Traditions of Gamelan Music in Java
Traditions of Gamelan Music in Java

Author: R. Anderson Sutton

Publisher: CUP Archive

Published: 1991-04-26

Total Pages: 328

ISBN-13: 9780521361538

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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.

Music in Central Java
Music in Central Java

Author: Benjamin Elon Brinner

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 200

ISBN-13:

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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
Gamelan

Author: Sumarsam

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 1995-12-15

Total Pages: 386

ISBN-13: 9780226780115

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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.

Unplayed Melodies
Unplayed Melodies

Author: Marc Perlman

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2004-10-25

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 0520239563

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

Javanese Gamelan and the West
Javanese Gamelan and the West

Author: Sumarsam

Publisher: University Rochester Press

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 222

ISBN-13: 1580464459

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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.

Gamelan Stories
Gamelan Stories

Author: Judith Becker

Publisher: Program for Southeast Asian Studies Arizona State University

Published: 1993

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13:

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The Sign in Music and Literature
The Sign in Music and Literature

Author: Wendy Steiner

Publisher: University of Texas Press

Published: 2014-11-06

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 0292769369

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The notion of semiotics as a universal language that can encompass any object of perception makes it the focus of a revolutionary field of inquiry, the semiotics of art. This volume represents a unique gathering of semiotic approaches to art: from Saussurian linguistics to transformational grammar, from Prague School aesthetics to Peircean pragmatism, from structuralism to poststructuralism. Though concerned specifically with the semiotics of music and literature, the essays reveal the breadth of semiotics’ interdisciplinary appeal, involving specialists in musicology, ethnomusicology, jazz performance, literary criticism, poetics, aesthetics, rhetoric , linguistics, dance, and film. The diversity of authorial training and approach makes this collection a dramatic demonstration of the on-going debates in the field. In many ways the semiotics of art is the testing ground of sign theory as a whole, and work in this subject is as vital to the interests of theoretical semioticians as to students of the arts. It is to both these interests that this volume is addressed.

Javanese Gamelan
Javanese Gamelan

Author: Jennifer Lindsay

Publisher: Singapore ; Toronto : Oxford University Press

Published: 1992

Total Pages: 108

ISBN-13:

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The gamelan music of central Java, until almost a century ago heard only in Java, is now being widely taught all over the world. More and more non-Indonesians are coming into contact with gamelan music through travel or through recordings or performances in their home countries. Yet, while valuable research material on gamelan music is available, this is the only short book available for those coming into contact with gamelan for the first time. The book outlines some of the basic concepts of Javanese gamelan, and provides a listening framework so that the perhaps exotic sounds can be given musical and cultural sense. Included in the text is an explanation of the historical background, the instruments and their making, tuning and notation, the structure of the music, and the place of gamelan music in Javanese society.