Pauline Oliveros: Lion's Eye/Lion's Tale

From the mid-1960s, composer Pauline Oliveros employed a variety of means to develop her concept of Deep Listening, including innovative uses of electronics, works based on gamelan music from Southeast Asia, drawing from atmospheres in unusual recording locations and much more.  In the last half of the 1980s, she created music from gamelan influences, including the two pieces for this recording released in 2006.

This blogger's first experience with gamelan was about 35 years ago through one of the many amazing recordings from the Nonesuch Explorer series and the effect on hearing this amazing music was powerful and immediate.  The hypnotic effects of percussion, chanting and singing and the instruments was just phenomenal and it was great to later see how classical composers like Lou Harrison and King Crimson guitarist and songwriter Robert Fripp adapted it to their work.

Oliveros, in the liners for this excellent recording, observed that "in Gamelan music the interlocking elements of traditional forms create a colorful, shimmering global sound.  The color shifts in beautiful and subtle ways with many instruments playing the same melody, but with a variety of ornamentation and punctuation peculiar to each instrument."

The 46-minute "Lion's Eye for Gamelan," dating to the mid-1980s and recorded with The Berkeley Gamelan Ensemble, finds Oliveros writing the orchestration so that the instruments are clearly heard, which distinguishes it from traditional performance.  Another notable element is that while higher pitched instruments are played faster or lower ones slower in gamlan, Oliveros used a computer-controlled sampler to sustain notes for up to a minute or longer, as well as having some at speeds as fast as 1,800 beats per minute.  The intent was to create an environment in which those rhythms might sound like waves.

Oliveros added that the piece could be played with a gamelan ensemble or with a sampler and music programming language called HMSL (Hierarchical Music Specification Language), which creates changing patterns every 30-beat measure, with the tempo going as fast as 72 beats per measure.  For the album, Carter Scholz of the Berkeley Gamelan wrote and performed the sampled portion.  "Lion's Tale for Sampler" was created four years later and involves speeds of up to 1,800 bpm with intricate patterning of polymetrics and polyrhythms and Oliveros added that it could be reprogrammed in new versions, as well as one in the MIDI format for keyboardists.

While computers and electronics are utilized heavily on this record, they work beautifully with the gamelan style and structure, enhancing its deeply immersive and spiritual character and truly reflecting Oliveros' concept of Deep Listening.

Music of Bali: Gamelan Semar Pegulingan

This excellent Lyrichord release, from field recordings made in the Balinese village of Ketewel at a Hindu temple, presents five tracks of gamelan music.

This blogger first encountered gamelan in the early Nineties and was immediately captivated by its otherworldly sounds, stately, gently hypnotic and highly rhythmic.

The liner notes by Wayne Vitale, who recorded the music, observe that there are some 20 variants of gamelan on Bali, with some of the oldest elements of the form played by an ensemble representing the Gamelan Semar Pegulingan, basing its work on the Balinese god of love, Semara.

Twenty-five musicians comprise the ensemble with families of instruments grouped together and the music utilized paired tuning, in which the tone of one instrument has a partner in another, tuned just higher or lower, for a mesmerizing effect through the use of tremolo, which gives that distinctive shimmering sound for which gamelan is so noted.

There are several metallophones, tuned at different octaves; tuned gongs; drums and cymbals, and flutes which accompany the main metallophone (the gender tetulas).

This music was performed for royalty for the purposes of relaxation, so it has the elements of manis (sweet) and halus (refined) sounds dedicated to that end, but in the village of Ketewel, the music takes on a religious dimension for rituals and celebrations at the temple.  The structure and the instruments used in the recording are said to date back more than 400 years.

The instruments are considered sacred and can only be used after offerings and rituals have been made and carried out to provide the proper spiritual environment for the making of the music and the ritualized masked dancing that accompanies some of it.

It is believed that this type of gamelan has healing powers and there are many people throughout the world who say that music does just that--has a restorative power for the health of the listener.  Westerners may tend to be skeptical of the medicinal effects of music, but there is no question that this music, once a listener accounts for the type of tuning and scales used and the melodic bent entailed in it, is strikingly beautiful and relaxing.  Why couldn't this be conducive to an improved mental, if not physical, well-being?

Lou Harrison: La Koro Sutro

This New Albion recording, released in 1988, is a brilliant collection of three works by the great composer Lou Harrison (1917-2003). 

The title piece is the one for which he is best known and it is a gorgeous rendering on this album with the 100-voice chorus singing from the Buddhist Heart Sutra, rendered here, however, into Esperanto, the language intended to be universal, though it has, so far, been anything but so.  In any case, the singing is complemented by harp, organ, and American Gamelan, Western-tuned percussion instruments built by the composer's partner and collaborator William Colvig.  Component parts include oxygen tanks, garbage cans, brake drums, sheets of aluminum, a metallophone made of PVC pipe, and other wonderful combinations of material.

Harrison and Colvig titled the instrument to distinguish it from the Indonesian gamelan from which it derived and the effect is, in conjunction with the voices, harp and organ, stunning.  "La Koro Sutro" was first performed in San Francisco in 1972 and this November 1987 recording was done by The Chorus and Chamber Chorus of The University of California, Berkeley under the direction of Phillip Brett.  The harpist was Karen Gottlieb, the organist was Agnes Sauerbeck and the American Gamelan players were Peter Thielen, Todd Manley, Gino Robair Forlin, Scott Evans, Don R. Baker and director William Winant, also a co-producer of this album.  It is a sure sign of a masterpiece when the work is so well constructed that it seems to end far too soon, even though this piece is nearly a half hour.

