#selonding

by James Kippen & Annette Sanger

For an ethnomusicologist, there’s never a dull moment in Bali! The Indonesian island famed for its rich and abundant arts offers so many opportunities to observe, experience, and participate in its astonishing variety of musics: a veritable sensory overload. On their sabbatical leave in the fall of 2014, Jim Kippen and Annette Sanger spent a month taking gendèr lessons with I Wayan Suweca, one of Bali’s greatest and most highly regarded musicians. (Michael Tenzer writes a lovely profile of Suweca in chapter 10 of the most recent edition (2011) of his book Balinese Gamelan Music.) The day after our arrival we found ourselves sitting in the music room of his house in Denpasar, beneath a ceiling fan that struggled to disperse a heat so thick with humidity you could slice it with a knife, surrounded a jumble of gamelan instruments occasionally punctuated by some of Suweca’s grandson’s toys. Following a brisk recapitulation of a couple of old favourites to warm up, we began learning another traditional piece, Lelasem Megat Yeh (Lizard Crosses the Water): we listened intently and learnt by rote, watching and imitating Suweca’s hands as they swept effortlessly up and down the bronze keys. This is difficult music: one needs to practice relentlessly. Amazingly, Suweca offered to lend to us his father’s instruments for the duration of our stay: this beautifully resonant and precious set not only had sentimental value for us all (as back in 2007 we had also learnt with Suweca’s father, the late great I Wayan Konolan) but it was also the set used to calibrate the tunings of all newly built instruments.

I Wayan Suweca in his music room

In the ensuing days we were invited to join Suweca for two public performances: a wedding and a temple ceremony. Firstly, at the wedding, we were ranged along one side of a pavillion, augmented by Suweca’s daughter and son and a student from the USA, playing as all guests filed past into the inner courtyards of the sprawling residence.

Wedding musicians

Secondly, the temple ceremony brought together the residents of an entire district of Denpasar to give lavish offerings and perform rituals to ward off evil spirits. A full gamelan played in one area of the temple courtyard while priests rang bells and intoned amplified chants, choruses sang, groups of men hammered loudly on wood (warning evil spirits to keep their distance), and a large circle of men shouted their raucous encouragement as two fighting cocks tore and gouged each other to shreds in the ring. Amidst all this were two relatively quiet gendèr instruments accompanying the ritual daytime puppet theatre, wayang lemah. Sitting just behind the dalang (puppeteer) we took turns to play introductory pieces with Suweca, including “Lizard Crosses the Water”. The puppet show then began, for which Suweca was joined by his son, I Nyoman Hariyana. Even standing close by it was hard to hear the music above the frenzied cacophony – the Balinese call it ramai – of simultaneous performances. But the gods and spirits can hear, and all this is done for their benefit.

Suweca and his son accompany the puppet show at the temple ceremony

An indication of just how ubiquitous and quotidian ceremonies are in Bali is suggested by the following anecdote. Annette strolled off one morning to the shops only to find a large number of Balinese men and women in formal religious attire entering a brand new hotel complex. She stopped someone to ask what the occasion was, then quickly rushed back to our villa to fetch Jim and his camera. Whenever anything new is created – a person, a building, an enterprise, a set of instruments – it must undergo an elaborate ceremony (or sometimes many of them) to ward off those pesky evil spirits and maintain balance and harmony in the cosmos. The new Swiss-Belresort was no exception: a high priest was chanting and performing a ritual on a raised dais on a little island in the middle of the vast swimming pool, offerings were steadily piling up opposite him, and the village gamelan ensemble was performing in one corner of the courtyard. A group of young girls emerged to perform the graceful ceremonial rejang dance. We enthusiastically took pictures, filmed, and chatted with the performers and hotel staff. Yet we found it astonishing that the many Western tourists scattered around the hotel complex on sunbeds or frolicking in the pool took almost no notice whatsoever of the proceedings!

Girls perform the rejang dance at the Swiss-Belresort hotel

A few days later, a phone call from an old friend, I Madé Bandem, led early the following morning to the arrival of a car to ferry us to another equally cacophonous village temple ceremony. Bandem is a jeweller from the village of Singapadu, where Annette lived and undertook fieldwork for two years from 1981 to 1983, and is the brother of Annette’s former dance teacher, I Nyoman Cerita. Bandem specializes in topeng, the masked dance drama where he dons different masks and assumes different characters.

Madé Bandem dancing in the guise of an old man

Among other old friends we reconnected with were two of our previous World Music Artists-in-Residence, I Wayan Sinti (2008) and Vaughan Hatch (2013). One evening, Sinti, Annette’s main gamelan teacher for many years, happened to be judging a gamelan competition to find the Badung region’s top youth ensemble. He invited us along to watch (in VIP seating, no less!).

Annette with Sinti in the administrative building for Badung region

The competition featured two ensembles pitted opposite one another on the voluminous outdoor stage. A large partisan crowd cheered and jeered in ways that would not seem out of place at a sporting event; we all watched as the immaculately dressed titans battled for musical supremacy, taking turns to dazzle with impeccably coordinated virtuosity and great dramatic flair.

The stunningly good gamelan group from Abiansemal performs in the competition (but they lost to an even better group from Mengwi!)

We also went to visit Vaughan Hatch and his wife Evie Suyadnyani, whose family selonding ensemble were giving a performance in the courtyard of their house. The selonding is a set of ancient iron instruments mainly used in special ritual circumstances, though it is currently enjoying a small surge in popularity.

Vaughan and Evie (far right) and their family ensemble

Among our other activities, we took in a kecak performance for tourists near the spectacular clifftop temple at Uluwatu. Kecak, in a format encouraged by German painter Walter Spies in the 1930s, enacts scenes from the Indian Ramayana epic, and features only vocal music (including the famous interlocking chak chak chak of the monkey chorus).

The kecak monkey chorus at Uluwatu chants as tourists look on

No trip to Bali is complete without visiting its artistic heart in Ubud. Even the local Starbucks at the Saraswati temple has ingeniously found a familiar Balinese symbol to accommodate its logo!

Annette with the Starbucks gong in Ubud

With so many fascinating events appearing on a daily basis in and around densely populated South Bali, we found it devilishly hard to escape for a relaxing break. Nonetheless, close to the end of our trip we organized a three-day excursion to the cooler mountains of northern Bali, specifically to the stunning rice terraces near Munduk.

Rice terraces near Munduk

And yet, even in this tranquil and remote setting, we found ourselves playing gendèr within an hour of our arrival. On learning of our interests, one of the delighted hotel staff members named Madé led us a short distance up the hill to his house in the village where we played on his uncle’s instruments while his aunt separated and dried heavily aromatic cloves on a large sheet.

Jim & Annette playing gendèr near Munduk

Madé’s aunt separates out cloves for drying

We also heard about a famous musician, I Madé Terip, who lives in Munduk village next door to the home of Witama, the owner of the hotel we stayed in. We just had to visit. Though busy preparing to transport an entire gamelan and its players to Ubud for a performance that evening, Terip nonetheless welcomed us and generously taught a gènder composition from northern Bali. Typically, we have found all Balinese musicians to be extraordinarily open and generous with their time and their knowledge: they are thrilled when people want to listen, understand or participate in their music, and there are no elaborate and esoteric rites of passage filtering access to the tradition.

Jim playing gendèr with Madé Terip