Jewish Contemplatives: A HERMIT'S TALE: Part Two

This is the second installment of The Hermit’s Tale.

Part One is HERE.

Introduction

In Part One I described how my musical life was revolutionised by an unexpected encounter with the Gamelan Music of Java while I was living in England. This second installment of the Tale goes on to describe some details of my life in Indonesia.

Gamelan altered the course of my musical journey, but it was also a spiritual catalyst—an opening of my inner consciousness as it were— and it prepared me for a return to the contemplative life.

Javanese Gamelan: The Hidden Melody that Awakens the Soul

Central Java is an exceptionally mystical and other-worldly part of our planet. Indeed, some say that its name is related to the term jiwa which means soul, and the significance of Javanese gamelan in my spiritual development is worth expanding on because it is in so many ways the expression of a Sufi form of meditation practice. There are jolly, playful, and “pop” types of modern gamelan performance, some mixed with western music and some delivered as avantgarde art. Popular and jolly styles are ubiquitous and are frequently quite raucous and frenetic.

This is not the type of gamelan music I was interested in. I wanted to learn the very formal concert performance type of gamelan that was performed in the Royal Palaces.[1] Playing such a gendhing (a piece for gamelan ensemble) or hearing it in its most classical Kraton (Palace) form provides the listener with an opportunity for reflection and meditation, and it can, and does, induce altered states of consciousness easily and frequently.

There is a type of extremely meditative gamelan music for gamelan gadon which uses the soft instruments in virtuoso mode, and there are also special genres for wayang (puppet dramas) and beksan (dance) but a typical classical Javanese gamelan piece for concert performance (Uyon-Uyon/Klenengan) is highly contrapuntal, repetitive, modal and rarely modulatory, and it will most commonly but not exclusively involve

(i) a loud and strong statement of an often lengthy theme repeated several times;
(ii) a short transition in dynamics and tempo;
(iii) an exceptionally long trance-like section of repeating the same theme at two, three, or four times the speed at a mp or p volume and with expanding and increasingly intricate decorative inner instrumental voices;
(iv) ending with a gradual re-emergence and restatement of the first strong and loud section.

Such a piece might well last an hour (or much more) with the central slow section taking 90% of the time.

To me, listening to this music feels like being in a boat that is slowly sinking amidst gigantic ocean waves to profoundly still depths, attaining a deep reflective tranquility in the barely moving waters at the deeper level, then slowly, ever so slowly, rising through the waters gradually but irrepressibly, to emerge— bursting through the ocean surface into the air again in momentous and buoyant triumph.

oooOooo

Before being transplanted to Java,my experience of gamelan had been minimal. In my teaching days in Frodsham, it is true that I was merely guessing much of the music. But at that time, in the UK, and unlike USA, Javanese gamelan was only just emerging into musical consciousness, and was rarely heard outside of the Indonesian embassy and the Halls of Academe. In Frodsham I had one Indonesian primary school karawitan booklet, a handful of cassette tapes, and my memory of the momentous first ASKI concert of 1979 to go by. Added to that were attendance at two EGO concerts; some kind and encouraging meetings with Neil Sorrel and Alec Roth of York University; together with the crash course in some of the basics that I received in brief encounters with the Heins family. In Frodsham we were simply (and shamelessly) making-up a lot of what we performed, but we performed with love and the greatest respect.

In 1984 I had found myself transplanted from rural Wirral to the sprawling bustle of Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia. My place of work was the British International School, and I made many long-lasting friendships with the staff, students, and families there; but I led something of a double life because all my out of school time was spent exclusively in the company of Indonesians. This was a deliberate choice as, after all, my motivation for moving to Java in the first place was to learn about the culture of the gamelan music I had been studying in Britain.

Like almost every European visitor and expatriate worker I know, I found the Indonesian people I met there to be the most friendly, polite, and optimistically cheerful people I had ever encountered—this is a generalisation made by many others who feel their lives were touched and transformed by the encounter. The cheering and uplifting education in derekh eretz that I received from my many Indonesian friends is one of the greatest gifts I have ever been granted.

