This week, I’ve been continuing to practice kendang, which is the drum that leads a gamelan ensemble. It’s quite difficult to get the right procession of sounds on it, so my teacher encourages me to just practice getting the sounds out first: like the Karate Kid, I need to have those basics down pat, and then everything else falls into place naturally. Beyond that, though, there’s a bunch of patterns that he’s been teaching me. These patterns are what the players play during performances, so that the ensemble can keep in time and listen out for the important sounds which dictate commands. And there’s always one problem I keep running into. I will play, stumble, and the teacher will grin, shake his said, and say:

“Not enough feeling!”

This isn’t just relegated to this gamelan teacher, either. It’s been a common critique of my playing throughout these past several years, by both my Balinese and Javanese teacher (so it extends beyond either tradition). Usually, this means on my next go I will try to put more emotion into the way I’m playing, thinking that perhaps I am playing too robotically. In English, this is what we take this phrase to mean in music. A common refrain that I have heard and used in my time performing with and conducting ensembles is a plea for the players to put more emotion, more feeling, into the way that they play. You’d be surprised at how often this makes a difference, but usually a run-through of a piece after asking for this is one that is just more dynamic and interesting, whereas the one before was perhaps a bit tired and dull. After I try doing this with gamelan, however, I end up getting the same response, leading me to scratch my head. I tried to be more emotive, so why was it not working? I was more expressive, so where am I going wrong?

Enter what I hypothesise is a difference in translation. While we use feeling primarily to mean, indeed, the emotive sense of what we want the music to bring out, I think feeling in this case actually means an inner sense of connection to the fabric of the music. You see, I questioned my teacher on this, because it’s something I’ve found common to many gamelan players: they actually hear the music when they are playing or experiencing one specific part of it. Dancers hear the music even if there is not a gamelan playing. Drummers hear the music even if there is no ensemble around them. The “feeling” is the inner sense of where the piece is currently at in the fabric of your place in the universe. The music exists in the musician’s head, with the cycle playing exactly as it should, and we need to match that cycle in performance, whether there is a group physically playing with us or not.

“Feeling”, then, is not a call to emotive playing that we find in orchestras and the tradition of Western Art Music, but a call to a deeper, intuitive sense of engaging with the music. Of course, this is hard to do for me as I don’t actually know all of these songs! So I have to build up my memory of them and learn to sit within the cyclic framework that exists for them. Which is a challenge, but one that is not too hard to overcome – like most things, it comes with time and exposure.

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