ABSTRACT Timbre, which traditionally was put in the background of musical compositions, now starts to gain a presence in the foreground of contemporary gamelan compositions. It does so to the extent that it dominates other musical parameters; it blurs the distinction between timbre, harmony, rhythm, and many other elements. In this paper, I analyse the rise of timbre as a compositional parameter by looking at new gamelan works after the year 2010. This includes the works of Septian Dwi Cahyo, Irene Tanuwidjaja, Dion Nataraja, Dieter Mack, Putu Septa, Arham Aryadi, Arya Deva Suryanegara, and Yan Priya Kumara Janardhana. Aside from this primary analysis, I also trace the development of the discourse regarding timbre in the gamelan tradition by looking at historical precursors in the twentieth century, such as works by I Wayan Sadra, Pande Made Sukerta, Aloysius Suwardi, Ki Tjokrowasito, and Ki Nartosabdho. I connect my analysis with various critical theories by writers ranging from Bhabha to Derrida to demonstrate that the rise of timbre has brought the gamelan tradition to its breaking point, yet, it is still in relation to that tradition; it is a state of tradition in suspension.

ABSTRACT In contemporary Indonesia, women composers can be considered as the Other. They are outnumbered, forgotten, and excluded in a patriarchal, male dominated music landscape. They are also disconnected from each other, and lost in the long history of Indonesian women composer's music and discourse. In 2021, amidst the darkest isolation as the world reeled from COVID–19, Indonesian women composers started to form a collective movement. This paper tells the stories of how women composers reconnected their ideas of solidarity through various online platforms. It captures an autoethnography of the networking process, one which seeks to follow the trace of musical exploration and resistance—a story of a woman becoming a composer in Indonesia.

ABSTRACT The development of new musical compositions for Balinese gamelan has resulted in a rapid growth in contemporary music genres. Their methodologies have led to extraordinary creativity and the forming of individual compositional styles that exhibit a variety of new and innovative approaches to composing for Balinese gamelan. These new ways include: combining traditional compositional techniques with foreign musical techniques and scales, conducting intrinsic and extrinsic experiments in choosing musical elements, and exploring possible collaborations between electronic music and gamelan. Many believe this has resulted from the tendency for composers to search for the new and unusual in the Balinese new music scene. By examining some of these new compositions and the thought process behind them, this article traces the historical development of new music in Bali, discusses its musical features, and presents the method of composition utilised by an older generation of composers in realising their music creations. It then considers younger composers and their approaches to utilising musical elements of their own and incorporating those of other cultures into their works. Next, it introduces various kind of techniques found in the development of individual methodologies exhibited at the Komponis Kini, a ‘new music for gamelan’ event. The paper proceeds with an analysis of segments of selected compositions by various composers who participated at the Komponis Kini event, including a discussion of how each composer understands and situates their work within projections for the future of Balinese new music.

ABSTRACT Since the 1980s, Indonesian sound artists/composers have been creating new instruments as part of their compositional work. Some of them invented new instruments to expand the tradition, while others used their new instruments to address current political issues in their communities. This phenomenon prompted me to investigate and analyse their works, which led to two conclusions. First, some sound artists/composers create new musical instruments to expand traditions, introduce new contexts and create their desired sound worlds. Second, the new musical instruments they create also act as visual art, serving as symbolic representations of society's problems.

ABSTRACT In the last two decades (2000–2020), new music activity in Yogyakarta has grown rapidly, due to the emergence of various creative forums/spaces that have accommodated the works of composers. The emergence of the internet and musical technology devices has also increasingly created various styles and forms of work, and has facilitated communication for composers. This article is only an introduction, to record, chronologically and partially, the events and network patterns among new music composers in the last two decades, especially what happened in Yogyakarta, on history and network. I am also directly involved on annual programme called October Meeting Contemporary Music and Musicians (from 2016 until now). In conclusion, it seems that the role and initiative of individuals and collectives has had an important impact on the development of new music in Yogyakarta. The study also produces interesting reflections about audience development, which is a challenge for composers and all other interested parties in Indonesia.

ABSTRACT The Noise music scene in Indonesia has grown its popularity in recent years, thanks to the movie Bising: Noise and Experimental Music in Indonesia (2014) about people who do Noise in Indonesia, Senyawa who plays everywhere, and the Jogja Noise Bombing Festival, which draws attention from Noise musicians and fans around the world who come to attend the annual festival. It is already acknowledged not only abroad, where it first gained its popularity, but also by several national media and music festivals who feature some Noise musicians in their programmes. From an unknown yet obscure genre, Noise music has been part of the independent music ecosystem in Indonesia. Nowadays, the Noise scenes in Indonesia are not limited to Java island, but include other islands such as Kalimantan, Sulawesi, Bali, Sumatra, Batam, and spaces in between. Studying the connections between the Noise activists in these islands through their network of touring, releasing an album together, or simply via Whatsapp group chat is interesting. This article aims at exploring the connections between Noise scenes in Indonesia. After studying the network directly through direct involvement and conducting interviews with some key figures in the scenes, we found some interesting facts such as the historical origin of its performers as well as infrastructures of the scenes (including but not limited to records labels, venues, communities, instrument builders, and festivals). The motivation of these Noise artists for networking and their desire to connect on a broader scale has helped the Noise scenes to achieve recognition.

