2 Martin Hatch Popular music in Indonesia It is impossible to avoid being impressed by the richness and variety ‘of musical experiences in Indonesia today. Not only is this richness and variety impressive, but the omnipresence of musical experiences ‘overwhelms even this American who is accustomed to weekly concerts, daily TV and radio jingles and soundtracks, supermarket muzak, the chimes of a fully programmed bell-tower, or the music that cascades from the radios of passing cars. In this essay I want to present one kind of survey of the repertory of Indonesian song recorded on cassette tape during the past ten years and distributed and sold, at the least, throughout the island of Java, Indonesia. The designation Indonesian in the construction ‘Indonesian song’ means, for the most part, songs with texts in the Indonesian language, not in any one of the 250 regional languages and dialects of the Island nation. This designation also means songs with other musical ingredients - instruments, timbres, or melodic, rhythmic, and formal organisation — which came to Indonesia within the past fifty years, or which are not directly derived from any one of the many regional types of music from Indonesia's past. I am focusing on the island of Java, because almost all of the two years I have been in Indonesia I spent on that island, particularly in the central area, the district known as Surakarta. Java, which is approximately the size of New York state, has a present population of over eighty million people, and the absence of urban concentrations of population, other than Jakarta with its eight million and Surabaya with its four million, guarantees that there are few places now on the island where one does not find communities of people. In fact, the conception of a return to nature, an outing away from others, or even a search for the natural world,