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Wayan Gandera and the Hidden History of Gamelan Gong Kebyar

CD Review Essay

Bali South: Gamelan Gong Kebyar & Gamelan Angklung. UCLA Ethnomusicology

Archive Series Vol. 1 (88251 70003 2 8). Recorded by Gertrude Rivers Robinson in

1970. Includes a 22-page booklet with photos, new annotations by I Nyoman Wenten,

Ph.D., and the original notes by Gertrude Rivers Robinson.

Michael Tenzer

University of British Columbia

A new CD of Balinese music featuring the mainstream repertoire forefronted on

Bali South will not strike connoisseurs as anything exceptional. The marketplace is amply

stocked with comparable items. The gamelan gong kebyar featured here on the first four

tracks, the celebrated Gunung Sari of Peliatan village, has been recorded commercially

numerous times since its 1952 world tour—the first such by a Balinese music and dance

troupe—and virtually identical versions of most if not all of the compositions included

have been available elsewhere at one time or another.1 The word kebyar, of course,

describes the flashy, energetic style of Balinese gamelan most famous around the world

and most widespread on the island itself. But there is no reason why the estimable

1 In addition to the original 1973 publication of the music on Bali South, Gunung Sari’s music has been issued (among other places) on Columbia Masterworks (1953), Nonesuch (1969), King Records (1991), Ocora (1994; reissues material first put out by Phillips in 1971), Unesco (1995; originally an LP) and Lyrichord (1997; also originally an LP). Ziporyn’s interesting review of the King release appeared in this journal in 1997. For a discography see Davies 2000. The group’s 1952 tour is the sole topic of Coast 1953. Other, more latter-day Peliatan gamelan groups such as Tirtha Sari have also been recorded and released internationally, sometimes playing some of the same repertoire.

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Gunung Sari cannot, like the Berlin Philharmonic, release multiple recordings of the

same music, especially when it is foreigners, not they, who instigate them. And Gunung

Sari itself, extant in some form since the mid-1920s, has certainly scaled historic

heights—it performed often for Sukarno while he was president, won frequent

competitions at home in the 1930s and ‘40s, and even dropped in to play at the 1931 Paris

Exposition, evoking profuse responses from Artaud, Cocteau, Milhaud, and a roster of

other impressionable auds and eaus in the Paris intelligentsia.

I don’t think it is going too far to say that Western experiences of Gunung Sari

crystallized the durable images and sounds of young, sensual “Bali dancers” that were

adopted and diffused into Western modernist consciousness. Bali South, however, is by

all appearances innocent of Gunung Sari’s hoary public life as a cultural icon and makes

no move to update or revise it. Yet for this observer the need for such revision is both

timely and overdue, and the chance to launch such an inquiry on the shoulders of this

unassuming new publication is irresistible.

The CD and the Peliatan Kebyar Canon

The kebyar tracks on Bali South were originally issued in 1973, also by UCLA, as

an LP. These and the other five selections on the CD were recorded in 1970 by Gertrude

Rivers Robinson, prior to that time a student of Mantle Hood in the UCLA

Ethnomusicology program. Robinson passed away in 1995 but for more than twenty

years was Professor of Music at Loyola Marymount University, also in Los Angeles; and

she composed some of the first works combining gamelan and Western instruments. (At a

1981 festival in San Diego I heard and saw her idiosyncratic Bayangan, a mini-ballet

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with visuals scored for eight gamelan instruments and chamber septet composed in the

early ‘70s.). She was important to the UCLA scene at the time and it is good that her

work is seeing light again.

Bali South features three brief instrumental works (Sekar Jepun, Gambang Suling,

and Hujan Mas ) plus the warhorse dance piece Teruna Jaya, done in the ubiquitous

standard version known by virtually every musician on the island, but with a special

passage of interlocking parts (kotekan) inserted near the beginning that suffices,

minimally, to mark this rendition as Peliatan’s. As for the instrumental pieces heard here,

they are still current in Peliatan but not elsewhere, at least any more. They are somewhat

fossilized, actually, and offer a view of Peliatan’s music in the mid-‘60s, when the group

first played them. It is striking that although 30 years has passed since the Bali South LP

appeared, the recording still reflects living practice in this particular pocket of Bali.

