Guest Lecture Series

Peter is a Fellow at Yale’s Tropic Resource Institute and speaks on his Thesis: Technology and Tradition in Java: Natural Resource Access and Innovation in the Gamelan Instrument Industry

Film director Matt Dunning give a discussion on his sensory ethnographic gamelan film “The Stirring of a Thousand Bells” Released by Sublime Frequencies (SF094), featuring a very rare type of gamelan, and a beautiful dance from the Mangkunegaran Palace.

Darsono Hadiraharjo, a Visiting Critic with Cornell’s Southeast Asia Program, discusses the music and career paths of his parents, Bapak Saguh Hadi Raharjo and Ibu Panut, in conversation with Cornell Senior Lecturer Christopher J. Miller. Darono’s parent’s were members of some of the most famous and influential gamelan groups from the 60’s to 2000’s like Condhong Raos and, Ngripto Raras. Lecture complete with musical examples and personal stories.

An overview of this lively East Javanese form of wayang kulit, in which traditional systems of apprenticeship and collective local sponsorship continue to strongly influence performance practices.

Jessika Kenney is a composer, writer, and performer working from the experience of listening to voices and vocalized response. Jessika will give a workshop which draws on life-long interests, including singing with gamelan, to inspire others to create their own unique vocal practices while in and out of various degrees of quarantine.

Banjarmasin-based ethnomusicologist Novyandi Saputra, MA is joined by Aural Archipelago founder Palmer Keen to share to share their work on the gamelan worlds of South Kalimantan, from Novyandi’s lifelong immersion in the gamelan Banjar tradition to Palmer’s research on the ritual gamalan of the Dayak Halong.

Madurese ethnomusicologist Panakajaya Hidayatullah, MA ia joined by Aural Archipelago founder Palmer Keen in discussing their research and documentation of rare Madurese gamelan offshoots in the Madurese Horseshoe of East Java, including glundhangan, an all-wooden “gamelan for pigeons,” and dhungdhungan, an ensemble of tuned drums.

A frank discussion about the role that music and dance studios (sanggar) can play in creating environment friendly alternatives to single-use plastic in everyday life in Bali, particularly at ceremonies, practices and performances. With the aim of inspiring others, Mekar Bhuana Co-founders, Vaughan Hatch and Putu Evie will present the solutions they have come up with and how they apply these within their own family as well as teams of musicians and dancers.

Between 1890 and 1939, laborers from the Dutch East Indies were “recruited” by the colonial government to work on plantations in Suriname, the Netherlands’ much smaller colony on the Caribbean coast of South America, after slavery was abolished there. Today, a distinct gamelan tradition is practiced by ethnically Javanese people in Suriname and in Javanese-Surinamese communities in the Netherlands.

Ed’s talk focuses on the intersecting possibilities of looking at language, interaction, and karawitan. He discusses the older forms of Balinese and Javanese, and what those texts can tell us about what happened historically to bring us to the contemporary forms of those languages, as well as how they show clear affinities to other members of the greater Austronesian language family, especially the Philippine-type languages.

Various Asian cultures have used puppets to model curing when disease or disaster threaten and, through miniaturization, to allow in a brief lifespan to envision more cosmic processes. Puppets/masks, including, of course wayang/topeng, have been put to work delivering the souls from hellish pains and allowing initiates to step from mundane to cosmic time.

As Indonesia explored a new world of independence in the 1950s and 1960s, the question of how to be simultaneously Indonesian and “modern” fell largely on the nation’s women. A reading of the voices that emerged through women’s magazines therefore offers a highly nuanced understanding of the process of the development of Indonesian national identity during the Sukarno era.

Richard North (who has been studying, teaching and performing Cirebon gamelan music since 1976) and his wife Felicia Danon North (a talented Cirebon Topeng (mask) dancer who has been playing Cirebon gamelan since 1998) will give a lively and informal introduction to five genres of gamelan music from the ancient north coast Javanese kingdom of Cirebon. Richard currently directs the University of California Santa Barbara Gamelan Ensemble, as well as the community group Gamelan Sinar Surya.

Bandung composer, musician, educator and music director Iwan Gunawan explores his gamelan-centered international music performance and compositional career. For over 15 years he has sought to express through his hybrid music not only his native Sundanese traditions but also to reflect Western musical practices and aesthetics.

Andrews talk focuses on the many aspects of the hybrid musical work of the Evergreen Club Contemporary Gamelan (ECCG), a Toronto-based professional ensemble playing degung – and often working with musical forces from other traditions and media: dance, feature film, video and shadow theater.

The Karaton Surakarta has had to make hard choices between maintaining its buildings or its rituals. Under Pakubuwana XII (reigned 1942-2005) the consistent policy was to give priority to the demanding cycles of ritual renewal while buildings were left to fall into disrepair. When in 1992 three princesses declared a hunger strike, it called attention to a dramatic mismatch between conventional practices of historic preservation and the living culture of the Karaton.