Between 1890 and 1939, laborers from the Dutch East Indies were “recruited” by the colonial government to work on plantations in Suriname, the Netherlands’ much smaller colony on the Caribbean coast of South America, after slavery was abolished there. Today, a distinct gamelan tradition is practiced by ethnically Javanese people in Suriname and in Javanese-Surinamese communities in the Netherlands. In this lecture, I discuss my work with Javanese-Surinamese gamelan musicians and explore what it means to play and listen to a musical tradition that developed out of a colonial history.