Kitsie Emerson: Finding Her Place

A classical musician by training, American Kitsie Emerson took a musical detour to immerse herself in the world of Javanese music and folklore. She tells Bruce Emond about bringing these Javanese traditions to a wider, modern audience.

When she was a piano student at Cornell University in the early 1980s, Kitsie Emerson would pass by gamelan instruments in the basement on her way to class. With her mind focused on Western classical music from the age of 5, she did not spare them a passing thought.

She later moved to New York City to study for her master’s in piano, and it was then that the solitary day in, day out grind of piano playing hit home.

“Life was very hard in New York, it was hard to earn a living,” Emerson, whose real name is Kathryn, says. “I had grown up in this beautiful Michigan town and then gone to Cornell where there were trees outside my practice room, but now I was worrying about my neighbors screaming at me to stop playing .… It got very unpleasant.”

After completing her degree recital at Queens College, she walked out into the New York streets and decided a lonely life at the piano was not for her. Needing a break from Beethoven, she took ethnomusicology courses, studying West African drums and the Japanese flute.

Her search ended when she saw a poster for a gamelan concert in Central Park. That was in March 1986; by the summer she was headed to Java to study gamelan in its place of origin.

"I just loved it. At that first rehearsal, I saw all these people together, and I just thought, ‘What are they all listening to, how are they relating to each other, what is the notation?’ And people told me that I could study in either Yogya or Solo (Surakarta).”

Kitsie, who hails from a tight-knit rural community “where everybody knew everything about everybody”, has found her calling once again in gamelan and traditional wayang kulit (shadow puppet) performances. She has studied the Javanese percussion orchestra for more than 20 years, is married to a respected drum player and gamelan teacher from Java’s heartland of Surakarta, Wakidi Dwidjomartono, and has branched out into what she terms “simultaneous, spontaneous” translations of the dalang (puppet master) from Javanese to English.

Three times a week, she and her husband host gamelan practices at their South Jakarta home. The musicians come from as far as Bekasi, waiting patiently on the terrace with cigarettes and hot sweet tea for their sessions to begin. They greet her with the respect shown to an elder of their group, but it’s clear they respect her as one of them. She talks about knowing “at least six things” from their lives, the intimate knowledge gained in a close community.

“People really respect you when you spend five or six hours a day studying their culture,” says Emerson, who teaches third grade at an international school. “They think I’m doing it because I want to preserve their culture, but it’s actually because I just love it so much.”

That love has transferred into learning the complexities of Javanese, from the refined high form of the language to the coarser language of the wong cilik (common people). She is obviously someone who sets her mind to something and gets it done, on her own; she notes that the women in her family were “pioneers”, becoming pilots or choosing to teach on a Native American reservation.

Emerson bought elementary school textbooks on Javanese, tuned in to Javanese-language radio stations in Surakarta and asked her husband that they only speak Javanese together so she could learn the language for shadow puppet performances.

“Our communication took a huge drop,” she jokes.

She became acquainted with dalang Ki Purbo Asmoro five years ago and was immediately struck by his skills. “He is a genius,” she says simply. “He is a master, a poet, he is funny, he has a beautiful voice.”

Emerson, 47, began translations for an expatriate audience in January 2005, and realized that she could pretty much paraphrase Asmoro’s words, although it is still difficult to translate the culture-specific jokes for a multicultural audience.

“The reaction has been very positive,” says Emerson, who will translate a shadow puppet performance next week in Jakarta. “All of us, when we first see a wayang performance, are like, ‘I’m never going to understand this’. I used to say that. But it really does matter what they’re saying. Once you know what they are saying, the philosophy, the metaphors and the debate come through.”

Although shadow puppet plays are enjoying a revival of interest, gamelan music is not doing so well today. It’s ironic because gamelan orchestras are the hot extracurricular musical activity on campuses in the United States and Europe.

“It has been so cheapened here in Jakarta. The musicians do a five-minute piece as part of the traditional element and that’s it. Young people aren’t interested in having gamelan music at weddings or circumcisions, they want modern music.”

Emerson has come a long way from her small-town childhood, absorbed in the piano while her peers played outside at the nearby lake. But in a way she is back where she started from.

“It used to drive me crazy when expats would say, ‘This is my home’, and I would say, ‘Ah, no it’s not’. But at some point something switched in me. It was like I had found my small town again.”
Photos by Allan Harapan

Ki Purbo Asmoro, with simultaneous translation by Kitsie Emerson, will perform at The Dharmawangsa on May 31 and June 1.

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