Anyone who has visited Peliatan over the years may well have heard any of them (plus

the short instrumental Kapi Raja, featured on the 1952 tour) at Gunung Sari’s weekly

tourist performance, where the same repertoire is recycled week after week, year after

year, to bussed-in throngs.

Although its musicians came from all strata of Peliatan society, in its halcyon

days Gunung Sari was closely stewarded by a charismatic local prince—Anak Agung

Gdé Mandera, who passed away in the late ‘80s—and, as they came of age, most of his

children. All performed, and rehearsals were held in his home palace courtyard, the Puri

Kaleran. Absolutely no disparagement is meant to Robinson when I note that by

promoting these recordings she unwittingly helped circumscribe an internationally-

oriented canonical repertoire, one based on a view that was uniquely shaped there, a

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corner of Bali that clung to an older view of the world. In 1970 this group had the

reasonable idea that its successes of the 1930s-‘60s could fuel continuing international

fame, but they also acted something like the spoiled rich kid on the block, as though they

were above being concerned with their reputation among the Balinese, who were, after

all, their own neighbors. In essence they were a Sukarno-era gamelan, a recipient of

boons, and unpredisposed to adapt to a process already underway in Suharto’s post-1965

Indonesia whereby cultural capital shifted toward urban institutions like the newly-

established conservatories. Prestige gravitated away from traditional and elite pockets

like Peliatan, which had accumulated it through direct interaction with Bali-struck

foreigners, an association originally facilitated through colonial administrative structures

and their alliances with local nobility. But the urbanizing, centralizing power has

consolidated, essentially to the present.

Did time stop in Gunung Sari’s corner of the world? Elsewhere Balinese music

has been a riot of centrifugal change emanating from the conservatories. With little or no

new repertoire to boast of for over 40 years, Gunung Sari has for some time been

perceived throughout Bali as resting not a little ridiculously on its ancient laurels.

Internationally, yes, their reputation has stayed secure. A steady succession of world

tours showcasing the same music during the ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s testify to Peliatan’s

continuing bankability, but their cache is integral to the consumerist mechanism of allure

that props up tourist-brochure, unchanging, exotic Bali. Gunung Sari’s reputation goes

hand in hand with that trope, which is not to imply in any way that they play poorly. To

the contrary, they are wizards—and they have certainly had enough practice! (And it

must be added that the group’s stasis is also at least partly due to its singular internal

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organization. Other Balinese music organizations are village or institutionally-based, but

Gunung Sari musicians each “own”(in the form of shares) their seats in the ensemble.

Considered a valuable investment, share owners are naturally reluctant to sell or pass

them on. Sometimes they are handed down as inheritance, even to non-musical

children—who may then rent them to non-owning performers. Consequently the group

median age is high, member turnover is slow, and the organization lacks motivation to

keep up with musical trends.)

In any case, an uninformed international audience has not served well to spur the

group’s development. In the end results must speak for themselves, and Gunung Sari’s

crucial peers—other Balinese musicians—while mouthing respect and homage for the

group’s patrimony, will always wonder just what arrested the development. I cannot

answer this question definitively, but having lived for years in the Peliatan area (and

performed with Gunung Sari for six months in 1982 when a member’s seat was unfilled)

I often reflect on it. I am naturally not here to bolster the tired chorus of jeers, but have

tried to understand Gunung Sari’s situation from various perspectives. Readers may

already have guessed that there is more to the story than meets the eye. I shall turn to this

and situate it in a broader ethnomusicological context after describing the CD some more.

