CHAPTER 6

Listening in the Sĕrat Cĕnthini

Tony Day and Sarah Weiss

The Sĕrat Cĕnthini, a poem composed in Surakarta, Central Java by Ki Ng. Ronggasutrasna, R. Ng. Yasadipura II, and Ki Ng. Sastradipura under the direction of the Crown Prince of Surakarta (later Pakubuwana V, r. 1820–1823), was written in 1815 during the British occupation of Java (1811–1816). Its Canto 363 features an unusually detailed account of sound and listening as a Javanese village awakens, preparations for a wedding get underway, and musicians begin to play. Although these scenes are preserved in a written text, the multilayered sonic experiences of life in nineteenth-century village Java are clangorously and melodiously present throughout the text, both in its description and in the words themselves. Written in verse to be sung and heard, the Sĕrat Cĕnthini’s abundant use of alliteration, assonance, and onomatopoeia invites the listener to pay attention to all of God’s creation, described in sonic, haptic, and kinesthetic ways.

Our analysis distinguishes three stages of increasingly attentive listening in the Sĕrat Cĕnthini. We further argue that the poem invites us to consider adding religious “intention” (Jav. niyat, Arabic niyya) to the attention that we as readers, like the villagers it describes, are paying to the sound of the poem—both the text itself and the performances described therein. This process ultimately transforms listening into a religious exercise of “audition” that the Sufis call samāʿ (Arabic).

The Sonic World of the Sĕrat Cĕnthini

The 722 cantos and 247,766 lines of poetry in the Sĕrat Cĕnthini are arguably the greatest expression of Javanese literary art; indeed, the eminent philologist R. M. Ng. Dr. Poerbatjaraka deemed the poem “de onvolprezen Tjĕntini” (the unsurpassed Cĕnthini).1 But what kind of inimitable literary work is it? The Eurasian translator C. F. Winter Sr.’s mid-nineteenth-century fictional informant, Parakawi, called the Sĕrat Cĕnthini a “perlambang ngelmi” (“oracle of knowledges”2), an enigmatic phrase that points to both the work’s encyclopedic character and its interest in esoteric thought and techniques of all kinds.3 More recently, Theodore Pigeaud classified the Sĕrat Cĕnthini as a “romance of vagrant students containing encyclopedic passages,” grouping it with three other works.4 Nancy Florida coined the phrase “santri lĕlana story” to expand the family of texts to which the Cĕnthini belongs, and Tim Behrend adopted and refined Florida’s definition of the santri lĕlana (wandering student of Islam) genre to clarify its common characteristics. According to Behrend, all santri lĕlana stories have (1) at least one santri (pious Muslim, student of religion) as protagonist, (2) a plotline in which this figure, in search of a lost relative as well as religious knowledge, wanders (lĕlana) through forests and populated countryside far from courts and cities in a landscape that may or may not be identifiable as contemporary Java, (3) a story of adventure related by means of recurring episodes that are combined or omitted in various configurations, (4) an end in which the protagonist’s mystical religious ideas get him into trouble, and he either escapes punishment or is killed.5

The Sĕrat Cĕnthini certainly fits but also exceeds Behrend’s criteria in an astonishingly complex way. The earliest version of the Sĕrat Cĕnthini comes from Cirebon, a town on the northwest coast of Java, at the beginning of the seventeenth century. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the poem was copied and read in Muslim religious schools (pĕsantren) in West and East Java. When the poem reached Surakarta in Central Java in the late eighteenth/early nineteenth centuries, Sufi court poets rewrote it, greatly expanding the number of episodes and characters, as well as the kinds of information and literary styles it contained. The version we will discuss, the so-called Major Cĕnthini or Cĕnthini Kadipaten, can be dated to the household of the Crown Prince of Surakarta on January 7, 1815. It is no less than forty times longer than the original Cirebon version.6

Musical performance is one of the many aspects of Javanese culture described at length in the Sĕrat Cĕnthini, where it is represented as a favorite pursuit of some of its itinerant characters. Performances in the poem involve playing on gamĕlan instruments or frame-drums, both as part of Muslim ritual events and simply for pleasure, or as accompaniment to dancing by male, female, or transvestite performers. Throughout, musical performance is fundamental to the very nature of the poem itself, which is written in poetic meters intended to be sung, either silently by solitary readers as they read the text to themselves, or in public performance to attentive listeners, who may even be lulled to sleep, as in Figure 6.1, by its poetic melodiousness.7 “Sounding” is fundamental to many experiences represented within the text, as well as to its reception by those who read and hence listen to it.

Several scholars of Javanese music have translated and discussed descriptions of musical performance from the Sĕrat Cĕnthini.8 Generally, however, these authors have not focused on “sounding” as such, or on what the poem can teach us about the experience of sound in Java.9 Our goal in this essay is not to construct a unifying metaphor for understanding Javanese culture through musical structure (or vice versa), but rather to allow the poets of the Sĕrat Cĕnthini to comment on the nature of sound and listening in their own words.

What can we learn about listening by simply reading an extended passage from a poem? The passage we have in mind comes in the middle of the Sĕrat Cĕnthini in a long episode devoted to festivities surrounding the marriage of Amongraga, a wandering Sufi sheikh (master, senior religious scholar), to the beautiful, pious, and talented daughter of the village head of Wanamarta, Tambangraras. Canto 363, in the Pocung meter,10 opens in the morning after a night of religious instruction, performances, and lovemaking, in which the sacred theme of higher, spiritual “union” of man with God is parodied in a detailed and energetic description of anal sex between Jayengraga,11 Tambang­raras’s younger brother who is a skillful musician, and two youths, Surat and Senu, who have aroused him by their dancing during the evening’s festivities.12

On hearing the first verse of the canto, the listener is likely to chuckle because the text presents Surat and Senu, the saucy (but reluctant) sexual partners of a few moments and verses ago, as the singers of a melodious early morning prayer in Arabic, whose words are “Prayer is better than sleeping.” These devout sounds in Arabic are soon amplified by Jayengraga intoning a sequence of obligatory Islamic prayers. We join him at verse 7 where, as praying draws to a close, all the voices of the village world begin to sound forth.13

The Sĕrat Cĕnthini consistently alludes to the tenets of Islam along with the political realities of early nineteenth-century Java and social norms more generally, and it playfully contests the stricter constructions of law-abiding Muslims, articulating a Sufi critique of legalistic, conservative Islamic practice.22 Raunchy sex is juxtaposed with pious behavior; gorgeous singing by talented and trained performers with that of country bumpkins chanting out of religious conviction or a false pride in their voices; order with disorder. The point is not invidious comparison so much as a demonstration of an inclusive tolerance for all forms of Islamic and Javanese cultural ways of being. This intervention occurred at a time when identities were becoming increasingly polarized just before the outbreak of the Muslim Prince Dipanagara’s rebellion against the Dutch in 1825.23 This historical background forms one important aspect of the sonic humor in the Sĕrat Cĕnthini.

The playfulness of Canto 363 in particular is announced by its meter, Pocung, described by various Javanese handbooks surveyed by Ben Arps in an appendix to his study of macapat (1992) as “frivolous,” “coaxing by making a joke,” or “without tension.”24 The light-hearted nature of the Pocung meter signals soundings of all sorts, both unstructured fun as well as serious, antistructural, Sufi play with religious ideas. In the verses translated above, the frenzy of the preparations can only be dimly sensed, but the sounds of the bustling, early-morning world of villagers and birds anticipate it. The routines of village life every morning are described in detail: Subuh prayers are recited, sellers head to market, smithies resume work at their forges, peddlers amble through neighborhoods offering sweet cakes, and birds and domestic animals attend to their morning ablutions while chattering to their mates. Strikingly, every image in these verses communicates the sonic world of a Javanese village dawn by connecting sound, touch, and movement. Praying voices are melodious. The buzzing of Arabic lessons being recited in unison mingles with the squeaking of the poles of merchants carrying goods to market. Repetitive work sounds, such as the grinding of meal or the smelting of metal, accompany the conversations of animals and the twittering of birds, onomatopoetically experienced through the poem, which would always have been sung out loud in the nineteenth century. The articulation of sounds entices the reader onward, beckoning her, or pulling him, through the sung narrative in the same way that the interactions of sounds in the early morning urge the inhabitants of Javanese villages to become ever more awake and engaged with their normal morning routines ahead of the special activities associated with the wedding. Everyone and everything—animal, villager, listener, porter’s pole—is drawn toward a goal that is even more significant than participation in the festive day at hand, one that is unnamed yet implicit within and sounded by each word and note of the canto in Pocung.

