Susan Pratt Walton

Susan Pratt Walton, Lecturer Emerita, is an ethnomusicologist with research interests in Javanese gamelan music, gender studies, life history studies, and performance studies. She has been studying, researching, and performing Javanese gamelan music since 1968, much of it in Indonesia, where she has conducted ethnomusicological fieldwork on many occasions in projects supported by Fulbright-Hays, Social Science Research Council, Luce Foundation, Mellon Foundation, and UM. She has become one of the foremost experts in Javanese solo female singing (sindhenan) and has performed with numerous gamelan groups in the US, Indonesia, England, Australia, and New Zealand. Her publications include a monograph on sindhenan, Mode in Javanese Music (for which she received the Louise Cuyler Award for Musicology at UM) and several articles on the cultural significance of this vocal tradition. She has also published translations from the Javanese of two major treatises on Javanese gamelan music. As Director of the University of Michigan Gamelan, she invited numerous Javanese musicians, puppeteers, and dancers to year-long residencies at UM and has produced several concerts involving almost 100 student dancers, actors, musicians and puppeteers in performances of traditional Javanese dance drama.