Gamelan Music example essay topic

Of all of the worlds' non-western music, none seems to be as familiar and at the same time as alien as Indonesian gamelan. Gamelan utilizes it's own, highly intricate, notation system under the context of large group orchestration much like a lot of western music. This fact makes gamelan easily dissect ible and imitable for western scholars and composers. It is also the main reason for such a high level of ethno musicological study done in Indonesia. Be that as it may, it is the other worldly sound of gamelan that truly captured many a westerner's attention and imagination.

Gamelan's first appearance in the west is a debated subject, but it is agreed upon that individual instruments (as opposed to whole ensembles) were imported from the East Indies to Europe in the early 19th century. The very first gamelan outside of South-east Asia was brought to England by a man named Stamford Raffles. He had just finished his governorship of Java in 1816 and decided to bring a taste of the wonderful music he had heard home. He brought more than a taste.

Raffles brought home two entire gamelan sets (just instruments) to Buckinghamshire, England. One was given to the Verney family to be put on display at the Clay den House, and the other was given to the British Museum's Department of Ethnology. Even though the west now had the capability of making gamelan music, it was a long time before the west actually heard gamelan. The instruments brought over by Raffles were used more in sound experiments by acousticians and instrument inventors than to actually make music. In fact, it wasn't until the latter half of the 19th century that gamelan was actually heard outside of South-east Asia. The first documented case of a gamelan ensemble outside of South-east Asia that I could find was actually an ensemble comprised of Dutch civil servants as opposed to Indonesians.

The date was 5/5/1857 and a group of civil servant trainees from Delft, on their way to the East Indies, performed a 'garebeg' for family and friends during their procession on their way out of town. I'm not exactly sure how they knew about 'garebeg', but the event is documented in Grove's Dictionary of Music (Grove's, vol. 9, p. 506). A Javanese ensemble played at the Arnhem exhibition in the Mangkunegaran Palace in 1879 marking the first expedition of an entire gamelan ensemble to Europe. After that first appearance, gamelans slowly started to appear at exhibitions all across Europe and America.

The next appearance I'm aware of occurred in 1882 at the London Aquarium and then again at the 1883 International and Colonial Exhibition in Amsterdam. America's first introduction to gamelan took place in 1883 at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago. This ensemble actually left their instruments to be kept at the Field Museum in Chicago It was the next appearance of gamelan in Europe that may have had the largest affect, making it the most notable. The year was 1889 and the place was the Exposition Universelle in Paris when Claude Debussy (amongst other composers) was first introduced to the sounds of the Orient and gamelan more specifically. The 27 year old fell in love with Asian music and started to incorporate Oriental melodies, scales (pentatonic), and titles (Pagodes) into his pieces. The first appearance of a Balinese gamelan orchestra playing in Europe occurred at the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris.

It was just a little later that the long time Debussy student, Edward Varese, began to also show an interest in Asian music. Varese, charmed by the sounds of the Orient, began to spread his ardency for the music amongst his American counterparts after emigrating to America. It was not the music itself that captivated Varese and other east-meets-west pioneers, but the realization that musical systems outside of the western twelve tone system could be employed to compose complex arrangements in a semi-western fashion. While none of Varese's compositions can be said to have a direct link to gamelan, it is important to note the influence that Asian music had on him. America, of all the western countries, had unknowingly become the most eager participant in the development of gamelan outside of Indonesia thanks to pioneering composers and the newly formed field of study called ethnomusicology. Jaap Kunst is known by many as the father of ethnomusicology, be he actually never studied gamelan.

It was his student Ki Mantle Hood who witnessed the first appearance of a non Indonesian, real gamelan ensemble to perform on a long-term basis and became enthralled. This performance occurred in the Netherlands under the direction of Babar Layar, who got his name from a Javanese composition. Layar formed the gamelan ensemble with his teenage friends in the German occupied Harlem in 1941 and continued to perform throughout the war (Grove's, vol. 9, p. 506). After Hood saw the gamelan performance he decided to devote his life to the study of the world's various traditional musics.

Another ethnomusicologist heavily involved in the study of gamelan was the Canadian born Collin McPhee. McPhee, born in 1900, studied composition and piano at the Peabody Conservatory in his youth. It was during 1931 that McPhee first heard a primitive recording of Balinese gamelans. McPhee was so impressed with these strange new sounds that he found himself in Bali studying gamelan in less than a year.

He remained there for seven uninterrupted years, during which he wrote Music in Bali. While McPhee was in Bali, he collected and transcribed native music and also formed several Balinese gamelans of his own, including a gamelan angklung and a gamelan sekar pegulingan. He also collaborated with the infamous Margaret Mead in spurning locals to start gamelan ensembles and to perform. Collin McPhee did something else of great importance involving Indonesian music.

