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Vocabulary

1. obscurity




2. niche




3. complexities




4. delve




5. notable




6. integration



7. penchant




8. atonal




9. alienate




Article : Gamelan – Inspiring foreigners, ignored by locals

While hidden in semi-obscurityback home, Indonesia’s gamelan instruments have managed to penetrate the experimental mindsets of Western musicians.

There are several forms of gamelan, depending on the region. There is the Javanese gamelan, the Sundanese gamelan and the Balinese gamelan, among others. Each of them has a different sound, scale, playing method and tools.

A gamelan ensemble can consist of 20 or fewer players playing various bronze bell-like instruments, brass glockenspiels, stringed zithers, wooden flutes or gongs.

The gamelan is largely overlooked as a niche art form in mainstream Indonesian society. However, it has attracted the appreciation of musicians in the West because of its interesting complexities. This is the topic that American PhD candidate and ethnomusicologist Jay M. Arms has chosen to delve deeper into. He feels that the gamelan, with its many forms, details and techniques is worth researching about as a result of its hidden significance in the global music character today.

The first notable exposure of the gamelan to the West can be traced back to the 1889 Paris Expo, during which a then-budding French composer by the name of Claude Debussy came across a Javanese gamelan orchestra and fell in love with its soft dissonant tones and non-rhythmic structure. He then incorporated the sounds of the Javanese gamelan into his piano pieces.

Debussy’s integration of the gamelan’s scale and lack of dominant melodic structure later spread to the works of his fellow Impressionist-era peers, including Erik Satie, who himself had a penchant for composing piano works that lacked time signature and dominating melodies.

In recent decades, the gamelan has made its way further into contemporary Western experimental artists’ music, as current artists have begun to take up the ambient, atonal sounds for use in their music. In the 1980s, British progressive rock band King Crimson aimed to recreate the atonality and free structure of the gamelan in three of its albums in that decade.

…….

“It’s funny that you westerners want to come here and study the gamelan, because the people [in Indonesia] don’t really care about it!” Arms recalled the driver’s words during a recent lecture at the IKJ.

Julianti pinpointed that incident as a direct example of class distinction regarding the gamelan, because only a certain group of people in Indonesia really do care about it.

“There is a class distinction in Indonesia and in the United States regarding the gamelan, because it’s a matter of access. This can also serve as a critique of the avant-garde movement’s habit of exclusivity because that movement tends to alienate those who they feel they cannot understand, in this case, gamelan,” she said.

In the US, the only place that one can learn the gamelan is at a university, Arms explained.

It is also notable that because gamelan sets built in America rarely use the standard bronze or copper used in Indonesian sets, instead opting for more accessible materials such as brass, steel or iron, the sound of the American sets is very different.

………..

“People in America have reached out to our culture, proving that they are genuinely interested. It’s up to us to develop the will to maintain this art, and [Arms’ research] proves that if we need help from abroad to do so, it’s available,” she said.

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Taken from The Jakarta Post :

http://www.thejakartapost.com/life/2...by-locals.html