1. Among his many biographies, the most definitive is that by Charles Edward Wurtzburg, whose work was edited posthumously for publication by Clifford Witting: Raffles of the Eastern Isles (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1954). A romanticized view is Life of Sir Stamford Raffles by Demetrius Charles de Kavanagh Boulger London, 1897, newly edited with an introduction by Adrian Johnson (London: C. Knight, 1973). The most skeptical view can be found in Thomas Stamford Raffles, 1781-1826: Schemer or Reformer? by Syed Hussein Alatas (Singapore: Angus and Robertson, 1971).
2. See The Raffles Gamelan: A Historical Note, ed. by William Fagg, with a biographical note by Douglas Barrett (London: British Museum, 1970).
3. See Jeune Scott-Kemball, Javanese Shadow Puppets: The Raffles Collection in the British Museum (London: British Museum, 1970).
4. Antique Collector 42 (April-May 1971): 56.
5. A very generous Mellon/Lamb Curatorial Sabbatical Grant from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, supported this research. I am deeply grateful to Sir Ralph and Lady Verney for welcoming me to their ancestral home and allowing unlimited access to their instruments. Many thanks are also due to Tony Bingham, who greatly facilitated my project with introductions and excellent preliminary photography. Finally, I am very thankful for the assistance and kindness given to me by Mr. and Mrs. Michael Sandford, Keepers of Claydon House, a property of the National Trust.
6. For searching out these documents, I am greatly indebted to Mrs. S. R. Ranson, Archivist of the Verney Archives; this archive is in the possession of the Claydon House Trust, located at Claydon House.
7. Aside from being the son of Raffles's sister, Mary Ann, William Charles Raffles Flint was married to Jenny Rosdew Mudge -- the daughter of Raffles's youngest sister, Alice Hull -- who inherited the bulk of Lady Raffles's estate in 1858. Flint effectively became the arbiter of the distribution of Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles's collections.
8. Determining a proper name for this instrument is not easily accomplished. The lowest sounding of the seven seven-keyed instruments has the appearance of a typical saron demung but it is in the same octave as the lowest portion of the gendèr barung -- a range normally associated with the slenthem and the slentho. The modern slenthem has keys suspended by cord over tuned resonating tubes. Slenthem keys usually have two longitudinal ridges which divide the width of the keys into thirds, like gendèr keys. The slentho is considered archaic today, and all of the slentho with which I am familiar have keys which rest on a saron-like support. Slentho keys lack ridges and are characterized by a prominently raised boss in the center, similar to the keys of a gong kemodhong. The Claydon House gamelan and the British Museum gamelan each have an instrument whose support looks like a saron but whose keys lack either the longitudinal ridges or the raised boss. If this were a newly developed instrument, one might consider it to be a hybrid, but since this type is unknown today, I refer to it here as a saron slenthem.
9. Lady Verney (Frances Parthenope Verney) was the older sister of Florence Nightingale, a long-term and illustrious resident of Claydon House.
10. Claydon House, Buckinghamshire, published by the National Trust (revised 1984; reprinted 1992); 21.
11. Several of these motifs can be found on other Javanese instruments and other utilitarian articles. It is difficult to know if the designs were influenced by European aesthetics or if they pre-dated Dutch colonialism.
12. I am grateful to John Koster for having made this determination through microscopic analysis of a small chip removed from one of the saron resonator cavities.
13. Among gamelan makers and musicians it is well known that the pitch of bronze keys and gongs tends to rise at a decreasing rate during the first several decades following their manufacture. Thus, it is considered normal that a gamelan will require tuning (by filing away material and/or by hammering) in its first year, fifth year, fifteenth year, and thirtieth year. It is said that after approximately thirty years, the resulting "seasoned" bronze is no longer subject to change in pitch. While I do not question this oral tradition, I am unaware of any long-term study which provides a detailed analysis of this phenomenon.