He was the first to compose gamelan pieces transcribed with western instruments. He wrote for solo or duel pianos, as well as a piece for the flute and piano. It was during 1936 that he composed his most famous piece, a tone poem called Tabuh-tabuhan, which was his first major orchestral work to utilize gamelan compositional practices. McPhee's trans-Pacific piece included a standard symphony orchestra and incorporated what he called a 'nuclear gamelan', made up of western instruments (two pianos, celesta, xylophone, marimba and glockenspiel) and two authentic Balinese gongs (Rich, 1995; p. 190). The nuclear gamelan's purpose was to imitate the "intricate, chime like figuration of some of the gamelan instruments". (Rich, 1995; p. 190).

McPhee used cellos, basses, low-harp and piano to play the roles of time keepers like the hand drum players in gamelan ensembles do. Tabuh-tabuhan was actually composed and first performed in Mexico in 1936. It wasn't until 1953 that the piece was performed in America (New York). In between he was constantly writing articles and lecturing about what he had learned while in Bali. He also wrote another book, A House in Bali, where he described his experiences while in Bali. McPhee joined the ethnomusicology department at UCLA in the late 50's, which he was largely responsible for starting, and remained there until his death in 1964.

UCLA was the first American university to build and maintain it's own gamelan, created by McPhee and his ethnomusicologist friend and colleague, Mantle Hood (Rich, 1995; p. 192). It was during the 50's and 60's that many American composers began to look outside of their own musical sphere's for inspiration. These composers traveled in the wake of such legends as Henry Cowell and his student John Cage, or Harry Parch, all three of whom were familiar with gamelan music. One such composer was Lou Harrison. Harrison was born right here in Portland, Oregon in 1917, and also studied under Henry Cowell at San Francisco State College (1934-35). This was where Harrison met Cage, and it was from here that Harrison and Cage began their early percussion experimentation's.

These early compositions were composed for and from homemade instruments assembled from scrap yard junk and household products and could certainly be viewed as precursors to his later east-meets-west compositions. This sort of instrumentation can be directly linked to the earlier works of Harry Patch and his homemade instrument ensemble. Harrison was also similar to Cage in that he studied composition under Arnold Schoenberg in Los Angeles only to later almost completely discard what he had learned about European musical tradition from him. "As with Cage, not much of the Schoenberg aura remained with Harrison for very long; Harrison's natural bent was towards the creation of elegant and immediately memorable melody, a quality not always congruent with the Schoenberg ian note-row" (Rich, 1995; p. 194). Harrison went on an Orient excursion funded by the Rockefeller Foundation and immediately set out to design and build his own gamelan upon his return. He and his long time friend and collaborator, sculptor William Colvin, went to work and have actually built many since.

Harrison has stayed in California teaching, lecturing, composing and playing until recently as far as I know. I have included part of Harrison's composition Varied Trio on the burnt cd as the first 2 tracks. Although it is not his most obviously gamelan inspired piece and does include the American Gamelan Ensemble that he is known for working with, I believe it is very representational of his predilection for gamelan music and his inclusive attitude regarding other styles as well. The Varied Trio piece was composed in 1986.

Movement 1 'Gending' is for piano, gong and vibraphone; 'Bowl Bells', the second movement, is for rice bowls played with chopsticks, pizzicato violin and piano. I also have included the last movement (Strofo 7 Man tro kaj Kunsunoro) of his 1972 composition titled La Kor o Sutra as track 3 on the cd. The Esperanto, an invented hybrid language that mixes the world's principal languages, title is actually a buddhist reference meaning 'the heart sutra'. The lyrics are taken ancient Greek texts and sung in Esperanto. Another American composer who is known for having studied gamelan (1973-74) and implementing certain techniques from it is Steve Reich. In his piece Music for Mallet Instruments, he "embraced the lush timbres of the balinese orchestra" (Schwarz, 1997; p. 9).

His brief, melodic phrases in Music for 18 Musicians can also be said to resemble those of gamelan. And Reich admits that he was definitely listening to gamelan during the period that he 'discovered phasing' and composed Music for 18 Musicians. He said at one point that "gamelan had no conscious influence on Music for 18 Musicians. Certainly there's no organization of musical structure similar to the gamelan. But yes, on a taken-for-granted, semi-unconscious level, all those colors had become part of my working vocabulary". (Schwarz, 1995; p. 13-14).

