On Sunday, June May 26th, 2002 at 3 PM at the amphitheatre outside of Whatley Chapel, I saw the Gamelan Tunas Mekar play some Balinese music. The show lasted a little under two hours, which was about how long it took for the benches to become uncomfortable. There was a good crowd there and they were supportive of the group, even during the somewhat long speech-making break. The spokesman for the group was entertaining and informative though, so they may be why everyone kept up the clapping.
Two different gamelan setups were used. The first had some medium and small xylophone-like instruments, two recorder-like instruments, a drum, some finger cymbals, and various gongs. There was a monotone gong that played on the downbeats for most of the time, which I’m guessing was used to keep time. It seems the entire gamelan would have to be built around the one note that gong played. The xylophone-like instruments were struck with hammers to make sound. I think each instrument had 10 or less metallic bars of different pitches that were hit. It wasn’t that easy to play them though, because they had to damp out the noise of one bar with one hand before they struck the next bar with their other hand. When they played fast, they didn’t even seem to think about what they were doing, so I guess they practice a lot or they’ve played the songs many times before. The only mess-up I noticed was when one of the recorder players played the wrong thing, but that was only because you could see it on his face. The second gamelan setup brought out some small, flattened bells and larger xylophone-like instruments, which were struck by padded mallets, as well as the large trompong, which they brought out for the final piece. The trompong is like a big, long xylophone. The songs using the second setup made more use of the big bass gongs in the back of the stage.
The musicians wore what I would assume are traditional Balinese clothes – purple jackets and yellow/orange saris for the guys and fancy purple and gold saris for the women. The dancers they brought out for three of the songs had even more ornate costumes and lots of makeup as well. What surprised me was that there only appeared to be two actual Balinese people playing instruments. They rest were just regular Americans.
The music was far different from what I’d ever heard before. A few chords they played struck a…chord…with me, but mostly it sounded like people playing in weird scales. It wasn’t bad, just different. There was definitely a danceable quality to the music, as was evidenced by the authentic dancers they had, and also how I was tapping my toes by the end.
The combination of a tight group playing music well, a nice day, a little history of the group, and three dance performances made for a satisfying audio/visual experience.
