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Gamelon in the West
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Of all of the worlds’ non-western music, none seems to be as familiar and at the same time as alien as Indonesian gamelan. Gamelan utilizes it’s own, highly intricate, notation system under the context of large group orchestration much like a lot of western music. This fact makes gamelan easily dissectible and imitable for western scholars and composers. It is also the main reason for such a high level of ethnomusicological study done in Indonesia. Be that as it may, it is the other worldly sound of gamelan that truly captured many a westerner’s attention and imagination. Gamelan’s first appearance in the west is a debated subject, but it is agreed upon that individual instruments (as opposed to whole ensembles) were imported from the East Indies to Europe in the early 19th century. The very first gamelan outside of South-east Asia was brought to England by a man named Stamford Raffles. He had just finished his governorship of Java in 1816 and decided to bring a taste of the wonderful music he had heard home. He brought more than a taste. Raffles brought home two entire gamelan sets (just instruments) to Buckinghamshire, England. One was given to the Verney family to be put on display at the Clayden House, and the other was given to the British Museum’s Department of Ethnology. Even though the west now had the capability of making gamelan music, it was a long time before the west actually heard gamelan. The instruments brought over by Raffles were used more in sound experiments by acousticians and instrument inventors than to actually make music. In fact, it wasn’t until the latter half of the 19th century that gamelan was actually heard outside of South-east Asia. The first documented case of a gamelan ensemble outside of South-east Asia that I could find was actually an ensemble comprised of Dutch civil servants as opposed to Indonesians. The date was 5/5/1857 and a group of civil servant trainees from Delft, on their way to the East Indies, performed a ‘garebeg’ for family and friends during their procession on their way out of town. I’m not exactly sure how they knew about ‘garebeg’, but the event is documented in Grove’s Dictionary of Music (Grove’s, vol. 9, p.506). A Javanese ensemble played at the Arnhem exhibition in the Mangkunegaran Palace in 1879 marking the first expedition of an entire gamelan ensemble to Europe. After that first appearance, gamelans slowly started to appear at exhibitions all across Europe and America. The next appearance I’m aware of occurred in 1882 at the London Aquarium and then again at the 1883 International and Colonial Exhibition in Amsterdam. America’s first introduction to gamelan took place in 1883 at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago. This ensemble actually left their instruments to be kept at the Field Museum in Chicago It was the next appearance of gamelan in Europe that may have had the largest affect, making it the most notable. The year was 1889 and the place was the Exposition Universelle in Paris when Claude Debussy (amongst other composers) was first introduced to the sounds of the Orient and gamelan more specifically. The 27 year old fell in love with Asian music and started to incorporate Oriental melodies, scales (pentatonic), and titles (Pagodes) into his pieces. The first appearance of a Balinese gamelan orchestra playing in Europe occurred at the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris. It was just a little later that the long time Debussy student, Edgard Varese, began to also show an interest in Asian music. Varese, charmed by the sounds of the Orient, began to spread his ardency for the music amongst his American counterparts after emigrating to America. It was not the music itself that captivated Varese and other east-meets-west pioneers, but the realization that musical systems outside of the western twelve tone system could be employed to compose complex arrangements in a semi-western fashion. While none of Varese’s compositions can be said to have a direct link to gamelan, it is important to note the influence that Asian music had on him.
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