jwilzewske: ligeti

Showing posts with label ligeti. Show all posts

Wednesday, February 2, 2011

Party of Two? Valentines, Chamber Music & Health

I n writing a successful quartet, composers have to turn inward and look for their most personal musical message. So also do the performers. There is no room for deception—nothing to disguise it and make it superficially attractive. Seduction or manipulation will be obvious and will fail. Everything in quartets and other small chamber forms is about honesty and mutual discovery.”
— Saul Bitran, violinist, Cuarteto Latinoamericano.

T he only way to reanimate these pieces is to play them with friends... When you’re ‘on’, not only are you breathing together, but you are also feeding off each other. You’re playing with someone who does something spontaneously and you respond, also spontaneously, which takes your performance and experience together to another level entirely.”
— Kathryn Selby, pianist, Macquarrie Trio.

C hamber music, besides being very intimate, is substantially concerned with understanding the other performer(s) on deep levels—doing this in an open and undirected way—and concerned, too, with being generous and responsive to the significant other(s) and creating valuable and meaningful things together with them.

I n that regard, almost any piece of chamber music might be considered to be coherent with the values celebrated on Valentine's Day. Almost all chamber music nurtures a sense of closeness, immediacy, and anticipation.

Y ou want something that is already at least slightly familiar and known to be pleasurable to and enjoyed by your partner—so there will be low risk of disappointment and the greatest probability for delight.

T o heighten the anticipation, an experience that is already familiar can be the subject of hints or other gestures to plan for the experience and savoring that experience. But in order to be worthy of anticipation, the thing hinted at must also be novel in some way, not routine.

B ut there are side-effects each piece can have—inherent objective, physiologic consequences (unintended or otherwise) that accompany the music’s subjective emotional/cognitive/inspirational effects (see Lemmer and other links below). A little quickening of the pulse and transient high blood pressure is what you are after. What I had not expected is how long (many hours) it lasts!

Understand distinctions between history, entitlement, and managerial theories of the self and the significant other.
Avoid defensive, self-protective ‘Model I’ patterns of interpersonal interaction that blame others and limit learning.
Emphasize shared goals, fearlessness, and equality—mutual influence in relationship.
Emphasize modesty of proportion, pleasure of execution, resiliency in the face of set-backs, and durability of vision and passion.
Love is an organization—one that is deserving of deliberate, rational, caring management.
Love is an organization that, like any other enterprise, has explicit and implicit processes—and denying this or neglecting the processes can only but lead to chaos, low client satisfaction, and investor disappointment.
Communicate and critically test each other’s assumptions and beliefs openly and often.
Combine mutual advocacy with inquiry.
Combine shared exertion with shared relaxation and a minimum of irritability and aggression.

Lemmer, Rat Valentines, Hypertension, & Ligeti Quartets

M ozart’s and Haydn’s music had only a slight reducing effect on the heart rate of the spontaneously-hypertensive (SHR) rats, and the blood pressure remained unaffected. The normotensive WKY rats showed no reaction at all. Ligeti’s String Quartet No. 2, on the contrary, caused a massive increase in SBP of around 20 to 30mmHg in the SHR rats which remained discernable over more than 10 hours. The WKY rats also reacted to Ligeti’s music with a raised SBP.”
— Björn Lemmer, Institut für Experimentelle und Klinische Pharmakologie und Toxikologie, Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg.

I am not saying to eschew the Ligeti in favor of Mozart or Haydn for Valentine’s Day—not at all; far from it. In fact, the Ligeti may be precisely what you two will prefer on that adventurous intimate occasion. You are looking for a string quartet whose climax is like the last lines of a poem that choke you up a bit; focus the mind and heart, so to say. Sort of like catching sight of the sea—unexpectedly; together. Twenty or 30 mmHg of higher blood pressure for a few hours is precisely what you two are looking for...

C oming back through the Chiba coast I thought of Shonagon’s list—of all those signs one has only to name to quicken the heart, just name. To us, a sun is not quite a sun unless it’s radiant; a spring not quite a spring unless it is limpid. There is a way of saying boat, rock, mist, frog, crow, hail, heron, chrysanthemum—a concise way that includes them all, implies them all.”
— Chris Marker, Sans Soleil.

