Gamelan: Cultural Interaction and Musical Development in Central Java

Sumarsam is an ethnomusicologist and practicing Javanese musician, and this University of Chicago Press book is his standard scholarly ethnomusicological study of Central Javanese gamelan, including the Sekaten ensembles maintained by the royal courts of Yogyakarta and Surakarta for religious and ceremonial use. Its strength is combining scholarly musicological analysis with the author's own practitioner background within the Javanese court gamelan tradition, giving it an insider's grounding that a purely outside academic study would lack. Its limit is that it centers on Central Javanese court gamelan specifically, so a claim about gamelan traditions from other regions of Indonesia, such as Bali, needs a source focused on that separate regional tradition rather than being drawn from this Central Javanese study.