Playing by the Rules when the Rules Don’t Exist

Abstract

I visited jakarta, iindonesia for the first time nearly thirty years ago, when I was an idealistic and impressionable young man at the start of my career in international business. Upon arriving, I checked into one of the city’s most luxurious hotels and headed straight to the concierge to inquire where I could see a live performance of gamelan. Gamelan is a form of Indonesian music (with Balinese and Javanese analogs) dating back to the twelfth century. Kneeling musicians i n colorful batiks play xylophones, drums, gongs, and other percussion instruments tuned to unique scales, making their melodies unpredictable and strangely pleasing. The driving rhythms and intense clashing sounds are punctuated by long climaxing crescendos. Gamelan musicians often provide the sound track to t he a ncient I nd onesian puppet theater art form known as wayang. The gamelan ensemble performs as the puppet masters and their carved, colorful puppets act out Hindu-Buddhist stories about nobility, complete with princesses in distress and their royal saviors. I’d been exposed to this exotic (to my ears) form of music in college, and the sound of gamelan always conjured up paradisiacal images of musicians in bright Asian attire playing as the sun set on another beautiful island evening. I couldn’t wait to experience this in person.