Music & Peacebuilding
Music & Peacebuilding
Who We Be: Collectivist Agency and Balinese Gamelan
In this podcast, we take a tour with Dr. Brent Talbot Balinese gamelan through the lens of agency and performativity. Exploring diverse cultures of Bali and the US, we ask questions of how we construct agency and stories of our performances in collectivist and individualistic contexts. We take the time to explore Talbot’s resource, Gending Rare and the work of Made Taro. While US notions of agency assume individualistic contexts, we ask about the potential to live into agency that is embraced by community.
The Music & Peacebuilding Podcast is hosted by Kevin Shorner-Johnson at Elizabethtown College. Join our professional development network at www.musicpeacebuilding.com - thinking deeply we reclaim space for connection and care.
It's that notion that musicianship can be stronger when we all get together to work on this and that we all value, things that we bring to the table. And so our agency is tied to this interdependence between participants so that we can you know, and everybody has some strengths and some weaknesses and we're stronger together than we are individually.
Kevin Shorner-Johnson:You are listening to season three of the music and peacebuilding podcast, a professional development network at music peacebuilding.com Exploring intersections of peacebuilding, sacredness, community, creativity and imagination through research and story. Brent C. Talbot has been a leading voice for change in the field of music education, a prolific author and frequent presenter Talbot's work examines power, discourse and issues of justice in varied settings for music learning around the globe. He is the editor of one of the best selling books in music education, marginalized voices and music education, the curator of an indigenous centering resource, Gending Rare children's songs and games from Bali, and co author of the
acclaimed book:education music in the lives of undergraduates, collegiate acapella in the pursuit of happiness. Prior to his appointment as professor and head of Music at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Talbot served for 12 years as coordinator of music education at the Sunderman Conservatory of Music at Gettysburg College. So I want to enter into agency, because your scholarship speaks in so many different ways to agency. And within this work, I think I can draw a line between your scholarship but also your approach to teaching and being whether I think about your work with children's choir or teaching students. And so I think I wanted to open this conversation just to understand if there was a story about how you became a teacher who believes in holding space for agency and voice.
Unknown:Wow, that's a great question. I, I had, I really didn't understand the word agency until I was into my grad program, Miss Susan Conkling. And I was working on my dissertation. And she said, and those of you who don't know, Susan Conklin, she was just a Maven of incredible musicianship and teaching, and was my dissertation advisor at the Eastman School of Music. And I was working on a research study on an eighth grade, urban females in school and out of school learning. And I looked at her participation as a singer in an all black Evangelical, children's choir, in her church setting. And then also her participation in her eighth grade urban school music program, and how radically different those two spaces were. And Susan started using the word agency. And I had never heard the word before. And I felt really embarrassed, she's like, oh, it just means choice. Or that's how she framed it simply for me at the time and and then it became kind of the the word I saw everywhere, after, you know, when you when you don't know something, and then suddenly somebody introduces it to you, and you realize it's been you've been swimming in it your whole life. And so, and then I was reading all of this sociological work, and philosophical work, and people kept talking about agency. And then, and then my work with Roger Mantie extended that a lot, because he's he, he's deep into philosophy. And Susan was the one who introduced us, she had just moved on to Boston University, and Roger was a new hire there. And so we both were into discourse analysis and wanting to know, power and privilege and control and and how that intersected in a variety of different learning spaces, and instead of competing with one another in our publication process and things like that, about discourse analysis, the two of us were just like, we should do some stuff together. And so and so that that's how that all got interwoven. But I would say going back to the, to the beginning of that story that I was a teacher in the city school districts in Rochester. And it became very clear to me that my knowledge about music education was very different than my students knowledge about music at all, you know, and how they learn was very rich, but it wasn't the way that I had learned. And so I was just grasping for anything I could to have some relevancy in their lives and to connect what they loved and appreciated about the ways that they made music or consumed music. And I just was, so