supporting the wajang in its expression of prijaji values, the gamelan orchestra presents to the ear the picture of the inner life the shadow-play presents to the eye. Except for the occasional inclusion of a two-stringed violinlike instrument called a rebab, the gamelan is entirely a percussion orchestra, which may consist of as many as fifty instruments in a very large court ensemble but usually contains about a dozen. One even meets, in Modjokuto, orchestras made up of only three or four people. I knew many individuals who owned only one instrument, or perhaps two, which they played solo when the mood struck them, or, regularly or irregularly, gathered together with others who owned an instrument or two to form a small orchestra. As the gamelan demands rather little of the delicate adjustment between separate virtuosi required by the Western orchestra, with its greater freedom for individual interpretation and consequently greater need for a coordinating conductor, there is little need for a stability of personnel. (But people say that the members of a really good gamelan orchestra must pada rasakaké: they must “sympathize with,” “feel with,” one another.) One often sees one performer replacing another at a certain instrument right in the middle of a piece; and any group of performers can form an orchestra on the spot, even if they have never met one another before. (Almost every man in Java—the players are all men—seems able to play a little gamelan music.) A lumber-yard manufacturer around the corner from me bought a set of instruments and placed them on a vacant porch for his workers, who played them almost every night; but hardly ever was the orchestra made up of people who had often played together as a unit.
The basic theme of the gending, or musical composition, quite simple and severe in form, is usually carried on the saron, a kind of metal xylophone the seven keys of which are struck one at a time with a wooden mallet and held down with the hand immediately afterward to prevent overtones. Thus the nuclear melody is struck out in a series of clear, distinct, and elemental tones, following one another in an even-flowing and almost entirely unstressed rhythm. A set of gongs of different sizes (of which the gong gedé, kenong, kempul, and ketuk are the most important, the first being the largest, the latter the smallest) “punctuate” the music, the largest gong marking the largest phrase, the second largest gong marking the next most gross subdivision, the smallest its basic units. Thus a gong gedé musical phrase, marked by the dull boom of the big gong, may be divided into two kenong phrases by the sounding of this somewhat smaller and hence higher-pitched gong; the kenong phrase may be divided into two kempul phrases; and finally the kempul phrase may be divided into two ketuk phrases.
A number of other instruments, most particularly the gambang, a large wooden xylophone struck with two mallets simultaneously, and the gendèr, which consists of a xylophone with keys strung on cords above resonating bamboo sound-tubes, play around the nuclear theme in small, delicate embellishments to enrich the starkness of the basic melodic line. The double-ended drum, one end of which is smaller than the other, the small end being played with the left hand, the large with the right, provides the beat. (There are sometimes two of these, one large, one smaller, both played by the same man.) It maintains the rhythm until the point comes for it to break into a new pattern; then it changes the rhythm, the other instruments following after. It is for this reason that the drummer is often called the “leader” of the gamelan orchestra and that the drum is considered the most difficult instrument to play.
Two major types of scales are used; sléndro and pélog, there being several sub-types of each. Sléndro has five equal-interval tones covering our octave; pélog has seven unequal-interval tones covering the same range. The sléndro scale is used in the accompaniment of wajangs dramatizing Mahabharata or Ramayana stories, the pelog scale for those dramatizing Hindu-Javanese kingdom stories; and, of course, both may be played alone.
The interweaving of the wajang and the gamelan is quite close. The three major divisions of the wajang noted above—the opening period until midnight, the complications period until three, and the closing section until dawn —are all marked off by the playing of special musical compositions or gendings (increasing, as the play itself, in noise and loudness as the evening wears on). There are gendings for nearly each aspect of the wajang. A war scene demands different gamelan tunes from those required by a court meeting between sat rijas; the Pendawas have getidings played for them different from those played for the Korawas; there is a whole class of tunes used for announcing the arrival of guests at court; alus figures are accompanied by different tunes from those for kasar. Each of the major figures has a gending associated with him, perhaps the most readily recognized tune being the one played at midnight to usher in the complications period and bring Semar ambling, in his peculiar rocking gait, on to the scene.
