17 posts tagged with "gamelan"

So, the ketipung repair has turned out to be partially succesful:

https://youtu.be/TyF6qkMC5SM

The main part of the repair is fine: gluing a thin circle of goatskin on the underside of the larger head worked well.

The problem was reassembling the drum. I tried to put it all back together dry, but it was impossible to rethread the tensioning thongs. After soaking, the ring of smaller head appeared to shrink, and I could not get it to properly sit back on the rim. It was also an incredible effort to try to get the tensioning thongs back in place and pull them tight enough. I ended up with the end of the straps about eight inches looser than they had been.

The woven tensioning rings had collapsed in the process of soaking, and I was struggling enough anyway with trying to get the thing back to gether without figuring out how they were supposed to fit. I used some cable ties instead.

However: the drum is more or less useable now, which counts as some sort of success. I'm going to do some more work on the tensioning rings, there must be a better way than those cable ties…

The 'ketipung' is the smaller of a pair of drums that are used together in the Javanese gamelan.

The original ketipung that came with our gamelan was damaged many years ago. For as long as I have been with the group it has had a 3cm gash in the larger head, and also a similar size split around the edge:

Covered up with gaffa tape the drum was still more or less playable, but far from ideal.

A good number of years ago now we were able to source a replacement drum from Indonesia, and this one has languished in the cupboard. I decided it was time to have a go at a proper repair!

My plan was to dismantle the drum and attempt a glue and leather patch from the inside of the head. This seemed simpler than trying to make an entirely new head: wiser heads than mine advised that this was a much tricker job than it looked!

First step was to get the drum dismantled. This involved soaking the whole thing in a bath for an hour or so, which loosened up the leather thongs enough so that I could release three of them and take them off the drum:

I sourced an 8 inch circle of shaved goatskin online from a supplier of djembe/bodhran heads. The existing heads are water buffalo, but from previous experience with another drum, I felt that the much thinner goatskin would be good for the patch.

After a lot of reading around about glue options – pva? latex? cyanoacrylate? diisocyanate? – I decided on contact adhesive, which was recommended in many places by people who work with leather. I decided to trust a well-known household brand that I was familiar with, rather than order a specialist product:

By good chance, I found a bowl of the exactly the right size for me to mark and then cut down the goatskin to fit. I followed the glueing instructions carefully, in particular making sure to allow enough time for it to be touch dry.

According to the instructions the bond is instant and requires no support, but I decided to bodge together a disc of plywood and the heaviest thing I could find in the house (an old alter bell) to hold it together while curing.

Ok, let's come back tomorrow and see how we did!

Yesterday I was in London with the Gamelan Composer's Forum, an occasional collective brought together by Aris Daryono and Rob Campion to share approaches to writing for the gamelan. This particular event the series is entitled 'The Intimate Gamelan', and features three pieces written for a gadhon-size ensemble, performing in a private house in South London.

There were three new pieces. 'Sang Empu' ('The Maestro') was Aris' piece scored for cello and ciblon, the cello part being taken by Alice Jones. Aris explains that this piece draws both on the cello tradition within kroncong, where the cello imitates the kendhang, and on the ciblon drummming for palaran.

Rob contributed another piece involving Alice on the cello, 'New Moon'. This featured Rob playing the slenthem with two beaters, like a giant gender: I rather like imagining the cello in this piece as a giant rebab!

My own piece was a one-off assemblage of two of my 'openings', flexible bits of bits of material that I reuse in different ways for different performing occasions. The first part was based on an idea entitled 'fibblestix', an accellerating series of percussive clicks that eventually prompt a response form the gender. The second part of 'Two Openings' – as the overall piece is called – is 'Adrift & Afloat' adapted for one pelog and one slendro gender. I'm very happy indeed with the way Rob and Aris approached this piece, very thoroughly prepared, and sounding very convincing indeed the intimate setting of a private house.

A fascinating evening: I'm glad I made the effort to get down to London to take part.

Just for fun, I did an arrangement of Ball of Sardines for one of Red Note's ‘Noisy Nights’: flute violin, trombone, and the conductor playing kethuk. (This is instead of the piece I was going to write, a masterpiece of algorithmic pointilism to be entitled ‘Moment of Indecision’. I may finish that one day…)

Monday 1 February 2000-2200 – Free Summerhall 1 Summerhall Place Edinburgh - EH9 1QH

Over the winter break, I've been working on some new music for gamelan. Following on from Naga Mas' rather spectacular success with our gamelan-in-outer-space piece Gamelan Untethered, we have plans to do something along the same lines, but this time on an underwater theme. Below is a midi demo of something I'm working on for the group: a sort of sampak/kebyar fusion piece, pulling together some of the livelier ideas from the Javanese traditions with a Balinese-inspired melody.

This may prove a little tricky to play!