Tracks 5-9 feature the gamelan angklung of Tunjuk village in southwest central

Bali and home to Nyoman Sumandhi, then a young performer who was to be invited to

study at UCLA a few years later. Balinese angklung, the modest but canny gamelan with

the four-tone, single-octave melodies heard at cremations and other ceremonies, is nearly

as ubiquitous as kebyar but less celebrated. Its often bizarre music, unassuming and

modest, tends, regrettably, to be overlooked by researchers, so fairly few recordings of it

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have been issued. Some exist, but I doubt that the pieces heard here duplicate anything

already available. Among the selections on Bali South, the highlight is Galang Kangin,

an architecturally ambitious, weirdly asymmetrical, fourteen-minute sonic prism. It seems

to be old, “deep” angklung, because its title is associated with music for ritual yet the

music has absolutely nothing to do with the squarer, pompous composition of that name

played by classical court gamelan. This music clearly underwent its own rigorous,

generational development in some village incubator, in isolation from the square confines

of court repertoire, but with no less seriousness, musicianship, or imagination. It is the tip

of an iceberg of an endlessly surprising, elastic, complexly discursive Bali, one that will

hopefully see extended scholarly treatment before long.

The CD is attractively packaged and remastered. The booklet includes Robinson’s

original brief notes and a much longer essay by Nyoman Wenten providing schematic

description for the musical forms and linked to CD timings. Sometimes Wenten’s

analysis mouths cliched standard information (e.g., calling old Bali “feudal”) and music

terminology without critically assessing the shape of the holes for which his square pegs

are designed.

Wayan Gandera’s Life and Times

Though Mandera was Gunung Sari’s artistic director and guiding force, the

group’s day-to-day music making was overseen by notable commoner musicians. The

original release of Bali South was subtitled The Compositions of Wayan Gandera in

reference to the drummer, composer and musical leader of Gunung Sari at the time of the

recordings. Due to the shift in focus brought about by the added angklung tracks, the

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subtitle has been dropped for the CD, though Gandera is featured in a terrific cover photo

(his image unfortunately not identified in the booklet). Credited as composer or arranger

for the kebyar selections, Gandera (also spelled Gandra, and pronounced that way) was

closely associated with Gunung Sari, sporadically but consistently, until his death at age

69 in late 2002.

Gandera was the only child of Madé Lebah, one of Colin McPhee’s principal

informants during the 1930s and also a musical leader in the group (Harnish 2001,

Warren unp.). Not incidentally, and owing largely to McPhee’s Peliatan connections from

thirty years before, Gandera already had a long association with UCLA by the time this

music was recorded. Selected to teach there by Hood, who was following McPhee’s

advice, Gandera (along with Cokorde Agung Mas) became the first Balinese to teach

gamelan in the U.S.A. He did so from 1959-63, working with Hood, McPhee, Robinson,

and Ruby Ornstein, whose dissertation on gong kebyar (1971) relies heavily on the

Gunung Sari repertoire and owes a great deal to Gandera and his father as collaborators

and informants. Gandera’s UCLA stint animated Hood’s vision for bi-musicality and

jumpstarted the international gamelan performance movement, and for that reason he is

significant to North American world music culture.

His UCLA prestige and English language skills made him uniquely worldly in

1960s Bali, yet, oddly, his personal fortunes waxed and waned throughout the 1970s, ’80

and ‘90s. Like McPhee, another pioneering denizen of two worlds who was never able to

fully reenter American life after living in Bali, Gandera also could never “go home

again.”2 He was by turns in or out of demand as a gamelan teacher in villages or for

2 Gandera’s own father is quoted at length in Warren (unp.), describing what for Bali (or anywhere) was a difficult parent-child relationship. At the end Lebah concludes: I don't know if it was the effect of being in

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foreigners and on either good or abysmal terms with the high-strung, prima donna-ish

membership of Gunung Sari (mainly abysmal). Beginning in the 1980s he was often

isolated and inactive in a small mountain village where he had moved in with his third

wife’s family and spent much time, poignantly, not doing music at all, but, inexplicably,

painting signs (p.c. 1982). Sometimes Gandera performed with Gunung Sari, but often

failed to participate in ritual performances or disappeared from the Saturday night stage

for stretches of time, citing irreconcilable differences. Later he would reappear as if

nothing had happened. He taught numerous times in Australia and kept a solid following

there. That his reputation diminished over the years in most quarters reflects in part on his

own character-- he had a touch of the rogue in him and more than a little tendency to self-

mythologize.