Another way in which the gamelan is married to the wajang, and to poetry as well, is through the songs called sulu/c, which are sung by the dalang at appropriate points in the play. Again, there are special songs for special events (impending war, a king entering his castle) or special characters (for Semar’s appearance, for the appearance of such a meditating guru as Ardjuna’s grandfather), and, further, special songs appropriate to special emotions (grief over a dead satrija, love songs, songs of doubt and indecision). As the suluks are derived from ancient Javanese versions of Hindu poems, and so are in great part incomprehensible both to the wajang audience and to the dalang himself, the emphasis tends not to be on their intrinsic meaning but, as in the music generally, on the mood they suggest. They are viewed more as abstract vocal music whose significance, like that of the gendings themselves, is in their rasa, in the feeling contained in them.
Playing (or listening to) a gamelan is a spiritual discipline, not just a mere amusement; in Modjokuto, people will tell you that they often play on a single gamelan instrument for a while in the evening in order to discipline and restrain their emotions, in order to make them alus. On the other hand, certain gendings are considered to have ritual efficacy, and so are proceeded by the burning of incense and a sadjèn offering to the spirits.
on the other side, gamelan music connects up with Javanese literature as well as drama through its accompaniment of Javanese poetry, the tembang. Tern-bangs are both poems and songs. They may be recited in a half-singing rhythm without accompaniment or they may be sung to a gamelan gending appropriate to them. The tembang forms are quite rigid; the number of syllables the line shall have, the number of lines, and the final vowel in the line are all carefully prescribed. There are about a dozen or so such forms, but only three are very common in Modjokuto: dandang-gula, sinom, and kinanti, for which the “formulas” are as follows:
Kinanti: 8u, 8Í, 8a, 8/, 8a, 8/
My diagram means that the dandang-gula form demands 10 lines: the first line must have 10 syllables and have i the final vowel or final syllable; the second line must have 10 syllables and a. It means that the sinom has 9 lines, the first being 8 syllables ending with an a syllable and so on. The poem composed for his children by a Modjokuto tembang maker from which 1 have already repeatedly quoted is in dandang-gula. Here I shall quote a stanza in Javanese before translating it—to serve the double purpose of displaying the form and, as the stanza concerns the prijaji view of language and poetry, of connecting tembangs into the general alus art complex I have been describing.
Rèhning Djawa ahli olah budi Kudu weruh surasané basa Kang sinandi sasadoné Kangikandas djroné lcalbu Hambukaa kekeran batin Jwa tjawuh panjurasa
Awit jèn tan runtut Pangrembugé tanpa gima Nora antuk munfangaté kawruh batin Mung malah dadi wisa
As Javanese are experts in exercising their spirits,
They need to know their feelings of words;
Those whose hidden meanings are unclear,
Those which have come aground in the heart.
Unfold the secrets of the inner life;
Do not confuse your linguistic insights;
Because if you do not put them, one by one, in order,
Your talk will be without use,
You will achieve nothing of any value in the understanding of the inner life.
In fact, your confused understanding will be as poison.
Here words are held to cloud meaning as much as reveal it; they are the lair forms in which we cast, never directly but always obliquely, our inner feelings. Words taken literally or impressionistically lead not to knowledge but to the poisoning of the spirit. Each word, each expression must be taken one by one in its proper order so that its true meaning, always vague and elusive as the batin is vague and elusive, may be partially grasped. Lair behavior, of which language (as well as music, dance, and drama) is a part, masks the batin; and thus only those who study the lair patiently and in orderly fashion are able to sort it out and get the “feeling”* that is subtly suffused through it.
For a sinom example I take not a stanza from the Modjokuto informant, although he wrote a long sinom poem too, but what is perhaps the most famous of all tembangs, certainly one nearly everyone knows and one you can hear sung by everyone from pedicab drivers to district officers:
Amenangi djaman édan
Ewuh-aja ing pambudi
Mélu édan ora tahan
Jèn tan mèlu anglakoni
Nora keduman mélik
Keliren wekasanipun
Ja talah ñora salah
Bedja bedjaning sing lali
Luwih bedja kang éling lawan waspada
We have lived to see a time without order In which everyone is confused in his mind.
One cannot bear to join in the madness,
But if he does not do so,
He will not share in the spoils,
And will starve as a result.
Yes, God; not wrong:
Happy are those who forget,
Happier yet those who remember and who have deep insight.
