Rasa

The complex notion of "rasa," as understood by Javanese musicians, refers to a combination of various qualities, including: taste, feeling, affect, mood, sense, inner meaning, a faculty of knowing intuitively, and deep understanding. This leaves us with a number of questions: how is rasa expressed musically? Who or what has rasa, and what sorts of musical, psychological, perceptual, and sociological distinctions enter into this determination? How is the vocabulary of rasa structured, and what does this tell us about traditional Javanese music and aesthetics? In this first book on the subject, Rasa provides an entry into Javanese music as it is conceived by the people who know the tradition best: the musicians themselves. In one of the most thorough explorations of local aesthetics to date, author Marc Benamou argues that musical meaning is above all connotative - hence, not only learned, but learnable. Following several years performing and researching Javanese music in the regional and national cultural center of Solo, Indonesia, Benamou untangles the many meanings of rasa as an aesthetic criterion in Javanese music, particularly in court and court-derived gamelan traditions. While acknowledging that certain universal psychological tendencies may inspire parallel interpretations of musical meaning, Rasa demonstrates just how culturally specific such accrued, shared meanings can be.

Marc Benamou is Associate professor of music at Earlham College; his writings interweave aesthetics with various other domains, such as gender, food, language, ornithology, and ethics; has performed extensively in Java and abroad as a vocalist of traditional Javanese music, and has founded and directed a number of gamelan ensembles in the U.S.

PrefaceTechnical NotesChapter 1: The Musical Scene in SoloChapter 2: The Taste of Music: Rasaning GendhingChapter 3: The Classification of Rasa GendhingChapter 4: Having Rasa, Part 1: Linguistic and Cultural PerspectivesChapter 5: Having Rasa, Part 2: MusicianshipChapter 6: The Communication of Rasa, Part 1: General Considerations of Expression and PerceptionChapter 7: The Communication of Rasa, Part 2: Garap and Other Factors Contributing to Specific RasasChapter 8: Why Rasa Talk MattersAppendix A: Classifications of Rasa Gendhing from Oral and Written SourcesAppendix B: How Iråmå WorksGlossaryBibliography Dictionaries and Glossaries Corpus: Works Having Citations of Rasa Terms as Used by Javanese Experts in Music and Related Arts General Works Discography of Recordings Referred to in the TextIndex