This project inspired another type of reflection for me. Collaboration implies agreement: No matter how difficult collaborative projects are, there is some level of agreement or shared assumptions around goals and/or process. But in the case of Bali, it points towards a larger category: Those pieces which involve the ideas, material, techniques or designs of two or more composers, even when there’s no contact or agreement at all.

The examples are many. I think of stories from the 1960s, in which gamelan groups were reported to have “stolen” entire compositions from their competitors, as they prepared for mabarung competition. I’ve heard it described how a gamelan group dispatched several spies to the village of their competitors. One focused on the drumming, one focused on the reong, and so on. Later, they reconstructed their competitor’s piece at home – a kind of musical reverse engineering. Then, in the actual gamelan mabarung competition, they played it before their competitors, thereby demoralizing them – and winning the match.

Less spectacularly but more consequentially, it has been common throughout much of the twentieth century (and probably earlier as well) for composers to take material from others, without attribution. I’ve witnessed composers freely lift entire sections from existing pieces, and use them in their “own” composition, so that one-quarter or even more of the resulting work came from elsewhere. Melodies, rhythms, orchestration and formal ideas and more have been freely taken and repurposed by composers and groups. Authorship was simply not the same individually oriented, legal and moral-cultural issue as in the West – with Composers engaged in a Sacred Act to make a Unique Work of Art over which he has complete Dominion. As Gary Watson pointed out in his study of musical “sampling” (borrowing) of melodic material, Shared Intellectual Property and the Maintenance of the Cosmic Order, musical material was often regarded as shared cultural heritage, rather than individual property. He ties this practice to the traditional religious belief system, in which people both feel the obligation to “venerate the common good of a cumulative ancestral heritage,” yet treating it in a way that both preserves and transforms it.

Bali’s musical history has revealed many examples. Often, gamelan leaders and composers were working in nearby villages, using a shared pool of new ideas and techniques that were in the air, exchanged very rapidly. As a result, the authorship of major twentieth century pieces – including Gambang Suling and Hujan Mas (Peliatan), Panji Semirang, Wiranata, Candra Metu, Wiran Jaya, and many others – is now actively debated.

On more underlying levels, it can be argued that musical material is always shared in any musical practice, and is part of what defines a style or genre. In the Balinese case, in genres such as lelambatan and pelegongan, root structures, metric design (e.g. length and dynamic shape of pallet) and characteristic, style-based components (e.g. drumming sequences) – transcend individual actualizations in pieces. Musicians are expected to follow these templates on almost all levels of form and detail, so that the resulting piece is recognizable as belonging to the genre. Change inevitably happens, as composers and players vary things to their liking.