| Popis: |
The music to which we are most accustomed is all but certain to evoke in us a range of emotional responses. Some pieces or passages may inspire a sense of grandeur and deep content, others may seem deeply sad, causing tears to well up in our eyes, and still others may seem humorous, evincing an inner smile or even a burst of laughter. When we approach a body of music unfamiliar to us, such as the music of a society or cultural group with whom we have not had close and extended contact, we are likely to attend to the features that most immediately seem to us to set it off from other more familiar musics and to hear these obvious identifying traits throughout whatever repertory we encounter. Yet just as the art music of late-eighteenth-century Austria or even of middle-period Haydn, for example, present a variegated aural and emotional terrain for knowledgeable listeners, the musics of countless peoples around the world offer complexity, subtlety, and emotional variety to their listeners. Musical terrains, if you will, are anything but flat. In this paper, I wish to explore some of the bumps in the Javanese musical terrain-the ways that humor underlies some pieces, passages, and performance practices in Javanese gamelan music. It is not my intention here to engage at length with the body of literature on humor in Western art music (nearly all of which focuses on music of the latter half of the eighteenth century). Much of this scholarship identifies composers' play with structural features, frustration of expectations, breaking of rules, exaggeration, and parodyprocesses found in Javanese music as well., Though at a fundamental |
