Barbara Benary was born on April 7th, 1946 in Bay Shore, Long Island. She began playing the violin at age six and went on to receive a B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York. Benary continued her education at Wesleyan University where she received her M.A. and Ph.D. while specializing in the music of India and Indonesia. As a graduate student, she joined a gamelan and studied Karnatic violin in Madras where she met Philip Glass, who was conducting research on Indian musical practices. Glass invited her to play with his ensemble and she toured with him for a year before getting a job teaching ethnomusicology at Rutgers University in 1973.
While at Rutgers, she started a Javanese gamelan named Son of Lion with colleagues Daniel Goode and Philip Corner. She was known for building their instruments, recording new Gamelan music for Folkways records, and teaching traditional Javanese music. Her published works include research into Indonesian gamelans, and traditions and composers within karnatic music, which is music from southern India that evolved from Hindu traditions. Unfortunately, Benary was denied tenure from Rutgers and decided to move to New York to continue her work with Gamelan Son of Lion. Though she no longer participated in the academic side of things, she still considered herself an ethnomusicologist through composing.
As a composer, Benary utilized minimalism and conceptualism for her pieces. She composed more than thirty pieces for gamelan, which have been performed by Gamelan Son of Lion. Benary has also written a number of theater and dance scores for various companies. Of note is a theater piece she wrote that combined gamelan and vocal oratorio with Javenese puppetry.
Benary views herself as a musician first with ethnomusicology as a modifier. She believes that the academic side of ethnomusicology fails to respect the individuals who use ethnomusic creatively. During her time as an ethnomusicologist, they failed to include material of interest to performers and instead focused a lot on academics. She does believe that the field opened up more in later years to allowing performances to be considered a form of scholarship, but she had already left the Society of Ethnomusicologists by that time. Sadly, Barbara Benary died on March 17th, 2019 after battling Parkinson’s for several years. Though she is no longer with us, her gamelan continues to perform to this day.
