American gamelan

Harrison and Colvig#

Harrison worked with John Cage in the 40s on percussion compositions with found metal objects, resulting in alternate scaled music. Lou Harrison and William Colvig, who met in 1967 in San Francisco, built a set of tuned percussion instruments that they called “an American gamelan” in order to differentiate it from Indonesian ensembles. It was first used in Harrison’s work La Koro Sutro in 1972. These are now referred to as “Old Granddad”, and Harrison wrote some pieces that can only be played on this set, including La Koro Sutro. Lou Harrison spent some time with a Javanese gamelan in 1976 (when Kyai Udan Mas, now at the University of California, Berkeley, was in residence at San Jose State University). This inspired him and his partner William Colvig to build a gamelan modelled specifically on Udan Mas (in instrumentation, although not in tuning). For this he used aluminum primarily, although the “great gong” was eventually fashioned out of iron. Colvig and Harrison built two large “double” gamelan (meaning that there were instruments in both the pelog and slendro tunings). The first was Si Betty, named for the financial benefactor Betty Freeman. Si Betty was bequeathed to Jody Diamond, and was in residence at Harvard University from 2007 to 2017; in 2018, Si Betty moved to Bucknell University in Lewisburg, PA. The second was named “Si Darius/Si Madeleine” after Darius Milhaud and his wife, because it was while holding the Milhaud chair at Mills College (where the gamelan still resides) that Harrison and Colvig had the support for its construction; a group there (as of 2008) is directed by Daniel Schmidt. Lou Harrison was well known for his compositions for gamelan; he was particularly adept at combining western instruments with his Javanese-style gamelan ensemble. (The scores for all of his gamelan works are published by the American Gamelan Institute).

See also#

• Gamelan outside Indonesia
• List of gamelan ensembles in the United States

External links#

• New music for gamelan by North American composers, 1993 Wesleyan University MA thesis by Peter D. Hadley
• List of gamelan ensembles in the United States at GamelanWiki.org
• United States gamelan directory, hosted by the American Gamelan Institute
• The Mills College Gamelan Si Darius and Si Madeleine Instrument design and construction by Lou Harrison, William Colvig, and Mills students in 1981

Listening#

• New Music America 1981: A Concert of New Gamelan Music (June 13, 1981)
• A New Gamelan, audio recording of Lou Harrison and William Colvig describing the theory and construction of one of the first American Gamelans, followed by a performance on it (free registration required at RadiOM)
• A multimedia slideshow of Gamelan Si Betty at Harvard University