender, Childhood, and Politics in Balinese Music Ensembles

Sonja Lynn Downing

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780252084553
  9780252042713
• eBook ISBN:
  9780252051579
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Ethnomusicology

In recent years, girls' and mixed-gender ensembles have challenged the tradition of male-dominated gamelan performance. The change heralds a fundamental shift in how Balinese think about gender roles and the gender behavior taught in children's music education. It also makes visible a national reorganization of the arts taking place within debates over issues like women's rights and cultural preservation. Sonja Lynn Downing draws on over a decade of immersive ethnographic work to analyze the ways Balinese musical practices have influenced the processes behind these dramatic changes. As Downing shows, girls and young women assert their agency within the gamelan learning process to challenge entrenched notions of performance and gender. One dramatic result is the creation of new combinations of femininity, musicality, and Balinese identity that resist messages about gendered behavior from the Indonesian nation-state and beyond. Such experimentation expands the accepted gender aesthetics of gamelan performance but also sparks new understanding of the role children can and do play in ongoing debates about identity and power.

1Clubs of Small Women

Organizations and Institutions that Support Female Musicians

A few girls joined gamelans in rare instances in the twentieth century and perhaps earlier, though no record exists of continuously active ensembles for girls beyond a scant few exceptional cases, and the idea of ensembles just for girls did not begin to spread until the twenty-first century. This chapter offers context for that development. The title of this chapter is a play on the title of a book by the late Canadian composer and music scholar, Colin McPhee. Best known for A House in Bali (2000 [1944]), a memoir of the years he lived on the island, McPhee’s main academic work is a detailed monograph, Music in Bali, published posthumously in 1966. McPhee published A Club of Small Men in 1948 and a related article titled “Children and Music in Bali” in 1955, based on his time Bali when he sponsored a group of young boys in 1937 to form a club dedicated to the study and performance of Balinese music. As implied by his book title, the only youths who were encouraged or perhaps allowed to play gamelan were lanang alit, or boys, literally “small men.” I use this implication as a starting point for taking a historical look at different types of social, political, and musical organizations that have supported various ages and genders of gamelan membership in order to set the stage for the specific organizations on which my research has focused.

The title of McPhee’s book and its implied exclusion of girls, istri alit, literally “small women,” from gamelan participation, provides a basis of comparison on which to examine the changing structures and institutions in Bali that have allowed recent and growing opportunities for girls to play gamelan music. By introducing traditional, governmental, and private structures and organizations, how they interact and influence one another, and which musicians they support, I establish the foundation for the rest of the book in positioning girls’ gamelans as fundamentally challenging assumptions of gender role separation in Bali. I focus here on the movement and generation of ideas and attitudes about gender and age within musical contexts. Girls’ gamelans are visible components of a reorganization of the arts currently occurring within the constellation of discourses about women’s rights and cultural preservation in Bali and Indonesia.

Traditional Social Organizations

Seka

Systems of social organization that have precolonial and/or local roots range from small, informal groups within neighborhood organizations to hereditary and hierarchical castes. McPhee introduces a type of informal organization that often supports gamelan activities for men, called seka (alternately transliterated as sekaa, sekaha, seke, or sekehe). McPhee describes their range of purposes, “from road-mending to music making … for the irrigation of the rice fields or repair of the temples to the carefree Kite-Flyers’ Club or Tuak (palm-wine) Drinkers’ Association” (McPhee 1966: 6). Some seka are long-standing, but many form and disband quickly and often. Seka barong, for example, are temporary processional groups formed by boys during the thirteen-day festive period between the Galungan and Kuningan holidays to ngelawang, or walk from village to village performing short skits portraying a barong, a benevolent mythical creature, often on old or borrowed drums and gong chimes and using homemade costumes (Bandem and deBoer 1995: 104; McPhee 1955: 76–78). I Made Lebah, McPhee’s driver and a musician in his own right, told David Harnish that he and Anak Agung Gede Mandera formed such a group as early as 1912, if not earlier (pers. comm., October 12, 2016). Clubs for playing gamelan are usually called seka gong, and they perform for secular and sacred events, festivals, and temple ceremonies. Often they will be asked to fulfill ritual musical functions for nearby temples.

