As a creative musician, I have composed numerous pieces. Yet I do not strongly identify as a composer. Improvisation feels more fundamental to my practice, and I have been equally fulfilled by collaboration.
Being the dominant paradigm for musical creativity in North American academia, composition was, however, the focus of my formal training, especially as an undergraduate. I started out in 1987 at the University of Victoria, in my hometown, studying in my first year with then-PhD students John Abram and Martin Arnold, and subsequently with Michael Longton. I was genuinely enamored with the scene there, which had grown around Rudolf Komorous and the “aesthetic of the wonderful” he brought to Victoria from Prague (see an essay by Arnold in the 2006 collection Canadian Cultural Poesis). That scene dissolved in 1989 when Komorous took a position at Simon Fraser University, so I followed him there. While I did study with Komorous, far more consequential to the path I have followed were my encounters with Indonesian music.
I took my first class in Javanese gamelan in spring of 1990, with visiting teacher Blacius Subono. A year and a half later, a group of composers from what is now ISI Surakarta presented an evening-length program of highly experimentalist new music. One of them, AL Suwardi, stayed for a one-month residency, part of which involved leading me and two colleagues in creating a piece of our own.
I was hooked. From October 1993 through May 1995 I went to Surakarta on the Indonesian government’s Dharmasiswa program. I spent most of my time studying traditional karawitan, through classes at ISI (then STSI), private lessons, and joining rehearsals around town. But I also jumped at opportunities to compose, to collaborate, and to take in as much contemporary art-making as I could.
In 1998 I started my graduate studies at Wesleyan University—an obvious choice given its strengths in gamelan and experimental music. For my MA, I pursued both composition and ethnomusicology. My final project was a three-hour-plus performance installation for gamelan instruments and other sound sources. I also completed a written thesis that explored the temporal dimensions of Javanese karawitan. My approach at that point largely worked within Indonesianist ethomusicology’s preoccupation with technical aspects of traditional musics.
Continuing in the PhD program, I shifted my attention to musik kontemporer, as new music in Indonesia had come to be known. In doing so I adopted the focus on social and cultural dimensions of music that dominated ethnomusicology as a whole. This was in part assimilation, but mostly it was a matter of adopting methods and modes of inquiry that best fit my topic and the questions I had about it. From first hearing AL Suwardi and his colleagues, I wanted to understand what drew them to experimentalism. How did they come to create music that in certain fundamental respects resembled the Western avant-garde, but in others remained grounded in karawitan and seemed largely free of Western influence—or at least the influence of the still predominantly Western musical avant-garde? At a pivotal point in defining the scope of my study, I realized that to more fully answer the question I needed to also examine the stories of their Western-oriented peers. In the end, my dissertation took the form of a broad historical survey. It aimed to explain how musik kontemporer came by its distinctive profile, encompassing both traditionally-based and Western-oriented composers, and to describe its prevailing cultural dynamics.
In 2008, my dissertation not yet complete, I started teaching at Cornell University. Marty Hatch, who founded the Cornell Gamelan Ensemble in 1972, convinced the department to hire me to take over that aspect of what he did as he neared completion of a phased retirement. I was appointed as a part-time Lecturer. I was passed over when it came time to fill Hatch’s line, but after completing my dissertation I was promoted to a full-time Senior Lecturer in 2015. Apart from the lesser salary, this has turned out to be a good fit, as the position affords me considerable flexibility in dividing my time between scholarly research, performance, and creative work, in addition to my core teaching duties.