Unsurprisingly, from the very start of the canto, we find an assonantal-alliterative sound play (Jav. purwakanthi) that is characteristic of Javanese macapat poetry. But the first twenty-seven verses of the canto are also devoted to vocalizations that combine religious with secular sounds. After the “well-tuned” (Jav. araras) voices of Surat and Senu singing their morning prayer in what is called a Banten melody in the text,25 we hear Jayengraga’s Arabic invocation transformed into Pocung prosody. On and on, through several verses, the sequence of prayers in Arabic, set to poetry in Pocung meter, issues forth, until the entire village is “carried away” (Jav. nganyut-anyut ) by the “gentle” (Jav. arum)26 voices of various praying individuals, which mingle indiscriminately with other sounds of the awakening village.

A striking feature of the description of sounds in the lines quoted above is their disparate, synesthetic omni-directionality. Some of the sounds are human, others are animal, still others are made by things. The canto begins by introducing one vocal sound and sound-maker after another in sequential fashion, then moves into a representation of village-wide vocalization, at which point, in the last line of verse 8, the sound-making spreads to the squeak-squawk of the bamboo carrying poles on their way to market. In verses 9 and 10 we hear the alliterative and assonant sounding of more early-morning work activity, especially in the first line of verse 10: kang glĕpung ting gĕrandug myang kang nglĕbur, “some ground meal with a crunch-crunch, and others smelted.” Then the production of sound passes to the morning birds in verses 11–14, whose songs are said to “answer” (Jav. imbal) one another.

This is the first moment in the depictions of sound in which we discern that it is heard akin to a gĕndhing, a composition of gamĕlan music. The term imbal is also used to describe the style of interlocking playing by the saron and bonang in gamĕlan performance, which has already been alluded to in verse 10, at a moment when the gamĕlan makers are up and at work. Moreover, in everyday usage, an imbalan is a message or debt that you receive, then pass on to another. Thus, the root meaning of the word conveys the sense of an ongoing ripple effect that these early sound-saturated verses of the canto render so vividly. Sounds accumulate in one medium, then spill over and become another, until the entire village resounds. But what was once disparate and disorganized is now the coordinated soundscape of the prosperous and productive village itself, which is about to celebrate the union of two of its most pious, eligible, and esteemed young people.

It is worth noting that in music-making events called klĕnengan, where musicians gather simply for the pleasure of making music together, the beginnings of pieces are marked by a singer who communicates with the rĕbab player to choose the next piece. The gĕnder player strikes a few notes to orient the singer to the scale and mode of the bawa or introduction to the next selected piece. The singer’s melody rises up over the din of musicians as they relax, talk, eat, and smoke. The musicians are gradually drawn to the sound and begin listening with increasing attentiveness as the solo voice reaches the end of the bawa and intones the regular rhythms that lead to the stroke of the gong and the beginning of the piece. The description of the village waking up, heard through the soundings of its disparate activities, which gradually join in imbal exchanges, mimics the experience of the beginning of a musical piece at an informal musical gathering, something that is described three more times in the canto.

Gamĕlan Sounded and Heard

Throughout verses 28 to 68, Jayengraga (“Master of the Body/Bodies”)27—the sexy (and certainly oversexed), musical son of the headman and younger brother of the bride—organizes preparations for the wedding ceremony and the performance of comic skits and masked dancing to be held in the late evening. These verses display the social hierarchy of the village: Jayengraga summons (nimbali) servants who “appear before his presence” (prapteng ngarsi), then “respectfully obey” (sĕndika turneki) him before hurrying off, like a flock of little birds, to do the master’s will. A temporary pavilion (tarub) is erected by a group of villagers and a female servant is given money to buy vegetables at the market. The village world continues to materialize before our eyes and ears, revealing a structure of authority and a hierarchy of masters and servants, men and women, with set roles and places in society. It is in this context, defined now sociologically as well as physically and sonically, that gamĕlan playing begins.

In verse 68, Jayengraga’s gambang playing emerges, assonantly and alliteratively, out of the word brambang, the onions, which are being peeled and chopped in the kitchen. The assonance and alliteration between the two words “gambang “and “brambang” is not simply a metrical requirement of the Pocung verse form, in which the second and fourth lines must end with vowel sound “a.” In the first instance the assonance references the actual sound of chopping of onions as rather similar to the resonant, struck-wood sounds of the gambang. The modulation from peeling onions to playing gambang further exploits the sound structure of the verse form to represent the continuous, interconnected, village-wide sound-making that we observed earlier in the canto. The urgency and energy of this process is picked up in verses 69 to 73 as Jayengraga calls his friends to join him in making music.

Once the music-making commences, Jayengraga contributes to these aforementioned kinesthetic sounds as he improvises on the gambang in verse 68 while giving orders to those preparing for the wedding feast, with his uncle Kulawirya vocalizing a drum accompaniment. But after Jayengraga calls out for other musicians to bring instruments and join him in playing a gamĕlan piece, and when the musical sequence begins in verse 74, the poem asks us to attend—both by eye and ear—to the gestures producing the sounds on some of the instruments, which are very precisely described in imagery that connects them to tiny creatures in the natural world. Together, this turns into qualities of the musical sounds of the instruments as communicated by the sung poetic words of the passage.

The ensemble of musicians performs the piece Kuwung-Kuwung, moving through the sections of the piece from sendhon to merong and inggah, ending with Pathĕtan Manyura Ngĕlik. The focus for those nearby who are attending to the impromptu concert are the individual instrumental performances, described in sharply differentiated terms according to the specific sonic quality of each instrument and its particular mode of performance by one of the named musicians. For the musicians themselves, the focus is on the interplay of wilĕtan, “intertwinings” in the performance of cengkok variations, which facilitates attainment of the most religiously sought-after goal of ensemble music-making, the musical “soul” (yatmaka) of the gĕndhing, for those who are capable of hearing it.

Listening throughout the performance, by audience and musician alike, is represented as being continuous and constantly attuned to nuances. These details are captured by the comparisons to different insects and their movement, as well as by suggestive onomatopoeias, and to the ways these nuances intertwine until they reveal the “soul” of the gĕndhing. The moment of greatest musical intensity coincides, not with the sounding of the gong, but with the arrival of the greatest musical density in verse 85, during which each instrument producing variation after variation is woven together, until the piece “falls” in its approach to the final cadence. Special attention is paid in the passage, in other words, not to structure, but to the “nuances of textual densification,” as Stephen Feld might put it,53 or, as Sumarsam has described in his essay “Inner Melody in Javanese Gamelan,” to the wilĕtan, the ways “each musician relates the part he plays to the melodies played on the other instruments,”54 which are represented in kinesthetic as well as sonic terms and minutely, metaphorically described, linking musical sounds to God’s world at large.

“Intention” (Jav. niyat) and Javanese “Listening” in the Sĕrat Cĕnthini as Sufi samāʿ

Know that hearts and consciences are treasuries of secrets and mines of jewels. Wrapped within them lie their jewels just as fire is enveloped in iron and stone, and hidden like water is concealed under dust and loam. There is no way of extracting such hidden things save by the flint and steel of audition to poetry and music (samāʿ), and there is no entrance to the heart save by the ante chamber of the ears. So musical tones, measured and pleasing, bring forth what is in it and make evident its beauties and defects.55

The special power of gamĕlan music can be released and experienced, for those who are playing it and for those who hear it, when making sound and listening to it is motivated by religious “intention.” At least, that is how it should happen according to Sufi theory about samāʿ, “listening which is spiritual.” Traces of this theory inform the passages we have just been reading in the Sĕrat Cĕnthini.56 Sufi ideas about samāʿ have long influenced Persian and Turkish music, and from very early on the Sufi love of music and the belief that by playing and listening to music one could achieve union with God were strongly condemned by legalistic Muslims as being akin to “usury, fornication, and intoxication.”57 Ghazālī’s Book XVIII from his Iḥyāʾ ʿulūm al-dīn, “Responses Proper to Listening to Music and the Experience of Ecstasy,” offers a famous discussion of samāʿ. The writings of Ghazālī, an eminent Sufi scholar from Persia, were well known in Java from the seventeenth century on. Here we make use of the interpretation of samāʿ offered by Ghazālī to elucidate the connections between intentional listening to/playing of music as it appears in the Sĕrat Cĕnthini.58

The quotation at the head of this section comes close to summarizing Ghazālī’s core idea about “listening that is spiritual.” Music is the medium that best conveys divine secrets contained in various kinds of writing, both secular and religious. It enters the “ear of the heart” when a human hears it. The “heart” is where the mystic contemplates—and may even achieve oneness with—God. The mystic capable of intentionally listening to music as a medium of divine revelation (Arabic samāʿ) will be able to hear the mystery that music conceals.

