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5.0 out of 5 stars
The Oldest 'Modern' Music, October 5, 2008
This review is from: Explorer: Bali - Gamelan & Kecak (Audio CD)
There's a story - perhaps apocryphal, but a good story - that a Balinese gamelan master once visited a performance by the well-skilled gamelan ensemble of Mills College in Oakland, California. The Balinese listened respectfully and praised the ensemble profusely, but said that there had been something missing... something essential but mysterious. When asked to be specific, he pondered, and then said, "Where are the frogs?"
Gamelan is a nighttime, outdoor music, an orchestra of tuned bells and gongs, with other percussion. Bowed string instruments are ancient in Indonesia also. Possibly the earliest bowed string ancestor of the spike-fiddle traveled north from Indonesia to China, from there west to Scandinavia and from there south to France, to evolve eventually into the viols and violins. Bowed strings, in any case, are among the instruments of the various gamelan ensembles included in this 'sampler' of the music of Bali. A "kecak" vocal ensemble also is heard, and it's a very distinctive sound. Note that this CD is a sampler, based on fairly old ethnographic field recordings. A real evening's gamelan would not be such a diverse selection of fairly short (10 minutes) pieces. The true gamelan might play all night.
If some of this music sounds remarkably like modern American and European 'classical,' that's not an accident. Many 20th C composers, especially Americans, were strongly influenced by gamelan - galvanized musically by their first encounters with it - and incorporated its patterns, scales, percussive effects, and even its instruments into their compositions.
Don't listen to this music if you hate to travel! You might fall in love with it and need to schedule your next vacation in Indonesia.
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