Fans of Anthony Braxton might recall Gino Robair as one of Braxton's many collaborators--the two making an album of duets in 1987 that this blogger owns.  William Winant is very well known as a percussionist, who has frequently performed Harrison's works and has also been on several John Zorn recordings, such as Kristallnacht (featured on this blog), Music for Children, and Elegy, these other two also being in this listener's collection.

The "Varied Trio" for Winant, pianist Julie Steinberg, and violinist David Abel was written for the trio, which has recorded many albums over the years, in 1986 and was first performed in February of the following year.  Winant, especially, is outstanding for his playing of the gong, vibraphone, rice bowls played with chopsticks, Chinese drums and bakers' pans.  Of the five movements, the fourth is performed without percussion and the interplay between Abel and Steinberg is tremendous.  Steinberg and Abel also performed on Zorn's Music for Children.

The last work is "Suite for Violin and American Gamelan" which Harrison and Richard Dee wrote in 1973.  Here Abel, who made his concert debut at only age fourteen, gets to demonstrate his skills on the violin in the seven parts of the 28-minute piece.  John Bergamo, an avid student of music from India, Bali and Java, conducts this piece, in which the gamelan effect merges so harmoniously with the violin.  The delicacy and feeling of this piece is extraordinary and it is as staggering as "La Koro Sutro."

Simply put, this album is a fantastic example of modern music that might be experimental but is also approachable, non-traditional but not off-putting, intellectually stimulating but exudes warmth.  Harrison is one of the giants of modern classical music and this record amply demonstrates why.

Lou Harrison:  La Koro Sutro  (New Albion Records, 1988)

1.  La Koro Sutro  28:50
2.  Varied Trio  15:19
3.  Suite for Violin and American Gamelan  28:14

Bali: Gamelan and Kecak

Another remarkable entry in the Nonesuch Explorer series of world music recordings is this 1989 release of Balinese gamelan and kecak recordings, supervised by David Lewiston in 1987.  Lewiston, who made many important contributions to the Explorer series, made his first trip to the island of Bali, in the region of Java in the Indonesian archipelago, in 1966 and made recordings that resulted in two albums that were early entries in the series.

Returning to the area two decades later, he remarked in the notes to this album, he found the process of arranging for the recordings to be much more difficult, because the pace of life and the gradual eroding of tradition complicated matters significantly.

Nonetheless, he was able, over a period from May to October, to record performances that showed that the unique music of Bali was still there to be savored and shared.  Some of these were recorded at the Bali Art Festival in the island's capital, Den Pasar.  The first piece is from the opening parade, in which some forty ensembles participated, and the 12-minute excerpt captures the sounds of a marching band called a beleganjer, which features songs, drums, flutes and cymbals; a gamelan with flutes, gongs, drums and a metallophone, a xylophone with tuned bronze bars in different pitches than heard in the Western version; a grumbungan ensemble performing on wood cowbells and slit drums; another gamelan called salunding, which includes tones like a bell; and another sample of beleganjer.

A village gamelan using a style developed in the 1910s comprises a ten-minute track with a notable harmony in the metallophone and a rollicking syncopation.  Following is a duet of a Balinese version of the jew's harp called genggong performed by brothers.  A four-minute frog song mimics these reptiles through the enggung, which is a piece of palm bark which is used as a wind instrument creating a very reedy sound. 

An example of the oldest type of gamelan found in Bali follows with the metallophone having iron bars and the result is a gorgeous one, showing its ancient origins of perhaps two thousand years.  Then comes a six-minute gamelan including the metallophone and the rich, sonorous tones of the gong, tempered by the high pitches of the flute. 

There is also a piece that has music accompanying puppet performances of tales that are taken from the ancient Sanskrit epics of India, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata and the puppets, made from leather, create shadows on a sacreen, hence the term "shadow play."  Two metallophones set at different octaves are played, but with the twist of the performer having to play with mallets in both hands, each of which plays a separate melody.  In addition, each note is followed by a damper by the heel of the hand and the players have to use syncopation in interlocking fashion.  Imagine the difficulty in learning to play in this way.

The kecak is a form of performing in which a chant of "tjak, tjak, tjak, tjak . . ." is done by a large ensemble of men, in this case 80, that reminds the listener of many of the trance pieces found in other parts of the world, but with this unique Balinese manner.  Coming to creation in the 1930s, the kecak is based on the story of monkeys who aided King Rama in his battle with a foe in the great Ramayana epic.  Finally, a nearly thirteen-minute gamelan based on a dance for warriors concludes this fascinating and varied album.

There is nothing like gamelan and Balinese music and its influence in the West has been shown in such areas as the piano work, Gnossienne, by the iconoclastic French composer Erik Satie, pieces by Hungarian composer Bela Bartok, and modern composers like John Cage, Steve Reich, Mike Oldfield and, especially, Lou Harrison, whose work will be touched upon here soon.  Also to be covered here soon is the 1980s work of King Crimson, whose guitarists Robert Fripp and Adrian Belew made frequent use of complex interlocking duets that Fripp dubbed early on in that period as "rock gamelan."

It is striking that music from a relatively small part of the world should have such a major influence on the larger parts of it, but this is testimony to the hypnotic beauty and otherworldliness of Balinese music.