the musical scene in solo thirty-one instructors), Tari (dance, seventy-three instructors), and Seni Rupa (visual arts, twenty instructors). The teachers of Solonese music used to include older, court-trained musicians (foremost among them, Martopangrawit and Mloyowidodo), but none of those who taught at the school are still alive. Increasingly, experts from outside the palaces also give lessons at STSI/ISI. But the vast majority of instructors are ASKI/STSI alumni, growing numbers of whom have earned graduate degrees abroad. Over the years, the school has sent musicians and dancers on tour to all parts of the globe, most frequently to the United States, England, France, and Japan. Beginning in the 1950s and continuing to the present, gamelan ensembles have sprung up in those four countries, as well as in the Netherlands, Canada, and Australia, among others. Many of the teachers for these ensembles have come from STSI/ISI. Conversely, the school has had several dozen foreign students enroll in it, or use it as a base for doctoral research (as did I). As a result of this international contact, the curriculum more and more resembles that of music schools in the United States and elsewhere. One similarity is in the emphasis on “classical” and “contemporary” repertoire. Whereas Western music schools have tended to shun popular music,27 STSI seemed to have banished the kréasi styles that were popularized by the recording industry (one exception is the Pedhalangan [Shadow Puppetry] Department, which included gendhing kréasi in its musical accompaniment classes). The omission was not accidental: one influential teacher, for instance, once dismissively referred to Nartosabdho as a “pop” composer. But Javanese— and U.S.—music schools are not simply motivated by classical-centered snobbery: there is a feeling that popular music (in all senses of the term) hardly needs an institution to either teach or maintain it. In recent years, the primary object of disdain (and despair) of the music faculty at STSI/ISI has been another genre that blends popular idioms with elements of gamelan music, campursari (literally, “mixed essence” or “mixing the best parts”). Unlike for gendhing kréasi, their sentiments are shared with many “outside” musicians,28 who see this relatively new hybrid genre as a threat to the very existence of more traditional—and especially classical—music. Campursari seems to have been invented, as early as the 1960s, at RRI, where the Western-trained kroncong musicians and the traditional gamelan practitioners employed at the station joined forces in a novel combination.29 Kroncong is itself a hybrid genre, containing mostly Portuguese elements, and may be considered Indonesia’s first national genre. Its instrumentation usually consists of various plucked and bowed string 27. See Nettl 1995. The observation is truer in performance than it is in musicology, where popular music is increasingly included. 28. See the next section of this chapter for a preliminary discussion of “outside” and “inside.” It is analyzed in greater depth in chapter 4. 29. Most of my information on campursari comes from Supanggah 2003. See also Perlman 1999.
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