The holy Quran itself has always been sung. Navid Kermani has argued that the singing/recitation of the Quran is essential both to its aesthetics and to its divine message. Kermani quotes Ghazālī from his Ihyā’:

I recited the Quran without experiencing any joy in it, until I recited it as if I was hearing the Messenger of God reciting it before his companions. Then I was raised to a higher station, and I recited it as if I was hearing Gabriel conveying it to the Messenger of God. Then God brought on another station (manzila), so that now I hear it from Him who speaks it. And I experience an enjoyment and contentment (naʿīm) that I can no longer do without.59

In Islamic tradition, there are many stories about listeners who become so enraptured by hearing a beautiful recitation of the Quran that they faint, or even pass away. Ghazālī reports four instances of men who died from the pleasure of hearing the Quran recited beautifully, a tiny fraction of the number of such Quranic deaths reported over the centuries.60 Kermani quotes several sayings attributed to the Prophet, such as: “‘Everything has an ornament; the ornament of the Quran is the beautiful voice.’”61 “If one follows the rules for an ideal recitation as outlined by Ghazālī . . . ,” states Kermani, “the musical rendition is not only ‘ornament’ in the ordinary sense of the term . . . on the contrary, it is basic to the actualization of the message.”62

And it is not just the Quran that has caused the deaths of those who have become unbearably enraptured from hearing a beautiful recitation. “The number of Sufis who are supposed to have died listening to music or poetry is probably only insignificantly fewer than the number slain by the Quran,” Kermani writes.63 In his remarks on samāʿ, Ghazālī and other Sufi authors discuss listening to music, poetry, and the Quran as belonging to the same discourse on samāʿ. The Quran is not poetry, but poetry as well as music also belong to the religious sphere. As Kermani puts it, “to the mystics, all three are an organ of religious insight . . . listening is not an end in itself but is directed towards achieving an insight, a ‘finding’ (wajd), as the word for ecstasy aimed at in listening indicates.”64 In other words, listening as samāʿ is paying attention to music and poetry with the specific “intention” to discover God’s mysteries hidden within sound.

The distinction Ghazālī and other Sufi writers draw between listening merely for pleasure and listening with “intention,” as samāʿ, is articulated in a subsequent episode in the Sĕrat Cĕnthini. Jayengraga, his older brother Jayengrĕsmi, Kulawirya, and their young santri companions have set out from Wanamarta in search of Amongraga, who has left his new wife for a series of adventures that will end in his death. The travelers come to a village where they play gamĕlan and where their learned host, Kidang Wiracapa, instructs them about the difference between playing music the way most musicians do, focusing on the beauty of the music they are making, and playing it as an act of worship to unite with God (Cantos 595–597).65

In v. 25 of Canto 595, Jayengraga picks up the rĕbab and plays the buka to the famous piece Gambir Sawit. As they play the gĕndhing the musicians are described (v. 32) as being in a state of (physical and emotional?) “constipation” (mĕlĕt). But as they listen to the “voice(s) of the gĕndhing” (gendheng gĕndhing), they are filled with pleasure and “knead their wilĕts together” (atangkĕb mulĕt wilĕtnya). Then, threading and weaving their sounds together in the most elegant fashion (sangsaya angikal bĕsus), “they perform the soul of the gĕndhing” (olah yatmakaning gĕndhing) (v. 33). In the very next line of the same verse, people who have been watching the performance, women and children, even very old people working in the kitchen, are described “bowling each other over” (asalang tunjang) and burning what they are frying as they are “overpowered” (katungkul) by the desire to look at those who are playing the gĕndhing, particularly the handsome Jayengraga (v. 34).

Wiracapa’s comment after the playing has ceased is that such skilled musicians could not possibly come from pious Islamic backgrounds. Kula­wirya in particular, with his refined playing, could only ever be resistant (cĕgah) to religion (v. 42): “Sabab wong gĕndhing puniku | atine mangeran gĕndhing | tan ana liyan kacipta | namung rasaning ing gĕndhing | sinungku sajroning nala | nalika lakuning gĕndhing ||” (Because a real gĕndhing person, / his heart only calls gĕndhing ‘Lord,’ / that is all he can imagine, / just the feeling /taste of a gĕndhing, / that is what lives inside his heart/after the gĕndhing is over //).66

But it must not be this way, as Wiracapa elucidates in the following Canto 596, composed in the Pocung meter. He explains to his listeners that the “taste, the meaning” (rasanya) of the “divine science” (ngilmu) requires them to learn to hear and play music differently.67 The path to “tasting” the music correctly starts with the individual instruments, brought together as a tuned ensemble on which a gĕndhing is played at different tempi (irama). The “soul” (yatmaka) of the music emerges when all the instruments are played together as a gracefully interwoven ensemble.68 Gamĕlan originated with the founder of Javanese culture whose name, “Widayaka,” means “a person who sings poetry” (wong anĕmbang).69 Voices sing, hands play instruments; singing (gendheng) is joined together (dhaup) with musical compositions (gĕndhing), whose loveliness originated with voice. Once all these elements combine (dhaup) with “divine science” (ngilmi), then the tones of the gamĕlan, along with sounds coming from the lips, together with the gĕndhing, express the “intention” (niyat) of the performance. “Musicians,” Wiracapa asserts, “are just a community (bangsa) of drunks, but even so, if they get drunk on the teachings of ngilmi, then they would commit themselves to abstinence and ascend to Mystery.”70 “Do not give in to the gĕndhing and its spell (surupan),” he adds; “the sounds of its beauty (surasaning raras) are but premonitions of your longing (kinarya pangresing kapti), are what guide (pangatĕre) the heart as it meditates (tyasing gagas).”71

Turning back to Sufi theories of samāʿ we can now assess what the description of the performance along with Wiracapa’s commentary teach us about how Javanese listen—or should listen—to gamĕlan music. The influence of Sufi ideas on the Javanese poets, probably as formulated by Ghazālī, are evident. To begin with, as is shown in every episode in which travelers play gamĕlan in front of village audiences, there is a difference between the two groups in terms of their “listening” and responding to music, the same distinction Ghazālī and other Sufi theorists of samāʿ make between advanced travelers on the Sufi path and ordinary people. Even though Wiracapa, voicing the opinion that pious Muslims still hold about musicians in Java, calls them drunks, the traveling musicians are sophisticated Sufis capable of seizing the “soul” (yatmaka) of a gĕndhing when they make their wilĕt perfectly intertwined in performance. Kulawirya and his companions do not need Wiracapa to explain this to them. The villagers, on the other hand, are mindlessly, uncomprehendingly thrown into confused awe by what they hear. Ghazālī would not have been surprised. According to him, and he was more insistent on this point than other Sufi theorists of samāʿ, only those who have already attained a high degree of mystical insight can “heart-savour” (dhawq) music, “listening to music (samāʿ) [as] a divine mystery (sirr Allāh) found within the harmonious relationship of measured tones to the (human) spirits and in the spirits becoming overcome by these melodies and stirred by them.”72 Ghazālī’s comment reminds us of Sumarsam’s thinking about the “inner melody” of a gamĕlan piece in performance:

It seems that no single instrument or vocal part in the ensemble is solely responsible for guiding the melodic motion of a gendhing. I believe the real ‘authority over melody’ is a melodic idea sung in the minds of the individual musicians. This directs the melodic motion. This melodic conception could be called ‘inner melody.’ Inner melody is the melody that is sung by musicians in their hearts. Inner melody is the essence of melody in Javanese gamelan. My gamelan teacher often advised me ‘golekana lan rasakna wosing utawa surasaning lagu,’ that is, ‘search for and feel the essence, or the soul, of a melody.’73

The moment when Javanese musicians feel the “soul” of the melody seems very much like “the essence of the ecstasy that the mystics pursue in samāʿ,” as Kermani puts it, which is an absorption in contemplation, a relinquishment of one’s subjectivity.74 Sumarsam’s musicians allow their subjective “inner melodies” to merge with the one essential “inner melody” of a gĕn­dhing, which is its yatmaka, its soul, once they have collectively grasped it.