ABSTRACT Indonesia’s new music, alive in some parts of the archipelago from Sumatra in the west to Papua in the east, can be seen as a musical expression, both in verbal and abstract sound form, resulting from cultural refraction through individual composers. Nevertheless, the centre of attention for musical culture is still Java and Bali, two main islands in the cultural politics of the archipelago. Outside the two, new music works and sources of creation for the respective composers in several regions in Indonesia are still less noticed, even ignored. This article explores the new musical expression in Papua, the easternmost part of Indonesia, especially in works based on the so-called indigenous music but still using western musical precepts in a very selective way possible. By extracting or being inspired by various forms of ritual in the areas, a young woman composer named Septina Rosalina Layan shapes the very characteristics of Papuan new music and differentiates her works from those of new music composers from other parts of Indonesia. The approach in this narrative inquiry is based on several paths, namely tracing her endeavour in combining oral and written processes and her faithfulness towards oral traditions so rich in vocal music. This essay proves that the boldness of Papuan new music is an idiosyncratic reopening of the musical treasures from the ancestral past.

ABSTRACT This paper discusses the development of artistic collaboration during the global lockdown, related to the COVID-19 pandemic. The art work under study involves the author’s practices of ecological sound art and intercultural collaboration in collaboration with Canadian composer and improviser John Oliver. A primary outcome of this work was the album Isolation Journal, released in 2020, in the midst of the pandemic. One feature of Isolation Journal was how it revisited site-specific recordings made in Vietnam, on the countryside north of Hanoi, for an installation made by Östersjö in collaboration with Nguyễn Thanh Thủy and Matthew Sansom [Östersjö, Stefan, and Thanh Thủy Nguyễn. 2016. “The Sounds of Hanoi and the After-Image of the Homeland.” Journal of Sonic Studies 12. https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/246523/246546]. Through remote interactions, and by building a complex sampler instrument using Östersjö's recordings of Aeolian đàn đáy, a traditional Vietnamese lute, as well as field recordings from the site, Oliver and Östersjö created the album Isolation Journal through remote interaction. This in turn became a fundamental building block when the author's Vietnamese/Swedish group The Six Tones took the initiative to develop a scene for telematic performance at Manzi Art Space in Hanoi. This series started out with a concert with John Oliver, The Six Tones and guest performers from Hanoi in July 2020. Building on audio and video documentation, as well as on qualitative interviews with the participating co-performers, an analysis of the emergence of discursive voice [Gorton, David, and Stefan Östersjö. 2019. “Austerity Measures I: Performing the Discursive Voice.” In Voices, Bodies, Practices: Performing Musical Subjectivities, edited by Catherine Laws, William Brooks, David Gorton, Nguyễn Thanh Thủy, Stefan Östersjö, and Jeremy J. Wells, 29–79. Orpheus Institute Series. Leuven: Leuven University Press] is drawn from these two internally linked artistic projects. The paper develops the analytical framework of tele-copresence, a synthesis of the contrasting concepts of telepresence and copresence, as a means for analysing the virtual presence which emerges through such remote musical interaction.

ABSTRACT Literary texts often considered difficult or challenging present formidable hindrances to literature classrooms founded on ideas of mastery and understanding. This mastery is facilitated through the visual privilege of lingering on a page of literature. Sound does not allow for this. As Walter Ong [2002. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge] once remarked, ‘If I stop the movement of sound, I have nothing—only silence, no sound at all’ (32). Sound allows for passivity as opposed to mastery, and thus allows for what I call the radical passivity of listening. In this article, I begin with the pedagogical possibilities of audiobooks, with the 1982 RTÉ audio version of James Joyce’s Ulysses at the centre. Here Molly Bloom’s soliloquy from ‘Penelope’ becomes a breathy spew of dialogue, often impeding the space necessary for interpretation, and calling for submission to her speech. I then move on to Anna Burns’ 2018 novel Milkman, and investigate the possibilities of ‘listening’ to a challenging text on paper as one would to an audiobook. In both cases, the female first-person narrators speak in response to rumours about themselves, and are struggling to be heard, while also calling upon the reader-listener, I argue, to suspend interpretive thought in favour of submissive listening. I thus advocate for a pedagogy of restraint, one which favours impressions over analysis and is founded in listening rather than interlocution.