This dissertation investigates the complexities of improvisatory practices in Balinese kendang (drumming), focusing on solo and paired drumming styles found within the gong kebyar ensemble. Improvisation studies scholar Paul Berliner states that "improvisation depends, in fact, on thinkers having absorbed a broad base of musical knowledge, including myriad conventions that contribute to formulating ideas logically, cogently, and expressively" (1994, 492). Drawing from Berliner's statement, I demonstrate how Balinese drummers think and talk about improvisation and how those cognitive and discursive processes manifest in actual performance practice. In particular, I focus on the improvisatory approaches, practices, and philosophy of the renowned gong kebyar drummer I Ketut Sukarata in three different contexts: paired drumming, solo drumming, and drumming for dance accompaniment. Although several authoritative works have been written on drumming in Balinese music (e.g., Asnawa 1991; Bakan 1999; Tenzer 2000a; Hood 2001; Sudirana 2009; Tilley 2019; Pryatna 2020), most of the ethnomusicological literature to date has given little if any significant attention to the improvisational dimensions of drumming. This has resulted in a lacuna of research on improvisation in Balinese music and drumming, to the point that improvisation has come to be regarded as a relatively minor component of drumming practice, at least until very recently. However, my research and more than twenty years of performing and experiencing Balinese drumming, including seventeen years of intensive studies with Sukarata, shows that improvisation is indeed a fundamental and essential component of the art form. My research, which combines the methods of music ethnography and music-theoretical approaches, as influenced most specifically by the work of other researchers engaged with the interdisciplinary field of music scholarship known as analytical approaches to world music (e.g., Tenzer 2006a; Tenzer and John Roeder 2011; Roeder and Tenzer 2012; McGraw 2008; 2013; McGraw and Kohnen 2016), fundamentally reconstitutes analytical methods to the study of improvisation in Balinese drumming and, by extension, in Balinese gamelan music more broadly.
