Musical concepts in oral performance of kakawin in Bali

Abstract

Unfortunately the erroneous belief seems to be ineradicable that non writing or non-reading societies live in a world virtually without memory, in a world of permanent change without any 'progress'. In fact, it is not the case that non-writing societies have no memory, but rather that they have a different kind of cultural memory. Initially, in the development of writing, the contents of memory are simply externalized; that is, writing is originally used as a medium for storage, serving accounting and bookkeeping purposes. Only at an advanced stage of development does writing acquire an additional, yet secondary function, which comes to dominate: that of a medium of communication, a means of communicating the sounds of language in a different mode.1 One may with good reason ask how these observations apply to the topic of this article; certainly, after more than a millennium of writing in Java and Bali nobody will suggest labelling these cultures as non-writing or non-reading. But looking at the reception processes of several Javanese and Balinese literary genres, in particular Old Javanese kakawin poetry, we may become aware of the sometimes forgotten original and true meaning of 'reading'. Script, the system of graphic signs representing the sounds of language, is unable by itself to ensure continuity of the encoded meaning and knowledge. The comprehension of script is not a matter of the script itself, but rests inevitably upon the corresponding cultural memory. Through the process of reading, the latent contents of memory are transferred to the present moment. Cultural memory, having been 'stored' in graphic signs, is appropriated anew through a process of communication, and thereby made concrete again. As a rule in particular in the reading of kakawin in present-day Bali this does not happen simply through silently decoding these signs, but rather through an audible oral interpretation and realization which strives for meaning through a complex process. Thus it seems that the kakawin poetry of ancient Java acquires its character as a meaningful literary text for present-day Balinese only through oral performance. Philologists, being traditionally inclined towards the study of