Something I’ve been developing in Indonesia is a concept of how music evolves. We’re all familiar with the biological concept of evolution: organisms have random traits introduced into generations, and the traits which stick end up becoming more and more common, resulting in a species that is more successful in its environment. The story I always heard about this was that Charles Darwin, when in the Galapagos, saw that birds had evolved differently on different islands. For example, if an island was rich in nuts, the birds had beaks that were strong for breaking them open, but if the island was rich in insect life, the beaks were longer to get into crevices where their food would be. In Bali, I had the realisation that gamelan also evolved in a similar manner. We know that gamelan originated on the island of Java (next door). But Balinese gamelan is different to Javanese gamelan. It’s tempting to say that Javanese gamelan today is what that gamelan was back in the day, but of course, it too has changed. Instead, we can think of medieval Javanese gamelan as a common ancestor of modern Javanese and Balinese gamelan, in the same way that apes and humans have a common ape-like ancestor.

Why these differences? Clearly, Balinese gamelan developed to be quicker and more energetic than Javanese gamelan. We can think of multiple reasons why – one might be that modern Balinese gamelan was reinvented heavily in the early 1900s when there had already been a lot of interaction with Westerners already, while Javanese gamelan perhaps has a stronger through-line through to the classical forms. Of course, unlike biological evolution, musical evolution is heavily shaped by people. People decide what to put into music, and how to change it – i.e. it’s not random, unlike the random mutations of biological evolution. So, for whatever reasons, Balinese people (largely) preferred gamelan one way, and Javanese (largely) another. And that’s why these forms have remained, because they were more successful than the alternatives.

Using this framework, we can think of a few other applications. For my research, I’m thinking about how the internet affects this concept. The internet means that music can have new elements introduced by new people quicker than ever before. We can also think about the declining popularity of classical music: classical music, by the academic definition, is not evolving (performances of Bach don’t really evolve much over time). So, how can classical music performance evolve to regain popularity with new audiences is a better question than why aren’t people attending classical music concerts? And in some ways, thinking about music in this way has made me realise how strange it is – in what other artforms are the classics so revered without caring much for the new stuff? It’s like if someone only read classics and said every new book was awful. This is one of the things I like about research – the chance to get a deeper insight into real problems that currently exist.

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