Attending to the Sĕrat Cĕnthini

For Sufis, including Sufi poets in early nineteenth-century Central Java, the experience of God’s beauty was primarily through sound. For some Sufis in the Middle East, the sounds of the Quran were the most incomparably beautiful.75 For others, like Ghazālī, it was listening, in the mode of samāʿ, to secular music and poetry rather than to the well-known, frequently memorized verses of the Quran that offered access to the Absolute.76 The poets of the Sĕrat Cĕnthini seem to have agreed with Ghazālī; indeed, Florida reminds us that, near the end of the poem, after a night of recitations and musical performances, “Amongraga pronounces his assessment of their night of devotion” in just these terms:

Sheikh Amongraga spoke softly,

‘Brother Ki Malangkarsa,

as for the faithful of Java,

to gain understanding in their hearts

the best of possible ways is

through the experience (rasa) of suluk alone

is reached the end to which we aim.

Different, the effect upon the heart

that comes from the Holy Qur’an–

demanding strenuous struggle,

long it takes to enter the heart,

never reaching the rasa of the Word;

for that requires the symbols of song

sung in Javanese macapat verse.’77

Up to this point, the situation described in the Sĕrat Cĕnthini seems directly connected to the Sufism of Ghazālī. And yet, if we read descriptions in the Sĕrat Cĕnthini of villagers listening and reacting to gamĕlan performances, something else seems to be going on other than their noncomprehension of the Mystery contained within its sounds. The sounding of gamĕlan instruments in the early nineteenth century also expressed an autonomous power, long predating Islamization, something that compelled listening and bestowed well-being.

Let us turn to the description of the last performance of music by Jayengraga and his companions (v. 144–96, the final stanza in Canto 363, and the opening stanzas of Canto 364 in Sinom meter, verses 1–14).78 The musicians have brought out a sacred gamĕlan named Alun Jaladri (Waves of the Sea) that belongs to Jayengraga’s father. When the musicians begin playing on it, everyone in the village hears (v. 157) and is “startled, their hearts pounding” (ingkang myarsa kagyat tyasira naratab).79

The villagers recognize the sound, and it fills them with joy. It compels them to put on their best clothes and bring money and other offerings to bestow on Jayengraga as a token of respect for Alun Jaladri, the women walking in a way that “showed off their beauty,” the men “their manly charms” (v. 188). Kulawirya comments that when people hear a gamĕlan like Alun Jaladri “the energy of pagan times returns” (v. 189), for the sound “by necessity bestows good fortune” (v. 192). At the beginning of Canto 364, which is in the Sinom meter, a single verse sums up Alun Jaladri’s power to cause involuntary responses by its listeners, with five lines stating the coming together of the various kinds of instrumental sound in a mystical unity as the rĕbab is played:80

The description ends with an image of the rĕbab, the most voice-like instrument in the gamĕlan ensemble, sounding the yatmaka, the “soul,” of all the “inner melodies” of the gĕndhing being played, brought together in the melody heard on a single string of the rĕbab. Although the villagers are not capable of the kind of samāʿ-like hearing that is implied by the poetry in verse 9, they are “lovestruck” (brangti) by what they hear, a state described in the poetry of pre-Islamic ancient Java as far back as the ninth century CE as an expression of the most advanced kind of aesthetic sensibility.81

The episode of “listening” from the Sĕrat Cĕnthini that we have been reading in Cantos 363 and 364 presents three distinct, but ultimately intertwined and mutually referential, kinds of sound-making and hearing. In the first of these, the village awakens to the sounds that people, animals, and things make every day at dawn. These sounds are there to be heard, but no one in the poem is listening intentionally to them. Those hearing the poem sung out loud, however, would be listening with intent, religious or otherwise.82 The poetry, as we have indicated in our annotated translation of it, is intended either to protect us from all harm and lull us into slumber, or to alert us to “earth’s signs and marvels,” as Ghazālī puts it in his On Conduct in Travel, Book XVII of the Iḥyāʾ.83

In the second phase of listening presented in these verses, when the musicians first begin making music together, the instruments being played are described in a way that recalls the minute kinds of sonic and descriptive reference to the tiny details of the everyday world that we find in the first phase of listening. It sounds at times as if the poets are drawing the entire human and natural world from the dawn-section of the episode into the “inner melodies” that the musicians hear in their hearts as they now play their different instruments. But this time the reader/listener is given to understand (v. 85) that not only are musical sounds intertwined with sounds and movements from the natural and physical world, they are also becoming intertwined, through the creative wilĕt of the musicians, with each other, as the mystical ensemble of sounds, “the interwoven style / seized the very soul of the gĕn­dhing.” Musical sounds themselves, like the onomatopoeic words that define and imitate them, express the “inner melodies” heard in the hearts of the individual musicians, that finally meet in a gracefully adorned “coil” (ukĕl) to reveal the yatmaka, the “soul,” of the gĕndhing. The musicians in this passage are clearly engaging in a kind of samāʿ as they play and which the listener to the poetry describing the scene can overhear.

Finally, when Alun Jaladri engulfs the village, it is as if the pre-Islamic, heathen sounds of that orchestra are supernaturally identical with ocean waves themselves. We are compelled, like ordinary Javanese villagers, to be respectfully attentive to Alun Jaladri. We might even imagine that some kind of good fortune may befall us just from reading the poetic account of this music, even though we are living more than two centuries later and are probably not intentionally journeying on a mystical Sufi path toward Mystery.