'* Surasa; panjtirasa, in line six, which I have translated “linguistic insights,” literally means something like "the comprehension of the feeling of words.”
The “time without order,” the djaman édan, has been variously identified with the depression, with the revolution, and with the present, with its motorcars, airplanes and atom bombs. In any case, a detachment born of deeper insight is again suggested as the main defense against madness within or without. (W aspada means to see clearly, to have clear insight into something; sometimes even in the sense of second-sight or clairvoyance.)
Finally a Icinanti, one of the simplest of all tembang forms. This famous one is taken from the scene in the Ramayana in which Anoman, the monkey hero, hears the imprisoned Dèwi Sinet, kidnapped wife of Rama, sing of her love for her distant husband, thus proving her faithfulness:
Duh Déwa duh Betara gung,
Tingalana Solah mami Sèwu lara sèwu brangta Tan ana timbangé mami Jén pukulun tan panggiha Kalawan Pangéran mami
O God, O Great God,
See my gesture!
A thousand sicknesses, a thousand longings—
There is none such as I If I do not meet My Prince.
As with us, different poetic forms are appropriate to different purposes. Kinanti poems are almost inevitably love-songs. Sinoms are often moral in tone, and sometimes prophetic as well, for example in the poetic predictions the 19th-century Javanese writer Rangga Warsita is claimed to have made of the coming of automobiles, airplanes, radios, and other modern wonders. The dandang-gula form is not so sharply defined in terms of function and may be used for various purposes, such as the didactic use above or for beginning a wajang dance. Of all the forms of the alus art complex, the tembang is perhaps the most widely diffused and the most often practiced, for it takes no capital to sing and not very much skill. You cannot walk from one end of Modjokuto to the other after ten at night and not hear someone singing a tembang somewhere along the way.
the gamelan connects drama to poetry and dance to them both. Javanese dancing is called djogèd as opposed to dangsah, Western dancing, which seems to appear almost obscene in many Javanese eyes. Evidently Javanese formal dance is more closely linked to the Javanese sense of their own identity, their body-image, than any other of their arts. Even people who are very Westernized in almost every other way still reject Western dancing with a shudder, using such expressions as, “When you dance djogèd you get lost in yourself, but when you dance Western-style, you are still conscious of what you are doing,” or “Dangsah may be all right for Westerners who are used to it, but Easterners (of either sex) dancing so close to a partner are not able to control themselves, and so it will inevitably lead to sexual intercourse,” or “I don’t mind seeing Europeans dangsah together, but if I see a Javanese doing it, it makes me feel queasy inside.” A student riot at Gadjah Mada University in Djokjakarta was set off during the time I was there by a few students daring to hold a party with Western dancing; and the death of a man in a Djakarta riot was held to have, in part, resulted from a similar situation.
There are two main types of djogèd: the ancient “princess” (putri) dances, srimpi and bedaja, performed only by young girls, and the much more recent dances (usually of both sexes) which act out the wajang and so are known as wajang wong, wong being the word for “man,” “human being.” The srimpi and bedaja are both group dances, the former having four dances, the latter nine. Until a few years before the war these dances were restricted to the courts; and it has only been in this century that Europeans have been permitted to watch them even within the confines of the castle. Formerly, srimpi was the name of an office as well as a dance, for each of the two courts (at Djokjakarta and Surakarta) had only four, chosen from among immature descendants of the ruler and replaced when pubescent. Bedajas, on the other hand, were pubescent but unmarried girls sometimes taken from among the common people outside the court and often serving as the sultan’s concubines. Dressed bare-shouldered in velvet bodices and brown-white batik sarongs, a long bright-colored double sash hanging between their half-bent legs from their waists to the floor in front of them, their heads crowned with a black and gold headpiece, their faces painted with the yellow powder we have' seen at Javanese weddings (for these are the “princesses” the bride is imitating), and moving with a kind of impossibly decelerated grace which made every gesture a calm defiance of anatomy and gravity, the srimpi and the bedaja summed up the Javanese theory of beauty and demonstrated it to king and court.