Indigenous Jakartan life was grounded by the concept of gotong royong. This term refers to a certain give and take which meant that almost everyone would semi-automatically drop everything to help any other member of their community who had a pressing need of urgent assistance. In the inner city pseudo-kampong communities whose bamboo and corrugated-iron homes were hidden just behind the mainstreets—often leaning directly up against the walls of concrete villas of the rich — the concept was universally applied.

This gotong royong activity could range from assisting neighbours to maintain their dwellings, clubbing-together to pay for a child’s surgery, sharing food even when they barely had any themselves, or just lending a hand if there was an accident or simply something that one could not do without the assistance of an extra pair of hands. I never saw the like again till I felt the warmth of the Spanish-Moroccan Jewish community I later joined in Spain, or in the deep level of mutual assistance that I witness here in my current Israeli home in Safed, where there are many organisations providing meals and financial assistance to the city’s isolated elderly and its many financially needy residents.

In Jakarta, such mutual solidarity was generated by a sort of hive-mentality that would burst out before my eyes almost daily in practical and generous physical action. People would give both their labour and time with barely a second thought, and give it with a smile— immediately. The awareness that the family of humanity is an endlessly extended one was expressed all around me and it created a warmth and a sense of belonging in the hearts of foreign workers like myself as much as amongst the Indonesians themselves.

The concept of gotong-royong is celebrated in the wonderful and playful gendhing dolanan composition for school children called “Gugur Gunung” by Ki Nartosabdo, with its refrain ‘holobis kuntul baris’ (pull together in a line). I taught it to children in this version with new English lyrics alternating with the Javanese original.

Come on, Let’s go, This song is fun
The lesson’s learnt, the job is done
We laugh and clap and sing and play
To drive the stormy clouds away.

If we all listen hard,
we’ll always clap it right on time (clap clap)
If we all listen hard,
and think of others all the time.

When we began to learn this song (clap clap)
We always got it wrong
Now we hear the bright kenong,
That leads us to the final gong.

Pull together in a line
Pull together in a line
Work that’s shared will turn out fine!

(Open the graphic in a new window to read it clearly)

Working as Director of Music in the British International School, I was welcomed with open arms and many smiles into the society of Indonesians of many backgrounds: including Sundanese, Betawi, Balinese, Central and East Javanese, Sumatran, and Indo-Chinese. But I had also come to Java as a student of Javanese Gamelan music (Karawitan) and consequently, outside of school, my time amongst the Indonesians was mostly spent within the huge subgroup of Central-Javanese Indonesians living in the capital.

I was swiftly adopted by the Jakartan-Javanese who addressed me as ‘Mas Nur’, and I studied and performed with them—almost always as the only European member present— in various gamelan groups in the city—including Karawitan Anjugan Yogjakarta TMI, Sari Laras, Subud Cilandak, and Swasta Widya). These groups were amateur groups playing on very expensive sets of bronze instruments. They came from all social classes and usually met weekly in the cool evenings to play for around three hours a week....often more. Some of them were housed in grand locations and performed in concerts or at special events. But gamelan was everywhere. I will give two brief examples to illustrate this ubiquity:

When I lived in the Jln Bangka district I was walking the two hundred yards between my home and the huge supermarket Kemchicks to buy food supplies and I took a slightly different route. I walked past a backstreet house and heard an informal amateur gamelan group playing. The full but modestly-cased set was laid out temporarily in the tiny front yard and I noticed there was nobody playing the bonang panerus. I put down my shopping bags and politely gestured if I might take the vacant place. The musicians just carried on playing but the kendhang player nodded in approval. I sat down, after respectfully making a kulo-nuwun gesture, just in time to contribute the missing element to the other bonang player's imbal pattern. Not a word was exchanged..... but the other bonang player turned with a smile and a raised eyebrow of surprise that I knew what to do. With no interruption in the flow of the performance, the music simply continued without pause. They made no fuss after I rose to collect my shopping bags, but we had a great time—and I left them silently smiling.