Notes

1. 1.  R. M. Ng. Dr. Poerbatjaraka, Pandji-Verhalen Onderling Vergeleken (Bandoeng: A. C. Nix en Co, 1940), 361, note 3.
2. 2.  Translation by Nancy Florida. Here and throughout the translations and discussion that follow, we are enormously grateful to Florida for her queries, suggestions, and corrections. Our warmest thanks also go to Els Bogaerts and Edwin Wieringa for their helpful corrections and suggestions.
3. 3.  C. F. Winter, Sr., ed. T. Roorda, Javaansche zamenspraken. Eerste deel: Zamenspraken over verschillende onderwerpen (Amsterdam: Johannes Müller, 1862), 193.
4. 4.  Theodore G. Th. Pigeaud, Literature of Java. Volume I. Synopsis of Javanese Literature 900–1900 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1967), 227–229.
5. 5.  T. E. Behrend, The Serat Jatiswara: Structure and Change in a Javanese Poem 1600–1930 (PhD dissertation, Australian National University, 1987), 325–26.
6. 6.  T. E. Behrend, “Technical Prolegomena to Any Future Centhini-Critique,” n.d.
7. 7.  The better of only two full-length studies of traditional Javanese poetic meters, called macapat and the performance of macapat poetry in modern Java is Bernard Arps, Tembang in Two Traditions. Performance and Interpretation of Javanese Literature (London: School of Oriental and African Studies, 1992).
8. 8.  Three significant contributions are those by J. Kunst, Music in Java: Its History, Its Theory, and Its Technique, Volume 1 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973); Noriko Ishida, “The Textures of Central Javanese Gamelan Music: Pre-Notation and Its Discontents,” Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 164 (2008): 475–499; and Sumarsam, “Inner Melody in Javanese Gamelan,” in Karawitan: Source Readings in Javanese Gamelan and Vocal Music, ed. Judith Becker and Alan H. Feinstein, volume I (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1984), 249–304.
9. 9.  For earlier studies that quote from and discuss gamĕlan playing in Canto 363 of the Sĕrat Cĕnthini, see Kunst, Music in Java and Sumarsam, Javanese Music and the West (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2013). Other scholars have attempted to capture Javanese culture in one iconic concept or another; see Benedict R. O’G Anderson, “The Idea of Power in Javanese Culture,” in Language and Power: Exploring Political Cultures in Indonesia, ed. Benedict R. O’G Anderson (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 17–77; A. L. Becker, “Text Building, Epistemology, and Aesthetics in Javanese Shadow Theater,” in Beyond Translation: Essays Toward a Modern Philology, ed. A. L. Becker (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 23–70; and Ward Keeler, Javanese Shadow Plays, Javanese Selves (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987).
10. 10.  The sung poetic meter Pocung consists of four lines, 12u, 6a, 8i, 12a, where the numbers designate the required number of syllables per line, followed by the vowels required for the final syllable of each line. Our translation follows Florida in adhering to the syllable counts for Pocung, which helps us stay close to the sentence structure and concision of the Javanese original. It also means that our English translation can be sung to Pocung melodies. We have not attempted to reproduce the play of assonances and alliterations, which are crucial to the meanings of the original.
11. 11.  The character Jayangraga is also known as Jengraga in the poem, especially when poetic meter requires that his name be shortened from four syllables to three.
12. 12.  For more on the mystical Sufi theme of “servant-master” (kawula gusti) in the Sĕrat Cĕnthini and playful parodies of the goal of bringing the two together in a mystical union often involving vivid descriptions of sex see Tony Day, “Stepping on a Wulu: Minor Characters and Narrative Possibilities in the Sĕrat Cĕnthini,” in Storied Island: Explorations in Javanese Literature, ed. Ronit Ricci (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2023), 57–60.
13. 13.  The Javanese text of the Sĕrat Cĕnthini, Canto 363, that we use for this essay, with small changes to spelling, comes from the online version of Kamajaya, ed., Sĕrat Cĕnthini (Suluk Tambangraras), Jilid VI (Yogyakarta: Yayasan Cĕnthini,1988), 124–40, accessible on sastra.org, https://www.sastra.org/kisah-cerita-dan-kronikal/serat-centhini/976-centhini-kamajaya-1985-91-761-jilid-06-pupuh-362-364. All the translations from Javanese are by Day, with interventions by Weiss and suggestions and corrections by Florida. Day claims responsibility for all remaining infelicities and errors.
14. 14.  In the last line of verse 7, dhikir are recitations associated with Sufi forms of worship that repeatedly intone God’s name and attributes. Slawatan are religious songs in Arabic or Javanese, accompanied by one or more frame-drums (tĕrbang).
15. 15.  The word bawa means “voice, sound” but also specifically the solo opening, sung by a male, to a gamĕlan piece. Here and elsewhere in the description of the first sounds heard in the village as it awakens there are allusions to gamĕlan. For a translation and discussion of verses describing a gamĕlan performance held later on in the day in this same episode from the poem see Tony Day, “The Poetry of Minor Characters and Everyday Life in the Sĕrat Cĕnthini,” Wacana: Journal of the Humanities of Indonesia 22 (2021): 707–26.
16. 16.  Subuh is the first of the five obligatory daily prayers in Muslim Java.
17. 17.  The word gĕrandhung, which is preceded by the word ting to indicate that it is an onomatopoeic word about sound, is not found in any of the Javanese dictionaries known to us. In a personal email (May 22, 2023), Edwin Wieringa, Professor of Indonesian Philology and Islamic Studies, University of Cologne, suggests that we translate it by thinking about words like glundhĕng, glendhang, and glondhang that have a similar sound. All of these words mean, according to the online Leksikon at sastra.org, https://www.sastra.org/leksikon, “the thudding sound that a small, hard object makes when thrown into an empty hollow space like a vat, chest, (empty) house or cart.” Based on our experience grinding hard substances with a mortar and pestle, we have decided that “crunch-crunch” is a good translation for gĕrandhung here. Wieringa’s suggestion makes a further important point about the way sound is heard and assigned meaning in Java. Words that sound alike in Javanese usually have similar meanings but are often associated with different events and experiences. Hearing the word gĕrandhung in verse 10 above would have stimulated memories of other, related words and life experiences for the Javanese listener in Surakarta in 1815, as it would today. Even if it is invented, which it probably is, metri causa, because it only appears in this place in the entire online version of the Kamajaya Sĕrat Cĕnthini, or in any of the hundreds of Javanese texts that have been put online at sastra.org, the word gĕrandhung not only fits the 12-syllable requirement of the first line in the Pocung meter, but also has good assonance-alliteration with the words galĕpung and nglĕmbur in the same line, better than any of the other words that sound like it and mean something like “crunch.” In other words, the poet achieves a play on sound and meaning with his invented “crunch” word within the line and encourages the listener to extend that play to other contexts in the listener’s experience. This kind of “synesthesia,” if we can call it that, has a Sufi religious meaning in the Sĕrat Cĕnthini.
18. 18.  Passages and whole stanzas describing singing birds occur regularly in both Old and Modern Javanese poetry. In our translation of verses 12 and 13, we add some descriptive detail to give the reader a sense of the diversity and colorfulness of the tropical birds mentioned, each of which also has its own distinctive song. In the third line of verse 12, cingcinggoling, which has lost a syllable, metri causa, in the Javanese text, is a synonym for sikatan, the black wagtail, but the word sounds onomatopoetic and, grammatically, is here the sound the sikatan are making. Similarly, we render aklikikan as the song of the female night cuckoo, whose mate answers her in the first line of verse 13. The word only appears once in the entire Sĕrat Cĕnthini and cannot be found in the dictionaries. We have added the adjective “dark” to describe the trees (kaywan) from which the kolik is singing to suggest the nocturnal nature of the two cuckoos as well as give the scene a slightly ominous feel. Javanese people believe that when these birds sing, they are warning the listener of the presence of thieves nearby.
19. 19.  In this line the chirping of the birds is sounded by means of the assonance of the “ch” and “k” in the words themselves.
20. 20.  In the last line the bird song is communicated by means of the alliteration of “e,” “a,” and “o” sounds. In the last two lines of verse 13, the kuthilang is a thrush, kedhasih a swallow, bethet a small green parrot, jalak a starling, menco a magpie, and kĕpodhang a golden oriole. The Javanese word that we have translated as “bicker” is imbal, which in gamĕlan terminology refers to the interlocking patterns, a kind of musical “conversation” or friendly “quarrel,” that can be played on two bonang or saron. In the last line the word sauran means literally to “answer one another” or, in the case of sounds coming from all directions, to seem to do so, but the expression saur pĕksi, “answer like birds,” means for a group of people responding to a request by someone in authority to say “yes” in unison. The suggestion is perhaps that the four different species of bird are answering one another politely and, as the first line of the next stanza suggests, agreeing respectfully with those in charge in chirping unison to participate in the activities of the new day, along with the villagers.
