Profile: Henry Spiller, Henry R. Luce Assistant Professor of Asian Music and Culture

The gamelan man

Early in his introductory ethnomusicology course, Henry Spiller likes to jolt students into a new perspective on music by considering a remote village whose insular tribe holds a cacophonous initiation ritual: the Kenyon First-Year Sing.

"If you listen, it's not about the music," laughs Spiller, who observes that the performance can be pretty ragged. "Yet the songs and the singing are an integral part of this rite of passage. In this tapestry of sound-the singing, and the jeering by upperclassmen, and the jeerers finally joining in the songs-the feeling of being at Kenyon is imparted to the new students. The melodies, the way the students have to learn the songs, and the way Doc Locke conducts them contribute to the social meaning. It's a powerful way of becoming accepted into this community."

Ethnomusicology, the study of music in its cultural context, is full of such revelations, and Spiller ventures far beyond Gambier to explore them, leading his students to see the familiar in the foreign as well as the foreign in the familiar (and, yes, the foreign in the foreign), and doing it with creativity and humor. The field is by nature interdisciplinary, and when Spiller came to the College in 2002 as Kenyon's first ethnomusicologist, he immediately found himself straddling several realms.

As his title suggests-he is the Henry R. Luce Assistant Professor of Asian Music and Culture-he has a place in both the music and anthropology departments as well as in Asian studies and international studies. In addition, he is the founder and conductor of the College's Indonesian Music Ensemble, which plays gamelan music, using a set of the bronze percussion instruments that he brought with him from California. It is one of just a handful of gamelan ensembles in the Midwest.

Spiller is a native of the Golden State, having grown up in the Los Angeles suburb of Montebello. During high school in the 1970s, he studied piano and played the electric guitar along with various other instruments ("all badly") in rock bands. At the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he majored in music, he discovered the harp, which he has played ever since, performing with a number of orchestras. And he discovered gamelan music.

"Santa Cruz was one of those wacky '70s places," says Spiller. "We had a gamelan teacher from Indonesia, who was fun to be around. I took classes and was in an ensemble, and I lived with three or four people who were also in the ensemble. We lived and breathed gamelan."

His path to ethnomusicology traces a meandering circle. He started graduate work in ethnomusicology, traveling to Indonesia for research on a master's thesis, but found at the time that he didn't really like teaching. So he left graduate school for what turned into more than a dozen years in Silicon Valley, working as a technical editor and computer programmer for such well-known firms as SRI International and Sun Microsystems.

Meanwhile, he reconnected with the academic world, teaching gamelan at Mills College in Oakland, California. He also continued to play the harp, earned a master's degree in harp performance, and found himself drawn once again to ethnomusicology. So he returned to graduate school, receiving his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2001. His dissertation, based on ten months of fieldwork in Bandung, West Java, involved Sundanese men's improvisational dance genres.

Spiller's Kenyon colleagues and students value his ability to contribute insights from diverse fields. The musicians benefit from his familiarity with cultural anthropology and his knowledge of non-Western music. The anthropologists benefit from his understanding of performance, in both music and dance. He is an accomplished scholar, with a book on gamelan music scheduled for publication later this year, and he is an inventive teacher well liked for his easy-going personality and wry sense of humor.

In addition to the introductory course, Spiller teaches an advanced ethnomusicology course whose topic changes from year to year. This year he focused on Asian vocal forms. Next year the subject will be Korean music. And of course there is the ensemble, which has twenty-four members this year.

"You should really watch him working with his gamelan orchestra," says Professor of Anthropology David Suggs. "He gets them going on a piece-one that is just in his head, with the parts for each instrument in his memory, as opposed to being notated on paper-and then weaves in and out of each musician's field, correcting, praising, blending them all, and seeming to do it all effortlessly."

The campus will have a chance to hear the ensemble perform on Saturday, April 24, as part of a program featuring two visiting Indonesian artists, a father and son, who combine gamelan and puppetry. Spiller is able to arrange for such programs with funds provided for the Luce professorship.

Like his classes, the programs seek to expand students' conceptions of music. "For most students, music is synonymous with recordings," says Spiller. "But recordings are really not a very important part of music. Music has meaning in interaction; it's a process as much as it is a product. Music is in behavior and in ideas more than it is in sounds."

-Dan Laskin