Javanese gamelan revives a hit in Chicago
By Riyadi
CHICAGO (JP): The sounds of a Javanese gamelan orchestra resonate in the windy city of Chicago, sending heavenly melodies from Indonesia and soothing some of the sad feelings about the country.
Four performances by the Friends of Gamelan (FROG), the only gamelan group in Chicago, have entertained Chicagoans during the last few months at the Brookfield Zoo, the summer picnic at Aurora, the Field Museum and the North Shore Center for the Performing Arts at Skokie.
In early October, the Friends, comprising Americans with an interest in Javanese percussion instruments, will again give a gamelan demonstration for Chicagoans, and this time at the prestigious Rotunda Symphony Center for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra's Day of Music.
Gamelan has been in Chicago for 106 years, and yet it is still an alien sound for most people in the city, including Kate Shorney, a graduate student at Columbia College.
"It's totally strange music to me, but it's beautiful," Shorney said after attending an Indonesian cultural show at Skokie.
But for most of the 50 FROG members, gamelan is already a part of their lifestyle.
They love playing gamelan and giving performances, although it means they have to put aside their free time to transport the instruments. For a one-hour demonstration at the Field Museum, for instance, FROG members had to spend at least 10 hours to prepare the instruments, perform and then take the instruments back home to the Rockefeller Memorial Chapel at the University of Chicago.
Carolyn Johnson, a FROG member, said: "It's really laborious. For that performance, I left home at 8 in the morning and got home again at 8 in the evening."
Nevertheless, FROG members are more than happy to give performances and gamelan classes to the public. This fall, classes will start on Oct. 5 at the University of Chicago. And two major performances are already scheduled for the year 2000. The first is for the University of Chicago's ensemble concert in January and the other is for a spring concert at the Friends gamelan home base, the Rockefeller Memorial Chapel.
The first Chicago performances of the gamelan were heard in a bamboo theater built as part of a Javanese village at the World's Columbian Exposition in 1893. There, the resounding, rhythmic sounds of gamelan accompanied puppet plays and dance dramas depicting Javanese epics.
The Field Museum's Asian curator, Bennet Bronson, said the 24- piece pelog (tune with seven intervals of unequal size per octave) gamelan then belonged to G.C.F.W. Mundt, a tea plantation owner at Parakan Salak, Sumedang, West Java.
Mundt, together with E.J. Kerkhoven, the owner of a tea plantation in Sinagar, also in West Java -- both members of a Java-Chicago syndicate -- shipped the gamelan, along with gamelan players and dancers, to Chicago and established the Javanese village for the exposition. The village, the gamelan and the Javanese participants were all part of a promotional effort to sell tea and coffee.
Musicologist Sue Carter-De Vale said these same Dutch entrepreneurs sponsored similar Javanese exhibits at the Amsterdam Exposition in 1883 and the Paris Exposition in 1889.
The gamelan, traditional dancing and puppet performances at the Columbian Exposition made the Javanese village one of the most popular sites at the exposition, the Chicago Sunday Tribune wrote in a four-column front page headline story titled "Glimpse Into Java" on July 2, 1893.
"The Javanese village is as faithful a reproduction of the real houses and public buildings as possible. The theater corresponds to the council chamber in the royal village, and the masagit (Mohammedan church) which stands opposite it, bears a close resemblance in general style of construction to the Sultan's dwelling," the newspaper reported.
Commenting on the Javanese village, Harper's Weekly wrote in its Oct. 21, 1893 edition: "It is quite safe to say, and that is that whoever missed the Javanese village missed one of the most alluring of all the side shows."
On the gamelan, Harper's wrote: "Indeed, the Javanese music is much more condoling than most of the Oriental orchestras that set the passer's teeth on edge in the Midway."
On the dances, it said: "The costuming is gorgeous, and the Javanese drama most curious and interesting."
Because of its popularity, Benjamin Ives Gilman, the first person to use the phonograph for the scientific analysis of music, went to the Javanese village to record the gamelan performance. Gilman used 33 wax cylinders to record the gamelan.
The original wax cylinder recordings of gamelan are now kept by the Library of Congress.
Johnson, a content specialist at the Field Museum's Sound from the Vaults exhibit, said: "These are the first known recordings of any gamelan."
The recording was made on Sept. 23, 1893, at 1.30 p.m. According to a transcript by the Library of Congress, Gilman announced at the beginning of the recording: "On the following cylinders, we propose to take the 1:30 p.m. performance in the Javanese theater. This consists of five parts. First, Lagu Rame or usual welcome. Second, Sundanese dance or tandak performed by dancing girls from West Java. Third, Sundanese wayang, representing (volume drops, inaudible) ... of Java. Fourth, Javanese wayang performed by the Javanese dancing girls from the court of His Majesty the Sultan of Solo (Surakarta), Central Java. Fifth, American national airs performed by the gamelan or orchestra. I shall try to indicate the points of differentiation between these five parts."
Johnson said the Sundanese gamelan composition in the recording was an advanced one and was played beautifully, but the Central Javanese composition was a simple one. "It was really boring. They played a simple lancaran (musical piece), and played it over and over again with no variation and no elaboration."
At the end of the exposition, the gamelan sets, puppets, dancing costumes, masks and angklung (tuned bamboo rattle) were all auctioned. The Field Museum, which was established earlier that year, purchased all of them except the angklung. The museum put the gamelan in storage for most of the time.
Since then, the gamelan never attracted the interest of Chicagoans until the 1970s when it received popularity among universities in the U.S.
Currently, there are about 80 gamelan groups scattered across the country, mostly at universities or colleges. The most popular gamelan in the U.S. is the Central Javanese one, followed by the Balinese and then Sundanese.
In 1978, the 1893 gamelan was taken out of the museum's storage, restored and used for training classes, only to be retired in 1982 for fear it would deteriorate with regular use, said Johnson.
Some of the gamelan students from the Field Museum formed the nonprofit Friends of Gamelan to raise US$5,000 to buy a new set of 60-piece gamelans from Central Java and another $3,000 to ship them to Chicago. The Friends' gamelan has double tunings: pelog and slendro (tune with five nearly equal intervals).
All the Friends needed was a name for their gamelan, but that could only be bestowed by a Javanese dalang (puppet player), said Linda Maher, another FROG member.
In 1994, a female dalang came to Chicago, and she was asked to bestow the gamelan. A big ceremony was then held, complete with a traditional rice cone, a roasted chicken and a package of Javanese incense offering. The Friends' gamelan, the dalang announced, would be known as Nyai Panjang Sari (venerable essence of gamelan music).
Unlike many other gamelan sets which normally have male names starting with Kyai, FROG's gamelan has a female name with Nyai.
"That's what I like, she gave a female name to our gamelan," Maher said.
Nyai Panjang Sari then rested in a grand room at the Roosevelt University for years until it was moved to its current home at the Rockefeller Memorial Chapel.
The Nyai Panjang Sari, however, is not a good quality gamelan set as it is made of iron, and the Friends want a better quality one, said its chairman Douglas Hudson.
"Once we have the money, we want to buy a new set of bronze gamelan," Hudson said.