ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on a specific issue: that of cultural erasure, and on a particular music-cinematic instance, the appropriation and resignification of Balinese kecak recorded sound in the context of the scene from Satyricon. It provides ethnomusicological consideration of schizophonic mimesis and cultural erasure in Federico Fellini's Satyricon, specifically in reference to the appropriation of a Balinese kecak sound recording for a key scene in that film. The chapter contributes at some modest level to the advancement of the area of interdisciplinary endeavor, and describes new approaches and new kinds of work in the study of screen music and sound. It examines Balinese music in the early 1980s. The idea of cultural erasure relative to the presence of what would normally be conceptualized as culturally situated musical sounds is both particularly amenable to ethnomusicological inquiry and particularly repugnant to ethnomusicological sensibilities.