Saturday, April 17, 2010

Quadrivium Novum: Unity with Autonomy

A [filmic] image combined with a sound placed in a context--none of which matches expectations--creates a metaphor and invites an individual search for meaning at a physical, emotional and psychological level (in that order).”
— Paul Rudy, UMKC Conservatory.

T he performance last night at Unity Temple by the electroacoustic quartet Quadrivium Novum was the final event of the 2009-2010 season for the Kansas City Electronic Music & Arts Alliance, KCEMA.

Q uadrivium is comprised of Rebecca Ashe (flute), Kari Johnson (piano), Cheryl Melfi (clarinet), and Mark Stauffer (cello). [‘Quadrivium’ may not only allude to their quartetness but also to each member’s equal, autonomous role in bringing new, disruptive repertoire and techniques to the ensemble’s collaborations—much as though each member were a canonical ‘subject’ to be studied, learned, mastered?] Each of Quadrivium’s members is associated with the UMKC Conservatory’s Community Music & Dance Academy.

Daniel Eichenbaum: Orbit (flute, clarinet, live electronics; 20 min)
Jason Bolte: Scrap Metal (prepared piano solo, fixed media; 10 min)
Mara Gibson: E:Vespers (flute, clarinet, piano, digital audio; 8 min)
Andrew Seager Cole: A Slow Unraveling (flute, clarinet, cello, piano, electronics, video; 8 min)
William Lackey: The World Falls Asleep (cello, digital recording of cello; 10 min)
Christopher Biggs: Bioluminescence (flute, clarinet, piano, digital audio, video; 12 min)

E ach of the works was rewarding, and I should apologize for not commenting here on each of them. Let me at least offer a few impressions of the three pieces that were world premieres: ‘E:Vespers’, ‘Orbit’, and ‘A Slow Unraveling’.

M ara Gibson’s ‘E:Vespers’, a ‘fantasie’ or tone-poem composed on the occasion of observing an eclipse, was remarkable for the organic, natural way in which the digital audio functions as an equal to the three live performers. The partitioning of human assistants and digital tracks programs all the tasks into one application, run by a single assistant at the console workstation in the center of the performance space. This approach does not ‘reduce’ the interpretation to ‘assistant vs. trio’ duality, nor does it risk dichotomizing the technology and the performers at the front of the performance space. Rather, with the house lights dimmed, the effect is one of a thoroughly integrated ‘whole’ in which the individual parts reveal their character and ideas—beginning with the tolling of delicate, repeated notes by the piano.

T he technology actually helps to maintain the textural and timbral cohesion of the other parts (clarinet, flute, piano), whose acoustic spectra are otherwise diverse. Unlike some electroacoustic works in which the technology is intrusive or merely ornamental; unlike works where the digital tracks, having been laid down and sequenced in advance, are inflexible and impose too much determinism on the live executants. In the case of Gibson’s ‘E:Vespers’, the composer is still the creator, and the 3 performers and 1 assistant are the directors in charge of interpreting the musical elements of the work, whether they are for an acoustic instrument or combined with a computer sequencer. The performers are responsible to recreate the world the composer has envisioned: here, a contemplative, reverent, panoramic one—punctuated with worries but ultimately beneficent—captured in the twilight of the eclipse and return of the sun after 'totality'.

W e orbit and float in our space gondola and watch the oceans and islands and green hills of the continent pass by at five miles per second. We move silently and effortlessly past the ground. I want to say ‘over the ground’ as I write this, but remember: in space, your sense of up or down is completely gone and my description must reflect this fact. In addition, the breathtaking speed of the ship is an odd and confusing contrast to the feel of perpetually floating within the spaceship. You do not sit before the window to view the passing scene, certainly not down upon it. Are you speeding past oceans and continents, or are you just hovering and watching them move beside you?”
— Joseph Allen, U.S. astronaut.

