Narratives of globalization are often about coping with inevitable and massive economic, technocultural, and societal change. Similarly, studies of music and globalization tend to be theoretically oriented and focus on large-scale transformation (media, industry, nation, etc.) rather than on local and individual innovation and ingenuity. This essay is a close to the ground ethnography of musicians (two, in particular) from the city of Jogjakarta, Indonesia and how they participate in and contribute to the larger globalized network of composers, artists, activists, intellectuals, and contemporary music lovers. It interrogates the concept of “world” music as well as the relation between the “local” and the “global.”

Venzha describes his work in numerous ways, from sound art and sound installation, to industrial ambient music, experimental electronic noise, and new media art. But Venzha, like so many Javanese artists, is also a passionate community activist. Indeed, he probably would be hard put to separate his creative work from his community work. For him, these two activities are inextricably intertwined. In 1999, he established an arts collective and new media art laboratory called the House of Natural Fiber (HONF). The reference to “natural fiber” underscores his concern for environmental issues. On the HONF website,17 he describes the organization as follows: “Since the beginning, the house of natural fiber has consistently focused on cultural development and New Media art, running numerous New Media art projects and workshops. In every project we
concentrate on interactivity with people and environments.”

My other composer-friend, known familiarly as Sapto, was an avid proponent of and composer for the Javanese gamelan (see Figures 4 and 5). Sadly, he died in 2009 at the relatively young age of 54. He was particularly interesting to me because he also had little formal training in music yet, until his untimely death, he was a major figure in the contemporary music scene of Jogja. He did play some of the instruments of the gamelan but his skills were limited to what he picked up as a grade school student of traditional Javanese dance. Born in 1955, Sapto had been an active performer as a dancer in the late 1960s. In 1972, after going on to high school, he stopped studying traditional dance, taught himself guitar, and played in folk and rock groups. In 1973 he also began to experiment with homemade instruments as well as create his own musical compositions. In 1975, Sapto turned his musical interests toward recording technology, learning audio mixing and editing through trial and error (using only two cassette decks—tape to tape, one as playback and the other as recorder—without an audio mixer). In 1986, he began to work with synthesizers, long before anyone else in Indonesia. Interestingly, his first composition using synthesized sound also involved the gamelan, a large work titled “Gamelan Meets Synthesizer Art Rock.” Since then, he focused his creative interests on gamelan related music. In addition to composing for dance, theater, and television, since 1989 Sapto had been a radio programmer and announcer at Geronimo FM, Jogjakarta. Finally, Sapto had been a community and arts activist since 1995. He was the principal organizer of the annual Jogjakarta Gamelan Festival (starting in 1995) and coordinator of Gayam16 (an educational community center, founded in 1999, that focuses on the performing arts, particularly gamelan and gamelan-related arts), honorary ambassador of Jogjakarta, and media arts and music lecturer/ teacher (as well as visiting artist) at institutions in countries throughout the world, including Australia, France, Holland, Japan, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and the US.