Sundanese culture is not well known in the United States. Even Americans who are familiar with Indonesian cultural traditions are unaware of the existence of 30 million Sundanese people in West Java who cultivate a range of performing arts as rich and vibrant as those of central Java and Bali. For example, American newspapers consistently misspell Sundanese as “Sudanese,” leading readers to assume that they are reading about North Africa. And “world music” courses in American universities typically introduce students to Javanese and Balinese gamelan music without even mentioning the arts of West Java. Through an examination of the history of the Sundanese performing arts in the U.S., my paper suggests reasons for American ignorance of Sundanese culture. I begin my history with the Sundanese musicians who performed gamelan, angklung, wayang, and dance at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893: although they played Sundanese music on Sundanese instruments, Americans perceived them as “Javanese” or “East Indian.” Furthermore, Americans generalized what they heard and saw in the Exposition’s “Java Village,” minimizing any specifically Sundanese stylistic details. Audiences were more likely to remember the gamelan renditions of “American airs,” such as “Yankee Doodle,” than the Sundanese music they heard, and those who couldn’t attend the Exposition themselves often were introduced to gamelan music through concert band “transcriptions” of the music from the Village that sounded more like Sousa marches.

The few Indonesian artists who visited the U.S. in the first 70 years after the Exposition were Javanese or Balinese, further erasing any awareness of Sundanese culture from the collective American consciousness. There was no significant exposure to the Sundanese performing arts again until the 1960s and 1970s, when performances at the New York World’s Fair in 1964, the residencies of Enoch Atmadibrata and Iwan Natapradja at UC Los Angeles in the early 1970s, and a team of Sundanese teachers at the Center for World Music in Berkeley, California, in 1974 once again presented Sundanese arts to Americans. In all these cases, however, the Sundanese teams were outnumbered and overshadowed by their Javanese and Balinese counterparts. Furthermore, other significant Indonesian performing arts programs— at Wesleyan University, for example—were devoted exclusively to the arts of Java or Bali. The lone exception is the long-standing Sundanese program at UC Santa Cruz, established by David Kilpatrick, which has been under the direction of Undang Sumarna since 1976.

A number of groups devoted to Sundanese music have been founded since the 1980s. The noted American composer Lou Harrison became interested in the characteristically Sundanee gamelan degung and inspired several other American musicians to embrace degung before he focused his attention on central Javanese gamelan. The noted Sundanese suling virtuoso, Burhan Sukarma, has led Pusaka Sunda in San Jose, California, since 1986, and several degung groups have been established at American colleges due to the patronage of the American horticulturalist Tony Lydgate. Nevertheless, in America, Sundanese music and Sundanese culture remain in the shadow of other Indonesian musics. My paper concludes with some recommendations for promoting awareness of Sundanese culture in the United States.