ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the origins, development, and implementation of a project during the 1990s: the Music of Indonesia project, which resulted in roughly 340 hours of field recordings in Indonesia. It describes the core of the program, the full-year survey course, Music Cultures of the World. It was required of all students who had designated ethno as a major or minor concentration; graduate ethno students were encouraged to take it twice, along with a parallel seminar. The Indonesia unit, focuses on Javanese and Balinese gamelan, shadow puppetry, wayang, and the tembang Sunda ensemble of voice and strings. The instrumentation of gamelan, the structure of wayang, and the notions of stratification and interlocking offered plenty of mileage. The chapter presents the full range and particularity of Indonesian music, national and regional, urban and rural, traditional and popular; and to see how the country's musical diversity was acknowledged and represented in media, education, public policy, and commercial recordings.
