MicroFest: The HMC American Gamelan and The Smudges
The Smudges:
Jeff Gauthier, violin
Maggie Parkins, cello
The HMC American Gamelan:
Jarred Allen, Avalon Feiler, John Gann, Kylee
Graper, Shivani Manivasagan, Hanna Porter, Kye Shi, Vivian Tao; Bill Alves, director
Sunday, May 1, 2022, 7 p.m.
Drinkward Recital Hall
Also Livestreamed
https://hmc-edu.zoom.us/j/99502004926
Photo courtesy of the Harvey Mudd College American Gamelan.
PROGRAM
Gending Demeter
Lou Harrison
The HMC American Gamelan:
Jarred Allen, Avalon Feiler, John Gann, Kylee Graper, Shivani Manivasagan, Hanna Porter, Kye Shi, Vivian Tao; Bill Alves, director
Jarred Allen, Avalon Feiler, John Gann, Kylee Graper, Shivani Manivasagan, Hanna Porter, Kye Shi, Vivian Tao; Bill Alves, director
Elegy for Bill Colvig
Bill Alves
The HMC American Gamelan
Jeff Gauthier, violin
Jeff Gauthier, violin
Palindrones (for B.B.)
Jeff Gauthier
The Smudges:
Jeff Gauthier, violin
Maggie Parkins, cello
Jeff Gauthier, violin
Maggie Parkins, cello
Entangled Tango
Jeff Gauthier
The Smudges
Music of Chants (in memory of John Cage)
Guy Klucevsek
The Smudges
Sailendra
Peter Moran
The HMC American Gamelan
Maggie Parkins, cello
Maggie Parkins, cello
The Presence in the Time Between
Bill Alves
The HMC American Gamelan
The Smudges
The Smudges
The Harvey Mudd College American Gamelan is an ensemble of traditional gongs and metallophones commissioned from a master instrument maker in Java, Indonesia. The concept of using traditional Indonesian instruments, techniques, and forms, but playing newly composed, non-traditional compositions comes from Lou Harrison, who built his own "American Gamelan" in the early 1970s. These instruments are tuned to just intonation versions of the traditional Javanese tuning systems, and each instrument exists in two versions, one for the five-tone slendro scale and another for the seven-tone pelog scale. This set of instruments has been in residence at Harvey Mudd College of the Claremont Colleges since 2000.
Gending Demeter (1981): Lou Harrison was first entranced with the bell-like tones of the Javanese gamelan orchestra as a young man in the 1930s. Unwilling to wait until he had access to such instruments, Harrison and his partner Bill Colvig built their American Gamelan in the early 1970s. Finally, in the summer of 1974, he had the opportunity to study and play a traditional Javanese gamelan in Berkeley California, and soon after he met one of the great Javanese masters of this music, Ki K. P. H. Wasitodiningrat, familiarly known as Pak Cokro. It was Pak Cokro who first encouraged Harrison that he write for the Javanese gamelan, and Harrison soon began turning out a large body of works for the ensemble. As Harrison had always been an enthusiastic reader of Greek and Roman classics, he composed a series of works named for Greek gods, often reflecting those archetypes in the musical character of the pieces. Demeter was the Greek goddess of the fertility of the earth, and by honoring her, Harrison also symbolically reflected his own environmental concerns.
Lou Harrison (1917-2003) was one of the great American composers of the twentieth century and a pioneer in art of cultural hybrids and alternate tunings. As a young man in California he studied with Henry Cowell and Arnold Schoenberg and with his friend John Cage established the first concert series devoted to new music for percussion. In 1943, Harrison moved to New York, where he made a name for himself as a composer, critic, and conductor, premiering the Third Symphony of Charles Ives. However, to escape the stress and noise of the city, he moved back to California in 1953, where his relative isolation was the perfect environment to study his interests in Asian music and just intonation. In the 1960s he traveled to Asia, studying Korean and Chinese music. In the 1970s, he began studying and performing Javanese gamelan music and would produce a remarkable body of nearly 50 pieces for the orchestra, often in combinations with Western instruments. By the 1990s, the world began to catch up with Lou Harrison, who by the time of his death was recorded on dozens of CDs and was the subject of many festivals and tributes. In 2001 he was the guest of honor at the MicroFest conference here in Claremont.
Elegy in Memory of Bill Colvig was written shortly after the death in 2000 of Colvig, who designed and built the first American Gamelan in 1970. He was a wonderful musician, instrument designer and builder, mountain climber, and collaborator with his life partner composer and microtonal pioneer Lou Harrison. Like many, I was charmed by Bill's energy, good humor, love of the earth, and his puns.
Bill Alves is a composer, video artist, and writer engaged at the intersections of musical cultures and technology. He studied the music of Java and Bali during a 1993-94 Fulbright fellowship and is now the director of the HMC American Gamelan. He is the co-author of Lou Harrison: American Musical Maverick and author of Music of the Peoples of the World is now in its third edition from Cengage/Schirmer. His recordings include The Terrain of Possibilities, Imbal-Imbalan, Mystic Canyon, and Guitars and Gamelan. His work with computer animation pioneer John Whitney inspired his abstract computer animations with music, now released by the Kinetica Video Library as Celestial Dance. He has extensively explored non-standard tunings in his work and is a co-director of MicroFest, the Southern California festival of microtonal music. He is on the faculty of Harvey Mudd College.
