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preface In the foregoing discussion I have spoken as if, according to Javanese musicians, music’s content is its affect. The situation is in fact a bit more complicated than that. What makes music meaningful for them is rasa. This word may indeed be translated as “affect,” and for much of the book this will do reasonably well. Yet rasa is much more than that. In chapter 2 I explore the meaning of this allimportant word, basing my analysis largely on oral citations from musicians I have spoken to. Though what concerns me most is how the word is used in a musical context, we cannot answer the question “What is this thing called rasa?” without adventuring into Javanese psychological and philosophical theories, which have a strong foundation in Buddhism and Sufism. Readers who are not drawn to detailed lexicographic explorations should at least read the final paragraph of the chapter in order to follow the rest of the book. In chapter 3 I whittle the meaning of rasa down to just “musical affect,” leaving aside its other dimensions, and investigate the range of rasas that may be expressed musically. To understand this panoply more fully, we must in turn ask how the various musical affects are related to each other—in other words, how the rasa lexicon is structured. An important point that emerges as rasas are mapped into shifting constellations of relatedness, is just how paramount connotative meaning is. Chapters 2 and 3, then, are mainly semantic in nature. It is in chapter 4 that I try to make good on my promise to weave together musical affect and musical context, or aesthetics and sociology. For in assessing who or what has rasa, we are led back to the Javanese categories of geography, gender, and social status first described in chapter 1. That is, in this chapter I look for patterns in just which performances—and, more particularly, which performers—are said to have more or less rasa than others. The question of what makes music “rasaful” is continued in chapter 5, but with more of a focus on the moment of performance. Chapter 6 consists mostly of lengthy excerpts from conversations with two noted musical experts. Following their lead, it takes a philosophical turn. The two main questions they tackle are “What is the relationship between what people say they feel when listening to music and what they actually feel?” and “How much of musical rasa is in the piece, how much in the performance, and how much in the perception of the performance?” From philosophy thence to music theory: chapter 7 continues the question raised in chapters 4 and 5 about factors contributing to the creation of rasa. But here, instead of music and rasa as a quality of the performer, the focus is on the variety of rasas catalogued in chapter 3 and on specific musical traits. That is, I seek to identify, other factors being equal, what effect various musical procedures have on any particular rasa as it is perceived by an experienced listener. Finally, in my last chapter I raise some larger issues, though I offer little in the way of definitive answers and allow myself to be more speculative than in the rest of the book. Some of my conclusions I will save for the end. But, by way of