The Newark Star-Ledger

November 15, 2004

by Bradley Bambarger,
Star-Ledger Staff

A flair for the unusual at Carnegie's Zankel

NEW YORK -- Seemingly serving as Zankel Hall's surrogate programmer, composer John Adams was given the run of Carnegie Hall's underground venue again this weekend for his alternative "In Your Ear" festival.

Adams curated Zankel's opening festivities last year to some acclaim. His longtime record company -- the eclectic Nonesuch -- has also become a key supplier of cross-cultural artistry to Carnegie, as the hallowed hall strives to lend its offerings a new-century slant.

"In Your Ear" eschewed the Western classicism that dominates Carnegie's upstairs space in favor of world music and jazz. Saxophonist Joshua Redman and Iranian composer/spiked-fiddle virtuoso Kayhan Kalhor were among the attractions, along with composer-instrumentalist Evan Ziporyn and Gamelan Galak Tika on Saturday afternoon.

Ever since Debussy was entranced by the visiting gamelan at the 1889 world expo in Paris, a series of Western composers has been influenced by the exotic, hypnotic tintinnabulations of these ceremonial Indonesian percussion orchestras. A resident of Bali for decades, Canadian composer Colin McPhee not only hipped Benjamin Britten to the gamelan but helped bequeath the influence to such Americans as Lou Harrison.

A composer and clarinetist with veteran new-music collective Bang on a Can All-Stars, the Chicago-born Ziporyn also directs the music and theater arts program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He co-founded Gamelan Galak Tika at MIT in 1993. At Zankel, the ensemble -- comprising MIT students, staff and friends -- performed a traditional work and a piece by contemporary Balinese composer Dewa Ketut Alit, as well as two Ziporyn compositions.

Gamelan events are visual as well as aural experiences, even those by academic groups visiting from Massachusetts. Gamelan Galak Tika -- old Javanese for "intense togetherness" -- performed in full Indonesian regalia on a stage dotted by tall pink umbrellas, in addition to the 20 or so ornate metallophones and several large gongs. Barefoot in plum-colored robes, the players cut across the spectrum of age, gender and ethnicity, with women sporting flowers in their hair and the men bandana-type head wraps.

Part of the standard Balinese repertoire, "Hujan Mas" (golden rain) is credited to multiple composers, its authorship typically uncertain in a musical culture that places a premium on performance ritual. The piece served as a brief opening fanfare, setting the intoxicating tone of wave-like rhythms and ringing sonorities.

Unlike Debussy or Britten, Ziporyn doesn't incorporate gamelan sounds into his music but rather brings his personal invention to the form. He goes to Bali, rather than bringing a bit of Bali back home. His "Amok!" is a sort of triple concerto juxtaposing electronically treated cello and digitally sampled percussion and keyboard with the gamelan. Rhythmically complex, the six-movement piece is also lyrical, not only thanks to the cello but to sundry percussionists doubling on wood flutes.

The cellist, Ha-Yang Kim, and digital percussionist, Nathan Davis, make up the duo Odd Appetite. They performed the complicated parts of "Amok!" with seemingly effortless élan. Playing a hand drum within the ensemble, Ziporyn led the group subtly through his polyrhythmic maze. Underlining the communal nature of the gamelan, Ziporyn, Kim and Davis next joined the ranks of metallophone players for Alit's "Semara Wisaya" (aspects of love), a brightly, melodiously clangorous piece.

Ziporyn's "Tire Fire" capped the afternoon with a cross-cultural, color-rich mix of mesmeric gamelan resonance and rock drama. Two electric guitarists, an electric bassist and keyboardist joined the ensemble, adding buzzing chords and tolling lines to the contrapuntal web. The composer hammered away at a metallophone, obviously, and infectiously, enjoying himself.

The New York Times

November 19, 2004

by Anne Midgette

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Music institutions in New York tend to present one kind of music. But the goal of Zankel Hall is to undercut the dominance of 19th-century Western art music at Carnegie Hall - undercut literally because it is in Carnegie's basement and figuratively by bringing in world music, jazz and other kinds of performance.

For the hall's opening last year, Carnegie invited the composer John Adams to curate a two-week festival demonstrating its artistic range; they liked the result so much that they had him come back to reprise it over three days last weekend, an event titled "In Your Ear," offering everything from the Paul Dresher Ensemble to the Iranian kamancheh player Kayhan Kalhor.

