These historic recordings were made in 1928 as part of a collection of the first and only commercially–released recordings of music made in Bali prior to World War II. This diverse sampling of new and older Balinese styles appeared on 78 rpm discs in 1929 with subsequent releases for international distribution. The records were sold worldwide (or not sold, as it happened) and quickly went out of print. It was a crucial time in the island’s musical history as Bali was in the midst of an artistic revolution with kebyar as the new dominant style of music. Gamelan groups were having their older ceremonial orchestras melted down and reforged in the new style. Intense competition between villages and regions stimulated young composers to develop impressive innovations and techniques. Andrew Toth has written of these landmark recordings:

Representatives from these companies [Odeon & Beka] were sent in August of 1928 to extend their coverage to Bali. Five of the ninety–eight existing matrices (sides) made at that time were included by the well–known scholar Erich M. von Hornbostel in an early anthology of non–Western traditions, Music of the Orient; this collection was the first exposure to Indonesian music for many people, the public as well as potential ethnomusicologists.

A third of the Odeon/Beka recordings appeared in Europe and America, but the majority had been intended originally for local sale in Bali. For this reason the information on the labels was printed in Malay, the lingua franca of the archipelago, and in some cases even in Balinese script. The ambitious plan to develop an indigenous market was a complete failure, however, since few Balinese were interested in this new and expensive technology–especially when there was a world of live performances happening daily in the thousands of temples and households throughout the island. McPhee was the only customer to purchase these 78 rpm discs in an entire year from one frustrated dealer; his collection contains most of the copies that are still preserved to this day, for the agent later smashed the remaining stock in a fit of rage (McPhee 1946:72).

Fortunately the recordings were made under the guidance of Walter Spies, the painter, musician and long–time resident whose intimate knowledge of Balinese culture was so freely given and so often benefited the work of others (Rhodius 1964:265; Kunst 1974:24). Although limited by the medium to being three–minute excerpts, they consequently are remarkable examples of a broad range of musical genres—vocal as well as instrumental—and many outstanding composers, performers and ensembles of the period who are now famous teachers of legendary clubs—I Wayan Lotring, I Nyoman Kaler, and the gamelan gong of Pangkung, Belaluan, and Busungbiu. These invaluable sound documents of the musical and family heritage of the Balinese include styles of vocal chant rarely heard today; Kebyar Ding, a historically important composition that has been relearned from the recordings by the present generation of musicians, whose fathers and grandfathers made the original discs; and records of renowned singers that are considered even sacred by their descendants, who keep tape copies in the family shrine. No new material was released in the West during the ensuing depression and war, while only reprints of the old 78’s were issued on different labels and in several anthologies.2

Much has come to light in the way of discs and information since Toth’s account. During the 1980s and 1990s Philip Yampolsky was able to locate 101 matrices (sides of the 78 rpm discs) at various archives in Indonesia, the U.S. and Holland. Yampolsky shared this information with Arbiter and myself, facilitating our worldwide effort to access and reissue each and every 78 disc. The process of gaining permission from each archive and visiting most of the collections has taken us eight years. While seeking out private collections we found another Odeon disc from the original set, unlisted by both Toth and Yampolsky, on an auction list from a rural Texas town. And a search through the shelves of the UCLA collection yielded an unpublished disc listed by Toth. This brings our collection to 104 sides of three minutes each to be released on five CDs. Although it seems clear, judging from a 1932 Beka catalogue, that Odeon and Beka recorded a considerable amount of music in addition to these, a decision may have been made not to publish any more once they realized the lack of a market. The recording masters were aluminum plates, most likely stored at the Carl Lindstrom factory in Berlin (the parent company), which was bombed during World War II. According to McPhee many were destroyed “during the Hitler regime,” possibly melted down for the war effort. However, another perspective precedes the war. In 1937 Béla Bartók wrote:

“It is well known that these companies are also busy recording the folk music of exotic countries; these records are bought by the natives, hence the expected profit is there. However, as soon as sales diminish for any reasons, the companies withdraw the records from circulation and the matrices are most likely melted down. This happened with one of the highly valuable Javanese record series of Odeon, as quoted in the bibliography of Musique et chansons populaires of the League of Nations. If matrices of this kind actually are destroyed, it represents vandalism of such nature that the different countries ought to enact laws to prevent it, just as there are laws in certain countries prohibiting destruction or marring of historic monuments.”3

Eighty years after the recording sessions, as we acquired the records and transferred them to CD, our research team visited the oldest knowledgeable artists—many in their 80s or 90s and one at the age of 100—in villages whose musicians and singers were recorded in 1928—and often the children of those artists, now in their 70s. We would bring a boombox and play a CD of music that no one had heard for eighty years. While some of the repertoire has endured, much of the style and aesthetic has changed and many compositions have been forgotten. Some families would give us photographs of the artists of 1928. Another photo, acquired at the New York Public Library, led to our discovery of one of the two living artists known to have participated in the 1928 sessions. Our team visited this ninety–one year–old woman, Mémén Redia (formerly Ni Wayan Pempen), who was a solo singer at the age of ten or eleven for Kedaton’s jangér group (CD#5). Mémén Redia described the recording session in detail and still remembered all the lyrics, correcting our earlier transcriptions. She recalled the recording taking place in the open air, on the ground and under a tataring ‘temporary structure of bamboo’ and kelangsah ‘woven coconut leaves’ near the village center. She suggested that some of the other recording sessions might have been at a balé banjar ‘central hamlet building’ open on three sides with

brick or mud wall and floor, and a roof of woven coconut leaves or thatch with bamboo and coconut wood beams. According to the Beka Record Company catalogue of 1932 all of their recordings were made in Denpasar, Bali except for two made in Lombok, but we think it somewhat unlikely the recording expedition went all the way to Lombok to record twelve minutes of music. Many older–generation Balinese we visited refer to the old records and record players collectively as orgel rather than the Indonesian piringan hitam ‘black plates’, perhaps because the record players might have been thought of as related to Dutch orgel pipe organs, being a machine that produces music.

Among the discs on this volume are several that the young Canadian composer Colin McPhee (1900–1964) heard in New York when Claire Holt brought them back from Bali in 1930.4 On listening to the 1928 Odeon recordings, McPhee and his wife, anthropologist Jane Belo, were inspired to embark on a visit to Bali the next winter which grew into a research expedition to consume them for almost eight years and lead to his major work of scholarship, Music in Bali and her work with Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson as well as her own books including Trance in Bali.

After four years in Bali, McPhee wrote an article, “The Absolute Music of Bali,” for the journal Modern Music, positing: “what inspires the musician with wonder and envy, is the satisfactory raison d’etre of music in the community. The musicians are an integral part of the social group, fitting in among ironsmiths and goldsmiths, architects and scribes, dancers and actors, as constituents of each village complex. Modest and unassuming, they nevertheless take great pride in their art, an art which, however, is so impersonal that the composer himself has lost his identity.”5

While McPhee’s ideal of Balinese music was “impersonal,” with compositions unattributed to specific composers, this became less the case in the course of the 20th century. Even in the early 1930s, McPhee quotes the composer I Wayan Lotring: “Ké–wah! It is hard to compose! Sometimes I cannot sleep for nights, thinking of a new piece. It turns round and round in my thoughts. I hear it in my dreams. My hair has grown thin thinking of music.”6

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