Thirteenth International Conference on The Arts in Society

Abstract

This work is the development of 20 years of study and practice of Javanese Tembang or sung poetry, using methods, musical structures, and classical poems found in radif-based practices of Classical Persian music as studied with the Iranian master teacher or Ostad, Hossein Omoumi. The trans-disciplinary practice which this requires finds its theorization with the help of non-knowledge in the Laruellian sense, and infers a practice of non-knowledge which the 19th c. Javanese court scribe Ronggosasmita may have expressed by creating a unique parable of a classic Sufi historical parable, that of the meeting of Rumi and Shams, in his 1815 work, Suluk Samsu Tabarit. In this sense the storytelling through song finds historical registers being transposed between levels of music, history, and spiritual realization practices, including sonic repetition, resonance, oral tradition of transmitted melodic concepts and atmospheres, and invocation of the impossible.