Gandera’s life story positioned him as an actor in a wider struggle for cultural

power and influence. He was compelling, controversial and in some ways difficult, but he

might have become far more central to the history of 20th century Balinese music had just

a few things been a little bit different. Though the last word on the subject would be

anyone’s guess, he is likely to remain a footnote figure better appreciated abroad than at

home, like Gunung Sari itself. Not only that, but island-wide, the core kebyar repertoire

might differ substantially from that passed down to us had Gandera found greater

influence outside his own locality This would be idle speculation had he not done

something extraordinarily redeeming just months before he died that justifies the

conjecture.

America…There is a story in Bali about a bird, named bangau, ya. He climbs very high to fly. But when he becomes bored there, eventually he comes home. And so I just wait to see when he'll come home.

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It turns out that Gandera was keeping a secret. Weak and unable to play, but

mentally undiminished, in mid-2002 he sat before the musicians of the Çudamani group

in Pengosekan villlage, Peliatan’s neighbor, and taught them a completely different

version of Teruna Jaya, and a mainly new version of the equally canonical Kebyar

Duduk, that had been confined to his memory alone for many years. Both pieces, learned

in northern Bali when Gandera was a young man, are fully distinct from the sanctioned

versions played daily all over the island by other groups (including the Teruna Jaya on

this CD). Neither had been heard since at least 1965, the fateful year of the Indonesian

anti-Communist massacres. The Teruna Jaya, especially, resembles its counterpart only

in name, as the gamelan angklung Galang Kangin resembles the eponymous gamelan

gong composition. Taken together, the two new pieces suggest a parallel, unseen, might-

have-been kebyar universe.

To convey how remarkable this is, imagine discovering totally unheard,

unrecognizable versions of any popular masterpiece, such as Brahms’ 2nd or Take the A

Train, that were easily as good as the originals. The opening minutes of the “secret”

Teruna Jaya, for instance, comprise a kebyar-proper (the ragged, metrically unstable,

unison playing and orchestration idiom that is the ensemble’s signature style) of

dimensions and audacious musical surprise unknown elsewhere in the repertoire.

Irregularly interpolated extended silences launch inexplicably into yet other, even more

rhythmically zigzag phrases, extending this Teruna’s kebyar beyond the point where one

recognizes a composer’s intentional, ironic commentary on the style itself; it rises to an

inspired level of originality. And as the piece continues, closely succeeding tempo

changes, unexpected interruptions of cyclic patterns, and layers of rhythmic and melodic

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elaboration accumulate—not so far as to transcend the style, but to display it at its richest,

most concentrated, most eloquent.

Why did Gandera keep this earthshaking music to himself for so long? The

wonder and significance of his death-bed musicological hat trick cannot be appreciated

outside of the historical context into which it may have arrived as too little, too late, and

to which I now repair.

The Official Kebyar Canon and Other Pretenders

The orthodox standard history of kebyar is akin to scripture for any Balinese

gamelan lover. Experimental and unpredictable, the music emerged and flowered in the

years following 1910 in North Bali, diffusing rapidly in the 1920s to most of the rest of

the island.3 It smashed icons of the musical status quo and fed off weakening royal

circumstances to become the embodiment of Balinese modernity and cosmopolitanism.

Kebyar’s fortunes were from early on linked to Dutch power and burgeoning tourism,

and when the centers for these migrated from North to South Bali starting in the ‘20s,

kebyar followed hungrily. Villages like Peliatan (and others situated near or in the new

nerve center, Denpasar) benefited, gaining attention locally and establishing connections

through the Dutch that started the ball rolling for recordings and international

performance.

History, though, casts aside many in its wake and forgets their stories. The North

Balinese musicians who invented the style found themselves bereft and thrust from center

to margin. Their consolation prize for a long time was the right to be derisively valorized

3 See, among others, Rubenstein 1992, McPhee 1966, Ornstein 1971, Bandem and de Boer 1995, Tenzer 2000.

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by others with epithets like “fierce” and “proud”, which consigned them to the mute

status of Balinese noble savages. But this was not, as any ethnomusicologist could

deduce, merely a musical misfortune. Throughout mid-century the entire Northern region

suffered economically and politically while the south—relatively speaking, at least—

prospered and basked. Northern and southern kebyar became perpendicular cultures, the

zeitgeist framing the latter as refined and splendid, the former as subversive and wild.

