Part One
The Port
Den Pasar
The House in Kedaton
Nyoman Kalér
The Masks
A Shadow-play
The Design in the Music
The Gods Descend
Kesyur
Portrait of a Prince
Chetig
Farewell Feast
Part Two
The House in the Hills
Durus
The Temple of the Dead
Primeval Symphony
The Regent
Sampih
Ida Bagus Gedé Expels the Demons
The Story of Sampih Continued
Lapse of Time
Lotring
The Cricket-fight
The Cremation in Saba
A Second Departure
Part Three
Two Years Later
The Gamelan of Semara
The Guru
The Children’s Music Association
The Lights in the Valley
ILLUSTRATIONS
Between pp. 64-5.
Gateway to Besakih, Mother Temple of Bali.
Temple offerings.
Cakes, fruits and sweetmeats for the gods.
Trompong player.
The deep-toned jégogans carry the bass.
The gangsas fill the air with ringing sound.
In the temple courtyard young girls perform the ceremonial rejang.
The little lélong dancers perform for the pleasure of both gods and mortals.
In the Temple of the Dead the women of Sayan dance before each shrine.
Each afternoon for a week the young girls from twenty villages gathered to dance at a harvest feast in Tabanan.
G’ndérs play the melody for the Wong dance.
The children’s orchestra.
The author’s Gamelan of Semara, the Love God.
Cymbals and little bells add shimmer to the music of Semara the Love God.
The guru, I Lunyuh.
The dalang opens his puppet-box.
We kill a pig for the galungan holiday.
Mask play.
The beloved but terrifying barong.
The witch Chalonarang.
Between pp. 160-1.
The garden at the house in Sayan.
Sampih dances kebyar: the opening.
The dance comes to an end.
Jews’ harps.
Arja musicians.
A feast delicacy—grilled sticks of turtle meat.
Rantun, the cook.
The ancient and holy Selunding gamelan that came out of the sea.
The soft-toned flutes of the ancient gambuh play.
Gedé Manik, drummer, dancer, composer of kebyar.
Sampih.
Lotring, the composer, was also famous for his subtle spicing of feast dishes.
Gusti Lanang Oka, a musician.
Kuta fishermen.
Durus.
Prince and Princess in the gambuh play.
Prince Panji and Perebangsa.
The new Stamboul Club near Den Pasar was encouraged by the Dutch School Supervisor and visiting missionaries, who considered it set a fine example.
North Bali gamelan.
PART ONE
THE PORT
THE SHIP HAD SAILED from Surabaya for Bali in the late afternoon.
The boy stumbled down the stairs with my bags to the cabins that ran along either side of the dark saloon, and carried them to the state-room that lay directly over the propeller. I opened the door to find a portly Chinese merchant very much at home on the lower berth. He had removed the top to his white silk pyjamas, and he lay there, relaxed as a reclining Buddha, smoking a pipe of opium in great tranquillity. On the upper berth he had neatly arranged his considerable luggage, which included a cage containing a restless starling. The porthole was clamped down so that no breath of air might trouble this cosy paradise. I had not the heart to disturb him, and after the boy had set down my bags I closed the door and went upstairs.
I spent the night on deck, leaning over the rail and looking into the darkness for some thin beam of light to signal the presence of land. The ship made a gentle commotion in the water, churning it into foam that dissolved with a faint hiss. The engines moaned in their sleep, and from time to time some inner vibration of the ship caused the little coffee cups, left on the tables by the deck boy, to ring softly in their saucers.
Even if I had had the cabin to myself I could not have slept, for I was filled with an inner excitement that kept me wide awake. I had come all this way on a quest of music—to listen to the gamelans, the strange and lovely-sounding orchestras of gongs that still made music, it seemed, in the courts of Java and the villages and temples of Bali, and as I looked out into the night I could hardly believe that this musical adventure was actually about to begin.
I was a young composer, recently back in New York after student days in Paris, and the past two years had been filed with composing and the business of getting performances. It was quite by accident that I had heard the few gramophone records that were to change my life completely, bringing me out here in search of something quite indefinable—music or experience, I could not at this moment say. The records had been made in Bali, and the clear, metallic sounds of the music were like the stirring of a thousand bells, delicate, confused, with a sensuous charm, a mystery that was quite overpowering. I begged to keep the records for a few days, and as I played them over and over I became more and more enchanted with the sound. Who were the musicians? I wondered. How had this music come about? Above all, how was it possible, in this late day, for such a music to have been able to survive?
I returned the records, but I could not forget them. At the time I knew little about the music of the East. I still believed that an artist must keep his mind on his own immediate world. But the effect of the music was deeper than I suspected, for after I had read in the early books of Crawfurd and Raffles the quite fabulous accounts of these ancient and ceremonial orchestras, my imagination took fire, and the day came when I determined to make a trip to the East to see them for myself.
I