Cross-Pollination Progression

When we think about globalization in musical terms, the results are at best cheesy and at worst an affirmation of American cultural hegemony: American Idol being weakly translated into A la Recherche de la Nouvelle Star in France, Turkish teenagers singing along with Eminem, that 80s Russian rock group Autograph. Outside the realm of commercial music, under the sobriquets of art music, classical music and IDM, cultural exchange has been more subtle and certainly more considerate.

Traditional Indonesian classical music, for example, has been infiltrating the Western mind since Claude Debussy heard the first strains of Javanese gamelan music at the 1889 Paris Universal Exposition, at the kampong (traditional village) exhibit in the shadow of the newly constructed Eiffel Tower. After passing hours absorbing the trance-inducing gamelan music, Debussy had his first visions of a music that defied Western convention. For the next three decades, his music incorporated ideas gleaned from these early experiences, seen in the extensive use of ostinatos and pedal points, as well as his signature layering of not only contrapuntal ideas, but of entire musical themes. A decade after his death in 1918, the first 78-rpm recordings of gamelan music brought this music to a wider audience in three-minute sound bites. The painstaking transcriptions of Canadian ethnomusicologist/composer Colin McPhee and Benjamin Britten and the opening of the first institute in the U.S. dedicated to the study of Indonesian music (at UCLA) tore down the last remaining veils of mystery and began one of the most influential cross-cultural pollinations in 20th-century music.

The 70s and 80s witnessed composers like Ingram Marshall, Robert Macht, Evan Ziporyn and Wayne Vitale spending time in Java and Bali. Lou Harrison, probably the most well-known American gamelan innovator, built several gamelans with his partner William Colvig and considered himself a composer of the Pacific Rim, linking him more closely to the great Javanese masters than to his compatriots on the East Coast. Other figures like John Cage, Larry Polansky, Jody Diamond, Keith Jarrett and Barbara Benary also connected on highly personal levels with this spiritual genre. Echoes of the repetitive structures, distinctive modes and attitudes toward intonation reverberate through the early minimalist works of Steve Reich, LaMonte Young and Terry Riley, the microtonal movement and then further into the realms of ambient electronica and trance.

While such modification of a traditional art form may seem like yet another example of cultural appropriation, the history of the gamelan is anything but stagnant. The gamelan, which translates roughly as "orchestra," is an ensemble comprising primarily hanging and racked gongs, metallophones and drums sometimes with wooden xylophones, bowed fiddle, zither and bamboo flute. First evidence of the gamelan’s existence dates from the ninth century, although it seems that the gongs weren’t added for another few centuries. Though some of the musical material certainly originates in the islands’ villages, the music blends pitch relationships from China, bronze instruments from southeast Asia, drums and modal practice from India and bowed strings from the Middle East. European music has contributed some elements, particularly in the realm of military music, and evolution continues to lead to greater diversity of styles.

To hear the music for yourself, you have two options: There’s a web fare on Orbitz that will take you from New York via Anchorage and Seoul to Jakarta for something like a mere $960, or you can hop on the 6 train to 68th St. and take in the spring concerts of Gamelan Kusuma Laras (formerly the Indonesian Consulate Gamelan). Specializing in the traditional repertoire of Central Java (karawitan), Kusuma Laras will be presenting a new work by guest director I.M. Harjito, a suite that accompanies traditional Javanese dance performance.

Gamelan Kusuma Laras spring concerts, Fri., June 6, 8 p.m., Sat., June 7, 3 p.m., at the Consulate of the General Republic of Indonesia, 5 E. 68th St. (betw. 5th & Madison Aves.), 212-971-2458.