why
RASA
talk matters
those who are most knowledgeable about the tradition. In other words, with respect to Javanese music, we might distinguish between different levels of insidership—of expertise—within Javanese society. Karawitan may be communal, but it is not participatory, in that the audience does not normally enter into the music-making. To be a good gamelan musician requires many years of focused effort and experience: this is a highly specialized activity. And, like jazz, much of the complexity of karawitan is accessible only to musicians. For instance, the kind of humorous dialogue that can occur between musicians in performance is usually lost on ordinary listeners— when, for example, an instrumentalist parodies another musician’s recognizable style; or plays wordlessly a melody associated with a senggakan;21 or fakes out the other musicians by pretending to head toward a wrong note but at the last second landing on the right one instead.22 In Java, most people cannot recognize one gamelan piece from another: they have very little detailed, explicit knowledge of the tradition. Musicians, on the other hand, carry on a rich, precise discourse about music. In all honesty, though, my decision to talk to musical experts was more a result of happenstance than of calculation. My initial contacts were all musicians; I was learning to perform; and so, not surprisingly, I just fell into that world. In addition, my principal advisor in Java when I began my fieldwork was Supanggah, who helped in directing me to people he knew were both knowledgeable and articulate; these were all eminent musicians. I do not regret my decision to ask the experts first. They spoke generously, passionately, eloquently. It would be interesting, though, to talk to nonmusicians about rasa gendhing, to see how their conceptions might be similar to those of the musicians I spoke to. The method of questioning would undoubtedly have to be more concrete, more deictic in nature (“What is the rasa of this recording?” “How is this piece different from the last one?”), but the results would be just as important, from an ethnographic perspective, and the comparison to musicians’ conceptions would be most illuminating.23
part ii: RASA and cross-cultural comparison The search for universals in humankind’s music has gone through many stages. For a time it was a taboo subject, since it evoked the ambitious but totalizing 21. A senggakan is a lighthearted, sung interjection by the gérong. 22. For instances of such humor, listen to Gamelan de Solo II:2, 16:55, 30:30, 35:00 and IV:3, 7:00, 7:55, 18:50–19:18. Further details about these passages may be found in the accompanying notes (pp. 48–49, 56). 23. I suspect that while nonmusicians have very little technical knowledge of music, they are more sensitive to rasa than they are made out to be (I am thinking, here, of all the disparaging remarks I heard about orang awam—“laypeople”). I have certainly found that students in the United States who are non-music majors are very sensitive to musical mood, yet often incapable of distinguishing one instrument from another.
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