Gamelan Ibu-Ibu in a Nineteenth-Century Javanese Manuscript

It has been some time since my last blog post - but this one is too good not to post on Indonesian Performance. Thumbing through Yale University Art Gallery's small collection of Indonesian manuscripts today, I ran across this illustration in a nineteenth-century wayang manuscript: an illustration of a gamelan ibu-ibu. In this double-page spread, a group of 5 women are playing kendang, rebab, peking, gender, and gong/ketuk. There are also two more saron-type instruments that have no players at them. All of the musicians are dressed in the same uniform - with blue skirts, the same armlets and hair decorations etc. And a couple of pages later two of the female musicians appear again in an illustration, carrying what appears to be the rancak (frame) for a bonang.

Illustrations of gamelan playing in manuscripts of this period are not common, let alone an all-female group. More research is clearly needed!

Further information on the manuscript (ILE2014.8.26), which entered Yale's collection in 2014, is at https://artgallery.yale.edu/collections/objects/181348