At last, we get to the piece we have all been working towards for so many months:

Kanda Buwana is the company name of dhalang Matthew Isaac Cohen. I have known Matthew for a number of years, most notably during the period when he was at Glasgow University. Matthew was responsible for bringing dhalang Ki Joko Susilo to Scotland, and Mas Joko, as we called him, was in turn reponsible for a transformation in the approach of Gamelan Naga Mas. He brought to us a great chunk of highly distinctive repertoire, most of it derived from the wayang, which we still play today: a talu, unusual srepeg and sampak, and Joko's arrangements of such pieces as Caping Gunung, Gambang Suling and Wong Donya. Our musical director Signy Jakobsdottir soaked up a year's worth of wayang drumming from Joko: Matthew was always around, playing peking devising wayang in English with Joko, with his then young daughter Hannah climbing all over him in rehearsal. Happy days.

To commemorate 30th anniversary of York's Gamelan Sekar Petak, Matthew created 'Lokananta, or the Playerless Gamelan', interweaving a number of different oral and literary sources with music which John Pawson had garnered from gamelan groups across the UK. Each section of the wayang was accompanied by a different group: in order, Cardiff Gamelan, Gamelan Midwest (comprising Cheltenham and Oxford), Gamelan Scotland (Aberdeen University, Gado-gado and Naga Mas), Gamelan Sekar Petak (York), Gamelan South East (Cambridge, Siswa Sukra, Southbank Gamelan Players), Gamelan South West (Bath Spa, Bristol), and Gamelan North (Chopwell, Dwi Gambira Sari, Durham.)

A full DVD of the show is in preparation, and I'm not going to attempt to describe the whole thing. The high point of the show for me was John Pawson's arrangement of Subakastawa Nyamat. Arrangement is too small a word for it: this was a unique artistic creation, bringing together all of the tunings, players and gamelans in a melding of Kodok Ngorek and Subakastawa. A great wave of building emotion as the first gamelan descended from the heavens, and all the musicians spread around the room gradually joined in singing 'Mideringrat…':

A moment I will never forget.

Though I say so myself, Gamelan Scotland acquitted themselves extremely well: 'blown away' was the response we seemed to get from everyone, not least for the dramatic entrance of our piper Hazen Metro on Margaret Smith's piece Iron Pipes. Another emotional moment for me as Mags sang her arrangement of Ca' the Yowes, and a scary moment for me when I had to lead the entire audience in a brief kecak! I also played Gamelunk, of course, which came off pretty well.

As to the wayang itself: the amplifiation of Matthew's voice was not entirely satisfactory on the musician's side of the screen, and there was much I could not follow. Matthew has a wicked sense of humour, and can be very good at the interplay and in-jokes between the musicians and the puppeteer: again, some of this seemed to get lost. I was impressed with Matthew's puppet technique, including a great trick of catching the limbs of one puppet between another and the screen, used to great effect in some of the fight scenes.

Today's conference activities were somewhat disrupted by a revised schedule of wayang rehersals, which also caused our Scottish group a certain amount of last minute phone calls to try to get everyone there in time. I was fortunately able to make Helen Loth's paper session '"Why gamelan, couldn't we just use steel-pans?": The use of gamelan with special needs groups and populations'. Helen is engaged on doctoral research in this area, and presented an illuminating account of her findings so far. Her application of the term 'special needs groups' is very broad: in effect she is surveying pretty much the a full range of what I would might have called 'community music' with gamelan in the UK. After a literature review, she presented a series of tables full of interesting nuggets of information: for instance, the most common timescale for this kind of work seems to be the (often criticised) one-off workshop, followed by the 1-2 week residency. I was particularly interested in a diagram which laid out people's perceived feelings about the different tunings one could potentialy use, slendro, pelog, Sundanese and two Balinese tunings. I was also fascinated by some of the negative perceptions of gamelan music which she had identified in her study. With the rescheduled day there was little time for discussion: this would have been an interesting area to probe further.

I've now been to two really excellent workshops by Jonathan Roberts. A number of years ago I participated in an illuminating session on wayang puppets and puppetry, and this morning he gave us a great section on gerongan, the unison (mostly male) singing which accompanies Javanese gamelan. In a brave but completely correct move, I think, Jonathan had us do hardly any singing, but spent the majority of the time on Javanese pronunciation. There are a number of sounds in the language which are not found in English, which we worked through in some detail: at times the session almost turned into – bilabial fricative?! – a lecture on phonetics. I still struggle to hear the difference between those d and t sounds, but I think I have clearer idea how to make them.

After the pronunciation, Jonathan took us through some techniques in Javanese vocal production. He started off by busting the myth that it is 'nasal'. Instead, we were to try yawning, to start to feel the action of the pharynx and how that could be brought into action to produce a kind of vocal resonance which he called 'twang'. I can't do it yet, but at least I'm going to stop singing through my nose!

Substantial chunks of the day were taken up by a series of rehearsals for the wayang. The venue was a modern dining hall, with a kind of semicircular shape. Spacially this allowed for a very good arrangement, with room for audience all around, and a separate staging area off to one side for dance and video. The ceiling was perhaps a little low, and the sound less resonant than might have been ideal.

There were seven amalgamated gamelan groups from over the UK who needed to rehearse: around 170 musicians in total! Coordinating all of this was musical director John Pawson, and by and large we got to do what we needed to do, albeit not without a certain amount of last minute stress. A day of hurry up and wait, mostly, with the Scottish group almost missing out on our final fifteen minute run-through.

