The HMC American Gamelan

The HMC American Gamelan: Gus Gil, Joey Qiongyue Hu, Yalai Jiang, Jenny Soonjin Kim, Jinglin Mo, Adam Tang, Robert Welding, Louis Ye, Bill Alves, director 

with video and special guest saxophonist Ulrich Krieger

Sunday, November 24, 2024, 7 p.m.
Drinkward Recital Hall

HMC American Gamelan performs "Breath of the Compassionate" by Bill Alves. Photo courtesy of Bill Alves.

PROGRAM

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.

Imbal-Imbalan is the Javanese term for interlocking parts, a technique in which a melody is created by the alternation between two or more instru-ments. Here those parts are polyrhythmic on many levels, creating a texture that does not really resemble traditional Javanese music, though sometimes such complex patterns are used in the neighboring island of Bali.

A Cornish Lancaran (1986) In his gamelan compositions, Harrison often reflected the ideal meeting of East and West by including Western instruments in concerto or concerto-like forms. In 1981 he wrote Lancaran Samuel using an untraditional combination of Javanese pitches to form his scale. A lancaran (pronounced ”lancharan”) is a Javanese form with a very compressed gong cycle, that is, just 8 beats between each large gong stroke. In 1986 in preparation for a concert at the Cornish School in Seattle, Harrison revised the piece and added a part for a solo saxophone. He named the new piece for this school, where his good friend John Cage had been employed in the late 1930s and had performed Harrison’s works for (Western) percussion ensemble. Here Harrison also takes advantage of the saxophone to bring out the bluesy character of this unusual scale and allow for the soloist’s improvisation within the Javanese form.

Haikai (1986) is the plural form of haiku, the famous Japanese poetic form of 17 syllables. Instead of syllables, Cage has specified 17 events (sounds, collections of sounds, or silences) for each of 8 sections. The events are determined by chance procedures. This is Cage’s only work for gamelan, written for Toronto’s Ever­green Gamelan. Cage said, “I wanted to make some use of the gamelan that, as far as I knew, hadn’t been made. I think that if I’m good for anything, that’s what I’m good for: finding some way of doing things other than the traditional way.”

Breath of the Compassionate (2009) is a type of pattern in Islamic geometric abstract art in which adjacent tiles alternately expand and contract into one another. This sense of visual inhalation and exhalation is known as the “Breath of the Compassionate” after the teachings of Ibn al‘Arabi, who named this universal principle of creation, joining the elements of fire, air, water, and earth. The video was created in tandem with the music and is synchronized with the performance.

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.

Bill Alves 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.

Ulrich Krieger is a saxophone player in the worlds of classical music, contemporary composition, rock, noise, and free improvisation and a composer of chamber music and electronic music. He recorded the complete saxophone works of John Cage, Henry Cowell and Percy Grainger as well being active in pushing the boundaries of saxophone playing in general and the function of the saxophone in rock and noise in particular, collaborating with Lou Reed, Lee Ranaldo, Faust, and Merzbow. His original compositions vacillate between just intonation, silent music, noise, and instrumental electronic, often asking for elaborate amplification, existing in the abysses between classical avant garde and experimental rock, refusing to accept stylistic boundaries. In his distinct style of amplified saxophone playing, he processes refined acoustic and quasi-electronic sounds by amplifying his instrument in various ways. Krieger is a professor for composition, experimental sound practices and rock music at CalArts.


HMC is deeply grateful for the generous support that created The Ken Stevens ’61 Founding Class Concert Series.