D aniel Eichembaum’s ‘Orbit’ is an antiphonal piece for flute, clarinet, and electronics. Rebecca Ashe and Cheryl Melfi are dressed in black, in near-total darkness, barefoot. They perform Orbit’s several movements as a duo, gliding anticlockwise between the four ‘stations’ that are set up on-stage. The stations are separated around the perimeter of a 10-meter circle whose perigee is closest to the audience and apogee farthest away.

T he ephemeral, ambient quality of electroacoustic elements is abundant, at times dominant. But it is important to note that the digital tracks are derived entirely from recordings of Rebecca’s and Cheryl’s own playing, breathing, moving—not from Eichenbaum’s digital waveform library or independent geek artistry in a vacuum. Extensive digital signal-processing (DSP) and editing have been done to produce what are now rendered by the sequencer in performance as, say, massive, rocket-like, spine-shaking ‘rumbles’ [from the multiple studio monitor speakers that are arrayed around the performance space, controlled from the assistant’s digital audio workstation console] or celestial chirps or high-energy quantum particle ‘tweets’. We had no idea of this in advance. But when Rebecca and Cheryl remarked after the performance that all of the electroacoustic effects we had just heard during this piece had begun from sounds that they themselves had made, and that Eichenbaum had recorded and processed and sequenced them as the three of them sat together at the DAW console in the studio, it was heartwarming evidence of a deeper sort of collaboration between performers and composer. Composer/DAW-artist/engineer as performer; performers as engineers/editors/co-composers. There is something profoundly ‘right’ about this.

W hat I mean is, composers, performers, computer musicians/DAW-artists have accepted, for the most part, the progressive abstractions from older analog and now-obsolete digital hardware into software modules and sequencer patches... not just ‘miniaturization’ per se but now total automation and virtuality, including software to manage the multiple applications and equipments and software to insert random aleatorics and emulate human-like variability effects. These abstractions are motivated by reliability, by productivity for the composer, by aesthetic considerations—all valid and admirable. But the abstractions have incrementally impoverished the electroacoustic performance experience, I think—compared to, say, my first experience of a Moog Synthesizer as a child of 10 at the Minneapolis Symphony (now Minnesota Orchestra) in 1963, teeming with patch-cables and wires and mad-scientist musician (I regret I cannot remember who, or which composers’ works were performed) at the keyboard, clearly *not* in complete control.

B ut in Eichenbaum’s ‘Orbit’ we have a focused assimilation of the digital and acoustic environments, in which the digital realization is a cohesive part--‘gluey’ elements that hold the entire composition together. The live performers are not ‘bystanders’. They are confronted, yes, by their own DSP-processed previously-recorded sounds. They are reacting to the aleatoric expressions of the DAW assistant who is reincarnating the sequences at one remove, so to say. And they know this, even though we in the audience did not, until the remarks following the performance.

H aving heard Rebecca’s and Cheryl’s post-performance commentary on ‘Orbit’, though, we now comprehend aspects of the performer-electronics interactions that we hadn’t grasped at first hearing: the intimacy of the part that you are now playing, live; the musical subtleties of rediscovering the state-of-mind you were in when you made the sounds that you are now hearing emanate from these electronics; the expressive stimulation of being re-reminded now, of how that sequencer patch was co-edited by you and Daniel not so long ago. This can be a truly productive process—and a provocative montage of active, creative roles and meta-roles for performers in their interpretations of electroacoustic music, as it was with the Quadrivium performance last night!

W hat else? The noise gradations range from total silence (a bus is heard faintly, passing by outside Unity Temple on 47th Street) to 100 dB butt-shaking. ‘Really Noisy’ (what Stockhausen would call ‘sehr geräuschaft’)–filtered ‘pink’ noise and rumbling ‘red’ noise, convolved with other signals on the track to the point where it pervades the space and progressively washes out and obscures Rebecca’s flute and Cheryl’s clarinet. ‘Sort of Noisy’ (‘etwas geräuschaft’) – square and sawtooth waves convolved with the rest, but with enough high-frequency spectral content to meld with and preserve the listener’s attentiveness to upper-register activity in the flute and clarinet parts... A dense polyphony, reminiscent of György Ligeti’s writing for the score of the film ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’: a choir of myriad voices; the mixing and intermingling and asynchronous entries and departures of thousands of voices; microtonal voices, sounding notes a quarter-tone higher or lower than their neighbors; cosmic cacophony tending toward pantheism.