14. In a modern pélog (heptatonic tuning system) gamelan there would normally be two gendèr barung. One, the Bem gendèr, would include the nada (the Javanese term for the concept of note name) 1, 2, 3, 5, and 6, while the other, the Barang gendèr, would include the nada 2, 3, 5, 6, and 7. In both cases, the fourth degree of the tuning system is omitted. Depending on the mode of the composition being played in either case, only five of the seven nada of the pélog tuning system are used. This pentatonic arrangement of the pélog tuning system allows for the necessary transposition of melodic material to and from the pentatonic sléndro tuning system, the other ubiquitous tuning system in Java.
15. While a discussion of the subjective nature of diatonic intonation perception is well beyond the scope of this article, it can be quantified to a certain extent. In his book, The Structure of Recognizable Diatonic Tunings (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), composer and microtonal theorist, Easley Blackwood, provides mathematically derived parameters for what he calls the "range of recognizability" (p 199). He posits that, according to his experience, recognizable diatonic scales can be constructed based on the perfect fifth interval ranging between 689 and 715 cents (and all other intervals being adjusted accordingly). In the one of the graphs of this article Blackwood's numerical values for a recognizably diatonic tone row based on the smallest possible perfect fifth are graphed along with those of the more widely known 5-Limit Just Temperament to facilitate comparison of the Claydon House gamelan tuning with these diatonic tunings. Also included in this graph for comparison is an expression of what Jaap Kunst refers to as a "Normalized Pélog," i.e., an averaged "standard" pélog tuning. Viewed altogether, it is apparent that the Claydon House gamelan is much more to similar to diatonic tuning than it is to laras pélog.
16. Quarterly Journal of Science, Literature, and Art, 25 (Jan. to June, 1828): 175-183; see esp. 178-9. I am grateful to John Koster for having brought this important evidence to my attention. Charles Wheatstone (1802-1875) is best remembered for his invention of the English concertina (patented in 1844) and the small mouth organ, known as the Symphonium (patented in 1829). Both instruments employ free reeds as their sounding elements. He was also a scientist with interests in electricity and an acoustician of some standing with broad interests in the physics of music.
17. Frances Baroness Bunsen, A Memoir of Baron Bunsen (London, 1868), I 512; quoted by John Bastin in "Korte Mededelingen: The Raffles Gamelan, Some remarks occasioned by William Fagg (ed.) The Raffles Gamelan: A Historical Note (British Museum, London, 1970)" Bijdragen Tot de Taal-, Land-, en Volkenkunde, Deel 127 (1971): 274-78.
18. The Historic Loan Collection of Musical Instruments at the Inventions Exhibition, 1885. It should be noted that the initial listing of these instruments is quite misleading. For a more accurate analysis of these instruments, see the Appendix to Alexander Ellis's "On the Musical Scales of Various Nations," in The Journal of the Society of Arts (30 October, 1885): 1102-11, esp. pp 1107-8.
19. Nada is used here to facilitate comparison with the tuning charts in figs. 12 and 16.
20. Ellis, op. cit., 1108.
21. Mantle Hood was asked to make this determination so that Mr. Langton, a technician from the British Museum's Department of Ethnography, who was also then engaged by Sir Ralph Verney, could re-peg the instruments. This was part of the process of making the entire gamelan visually more presentable.
22. Determining when and where these replacements were made is impossible. Based on two considerations, I think it likely that the keys had been missing -- and were replaced in England -- three or perhaps four decades before their sale to Sir Harry. The patination of the replacement keys matches that of the original keys today, and I believe the wording of Flint's letter to Sir Harry, "Whatever imperfections Exist are such that have always been known to us," acknowledges the existence of the replacements at the time of transmittal. Secondly, in the same letter Flint states, "...the collection I presented to the British Museum...is far less perfect;" indeed, that gamelan is lacking an even greater percentage of keys and they were never replaced!
23. There has been a persistent rumor that, at some time in the past, the keys of the Raffles gamelan at Claydon House had been intermingled with the keys of the Raffles gamelan at the British Museum. According to files in the British Museum, Langton proposed this theory to Mantle Hood and Klaus Wachsmann when they examined the Claydon House gamelan on September 7, 1962. On the following day, the trio examined the British Museum gamelan which was on exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum. In a letter dated October 5, 1970 from Wachsmann to the British Museum's Keeper of Ethnography, William Fagg, Wachsmann stated that he and Hood were in agreement that there had been no transposition of keys from the two ensembles. Based on my close examination of both sets of keys, I am certain that, with the single exception of the "Outsider key," Hood and Wachsmann were correct in making this determination. The lengths, widths, shapes and weights of the Claydon House keys are completely dissimilar to those attributes of the British Museum keys. Furthermore, there is no correlation whatsoever between the tunings of the two ensembles.
