The inaugural Research Award from the UC Davis Emeritus/ae Association (UCDEA) has awarded Professor of Music Henry Spiller, emeritus, of the Department of Music, for his project ”Between Two Worlds: Sundanese Music Theory according to Jaap Kunst and R.M.A. Kusumadinata.” The award includes a $5,000 grant, and Spiller will give a lecture on the topic as part of UCDEA’s upcoming “Brain Food” lecture series.

This project—which will review the nuanced views on Sundanese music by the Dutch ethnomusicologist Jaap Kunst and the Indonesian ethnomusicologist and composer R.M.A. Kusumadinata—grew out of a project funded by the Henry Luce Foundation, awarded in 2019.

The Luce grant helped digitize and make accessible to scholars numerous archival documents and sound recordings made during the missionary period in Indonesia, vastly expanding the available historical record of Indonesian music for present-day scholars. From 2019 to 2022, two international scholars conferences took place at UC Davis, exploring the present and evolving views of the music history of the Indonesian archipelago.

One of the results of these conferences is a newly published book, Missionaries, Anthropologists, and Music in the Indonesian Archipelago, edited by Anna Maria Busse Berger and Henry Spiller. The volume, published by the University of California Press in 2025, greatly adds to the historiography of Indonesian music.