The Gamelan Digul and the Prison Camp Musician Who Built It. (Book Reviews: Ethnomusicology).(Book Review)

The Gamelan Digul and the Prison Camp Musician Who Built It. By Margaret J. Kartomi. Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 2001. [xxi, 123 p. ISBN 1-58046-088-7. $75.] Illustrations, bibliography, index, compact disc.

The Gamelan Digul is the latest publication of prolific ethnomusicologist Margaret J. Kartomi, professor of music at Australia's Monash University. In six chapters, Kartorni tells the extraordinary true story of a Central Javanese court musician named Pontjopangrawit (1893-1965?), whose anti-colonial beliefs led to his internment at a New Guinea prison camp from 1927 to 1932. During the five years of his internment, Pontjopangrawit created a unique gamelan ensemble of found objects that sustained him and his fellow Javanese prisoners through performances, rehearsals, and the development of new compositions. Pontjopangrawit himself returned to his native city of Surakarta upon his release, and the gamelan ended up in Australia in the early 1940s, where it has remained ever since. The ensemble was later to play an important role in the strengthening of relations between Indonesia and Australia.

The book's prologue contains useful introductory information about the gamelan Digul and the overall context of Central Javanese gamelan ensembles. While some of this initial information about gamelan is familiar territory for ethnomusicologists, it is precisely the placement of the gamelan Digul in the larger context that engages the mind immediately. Chapter 1 summarizes what is known about Pontjopangrawit's early years as a musician and activist in the court at Surakarta. Deftly weaving nineteenth-and twentieth-century court culture together with Pontjopangrawit's advancement through the court ranks, Kartomi also brings to light the anticolonial movement and rise of communism.

Chapter 2 examines Pontjopangrawit's life in the Tanah Merah ("Red Earth") prison camp at Boven Digul, Central New Guinea. Kartomi cites multiple sources in her attempt to bring to light both the harshness of the conditions at the camp and the importance of the gamelan to the inmates. She also notes the similarity of musical activity between the Tanah Merah prisoners and the internees of Nazi extermination camps (p. 33). Chapter 3 has as its focus Pontjopangrawit's activities upon his release from Tanah Merah, and his success as a significant artist in the Surakarta karaton (palace) prior to the mystery surrounding his death. This chapter contains many Central Javanese musical terms that are highly significant to musical insiders, but which will baffle those readers who have difficulty keeping track of new musical terminology.

The book shifts in focus in chapter 4, examining the ...