Listening to an Earlier Java

Reviewed by: Listening to an Earlier Java: Aesthetics, Gender, and the Music of Wayang in Central Java Benjamin Brinner (bio) Listening to an Earlier Java: Aesthetics, Gender, and the Music of Wayang in Central Java. Sarah Weiss. Leiden: KITLV Press, 2006. 187 pp. + CD-ROM. In an impressive feat of scholarship Weiss brings together keen ethnographic observation with interpretation of literary texts, and a complex theoretical apparatus as she leads the reader to listen to traces of older Javanese musical practices. These practices are associated with the shadow play (wayang kulit) and the instrument in Central Javanese gamelan most closely associated with female musicians, a metallophone called gendèr. This extraordinary amalgam is already evident in the thoroughly subdivided table of contents, which favors alliteration and attention-grabbing word play whenever possible, in keeping with the nineteenth-century poem cited and analyzed at the beginning of the book. In “Preliminary Soundings,” her introduction, Weiss uses that lengthy excerpt from the Serat Centhini, describing the sounds of early morning in a village on the day of a wedding, to thrust the reader into the aural richness of a Javanese soundscape. The challenges of undertaking the dissertation research that led to this book are interwoven with threads that Weiss elaborates in the course of the book: setting out to determine what was “female” about female playing style (identified as such by Javanese performers) she had to examine distinctions of old versus new, and the discourses of locality and gender, in relation to gendèr performance. The first chapter concerns the foundational musical phenomena for the book. Grimingan is the improvisation that gendèr players perform as tonal support and sonic backdrop to the narration and dialogue in Javanese shadow plays. Weiss compares grimingan to the performance of sulukan, songs sung by the puppet master, in which the gendèr player takes an important role. Her account of interaction is normative, not reflecting the many vagaries of interaction in actual performance,1 particularly when instrumentalists actually lead or anticipate the dhalang. But this does not detract significantly from the comparison. The details of musical practice take a back seat for the rest of the book as Weiss launches an extensive interpretive mission. She addresses gender in “Competing Hegemonies: The Discourse on Javanese Gender,” a reexamination of Javanese thinking about potency and power in relation to feminist scholarship, which [End Page 135] argues compelling for complexity in its final section “Competing and Interacting Hegemonies in Java.” The lore transmitted by female gender players—their accounts of legendary figures linked to their personal histories—leads Weiss to delve into Javanese mythology and structuralism in chapter 3. She provocatively titles this “Flaming Wombs and Female ‘Gender’ Players,” a gratuitous but irresistible play on the double meaning of “gender” (from which she has conveniently erased the accent grave over the second e). Asking whether binaries such as male/female and order/chaos should be seen in terms of opposition or complementarity, she points to problems with either interpretation and proposes that it is the interaction of two pairs that is productive. The male/female binary does not map onto order/chaos but intersects with it, she argues, producing various possibilities. The goddess of the South Sea, Nyai Lara Kidul, is a figure of chaos and order. In the case of Batara Guru’s uncontrolled lust chaos is gendered male, while in the instances of women in Javanese myth and legend who were endowed with flaming wombs that can be conquered or quelled only by certain men, chaos is gendered female. “The fact that chaos and order are not permanently aligned with one gender or the other suggests that there is no hierarchy of valuation operating between order and chaos or between maleness and femaleness.” This radical departure from earlier scholarship is reached through carefully reasoned argument based on convincing examples from core Javanese cultural beliefs. Drawing on John Pemberton’s discussion of rebutan and slametan (1994) Weiss proposes a gendered interpretation of these ceremonies, which are linked to fertility and prosperity. She then notes that the tales about female gendèr players and their dhalang (puppet master) husbands exhibit some of the relationships between gendered chaos and

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