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Gamelan music groups find the beat on U.S. campuses

Maggie Tiojakin Contributor Boston

At 7:45 p.m. at MIT's Kresge Little Theater, 20 men and women, most of them American, entered the stage dressed in cranberry- colored outfits and yellow headgear, with a purple rose tucked behind one ear.

Immediately, they positioned themselves behind a set of gamelan traditional orchestra instruments as the houselights went from dim to complete darkness.

For the next hour and a half a series of high-pitched noises emanated from the stage as the players relentlessly pounded and hammered on gangsa (a middle-register metallophone used to provide melodic ornamentation), rayong (12 small gongs in a set, supported horizontally in a frame), jegogan (metallophones), gong and kendang (traditional drum).

Unfamiliar with the performance but strangely drawn into it, the audience froze in their seats.

"I don't want it to end," said Stacey Collins, a Cambridge resident who came to the show at a friend's recommendation.

Gamelan is nothing new to Western ears; the word entered the English language in the 1860s after gamelan orchestras performed at world expositions in Europe.

Today, however, it is enjoying a revival of sorts; more than 100 universities in the United States have opened gamelan music courses as a part of their curriculum, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is no exception.

Familiarly known as GGT, the Boston-based Balinese gamelan group Gamelan Galak Tika was founded at MIT in 1993 by composer and clarinetist Evan Ziporyn, who took a teaching position at the institute in 1990.

For the past 11 years, the campus has hosted over 50 performances by Galak Tika, and drawn thousands of international audience members from its surrounding community. This year, the group hopes to collect US$60,000 from performance takings and donations to help fund their first trip to Bali next year to attend the International Bali Arts Festival 2005.

"If it happens I will flip for joy," said Rebecca Zook, a member since 2000.

A local musician, she joined Galak Tika at a friend's invitation.

"The first time I learned how to play (gamelan), I felt like the part of my brain I had never used before just split wide open," said Zook, recounting her experience of playing with the ensemble.

"(Gamelan music) is all about internalizing everything until it becomes automatic, like reciting your own phone number or spelling your name."

Zook also started composing gamelan music two years into her membership at GGT.

Sean Mannion, a recent graduate of the New England Conservatory of Music who has been with the group since 1997, admits their are highs and lows to composing music with gamelan.

"Usually, the end result of my music is a fusion of my experience with Balinese gamelan and my own personal musical expression," he said.

Mannion applied to join the group after watching one of Galak Tika's earlier performances, where he "was completely wowed".

For Ziporyn, learning how to play gamelan instruments was a challenge.

"Obviously, I'm not Balinese, nor Indonesian -- it's not my culture," he said.

In the beginning, the 45-year-old musician, who started his career playing and composing jazz music, sensed some trepidation to play gamelan music because of its traditional qualities.

"It was more of a psychological fear," he said, claiming that it had taken him 10 years to begin the process of mastering the ensemble. Once he felt comfortable enough with the instruments, however, playing gamelan came naturally to him.

What drew him to the music was the first record of Balinese gamelan he had purchased in 1979 while studying at Yale University.

"I immediately fell in love with the music," said Ziporyn.

Dying for new materials to incorporate in his own compositions, Zyporin only saw one solution.

"I contacted Michael Tenzer in the fall (that same year)," he recalled.

Tenzer, a world music scholar and professor of music at the University of British Columbia, who had taught at Yale for some period of time, is a renowned expert on Balinese gamelan.

He has written countless papers on Balinese arts and culture, and in 1979, he cofounded a Balinese gamelan group, Gamelan Sekar Jaya (GSJ), based in San Francisco. Tenzer spent a few years living in Bali, hoping to absorb its traditions and music, and it led the group's debut tour to Bali in 1985.

Ziporyn, who was studying gamelan under Tenzer's guidance and already an active member of GSJ, could not afford to miss out on the opportunity.

"Balinese were shocked that Americans could play (gamelan) music, or even wanted to," said Ziporyn of the memorable visit.

