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Solo is home to the Javanese Gamelan tradition. But you don’t need to visit Java to play the instrument. Once a week, the Indonesian consulate in New York throws open its doors to amateur musicians. The World’s Alex Gallafent has today’s Global Hit.
We’ll get to the Gamelan in a moment. But the evening at the Consulate begins with food. Three women arrive bearing crinkly plastic bags filled with homemade spicy corn fritters. They introduce themselves.
Confusingly.
WOMEN: “Sri, Sri, but she’s also Sri. Sri, Sri, Sri.” “Three of us the first name is the same.”
All three called Sri?
The most talkative, Sri, offers to clear things up.
SRI: “This is my formal name in the office, and this is my home name.”
GALLAFENT: “And what’s that?”
SRI: “Honey.”
GALLAFENT “Honey?!”
OK, so let’s USE her home name. Honey is sweetness and light. This evening she’s 50% smile. 50% giggles.
She’s come from her job at the Indonesian mission to the United Nations. Honey deals with the office correspondence. It’s stressful. That’s where the gamelan comes in.
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Playing it is relaxing. And the music feels a bit like home.
HONEY: “..for some reason yes. It’s very rare you listen to this music. So when you hear it it’s like yes, oh my God we are home. We speak the same languages, Javanese, so it’s just like home, yes. So it’s fun.”
If you haven’t seen the gamelan before, picture a small room filled with low-lying gongs, bells and drums.
All the small instruments together add up to a gamelan. And it’s played not by one person, but a whole a group of people. These evenings of gamelan at the Indonesian consulate were started by an American, Anne Stebinger.
In the late 70s, she visited Indonesia, where her father had gone to work for an oil company.
She was in college at the time – a music major – and decided to have a go at the instrument.
STEBINGER: “..and I got hooked. And then I moved back to java to study for three years – central Javanese gamelan, Solo-style.”
As in Solo, the ancient capital of Java.
STEBINGER: “It’s sort of like studying jazz in New York. You go to Solo, that’s where you go to study.”
In 1983, Stebinger came back to the States. She visited the consulate hoping to find a part-time job.
STEBINGER: “I was in grad school, I spoke some Indonesian, said do you want to hire me? And they said you probably don’t want to work here, we don’t pay minimum wage, but do you want to start up a gamelan?”
It turned out the the Consulate had its own instrument, a gamelan brought over from Indonesia for the New York World’s Fair in 1964.
It hadn’t been played since.
The gamelan gets a work-out more or less every week now, by beginners and – here – by more proficient players.
But these more skilled gamelan performers…
..they’re mostly Americans.
A fact that’s not lost on Honey.
HONEY: “You know it’s embarrassing for us, because we see foreigners knows better than us, so it makes us… Come on we have to do it too! It makes us proud to see them play our music. And it’s not easy. It’s very difficult.”
..so difficult that all the players need a teacher.
For a while, Anne Stebinger ran the rehearsals.
Now it’s an Indonesian named Harjito, who’s also an artist-in-residence at Wesleyan University.
He remembers that the Indonesian players weren’t too comfortable with Anne Stebinger, even though, as he says, she’s a good teacher.
But being a good teacher wasn’t the problem. The Gamelan is an proud Indonesian instrument. Stebinger is an American teacher. The discomfort is a little embarrassing to Harjito.
HARJITO: “It’s kind of.. The feeling, I don’t know how to explain.”
Getting Harjito to teach the class was a clever bit of diplomacy.
Here’s Honey.
HONEY: “We’re just OK OK OK! And everyone’s having fun, a quick learner. It’s getting easier.”
Anne Stebinger says the Indonesian beginners are catching up with the more proficient Americans.
STEBINGER: “They’re much faster, they can come in for six months and learn what we learn in five years. It’s in their ear already – they heard it growing up.”
HONEY: “I was intimidated the first time because they know better than us. We have it, so we don’t think it’s important. But when you don’t have it, somebody else then – oooh! But now we are far from it, we never heard of it, we missed it, and so we start to learn it.”
In Java, the gamelan is played with a lot of decorum, in grand palaces with marble floors. They take the instrument seriously in New York too. But here the sound of the gamelan is mixed with laughter.
HONEY: “It’s fun, it’s fun.”
For The World, I’m Alex Gallafent, New York.
great music, and we will keep listening if there any more Javanese gamelan onair