Tenzer, Michael - Journal of Music and Meaning

JMM – The Journal of Music and Meaning, vol.2, 2004, section 10 – printout.
Original article URL:
http://www.musicandmeaning.net/issues/showArticle.php?artID=2.10
[Refer to this article by section numbers, not by page number]
JMM Book Review:
Tenzer, Michael. Gamelan Gong Kebyar: the Art of Twentieth-Century
Balinese Music. Chicago and London: the University of Chicago Press, 2000.
xxv, 492 pp., analytic illustrations, transcriptions, photographs, glossary,
bibliography, index, two compact discs with musical examples cued to the text.
(Reviewed by Edward Green)
10.1 Ethnomusicological Syncretism
In this innovative, carefully reasoned book, Michael Tenzer provides a
comprehensive, technical account of modern Balinese music. Surprisingly, he
approaches the task in a boldly syncretic manner, making coordinated use of
indigenous Balinese musical concepts as well as Western analytic tools, such as
the mathematics of “contour classes.” In chapter 9 we see Tenzer’s syncretism
in full force as he compares, for the purpose of mutual illumination, a blues by
Jackie Byard and Wayan Sinti’s important l982 gamelan composition Wilet
Mayura. He also makes use of passages by Mozart, Ives and Lutoslawski.
Many ethnomusicologists would, on methodological grounds, object to
such syncretism, asserting that music can only be understood from “within” a
culture, and that any use of theoretical concepts arising from an “outside”
culture can only distort. Tenzer plainly disagrees. “The politics of irreducible
difference,” he writes in Chapter 10, “continues to color our perspectives.”
These scholarly politics prevent us, he argues, from seeing the interexplanatory
nature of all music. He gives this example on page 435: “Nelitti
[melodic strata moving one tone per beat] behave according to a Balinese
grammar, but the grammatical structure reflects a need to balance motion and
stasis, cadence and progression, symmetry and asymmetry…a phenomenon that
is not culturally unique.”
Tenzer clearly feels Balinese music is illuminated by “dialectic”
reasoning, and he asserts, in many passages, that the most fundamental
dialectic in Balinese music, underlying all its technical particulars, concerns
the relation of ngubeng and majalan [stability and activity]. In Chapter 6 he

deals with these opposites in terms of melody. (Here, incidentally, is where he
also makes his most telling use of strictly mathematical analysis.) In Chapter 7
the concepts of ngubeng and majalan are used to clarify Balinese meter and
rhythm; in Chapter 8, large-scale form.
Perhaps Chapter 7 is Tenzer’s most innovative. Titled “Meter and
Drumming,” in it he asserts the critical role of kendang drumming in the
rhythmic life of the modern gamelan. Previous scholars (at least in the West)
have taken for granted that the responsibility for delineating colotomic metric
structure in any form of gamelan, including kebyar, lay with the gongs.
Certainly that is how Colin McPhee, in his l966 classic, Music in Bali, presents
the matter. Even as recent, and as excellent, a work as Michael Bakan’s Music
of Death and New Creation (1999) follows this conception. Tenzer disagrees; he
asserts that colotomic meter can only be conceived as a compound of
regularity and irregularity, with the two rhythms intensifying and clarifying
each other. If this is true, then it follows that kendang drumming is not
subsidiary to the music of the gongs, but rather a full partner to it.
10.2 Context, Continuity and Origin
Complementing the highly technical “core” of this book—(some of which was so
unremittingly mathematical that this reviewer found it hard to believe any
flesh-and-blood listener could actually hear such “tonal” relations in “real
time”)—are many sections in which the author widens his focus, and provides a
view of the larger cultural context for kebyar. In Chapter 2 we meet a 1750
Balinese text, Prakempa, in which the scale tones of pelog and slendro are
presented as the part of a spiritual mandala—“a vibrant…interconnected
network of spiritual sound, color, and thought, ‘running,’ as it were, on powers
provided by the gods.” (p.36). Chapter 3, continues in this philosophic vein, as
Tenzer presents the deep linkage between the fundamental world-view of the
Balinese—who value, at once, the seemingly contradictory ideals of hierarchy
and democratic cooperation—and the highly stratified, yet interlocking nature
of gamelan music-making. The chapter is entitled, “The Social Construction of
Kebyar Ensemble Virtuosity.” This linkage is solid ethnography.
Tenzer makes further clear that for all its “revolutionary” musical
character, kebyar, by holding fast to these fundamental (albeit contradictory)
Balinese values, must be judged a continuation of the island’s culture rather
than a rebuke to it. Here he provides a very valuable corrective to McPhee
who, as late as l966, in his otherwise authoritative Music in Bali, lamented the
impact of kebyar on Balinese music. (McPhee saw Gamelan Gong Kebyar as
undermining genres he considered more deeply authentic, such as Gamelan
Pelogongan).
Innovative, too, is Tenzer’s account of the origin of kebyar. The mass
suicide (puputan) of the Balinese royalty on the field of battle as they faced

