It’s no surprise that le kampong javanais – the Javanese village – should have been the most popular colonial attraction at the 1889 Exposition Universelle in Paris. People were charmed by the grace of the dance and the magic of the music, which might have been designed to represent Caliban’s sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not. The resident dancers at the Exposition became tabloid celebrities; Saint-Saëns declared that gamelan ‘dream music’ had hypnotic powers. Debussy, having attended performances at the kampong, would later extol the music as being ‘as natural as breathing: their conservatoire is the eternal rhythm of the sea, the wind among the leaves, and the thousand sounds of nature.’

Yet the English were the first Europeans to appreciate it. One of Sir Francis Drake’s entries in the logbook of the Golden Hind in 1580 describes a musical exchange on the south coast of Java between the local ruler and his English visitors. First Drake gave a performance with his musicians in honour of Raia Donan, king of Java, then he listened to the king’s ‘country-musick, which though it were of a very strange kind, yet the sound was pleasant and delightfull’. European interest was rekindled in the nineteenth century with the collecting expeditions of Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles and others, but the melodic and harmonic nature of gamelan only came properly into focus when the English physiologist Alexander Ellis subjected Javanese music to tonal analysis in his pioneering study of ‘the scales of various nations’.

Colonial links forged in the seventeenth century ensured that Dutch and Javanese scholars should lead the musicological enquiry. In 1857, students of the Royal Academy of Delft became the first Europeans to give a gamelan performance; the author of the programme note expressed an awareness of its microtonal modes, but gave a patronising explanation for them. Quarter tones, he wrote, were due to ‘a deficiency of the instruments’ because the Javanese had ‘no knowledge of the mechanics necessary to make them all the same … The variety of sounds and the simplicity of style cause all pieces to sound almost alike.’ But Dutch scholarship was soon on the trail in a properly