On Saturday afternoon the featured artists were Evan Ziporyn, a composer and clarinetist, and the gamelan orchestra Galak Tika, which Mr. Ziporyn founded at M.I.T. in 1993.

Gamelan means "to hammer," and the orchestra is composed of xylophonelike instruments whose hard metallic rhythms evoke, to Western ears, the timbre of Wagner's Niebelungs at their anvils, ameliorated by a few softer mallets and a set of dark metal gongs. One player keeps the beat on a simple percussion instrument, while the effective bandleader is one of two drummers, playing a two-headed instrument, at centerstage. The complex music is not notated, which gives it a sense of spontaneity as well as inevitability, like the pattern of tree branches against the sky. On Saturday, Galak Tika opened with a popular piece written by a Balinese master in the early 1960's, showing the gamelan as it would like to be seen.

But one point of the exercise was that Mr. Ziporyn had taken the tradition and run with it, so most of the program was devoted to two pieces in which he added Western instruments to the gamelan tapestry. "Amok!" from 1997, mingled cello with keyboard and percussion samples, refracting even the cello's tone into an unusual wailing quaver. The piece played with the delicate balance of interaction between the gamelan orchestra's musicians, thrusting other sounds into the music's spokes and exploring the new lopsided patterns that emerged. It was, however, a lengthy excursion.

Tighter and more obviously appealing was "Tire Fire" (1994), for gamelan, keyboard and three electric guitars. Toward the end of the piece, the gamelan players paused to listen to the guitars, then picked up on what they were doing in their own language, creating an exuberant blast of metal fireworks.

The Jakarta Post

July 11, 2004

by Maggie Tiojakin, Contributor, Boston

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Gamelan groups find the beat on U.S. campuses

At 7:45 p.m. at MIT's Kresge Little Theater, 20 men and women, most of them American, entered the stage dressed in cranberry-colored outfits and yellow headgear, with a purple rose tucked behind one ear.

Immediately, they positioned themselves behind a set of gamelan traditional orchestra instruments as the houselights went from dim to complete darkness.

For the next hour and a half a series of high-pitched noises emanated from the stage as the players relentlessly pounded and hammered on gangsa (a middle-register metallophone used to provide melodic ornamentation), rayong (12 small gongs in a set, supported horizontally in a frame), jegogan (metallophones), gong and kendang (traditional drum).

Unfamiliar with the performance but strangely drawn into it, the audience froze in their seats.

"I don't want it to end," said Stacey Collins, a Cambridge resident who came to the show at a friend's recommendation.

Gamelan is nothing new to Western ears; the word entered the English language in the 1860s after gamelan orchestras performed at world expositions in Europe.

Today, however, it is enjoying a revival of sorts; more than 100 universities in the United States have opened gamelan music courses as a part of their curriculum, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is no exception.

Familiarly known as GGT, the Boston-based Balinese gamelan group Gamelan Galak Tika was founded at MIT in 1993 by composer and clarinetist Evan Ziporyn, who took a teaching position at the institute in 1990.

For the past 11 years, the campus has hosted over 50 performances by Galak Tika, and drawn thousands of international audience members from its surrounding community. This year, the group hopes to collect US$60,000 from performance takings and donations to help fund their first trip to Bali next year to attend the International Bali Arts Festival 2005.

"If it happens I will flip for joy," said Rebecca Zook, a member since 2000. A local musician, she joined Galak Tika at a friend's invitation.

"The first time I learned how to play (gamelan), I felt like the part of my brain I had never used before just split wide open," said Zook, recounting her experience of playing with the ensemble.

"(Gamelan music) is all about internalizing everything until it became automatic, like reciting your own phone number or spelling your name." Zook also started composing gamelan music two years into her membership at GGT.

Sean Mannion, a recent graduate of the New England Conservatory of Music who has been with the group since 1997, admits their are highs and lows to composing music with gamelan.

"Usually, the end result of my music is a fusion of my experience with Balinese gamelan and my own personal musical expression," he said.

Mannion applied to join the group after watching one of Galak Tika's earlier performances, where he "was completely wowed".

For Ziporyn, learning how to play gamelan instruments was a challenge.

"Obviously, I'm not Balinese, nor Indonesian -- it's not my culture," he said.