21. 21.  In the first line of verse 14, two words have associations with gamĕlan. Umyung, translated as “resound,” can describe the sound of a flock of birds echoing from the forest but also the sonorous resonance of gamĕlan instruments being played together. Barung means to “accompany” but more specifically to make a sound, with the voice or another instrument, at the same time as other gamĕlan instruments are playing.
22. 22.  For more on Sufism in early nineteenth-century Surakarta and the Sufi character of the Sĕrat Cĕnthini, see P. J. Zoetmulder, Pantheism and Monism in Javanese Suluk Literature: Islamic and Indian Mysticism in an Indonesian Setting, ed. and tr. M. C. Ricklefs (Leiden: KITLV Press, 1995); Nancy K. Florida, “Shaṭṭāriyya Sufi Scents in the Literary World of the Surakarta Palace in Nineteenth-Century Java,” in Buddhist and Islamic Orders in Southern Asia, ed. R. Michael Feener and Anne M. Blackburn (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, Amazon Kindle Edition, 2019), 226–70; and Day, “Stepping on a Wulu.”
23. 23.  See Peter Carey, The Power of Prophecy: Prince Dipanagara and the End of an Old Order in Java, 1785–1855 (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2008) on the Dipanagara rebellion and Eric Tagliacozzo, ed., Southeast Asia and the Middle East: Islam, Movement and the Longue Durée (Singapore: NUS Press, 2009) for other Southeast Asian examples of the debate between more conservative and more tolerant forms of Islam in Southeast Asia in the nineteenth century.
24. 24.  Other descriptions include: “[for use] as [an] interlude (sĕsĕlan) when tension is slack (grĕgĕtipun kĕndho); and when [the] atmosphere is leisurely (sasĕkecanipun)” (Arps, Tembang, 423).
25. 25.  Banten is a province in West Java known for its Islamic culture.
26. 26.  The word arum, which is used 408 times in Kamajaya’s edition of the Sĕrat Cĕnthini, is given the primary meaning “fragrant” in the dictionaries of the Leksikon and is used to describe flowers and women in the poem. But it also frequently describes how people speak and how music sounds. This synesthesia of meanings between sight, sound, and smell, which we encounter repeatedly in the passage we are discussing, is very old in Java. P. J. Zoetmulder and S. O. Robson, Old Javanese-English Dictionary, Part II (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1982), 1569 give the meanings of the root word rūm in Old Javanese as “beauty, loveliness, charm, attractiveness, sweetness, gentleness, fragrance.”
27. 27.  As translated in Nancy K. Florida, “Better to Touch the Heart: Performing Sufi Songs (Suluk) in the Sĕrat Cĕnthini,” in Storied Island: Explorations in Javanese Literature, ed. Ronit Ricci (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2023), 66–95.
28. 28.  The third line of this verse consists of four words that relate to playing the gambang or other instruments in the gamĕlan. Gĕtĕr means a loud noise that causes you to shudder but is also the trilling motion made by the fingers playing the rĕbab or while dancing. Glĕbĕg means to make a trilling sound on a gambang with the round, padded ends of the gambang mallets. Kur is short for ĕkur, the clucking sound that hens make. And jawil is to poke someone with your finger. All these words precisely evoke the sound and manner of playing the gambang.
29. 29.  As with Hindustani bols, Javanese drumming or kĕndhangan is taught and learned through spoken syllables. Each hand stroke has a spoken sonic reference that sounds reasonably like the one produced on the drums. Although these sounds can be rendered visually and written parts can be used in teaching, students typically learn using the spoken syllables, and teachers often sing the kĕndhang parts while playing other instruments to remind students where they are in the piece and which patterns and sounds they should be playing. When musicians perform without a drum, as depicted in this line, they often sing the kĕndhang stroke syllables in transitions when the drum would lead the change or when they want to “hear” the drum part. Here Kulawirya joins in with Jayengraga’s gambang playing by speaking the drum syllables, even though he does not yet have a kĕndhang in hand. He receives one in verse 72, after Jayengraga tells people to bring more instruments.
30. 30.  Playing gadhon style refers to the performance of music with the principal, elaborating instruments—rĕbab, gĕnder, gambang, suling—but without the large group of instruments in the saron family, which play the balungan or skeletal (sometimes referred to as “main”) melody of the piece. The term comes from the Javanese verb anggadho, which means eating a meal without eating rice, that is, eating the vegetables, protein, and sambal (hot sauce) only. Whether this means eating the most important parts of the meal (the meat and vegetables) or NOT eating the most important part of the meal (the rice) is open to debate. Nevertheless, the analogy makes a clear comparison between the melody played by the saron family and rice, and the music played by the elaborating instruments as the vegetables, protein, and sambal. In this passage, only the elaborating instruments and a voice are heard. As we argue below, following Sumarsam, “Inner Melody,” this ensemble is all that is required to evoke “the inner melody” of the gĕndhing, the sound that matters most to musicians and that is central to the mystical meaning of the passage.
31. 31.  Man is short for paman, “uncle.”
32. 32.  The musicians named in verses 71–73 appear elsewhere in the poem. The most important of them for the story is Kulawirya, who is Jayengraga’s uncle, the younger brother of his father, and a constant traveling companion in later episodes in the poem.
33. 33.  Kamajaya footnotes this word, which doesn’t exist as spelled, and corrects it to thinthing (also spelled thentheng), which means the sound obtained by striking a key or stroking a rĕbab string to test the accuracy of its pitch.
34. 34.  Gĕndhing Kuwung-Kuwung is today most often performed in laras pelog pathet barang. However, in Raden Tummenggung Warsadiningrat’s “Wédha Pradangga,” tr. Susan Pratt Walton, in Karawitan: Source Readings in Javanese Gamelan and Vocal Music, volume 2, 47, the piece is listed as a gĕndhing rĕbab in pathet manyura. In Javanese modal theory (pathet theory), pathet barang and pathet manyura are comparable in terms of mode hierarchy and some interpretive elements.
35. 35.  The word we have translated as “resonance,” grengek, does not appear in the collection of dictionaries in the Leksikon of sastra.org. The word sounds onomatopoetic, like the sound the string of a rĕbab makes when bowed and may have been made up to convey such a sound. It only appears in this place in the Sĕrat Cĕnthini and nowhere else in the collection of hundreds of Javanese texts found on sastra.org, an assertion we base on a search we made on the sastra.org website using their search function, https://www.sastra.org/telusuri. There are words with similar spellings that come to mind when we hear “grengek” in this context: grĕngĕng, meaning “to make a humming, buzzing, whining” sound or grĕnggĕng, to sound like a buzzing bee.
36. 36.  “Sound unfurled” is our translation for the word amiwil, which is a variant spelling of amiwir, which means to spread its wings (of a bird) or flick the scarf around your waist away from your body (a Javanese dance movement). The Javanese line says literally: “stopped, the trilling (of the wire) spreads its wings/flicks away its scarf.” Bird and dance imagery (we will soon meet references to the latter) are never far from the minds of the poets as they describe musical sound in the Sĕrat Cĕnthini. This line is another good example of the haptic and kinesthetic nature of Javanese sounds.
37. 37.  “Caterpillar grasping” is our translation for ngulĕr keket. This is the only place in the Sĕrat Cĕnthini where this expression occurs. An ulĕr is a generic caterpillar; keket means to clamp onto something. An ulĕr keket, to quote from one of the dictionaries in the Leksikon of sastra.org, is “a very large, green, hairless caterpillar.” Literally, ngulĕr keket means “to behave like an ulĕr keket.” In the next line, which is the first line of verse 76, the word puk is the sound of the rĕbab player’s finger as it pushes quickly and hard against the wire and the neck of the instrument.
38. 38.  Kamajaya amends the word ganggang to nganggang, meaning to lightly touch, brush. An anggang-anggang is a kind of water spider, whose skimming movements across the smooth surface of a pond are imagined here along with those of a skittish fly, to describe, in a vivid way, the touch and movement of the rĕbab musician’s finger as he plays.
