ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the musical tastes and choices of the people who are active in their immediate Christian communities: musicians, untrained choir members, and church gamelan players. It examines the theories and agendas they enact, implement, and simply live in their everyday life experience. Since the year 2000, several historical resources have been published on Asian, and specifically Indonesian, Christianity. Church music provides the setting for an important negotiation between “western” Christian ideology and the receptive local, indigenous environment. Inculturation has been an important subject of postcolonial studies, both as a term and as a phenomenon, and it has occasioned a large body of theological, cultural, and musical literature. Contextualization in the field of music lags behind theological contextualization. Protestant Churches in Indonesia to greater or lesser degree stress contextualization; thus, indigenous musics are also incorporated to differing extents. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