In the beginning, the 45-year-old musician, who started his career playing and composing jazz music, sensed some trepidation to play gamelan music because of its traditional qualities.

"It was more of a psychological fear," he said, claiming that it had taken him 10 years to begin the process of mastering the ensemble. Once he felt comfortable enough with the instruments, however, playing gamelan came naturally to him.

What drew him to the music was the first record of Balinese gamelan he had purchased in 1979 while he was studying at Yale University.

"I immediately fell in love with the music," said Ziporyn.

Dying for new materials to incorporate in his own compositions, Zyporin only saw one solution.

"I contacted Michael Tenzer in the fall (that same year)," he recalled.

Tenzer, a world music scholar and professor of music at the University of British Columbia, who had taught at Yale for some period of time, is a renowned expert on Balinese gamelan.

He has written countless papers on Balinese arts and culture, and in 1979, he cofounded a Balinese gamelan group, Gamelan Sekar Jaya (GSJ), based in San Francisco. Tenzer spent a few years living in Bali, hoping to absorb its traditions and music, and it led the group's debut tour to Bali in 1985.

Ziporyn, who was studying gamelan under Tenzer's guidance and already an active member of GSJ, could not afford to miss out on the opportunity.

"Balinese were shocked that Americans could play (gamelan) music, or even want to," said Ziporyn of the memorable visit.

Naturally, GSJ was nervous about presenting Balinese culture to the native Balinese, worried they might somehow get it wrong. But Balinese people eventually "forgave (the group)'s inaccuracy in playing the music" and accepted it instead as a gesture of respect, Ziporyn said.

He expects Galak Tika will do just as well, if not better, in its debut tour next year. Even though the group is a mirror image of Gamelan Sekar Jaya, Ziporyn insists that Galak Tika is, in its own merit, an independent and self-sufficient group.

"(With Galak Tika) I wanted to do both traditional and experimental music," says Ziporyn, who, based on this idea, was initially going to name the group Intergalactic Gamelan. Then, after consulting with I Nyoman Catra, a resident artist who helped Ziporyn co-found the group, a new name, one that is not too far from the original idea, was suggested.

Derived from the ancient Sanskrit dialect Kawi, Galak Tika could be translated as: "intense togetherness", "rabid musical gathering" or "crazy ball of yarn".

Ziporyn agreed to go with the second option. "All of these seem to fit (with the group)."
Ziporyn, born in Chicago in 1959, is not your average Joe. As a young boy, he grew up listening to Beethoven and Schubert at home. As a teenager, he discovered jazz and progressive rock. By the time he went to college, his musical interests had reached continents beyond the one he was living in, particularly Africa and Asia.

"My father is a classical violinist and he owned a large collection of world music records," Ziporyn says. "I was always interested in music from other cultures, and I always look to it for ideas and inspiration as a composer."

Ziporyn's life-long affair with Balinese music and dances brought him to the famed island several times, where he received his Kerawitan (music) diploma as a Fulbright scholar from the Denpasar-based Indonesia Institute of the Arts in the late 1980s.

Asked what he thinks of Javanese gamelan, Ziporyn quickly explains that although he appreciates Javanese music, he felt the course of fate brought him to the Balinese variety.

"Javanese music has a kind of depth I really admire; it's just not the place I happen to end up in," he says.

Apart from their historical accounts, musicians have argued that the major difference between Balinese and Javanese gamelan lies strictly in its composition. Whereas Javanese court music tends to be more "improvisational", Balinese music leaves very little room, if at all, for improvisation during performances.

According to Tenzer, Balinese musicians "rehearse to perfect their music as a unified musical expression", instead of individual ones.

Regardless, Ziporyn adds that, for future reference, he hopes Galak Tika will consider an interest in Javanese music, which he views as something "very unknown in the West".

Influenced by the works of Bela Bartok, a 20th century Hungarian composer who incorporated most of his compositions with traditional elements, Ziporyn started using a similar technique for his own works.

"I want to present something to (the American audience) in a frame that they understand."

That something was Balinese gamelan music,"because it doesn't really matter how beautiful or exotic a music is; when people don't understand the context of the music, they immediately shut down."

