Returning Minimalism (In Deung – vibration of the spirit (getaran jiwa); In Dang – teruna’s dream (mimpi teruna))
Gamelan Semara Ratih of Bali
Sargasso scd28074 (sargasso.com)
This musically intriguing and culturally complex release uses American composer Terry Riley’s genre-defining 1964 minimalist work In C as a working model for exploration and improvisation by the renowned group Gamelan Semara Ratih (GSR) from southern Bali, Indonesia. It’s the brainchild of the Italian gamelan recording producer and composer John Noise Manis who has since the 1990s nurtured the notion of bringing together two of his musical passions: minimalism, and Javanese and Balinese forms of gamelan music. This ambitious album is the third in the series titled “Returning Minimalism.” In each, the creative challenge posed by Noise Manis to indigenous performers: find your inner, culturally appropriate In C.
He’s certainly not been the first to employ cross-cultural approaches to exploring music he loves. As the musicologist Kyle Gann has written, “minimalism [can be seen as] an irruption of non-Western influences into the Western tradition – even, American music’s attempt to connect with the rest of the world.” More pointedly however: did gamelan music somehow exert a substantive influence on early minimalism? There’s no evidence for this. To the contrary in 2011 Terry Riley stated that in the early 1960s when he created his early minimalist works, “the fact is that I didn’t know about gamelan.”
Regardless of shifting perceived patterns of cross-cultural influence the ongoing Returning Minimalism project argues for the important work of contesting stereotypical Western exoticist readings of culture. In this album the project has put a seminal musical composition, which at its birth shook up norms of classical Western music, into the hands of Balinese composers and musicians.
Guided by the seasoned American gamelan musician Ken Worthy, in their adaptive explorations of In C the 23 musicians of GSR are heard in two works on this ear-opening album. They form an attractive unforced-sounding hybrid reflecting both their Balinese and minimalist sources with clarity while not compromising either. On track one, In Deung – Vibration of the Spirit, melodic cells from In C are transposed into the seven-tone tuning of the GSR gamelan evoking an introspective mood representing “the spirit centred in the self.” By way of contrast the more lively In Dang – Teruna’s Dream reworks In C motifs and skilfully weaves into the fabric occasional quotations from Teruna Jaya (Victorious Youth), the influential early 20th-century North Balinese masterwork.
This marvellous music helps us deepen our understanding and enjoyment of such masterfully made multiple redirections in the flow of trans-cultural influences.