ill prepared to work in that environment, as a white male, upper class individual who grew up in a small town in New Hampshire with very little diversity outside of being Protestant or Catholic, so it was, it was pretty, it was pretty jarring. And I learned a lot and my students have, you know, in these kinds of stories, we hear how much they teach us. And I'm not sure how I, I know, I taught them a lot of really great things. But it was, it was mostly, for me a learning process to kind of really get to know who they were first and what they did on the weekends or in their basements or how they all made music, and then in the process to be like, hey, you know what, this is gonna be important. And for me, it allowed me to reflect on all of the ways that I made music outside of the School of Music and some of the challenges that I faced, as a student at Indiana University, where I did my undergrad, where I had grown up in a small town in New Hampshire and moved to this space, and everybody around me was just so much better. But I came from a space where I was the best, you know, like, a lot of undergrads face this moment, where they,
Brent Talbot:they've, they've been the kind of big star in their, in their region, and then suddenly, they're you, there's so much more, you realize, you have no clue. And so, I'm in being very humbled about that, but then also being very frustrated that I in the process of that formalized experience, I lost my passion and love for music. And, and I was very upset about that. So I, I found myself participating as in a Latin rock band. And, and that brought me so much joy, or, you know, my time in the marching band, you know, brought me a lot of joy. Or, I taught myself to be a DJ, on turntables. And, and I was a club kid I loved, I loved dancing, and I loved going out partying in these, like warehouses in the middle of nowhere, but I but I definitely that was where I had loved and connected with music most. And I realized that there was something very powerful in those spaces, that didn't always get reflected or understood or valued in school settings. And I knew how to do school music very well, both because I was a In articles on student home lives and teacher burnout, product of strong school music programs, and also a family that valued formal music education in ways that, you know, were more site based, and then aural based and, and that, you know, all of that kind of came to a head and I realized, oh, I can do these things too. And, and value those ways of music making. And Susan was very good at highlighting those for me and bringing those to the forefront. You know, when you go to for grad school, in a field, like music education, often you might think, Oh, I gotta continue this way. And that's what's gonna legitimize me in the eyes of all these other people. But she opened up all of those spaces for me, and really neat, compassionate, thoughtful, inquisitive ways that then led me down paths of doing research in that arena, because she could tell that that's what meant the most for me and where I thrived in my own identity. More so than say, being a classical pianist, which I also love doing, but it was different. And also for me it’s the relationships in much the ways that Karen Hendricks writes about in her compassionate music teaching or that way that Juliet Hess writes in music education for social change It's these it's these spaces and ideas about the ways that we we connect the relationships we make with students and their families and their worlds. So that we can, we can develop ways to change things and to do it without the need or assistance of others, to guide us, always in that process and That's where Roger and I really kind of dug into the acapella kind of book that you're referencing in terms of these ideas of agency. And, and the different ways that we theorize about what agency does and how school music can can work very much against the the the altruistic goals that we all write about in our music, philosophies, about, about developing lifelong music makers to go off and do these things. But the reality of how we do it often is the biggest barrier inhibitor. In the process of developing students who can be independent agential musicians Conkling wrote of diverse concerns of agency. Her examination of student home lives explores student voice, choice and representation within music curricula. In an article on teacher burnout and meaning making Conkling and Conkling ask what makes a teacher stay in contexts of high burnout and deficit labeling. The teacher they study speaks of her yearning for agency, time, resources and shared planning. agency may be a core part of what it means to belong, when we feel heard, valued, and have a welcoming space to make a difference. In my last interaction before Susan's passing, I remember hearing the words Great to see you, Kevin, those simple words from a prestigious scholar were a lifeline to my vulnerable sense of value, identifying that she remembered me from months prior, and that I might belong as a colleague. With her generosity, I see and feel the connection and interaction of belonging, relation trust and dignity and confidence within agency.