A ndrew Seager Cole’s ‘A Slow Unraveling’ applies combinatoric permutations to tiny musical elements to generate large [fractal?] structures. The fast-tempo elements that begin the piece devolve into slower ‘child’ elements that enclose and subsume the ‘parents’ until the music completely unravels, finally coming to a rest. The music was genuinely interesting and admirably executed, regardless of its formal compositional methods and inspiration. Kari Johnson’s piano and Mark Stauffer’s cello were especially compelling, as regards imbuing the piece with vivid kinesthetic impressions of velocity and depth/space. The piece has narrative; a story unfolding among the performers. It is intimate ‘chamber music’, yes. But it is the paradoxical ‘intimacy’ of space itself, on an astronomical scale.

B ravo!

Saturday, May 9, 2009

Ain’t No ‘Girl’ Music: Physical Vehemence in Unsuk Chin’s ‘Akrostichon-Wortspiel’

T hough some points of contact with the theatrical surrealism of Ligeti’s ‘Aventures/Nouvelles’ might be detected, ‘Akrostichon-Wortspiel’ gives much more emphasis to wit and exuberance than to menace. The third movement, ‘Die Spielregel—strawkcurtieZ’ (Zeitruckwarts - reversed time) is a dazzling scherzo with appropriate palindromic elements. But the most sheerly beautiful music is in the fifth movement, ‘Domifare S’, whose beguilingly repetitive descents are magically offset by the simple device of destabilising a bass line, which is in any case slightly out-of-tune. A similar process is applied to the initially stable, inflected Bs at the start of the last movement.”
— Arnold Whitall, Musical Times, 2000.

F or the relatively apolitical Unsuk Chin it is not a question as to how frequently performed or widely noted a piece may become. Instead, what matters most is that it be performed empathetically and be understood, no matter how esoteric its content or intentions.

A nalysis assumes that music is a metaphor for ‘literary’ meaning—analysis aims to clarify relationships, customarily using methods that closely parallel ‘literary’ theory.

A nd the Unsuk Chin piece performed at Lincoln Center last night is nominally ‘literary’. The texts that informed/inspired Akrostichon-Wortspiel come from Michael Ende’s ‘The Endless Story’ and Lewis Carroll’s ‘Alice through the Looking Glass’. The selected texts have been redacted so as to juxtapose consonants and vowels to form novel, surprising patterns. In some places (e.g., Mvt. 3) the letters comprising the words are reversed, playing tricks with the things signified. It is a different sort of fantasy—entirely different from the ‘grotesqueries’ of Ligeti’s ‘Mysteries of the Macabre’, which was the first piece of the program.

Y et, analyzing ‘Akrostichon’ in a ‘literary’ way seems wrong somehow. And why always draw parallels between Unsuk Chin and Ligeti or Lutosławski or others, anyway? To me, seems like a ‘stretch’. Not that resemblances are hard to find; they are not. But the ‘stretch’ has for me more to do with the motivations that seem to underlie the music and why it came to be written. For example, I enjoyed the intensely physical passages in ‘Akrostichon’, where modernist and classical idioms violently oppose each other.

K ommt der öffentliche Druck, das ist sehr schwierig, die Qualität zu halten, die Öffentlichkeit will immer mehr, man versucht die Gunst der Stunde zu nutzen...
[The public pressure... it is very difficult to maintain real quality... the public wants more and more, of whatever is en vogue...].”
— Unsuk Chin, interview with Hanno Ehrler, Berlin, 2008.

[50-sec clip, Ensemble intercontemporain, Unsuk Chin, ‘Akrostichon-Wortspiel’, Mvt. 1, 2.0MB MP3]

T he aggressive passages in the Ligeti pieces on the program are less ‘open-ended’, less ‘exploratory’, more ‘flamboyant’ than Unsuk Chin’s. Maybe it’s a difference that arises because of their different cultures, different ages at the time these respective pieces were composed, different financial and political circumstances at the time, and so on. Surely it could have nothing to do with gender, could it?