The Smudges came into being in 2018 when cellist Maggie Parkins and violinist/composer Jeff Gauthier decided to expand their traditional duo repertoire to include electronics and improvisations and compositions by Jeff and friends. Their ability to improvise allows them to engage with various styles as they smudge the boundaries of contemporary music. Their first album, Song and Call was released in February 2022 on Cryptogramophone Records.
Maggie Parkins is a cellist, teacher, and enthusiastic chamber musician with a passion for new music which she performs with Eclipse Quartet, Brightwork newmusic, and Mojave Trio. As an improviser Maggie has worked with the Jazz Passengers, Anthony Braxton, Caetano Veloso, Bjork, Zeena Parkins, Billy Childs, Nels Cline, and The Smudges. As an orchestral performer, she has performed with conductors Seiji Ozawa, Leonard Bernstein, Simon Rattle, Oliver Knussen, and Andre Previn. Maggie has performed at prestigious festivals around the world including Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, Banff Centre, Festival Internacional de Musica de Cadaques (Spain), Heidelberg Castle Festival, Spoleto, Taktlos Festival (Switzerland), Scarlatti Festival (Naples), Tanglewood Festival, Bach Aria Festival and Wels Festival Unlimited. Maggie attended Eastman School of Music and has a doctorate from SUNY at Stony Brook. She was a professor at the UC Irvine for 19 years and currently teaches cello at Pomona College. An active recording artist, Maggie has recorded extensively with harpist Zeena Parkins, accordionist Guy Klusevsek, The Smudges, and Eclipse, and can be heard on the Tzadik, Avan, New World, Bridge, Cryptogramophone and Victo labels.
Jeff Gauthier has performed regularly with the Los Angeles Music Center Opera, Los Angeles Master Chorale, Long Beach Symphony, Oregon Bach Festival and the Carmel Bach Festival. As an improvising violinist Jeff has performed and recorded with artists like Nels Cline, Alex Cline, Yusef Lateef, Adam Rudolph, Mark Dresser, Myra Melford, Vinny Golia, Todd Sickafoose, Phillip Greenlief, and many others. His own ensemble, The Jeff Gauthier Goatette has recorded six CDs for the Nine Winds and Cryptogramophone labels. As executive director of the Jazz Bakery for seven years, Jeff managed one of the most historic jazz organizations in Southern California. He was co-artistic director of the acclaimed Angel City Jazz Festival with Rocco Somazzi for several years, and is currently Associate Director of Piano Spheres. Jeff is a graduate of California Institute of the Arts.
Accordionist/composer Guy Klucevsek has been a major contributor to the accordion renaissance of the last 25 years. His music reverberates with sounds of the ballroom, the beer garden and the concert hall, fusing elements of regional accordion styles with jazz and avant-garde music. He has performed and/or recorded with Laurie Anderson, Bang On a Can, Brave Combo, Anthony Braxton, Anthony Coleman, Dave Douglas, Bill Frisell, Rahim al Haj, Robin Holcomb, Kepa Junkera, the Kronos Quartet, Natalie Merchant, Present Music, Relâche, Zeitgeist, and John Zorn.
Sailendra draws both on very free rhythms and very fixed rhythms. The opening phrases speed up and slow down to create unpredictable rhythmic interactions as they overlap. The parts come together in fixed interlocking patterns idiomatic of traditional gamelan playing to accompany the cello solo. The cello and gamelan then combe together in rhythmic unison, before returning to a free rhythm at the end, eliciting natural harmonics from the instruments in their final passages. This was my first gamelan composition to use only the five-note slendro scale, so it is named after the ancient Indonesian dynasty, the Sailendra, from which it is thought the scale derives its name.
Peter Moran is a composer and music director whose interests include microtones and tuning systems, postcard miniatures, and sacred choral music. He studied music at University College Dublin and the University of York, UK. He has won several international composition prizes and he has held artistic residencies at University College Dublin, the soundSCAPE Contemporary Music Festival in Italy, and the Frédéric Chopin Conservatoire in Paris. His music has featured in concerts and festivals across Europe, Asia and North America and is released on Ergodos Records and Farpoint Recordings. Peter is the founder and director of five Javanese gamelan groups in Dublin since he acquired for Ireland's National Concert Hall a complete double gamelan as a gift from the Sultan of Yogyakarta in 2014. Since then, his ensembles have performed traditional and contemporary gamelan music across Ireland, the UK and Indonesia.
The concert series is currently open to the public. Students, faculty and staff of the Claremont Colleges must show Claremont Colleges ID. Audience members from outside the Claremont Colleges must provide proof of vaccination and be asymptomatic. Wearing a mask is required. The Covid-19 guidelines will be updated as new information becomes available.