Kevin Shorner-Johnson:Yeah, I want to get get to the acapella section on the segment, and I did notice the lovely dedication to Susan at the beginning of the acapella book. So let's start with gamelan first and Balinese children's songs and then work our way back to acapella. So, I want to start first with the ethics of this resource. So you've created this resource for GIA publications, to introduce Balinese children's folk songs within classrooms and activities. But as we talk about voice, I wondered if you would first talk about your decisions to make it an ethical resource. So you've worked with the voices of illustrators and collectors within Bali, you've developed multiple representations of music, whether it be on a street corner with guitar or whether it be in a children's playground, you've empowered children to teach us pronunciations. So talk about your decisions to produce an ethical resource that shares agency maybe.
Brent Talbot:I, yes, this was so crucial for me, as an ethnomusicologist, and a music education person, I really just was unhappy with the multiculturalism or multicultural approach in music education, which has very good well meaning roots, but I think are quite dangerous, and often recenter dominance of, of a wide variety of types of isms. And I I wanted to do something different. I wanted to, to not center the teacher in the learning process, but to really live, what I preach. And at Gettysburg over the past 12 years has been central to my thinking, I've really fully embraced a critical pedagogy approach a Freirian model, and asked my students to join me in that and so you know, drawing upon readings, like, pedagogy of the oppressed, or, you know, looking through a critical lens like Henry Giroux's work does or bell hooks Teaching to Transgress these, these texts are what guide our thinking and, and I realized breaking down the relationships between student and teacher and teacher, and student, you know, just really kind of have this much more horizontal approach rather than a vertical approach to learning where we inquire together and that really the role of the teacher becomes about Thinking critically and deeply about questions that matter. And I thought to myself when I went to Bali, how difficult that was going to be, as a white researcher from North America coming into the space and trying to promote indigenous forms of learning, especially a space that's that's, that is partly different in in its kind of history of colonization, but that the roots of colonization are so deeply entrenched in the ways that people in those spaces also think. And so I wanted to find a compassionate way where students could learn alongside their teachers and that the teachers didn't have to be the the conduit or the central knowledge bearer for for the students in the in American classrooms or just classrooms outside of Bali, it didn't really matter. And so when I went into that space I worked with, I KETUT GEDE ASNAWA who was my mentor, and a person who I did wrote my dissertation on, I wanted to understand the challenges it was for being a man or a person coming from, from Bali, with this history of this musical practice. And then to uproot that and put it into an American university institutional setting, and what it does to one's psyche and identity, and the ways that one has to negotiate and code switch on all of the layers, whether it be language or music switching, you know, that all of these things had to constantly be negotiated. So I when I entered that space, I wanted to work with him, and also as a way of honoring his knowledge that he taught me and how we can kind of bring all of that to in really accessible ways to students and teachers in outside of Bali. And he introduced me to Made Taro, who was this magical figure like a Mr. Rogers, he has his own TV show. It's kind of special and and that collaboration really led to kind of making some choices about how can, how can we, how can we use music to really teach about this space if you've never been here? So I led with that question. And we developed, we chose 14 songs that would specifically by just singing them or learning about them, we could understand what it was like to navigate some of that space a little bit better. And some of the creative ways that I thought about doing it was just you know, we need to use multimedia in all of this. But we need a rich visual component. So I worked with visual artists that a number of I kind of proposed this idea to a number of them and crowdsource that people came in from all over the place. And so I found two great artists to from Neverland, who just blew my mind with what they could create. And then I worked with videographers that I had known for a number of years from many visits there. And we went to the schools, where Made Taro taught and filmed his his Bali TV show that airs on Sundays to the whole island. And these families were just very generous and excited to kind of share and so we, we chose those, we signed them, and then I worked and I edited all the videos so that when we watched them, no matter who you were anywhere around the world, that you could figure out the rules of the game pretty quickly, because I've spent a lot of time with children and I, and I watched them play. And they work and how they organize themselves. And in the process, you know, like they, they are very good at establishing rules and understanding rules and setting up all these kinds of these guidelines. And when we get out of the way, a lot of beautiful music, making a lot of beautiful social organizing all kind of comes to life. And so I thought, let's just do this through video. Let's do this through. Let's have them think about it. And so instead of the teacher being like, here are the five rules that you need to know about this game, to instead situate it differently and say here are Here's a video of some students playing a game in Bali. do you what do you think the rules are? Let's watch this together and see if we can figure it out.