W ell, sure, it could! There is a physical vehemence in ‘Akrostichon’—a gendered performativity, along the lines that Judith Butler has written about. It is not a ‘tame’ cross-word. It is intensely physical, not cerebral. This piece, to me, is about beauty-in-vehemence—about women’s right to engage in aggression and vehement action, in violent performative action that involves risk. Inexplicable risk—much like my maternal grandmother who, in the 1920s, was physically boisterous; a honky-tonk piano player in Superior, Wisconsin, among other things; smoked big stogies to the ripe old age of 93… valor on the violent fields brings ‘glory’ to the valiant-violent participants; violence and aggression beget ‘story’ and meaning; risk is essential to creation and story-generation.

C hin’s compositional method seems thoroughly ‘organic’, and more concerned with forging palpable ‘continuity’ than Ligeti may have been in the 1970s and later. Ligeti, by then, had nothing to ‘prove’. Unsuk Chin is, in this piece, showing her discoveries of what needs yet to be proven, physically. The development progresses relatively slowly: the listener has ample time to grasp the emerging textures, orient herself/himself, place things in context, become convinced of what is being ‘shown’ or ‘proven’. In all, this was an absolutely wonderful interpretation by Yeree Suh and members of Ensemble intercontemporain, under Susanna Mälkki’s shrewd-yet-intensely-physical direction. Bravo! (for the entire program, not just the one piece that spawned the comments above)

Sunday, October 12, 2008

South Asian Chamber Music: Gamelan Galak Tika

Gamelan Galak Tika, Copley Square, Boston

G amelan presents reality in musical form: it is cyclical yet linear, constantly alternating between event-overload and waktu kosong—‘empty time’. A person’s role within the ensemble is strictly defined and limited, only becoming meaningful in relation to the whole through kotekan. Culture is what we make of the world, both in creating cultural artifacts as well as in making sense of the world around us. Culture-making is an individual and collective civic duty.”
— Evan Ziporyn, MIT.

As non-Western chamber musics go, none, I think, is more beautiful than gamelan.

A gamelan is usually comprised of two metal percussion sets of bells—metallic drones, basically, plus some bronze or brass gongs—and each set is tuned to a different pitch-interval structure (‘laras’). One set is tuned to laras ‘sléndro’ (a pentatonic five-tone tuning system made up of approximately equidistant intervals), and the other set is tuned to laras ‘pélog’ (a heptatonic seven-tone tuning system with larger and smaller intervals). The gamelan’s elements are bulky and some of them are heavy, so the logistics and expense of touring with them are difficult. The MIT-based group, Gamelan Galak Tika, is one of a few gamelan ensembles touring regularly. Gamelan Galak Tika was founded in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1993 by Evan and Balinese artists Nyoman Catra and Desak Made Suarti Laksmi. A part of the MIT Music and Theater Arts program, its membership is comprised of both students and members of the Cambridge community.

Gamelan tonality is not the only distinctive aspect of gamelan music; the rhythms are characteristic, too. The precise inter-relationship of the gamelan percussionists’ parts is known as ‘kotekan’. Difficult for Western ears and minds to recognize—kotekan can, like Indian carnatic music, be mistaken as aleatoric, random, concrète.

Gamelan is a visceral, physical chamber music. The word ‘gamelan’ means nothing more grand than ‘to hammer’. The percussion ensembles of Java and Bali often involve 10 to 30 members, but smaller gamelan ensembles exist as well. The word ‘gamelan’ implies a collectivism or ‘social’ hammering; in general, ‘gamelan’ doesn’t denote solo hammering by one individual. Besides the gongs and metallophones, a gamelan ensemble often includes hand drums, cymbals, bamboo flutes, and violin-like stringed instruments. For some gamelan pieces, vocal or ambient sounds are added.