In practice the above costume description applies only to the Surakarta (commonly called Solo) court. The Djokjakarta dress is slightly different, as is the dance style itself. The Solo style is usually considered to be rather more “soft” and “feminine,” that of Djokjakarta rather “stern” and “masculine”; but neither is likely to be considered very dynamic by our standards. This general difference runs through nearly all the arts of the two courts—music, dance, drama—as well as through the systems of manners; but to an untrained Western eye the differences are likely to be small enough to be missed entirely. In any case, since for various reasons Djokjakarta has traditionally been more conservative and encapsulated within itself than Solo, the latter has had a far wider influence on the countryside and has provided the aesthetic model for most of those outside the immediate environs of the court. This includes Modjokuto, where one sees almost no Djokjakarta style dancing at all, and where, when people say the kraton (“court,” “castle”), they almost always mean Solo.
Interestingly enough, in the postwar period the situation has reversed in the sense that die Djokjakarta court, led by its modern-thinking sultan, has become a center of political consciousness in the new Republik while Solo has been left behind clinging to the relics of its old supremacy. Since the twenties, nationalism has had a greater impact upon the Djokjakarta court than upon Solo, which remained vigorously pro-colonial to the bitter end, with the result that the intelligentsia leadership of the prijaji group has come more and more from Djokjakarta and the literati leadership, to a great extent, has remained in Solo.
The line between Javanese gestures in the dance and out of it is not very sharp—as one realizes when a coolie on the back of a truck gestures to one to pass with an arm motion that could have come out of a court dance, although he no doubt knows no dance; or when a Modjokuto girl seats herself on the floor with the same unbelievably gradual sinking motion with which this is accomplished in a srimpi. The gestures seem to flow along self-contained, detached from the rest of the body, as though they were operating in a world of their own, and then suddenly break into a final twist or turn and join again into a unity with the other limbs, the trunk, and the head. Many of the most intricate gestures of the dance itself—the pointed-finger flipping of the sash in one direction or another, the kicking of the sarong train back with the foot, the bending of the hand backwards toward the wrist, or the movement of the head horizontally along the plane of the shoulders— are considered so difficult to perform with the necessary grace that only those who begin to study them very early can ever practice them with the required skill; and as soon as a dancer grows to womanhood, about twenty to twenty-five, she no longer will dance. One never sees anyone older than the middle twenties dancing alus dances in Java; most performers are from about ten to fifteen years old.
Both the bedaja and the srimpi have stories behind them. Some of the motions are supposed to be imitations of natural actions—such as “waves of the sea,” a kind of half-rocking motion—or of such human behaviors as combing the hair, dressing, fighting, or bowing to a lord. (Djokjakarta srimpis involve the wielding of daggers—kris—and bows and arrows, for they tell the story of a struggle of two girls over one man.) These natural actions are so highly stylized that the dances are in no way realistic but starkly abstract. The girls move back and forth within a square space, always facing either north, south, east or west, never diagonally. The rhythm of the dance is slow, deliberate, controlled; and the motions have a ritualistic exactness. An absolutely correct posture is required, the shoulders in just such a place that the shoulder bones do not protrude at all. Breathing must be shallow and not noticeable. Eyes must be kept fixed in one place, directly forward and a little down, giving a trance-like effect to the dance, an effect heightened by the frequent use of the “waves of the sea” step, which is merely a gently rocking motion while standing in one spot, a motion that seems to be hypnotic for both the performers and the spectators. The set expression, the carefully controlled motions, give a feeling of inwardness, of concentration on the self, and of a conception of a perfection of self-contained grace which each dancer is trying to reach independently of the others :
At one point he (a member of the governing board of a Modjokuto gamelan and djogèd group) talked about the djogèd and said that its purpose was to njetunggalaken Latin, to make as one, to unify and concentrate the inner life. He illustrated with arm motions from a man’s dance, with arms high and crooked in front and elbow rather forward, and said that the eyes must follow the point of the elbow, first on one arm and then on the other, and not just look here and there.
