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Gamelan: Cultural Interaction and Musical Development in Central Java
by
Sumarsam
Gamelan is the first study of the music of Java and the development of the gamelan to take into account extensive historical sources and contemporary cultural theory and criticism. An ensemble dominated by bronze percussion instruments that dates back to the twelfth century in Java, the gamelan as a musical organization and a genre of performance reflects a cultural herita
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Paperback, 368 pages
Published
December 15th 1995
by University Of Chicago Press
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Community Reviews
(showing 1-30 of 32)
As a Javanese who teaches ethnomusicology at Wesleyan, Sumarsam is uniquely situated to write about the bronze percussion ensembles known in Indonesia as gamelan. The function and form of music provide by a gamelan ensemble is radically different from anything we are accustomed to in the West. Notions of melody, tone, rhythm and performance are so different from the Western tradition that even the question of notation has been difficult to settle. The relative importance of the composer and the
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classic on the subject... careful, detailed account to the history of javanese gamelan, followed by an even more detailed analysis of its main theoretical components...
A nice anthropological overview of the history of gamelan.
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