Cultural disenfranchisement contributed to political rupture, and during the revolutionary

‘50s and ‘60s temperatures and factions were hottest in the north. With a bitter irony that

harmonized with the image that had been foisted upon them, “savage” Northerners were

also the most homicidal in 1965, a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy (Geoffrey Robinson

1995).

As kebyar became an official music a canon gradually took shape, culled from

both northern and southern repertoire items. I would not say that this process unduly

limited musical diversity until quite late in the game, yet over the decades core

compositions such as Teruna Jaya and Kebyar Duduk became more and more

standardized. It took until the 1970s at least for this to become really noticeable in terms

of the repertoire as a whole, and was accountable not just to tourism and political power,

but to other forces like media and the rise of educational institutions. Wayan Beratha, the

most prominent musician in Denpasar, actually lived the prestige that Gandera might

have. An extremely dignified and gifted man, he nevertheless came to monopolize kebyar

as a conservatory teacher, arts bureaucrat, pundit and prognosticator, willing modeler of

Suharto government art ideologies, and (later in life) adjudicator for gamelan

competitions. For the yearly Festival Gong competitions he also composed new works

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that, through performance, radio emissions and cassettes, filled out the musical standard

parlance for 20 years after 1965, including “classics” like Palguna Warsa, Kosalia Arini,

Panyembrahma, and Tabuh Pisan Bangun Anyar (Tenzer 2000 ch.8).

Beratha’s style was promulgated evangelistically by generations of conservatory

students and young faculty. It was learned and played by competition groups not just in

his own region but elsewhere, including the north and northeast, where in effect it was

“imposed” on groups too humble (or exasperated) to resist. Between competitions they

grumbled, and for a few years in the 1980s even held their own intramural contests. In the

21st century one has to look harder and in remoter north Bali pockets for traces of

authentic north Bali kebyar style. Mountain villages like Menyali still play it proudly, but

when I heard their gamelan in 2000 the musicians were mainly senior citizens; young

folk had fled to the cities or were no longer interested. Fabulous young players were

present in abundance when I heard the north Bali competition group preparing in 2003

for their Denpasar showcase—but the composers and teachers had been imported, like

they are virtually always, from the south.

Until the era following the national political crises of 1998 the music of the

Denpasar canon-makers (Beratha, and latterly his students) was everywhere—and

especially in the southern part of the island, with the exception of Peliatan. But as history

has it, old kebyar has come to persist in Peliatan, as old French lives in Quebec. The

music Robinson recorded there, though obediently credited to Gandera, actually came—

unquestionably in terms of style, and more so in the details of compositional content than

Gandera might have acknowledged—from the northern village of Kedis Kaja, where

Ornstein had gone to do fieldwork. Kedis Kaja was a music hotbed, with a remarkable,

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creative group under the leadership of one Gdé Merdana, who was also the group’s

composer. This is where the instrumental compositions on Bali South originated and it

was also, quite possibly, the source for Gandera’s secret pieces.

Ornstein spent only several days in Kedis Kaja recording and working with

Merdana and his group.4 Gandera acquired Hujan Mas and Gambang Suling by listening

to recordings she had made there, passing the music on to the Peliatan players later.5 On

Bali South the music is described as Gandera’s “arrangements” of something learned in

North Bali, but also, ambiguously, as “his” music: hence the title of the original LP. That

he would accept credit and not defer to or even mention Ornstein or Merdana is

unremarkable in Bali, especially in a context where Western observers like Robinson

sometimes press for compositional authority to be claimed. And in fact we can not be

sure either if Merdana’s imagination was the ultimate source for the music. In Gandera’s

case, though, there is an extra dollop of conceit, because in the 1960s he alone among

Balinese musicians, with UCLA under his belt, knew what a title like “Music of Wayan

Gandera” signified to foreigners, and what attention it could bring.

