Marriage Ritual, Campurssari Music, and Imagination of Modernity in Java

The history of music is always apart of the wider historical circumstance. Within the stream of ideas, the study attempts to answer the basic question: what the historical context is represented by the 'new genre' music Campursari, which is became apart of marriage ritual in most of Central Java area in the last two decades. Based on Wittgenstein thought stating that: 'much of human activity is the expression of imagination', the study depicted in ethnographic method, how the marriage ritual became an arena in which the imagination of gilt age and an ideal pattern of society is presented in performance through the procession act of marriage ritual. When the modernity emerged as the ideological discourse in Indonesia and found its ideal loci in the New Era, they entered pervasively to the sacred area. In that area, the new form of society is appropriated in imaginative way through the manipulation of material and visual sign and expressed in Campursari performance.