Radical Traditions

Reimagining Culture in Balinese Contemporary Music

Datos Bibliográficos

ID19976952
AutoresAndrew Clay Mcgraw
Año2013
Páginas304
Fecha de publicación2013-11-08
Open AccessNo
TipoBOOK
RevistaRadical Traditions (SOURCE_BOOK)
EditorialOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199941407.001.0001
OpenAlexW4234034071
Open LibraryOL27589435M
ISBN9780199941407
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas13

The Indonesian island of Bali has long been famous as a tropical paradise, its ubiquitous temple ceremonies accompanied by the shimmer of ancient gamelan percussion orchestras. But “Balinese music” encompasses a much wider range of expressions than just these iconic traditional sounds. Balinese contemporary music, musik kontemporer, is a self-consciously experimental expressionthat emerged in the late 1970s and has flourished in the post-totalitarian reform era since 1998. Through this form many Balinese composers have sought to reconcile the persistent tensions between the classic ethnographic and touristic image of “The Balinese” as a people with tradition and the feeling of living in a complex global society. These composers’ praxis represents a reimagining of Balinese culture through their nullification of the insidious opposition of “traditional” and “modern” practices -- perpetuated by Western ethnography, state cultural policy, and regional polemics -- as a pointless friction that retards the natural flow of change. Informed by a fifteen-year engagement with Indonesian music and over four years of field study, the author weaves together novel ethnographic, music-theoretical, semiotic, and critical analyses to demonstrate the complex meanings of Balinese contemporary music and its relationship to Indonesian society and global aesthetic networks. Although Bali’s has long been imagined as a neatly bounded society, the intensely intercultural nature of Balinese musik kontemporer reminds us of the island’s historical links to other cultures and of the complexities of intercultural meaning, interaction, and borrowing in which we are all today enmeshed

Anarchism and Radical Politics · History · History and criticism · Indonesia · Music · Music, asian · Music, history and criticism · Social aspects · Social conditions