What happened next was reported by Ornstein in her dissertation: the citizens of

Kedis Kaja, apparently sympathizers with Partai Komunis Indonesia (PKI), were

slaughtered en masse. Their banjar (community hall), with gamelan instruments stored

therein, was reduced to ashes during the 1965 bloodbath (1971:54). It was not unheard of

4 Some information in this passage summarizes a phone conversation I had with Ornstein on June 6, 2004. She remembers Gandera’s father Lebah travelling to Kedis Kaja with her, but is not sure whether Gandera did. In any event, she asserted, the north Bali music Gunung Sari learned came from recordings she made. I thank her for her assistance and candor. 5 In her dissertation Ornstein briefly discusses another musician from north Bali, Gdé Purana, who also composed two pieces titled Gambang Suling and Hujan Mas, ostensibly distinct from Merdana’s. It is not clear how different Merdana’s and Purana’s compositions were. My goal is not, however, to uncover ultimate authorship so I do not dwell on precisely who created the music that ended up in Peliatan’s

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for entire communities to cleave to the same politics and meet common fates during this

savage, extremely partisan period. In the shadow of these events Gandera’s decision to

selectively share the Kedis Kaja music with Gunung Sari—teaching them the

instrumental new music compositions but not the dance pieces—calls for explanation. I

can only make educated guesses as to why he did so. One is that, especially in those days,

instrumental works were perceived as more ephemeral, eminently usable without regard

for ideas of intellectual property or long-term cultural significance. Teruna Jaya and

Kebyar Duduk, on the other hand, especially the shocking North Balinese versions, were

inherently weightier and to be treated with appropriate awe and caution. Or it may be

something as simple as the fact that the aloof Gunung Sari players already knew standard

renditions of this music and were not impelled to relearn anything unnecessarily. The

events of 1965 nonetheless orphaned two pieces that, but for Gandera’s vivid powers of

recall, would otherwise have been lost.

I stress that Gandera did not necessarily learn the new versions of Teruna Jaya

and Kebyar Duduk in Kedis Kaja along with the instrumental music; at least I have no

way to prove that he did. Gandera himself claimed that he learned the former as early as

the 1950s from man most often credited as the creator of the standard Teruna Jaya, Gdé

Manik of Jagaraga, a north Bali village; and he traced the latter to the pre-1952

generation of Gunung Sari.6 It would be too easy to take these stories at face value given

Gandera’s Stravinsky-like penchant to manipulate attributions in the service of his own

reputation. (Working closely with Manik on Teruna Jaya in 1982, I never heard any

repertoire. Nor would it be, as I say, possible or even relevant to do this in Bali. This is all the more true since all of the characters in this story are deceased. 6 This was reported to me by Dewa Ketut Alit of Pengoselan, who spoke to Gandera about the music when the latter was teaching it to Çudamani in 2002.

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mention of this other version.) Moreover, neither of Gandera’s stories accounts for the

music’s subsequent total disappearance, which would be explained more convincingly by

a connection with the isolated, outcast Kedis Kaja group. But it is the mere fact of

(especially) the Teruna Jaya’s disappearance, as well as its certain origin in northern

Bali, that forms the crux of this story.

Shifting Ideas about Balinese Music Institutions

In the years leading up to Gandera’s death the social life of Balinese gamelan was

experiencing a sea change. It continues to the present, especially in more artistically

active parts of the island. Traditionally, gamelan is a village activity, as it had been in

Kedis Kaja, with communally owned instruments used mainly for religious purposes.

This remains a constant. But, as explained above, cultural power had been accumulating

in the capital city since before independence, a pattern seen in many other transitions out

of colonialism. A Denpasar, conservatory education for young Balinese musicians with

professional aspirations (professionalism itself being a previously unimaginable notion

that Gandera unwittingly lived at UCLA) was for decades, and essentially still is, the only

way to go. The schools are powerful institutions with deep island-wide influence and

visibility. And some graduates do land on a career track, making money as artists where

possible, often in connection with appetite for Balinese arts internationally.

