Towards a More Open Approach to the History of Javanese Music

Abstract

We are at a point now where many students of Java's culture regard the history of present-day musical activities as irrelevant, either because they believe that history to be indecipherable, or because the musical activities themselves are considered to need and be worthy of more consideration than their history. Yet the materials available for a general discussion of the Javanese past from the ninth century A.D. on, though perhaps not as plentiful as those of Western cultures, are substantial, and a sufficient proportion of them relate to the antecedents of what is regarded as music by Western and Javanese musicologists to justify a large amount of musicological--music history--research. It seems to me that what we need is a reformulation of our ideas on the history of Javanese music.