Harrison: Gamelan Music

 

1 Philemon And Baukis 12:39
2 Cornish Lancaran 05:36
3 Gending Alexander 13:28


4 Homage To Pacifica - Prelude 06:37
5 Homage To Pacifica - In Honor Of The Divine Mr. Handel 05:48
6 Homage To Pacifica - In Honor Of Mr. Mark Twain 06:13
7 Homage To Pacifica - Interlude 04:24
8 Homage To Pacifica - Ode On Bravo Twenty 00:40
9 Homage To Pacifica - Interlude 2 02:15
10 Homage To Pacifica - Litany 02:20
11 Homage To Pacifica - In Honor Of Chief Seattle 08:46


12 Bubaran Robert 05:19

LOU HARRISON Gamelan Music liner notes

In 1959, Mantle Hood brought to the United States the first full Javanese gamelan for use in his Institute of Ethnomusicology at the University of California Los Angeles. At about the same time, Dennis Murphy began to build gamelan instruments in Wisconsin. The American Gamelan Institute keeps a running record of gamelan in the United States and estimates that, as of this writing, there are about 150 of them, both Indonesian and American made.England and Japan have a half dozen or more each, and Holland has eleven or so. Long ago the Dutch brought Indonesians to work plantations in their South American Guyana. These workers brought gamelan with them, and over the course of time established a special kind of gamelan music which survives in present day Surinam. The great beauty of sound that all of these orchestras produce from their tuned metal keys and wide range of gongs is like no other, and excited Debussy, Ravel, Britten, Eichheim, and McPhee among other western composers. I myself was invited to compose for gamelan by K. R. T. Wasitodiningrat, the greatest living Javanese composer, who has been mentor to almost all North American players (who is known by his familiar name Pak Cokro) and whose own works written in the United States are numerous and beautiful. His invitation was enormously stimulating to me and in the many years since then I've labored to prove worthy of it. My occasional experiments have not fazed him and, indeed, some of his own have been "beyond the pavement," so to speak. He chose the Pelog tuning which is still heard in the Mills Gamelan. From that tuning William Colvig and I have raised the second pitch a little in the Pelog of Gamelan Si Betty. Although Pak Cokro would prefer a lower "pitch one" in our Slendro section, nevertheless he wrote for it, under a collective gamelan grant funded by NEA, what many feel to be his American masterpiece -- "Purnomo Siddi" (The Joy of the Full Moon), which will be heard in the second of these discs. There is a charming and heart­warming phrase in Indonesian -- "main bersama sama" -- which means "playing together", and it carries the full sense of transcultural warmth and understanding. One of my own pieces actually carries this Indonesian title as such, and most of the pieces on this disc carry the idea further in works for violin, saxophone, trumpet, and harp playing as soloists with the gamelan. I have also integrated the harp directly into the gamelan texture, in these instances not as soloist, as indeed I have also done with Latin-American percussion instruments, a virginal, and a western-style chorus.