Zheng Xiaoying (1929–), the first female conductor in China, has been a staunch advocate for yangxizhongchang—chanting Western works in Chinese—since the 1980s, when she was the chief conductor of the China National Opera. In 1981, she worked with French director Rene Terrasson, conductor Jean Périsson, and soprano Jacqueline Brumaire on rehearsing for the Mandarin rendition of Georges Bizet’s Carmen. This experience led Zheng to take on the task of re-translating Gustav Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth) since 1985, a cultural history that has yet been understood not only in the Anglo-American academy, but also in the Chinese scholarly community.

This paper draws on the author’s interview with Zheng in January 2024 in Xiamen, China, and the study of Zheng’s personal notes, study scores, and translations on which Zheng based her work, to reconstruct such a history. This reconstruction re-presents Zheng’s own narrative of the history and is pitched against the author’s post/de-colonial reading thereof (Nagar 2019; Apter 2006). The objectives of this investigation are twofold: first, to showcase that a critical examination of this history enables us to perceive Das Lied through a non-Western linguistic and cognitive framework that significantly impacts the relationship between music and text (Bhabha 2016); and second, to emphasize the importance of resisting the enchantment of transnationality and interculturality that translation often entails, and instead recognizing the performative sovereignty that layers of translation confess through music. As Zheng repeatedly emphasized: “Music is for the people.”

This presentation analyzes the complex, distributed creativity behind the composition of a new string quartet work, entitled Segara Gunung, by the female Javanese composer Peni Candra Rini. Commissioned in 2023 by Carnegie Hall and the Kronos Quartet, production of the thirty-minute suite entailed substantial international collaboration between Rini, her team of gamelan musicians, Kronos, and two American arrangers. Rini will join the presentation virtually from Java to comment upon the analysis and respond to questions following the presentation. The nature of the work and the processes through which it emerged trouble conventional Western models of composition, authorial voice, and intellectual property. Responding to her American collaborators’ handwringing over the expectation to represent a singular authorial voice in programs, concerts, and recordings, Rini responded: “that’s your hang-up, not mine. This is always how we compose in Java.” Rini is one of Java’s leading gamelan vocalists (pesindhen) and faculty at the Indonesian Institute of Fine Arts. Traditional gamelan compositions are collaboratively realized through improvisation on elaborating instruments. Improvisation and collaboration are also important in neotraditional and experimental composition, in which a work’s putative—or named—composer is typically the primary voice of a collective expression. The concept of the composer as a singular expressive voice with absolute control over the “work,” over which the composer enjoys property rights, is essentially alien to Javanese gamelan composers. This perspective may explain why Rini approached the intercultural misunderstandings, mishearings, and aesthetic clashes that emerged in the creation of Segara Gunung as ultimately enriching the work.

Contemporary, non-traditional composition for gamelan has been a common practice since the Pekan Komponis festival was first held in Jakarta in 1979. Since that time, gamelan kontemporer has crystalized into a relatively stable genre, the theory and practice of which was even added to the Universitas Pendidikan Indonesia curriculum with a first-of its-kind course in 2022. This paper theorizes gamelan kontemporer as a medium for the co-production of culture, exemplifying the “awkward, unequal, unstable, and creative interconnection across difference” which constitutes Tsing’s concept of “friction” (2004). While substantial scholarship has already been done on experimental music in the context of Balinese gamelan (McGraw 2013; 2014), this paper makes a case study of the recent 40^th-anniversary project undertaken by Toronto’s Evergreen Club Contemporary Gamelan to broaden the gamelan kontemporer scope to include Sundanese instruments. Drawing on ethnographic interviews with Canadian and Indonesian participants in the November 2023 project, the co-authors demonstrate how gamelan kontemporer functions as a kind of “common-denominator” for intercultural creativity, the music diplomacy of gamelan kontemporer challenges notions of hybridity.