But the schools have also fostered increasing disappointment in many quarters.7

The challenges are formidable and deserve extended discussion; here I can only sketch

7 I refer in the following to ISI-Denpasar (Institute of Indonesian Arts; formerly STSI, and before that ASTI), though the problems are the same if not worse at SMKI (formerly KOKAR), the high school that prepares students for ISI. The comments are offered in a spirit of frankness and respect for the many faculty with whom I have worked closely over the years. The is especially true for the current director, Wayan Rai,

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the following: 1) faculty are not trained to adapt to an essentially Western model of

university pedagogy, so class time is often wasted or unfocused; 2) constant official

demand for school ensembles to perform at government and tourist-related functions

means that classes are cancelled routinely;8 3) government corruption, favoritism and low

salaries foster a culture of boredom, suppressed anger, and cynicism among many faculty

which grinds down their commitment to their jobs. After a heyday of promise and energy

in the ‘70s, ‘80s and early ‘90s, recent graduates with whom I have spoken are openly

bitter about the quality of their education, even as they express respect for the many

excellent faculty artists. Thus has the bloom come off the rose, and alternatives are

arising to address a growing sense of decay and loss of faith.

Especially in the aftermath of the 1998 crisis and the 2002 bomb, there is now

impressive grassroots energy for “taking” Bali back out of the hands of the official

machinery and restrengthening its village roots. The Çudamani collective in Pengosekan

is one of numerous sanggar (studios/workshops) that nurture a reconstructed communal

culture for music and dance. Members practically live together, sustain an extremely high

level of artistic achievement, and have been impressive in gaining both local and

international recognition. Çudamani won Ford Foundation support to sponsor its

residency programs with older artists, and though it is not a degree-granting institution

this is seen as providing the true interaction and education that had been lacking at the

conservatories (see Vitale 2002 and Tenzer 2000:108-112). Most importantly, members

feel more in control of their artistic destinies.

and his predecessor, Wayan Dibia, both of whom both acknowledge and work tirelessly to make headway on the issues I mention here. 8 For an interesting view of STSI’s government-sponsored performances, see Hough 1992.

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All of this, combined with Gandera’s experience teaching in Pengosekan as a

younger man, drew him to approach Çudamani with an offer to teach, once he had

recognized the seriousness of his illness. Were they the worthy vessel he had been

waiting for? Many Çudamani members, through their parents’ stories and early childhood

memories, viewed Gandera with some fascination. He appeared as a kind of local outlaw

whose erratic behavior was evidence of the toll taken by protecting his (perceived)

unassailable artistic standards against the degradations of both Gunung Sari and the

Denpasar machine. An outsider to Bali’s institutionalized culture, Gandera represented a

role model, an authentic countering force. In return, by bestowing the lost music he

conjured the secret life of kebyar for Çudamani, linking one culturally potent and anti-

hegemonic force to another and sealing a pact, as it were. When I recorded the music in

June 2003, Dewa Ketut Alit, Çudamani co-director, was thrilled to have it documented,

but very serious about restricting its dissemination. “We can’t just sell this to Bali Stereo

[one of the leading CD/cassette marketers in Bali] and its distributors and then sit back

while groups all over Bali learn it right off the recording. Let news of these pieces spread

through our performances and word-of-mouth, the way they would have in the past. If

people want to they can come to us to learn them in the traditional way, a way that pays

proper respect to Gandera.” In this light, Gandera’s last act appears to have been his most

efficacious.

Ethnomusicology and an Upside-down History of Balinese Music

Gandera took his full reasons for withholding the music for so long to the grave,

but I shall venture a further perspective. Given his egotism and rocky personal

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interactions with other Gunung Sari members, as well as the group’s time-honored ethos

of cantankerousness, he probably withheld the music from them partly out of spite. And

for their part Gunung Sari, having mastered standard versions of Teruna Jaya and Kebyar

Duduk, would have been disinclined to make the extra effort to learn new ones, especially

from him. In other words, the soaring narrative of resistance and rebellion just offered is

too romantic. It needs tempering with the quotidian details of warring personalities,

personal grudges, and plain laziness.

