Rasa in Javanese musical aesthetics.

Abstract

Rasa, in a Javanese musical context, has many meanings that range from affect, feeling, and inner meaning to perception, understanding, and intuition. Musicians use the word and its synonyms ubiquitously in evaluating music, and in describing what good performers and knowledgeable listeners do. It is thus the key to understanding Javanese musical aesthetics. Based primarily on three years of fieldwork in central Java (Indonesia)--which consisted in taking music lessons, performing, and conversing--this study focuses on what Javanese musicians say about their music. As an ethnography of speech about musical content, it overlaps with the fields of anthropology, philosophy (aesthetics), linguistics (semantics), and psychology (emotion, cognition). After describing the social context of music-making in the city of Solo, I explore various dimensions of the word rasa as it is used by musicians. I then take one of these usages, rasa gendhing (affect/meaning of a piece), and present various classifications of the gamelan and vocal repertoire according to this and related parameters. The other major topics discussed are degrees of rasa (who or what has rasa, and how much), and how rasa is expressed in performance. My ultimate goal is to provide an entry into Javanese music that emphasizes musical meaning as conceived by the people who know the tradition best, the musicians themselves.