The wajang wong is less abstract. The modern wajang wong came into being only about the middle of the eighteenth century as part of a revival of classical Javanese art after the blows it suffered during the period of Moslem intrusion. It more or less amounts to a “dancing out” of the shadow-play lakons, or, more often, of sections of them. Most of the lakons are from the Mahabharata cycle (there being over a hundred of these, by far the largest corpus of any of the cycles, which is one reason for its popularity), and different dancers take the different parts—Ardjuna, Bima, Semar—speaking lines as well as dancing. The form of the wajang is somewhat simplified, each scene consisting usually of a djedjer, in which important persons stand facing one another and chant a few words in a kind of gruffly pompous tone; mlaku (literally, “to walk”), in which they dance toward and away from each other, often someone coming in and bringing news; and then prang, war, in which some vigorous but formalized fighting-dances take place. Some of the characters, particularly those representing giants, wear masks, and the whole thing is accompanied by the gamelan as usual.
Except for professional touring companies and, increasingly, on the radio, one rarely comes in contact with a performance of an entire wajang wong. If one does, one witnesses more a dramatic performance, a kind of opera, than a dance performance. At the court centers certain scenes or dances, which differ rather little in basic form from scene to scene and lakon to lakon in any case, are elaborated into dances complete in themselves called petilan or “excerpts,” such excerpts often including hilarious slapstick pantomime clowns—Semar and his sons—mimicking the hyper-a/wj movements of the principals.
In Modjokuto one sees only such “excerpts,” usually even more simplified (there almost always being no clowns), performed by amateurs, the more drama-like wajang wongs being left to professional companies. Thus the wajang wong in Modjokuto refers to two things: an opera-like rendition of a wajang lakon by a professional troupe, which form I shall discuss in the ne^t section, and a set of abstract dances largely complete in themselves bui t generally around wajang themes and characters. In fact, the only difference between these latter and the srimpi—which, indeed, is often mixed in with them during a performance, more or less at random—is the addition of male dancers and male-type dances; they are not developed dramatic performances.
People can hear the full performances over the radio; and every few months or so a professional troupe of dancers and actors who travel about: performing the wajang won g will come to town and perform for a few days. In both these latter cases, the wajang has been even more adapted away from its original form and become something like a Western opera—a mixture of semi-realistic drama mixed with music and dance, although there is not as much singing. The formal tripartite division of the wajang wong proper, which is essentially still a dance rather than a play, dissolves into a looser and more dramatic form approaching the freedom and realism of the popular dramas such as the ludrug, ketoprak, and others, to which we shall come presently. Thus, at its “bottom end”—and some of the professional wajang wongs which come to Modjokuto are sorry affairs indeed from an aesthetic point of view—are popular “folk plays” in which the name, the bare outline of the plot, the characters, and the gamelan of the wajang are present, but little of the rasa. At the upper end, however, the dance performers of wajang wong fragments which are performed in Modjokuto represent the same alus theory of art as underlies the srimpi, perhaps best summed up by a Djokjakarta university student, who said:
There are three main principles of the dance, the essence of the dance:
Wirasa [rasa: wi- is just a fancy prefix which no one but the elevated use]— the philosophy, the direction, the “mystic Weltanschauung” underlying the dance; the “purity" of it.
Wirania—the music [literally: tempo, rhythm].
Wiraga—the action, the dance itself.
There must be a harmony between these three principles. All the actions have meaning, but you must know the wirasa to understand the meaning.
“You must always look at the dance,” a Modjokuto informant warned me, “not at the dancer.”
In Modjokuto there were four alus dance groups, three of them under the same leader, a public school teacher who was also a dalang (and headed an organization of all the dalangs in the area which was designed to raise standards of performance, exchange material, and so on, but which seems rarely to have met). He trained a group of young boys and girls from his school to dance the srimpi and wajang wotig, contracting performances for them at occasions such as weddings and circumcisions held by prijajis or richer abangan villagers, such as village chiefs. He also taught a group of young men and women in their late teens and early twenties who were attached to the railroad union, an organization which had a lively interest in the arts, owning a gamelan and having a special department for “sports and culture.” This group performed in the union’s meeting-hall on various special occasions such as the First of May. Lastly, he found time to teach a group of small girls in an organization called Langen Putera Modjokuto (Modjokuto Recreation Society for Children) to do the srimpi. This organization, originally founded by a retired civil servant in Modjolcuto, was run for the most part by officials from the government pawnshop and other government offices to teach children to dance, play the gamelan, sing tembangs, and so on— although by the time I left Modjokuto it was beginning to lose much of its impetus.
