Spokesperson for Javanese culture

Blontank Poer, The Jakarta Post, Semarang

The word gamelan is always associated with a set of uniquely Javanese musical instruments. Few people, however, know when it was invented and first became popular in Java.

There is a dearth of literature on gamelan, particularly because it is based on archaeological research.

Therefore, research conducted by Sumarsam, an ethnomusicologist born in Bojonegoro, East Java but who now stays in the U.S., has become an interesting reference.

A member of the faculty of Wesleyan University, Connecticut, he said gamelan in the form of a large ensemble, as is commonly seen now, was not introduced until the heyday of an Islamic kingdom in Demak between the late 16th century and early 17th century.

"Until the emergence of the Islamic kingdom in Java, a popular musical instrument was something like a gong. Other instruments like rebab (a violin-like instrument), kendang (small drum), gambang (a musical instrument made up of wooden pieces) and others were still alien, then," Sumarsam told The Jakarta Post.

To come to this conclusion, Sumarsam has studied old books by Dutch scientists now still well kept in libraries in Holland. He also studied all ancient Javanese books and examined archaeological research.

Sumarsam also studied reliefs in temples across Indonesia. The Borobudur temple in Magelang, Central Java, a Buddhist temple built in the 9th century, does not give sufficient information about gamelan.

He went to the 14th-century Panataran Temple in Blitar, East Java but found little that could tell him more about gamelan, a musical instrument claimed to be indigenous to the Javanese. "The two temples only told us about the presence of a musical instrument in the shape of a large bell now called a gong," he said.

Gamelan developed and became a large ensemble when kingdoms in the rural areas like the Surakarta and Yogyakarta palaces combined several sets of gamelan and played them together in traditional rites.

Likewise, when Surakarta palace included in the gamelan ensemble a number of western musical elements, such as trumpets in a single sound arrangement in the early days of the Dutch colonial rule in Indonesia in the 16th century. As a result, gamelan strongly established itself as a large ensemble and rapidly developed.

Sumarsam has put down his research on this subject in a book titled Gamelan and Cultural Interaction and Musical Development in Central Java", originally his dissertation for his doctorate at Cornell University. In 1995 the dissertation was published by University of Chicago Press under the title of Cultural Interaction And Musical Development In Central Java.

Today Sumarsam is one of the few spokespersons for the Javanese culture in the world, particularly in the U.S. In addition to teaching Indonesian music and theater at the music department of Wesleyan University, he is also a gamelan instructor in Wesleyan and some other US universities. In Wesleyan he is also assigned to deal with foreign students and attend to their scholarships.

Sumarsam was born on July 27, 1944 in a small village in Bojonegoro, East Java. He began to be interested in gamelan thanks to a leather puppet master in his village. Back home from school, he often watched elderly people in his village play the gamelan. One day, he was asked to join them.

"I was very happy then, especially because I had the opportunity to play gamelan," he reminisced.

His talent impressed the leader of the gamelan music group. So, when he was 9, the group took him to visit one village after another for tayub dance performances. As he spent too much time with the gamelan group, he finished his junior high school a year late.

Leaving junior high school, he made up his mind to become a gamelan artist and joined the Konservatori Karawitan (Traditional Javanese Music Conservatory, now the Indonesian Karawitan Secondary School/SMKI) in Surakarta. Owing to his outstanding achievements, he taught at this school after completing his studies there. At this time he joined the Surakarta Karawitan Art Academy (ASKI, now the Indonesian Art Tertiary School or STSI of Surakarta).

It was when he was studying at ASKI that he had the good fortune to be able to travel round the world.

"Sumarsam was fond of getting mixed with foreign students when he was a student at ASKI," Rahayu Supanggah, ethnomusicologist and composer, told The Jakarta Post.

When he first went abroad, he joined the Indonesian art mission to the 1970 Japanese Expo in Osaka. As the mission was to stay in Japan for seven months, he traveled to Tokyo, Kobe and other places in Japan as a street musician. Then he went to the Philippines and then stayed in Canberra, Australia, for a year.

Thanks to his good relations with a number of ASKI alumni from the U.S., Sumarsam was elected a visiting artist to teach Javanese art in Wesleyan University in 1972. He taught the theory and history of Indonesian music.

The university happened to have a set of Javanese gamelan and often invited a number of Indonesian artists, such as the late Prawoto Saputro, a composer from Surakarta, and the late Ben Suharto, a choreographer from Yogyakarta.

At the same time, he also pursued further studies in Wesleyan and earned his MA degree in 1976 with his thesis titled Inner Melody in Javanese Gamelan. Then he went to Cornell University, Ithaca, to study for his doctorate degree. It was while in Cornell that he got acquainted with noted Indonesianist Benedict Anderson, a person who, according to Sumarsam, had a very good understanding of Javanese culture and tradition. Anderson also owns the best Center for South-East Asian Studies in the U.S.

It was while in Cornell that he began to be interested in ethnic music from India, Cambodia, Myanmar, Thailand and also African as well as Western music. However, when it was time for him to write his dissertation, he could not go far from his own culture. Finally, he wrote about the history of gamelan compared with the history of other kinds of music.

Sumarsam is married to Maini of Semarang and has two children. His wife is a dance teacher at the same university.

One thing that makes Sumarsam proud is that apart from classical Javanese gamelan music and dances, Balinese gamelan and dances are also popular among the American audience.