Kevin Shorner-Johnson:In Talbot's publication of Gending Rare, he introduces Meong Meong a cat and mouse game set to music. As the cat chases the mouse and a dance of ecological balance Talbot writes that the song and ceremony reminds us that we need to, quote, behave in a way that restores balance to the world. Listen, as children and Made Taro enter the joyful musical play of Meong Meong [music]
Brent Talbot:And to take this inquiry based approach and problem posing approach rather than this direct teaching kind of, you know, expert knowledge positionality and really just changes the whole game, in my opinion. And then there's a you know well great, most teachers have not been to Bali they don't know how to pronounce. And if they have, they're unlikely to have actually learned in the local language. A Basa Bali so they, you know, to have young children slowly do the video of the pronunciation so that the teacher can then just pause it and say repeat after this child. Let the Balinese be the one who teaches you how to pronounce their own language rather than, you know, have to work really hard or to butcher it, you know, in some way. So. So those are the ways that I thought through the ethics to answer your question, and a long winded response is that I really felt that I needed to step aside and think deeply about what I could do that would allow people to show their own their own culture, and to present it in interesting ways.
Kevin Shorner-Johnson:In one interview, Made Taro commented that he was saddened when he saw children who are without the imagination of play, making a toy propeller and flying a kite to awaken children's imaginations. Made Taro commented, I was so happy to see them playing I forgot that I was old, watching Made Taro as a cultivator of play, I embrace the beauty of his continuing legacy. With the diversity of Talbots representations we turn to a street recording of Meong Meong followed by a child sharing the pronunciations of this song Our acknowledgement of diverse ways of musicking and being open a freedom of imagination and creativity.[music]
Unknown:[child pronouncing words to Meong Meong]
Kevin Shorner-Johnson:A recording of the Gettysburg children's choir performing songs from the Gending Rare collection as arranged by Brent Talbot. [music] So I'm really interested about my own bias and the bias within the United States about what we think agency is. Um, so if, you know, I would speak from my own bias that I think for a long time, I believed that agency is my individual right to make my own decisions or determinations, and here we are encountering a culture that we might describe as being more collectivist. And many of these songs talk about interdependence and collectivism. And so if I think too about concepts like suka duka, Happy Together sad together, or desa, kala patra, this appropriate time, place circumstance, these ideas that our lives are being constrained in some ways by collectivism. I guess the question, this is a really impossible question, is their agency in collective voice? And what what have you learned from Balinese music making both in Gettysburg and abroad that might speak to collective agency?