P revailing scholarly analyses of international relations pay virtually no attention to music. And yet the political dimensions of music are all too evident. The terrifying realities of conflict and the search for peace have inspired composers throughout history, from Haydn’s anti-war message in Missa in Tempore Belli to the astonishing outpouring of musical creativity following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Few would question the political content of explicit musical texts, such as protest songs. The more difficult challenge, however, is to locate the significance not only of titles or sung passages (where references to the political are easy to find), but also of purely instrumental music.”
— Roland Bleiker, Of Things We Hear but Cannot See, in Resounding International Relations (Franklin, ed.), p. 179.

In follow-up to the previous CMT post on separation of Music and State, I should mention that gamelan is the ethnic chamber music of Java and Bali, and is historically both a religion-sponsored sacred chamber music and a State-sponsored courtly and secular chamber music. The Balinese form of Hinduism prescribes gamelan for all ceremonial and liturgical events.

T he present Lao government is ideologically committed to the promotion of ethnic equality. The nominal equality of the state-constructed ethnic categories of Lao Lum, Lao Theung, and Lao Sung is officially celebrated in political rhetoric and administrative decrees. [But there is a] paradox that these official practices nevertheless result in the implicit affirmation of ethnic Lao political and cultural superiority. A popular restaurant features traditional Laotian live music. ... [But] the dance itself, as well as the musical accompaniment, contains no ethnic minority elements; instead, it is unmistakably ethnic Lao.”
— Jan Oveson, in Civilizing the Margins (ed., C. Duncan), p. 214.

If you would like to experience a concert of contemporary gamelan music, you can do that next Saturday, 18-OCT-2008, at 14:30 at the brilliant, new EMPAC at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Gamelan Galak Tika and Ensemble Robot will perform at the opening of RPI’s new Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center in Troy, New York. Or you can catch them in Boston later this month (Thursday, 30-OCT-2008, 19:30) in the intimate Berklee David Friend Recital Hall at 921 Boylston Street. Gamelan Galak Tika will be performing new music by composers including Ramon Castillo, Midori Matsuo, Sachi Sato, Christine Southworth, and Po-Chun Wang.

Or, if you are in Kansas City this weekend, you can hear Gamelan Genta Kasturi at the Urban Culture Project, La Esquina, 1000 West 25th St, Kansas City, MO, 18-OCT-2008, at 19:30, and 19-OCT-2008, at 14:00.

David Friend Recital Hall, Berklee College of Music

Gamelan Galak Tika play on two complete gamelans, both ‘sléndro’ and ‘pélog’. [Incidentally, Galak Tika is not a cute, spacey corruption of ‘galactica’. ‘Galak Tika’ in Bahasa Kawi (classical Javanese, a dialect of Sanskrit) means ‘intense togetherness.’ And intense togetherness is surely the unabashed effect that listening to and performing gamelan chamber music has.] Have a listen to a clip from one of their recent recordings:

[50-sec clip, Evan Ziporyn, Gamelan Galak Tika, ‘Ngaben’, 1.2MB MP3]

With gamelan, there is, not surprisingly, an ‘historically-informed performance’ (‘HIP’) and historically-informed composition movement, not unlike HIP for Early Music in the Western tradition. Some composers who have written new music for gamelan—Györgi Ligeti, Michael Nyman, Lydia Ayers, Howard Skempton, David Parsons, and others—have been primarily interested in the gamelan for its interesting, atmospheric timbre. They have not been fastidious about Javanese sléndro/pélog tuning, except where it happenstantially suits their own compositional goals. They have not been fastidious about inter-part ‘kotekan’ rhythmic historicity either, except where it somehow supports the rhythmic complexity and authenticity that they were aiming at. A traditional gamelan ensemble learns aurally, typically without any notation. But that does not mean that the pieces are somehow imprecise or ad hoc improvised. Historically, they were not. It takes many, many hours of rehearsal to achieve the collective kotekan and learn a piece without notated sheetmusic. (It takes many hours even when you do have a written score!)

