Christopher L. Basile completed a PhD dissertation on Tradition and Change in Rotinese Sasandu-Accompanied Song at Monash University in Australia. He has published a CD of his Rotinese field recordings, Troubled Grass and Crying Bamboo: The Music of Roti (Indonesian Arts Society IAS5), and written reference articles on music in Roti for The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (2000) and The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music (1999). Email: cbasile9@gmail.com
Brian Baumbusch, MA (Mills College), 2013, is currently a DMA candidate in music composition at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he is also the faculty instructor and director of the Balinese Gamelan ensemble. He currently directs the contemporary gamelan group, The Lightbulb Ensemble, based in Oakland, California. He and the ensemble received the 2014 Gerbode and Hewlett Foundations Music Commissioning Award for the composition they wrote with composer Wayne Vitale. Baumbusch is currently conducting research on rhythm and metallurgical acoustics. Email: bbaumbusch@gmail.com
Benjamin Brinner, PhD and MA (University of California at Berkeley), 1985 and 1979, is a professor in the Department of Music at UC Berkeley. As an ethnomusicologist, he is interested in issues of musical cognition, musical memory, and how musicians know what they know. He has conducted research in Indonesia and Israel with the support of two Fulbright fellowships and several research grants. An award-winning author of three books, Brinner has co-directed UC Berkeley’s Javanese music performing ensemble Gamelan Sari Raras since 1989. He has taught ethnomusicology courses at Tel Aviv University, the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and Colorado College. Email: brinner@berkeley.edu
Elizabeth Clendinning, PhD (Florida State University), 2013, is Assistant Professor of Music at Wake Forest University, where she directs Gamelan Giri Murti. With a BA from the University of Chicago (2007) and MM from Florida State University (2009), she was a Visiting Instructor in Ethnomusicology and Director of World Music at Emory University (2013–14) and past president of the Southeast and Caribbean Chapter of the Society for Ethnomusicology (2015–16). Her research addresses concepts of space, time, cultural representation, and pedagogy within transnational Indonesian communities. Clendinning’s current book project focuses on gamelan and the historiography of American ethnomusicology. Email: clendiea@wfu.edu
Jennifer Fraser, PhD (UIUC), 2007, is Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology and Anthropology at Oberlin College. She is the author of Gongs and Pop Songs: Sounding Minangkabau in Indonesia (2015) and articles in the journals Ethnomusicology and Ethnomusicology Forum. At Oberlin, Fraser teaches both the Central Javanese gamelan and a talempong ensemble, which she believes is the only one of its kind in the United States. Email: jfraser@oberlin.edu
Cobina Gillitt, PhD (NYU), 2001, is an assistant professor of Theatre and Performance at Purchase College, State University of New York. Her translations of Indonesian plays appear in Islands of Imagination: Modern Indonesian Plays in Translation (2015) and The Lontar Anthology of Indonesian Drama, Volume III: New Directions: 1965–1998 (2010). She has published several articles and book chapters on Indonesian theatre and the theatrical avant-garde, including “Richard Schechner” (2013), “How the Fish Swims in Dirty Water: Antigone in Indonesia” (2011), and “Indonesian Theatre and its Double: Putu Wijaya Paints a Theatre of Mental Terror” (2006). Email: cobina.gillitt@purchase.edu
Lisa Gold, PhD (UC Berkeley), 1998, teaches in the department of music at the University of California at Berkeley. Her research interests include Balinese and Javanese music in ritual and theater, gamelan gender wayang, shadow puppetry, folklore and folk music of the British Isles, oral performance and improvisation, sound studies, music, place, and spatial orientation, and transmission and performance ecosystems. In addition to being an author and a member of Gamelan Sari Raras, Gamelan Sekar Jaya, and ShadowLight, Gold assists in the Balinese gamelan program at UC Berkeley. She has performed and conducted research extensively in Bali and the US. Email: lisagold7@gmail.com
Gini Gorlinski, PhD (University of Wisconsin-Madison), 1995, is an instructional designer for Pearson North America, where she works with graduate and undergraduate faculty to develop online courses for the digital environment. She continues to write on topics related to her music-ethnographic research in Indonesian and Malaysian Borneo, primarily among Kenyah and Kayan peoples. Her work has appeared in an array of music and non-music journals, anthologies, and encyclopedias. Gorlinski has earned a black belt in tang soo do and spends many evenings and weekends in the dojang (martial-arts studio) as both a student and a teacher. Email: vkgorlinski@yahoo.com
David Harnish, PhD, is Professor and Chair of Music at the University of San Diego. He has published books and articles on the music cultures of Bali and Lombok, including Bridges to the Ancestors: Music, Myth and Cultural Politics at an Indonesian Festival(2006). In addition, he co-edited/authored Divine Inspirations: Music and Islam in Indonesia (2011) and Between Harmony and Discrimination: Negotiating Interreligious Relationships in Bali and Lombok (2014). He directs Gamelan Gunung Mas at the University of San Diego and serves as academic liaison for the Kyoto Prize Symposium. Email: dharnish@sandiego.edu