Brent Talbot:Again, deep, I, yeah, Bali changed everything for me. I have lived there for for many, many summers. And then had the pleasure of living there and on sabbatical and 2014, to write that resource. And I went there with the mindset of the sense of urgency, because, you know, we had this limited time that we needed to, you know, that I needed to collect these things, to write this thing to do the institutional expectations of getting tenure and all the stress about all the you know, those pressures. And I just know, I remember people would ride their mopeds up to, to my, to [???] home, where I was staying, and, and I, they, the family, they had put a little makeshift table with a chair, because most people don't sit in chairs and boys, it was like, they call it canto-a Brent, which is Brent's office. And, and it was, you know, it was right out the front. Because the, our notion of what a home looks like is very different. It's ??? more fluid and open air. And so I had the space that I had dedicated around my laptop, and I would I would sit for hours writing and doing this this work, and people would come in, they were curious, or they'd come up and ride a moped up and they'd be like, Hey, how are you? We're gonna go to this event, do you want to come? And I say, No, I have to do this work. And I think it was about like, a week in that I finally it was like, you're an idiot. Like, what do you mean, I can't go to this event, because I'm writing? That's the whole point of here is to immerse yourself in this culture and to get as much information and understanding deep understanding so that you can, again, ethically write about the space and these and the ways that people music here. So I just then I just changed my entire approach and said, Yes!, anytime somebody came and said, Do you want to go do this? I said, Yes. And, and so that, that led me on this beautiful journey of witnessing the most incredible behind the scenes, living experiences, you know, things that people you know, just participating in middle of the night ceremonies called Jala Narangs? that where people are all in like trance and seeing the, you know, the sky on fire or whatever, you know, just like these things that you I can't even explain and it's hard to get people to rationalize if they've not been in that space. And and when I do describe it, it sounds like I was on a, doing a lot of drugs, which I don't do so. So it's hard to kind of really articulate in ways that unless you've been there, you you understand it, but but in the process, I started to understand better what collective agency meant, because we do have this rugged individualism that guides our existence. And the structures are built around this independence, and this notion of, of independent, but people live in homes and they care. And there's this really, skala??? is a notion of service, these organizations that, that you're kind of your family you participate in, because your family has been good at doing it for generations. And so because your grandparents or grandparents are doing it, you've learned the skills to do it and you pass it on. But there's a group of people who do them and they may they may be something like the Gamelan is is this type of service organization that when somebody has a major event in their lives that need celebrating and needs music, then people just show up and they do it. And it's the villages kind of gamelan group that does this or the ska??. And in this one for like the subak, which are the, the irrigation canals that, that provide water to every rice farmer from the highest mountain all the way down to the sea, and, and that they need to be cleaned out regularly. So there is a group of people who go around making sure that the waterways are clean and, and being able to flow the water sources throughout the island. And there are others who gather to chop meat and spices and vegetables for a ceremony. And, you know, so we might have a caterer or something like that, well, there they you buy a bunch of the stuff, and then you know, it's a party and 20 people show up and start chopping things for you. So it's um, but this is all part of this kind of notion of service, that that that helps keep things going. And in the process, you know, when you have a ceremony, everyone's invited, and so everyone's fed regularly like it. That's not to say that there isn't homelessness or that there isn't, you know, food scarcity, for a lot of people in Bali, there's certainly that people are living in impoverished ways. But my experience was seeing a lot of generosity of always having a space to sleep and a place to eat, and a meal that, you know, it might not be luxurious, it might not be the most healthy to eat, or whatever. But like people are, people are providing these things in different ways that I just don't necessarily always see in, in US cultural spaces. All of that led me to understand that there was this energy behind the scenes, that govern ways that we, that we perceive the world and understand how we can kind of grow and develop and help. And to and to change, and with that, there's also restrictions and heavy expectations. And so agency is difficult to conceptualize. If we only use a Western framework of agency, then then it tends to be within an individualized kind of component, but there can be some power behind this broader, imaginary, this bigger duty, and it fits in well within Agama Hindu beliefs, because Dharma is your duty, your duty to your family your duty to your, to your community, your duty to your nation. And, and that that sense is, you know, whether we want to do it or not, sometimes we just have to step up and kind of make it happen. And so there's that there is that pressure, but it doesn't, I don't always get the sense that people think about it. Critically in those ways, in the same ways that we might, you know, kind of separate the individual from herself from from the group
Kevin Shorner-Johnson:notions of Dharma are fundamental to Hindu traditions. Dharma is our Connected sense of duty. That is the cornerstone of relation where I feel the tug of my duty as a father, partner, and teacher. For definitions of agency that need complete freedom. This sense of duty can be a constraint that feels like a closing of possibility. But for new definitions, ones where we need each other in communities of listening and sounding voice, the tension of freedom-constraint, may offer expansive possibilities.