39. 39.  “Standard” is our translation of the word pacak, which means a pole stuck into the ground to fix something to the earth or lay claim to the spot, and hence, by extension, a rule or standard of behavior or performance that should be achieved. The listeners here, who feel that the Crĕmasana’s rĕbab playing has achieved exactly the right quality and mood, are the musicians as well as any and all of the implied audience. Throughout the passages we are discussing, the assessment and description of sounds imply standards of excellence as well as precision of metaphoric analogy by which the quality and nature of sound production is evaluated. Florida suggested to us that pacak might refer to the musicians themselves, rather than their playing, and indeed the first line of v. 80 and the second line of v. 82 below support this possibility. We concur that pacak refers to both at the same time, fusing the sound, the manner of playing, and the appearance of the musician in performance together in a single, kinesthetic image.
40. 40.  This refers to the kind of sounds produced by the gĕnder as well as the rapid motion of Gandasana’s hands, which gesture in a furious manner as he plays. The description is of the sounds-as-kinds-of-motion.
41. 41.  In the first line, ngĕnuk-ĕnuk means to form little hills or clumps of cooked rice with a cup and describes the way the gĕnder player’s hands look while he plays. Bĕngkak is a term used for playing the gĕnder or gambang when the hands are spread, playing low and high notes that are wide apart together. Pinjal or kĕpinjal are fleas and ngĕpinjal is to jump around like a flea, but specifically in the context of playing gamĕlan, to jump into off-beat spaces and fill them up with sound.
42. 42.  In the first line of v. 80, the word pacak is used again to define the quality of the playing and/or the elegance of the musician, this time by comparing it/him to the masked-dance character Onĕngan. It is interesting that although here the gĕnder player is male, the instrument was traditionally played by women in shadow-puppet (and perhaps also masked-dance?) performances. Onĕngan is the elegant sister of Panji, the famous hero of a large cycle of stories that were performed as sung poetry or by masked dancers in Central Java, married to the proud Wukirsĕkar, or Gunungsari, to whom the style of Jayengraga’s gambang playing is compared in verse 82 below. Both of these characters had prominent roles in masked dance performances of the Panji epic in Surakarta in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the last line, the alliteration and assonance of “t’s,” “u’s,” and “i’s” imitate the sounds Tunjangkara makes as he tongues and blows into his suling. The dictionaries do not tell us what kind of bird the tilĕpan is, only that it is little; its song may well be imitated by the reiteration of “t’s” and “i’s” in the line, sounds that require the tongue to be pressed forward against the teeth, as does tonguing the suling.
43. 43.  The last two words of the verse, aliyu-liyu, imitate the four-note flourish the suling makes at the very end of a cadence.
44. 44.  “Thokkingly” is our own invented sound-word to translate Javanese glĕbĕg, which is used only here and in verse 69 above in the entire Sĕrat Cĕnthini. For a discussion of how the sound “gĕblĕg,” which is onomatopoetic, is made on the gambang, see note 29 above.
45. 45.  The Suluk or Pathĕtan Manyura Ngĕlik is the song, accompanied by gĕnder, that a Central Javanese puppeteer sings at the conclusion of gĕndhing played for certain scenes in the Pathĕt Manyura, or third and final section of a shadow-puppet play in the early hours of the morning before dawn. Probohardjono (see Radèn Ngabèhi Samsudjin Probohardjono, “Serat Sulukan Sléndro,” tr. Susan Pratt Walton, in Karawitan, volume I, 476-77, 489, and Warsadiningrat, “Wèdha Pradangga,” 90), say that Pathĕt Manyura Ngĕlik was composed by Pakukubuwana IV (1768–1820), the ruler of Surakarta at the time when this version of the Sĕrat Cĕnthini was created.
46. 46.  “Sweeps away” in the first line of v. 83 is our translation for nganyut-anyut, which refers specifically to the enrapturing effect of musical sounds on a listener and is constantly used in the Sĕrat Cĕnthini to describe the effect of gamĕlan music on an audience. The same expression is used above in v. 7. In the first line of v. 83, Widiguna’s Suluk Manyura Ngĕlik calls attention to the approaching end of the pathĕtan, but gamĕlan music and singing can also serve as a protective lullaby that allows the listener to doze off, protecting her from harm. Florida once told us that there used to be a special group of soldiers who sang all night from poetic texts as they guarded the palace of the ruler of Surakarta. This practice was probably a variant of the nighttime performance of a poem in Dhandhanggula meter, the Kidung Rumĕksa ing Wĕngi (Song Guarding the Night), which can still be heard at night in Central Java to protect listeners and sleepers from a wide variety of evils. Bernard Arps, “The Song Guarding at Night,” in Towards an Anthropology of Prayer: Javanese Ethnolinguistic Studies/Vers une anthropologie de la prière: études ethnolinguistiques javanaises, ed. Stephen C. Headley (Marseille: Publications de l’Université de Provence, 1996), 47–113.
     A marvelous visual depiction of the soothingly sleep-inducing and protective effect of singing macapat poetry to an audience at night is the illustration in Figure 6.1, from folio page 96r of British Library MSS Jav89., a late eighteenth-century manuscript of the Damar Wulan romance written in macapat poetry. The drawing shows four guards in the evil Menak Jingga’s palace after night has fallen, three of them asleep or listening drowsily, eyes shut, heads resting on arms, in different locations and postures, while the fourth reads from a text on which is written: mamaca damar wulan (reading Damar Wulan). The whole picture is an ironic allusion to the fact that the hero, Damar Wulan, will later kill the evil Menak Jingga and so win the hand of the Queen of Majapahit. To see this illustration in context, as well as feast your eyes on the rest of the wonderful drawings made for this manuscript, including depictions of gamĕlan playing and accompanying dancing, go to http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/FullDisplay.aspx?ref=MSS_Jav_89.
47. 47.  Sarayuda is mentioned ten times in the Sĕrat Cĕnthini, eight of which appear at moments of music-making. The word is described by Becker and Feinstein (see Becker and Feinstein, eds., Karawitan, volume III, 27) as designating “the end [last note] of a pathĕtan accompanied by kĕndhang and gong or kempul and (sometimes other colotomic instruments).” In such moments in the Sĕrat Cĕnthini, only the kĕndhang and gong are mentioned.
48. 48.  In the third line of verse 85, the word rĕbut, “seize” is a key concept for a certain kind of Javanese behavior during ritual events in which unruly crowds grab food and offerings that have been ritually sanctified in order to capture and possess the blessings that now inhere within them. This practice is associated with Sufi beliefs in Java. See John Pemberton, On the Subject of “Java” (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 257 and Tony Day, “Stepping on a Wulu: Minor Characters and Narrative Possibilities in the Sĕrat Cĕnthini,” in Storied Island: Explorations in Javanese Literature, ed. Ronit Ricci (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2023), 51, fn. 30. Later in the canto, in verse 114, when the musicians are playing the gĕndhing Gambir Sawit, they again rĕbut ngĕs kĕsaman, “seize joy in the sameness” of the beauty of their interwoven playing, and then they all become birai, “besotted,” with what they are playing and hearing, a feeling of ecstasy that brings them closer to God, if they are playing with a religious intention (niyat) in mind. Here and elsewhere in the Sĕrat Cĕnthini playing music together can be an exercise in Sufi worship.
49. 49.  The word niba, “fall,” refers to the transition from the first section of a gĕndhing or merong to the second section or inggah.
50. 50.  This line is difficult to translate. We think that it describes the way drumming patterns change when “falling” from one section of a gĕndhing to the next. This kind of transition is characterized by an increase in subdivisions of the beat. This increase calls for the drummer to play different kinds of sound, some of which are low, like bĕm sounds, and some of which are higher and faster moving. The word nĕlampet refers to folding or doubling and kĕmpyang, while usually referring to an instrument, also refers to the smaller, higher-sounding side of the kĕndhang opposite to the one on which the lower bĕm sounds are played (Javanese drums are usually two-headed).
51. 51.  See note 41 above. Here Pathĕt Ngĕlik refers to an arhythmic, coda-like piece performed after, and in the same mode of, a gĕndhing. Ngĕlik refers to a version of the piece beginning in a higher register of the mode.
52. 52.  See note 23 above. Jayengraga or Jengraga’s name can also mean “triumphant in love”; raga can mean “body, physical appearance, love.” Jayengraga is not only gorgeous to look at and devoted to sexual conquests of both women and men, he loves food, fine clothes, playing music, and singing. Whenever he sings, even when he is intoning religious texts or reciting the Quran in the mosque, his performance is enthralling.
53. 53.  Steven Feld, “Aesthetics as Iconicity of Style, or ‘Lift-up-over Sounding’: Getting into the Kaluli Groove,” Yearbook for Traditional Music 20 (1988): 82, italics in the original.
54. 54.  Sumarsam, “Inner Melody,” 303.
