Gamelan Girls: Gender, Childhood, and Politics in Balinese Music Ensembles is about an integral part of everyday social, cultural, and religious life in Bali, the gamelan music that is performed in a wide variety of contexts, from secular to the highly sacred. The Indonesian word gamelan is analogous to the English word orchestra in that it can refer to both the set of instruments that comprise a whole ensemble and to the group of musicians who play in that ensemble.
The author, Sonja Lynn Downing, concentrates on the members and teachers of the few organizations in Bali that allow and encourage girls to play, and she examines the ways in which girls actively contribute to new combinations of femininity, musicality, and Balinese identity. She presents a longitudinal study investigating how children’s lives and musical activities interact with their surrounding world. She takes a phenomenological approach to examining how girls enact and negotiate their gendered, cultural, and creative identities through learning and performance, as well as how children, their families, and their teachers address varying and conflicting imperatives from governmental and commercial forces.
The first chapter of the book discusses the various types of traditional, governmental, or private organizations that have supported or restricted girls’ gamelan playing throughout the historical record. Through a discussion of how these different structures influence one another, the author offers histories of women’s and children’s gamelan ensembles. Exclusively ethnographic, chapter 2 introduces the organizations and individuals featured throughout the book to ground the author’s later analyses in musicians’ lived experiences.
Chapters 3 and 4 offer historical and political contexts of women and children in Balinese gamelan to better understand girls’ positions as they contribute to Balinese cultural identity and artistic life. In chapter 3, the author addresses the push to standardize cultural and religious diversity since about 2002 under a campaign of cultural preservation. Then the book contextualizes girls’ and women’s gamelans within competing ideologies of national and local gender identities, in order to show how private performing-arts studios and teachers resist those ideologies that impede the work of female musicians. Chapter 4 situates children’s gamelans within competing ideologies of national and local conceptions of children and family as well as within influences from globalization, namely tourism and commercialization. Doing so allows the author to illustrate how private studios and children themselves push back against restive national and commercial forces.
Chapters 5 and 6 delve into the obstacles young and adult female musicians face as well as the progress they and their respective groups have made between 2002 and 2015. Chapter 5 offers an in-depth analysis of how girls are able to reformulate notions of Balinese gender by actively contributing to the intersection of femininity and musical excellence, previously understood in Bali to be mutually exclusive in the realm of gamelan gong kebyar. Chapter 5 also involves discussions of gendered challenges involved in being musical leaders of gamelan ensembles. Chapter 6 assesses problems girls and their studios still face. The author also explores the benefits visible now that girls’ groups are increasing in number, with some girls’ mixed-gender ensembles having been continuous for over a decade.
The conclusion of the book explores girls’ participation in changing religious and cultural practices, as seen in their artistic contributions to festival competitions and Balinese Hindu temple ceremonies. This discussion ties the previous arguments together, as Balinese notions of gender are closely tied to politics and current tensions between Indonesian and Balinese identities, and it highlights the importance of girls’ roles and musical experiences in the intersections between them. The concluding chapter also focuses on the future of girls in gamelan with a consideration of what is still needed for girls to thrive musically in Bali.
Though each chapter has a specific focus or theme, the events and stories related within them move roughly chronologically through the book, allowing the reader to follow the experiences of the girls growing up in their respective ensembles and the development of those ensembles through nearly the first two decades of the millennium.
Downing’s goal is to go beyond other ethnomusicological scholarship that has described socio-musical shifts that occur when women or girls are included in previously exclusively male music-making. She delves into the details of why and how often shifts happen and offers an understanding of them through accounts and analyses of conversations, rehearsals, temple performances, tourist shows, and competitions.
Gamelan Girls: Gender, Childhood, and Politics in Balinese Music Ensembles is useful not just to ethnomusicologists who study gamelan music, but also to music educators, child development specialists, and those interested in childhood studies and gender studies.
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[Review length: 763 words • Review posted on February 4, 2022]