In addition to their musical training through Emory gamelan workshops and concerts, Emory Gamelan members have been able to advance their musical scholarship credentials by tying their gamelan activities with other academic projects, such as Honor Thesis, Study Abroad, and Academic Fellowships.
Ryan Sutherland: Undergraduate Research Creates a Musical Legacy
By Kimber Williams | Emory Report | May 17, 2016
Sitting amid a sea of graduates on the Emory Quadrangle last week, it was hard for Ryan Sutherland not to reflect on the experiences he would be taking with him.
Walking across this very lawn during his first campus tour. Discovering the study of ethnic instruments in his first ethnomusicology class. Performing with the Emory Gamelan Ensemble. The chance to do field research on traditional Javanese and Balinese music…
But even as Sutherland prepared to leave Emory with a double major in music and biology, he knew that he would also be leaving something important behind.
With the aid of grants through The Bradley Currey Seminar, which supports archival undergraduate research, and the William Lemonds Award for Summer Study Abroad, offered through Emory’s Music Department, Sutherland was able to follow his interest in the gamelan — a traditional Indonesian percussion ensemble — all the way to Baturiti, Bali, Indonesia, last summer. read more
Guest Contributor: Currey Seminar student reflects on his travels in Bali
By Ryan Sutherland, February 8, 2016
Honor Thesis: Music and Regional Identity in Indonesia: Tembang Sunda of West Java
By Anita Balasubramanian (2010)
Tembang sunda is an aristocratic vocal genre that developed in the Western third of Java, Indonesia, a region also known as Sunda. This classical form originated in the 1840’s in Cianjur (a town between Bandung and Jakarta) during the Dutch colonial period. In the 1960’s, its practice expanded throughout West Java, and relocated to the region’s prevailing cultural center–metropolitan Bandung.
Despite the institutionalization of music education in contemporary Bandung, the oral-aural transmission of musical knowledge between teacher and student is still the primary mode of teaching tembang sunda. Many traditional genres of West Java, such as gamelan degung, have experienced change and innovation in theorizing musical processes, thereby becoming modernized in their pedagogy. Yet, tembang sunda has continued to maintain the oral tradition as a central and inherent component of its learning processes. This is due to the different performance contexts that characterize tembang sunda, each of which requires adaptability and knowledge on the performer’s part. Based on my learning and performance experiences in Bandung, I have learned that there are also different aesthetics and expectations associated with each performance context. Each context is important in maintaining the social organization distinctly framed by tembang sunda, and informed by the history of both the Sundanese region as well as the entire island of Java; hence, it is important to perform according to context.
A student learning tembang sunda is made aware of these differences by employing the oral approach in their training, through maintaining close interaction with the teacher, and participating in relevant musical and extra-musical activities. The learning process subtly prepares a student or performer to adapt to each of these different contexts. Therefore, by means of effective teaching methods, the student is acquainted with the analogies and dissemblances between performance contexts, and thus, the significance of tembang sunda. See full thesis.
See below two videos of Anita performing tembang Sunda at Padjajaran University, West Java, Indonesia.
Sundanese tembang is not an easy genre to learn, especially when teacher and student cannot speak each others’ languages. Watch a demonstration of their unique teaching-learning method between Anita and her teacher, Ibu Euis, below [at 15:35].