Lastly, there was a dance group of Taman Siswai|: students who practiced weekly at the home of one of the Taman Siswa school teachers. They performed at Taman Siswa events of one sort or another and sometimes at the district officer’s office on national holidays, although they had to compete with the other groups for this honor. Some, but very little, alus dancing seems to have been taught in the government sekolah guru—in teachers’ school— in town. But with the new emphasis on subjects such as science, history, and Indonesian literature in the public schools, the heavy emphasis on Javanese art that marked the “native schools” before the war has disappeared.
Batik, the final element in the alus art complex, is a method of resist-dye textile design which uses wax as the resistant. A design, largely abstract although sometimes there are bird or floral designs included, is drawn or stenciled in pencil on a piece of white muslin which is then hung over a rack about a yard high. The artist, always a woman, sits on a mat on the ground with the bottom part of the cloth spread out before her. (She can roll up the end on which she is not working on sticks.) Next to her she has a small charcoal stove which keeps a pan of wax molten. With the aid of a small metal instrument (tjanting), built on the funnel principle, she covers with wax those parts of the design which she wishes to leave free of color. This completed, the cloth is dipped in a vat of dye, most often either ink-blue or brown, sometimes yellow or reddish-brown. Then the wax is scraped off, and later one can, if that is the intention, apply more wax and dip again in a second color.
Since each of the important batik centers such as Djokjakarta, Solo, Pekalongan, and Surabaja has special designs and colors, one can almost always tell where a particular cloth originated or at least what style it is following. In the days before the Republik certain designs were reserved to royalty, and the female manufacture of batik was an important means of support for many prijaji families whose male head spent much of his time in largely unremunerative court duties. Also, like dance, music, and drama, batik was a spiritual discipline. Since single pieces may take months to complete, it took great inward concentration to work on such a piece of very detailed and delicate cloth painting; and a favorite symbol of mystic experience is still mbatik manah—“drawing a batik design on the heart.”
Nowadays, however, probably 95 per cent of the batik production is tjap —a semi-mechanized method in which the design is cast into a lead stamp which is then dipped into wax and stamped by hand on the cloth. Although still slow compared to Western mechanical methods of textile painting, this 1 method speeds up production tremendously—at the cost of a loss of the delicacy of the hand-drawn batik.
Batik production is an important industry in Java, and all married women still wear batik sarongs every day in Modjokuto. (Unmarried girls wear Western dresses.) On special occasions men still wear batik sarongs although the practice is disappearing rapidly. (They are always worn in the dances.) In Modjokuto only two women told me they ever did any batik themselves; and I never actually saw them do any. Most batik worn by Modjokuto women is tjap imported from Djokjakarta, Solo, Surabaja, and other large cities. In Modjokuto, hand batik-making is a lost art; but in the large cities one still sees a little of it, serving now a carriage trade which can afford to pay three or four hundred rupiah for a single sarong.
Wajang, lakon, gamelan, djogèd, tembang, and batik, then, form an integrated art-complex expressing largely prijaji values. Although the forms are well-known and still attractive throughout the whole of the society—but perhaps not so attractive to most as the kasar art-forms we shall discuss next, it is among the prijajis that they find their greatest strength and their most explicit interpretations. Even in the past, the heart of these alus forms was always in the courts, where they were cultivated and perfected and, from which center they flowed outward and downward, as political and spiritual power themselves, to the masses, increasingly ineptly performed as they descended. If anything, the tendency for these alus art-forms to become a gentry concern is increasing with the greater hold the popular dramas and the more Westernized forms of art are getting on the masses, leaving interested prijajis as the main patrons of the traditional high-art. It is at the large prijaji conspicuous-display rites-of-passage celebrations that one mainly sees this sort of art now in Modjokuto. The district officer gave his daughter a two-day wedding, with imported djogèd dancers the first evening and a shadow play with an imported dalang the second; a retired official of the government pawn-shop hired the town hall in which to show a wajang when his daughter married; and a prijaji politician hired dancers for his son’s five-days-after-the-wedding celebration.
Taman Siswa is a Java-wide private school system, with headquarters in Djokjakarta. It has devoted itself to the preservation of Javanese culture and the building up of “national feeling” among the masses.