University Gamelan Ensemble explores music, culture and creativity at Bellefield Hall concert

The University of Pittsburgh Gamelan Ensemble played at the Bellefield Hall Auditorium on Nov. 18th, inviting the public and anyone affiliated with the University to hear the traditional sounds of the Sundanese drumming ensemble. The concert consisted of an hour of musicality, cultural exploration and community. 

Gamelan is a musical style that originated from Indonesia and has three main styles — Balinese, Javanese and Sundanese. The Gamelan ensemble plays primarily Sundanese style music and pulls songs spanning from ancient times to contemporary gamelan. 

Gamelan instruments are mainly percussive, mallet instruments made from fitted metals such as iron or bronze and divided into two main families — pencon and wilah. Pencon instruments are gongs or gong-like and can vary in size while maintaining their disk-like shape. Wilah instruments are similar to the xylophone, as they have slated keys that are amplified by pipe-like structures underneath. Both of these instrument families are played with a mallet, a type of tool used to hit percussive instruments that has a spherical end for playing.

The concert began at 8 p.m. and ran for under an hour with a program of six songs. Members of the ensemble rotated on and off stage between songs, with some rotating between different instruments. Alongside the pencon and wilah instruments were percussive instruments similar to a bongo or hand drum and a flute-like instrument called a “suling,” or a ring flute.

The concert had an echoing sound from the metallic instruments, and the suling added a high-pitched voice to the music. A featured composer in the ensemble was Lou Harrison, an American composer whose work invited the students to view a disjunct interpretation of gamelan and compare it with styles of music they were more familiar with. One of the Harrison pieces featured Roger Zahab, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh who has a focus in violin performance and directs the Pitt Symphony Orchestra. 

Gamelan Ensemble is open to students across the university and community members, regardless of their experience in playing. Jay Arms, a professor in the University of Pittsburgh’s music department and the ensemble’s director, embraces students with different levels of musical experience in Eastern music, Western music and music in general.

“The students who are more entrenched in a tradition, not necessarily Western tradition, but any other tradition, might find it more difficult than those who have no musical background at all, who are maybe more susceptible,” Arms said. “And just since they’re doing it for the first time, they don’t have a preconceived notion of how they’re supposed to learn or how the music’s supposed to go.”

Gamelan playing is rooted in community. In the concert, all of the performers — whether they were faculty, students or staff — were sitting on the ground playing together. The players worked off of one another’s silent signals, such as body movements, making eye contact with one another, even breathing in sync to listen to each other and work towards a whole tone.

Kristian Swann, a senior biology major, wanted to join the ensemble to explore something different after playing the cello in chamber ensembles for the past three years, and learned a lot from the communal aspect of gamelan.

“Basically, you’re all working together to produce this solid, beautiful thing, and definitely with the gamelan, because we usually don’t read sheet music — we only did it for, like, the composed part of composed pieces — but we’re playing patterns, and it’s really useful listening out to the other players when it comes to being together, and also just, you know, making sure you’re in the right place and getting everything solid,” Swann said. 

The concert was free to students, staff, faculty and members of the public. Nichole Faina, a content manager on staff at the University of Pittsburgh, found the concert on Pitt’s events calendar and wanted to experience a new kind of music. 

“I’m just always looking to kind of expand my horizons. I think since I’ve kind of turned to Spotify,  the algorithm has turned kind of narrow for me, and I just find that I’m listening to the same kind of stuff all the time, so I’m trying to just do something different,” Faina said. 

Students can enroll in Gamelan Ensemble for the upcoming spring semester under MUSIC 0690 for course registration. No experience is required, and students from all areas of study are encouraged to play music and join the gamelan community.