The Boston Globe: California, Bali, music and dance meet at MIT

Wednesday, April 20, 1994

California, Bali, music and dance meet at MIT

By Debra Cash

SPECIAL TO THE GLOBE

If it is true that the musical world is a shrinking village, there be no more compelling indication than the fact that you can buy cassettes of a San Francisco-based gamelan in out-of-the-way record stores in Bali.

Gamelan Sekar Jaya’s name means “Flowering Success.” As it turns out, the success of this all-volunteer group of California computer programmers, schoolteachers, carpenters and therapists has exceeded its founders’ wildest dream as the ensemble has become an honored participant in the evolution of Bali’s musical culture. Boston audiences get a chance to experience the gamelan’s shimmering clangor and intricate, flowing dance drama in a free performance that will be held outdoors on the plaza of MIT’s Stratton Student Center tomorrow evening, weather permitting. (There’s also a free improvisational demonstration tomorrow afternoon at “The Cube” in the Weisner Building on Ames Street.)

It’s a good thing that outdoor performances are a Balinese tradition, since as MIT arts provost musicologist Ellen Haris joked recently, the sounds of a 30-member gamelan orchestra, with its gongs, flutes and marimba-like metallophones is capable of blowing off the sturdiest campus roof.

In its first East Coast tour, Gamelan Sekar Jaya comes to Boston at the invitation of MIT composer and clarinetist Evan Ziporyn, who as a longtime member of the troupe still considers himself part of Sekar Jaya’s extended “family” and has started a student gamelan ensemble, Gamelan Galak Tika, at MIT.

Ziporyn affectionately recalls the early years of Sekar Jaya in the early 1980s as “a California post-hippie kind of thing,” made up of seekers who had “just come back from tramping around the world.” The participatory ethos of a gamelan “seka” or club, with its community spirit and shared responsibility, matched the spirit of the time. So did the music, which after the appeal of minimalists like Philip Glass and Steven Reich (who himself studied gamelan music in the late 1970s) was increasingly comprehensible.

“I’m a suburban kid from Chicago who was brought to classical music concerts with my parents, heard my grandmother’s Yiddish chorus and listened to rock ‘n’ roll and jazz,” Ziporyn says. “There’s an implicit hierarchy of genres and cultures that has nothing to do with the reality of one’s musical life. If you’re an open-minded musician, when you hear things that interest you you’re compelled to follow through. What happens is that as you learn about [a musical form like Balinese gamelan], your preconceptions get smashed, and after a couple years you say ‘Now I’m beginning to know what this music is about.’ “ Ziporyn’s exploration of this non-Western music coincided with the interest of another young American composition student, Wayne Vitale, one of Gamelan Sekar Jaya’s five remaining original members and its current director. Vitale was finding his academic musical studies at the University of California at Berkeley increasingly sterile, and found Balinese music “a breath of fresh air.” Asked to be the kempli, or “beat-keeper,” of the orchestra, he remembers thinking, this is going to be a piece of cake, until the orchestra’s syncopation exploded around him. He was hooked, and after having spent more than five years in Bali studying the music and making field recordings, Vitale considers Bali his “second home.”

In separate conversations before Sekar Jaya’s MIT residency, both Vitale and Ziporyn mentioned that learning Balinese music is an altogether different educational process than learning Western music. The music is not notated, and the orchestra does not watch a conductor. Instead, the music is assembled by rote memorization, “from the ground up.”

“It’s a very difficult music; you have to learn it by ear and have to know how what you are doing is related to everyone else,” Ziporyn explains. But this process builds “a kind of social web that extends out to other things, so that you’re connected with other people very directly.”

Sekar Jaya has also allowed Americans to connect very directly with master teachers such as Balinese composer I Nyoman Windha, and his wife, dancer I Gusti Agung Ayu Warsiki, who are the latest in a stream of Sekar Jaya’s distinguished guest directors. Their 8-year old son Wahyu Indira is a dance prodigy who regularly is asked to perform in Indonesia for visiting dignitaries. This past year, the MIT gamelan has been working with I Nyoman Catra, a masked clown now in residence at Emerson College and singer and dancer Desak Made Suarti Laksmi. All will appear at MIT Thursday.

“In music and dance there is no God-given right to anything.” Vitale says heatedly. “It has everything to do with your own attitude and sincerity about learning and loving a tradition.” He goes on to mention that Sekar Jaya has been welcomed with open arms by the Balinese, who are touched that Americans have committed themselves to this art form.

And what about charges of imperialism and inauthenticity? For some, Balinese music should be left to the Balinese, not appropriated by outsiders looking for “exoticism.” Ziporyn is pragmatic. “Balinese art is in a continuous state of transformation. Charlie Chaplin came to Indonesia in the 1920s and the Balinese liked him so much they started developing dances with clowns in tuxedo and bowler hats. It’s condescending to say that a culture can’t choose how it wants to adapt. In Indonesia, a guy who buys a motorcycle has to put offerings on it as well as on all of his less-modern possessions. “If you have a respect for the tradition and know that it will take you a long time to get inside it, it’s a positive thing. Sometime I come across things that I find distasteful, like New Age recordings with titles like ‘Flowers of Bali,’ but it doesn’t hurt anything.” Sekar Jaya has left its mark by offering experimental “fusion” compositions such as Ziporyn’s “Tire Fire,” scored for gamelan, electric guitars, electric bass and electric mandolin and Sekar Jaya cofounder Michael Tenzer’s “Banyuari,” which incorporates both South Indian techniques and Western musical development. Vitale, however, is quick to point out that these works were created after a number of years of respectful and serious cross-cultural study. “We didn’t just pick up on an interesting bunch of instruments.”

“We’re not claiming to be anything we’re not,” Ziporyn says. “We’re Americans who love this culture. In a way, what Sekar Jaya does when it performs Balinese music is no different than what the Tokyo Philharmonic does when they perform Brahms.”