Naturally, GSJ was nervous about presenting Balinese culture to the native Balinese, worried they might somehow get it wrong. But Balinese people eventually "forgave (the group)'s inaccuracy in playing the music" and accepted it instead as a gesture of respect, Ziporyn said.

He expects Galak Tika will do just as well, if not better, in its debut tour next year. Even though the group is a mirror image of Gamelan Sekar Jaya, Ziporyn insists that Galak Tika is, in its own merit, an independent and self-sufficient group.

"(With Galak Tika) I wanted to do both traditional and experimental music," says Ziporyn, who, based on this idea, was initially going to name the group Intergalactic Gamelan. Then, after consulting with I Nyoman Catra, a resident artist who helped Ziporyn co-found the group, a new name, one that is not too far from the original idea, was suggested.

Derived from the ancient Sanskrit dialect Kawi, Galak Tika could be translated as: "intense togetherness", "rabid musical gathering" or "crazy ball of yarn".

Ziporyn agreed to go with the second option. "All of these seem to fit (with the group)."

Ziporyn, born in Chicago in 1959, is not your average Joe. As a young boy, he grew up listening to Beethoven and Schubert at home. As a teenager, he discovered jazz and progressive rock. By the time he went to college, his musical interests had reached continents beyond the one he was living in, particularly Africa and Asia.

"My father is a classical violinist and he owned a large collection of world music records," Ziporyn says. "I was always interested in music from other cultures, and I always look to it for ideas and inspiration as a composer."

Ziporyn's life-long affair with Balinese music and dances brought him to the famed island several times, where he received his Kerawitan (music) diploma as a Fulbright scholar from the Denpasar-based Indonesia Institute of the Arts in the late 1980s.

Asked what he thinks of Javanese gamelan, Ziporyn quickly explains that although he appreciates Javanese music, he felt the course of fate brought him to the Balinese variety.

"Javanese music has a kind of depth I really admire; it's just not the place I happened to end up in," he says.

Apart from their historical accounts, musicians have argued that the major difference between Balinese and Javanese gamelan lies strictly in its composition. Whereas Javanese court music tends to be more "improvisational", Balinese music leaves very little room, if at all, for improvisation during performances.

According to Tenzer, Balinese musicians "rehearse to perfect their music as a unified musical expression", instead of individual ones.

Regardless, Ziporyn adds that, for future reference, he hopes Galak Tika will consider an interest in Javanese music, which he views as something "very unknown in the West".

Influenced by the works of Bela Bartok, a 20th century Hungarian composer who incorporated most of his compositions with traditional elements, Ziporyn started using a similar technique for his own works.

"I want to present something to (the American audience) in a frame that they understand."

That something was Balinese gamelan music,"because it doesn't really matter how beautiful or exotic a music is; when people don't understand the context of the music, they immediately shut down."

Aneh Tapi Nyata (Strange But Real, 1995), Amok! (1996), Kebyar Kebyar (2002), Ngaben (2003), and Ngeredana (2004) are a few examples of Ziporyn's blended gamelan compositions. For the world premiere of Ngeredana on May 14 at MIT's Kresge Little Theater in Cambridge, Ziporyn collaborated with Wu Man, a pipa (plucked instrument in the flute family) virtuoso, who joined Galak Tika in performance.

Comprised of 30 members, mostly from MIT community, Gamelan Galak Tika is hardly something that can be taken for granted. They give five to six performances a year, some of them hosted by MIT, some others by musical conservatories or colleges in and around the East Coast.

To perfect their craft, the members work closely with another distinguished Balinese artist in residence who has been involved with the group from the very beginning, Desak Made Suarti Laksmi.

"I think we're doing something that would be of interest to Balinese," said Ziporyn, who had just completed a month-long production of Oedipus at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, for which he wrote the musical accompaniment.

Commenting on what is in store for the group in the next few years, Ziporyn states that they hope to continue preserving and promoting Balinese arts and culture as a part of Boston's multicultural scene.

In a city of five million people, Galak Tika stands as the only representative of a Balinese gamelan group. This alone is an accomplishment. "It makes one feel that one has contributed a little to the community," he added.