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Gusti Putu Madé Geria’s Theory for Balinese Gamelan
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Journal Article
Gusti Putu Madé Geria’s Theory for Balinese Gamelan
2024
Overview
The contents of a set of undated, handwritten notebooks by Balinese musician Gusti Putu Madé Geria (1906–83) are first assessed in historical perspective. He was in effect the first Balinese musicologist, but his work evokes older anonymous lontar (palm leaf manuscripts) of Balinese scribes, themselves heir to traditions of Hindu-Buddhist thought. Some of his descriptions of instruments and ensembles mimic the discourse of high priests and invoke unseen worlds. I will briefly consider their relationship to specific lontar and to Tantrism (Bandem 1986, Becker 1993). Geria’a analytical thinking dwells in a network of ideas bridging his precolonial umwelt with an inchoate Indonesian modernity. He invented a witty cornucopia of terms in Balinese for instrument functions and melodic patterns where none previously existed in oral tradition. His lexicon is a product of his insight into particular linear-intervallic structures and their motile impulses. Geria in effect provides a theory enabling close readings of “classical“ Balinese gamelan repertoires, which teem with these patterns. I introduce a selection of them, amplifying (and culturally decoding) Geria’s classifications and notations with a more granular but, I aver, ethnographically relevant approach. The last part of the paper sorts Geria’s terms by lexical field: the natural world, emotion or character, action and perception, and the unseen world. Finally I compare Geria’s lexicon with my own published work on the same musical material, assessing the epistemological gaps within each and between the two.PEER REVIEWER: Ed GarciaVIDEO CREDITS (left to right and front to back row in Part IV): Walker Williams, Putu Ichi Oka Swaryandana, Michael Tenzer, Oscar Smith, Iljung Kim, and John Lai. Videography, recording, and editing, March 2023: Jason Winikoff.
Publisher
Society for Music Theory
Subject