It does not matter which of the origin stories or rationalizations for Gandera’s

behavior proposed, or some combination, is absolutely true. I have tried to account for

alternatives and give them balanced consideration. Even if the real reasons were other

than any of these, the power Gandera stored up by controlling the life of this music is

palpable. With this in mind, conceptualizing the tricky balance between the quirky

agency of individuals and the broad historical force of institutions provides for the

ethnomusicologist a constant object lesson in the explanatory limitations of culture. If we

accept that music’s fate rests on the shoulders of paradoxical characters like Gandera,

some aspect of our professional creed is challenged. This is especially evident in a story

like the one just told, which plays foil to the academic, intellectual legacy of Bali as an

icon of cultural coherence and communality.

Even in Bali, it is impossible not to infer, it all boils down to what individual

people do. Imagine if Gandera had had a different personality, or if Gdé Merdana and his

band had not been political pariahs. Immediately we plummet into an alternate universe

where, like time travelers, we find ourselves affecting events profoundly. A selfless

Gandera might never have kept the music to himself, so his (now) easy chums in Gunung

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Sari could have learned and performed it long ago. Instead of mocking the conservatory

and its aspirations—as he did constantly in real life —such a pliant Gandera would very

likely have ended up teaching there, as his father did in the early days (Ornstein

1971:40). Thus his musical influence might have been on a footing with Beratha’s. The

effect of this could have rippled out and affected kebyar repertoire everywhere. Or

consider a personality transplant for the charismatic Merdana. He might have been an

ideological peacemaker in his part of North Bali and as a result he and his village could

have escaped annihilation. A forceful musical voice would not have been silenced, and

local resistance to Denpasar-based cultural hegemony might have been more robust.

All this fantasy is grounded in a commonplace: that some unforeseen tweak of a

chromosome could have made Wayan Gandera (or anybody) into someone else, and

turned history upside down. Viewed that way cultures matter a lot less than individuals

and their serendipitous interactions, and that is something for ethnomusicologists to

ponder. The problem will always be to get close enough to the people with whom we

work and study in the field to be in a position to grasp the impact of their individual

actions over a meaningful span of time.

References

Bandem, Madé and Frederik E. de Boer. 1995. From Kaja to Kelod: Balinese Dance in

Transition. New York: Oxford University Press.

Coast, John. 1953. Dancing Out of Bali. New York: Putnam.

Davies, Stephen. 2002. “Balinese Musicians Assessments of Recorded Performances,”

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International Yearbook of Aesthetics, Richard Woodfield, ed, Volume 4

(www.ntu.ac.uk/ntsad/research/iaa/iaa4).

Harnish, David. 2001. “A Hermeneutical Arc in the Life of Balinese Musician, I Madé

Lebah," The World of Music 43 (1): 63-87.

Hough, Brett. 1992. Contemporary Balinese dance Spectacles as National Ritual.

Clayton, Victoria, Australia: The Centre for Southeast Asian Studies, Monash

University.

McPhee, Colin. 1966. Music in Bali: A Study in Form and Orchestration in Balinese

Orchestral Music. New Haven; Yale University Press.

Ornstein, Ruby. 1971.Gamelan Gong Kebyar: The Development of a Balinese Musical

Tradition. Ph.D. diss. University of California, Los Angeles.

Robinson, Geoffrey. 1995. The Dark Side of Paradise: Political Violence in Bali. Ithaca:

Cornell University Press.

Rubenstein, Raechelle. 1992. “Pepaosan; Challenges and Change.” In Schaareman, D.,

ed., Balinese Music in Context: A Sixty-Fifth Birthday Tribute to Hans Oesch, 85-

114. Winterthur: Amadeus Verlag, Forum Ethnomusicologicum 4.

Tenzer, Michael. 2000. Gamelan Gong Kebyar: The Art of Twentieth Century Balinese

Music. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Vitale, Wayne. 2002. "Balinese Kebyar Music Breaks the Five-Tone Barrier: New

Composition for Seven-Tone Gamelan." Perspectives of New Music 40/1

(Winter):5-69.

Warren, Carol. Unpublished chapter-length ms. Madé Lebah - Reminiscences From

'Jaman Setengah Bali' (Half-Bali Times).

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Ziporyn, Evan. 1997. CD review. Golden Rain/Gong Kebyar of Gunung Sari, Bali.

Asian Music 28 (2), pp. 149-151.