Dutch armies” is well known—as is the fact that the loss of the court as a focus
for Balinese politics and music made possible a new spirit of independence in
the outlying villages. Where the author breaks new ground is by documenting
the emergence of kebyar “as a result of the attempt to fuse pepaosan [poetry]
competitions with…the addition of gamelan accompaniment” (p.86).
That these poetry readings, suffused with anti-Dutch sentiment, might
engender a revolutionary music is hardly surprising; yet prior to this book, no
mention is made, at least in Western scholarship, of this signally important
historical connection. It is not written of in McPhee’s monumental 1966 study,
Ruby Sue Ornstein’s important 1971 dissertation, or Bakkan’s 1999 book. Even
Tenzer is silent on the subject in his Balinese Music of 1991.
10.3 Universals in World Music
Much more could be said in praise of this remarkable work. One might think,
for example, that a theorist so adept at “abstract” analysis might shortchange
the “programmatic” aspect of Balinese music. But this is hardly the case; the
author devotes his pivotal fifth chapter, entitled “History, Repertoire, Topic,
and Structure,” to just these matters. We learn that even in the most
seemingly “abstract” of Balinese gending [compositions] there are always
implicit references—via musical gestures of melody, rhythm, or timbre—to
“topics” explored explicitly in Balinese dance, religion, and theater. Strikingly,
and in keeping with his “syncretic method,” Tenzer relates the desire of kebyar
composers to integrate such “topics” into their formal designs with the
procedures followed by Haydn and Mozart in the days of High Viennese
Classicism.
Once again, some ethnomusicologists might find this “syncretism”
questionable. This reviewer, however, finds it thrilling. He only wishes there
were more of it in the book! Certainly Tenzer’s work is in keeping with a
growing trend among scholars (Jay Rahn of York University, Toronto is another)
to revisit sympathetically the concept of universals in world music—indeed in
world art. The great American poet and philosopher Eli Siegel said it best when,
in the l940’s, he gave this principle of Aesthetic Realism which gives the
relation of art and life a solid scientific foundation: “All beauty is a making one
of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in
ourselves.” In his emphasis on dialectics as a means of making meaningful
cross-cultural comparisons, Tenzer supports Siegel. Through the on-going
impact of Aesthetic Realism, and of its intellectual allies, a new scholarly
orientation is emerging and a new methodology is being established—one in
which researchers consciously aim at being fair, simultaneously, to the
uniqueness of a musical culture and its relations to other cultures, seemingly
very different. It augurs well for 21 st -century musicology.

If there is any flaw in Tenzer’s book—(leaving aside the unfortunate
production decision to use black and white photographs exclusively)—it lies in
the lack of clarity concerning some of the text’s musical examples. I am not
referring to any imprecision in the transcriptions, for as far as one can discern
there isn’t any. Instead the problem lies in the fact that while certain
transcriptions are listed as corresponding to a certain track on the CD, the
transcription may be significantly shorter than the track: perhaps only 10
seconds of music, while the track lasts several minutes. For persons who want
to “train their ears” to grasp Balinese musical structure, it is deeply frustrating
not to have more precise information regarding when to listen to such
transcribed passages.
This, however, is quibbling. The central fact about this book is that it is
thrilling, ear-opening, mind-enhancing: a magisterial work.
Edward Green is a professor at Manhattan School of Music, where he has
taught world music since 1985, as well as courses in composition, music history,
and jazz studies.