The second story refers to an even smaller group of amateur musicians. Alongside a canal in Radio Dalam, South Jakarta, deep inside one of the inner-city kampongs mentioned earlier, I lost my footing on the muddy path and fell down a steep ravine on the banks of a wide and deep canal. As a child I had avoided an injury when I slipped climbing over a Territorial Army base fence whilst playing with the other Whitford Road children. The iron spike went through my trousers but not my flesh. I was left suspended on that spike while the other children rushed to fetch an older and taller child to lift me off.

Here on the banks of that Jakarta canal, the same thing happened. I had fallen down the slope but a huge iron spike in the concrete canal-bank went straight through my trouser belt and left me suspended a metre below street level. Unsurprisingly, what seemed like an entire village rushed to the scene and I was rescued in moments by the concerned and excited multitude. Recovering from the shock in the modest home of one of the rescuers, I commented on the presence of some piled-up gamelan instruments in their home.

Within moments the instruments were pulled out and we played Ladrang Slamet, a gendhing (musical opus) whose name means both ‘safe’, 'welcome', and ‘blessed’. The kind of gamelan music I was attracted to was always the deeply mystical and ritual style of the Central Javanese palaces of Surakarta and Jogjakarta, but I also experienced many deeply moving ‘serious’ performances in less elevated circumstances. This noble little performance is etched in my memory like a widuri-bulan gemstone.

Gamelan is the musical and spiritual heart of the Javanese—for both Sultan and Villager.

Here is a photo of that moment right after the rescue:

Teaching and Learning

Although my teaching and managerial duties at the ever-expanding British International School were considerable, in my free time I studied gamelan performance privately. In the UK, I had been moved by the Solonese (Surakarta) style of gamelan performed by the ASKI musicians, and in my early years in Jakarta I studied under the maternal and benevolent guidance of Ibu Sutikno in Jln Ciniru (following the Surakarta/Solonese style that I had heard in UK) but I soon moved on to specialise in the Kraton (palace) style of gamelan of the Mataram tradition of Yogyakarta.

In those days the notations of Kraton gamelan pieces by Roger Vetter were pure gold to me. Nowadays Roger has shared his experience and knowledge of both the instruments and perfomance online and you can hear and see his work on the Mataram Palace style I am referring to HERE

At exactly the right providential time I was introduced to a very special teacher. Pak Rudatin Brongtodiningrat [ii]—the uncle of the Sultan of Yogyakarta—and I began a course of study as his devoted murid. This process involved a private weekly lesson on the bonang at my home (with visitors or my friend Pak Bahrudin providing a balungan in assistance) for over four hours every Tuesday evening. Pak Rudhatin enabled me to access the gamelan groups of many Yogyanese musicians, and thanks to him I was able to meet the Sultan himself and ‘pledge allegiance’ to him personally.

Pak Rudhatin taught me the palace style of performance by classical methods... theory was not explained but the student was expected to gain understanding by learning patterns that might be appropriate by imitation and repetition. I was reminded very strongly of the methods of my Novice master in the Carmelites who had never explained the spiritual life or the way to “practice meditation” but deliberately yet attentively left me to discover it myself, simply by sitting in silence daily— attempting to relate to G-d in whatever way I was led. The gamelan lessons were not quite so open ended.

Gamelan works have a set form and a set 'balungan' (sometimes called a skeleton melody) which is often memorised. Certain instruments in the ensemble weave their own intricate melodies around this outline balungan or anticipate its progress according to acceptable patterns. There is much talk of the truth being the inverse of this....namely that there is a hidden melody or melodies, and the balungan is derived from that/their voice/voices.

Jewish readers will immediately see the correspondence between this concept and the notion of a written Torah and the Supernal Torah or Torah of the Heart.

My Teacher was schooling me in the traditional manner, and if I played a bonang pattern that he did not approve of he would simply say it was ‘tidak enak’ (not pleasant) and invite me to try a different interpretation (from the battery of possibilities that he had previously taught me) until a more appropropriate cengkok met his approval. It was quite exhausting and largely wordless process that involved the devoted submission of the student to the teacher and great deal of mutual patience.