Now, an interesting aside, but I want to tread carefully, as this concerns an overheard remark. One of the groups was about to rehearse a piece which incorporated clarinet, and someone from one of the other groups was apparently heard to say 'Here comes the sacrilege'. Maybe this was a joke: probably it was a joke. I entirely respect the conservative impulse in traditional musics, but 'sacrilege' seems a very strong word. Of course we were all thinking, 'Wait till he hears the bagpipes!'.

An excellent Indonesian meal was provided for the participants: I had the rendang, always a favourite!

After lunch today we had a joint session, with three people presenting their experience of teaching gamelan in schools and universities. I am presently engaged on a project to attempt to establish a gamelan at Stevenson College Edinburgh (soon to be Edinburgh College), so this area is of particular interest to me.

Ruth Andrews runs a gamelan programme for 12-17 year olds at the International School of Amsterdam, which sounds like it would be a model to aim for. The gamelan is permanently installed in a large room, and all the students have gamelan activity in every year of their studies. Links are made between the cultural and historical perspectives offered by the gamelan and other areas of the curriculum. The gamelan seems to have become a central, shared experience for everyone at the school: a musical ensemble where everyone takes part on an equal level, with no soloists or stars.

Andy Gleadhill is a music officer in Bristol, where gamelan is firmly established as a whole-class music activity within the primary curriculum. There are 66 (!) specially designed sets of gamelan instruments in their schools. Andy presented some material from a particular project which combined Digital Audio Workstation technology – loops and recording in GarageBand – with gamelan, the students working to put together a hybrid version of a Black Eyed Peas song.

Maria Mendonça outlined a degung programme which she runs at Kenyon College in the States. I don't fully understand the American system, but this seems to be one-semester class which can be taken by either music students or students on other degrees. She works largely by ear rather than using notation, and spoke very positively about the level playing field which can be established between trained and untrained musicians. She described a teaching model where the students have a two-hour class, followed by an hour to work as a group on their own. She seems to use peer teaching extensively, on the very simple model of having students swap around and teach each other the parts: a practice I have also employed.

This was an informative and inspirational setting. Particularly impressive was the roster of visiting artists which Maria had managed to get, which included, wait for it, Euis Komariah, Nano S and Balawan! (Ok, perhaps these names may not mean much to non-gamelan specialists… I was about as impressed as I would have been if she said she had got Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington, and Charlie Christian :)

Later in the afternoon, Charlotte Pugh and John Jacobs gathered a large group of us together for a session billed as a gamelan 'improvisation' workshop, although it seems to me it was more like a session on group devising. Charlotte played to us the outline of a medium length phrase in slendro, which we kind of copied back as a group, or in small teams, in an approximate fashion. John then gave us a similar phrase on the pelog instruments which we also worked on in small teams, and then both pieces of material were combined. A very chaotic sound resulted, but with some definite sense of shape. A short discussion ensued as to what we might then do if this was the first week of an eight-week project. Would the work crystalise into a composition, or would one seek to open up the process to a much more free and unpredictable form of improvisation?

An interesting point of practice which I will file away for future use: they had a couple of mics up, and a dedicated engineer who was able to play back to us instantly the short chunk we had just put together. This instant feedback was a great way for the group to be aware of the whole picture, not just what each subgroup was doing.

Our first session today was the fascinating tale of the Dutch group 'Babar Layar', as researched by Maria Mendonça. It's a story worthy of Hollywood: a group of Dutch teenagers who decided to construct their own gamelan under the Nazi occupation, going on to become a key influence on gamelan in Europe and the States. There's a clip of them playing at an Eistedfodd in Wales in 1953 (about 1'50 into that clip).

After Maria's session I took a break, and missed what seems to have been one of the best workshops of the conference 'The Song of the Gong: teaching Javanese gamelan to the early-years with reference to Kodály, Dalcroze & Alexander' by Nikhil Dally. I gather this was a very grounded, embodied, vocal approach to teaching basic gamelan cycles.

Over lunch we had 'a concert of contemporary music for chamber gamelan ensembles, with electronics flute, banjo and vibraphone'. The standout piece was undoubtably Robert Campion's 'Gendèr Study 3'. The idea of making a 'study' for this complex and hard to master instrument makes perfect sense: a tightly structured, sparky piece, performed with great focus and intensity by the composer himself.

Jon Hughes, John Jacobs and Charlotte Pugh had collaborated on a piece which seemed to comprise a layer of devised loops and fragments, recorded and diffused over an ambisonic rig, combined with live ?improvised rebab from Charlotte and planned ostinato material from John on gender paneruus and Sundanse drums. This worked well for me, particularly the rhythmic energy of the piece.

Aris Daryono's piece for two sarons wrung a large number of different ideas from the basic idea of imbal: perhaps too many ideas? Ellen Jordan had devised a collision between the traditional American tune Wayfaring Stranger and Wilujeng, with voice, rebab and banjo. A good idea, with perhaps an over-fiddly execution.

Daniel March's 'Pieces of Five and Three' and Symon Clarke's 'Three Exits' were attractive and carefully written, but perhaps a little abstract for my taste.