[50-sec clip, David Parsons, ‘Urartu to Ubud’, 1.2MB MP3]

[50-sec clip, Lydia Ayers, ‘Prime Gongs’, 1.2MB MP3]

[50-sec clip, Jan Michiels, Györgi Ligeti, ‘Ouverture-Jaya Semara’, 1.2MB MP3]

Lou Harrison (1917-2003) was a notable exception insofar as he did not merely coopt the instrument and leave its idioms behind. His gamelan compositions pushed the boundary in terms of rhythmic and harmonic innovation in gamelan, but he also concerned himself deeply with traditional, authentic gamelan composition and performance. Harrison was a student of Henry Cowell, Arnold Schoenberg, and K.R.T. Wasitodiningrat (Pak Cokro). He is noted for incorporating elements of the music of non-Western cultures into his work, and he is one of the most prominent composers to have extensively used microtonality in his pieces. Harrison’s music is often constructed around so-called ‘melodicles’, short motifs that he reverses (palindromes) and inverts upside-down in pitch-space: minimalist but melodic, giving rhythm a role equal to that of melody; sensual, corporeal, physical.

[50-sec clip, Lou Harrison, ‘Jhala III’, 1.2MB MP3]

[50-sec clip, Lou Harrison, ‘Chaconne for Gamelan and Violin’, 1.2MB MP3]

I ’d long thought that I would love a time when musicians were numerate as well as literate. I’d love to be a conductor and be able to say, ‘Now, cellos, you gave me 10:9 there, please give me a 9:8 instead.’ I’d love to get that!”
— Lou Harrison.

Gamelan Galak Tika founder and director is Evan Ziporyn, Kenan Sahin Distinguished Professor of Music at MIT. Recently he completed a work for Yo Yo Ma’s ‘Silk Road Project’, co-commissioned by Carnegie Hall, and a concerto for gamelan and strings for Galak Tika and the Philadelphia Classical Orchestra, commissioned by the Pew Foundation, premiered in 2007. His compositions have been performed by the Kronos Quartet, Bang On A Can, Nederlands Blazer Ensemble, master pipaist Wu Man, Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP), and Gamelan Sekar Jaya. In addition to writing for Gamelan Galak Tika, he has arranged for the group works by Brian Eno, Conlon Nancarrow, Hermeto Pascoal, and Kurt Cobain. He also regularly performs and records as a featured soloist with Steve Reich and Musicians, and shared in their 1999 Grammy for “Music for 18 Musicians”. Born in Chicago in 1959, Ziporyn received degrees from Yale University and the University of California, Berkeley, where his teachers included John Blacking, Martin Bresnick, Gerard Grisey, and David Lewin. Upon completing a Fullbright Fellowship in Indonesia, he became Musical Coordinator of San Francisco’s Gamelan Sekar Jaya in 1988. He collaborated with Balinese composer I Nyoman Windha on ‘Kekembangan’, a unique work for full gamelan and saxophone quartet. He has been on the faculty of MIT since 1990.

G amelan ensemble interactions are like fish swimming in a school. Like birds flying in a flock. There are individuals, but the interlocking kotekan makes them express themselves as a collective, a synchronized, composite organism.”
— Jeffrey Ruckman, Gamelan Genta Kasturi, KCUR interview.

Gamelan Galak Tika, Boston Museum of Science, 2006

D hek jaman berjuang njur kelingan anak lanang
Biyen tak openi ning saiki ana ngendi
Jarene wis menang keturutan sing digadhang
Biyen nate janji ning saiki apa lali
Neng nggunung tak cadhongi sega jagung
Yen mendhung tak silihi caping nggunung
Sokur bisa nyawang nggunung desa dadi reja
Dene ora ilang nggone padha lara lapa.
[Since the war, I remember my son—
Long ago I cared for him, but now where is he?
I hear he has prospered. His dreams have now come true.
Long ago he made a promise, but now has he forgotten?
In the days on our mountain, I fed him corn and rice;
When it was rainy, I lent him my hat.
I hope he and his generation will come to their senses [and grasp the collective significance of those kindly gestures so long ago].
I hope to see this remote village become [with their financial and political help] a better place,
So that our own unselfish efforts will not have been without consequence.]”
— RumahKiri.