ABSTRACT
It has been more than thirty years since I first heard the exotic sounds of a gamelan ensemble emanating from somewhere in the performing arts building at the University of California at Santa Cruz, where I was a first-year music major. I was sitting in an eartraining class, practicing singing and identifying intervals with my classmates, when all of a sudden an unearthly, ponderous, utterly unidentifiable noise penetrated the walls. It wasn’t particularly loud, but it was quite distinctive and strangely compelling; it certainly made a startling contrast with the weak singing sounds my fellow students and I were making. “It sounds like they got the gamelan going,” the teacher commented, and I wondered to myself, “what on earth could a gamelan be?” I made it a point to search out the room in which this strange thing was kept, where I discovered that a “gamelan” was a collection of odd-looking percussion instruments. (Somehow, I knew instinctively that the term referred to the whole collection of instruments; I never asked the question I have since heard countless first-timers ask—“which one is the gamelan?”) Unlike the musical instruments to which I was accustomed, such as pianos and guitars, with their neat symmetry and manufactured perfection, there was a sort of Fred Flintstone quality about these gamelan instruments—each key and pot was irregularly shaped and sized and attached to the intricately hand-carved stands with uneven nails or rustic-looking ropes. The golden metal from which the keys and pots were made seemed to glow mysteriously. I found the whole package to be invitingly inscrutable; it looked timelessly ancient, mystical, and most definitely exotic.
