Lotring, I Wayan

(b Kuta, Bali, ?1883; d Kuta, 1983). Balinese composer, performer and dancer. He was a pre-eminent figure in Balinese music between the Dutch takeover in 1906 and the onset of World War II, a crucial period during which the old court system was in decline and the performing arts were enjoying a new secular and popular role. Lotring trained as a dancer at the court of Blahbatuh. Until retreating from public life in the late 1940s he drummed, choreographed and taught music to gamelan clubs in Kuta and throughout southern Bali. As well as instrumental works mainly for gamelan ensembles of the palegongan type, he reworked the legong dance form with elements of the modern kebyar style. He taught his music in numerous villages, freely reworking his compositions each time, so that contrasting variants of each work exist. The instrumental pieces achieved wide success in the 1920s and 30s as preludes for dances or dramas given in recreational contexts. Their rhapsodic, distinctively modern forms, innovative textures and patterns, and assimilation of materials from older gamelan genres (such as the incorporation of the 5 + 3 rhythm of gamelan gambang into his piece Gambangan) became models for subsequent new music composition on the island. The American musicologist Colin McPhee worked closely with Lotring in the 1930s, profiling him at length in A House in Bali (New York, 1946/R) and devoting a chapter to an analysis of his music in Music in Bali (New Haven, CT, 1966/R). Consequently, in addition to its canonization by the Balinese, Lotring's music has been widely celebrated by succeeding generations of foreign admirers.

WORKS

(selective list)

all for Balinese gamelan and composed between 1910 and 1940

MICHAEL TENZER