Brent Talbot:And so it changes our notions and so in gamelan, you know, in my own experience of as a musician, I'm constantly seeing how we connect these together and the Gamelan is a beautiful instrumental ensemble in in that it, it represents all of these tenants from the cultural spaces. So karma and dharma and reincarnation are all represented in the very fabric of the music itself and in the instruments and so the gong cycle, as one example is a representation of, of of reincarnation. It's often it on on an eight beat cycle, though not always. And the counting would start with the last number. So instead of starting with one we start with 81234567, the gang would hit on eight and when we're playing it from a Western perspective We might count it one, two, you know, hit the gong on one. But it's, it's, it's different. Because the end is the beginning and the beginning is the end. And we have the cyclical nature of the whole process. But we also understand that in reincarnation, you know, for a Hindu, that's one of the biggest moments of one's life is one's death. Because you're, you're being reborn into a new, a new level. And, you know, in relation to you have to take into consideration karma and the other kind of elements that that play along, but it's giving good out into the world and receiving it, you know, in that bounty, you know, comes for life cycles. It's not just, it's just not the here and now. And so we see that in the gong, and dharma is related in the kind of duty or the interconnectedness that happens with the interlocking kotekan, or the hocketing kind of musical patterns that happened between two instruments to create a whole composite pattern. And it's, that's both horizontal and vertical and kind of harmonic and melodic ways. So it's, it's, um, we see how we see how these tenants play out in the ensemble itself, which I think is always fascinating.
Kevin Shorner-Johnson:Lisa Gold introduces the colotomic cycle, as a fundamental structure of gamelan, constructed as an interdependent sequence of tones and timbres, the colotomic cycle sounds circular time where the past is played into the present.[music]
Brent Talbot:And that, to me means that to, to work towards this bigger goal requires collective energy, when I'm running our gamelan the beginning years were so difficult because nobody had a context to grab on to. And now the Gamelan, at Gettysburg has been around for 12 years, half of the ensemble or community members are alumni who've been playing for for years, and just their knowledge and their ability of understanding how this some of this or maybe we play past pieces that have been performed before. Having that in the room, the newer learners can pick up so quickly, and it's and it's different. But there's an element in Bali that I always found fascinating that, you know, somebody's just starts lining out something and then everybody just starts, you know, collectively remembering how this piece emerges or they feel or they can they have the codes to start to kind of disseminate what the harmonies would be and how to hramonize. And it's similar what I've seen, in my time, in Tanzania, working with youth choirs there, you know, who are who are totally all student run, no adult leaders, you know, and somebody say, oh, let's do this thing and line it out. And then suddenly, like, eight apart, harmony is like erupting, and everybody just kind of saying, you know, starts accompanying and different things. And it's, it's that notion that musicianship can be stronger. When we all get together to, to work on this, and that we all value, things that we bring to the table. And so our agency is tied to this interdependence between, between participants, so that we can, you know, and everybody has some strengths and some weaknesses and, but we're stronger together than we are individually. And that I think, is really, really a powerful component that we don't often think about. Or if we do, we don't design it in ways where there's this kind of, you know, evening out to power dynamics or hierarchies. Instead of having like the director standing at the front teaching you and feeding you all of this information that can often be inhibiting rather than being like, hey, you know, I remember this, it goes this way. What do you think we should do in these particular elements and people add, it's the more improvisatory Yes and game you know.
Kevin Shorner-Johnson:The delicate dance of freedom and responsibility is the life of community. May our possibilities for voice and choice be held by the interdependence of listening. Special thanks to Dr. Brent Talbot for his permission to use recordings from Gending Rare children's songs and games from Bali. The book is published by GIA publications and is a beautiful collection of accessible songs and games for general music classrooms. The next episode in this series, will continue our exploration of agency as we place Mantie and Talbot's research on acapella singing side by side with a continuing examination of Balinese collectivist agency. This is the music and peacebuilding podcast hosted by Kevin Shorner-Johnson. At Elizabethtown college we host a master of music education with an emphasis in peacebuilding. thinking deeply, we reclaim space for connection and care. Join us at music peace building.com