24. See, for example, the zoomorphic gamelan and the Drake miniature gamelan, both at the British Museum, and the photographs of the Sultan's gamelan in Bangkalan, Madura, in Brandt Buys's monumental article, "De Toonkunst bij de Madoereezen" which constitutes nearly the entire 377 page volume of Djawa, 8 (Java Instituut, Soerakarta: 1928). All of these are similar in instrumentation.
25. I know of only one other gamelan comprised of equal-dimensioned massive saron cases; it is from Banjarmasin, a sultanate on the southeastern coast of Kalimantan (formerly Borneo) and is now in the National Museum in Jakarta. It is said that this highly regarded ensemble was already very old when it was removed from Banjarmasin in 1862. It can be heard on the UNESCO recording, Series Musical Sources: Art Music from South-East Asia IX, 2, Java: Historic Gamelans (Philips 6586 004 [197-], the slipcover of which includes some photographs.
26. This may point to a forgotten practice associated with the use of sorogan keys: a single pélog gendèr can be used in either bem or barang modes by exchanging the 7 keys for the 1 keys (or vice versa). In making this switch, all the other keys remain the same, but since the resonating tubes under the sorogan keys are tuned to one of the pitches, the volume of sound is greatly diminished when the "wrong" key is suspended above it. Since the resonating pitch of a tube can be altered by narrowing its aperture, the "butterfly valves" on the Claydon House gendèr may reflect an extraordinary solution to this problem.
27. The tuning of the gambang was not considered since wooden keys are not reliable specimens for pitch measurements because of their hygroscopic nature. During humid seasons the pitch tends to be higher than that in drier climatic conditions.
28. I am very grateful to Dr. Nancy Florida, Dr. Sumarsam, and I. M. Harjito for attempting to discover the meaning of these inscriptions. Of the two hands at work, the former does not appear to mean anything, while the latter may be a chronogram (candrasengkala) and may possibly be interpreted meaningfully at some time in the future.
29. This area of research is still in its infancy. To my knowledge, characteristics of only three generalized types of gongs are currently identified by Javanese academics and organologists. These types, Bondhan, Siyem, and Gunapawiran (oldest to most modern, respectively), are distinguished by the angle and depth of the sidewall and the relative diameters of various parts of the gong. A detailed discussion of gong morphology in Java has yet to be written and is well beyond the scope of the present article.
30. This likely provenance was first put forward by the late Jeune Scott-Kemball in her unpublished manuscript, The Raffles Gamelan now in the files of the British Museum. I am deeply indebted to Dr. Brian Durrans, Deputy Keeper of the Department of Ethnography, for allowing me to study her work and the instruments themselves.
31. See F. De Haan, "Personalia der Periode van het Engelsch Bestuur over Java 1811-1816" in Bijdragen Tot de Taal-, Land-, en Volkenkunde 92 (1935): 477-681, esp. 619; and Pangeran Arya Panular, The British in Java, 1811-1816, A Javanese Account (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 421, n. 111. ed. Peter Carey. I am grateful that Amrit T. Gomperts pointed out the significance of this connection to Peter Carey who included this correction to the record in the footnote cited above.
32. At the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam there is a gongstand (inventory no. 450-2) (fig. 9) which has carved spiral balusters and repetitive beadwork virtually identical to those of the Claydon House gongstand. The crossbar itself is composed of two intertwining Naga (mythical water snake kings) upon which, a web-footed bird is perched -- both iconographical elements not uncommon in Madurese gamelan decoration. According to the Tropenmuseum's records, the gongstand was a gift of Prof. Dr. Jan Veth in 1928 and said to derive from Central Javanese. I am grateful to Ms. J. Boers and Mrs. E. Den Otter for supplying this information.