Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

A STAGE IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF CENTRAL JAVANESE GAMELAN MUSIC

2010; Routledge; Volume: 38; Issue: 111 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/13639811.2010.489366

1469-8382

Noriko Ishida,

Music Technology and Sound Studies

Abstract Widyaswara, a staff notation for vocal music of Central Java that was developed in the second half of the 19th century, gave birth to a somewhat unpopular notation for gamelan compositions called nut rante. But the cipher notation called nut angka, invented towards the end of the 19th century as an innovation of nut rante, became very popular among both professional and amateur musicians. It not only caused changes in performance practice and therefore in the texture of the music itself, but also brought forth new methods of composing. Moreover, it made amateur players' access to gamelan music much easier, though at the same time it impoverished ensemble performance. Notes *I am extremely grateful to Yayasan Sastra in Surakarta (www.sastra.com) for access to their manuscript collection and permission to use a number of these manuscripts, and to Dr R. Bremer, then of Thesinge, Netherlands, for the thoroughness with which he edited my article as well as for his careful correction of my English. 1 Nut or enut (from noot, i.e. ‘note’ in Dutch) means notation, and angka means number or numeral. Therefore, nut angka means notation with the aid of numbers, i.e. cipher notation. 2E.g. Kunst (Citation1973: 347); Becker (Citation1980: 11–25); Lindsay (Citation1991: 198–201); Sumarsam (Citation1995: 106–13). The saron is a metallophone generally possessing six or seven keys. 3E.g. the preface to Serat pakem wirama wileting gendhing pradangga, written in Yogyakarta in 1923 (Lindsay Citation1991: 207, n. 25). 4See Perlman (Citation1991: 48–51) for more information about the kinds of nut rante and their characteristics. 5We have only six manuscript collections of gendhing notated in nut rante (Perlman Citation1991: 36). 6In nut angka they are written as 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 1˙ in slendro and 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 1˙ or 7˙, 2, 3, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7 in pelog (for an approximation to the western musical scale, see Becker (Citation1980: xvi)). The note called pelog – note 4 in nut angka – is written between the third and fourth lines, not given a line of its own. 7The duration of a single dot equals one beat in a gatra, i.e. measure, something I shall come back to later. 8The term widyaswara, literally meaning ‘how to know the tones’, is not very popular, and has so far been found in only two manuscripts, Sekar macapat tengahan sarta sekar ageng mawi nut and Nut rante gendhing Jawa. The latter is not a collection of vocal melodies in 13-line staff notation, however, but a collection of gendhing in 6-line staff notation. Therefore, there is a possibility that the term widyaswara was also applied to gendhing notation in 6 lines. Although we do not yet dispose of a generally accepted exact definition of the terms widyaswara and nut rante, for the sake of distinguishing between them I shall use widyaswara for the staff notation of vocal music with letters or numbers as notes, and nut rante for the staff notation of gendhing with dots as notes. 9For my use of the term ‘composed melody’ (and of the verb ‘to trace’ in relation to it, as used e.g. in pp. 279 and 281 in this article), see the detailed discussion of these phenomena in Ishida (Citation2008: passim). 10The rebab is a two-stringed bowed spike fiddle. 11 Gendhing rebab are softly played pieces performed by the full gamelan, whereas gendhing bonang are loudly played pieces performed on the loud-playing instruments only, without singers, rebab, gender, gambang, suling, siter or celempung. 12On the composed melody of gendhing bonang, see Ishida (Citation2008: 479, n. 7). 13There is no doubt that melodies of gendhing bonang composed on the saron, an instrument possessing a range of a single octave only, are conceived to cover a range of more than one octave, as is realised in their performance on the bonang, an instrument with a range of several octaves that can unfold the melody to its full multi-octave range. 14See n. 9. 15Several manuscripts included in Behrend Citation(1990) are listed under different titles by their annotators. 16The date is found on p. 4 of Sekar macapat tengahan sarta sekar ageng mawi nut in the form of candra sengkala, the Javanese way of inscribing numbers to indicate a certain year within a line of verse. The other manuscript, Serat pratelaning sekar kawi, bears no date. 17The musicians playing in Arnhem, Netherlands, in 1879 were from the court of Mangkunegara IV in Surakarta, while it is not known from where the musicians in 1882 came. 18For a fuller discussion about the nature of the notation of karawitan and what was brought to the music by this notation, see Ishida Citation(2008). 19Numbers from 1 to 7 are read as setunggal, kalih, tiga, sekawan, gangsal, enem, pitu in high Javanese, and as siji, loro, telu, papat, lima, enem, pitu in low Javanese. Normally, low Javanese is used in Surakartan karawitan, and often these terms are made monosyllabic: ji, ro, lu, pat, ma, nem, pi. These monosyllabic names are used for solmisation, like do, re, mi in western music, and presumably such solmisation became possible in Javanese music only after Jayasudirja's innovation. 20This loose insert is a letter written by Prajalukita, presumably a master court singer in Surakarta, to Suwita, perhaps his pupil. Surprisingly, this slendro melody is written with the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, not with 1, 2, 3, 5, 6. In addition, it is a remarkable fact that this notation writes out every note passed through by a melismatic melody. 21It is a dated notebook (untitled manuscript no. 1) containing notation presumably written by Warsapradongga, Warsodiningrat's father and a master musician of the kepatihan, active in the late 19th and early 20th century, who died in 1911. Basing himself on information provided by Martopangrawit, as cited in Florida (Citation1981: 2), Sumarsam offers Buk gendhing slendro tuwin pelog, written by Gondapangrawit at an unspecified date, but presumably before 1893, as the earliest extant document (Sumarsam Citation1995: 112). However, Martopangrawit's information seems to have been incorrect. Gondapangrawit has proved to be the name by which Warsodiningrat was known when he was young, viz. from 1908 to 1911 (Wiranta Wijayasuwarta Citation1972: iv), during which time he must have written this Buk gendhing – although the actual manuscript we now possess may well be a later copy, since it seems not to be in Gondapangrawit's own handwriting to me, and describes the writer's position as that of a rebab player, which he held indeed, but only from a later date onwards. In any case, the manuscript dated in the Javanese year 1824, i.e. 1894 or 1895, is earlier. 22These statements suggest that there was something like a ‘culture boom’ among intellectual (literate) amateurs in Surakarta towards the end of the 19th century. For further analysis concerning the relationship of new notational technologies to the democratisation of musical practice, dispersion of musical authority and new compositions, see Ishida Citation(2008), which discusses these topics at some length. 23 Gendhing sri-sri are pieces that were composed at the court of Paku Buwana X (r. 1893–1939) to commemorate various events that took place at the palace, the titles of which mostly begin with the word ‘sri’. For a collection of gendhing kepatihan, see S. Mloyowidodo Citation(1976). 24See untitled manuscript no. 2 in the reference list, and for Warsapradongga, see n. 21 of this article. Pace Marc Perlman, who uses the expression in a totally different sense in the title and body of his doctoral dissertation (Perlman Citation1993), these are probably ‘unplayed melodies’ in the most literal sense of the word.