55. 55.  Passage quoted in Leonard Lewison, “The Sacred Music of Islam: Samāʿ in the Persian Sufi Tradition,” British Journal of Ethnomusicology 6 (1997): 1, from Book XVIII, “Responses Proper to Listening to Music and the Experience of Ecstasy” of the Iḥyāʾ ʿulūm al-dīn (The revival of the religious sciences) by the famous twelfth-century Sufi scholar Abū Ḥāmidal-Ghazālī (1058–1111). The importance of al-Ghazālī’s writings and ideas for understanding Javanese Islam, particularly in the literary world of early nineteenth-century Surakarta, where the influence of Shaṭṭārī thinking was very strong, is suggested by the fact that his Iḥyāʾ is mentioned in the Sĕrat Cĕnthini. See Tony Day and Nancy K. Florida, “A Sufi Traveler on the Road in Nineteenth-Century Java,” Philological Encounters 9 (2024): 60–95 for a discussion of another episode in the poem where Ghazālī’s ideas from the Iḥyāʾ (in this case, from a chapter about conduct during travel) seem to have been on the minds of the Cĕnthini poets.
56. 56.  We take this terse, definitional phrase for samāʿ from J. During and R. Sellheim, “Samāʿ,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition, ed. P. Bearman, T. Bianquis, C. E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel, W. P. Heinrichs. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/1573–3912_islam_COM_0992.
57. 57.  Lewison, “The Sacred Music,” 2–3.
58. 58.  For an English translation of Ghazālī’s Book XVIII, see Duncan B. MacDonald, “Emotional Religion in Islam as Affected by Music and Singing,” The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland Apr. (1901): 195–252; Oct. (1901): 705–48; Jan. (1902): 1–28.
59. 59.  Navid Kermani, God Is Beautiful: The Aesthetic Experience of the Quran (Cambridge: Polity Books, 2018), 321. Kermani’s chapter 6, “The Sufi Listeners,” 293–345, especially the section, “The Pleasure of Listening,” 320–345, is the most relevant to our essay.
60. 60.  Ibid., 323.
61. 61.  Ibid., 325.
62. 62.  Ibid., 326.
63. 63.  Ibid., 327.
64. 64.  Ibid., 331–332.
65. 65.  Kamajaya, Sĕrat Cĕnthini, Jilid IX, 1990, 277–78, 281.
66. 66.  Jaap Kunst translates all of Wiracapa’s comments following the performance of Gambir Sawit, Canto 595, v. 41–49, in which the village sage criticizes musicians for their godless infatuation with music. Kunst, Music in Java, 267–68.
67. 67.  We discuss Canto 596, v. 1–38, paraphrasing and making use of short quotations from the poem as we do so. Kunst translates v. 28–32 in full (Kunst, Music in Java, 268–69), and Judith Becker quotes and slightly revises Kunst’s translations of these lines in her analysis of this passage (Judith Becker, Gamelan Stories: Tantrism, Islam, and Aesthetics in Central Java [Tempe: Arizona State University Press, 2004], 106–8). Becker is the only previous scholar to have suggested a connection between Wiracapa’s critique of musicians and the Sufi idea of samāʿ.
68. 68.  Wiracapa says: “The yatmaka is the ukĕl of the gĕndhing” (Canto 596, v. 6). The basic meaning of ukĕl is “tendril-shaped coil.” It is widely used in descriptions of hand-movements in dance and terms for variation in musical ornamentation. The hands of the legendary female gĕnder musician, Nyai Jlamprang, when playing close together, were said to resemble those of a dancer making the ukĕl pakis (curled fern-tendril) movement with her hands (for this comparison and the legend of Nyai Jlamprang, see Warsadiningrat, “Wédha Pradongga,” 115–18).
69. 69.  The dictionaries explain that Widayaka is another name for Aji Saka, the legendary bringer of culture and literacy to Java. Another meaning given for “widayaka” is pujangga, “poet.”
70. 70.  Canto 596, v. 21 (Kamajaya, Sĕrat Cĕnthini, Jilid IX, 1990, 280).
71. 71.  Compare Kunst’s translation of this verse 29 in Kunst, Music in Java, 268. We are indebted to Kunst for helping us arrive at our own understanding of the verse.
72. 72.  Passage from Ghazālī’s Iḥyāʾ, Book XVIII, quoted in Lewison, “The Sacred Music,” 17. The translation “heart-savour” for dhawq, one of Ghazālī’s most important philosophical and aesthetic concepts, is Lewison’s. Eric Ormsby defines dhawq as “to experience directly, without mediation. It is the confluence of perception and action. . . . In his Sufi writings, Ghazali uses ‘taste’ as a coded metaphor for experience. The deepest truth is perceptible only through experience; truth must be tasted to be known.” Eric Ormsby, Ghazali (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2007), 105. Wiracapa uses the Javanese word rasa in a way that reminds us of Ghazālī’s dhawq. As the Sĕrat Cĕnthini, and Sumarsam, in the passage below, describe it, feeling the “soul” of a gĕndhing is a practice, something Javanese make happen and experience when they play music together. See Florida’s discussion of rasa as direct experience when the word is used in another passage in the Cĕnthini where musical performance enables “the presencing of God” in Florida, “Better to Touch,” 76.
73. 73.  Sumarsam’s stress on the primacy of the human voice in his concept of melody and melodic motion in gamĕlan is also noteworthy in the context of our discussion (Sumarsam, “Inner Melody,” 262). He says: “If inner melody is the essence of gendhing, based on the inner feeling of the musicians, we may say that the range of the gendhing is actually comparable to the range of the musicians’ voices” (263). Commenting on the rĕbab, the most voice-like of gamĕlan instruments, Sumarsam writes: “Some gamĕlan teachers believe the rebab presents the ‘soul’ of the gendhing, and they call it the pamurba yatmaka (‘that which has authority in presenting the soul’),” 264. Recall that it is the yatmaka of the gĕndhing that the traveling musicians in the Sĕrat Cĕnthini are said to seize at a certain moment in each of their consummate ensemble performances. Note also the similarity of the “inner feeling” that, according to Sumarsam, Javanese musicians activate to listen for the yatmaka of a gĕndhing when they are playing it, and the “heart-savouring” mode of mystical listening to music described by Ghazālī.
74. 74.  Kermani, God Is Beautiful, 334, quotes from Nietzsche, Adorno, and Schopenhauer to suggest that these German philosophers, particularly Schopenhauer, like the Sufis, thought of music not as a representation but as the “authentic medium” of the Absolute (Ibid., 339–41).
75. 75.  Ibid., 344.
76. 76.  Lewison writes that Ghazālī “enumerates seven reasons why listening to poetry is more conducive to rapture than hearing the cantillation of the Koran” (Lewison, “The Sacred Music,” 19).
77. 77.  Florida, “Better to Touch,” 91–92. As an alternative translation for line 6 in the first stanza in the Asmarandana meter above, Florida gives: “through the meaning, the Mystery of suluk alone.” In her Glossary to Ronit Ricci, ed., Storied Island: New Explorations in Javanese Literature (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2023), 287, Ricci defines the word suluk as: “Sufi discipline; name of a genre of ‘classical’ Javanese poetry (Sufi songs) composed in macapat verse; related to Arabic sulūk or ‘pathway’ in Sufism.” We have italicized the words rasa and suluk in our quotation of Florida’s translation.
78. 78.  Kamajaya, Sĕrat Cĕnthini, Jilid VI, 124–42.
79. 79.  Ibid., 137–40.
80. 80.  Ibid., 142. See Tony Day, “The Poetry of Minor Characters and Everyday Life in the Sĕrat Cĕnthini,” Wacana: Journal of the Humanities of Indonesia 22 (2021): 707–726 for further discussion of this verse and the episode at the beginning of Canto 364 in which it appears, especially at 724. The translation of the seventh line published in that article has been revised here following the suggestion by Florida that a better reading for the word anglola is anglela, which appears in this place in the edition of the poem published in 1912. Serat Tjenthini, Serat Tjenthini, Babon Asli Saking Kitha Leiden ing Nagari Nederland, Djilid I-II (Betawi: Ruygrok, 1912), 252, meaning “audible, note by note.”
81. 81.  The word brangti, which we translate as “lovestruck,” can also mean “passionately longing” for God. It is a very old word in Javanese associated with wandering, mystical poets as described in Old Javanese poetry. For a discussion of the poet in ancient Java and the “cosmic unity” of his world, see P. J. Zoetmulder, Kalangwan: A Survey of Old Javanese Literature (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974), 126–214.
82. 82.  Just as the pre-Islamic sound of the gamĕlan ensured the safety of the world in which it was sounded and heard, the reading/singing of the poem has a similar effect on the worlds in which we listen to it. The singing of the poetic episode we have been examining, apart from its potential for inducing mystical states of mind, actualizes and activates the all-encompassing feeling of well-being described in the fictional world of the passage, so that it is transported, via the ears of our hearts, to us as we listen, encouraging us to bring that feeling to bear on our own worlds and lives.
83. 83.  The phrase is quoted in Day and Florida, “A Sufi Traveler,” 77, in their discussion of the attention that the poets of the Sĕrat Cĕnthini pay to minute details of sight and sound, a reflection, they argue, of Ghazālī’s belief that even the tiniest, flea-like detail of the physical and living world, all the “specks in the heavens and the earth,” bear witness to their “Creator’s glory” (79–80). Such an attention to nature in all its particularities can be found in Old Javanese poetry as well; it doesn’t commence with the coming of Islam to Java or the acquaintance of early nineteenth-century Surakarta poets with the ideas of Ghazālī.