Music and Performing Arts of Asia and the Pacific. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2015. xii, 266 pp. (Figures.) US$42.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8248-4094-5.
Javaphilia is a smartly researched, historical account of four influential individuals’ engagement with Javanese music and dance in the American cultural imagination. The biographical data is sandwiched between two expositions, the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, which featured the Java Village, and the 1986 Exposition in Vancouver, where the First International Gamelan Festival and Symposium was held. Culminating in several performative moments throughout the decades, Spiller provides critical perspectives on four influential “javaphiles,” or “those who love Java” (vii): artist Hubert Stowitts (1892–1953), singer Eva Gauthier (1885–1958), ethnomusicologist Mantle Hood (1918–2005), and composer Lou Harrison (1917–2003). Henry Spiller shows that artists and scholars alike have participated in a subcultural affinity for Javanese expression since 1893, leaving perennial waves in the contemporary American cultural imagination.
By utilizing a microhistorical approach, Spiller explores “the minute details of small events or individuals’ lives to illuminate larger cultural patterns and narratives” (17). More specifically, the purpose of the book is to illuminate and critique the ways in which Americans have imagined Java through an analytical lens that explores “self-understanding and self-fashioning, orientalisms, and microhistory” (25). Four of the book’s seven chapters are devoted to specific individuals, those mentioned above, illustrating how each used Java for their own careers and “self-fashioning” (25), while contributing to a wider cultural affinity for Javanese arts. He argues that for Stowitts, Gauthier, Hood, and Harrison, Javanese arts provided more individually suitable ways to negotiate aesthetic sensibilities and identity formations where mainstream American artistic practices could not. Spiller also reflexively includes himself in his nuanced critique of javaphilia in America by providing his own, albeit brief, microhistory in the form of an autobiographical account.
The central theme of the book revolves around the notion that American mainstream values and sensibilities left each individual javaphile feeling marginalized, pushing them to pursue new ways of forming identities through the idea of Java. Gauthier was not well received as a singer before traveling to Java, Stowitts felt alienated by homophobia at home, Hood was frustrated with Cold War values, and Harrison shied away from the “anxious expressions” of the American music establishment (5). Each of these javaphiles was disenchanted by their place in American culture; as Spiller notes, “[n]one of the conventional subject positions available to them was quite suitable” (5).
While focusing primarily on biography and microhistory as method, Spiller also weaves in musical analysis that illustrates the ways in which individuals have imagined Java, Indonesia, and the East through orientalizing and decidedly American filters. These analyses are interesting given that, as Spiller argues, many javaphiles looked to Java as an alternative site through which to express their artistic, sexual, and political identities and desires. As revealed throughout the book, these desires are often expressed through misrepresentations and exaggerations of Javanese culture. Notably, as Spiller demonstrates, many of the musical features associated with Java remain consistent from the time of the 1893 World’s Fair, throughout each of the aforementioned javaphile’s lives, and remain salient for affinity groups today.
The primary musical characteristics that came to represent Java in American performances included “complex timbres, stratified polyphonic textures, and formulaic repetitiveness of the music that stuck in people’s ears” (27). While these features stood out and remained consistent in American conceptions of Javanese music, other biases in musical transmission included practices such as conforming transcriptions to Western musical preconceptions (37), or gravitating towards Western harmonic conventions in Javanese song arrangements (73). These and other tendencies are traced throughout the book, from transcriptions by visitors to the World’s Fair to Lou Harrison’s tuning and stylistic adaptations in what he called the American gamelan.
In concluding the book, Spiller notes that individuals no longer dominate the arena of javaphilia but have influenced a wider subcultural affinity for Javanese culture, most notably in university settings. Citing what ethnomusicologists have called “ethnodrag” in university gamelan performances, where students and teachers play the part of Indonesia through often awkwardly fitting costumes and musical adaptations, he suggests that the American gamelan musician is a “double-Other” who, in part because of his or her own feelings of alienation and need to identify outside of the American cultural mainstream, reinterprets Javanese culture in order to construct an identity for him- or herself (199).
Though critical in his examination of American javaphilia, a critique that includes himself, Spiller is charitable in his assessment of Americans’ love of Javanese culture. Noting that “assimilation is different from intimate familiarization, and that the former is impossible in an American setting,” he provides an ultimately supportive and positive interpretation of the cross-cultural bridges that are built upon an initial platform of individual self-fulfillment (199). In addition to self-fulfillment, the author cites ethnomusicologist Mark Slobin’s two-pronged approach as a way of understanding affinity groups: self-fulfillment and communitas (199). Spiller argues that it is through these motivations that javaphilia continues in American settings today.
Spiller’s work contributes to a lesser-covered topic in ethnomusicology: gamelan and Javanese arts in American settings. Along with works such as Judith Becker’s “One Perspective on Gamelan in America” (Asian Music 15, no.1 [1983]: 81–89), or Leta Miller and Fredric Lieberman’s “Lou Harrison and the American Gamelan” (American Music 17, no. 2 [summer 1999]: 146–178), where ethnomusicologists have examined the impact of gamelan in North America, Javaphilia is a significant contribution. Relevant to a wide range of cultural scholars, but especially ethnomusicologists, those studying Javanese arts will appreciate the many insights into their field through Spiller’s careful historical research. Beyond interest to specialists, the book is relevant for all those working and studying in American—and wider—academic institutions where ethnomusicology and world music is taught and performed. Alongside works such as Performing Ethnomusicology: Teaching and Representation in World Music Ensembles, edited by Ted Solís (University of California Press, 2004), which examines the performative aspects of ethnomusicology as a discipline, or Ethnomusicology and Modern Music History, edited by Stephen Blum, Philip Bohlman, and Daniel Neuman (University of Illinois Press, 1991), which discusses ways that ethnomusicology fits into historical music research, Henry Spiller fills in a major portion of the performative history of ethnomusicology, a portion significantly and influentially bound up with javaphilia.
Joe Kinzer
University of Washington, Seattle, USA
pp. 402-404