Rasa: Affect and Intuition in Javanese Musical Aesthetics

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Preface
Technical Notes
Chapter 1: The Musical Scene in Solo
Chapter 2: The Taste of Music: Rasaning Gendhing
Chapter 3: The Classification of Rasa Gendhing
Chapter 4: Having Rasa, Part 1: Linguistic and Cultural Perspectives
Chapter 5: Having Rasa, Part 2: Musicianship
Chapter 6: The Communication of Rasa, Part 1: General Considerations of Expression and Perception
Chapter 7: The Communication of Rasa, Part 2: Garap and Other Factors Contributing to Specific Rasas
Chapter 8: Why Rasa Talk Matters
Appendix A: Classifications of Rasa Gendhing from Oral and Written Sources
Appendix B: How Irama Works
Glossary
Bibliography
Dictionaries and Glossaries
Corpus: Works Having Citations of Rasa Terms as Used by Javanese Experts in Music and Related Arts
General Works
Discography of Recordings Referred to in the Text
Index

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The complex notion of rasa, as understood by Javanese musicians, refers to a combination of various qualities, including: taste, feeling, affect, mood, sense, inner meaning, a faculty of knowing intuitively, and deep understanding. This leaves us with a number of questions: how is rasa expressed musically? Who or what has rasa, and what sorts of musical, psychological, perceptual, and sociological distinctions enter into this determination? How is the vocabulary of rasa structured, and what does this tell us about traditional Javanese music and aesthetics? In this first book on the subject, Rasa provides an entry into Javanese music as it is conceived by the people who know the tradition best: the musicians themselves. In one of the most thorough explorations of local aesthetics to date, author Marc Benamou argues that musical meaning is above all connotative - hence, not only learned, but learnable. Following several years performing and researching Javanese music in the regional and national cultural center of Solo, Indonesia, Benamou untangles the many meanings of rasa as an aesthetic criterion in Javanese music, particularly in court and court-derived gamelan traditions. While acknowledging that certain universal psychological tendencies may inspire parallel interpretations of musical meaning, Rasa demonstrates just how culturally specific such accrued, shared meanings can be.

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