(Re)Collecting: Southeast Asia at the Johnson Museum

Martin Hatch is an emeritus Professor in the Music Department at Cornell University and has been actively involved in the Southeast Asia Program and established the Cornell Gamelan Ensemble when he came as a graduate student at the same department in 1972. Marty and Susan met for the first time in a joint Smith College-Wesleyan University concert tour in Mexico in 1963 when they were undergraduates. While Marty was conducting his graduate work in “world music” history and performance at Wesleyan in 1964, Susan graduated from her program and became a teacher at the public school in Prince Edward County, Virginia. They met again in Martha’s Vineyard after Susan returned from her apprenticeship in pottery making in Devon, England, in 1967 and got married in November that year. After Marty finished his graduate work, he and Susan took Indonesian language at Yale and decided to live in Surakarta, Indonesia, in the fall of 1969. While in Surakarta, Marty studied at the newly-established Akademi Seni Karawitan Indonesia (ASKI) with private teachers of gamelan and tembang or Javanese classical vocal music and Susan taught English to students at ASKI. 

Marty and Susan decided to return to Indonesia when Marty discovered that he developed metastatic cancer. After the surgery, Marty came to Cornell for his graduate studies in Southeast Asian Studies and music. They bought a small portion of a farm with a house and a barn in Ithaca. Toward the end of the 1970s, Susan and her colleagues founded an organization called Citizens Concerned for Children, and started a state-funded office to provide legal representation of children in family court cases. At the Music Department Marty intended to bring Southeast Asian music tradition, in particular, gamelan and he received support from the Southeast Asia Program. Marty brought with him a small set of gamelan that was on loan from Harrison Parker, a Cornell engineering alumni who Marty met in Indonesia when Parker served as a USAID Food-for-peace employee. By the end of his graduate study in 1980, the Music Department received a long-term loan of a gamelan set from the Metropolitan Museum of Art through the efforts of John Pemberton and Jennifer Lindsay, both were graduate students in the Southeast Asia Program. Since then, the gamelan set has accompanied many events and wayang performances of the Southeast Asian Program. 

During their time in Surakarta in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Marty and Susan bought a set of wayang kulit or shadow puppets of the punakawan (clowns) that they later gifted to the Music Department and now are stored in the Gamelan Room. While Marty does not remember exactly when he and Susan acquired the wayang golek or the rod puppet collection that they donated to the museum in 2009, Marty recalled that they acquired them from one of the best puppet makers in Yogyakarta. Their wayang golek gift adds to the existing collection of rod puppets coming from Claire Holt through Ben Anderson in 1998.