Gamelan gong kebyar emerged around the turn of the 20th century in North Bali’s Buléléng region, which came under Dutch colonial control in 1849. At the time, Bali was divided among eight kings whose rivalries allowed the Dutch to pit one kingdom against another. Dutch economic control was the intention, but their campaign was framed with moral arguments rooted in the Balinese slave trade (from which the Dutch had long benefited) and in widow sacrifice tied to royal cremations. In succession, the Balinese kingdoms fell to Dutch attacks: Lombok in 1894, Badung (Denpasar) in 1906, and Klungkung in 1908. As the historian Adrian Vickers notes, “The Dutch moved on the capital of Denpasar. On the morning of September 20, the king, his family and thousands of armed followers all dressed in white and ready to meet death in battle, marched out to meet the Dutch. Each of the leading warriors ran amok in turn, marching on as if bullets would bounce off their bodies. The Dutch opened fire on women with weapons in their hands, lance or kris, and children in their arms who advanced fearlessly upon the troops and sought death . . . surrender was impossible.”
The reasons that led to the artistic flowering that followed the collapse of the Balinese kingdoms are open to speculation. The Balinese musician I Nyoman Catra has suggested that the surge of experimentation functioned like medicine, helping to heal the trauma of social upheaval and colonial occupation. With the dismantling of the power and wealth of the regional courts, the arts broadened beyond the capitals and spread into the banjar (village) effectively democratizing artistic life. Furthermore, new fashions and technologies associated with modernity arrived with the Dutch, alongside a small but steady flow of European and U.S. travelers who, in the 1920s, began traveling to Bali on cruise ships.
Around this time, gamelan gong kebyar and related dances were beginning to be heard and seen across both North and South Bali. Kebyar’s innovations took shape between 1910 and 1915 in North Bali’s Buléléng region, then the Dutch colonial administration center. Across the island in the late 19th century, Balinese-language literary life–sometimes blended with Kawi (known as old Javanese)–entered a particularly creative phase. Traditional poetic genres and their song forms took on mystical, romantic, historical, and sociopolitical themes, while renewed interest in classical kakawin texts also inspired a wave of Balinese literary clubs devoted to teaching Kawi recitation and translating the material into Balinese language. Another popular genre, palawakya, refers to a non-metric Balinese form of storytelling, chanting, or prose narration with themes inspired by the Mahabharata. Clubs from different villages often competed with one another before larger, growing audiences at ceremonial religious events and at night markets.
At these gatherings, the juru baca (singer/reader) and the juru basa (translator) might sit within a gamelan while kakawin verses from the Mahabharata were intoned. Alternatively, musicians within the ensemble could sing a kakawin verse on the spot–since performers were expected to know kakawin well enough to respond musically to the sung text. The gamelan would punctuate these moments with brief instrumental interludes drawn from the classical repertoire, increasingly animated by the brighter, more improvisatory phrasing that would come to define the gong kebyar tradition.
This according to the commentary by Edward Herbst that accompanies the CD The roots of gamelan: The first recordings—Bali, 1928; New York, 1941 (World Arbiter, 1999; RILM Abstracts of Music Literature 1999-38076).
Related Bibliolore posts:
https://bibliolore.org/2023/06/12/lost-and-found-balinese-music/
https://bibliolore.org/2022/11/14/balinese-aesthetics/
https://bibliolore.org/2019/08/15/bali-remixed-and-revisited/