Reich, Harrison and McPhee were the first of many of what we might call 'modern composers' to use gamelan in western composition. They started a tradition that is being carried out by the composers of today and will continue to be carried out by those of tomorrow. One such composer is Evan Ziporyn, who began his studies of composition in the late 70's at Yale University. Ziporyn would then have a fateful introduction to Michael Tezner in the late 70's, who had just returned from Bali. Tezner was a member of Sekar Jaya, an American gamelan in Berkeley California. Tezner convinced Ziporyn to enroll in the Ph. D. program at the University of California at Berkeley and join his gamelan, Sekar Jaya.

Ziporyn was now pulling double duty studying both western composition and Balinese gamelan, and the affect it had on him would prove to create a genuinely American sound in his later compositions. Ziporyn's first compositions were collaborations with the Balinese composer I Nyo man Windham titled Kekembangan and Aneh Tapi Nyata (both available on New World Records 80430-2). "The singer in Aneh Tapi Nyata laments the rootlessness of the modern west, and asks the Balinese for their leftover sacred offerings" (Perlman, 2000; p. 1). Both Aneh Tapi Nyata and another composition, Tire Fire, were written for Sekur Jaya after Ziporyn had already left the group to begin teaching composition at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

MIT supported his work on gamelan so much that they funded the purchase of an entire set of gamelan instruments as well as the services of two Balinese teacher / composer /musicians. With his new set up and collaborators, Ziporyn formed Gala k Tika, MIT's own gamelan. Their performance of Tire Fire is included on the cd as tracks 4-8. Tire Fire is an excellent example of two cultures colliding.

Ziporyn uses a semi-tone gamelan in combination with guitars, basses and keyboards tuned in the standard tempered western scale. The effect is highly dissonant and the culture shock is utterly American. Only in America and a very few other places will you find the combination of two so unrelated musical tunings and textures. Ziporyn's pieces are as much a cross-cultural experience as they are music. Michael Tezner, meanwhile, stayed with Sekur Jaya and has composed many pieces in the traditional Balinese forms as well as stretching out into new hybrid territories. Two of his pieces (Banyuari and Situ Banda) can be found on the compilation entitled American Works for Gamelan Orchestra as well two pieces by Evan Ziporyn (Kekembangan and Aneh Tapi Nyata).

I have included Tezner's Situ Banda on the cd (track 9) as an example of his own unique reinterpretation of Balinese gamelan. Tezner wrote Situ Banda for a group of students at the higher Balinese conservatory in 1989. The final American composer I will adress is Wayne Vitale, and he is the most traditional of the three modern composers I have discussed. He is the perfect example of how a tradition can be carried on thousands of miles away by a completely unrelated culture to the one that started the tradition. The piece by Vitale that I have included as track 10 is called Khayalan Tiga.

Khayalan Tiga was composed in 1990 for the Balinese gamelan ensemble A bdi Buda ya, whose work he had long admired. "Though it (Khayalan Tiga) has it's share of innovative elements, this piece stays fairly close to the standard modern keb yar genre known as 'new creations' or kr easi baru" (Perlman, 1993; p. 6). The title means Fantasy in Three. I was in fact recently fortunate enough to see Lewis and Clarck's own gamelan, The Venerable Showers of Beauty Fenwick Gamelan, perform traditional Javanese way ang kul it and music. It was amazing. It, along with all of the composers aforementioned, stands as proof that the gamelan tradition will live on in the west even if does not live on in the east.

Gamelan will also live on in another, more diluted, sense as well. There are people today making music that are influenced by the aforementioned composers. These groups and individuals are expanding what they may not even know as the gamelan sound and / or technique. The minimalists Philip Glass and Steve Reich both studied gamelan and are huge influences on a lot of today's music, whether it be underground or pop. The American post-rock movement, which developed in the 90's in Chicago and New York, is heavily influenced by both minimalism and gamelan. I've included a track (11) called "I Set My Face to the Hillside" by a group whom many consider to be the fathers of post-rock, Tortoise.

This song displays how gamelan echoes on even in the most unlikely of places, (fairly) popular American music. The connection to Reich is more immediately recognizable, but gamelan's influence is still there. Even my own music and that of my friends' is influenced by gamelan. Gamelan has found a permanent second home in not just the USA, but in the rest of the world as well. Today there are gamelan ensembles all over Asia, Europe, North and South America, Australia, even Africa (and who knows where else? ).

Gamelan not only belongs to Indonesia, it now belongs to the world. You can hear on all the four corners of the globe, if only you wait long enough and seek it out hard enough. You may not even recognize it when you hear, like in the case of Tortoise. It may not be traditional, or even untraditional, gamelan. However, somewhere deep down inside, the essence of gamelan exists and lives on in the west..