Slowly I began to let my mind rest

and let my hands go wherever my intuition led me.

Pak Rudhatin was teaching me music but actually,

he was teaching me much more.

Some of it I was aware of at the time.

Some of it still has me pondering to this day.

oooOooo

These days, being of decidedly limited financial means, I am blessed to receive a pension from the Israeli government and charitable support from some very kind and generous Jewish donors who help to put food on my table. On moving to Jakarta, I had sold my stone cottage in Storeton and the salary of an expatriate teacher at BIS was generous, and so in the 1980’s I was financially wealthy. Consequently, I was actually able to commission and own a full Slendro set of Gamelan Instruments (named Chakrabhaswara - Fiery-wheel of sound). It was on this set that I received my tuition from Pak Rudhatin.

This beautiful and majestic set was made by the master craftsman and virtuoso gamelan musican, Pak Suhirdjan of Yogyakarta. [iii]

Though I was never a Subud member myself, I was friendly towards the institution and Pak Rudhatin was their Gamelan tutor. Consequently, the Indonesian members of the gamelan group from Subud Cilandak used these instruments in my home for a special monthly rehearsal, and for a time they were actually housed and used at the British School for the children’s regular gamelan lessons.I later sold the set to a UK Education authority just before moving to Singapore.

Eventually, The British International school bought its own Gamelan, a small bronze pelog set in Solonese style cases, seen in the following picture. (along with some of my most stellar pupils, Faye-Anne Chylek, Andrew Bennett, Roshan Vaswani, Daniel Smith,Estelle Rees, and Alison Taudevin....some of whom are still in touch with me some thirty years after this photo was taken. )

One of the outstanding reasons for teaching gamelan in schools is the fact that it is a multi-level mixed ability system. There are instruments which demand great skill and dexterity; those which require an average manual ability; and those which are undemanding technically, but yet demand great attentiveness to the balungan and format of the gendhing being performed.

When teaching the pioneering students of Frodsham High School in 1984, it was these skills that were in the forefront of my methods and that Cheshire group certainly mastered the spirit of gotong royong before we had even heard of the term.

After moving to Jakarta I was at last able to see and hear the music close-up. And slowly but surely I developed a special course for children and adults that I was able to make a principal element in the school music curriculum at both BIS Jakarta and Tanglin Trust School in Singapore.

The original “Frodsham” aims had remained constant throughout, but in teaching gamelan ( to both children and adults) my tachlit, my ultimate goal was never a purely musical or even a social/community building one. After a few years in Jakarta, I began to teach the music in a manner which consciously attempted to develop the students’ general powers of intuition and (possibly, even) their telepathic ability. I will unpack this just a little:

In my teaching of the Year Six course, I would begin many class gamelan lessons with a game in which the entire group would follow my gently droned vocal monosyllabic instruction to play a certain note whilst gently tapping three lento-paced beats on the ketipung drum—all striking that cued note simultaneously on the fourth beat as I struck gently on the lower pitched large drum (kendhang gending). This process would be repeated with the pitch number/name of the note changing every fourth beat. In effect, generating a gatra-based line of melody.

[open image in new window to view clearly]

I would thus be cueing them to play a real or imaginary gendhing with typical melodic-phrase patterns while they were slowly being placed in a form of peaceful semi-trance.

Then, every now and then instead of announcing the next number I would simply say “next note”. The accuracy of children’s intuition in guessing and playing this note was almost universal. I believe this was a combination of (i) their having subconciously absorbed the characteristic melody shapes; (ii) being intensely attentive aurally but mentally asleep; and (ii) surprising “unison guesses” which really did feel like pure group telepathy.

I used similar game-like exercises in which students followed the bonang cues I was playing with no speech....but this was more tiring for the young children if I did it for too long. In any event, these intense lesson-openers were almost invariably followed by more lively and soran style pieces which certainly woke them up—and anyone next door trying to teach Year Four Maths. (Sorry Becky!)

