10. Indonesian Performing Arts in the Netherlands, 1913–1944

Abstract

The history of Indonesian music in the Netherlands is sometimes assumed to begin with Babar Lajar (Javanese for ‘Setting Sail’), a youth gamelan founded in Haarlem in 1941 and active through the mid-1950s (Mendonça 2002: 115–150). This so-called ‘white gamelan orchestra’ ( blanke gamelanorkest) was avidly supported by ethnomusicologist Jaap Kunst (1891–1960) and often performed on Dutch media, giving radio concerts, accompanying classical Javanese dance in the dance documentary Danskunst in Indonesië (1947) and modern Javanese dance in God Shiva (1955), and providing music for the Philips LP record of Jaap Kunst’s children’s book Begdja the gamelan boy: A