In 1955, McPhee wrote, “a gamelan composed exclusively of small men is unheard of ” (83), though it is difficult to be sure. McPhee’s article gives an early account of children’s participation in a gamelan ensemble, though it is written—indeed, the whole project itself was undertaken—with what ethnomusicologist Amanda Minks calls a “certain colonialist paternalism” (2002: 403fn14).1 Inspired by seeing a seka barong with members aged two to eleven during Galungan and some children playing around on instruments at his home in Sayan, McPhee wanted to see how quickly a group of children could learn in a more formal sit-down ensemble setting. He found various ways to encourage the boys to continue in various forms: after the barong processions and plays stopped, McPhee suggested a genggong (bamboo mouth harp) ensemble, and after that disbanded, a gamelan angklung. He bought the instruments, hired a teacher (I Nengah from Selat village, joined by Lebah), offered rehearsal space, and found the angklung’s initial performance venues. What is not apparent is whether such an idea caught on right away in other villages or was developed again at a later date by Balinese teachers, parents, or children themselves. Lisa Gold reports, however, that Lebah was teaching children’s gamelans in Peliatan and Teges villages as late as 1981. The Peliatan group rehearsed at the Puri Mandara palace on gamelan palegongan instruments, and eventually became what is now Gamelan Tirthasari, an adult gamelan that performs weekly for tourists (pers. comm., October 12, 2016).2

Though McPhee never gives any indication that girls might have had even a chance to play gamelan, there are accounts from the same decade of girls and women playing gamelan in the northern part of the island. Beryl DeZoete and Walter Spies wrote about multiple gamelans of young girls in Singaraja, as they observed in 1935: “There are several village orchestras composed entirely of little girls, who, sitting between their feet, dance vigorously up and down while they play, with astounding delicacy, precision, and ardour. Walking in the country round Singaradja in the evening one may often be led by the sound of a gamelan to a roofed pavilion where the youth and age of the village are gathered round a number of tiny musicians, many of them mere babies, intently rehearsing under the unobtrusive leadership of a slightly older girl” (1958: 237). Sarah Willner adds, “Pak Panji remembered a gamelan wanita angklung from Sangburni village, active perhaps in the 1930’s” (1997). More recently, some villages have a history of individual or pairs of women playing instruments at home or in somewhat private ceremonies (Susilo 2003: 13). These accounts raise questions as to what happened to the groups from the 1930s, and if they were representative of common trends or if they were exceptions. If the former is the case, we must wonder why female—especially young female—instrumentalists became so rare, why they did not play in ensembles for the public for so many decades, and why regard for female instrumentalists declined.

Women’s opportunities to play gamelan music on the island of Java earlier than the late twentieth century are better documented, though also indicate ups and downs of female musicians’ status. Central Javanese women who accompany shadow puppet plays (wayang) on gender instruments maintain an old style of playing associated with female musicians that dates back to at least the mid-nineteenth century (Weiss 2006: 14). In West Java, gamelan degung (an aristocratic genre of Sundanese gamelan) ensembles for women started in the 1950s as a leisure activity thought to be appropriate for female students—teenage girls and young women in their twenties—to take part in. Here other similar groups quickly followed, including adult women’s groups, organized through neighborhoods and places of work. Women’s degung ensembles became popular to hire for weddings through the 1950s and 1960s. President Sukarno even requested performances by young women’s gamelan degung when visiting Bandung. By the late 1970s, degung ensembles with only male musicians resurged in popularity while women started leaning more toward singing or dancing, as singers were added to degung ensembles and as jaipongan dance (a modern genre of Sundanese dance) became popular (Swindells 2004: 30–34, 199).

Caste

In contrast to the voluntary nature of seka, a hierarchical caste system is prevalent in much of Bali and historically may have determined which women could play gamelan. Today, among Balinese-Hindus on the island, about 10 percent are born into one of the three highest caste levels known as the triwangsa: Brahmana, Satria, or Wesia. The other 90 percent are known as Sudra, or commoners. This structure was a combination of an ancient system of origin temples overlaid with South Asian Hindu castes (Lansing 2006: 55), and was based on a feudal system of rice production and distribution, where the Sudra were farmers and triwangsa members were priests and aristocracy (Fagertun 2017: 333; C. Geertz 1980: 129). Caste level influences the level and specific vocabulary of Balinese language spoken, the height of structures in homes, marriage possibilities and kinship (H. Geertz and C. Geertz 1975: 6–7, 31), and aspects of cremation rituals. The caste system in Bali went through multiple changes in the twentieth century, starting with the Dutch standardizing local variability and enforcing strict separations (Picard 1999: 20). People in some parts of Bali then largely abandoned it after Indonesian independence in favor of more democratic ideals and in reaction to tensions over loss of land ownership and control (Robinson 1995: 248). Some families dropped their high caste level and associated names during the political tensions in the 1960s. More recently, caste identifications have been strengthened as part of efforts to preserve Balinese culture; though they no longer strictly determine life path, they intersect with class and gender in regard to financial potential (Fagertun 2017), social status, profession, and political power.