In further illustration of the “feel” of these Year Six lessons, Here is a recording of a regular Year Six class in Singapore. [iv] There are musical errors as the students were recorded early in the course and the task was still beyond the bonang players' level—but they demonstrate what I consider to be a good level of intuition. The children look really miserable, but I can assure you they were not — they were just engaged in a very serious activity demanding concentration.

Children lining up for a session on the gamelan resembled kittens before a dish of food in their enthusiasm to play in this mode, and sometimes I had to ask them to be seated in smaller sub-groups to avoid a pile-up—so I know they were very much enjoyed. (Other aspects of my teaching were a lot more wild and jolly—ask them and they will tell you.)

In Western ‘classical’ music we are used to being guided by fully-notated scores and the direction provided by a conductor. In Javanese gamelan a basic score is sometimes used, but the conductor’s role is shared by the kendhang player (drummer) —who controls tempo, transitions and conclusions, and certain cues for particular moods and their set styles of performance; the bonang barung player; and (often the) peking player—who anticipate and announce the balungan, transmitting melodic information and underlining the tempo/irama messages of the drummer. This second role is also sometimes assumed by soft style instruments— the rebab and the gender barung. According to this system one is led by (i) a knowledge of forms, moods, and stylistic patterns: and (ii) by listening attentively to those leading instruments and “guessing” what the next note should be.

Listening with acutely intuitive ears.
Feeling what is being asked of one.
Allowing the ego to melt into ensemble solidarity.
working in creative independance but within a tightly formal framework
Being led by a pure melody whose nature is multi-facetted.

Am I making my point about the connection between Gamelan and Jewish (and especially Jewish-Sufi) meditation clear enough for you?

The key to what I am writing about here is the term Kebatinan.

Kebatinan is a term which is often used to denote a magical or psychological philosophy whereby an individual might attain paranormal or supernatural ability. Consequently it is often given a bad name by power-seeking charlatans and certain outlandish cults— but at its deeper and purer levels, the term refers to the Javanese tradition of mystical spirituality (batin being Javanese for the interior aspect or soul of something). Significantly it is also called ‘Kejawen’ which might be translated as ‘Javaneseness’ —so essential is it to the mindset of even the most modern Javanese.

The Encyclopedia of Islam (on Brill) defines Kebatinan as follows:

‘In Indonesia, kebatinan is generally considered mysticism, in particular the spiritual approach to life in the Surakarta and Yokyakarta sultanates, the Javanese heartland. The term derives from the Arabic bāṭin, the inner or internal, particularly the mental, spiritual, and esoteric. As a practice, kebatinan is the cultivation of one’s inner being or secret self and the honing of one’s intuition (Indon., rasa) as the way to truth, to being in step with the pre-ordained order of existence, and ultimately to intuiting its presence in one’s bāṭin.’

Though its realm of activity is psychological and philosophical, it has a religious heart. To the outsider it may seem to be infused with hints and practices that belong to Hinduism and animism (both of which are preserved in the gamelan music of Bali), Kejawen and its partner Karawitan are, at base, Islamic. Since the Royal courts were converted to Islam by the legendary Wali Songgo of the fifteenth/sixteenth century, many of the older Hindu stories that were told by dance, song, and puppet shows were re-cast with a much more Islamic flavour.

The very purpose of the music ( at its highest stages) became the development of a person’s intuitive spiritual awareness. This was because the peak of human achievement in the system of Kejawen is Manunggaling kawula Gusti: the union of the (human) servant with the (Divine) Lord. This concept was ( and is still) represented in detail in the tale of Dewaruci (which concerns both the inner dwelling of the Divine in the human soul/microcosm and the presence and unity of the Divine in all creation (macrocosm).[v]

The path of Kebatinan involves asceticism,solitary retreats,fasting, and deep bertapa (meditation). Of course these were never part of my teaching in the classroom. There in the classroom, it was only the intuitive and psychological elements, present in kebatinan, that I was hoping to encourage—religious matters were never mentioned. Nevertheless, I am convinced that there is no better musical-mental training of the kind of attentive listening and ensemble intuition than Javanese Gamelan.

But in my private musical studies and in my own spiritual education, it was the psychological and spiritual aspect of the music that became my lasting focus.