Meghan Hynson, PhD (UCLA), 2015, is now a Visiting Assistant Professor of Ethnomusicology at Duquesne University. Her research focuses on the performing arts of Indonesia, in particular, music and ritual in Bali and the use of angklung in music education and cultural diplomacy in West Java. Hynson’s current research projects include the Balinese wayang sapuh legerritual from Mas Village, Gianyar; religiosity and syncretism in the Balinese “Call to Prayer” (Tri Sandhya); and commoditization and change in the DVD culture of modern Balinese shadow puppet theater. Email: meghanhynson@gmail.com
Alexander Khalil, PhD (UCSD), is an ethnomusicologist and cognitive scientist. He holds a doctoral degree in music from the University of California, San Diego. His doctoral dissertation, “Echoes of Constantinople: Oral and written tradition of the psaltes of the Ecumenical Patriarchate,” explores the complex process of interpreting written music. After receiving his doctorate, he trained in science for five years as a postdoctoral scholar at the department of Cognitive Science, UCSD, where he conducted behavioral and electrophysiological research on music, culture, and cognitive development. He currently continues this work as a project scientist at the Institute for Neural Computation at UCSD. Email: akhalil@ucsd.edu
Rachmi Diyah Larasati, PhD (University of California, Riverside) 2006, is associate professor of cultural theory and historiography of dance in the Department of Theatre Arts and Dance at the University of Minnesota. Currently dance director, she is also affiliate graduate faculty in the Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies (GWSS) department, the Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change (ICGC), and the Asian Literatures, Cultures, and Media department. Larasati is the author of The Dance that Makes You Vanish (2013) and more than fifteen scholarly articles. She is currently writing her second book, Dancing in the Forest. Email: laras001@umn.edu
Andy McGraw, PhD (Wesleyan University), 2005, is an Associate Professor of Music at the University of Richmond. He has published extensively on traditional and experimental music in Southeast Asia. As a student and performer of Indonesian musics, he has studied and collaborated with leading Balinese and Javanese performers during several years of research in Indonesia. His performances and collaborations have appeared on the Tzadik, Sargasso, and Porter record labels. McGraw is the author of Radical Traditions: Re-imagining Culture in Balinese Contemporary Music (2013). Email: amcgraw@richmond.edu
Sumarsam, PhD (Cornell University) is a Professor of Music at Wesleyan University (Middletown, Connecticut). He holds a BA from the Indonesian Gamelan Academy in Surakarta and an MA in music from Wesleyan University. Sumarsam has published widely on gamelan and wayang. His first book was Gamelan: Cultural Interaction and Musical Development in Central Java (1995; Indonesian, 2003), followed by Javanese Gamelan and the West (2013). His third book will explore the impact of Islam on the development of the performing arts in Java. As a gamelan musician and amateur dhalang of Javanese wayang puppet play, he performs, conducts workshops, and lectures throughout the United States, Australia, Europe, and Asia. Email: sumarsam@wesleyan.edu
Wayne Vitale is a composer, educator, and scholar inspired by the music of Bali. He has studied, documented, and collaborated with many of Bali’s greatest musicians. His compositions for bronze gamelan range from traditional to experimental/multimedia and have been performed by noted gamelan orchestras in Bali. Vitale is a founding member and past director (1992–2009) of Gamelan Sekar Jaya (www.gsj.org) and a founding member of the Lightbulb Ensemble. His recording label, Vital Records (www.vitalrecords.ws), focuses on new and traditional Balinese music. Devoted to the metallic art of gamelan tuning and restoration, Vitale refurbishes Balinese instruments throughout the US and Europe. Email: waynea.vitale@gmail.com
Tyler Yamin, MFA (California Institute of the Arts), 2012, is a graduate student in the UCLA Department of Ethnomusicology. He has extensive experience teaching and performing gamelan music in the US and Indonesia, and he attended the Center for World Music in San Diego as a child. An advocate for rare and neglected forms of Balinese music, Yamin built a gamelan ensemble to perform traditional repertoire. As the director of Gamelan Pandan Arum, he has been able to teach and preserve exceedingly rare pieces that have not been attempted outside of Bali. Email: tyamin@alum.calarts.edu
Credits
- Editors
- Sumarsam, Wesleyan University
- Andy McGraw, University of Richmond
National Museum of Asian Art
- Project Coordination
- Zeynep Simavi
- Michael Wilpers
- Copy Editing
- Nancy Eickel
- Web Design
- Ryan King
- Liz Cheng
- Melda Washington
- Gio Camozzi
This publication is made possible, in part, through support from the Embassy of the Republic of Indonesia in Washington, D.C. Performing Indonesia: A Conference and Festival of Music, Dance, and Drama was a joint presentation of the National Museum of Asian Art (Smithsonian) and the Embassy of Indonesia, with support from the Ministry of Education and Culture (Jakarta) and Rumah Indonesia, in 2013.