The richness in Balinese performing arts owes much to precolonial court patronage with artistic innovation fostered by competition between rival courts of the island’s several kingdoms, each wanting to outdo the others in wealth and sophistication (Vickers 1989: 53–54). Only a few sources indicate who those musicians were; some evidence suggests female musicians in Bali and Java centuries ago. The earliest sources are the ninth-century carved reliefs in the ancient Buddhist temple of Borobudur that “could possibly represent scenes familiar to the inhabitants of the Hindu courts of ancient Java” (Vickers 1985: 161fn43), themselves predecessors of later Hindu courts in Bali. Texts like the sixteenth-century “Malat,” an epic poem about the legendary Prince Panji, describe women playing instruments. Other sources dating from the nineteenth century, including the Aji Gurnita (Teachings of Music) manuscripts, palm-leaf inscriptions, and paintings, clearly depict women, as well as men, playing gamelan instruments. In each of these cases, the portrayals of their dress, hairstyles, and facial features indicate that they were women of the court (Vickers 1985: 161). Though today assumptions abound that women playing gamelan is a new development, I talked to women of high caste who spoke of generations of women in their families playing instrumental music (Ida Ayu Wayan Arya Satyani, pers. comm., May 24, 2006; Cok Sawitri, pers. comm., July 30, 2006), intensifying the question as to what happened in the twentieth century that removed female instrumentalists from visibility. I discuss some possible answers in chapter 3.

Banjar

One of the most important structures in Balinese life today is the banjar, or neighborhood organization. Initially part of the feudal system in support of ruling kingdoms since at least the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century, the banjar system was separated from the royalty by the Dutch in the early twentieth century, and made into wards of the village (Vickers 1989: 47, 133). As the royalty weakened over the twentieth century, individual banjar took over gamelan management, maintenance, and funding, and older court instruments were melted down into the new and fashionable gamelan gong kebyar. Banjar meetings are now led by an elected head and conducted democratically (Tenzer 2000: 80), with every male member given equal weight in discussion, disputes solved by consensus, regardless of caste. Members of seka generally come exclusively from the same banjar (H. Geertz and C. Geertz 1975: 158). Banjar and seka finances, including support for gamelan maintenance, teaching, and transportation, are contributed to collectively. Gamelan rehearsals are equalizing contexts where members of different statuses, otherwise traditionally separated by different seating heights, sit side by side at their instruments. Musical roles may be filled by any caste level, though nonmusical leadership positions, when they are available, may be given to those of higher caste (Tenzer 2000: 83). Traditionally, boys interested in learning gamelan would learn at home if they were lucky to be born into a musical family, and/or sit in with the banjar’s seka gong if there happened to be an opening. Learning as they went, they would be absorbed into the village’s adult group one by one (McPhee 1966: 7–8).3 Often boys are encouraged to play instruments that their fathers’ had specialized on.

McPhee described many styles of music and documented the changes that were occurring in music and dance performance during the time when he lived in Bali in the 1930s, namely the explosion of kebyar’s popularity. Now the most commonly played genre among adult and children’s seka gong, gamelan gong kebyar is an ensemble for about twenty-five musicians. It includes metal-keyed instruments, rows of gong chimes, a few hanging gongs, and kendang, and can also include suling and rebab.4 Vocalists may be added, as well, depending on the piece. Gong kebyar ensembles may play newly composed secular pieces or traditional and ritual pieces from older genres; repertoire includes instrumental pieces and those that accompany dance and/or theater. Pieces are through-composed and there is generally little room for improvisation, though some pieces are open-ended depending on the dancer, actor or actors, and ritual needs. Characteristic of Balinese gamelan is the frequent use of rapidly interlocking parts called kotekan, which also require significant experience, lots of practice, or both. Written notation is not used except on the part of some individual composers; learning a new piece requires intensive rehearsal time. The overall aesthetic of gong kebyar is ensemble virtuosity, where groups aim to impress not through any individual outstanding musician, but by the precision, uniformity, and cohesion of the group as a whole (Tenzer 2000: 71–114).

One exception to the otherwise common rule in the latter half of the twentieth century that only boys and men played gamelan in banjar groups is a girls’ gamelan on the tiny island of Nusa Lembongan, off the southern coast of Gianyar Regency, just to the n...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Spellings and Acronyms
• Introduction. Girls Playing Loud: The Significance of Girls’ Gamelans in Bali
• 1 Clubs of Small Women: Organizations and Institutions that Support Female Musicians
• 2 Support and Satisfaction: Sanggar and Their Advantages
• 3 Arjuna’s Angels: The Cultural Politics of Balinese Identity, Music, and Gender
• 4 Gamelan vs. Cell Phones: The Cultural Politics of Children, Music, and Globalization
• 5 Leading Girls in Gamelan: Embodiment and Agency in Practice and Performance
• 6 Playing in the Dark: Old Memories and Current Challenges
• Conclusion: Mulo Keweh Megambel (Indeed, Playing Gamelan Is Difficult)
• Notes
• Glossary
• References
• Index
• Back cover