No abstract

Colonial and early postcolonial accounts often regarded the performing arts in Bali as an autonomous field, furthering anthropological romances of the Balinese as the ultimate cultural beings, seemingly disinterested in politics and power. Many contemporary accounts of the arts have either presented an image of the Balinese as self-consciously apolitical or, through a narrow focus on repertoires, have illustrated the arts as a pure, bounded arena. I argue that the diverse meanings invested in the performing arts reflect changes in the statecivil nexus and transformations in the landscape of ethnic and religious relations in Indonesia. For artists, their work provides a conduit through which to critique politics and politicians. For politicians, appeals to and support from performing artists provides a mode of establishing credibility. In Bali, the performing arts represent a site for analysing changes in political organisation and expression and for investigating the status of emergent democracy and entrenching Islam. I chronicle the 2008 gubernatorial elections and the candidates' appeals to and leverage of artists, describing how politicians seek to portray themselves as the paternal protector of an island whose unique culture is under constant threat. In 2008 issues of intellectual property, multiculturalism and religious fundamentalism, and their relationship to the arts, were the most salient issues in this discourse. This is followed by an account of the convoluted and controversial elections at the Indonesian Institute of the Arts and the passage of the 2008 anti-pornography bill and the Balinese resistance against it.

We examine the temporal properties of cyclical drumming patterns in an expert performance of Afro-Cuban rumba recorded in Santiago de Cuba. Quantitative analysis of over 9,000 percussion onsets collected from custom sensors placed on various instruments reveals different types and degrees of rhythmic variation across repetitions of each of five characteristic guaguancó patterns (clave, cascara, quinto, segundo, and tumba). We assess each instrument’s variability using principal component analysis and multidimensional scaling, complementing our quantitative exploration with insights from music theory. Through these methods, we uncover details of timing that are insufficiently conveyed with standard music notation in order to shed light on the role of improvised variation in solo and accompaniment ensemble roles.

This article describes experiments designed to determine the perception and cognition of time-in-music among Balinese gamelan musicians. Three topics are discussed. First, the proposed connections between cultural/religious concepts of time and the construction of (time in) gamelan music are explored. Here a novel and experimental use of the Implicit Association Test is incorporated to explore potential implicit (unconscious) connections between concepts of time-in-music and time-ingeneral. Only weak associations are found. Second, the author explores music's influence in subjects' ability to gauge objective durations. Other than a tendency for Balinese subjects to consistently underestimate actual timings, and the potential for tempo changes to influence response patterns in specific ways, few strong patterns are found. Third, previously proposed models for the performance of tempo changes (here, rallentandos) are explored in the context of gamelan music.Results from perceptual tasks and an analysis of performance suggests that previous idealized models are too simplistic to describe the Balinese case. THE conflation, common in musicology and anthropology, of time-in-music with time-in-general (or, time in cosmological senses) invites all sorts of well-documented problems and paradoxes (see Rowell, 1979Rowell, , 1985Mayr, 1985). Given too much time to ponder it, we are easily over-stimulated by certain eccentric truths concerning time: Definitions of time are impossible as nothing resembles it. Our concept of time is an intellectual and cultural achievement (Gibson, 1975). Pitch, timbre, and harmony are but a complex spectrum of oscillations (tempos). Music, as we know it, exists somewhere in the middle of the spectrum between the rhythmic oscillations of galaxies and those of the atom. From the physicist's perspective, music is but the play of time. As we have no organ with which to sense time directly, humans can only perceive time through the motion-reckoning of various 'clocks' (literal clocks, biological clocks, atomic decay, etc.) all of which create sound, however minute and inaudible.[2] Sound is literally time's measure (Clynes & Walker, 1986).Such interesting arcana thrusts us into a swirl in which the potential philosophical connections between music, time, and practically all other phenomena threatens to overwhelm; we are in danger of "losing ourselves in the infinite" (Sachs, 1953, 18). This should be checked, however, by an understanding of human modes of perception and cognition; we might conceive of time and tempo as a boundless continuum, undulating in beats from galaxy to atom, but this is not how we perceive it-such a suggestion has no cognitive reality for our sensory system. We do not perceive pitch as rhythm. The fundamental limits of our short-and long-term memories have profound implications for how we understand and experience the difference between the groove,[3] rhythm, meter, form and overall structure of music. In this article I work to tease apart the conceived and percei...

On my first research trip to Bali, Indonesia, I brought along a reasonably expensive digital metronome with the wrongheaded idea that it would somehow aid my learning gamelan music. In a completely uncharacteristic mistake, Singapore Airlines lost my luggage containing the metronome. More than once, my Balinese teachers suggested (only half-kiddingly) that the goddess of music, Saraswati, had probably had a hand in this. Many Balinese teachers have commented that their greatest pedagogical challenge is in helping their foreign students develop a sense of the fluid, flexible nature of Balinese musical time. The differences between Balinese and Euro-American musical time and their representations have partially blinded theorists to its shape, function, and significance. In his magnum opus Music in Bali (1966), Colin McPhee describes a performance that particularly delighted him: With no rhythmic support of any kind, the players must follow the leading gangsa, partly by watching, partly by ear. They must all feel in the same way the flexible, rubato nature of the passage. The charm of this episode, as played by the gamelan at Jagaraga in 1938, was irresistible. It lay partly in the melody itself, sounding thinly chiming octaves and stressed at intervals by the vibrant tones of the jublags and jegogans. But perhaps most enchanting of all was the lovely pliancy of the passage, and the perfect accord of all the players. (McPhee 1966:350)