A Grammar of the Musical Genre Srepegan

Scholarly studies which cross disciplinary boundaries often present the same problems of understanding as do texts from a foreign language. Even if we know the grammar and the vocabulary of the foreign language, meaning may escape us because we are unable to recreate the context of the text, the author's purposes, or his intellectual environment, or because it may not be clear to us "what game is being played." The authors of this article come from the disciplines of ethnomusicology and linguistics, respectively, and are writing for an audience of theorists of Western music. The possibilities for misunderstandings or non-understandings are vast, and yet we feel that "intruding upon each other's fields" can be, for all concerned, one of the most fruitful ways of stimulating new insights into the nature of music. "The game being played" here is to see what principles of coherence operate in a genre of music radically different from Western music. Understanding what Western music is not is surely one of the basic elements in understanding what it is. Since this article presents reading difficulties whose sources differ (unfamiliarity with Javanese gamelan music, unfamiliarity with the genre srepegan, unfamiliarity with the type of formalism of this presentation and the motivation for the formalism), we have included below a brief outline, a map,