Asian Music

Volume 5: The ambience of uyon-uyon (gamelan performance for listening pleasure) Monosuko is captured in this CD release by producer John Noise Manis, the fifth of seven volumes to date in his series of recordings of central Javanese gamelan music on the Felmay label. Monosuko is a decades old "listeners' request" tradition of radio broadcasts of gamelan music by the studio musicians of the Yogyakarta branch of the Radio Republik Indonesia (hereafter R.R.I. Yogya). Once broadcast live, for the past few decades the Monosuko program has been taped for later broadcast. This "field recording" exudes authenticity in that it presents the sound of gamelan performance by professional musicians as mixed by Javanese studio technicians and as heard by Javanese radio listeners. The music heard on this CD is performed on the double (sléndro and pélog) gamelan Sadatpangasih; before belonging to R.R.I. Yogya, the two halves were named individually kangjeng kyahi Puspanadi (the pélog set, previously associated with the Yogyakarta palace and possessing rare and visually distinctive faceted gongs [pencu blimbingan]) and kyahi Kuntul Wiranten (the sléndro set).

Much valuable and accurate historical and stylistic information is presented in the notes by Hardja Susilo, the guru of many non-Javanese students of gamelan, [End Page 142] including this reviewer. Although the liner notes take the form of an interview between Manis (producer) and Susilo (expert), their content can and should be read as commentary by Pak Susilo on the performances at hand and the Yogyanese tradition in general.

Tracks 1, 3, and 5 of this CD contain performances excerpted from a typical two-hour Monosuko broadcast. As is customary with uyon-uyon broadcasts in central Java, be they originating from palaces or radio stations, Monosuko broadcasts are framed by institutional "signature" pieces. The R.R.I. Yogya signature pieces, which open and close this CD production as well (the latter is subsumed into the "Pangkur Jenggleng" track, #5, discussed below), are functionally titled "Pembuka" ("Opening," a ladrang with a mixed chorus singing a greeting text) and "Panutup" ("Closing," a bubaran with the chorus singing an uplifting, nationalistic text).

Tracks 3 and 5 are severely edited versions of lengthy performances made by the CD's producer that "reflect [his] own (Western biased) aesthetics" (liner notes). The first of these involves some substantial cuts—what was originally a half-hour long performance is reduced to about ten minutes in duration—at musically awkward points in a medley of vocal and gamelan pieces that has gendhing "Madya Ratri" as its central component.¹ If listened to as background music, the casual listener might not be aware of the musical decimation taking place, so smooth is the digital surgery practiced by the producer. However, any student of gamelan listening with care will be left perplexed by the resulting assemblage of fragments from the performance. Track 5 (which concludes with the abovementioned "Panutup") fares no better. The most endearing part of any Monosuko broadcast for the audience is the playful "Pangkur Jenggleng" set, in which a comedian and his/her sidekick verbally spar with one another and with the musicians in the studio while performing a highly fragmented and idiosyncratic rendition of ladrang "Pangkur." This set can easily stretch out to over half an hour, with well over half of the time being taken up with improvised dialog. So it is understandable that, for a commercial CD release focusing on music and intended for a non-Javanese audience, a producer would extract an abridged version out of a full "Pangkur Jenggleng" performance. Not only is the vast majority of the dialog excised in this instance, but a good bit of the music is as well. This must have been a tough call for the producer, because an album attempting in...