The kebatinan tradition of Java is woven into the substance and hidden melody of gamelan music. Kebatinan has animist aspects, but it is most often expressed in Islamic-Sufi mode. Javanese Kebatinan speaks of the way in which the teacher ‘opens’ the soul, a term denoting a kind of initiation in intuition and sensitivity to things spiritual.

For me that teacher was the gamelan music of the Yogja tradition itself, often specifically mediated through my teacher Pak Rudhatin.

A well known text from eighteenth century Surakarta reads:

The music itself disappears

and nothing is left of it.

It has become a road,

a guide to union with the Divine.

This is the way that one should go:

We should return all sound of instruments and voices

to the One who generates every sound

and who gives man the faculty of hearing.[vi]

(Inghulikhen Swara Mring Kang Duwe Swara)

The gamelan music I was playing and studying was opening up long-closed spiritual doors anew, and I found myself pondering my place in the cosmos quite intensively. I also began, as it were, to notice the concealed worlds that are hidden alongside and behind the physical world—something that I had first encountered as a child and especially as a Carmelite but somehow lost in my workaholic fug. In Java it was somehow easier to spot the ‘angelic’ messages one encountered in coincidences and in synchronicity but had never really paid much attention to. Somehow, the veil seemed very thin on that Island.

As I have hoped to show you here, Javanese kebatinan culture expresses the conviction that gamelan studies develop one's rasa (intuition) —a Javanese/Indonesian term closely related to sufic dhawq, and I am certain that this is true.

My encounter with Central Javanese Gamelan in its more mystical forms prepared the way for my conversion to Judaism, which may sound paradoxical. But it is understandable if one has had true experience of this intensely mystical and contemplative form of music making. It can operate as a kind of gate or channel for the opening (pembukaan) of a person’s self awareness and awareness of spiritual matters.

Much of this developed in the time before I owned a computer, before the internet (in its current form) had been invented, and in a country where I had a very limited access to English language religious or literary texts of any kind. Consequently—and fortuitously—it was a process that simply had to take place inside my own mind and soul, and particularly through the vehicle of contemplative prayer.

Most of all,

it was marked by a return

to doing a great deal of talking to G-d again.

Those enhanced contemplative discussions led to my conversion to Judaism which was supervised from afar but which took place on the Island of Java. And in the next installment it is to that part of the Hermit’s Tale that we will turn.

Part One of A Hermit´s Tale is HERE

Part Three of A Hermit´s Tale is HERE

[i] For some superb material regarding the gamelan music of the Yogya Kraton see Roger Vetter's website HERE and also HERE. The photo which heads this essay is also by Roger Vetter and shows Kraton musicians playing the 18th century gamelan K.K. Kancilbelik in 1982.

[ii] Pak Rudhatin was born on August 27th 1925. His mother was GBRA Brongtodiningrat. He worked in the Perpustakaan Banjarwilopo Kraton Yogyakarta and studied music and dance there as a member of Siswo Budoyo,Dwi Budoyo,Paromo Budoyo, and Siswo Among Bekso. In addition he received music instruction from KRT Madukusumo,music and dance instruction from his own father GPH Brongtodiningrat, and from GPH Notoprojo.

He relocated to Jakarta where he worked for the Direktorat Kesenian Dep. Dikbud. He was also active in teaching at INTI, Yayasan Ngeksi Gondho, and Candra Budaya. He is laid to rest at the Royal cemetary in Kota Gede. May his memory be for a blessing and may his soul have an aliyah.

[iii] Other gamelans by Pak Suhirdjan may be viewed HERE

[iv] The children are performing on slendro Gamelan Sekar Laras the last set I commisioned from Joan Suyenaga and Mas Hirdjan in Yogya, and in my opinion it was the finest of all the instruments he ever made for me or my employers. It had a beautiful presence and seemed to generate great peace. I had requested a very noble and unusually-low tuning when the instruments were made (heard in this recording). Sadly the instruments were re-tuned a pitch higher in later years and the intended tonal embat/character of the set was lost.