Aneh Tapi Nyata (Strange But Real, 1995), Amok! (1996), Kebyar Kebyar (2002), Ngaben (2003), and Ngeredana (2004) are a few examples of Ziporyn's blended gamelan compositions. For the world premiere of Ngeredana on May 14 at MIT's Kresge Theater in Cambridge, Ziporyn collaborated with Wu Man, a pipa (plucked instrument in the flute family) virtuoso, who joined Galak Tika in performance.

Comprised of 30 strong members, mostly from MIT community, Gamelan Galak Tika is hardly something that can be taken for granted. They give five to six performances a year, some of them hosted by MIT, some others by musical conservatories or colleges in and around the East Coast.

To perfect their craft, the members work closely with another distinguished Balinese artist in residence who has been involved with the group from the very beginning, Desak Made Suarti Laksmi.

"I think we're doing something that would be of interest to Balinese," said Ziporyn, who had just completed a month-long production of Oedipus at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, a Greek drama for which he wrote the musical accompaniment.

Commenting on what is in store for the group in the next few years, Ziporyn states that they hope to continue preserving and promoting Balinese arts and culture as a part of Boston's multicultural scene.

In a city of five million people, Galak Tika stands as the only representative of a Balinese gamelan group. This alone is an accomplishment. "It makes one feel that one has contributed a little to the community," he added.

La Folia Music Magazine, Volume 2 Number 5: “Three of the Year’s Best”

Review of:
Evan Ziporyn / Gamelan Galak Tika : Amok!

Review of the recent CD “Evan Ziporyn / Gamelan Galak Tika”

Evan Ziporyn moved from the West Coast to MIT and there formed a gamelan. Ziporyn’s involvement in Balinese music has a history, well covered in the good notes. To judge from what one hears going on in the present recording, Ziporyn’s Galak Tika ensemble got some rock-solid coaching from two masters, I Nyoman Catra and Desak Made Suarti Laksmi. A well-trained gamelan is on its own buoyant merits a pleasure and a treat. What, for me, puts this release in a best-of category is Ziporyn’s having integrated two high-energy musical styles – cultures, if you like: Downtown and Balinese – in such a way as to arrive at an entirely valid third. One remembers from around the time of WW2 a synthetic rubber, widely regarded by drivers as inferior. Yet something synthetic, particularly in this period we agree to call postmodern, might very well look to a brighter multicultural future (even though the work continues to give me the willies). To be sure, the two multi-part numbers on this disc, Amok! and Tire Fire, are indeed synthetics in both senses of that term: syntheses in the literal sense as well as concoctions, and what tasty concoctions they are! I judge the titles ill conceived in that they suggest raucous anarchic events when, in this listener’s opinion, sprightly subtlety obtains. Demure, however, not. Subtlety need not imply quietude. A gamelan is a gamelan, after all, as are electric guitars.

Cambridge Tab
Friday, May 9, 2003

By Jennifer Lawinski /Correspondent

Regarding: May 2, 2003 GGT performance at the Charles River Conservancy's Bridge's Alight event at Weeks Footbridge

Bridges of light shine

The eerie music of the Gamelan Galak Tika of M.I.T. drifted across the parklands surrounding the Charles River on Friday evening. As dusk fell, white lights illuminated the Andersen and Weeks bridges spanning the Charles River in a celebration sponsored by the Charles River Conservancy called "Bridges Alight." In spite of the damp chill, dozens gathered along the banks of the Charles River to see the Andersen and Weeks bridges illuminated by the Conservancy for the first time since the December, 2001, and listen to the music and dance performances taking place on both banks of the river.

"By lighting the bridges, we want to draw attention to the bridges and the parklands," said Renata von Tscharner, president of the Charles River Conservancy. "It looks pretty from a distance, but the Weeks Bridge is in a very, very bad state of repair." The organization and its volunteers sponsor events and participate in cleaning up the parklands and promoting awareness of the need for clean, safe recreation space along the Charles River. Conservancy volunteers distributed information about the parklands and the group's conservation efforts, as well as glow-sticks so that
the audience could participate in the "illumination" of the evening.

John Powell of Allston designed and implemented the bridge lighting. "This is a way to draw attention to the river," he said. He wanted to illuminate the bridges "because they're really beautiful and it's kind of strange to go to an international city and have it be so uninternational."

"It's giving the city credit for itself and how beautiful it is," said Powell. He is also responsible for lighting the Moakley Bridge and King's Chapel in downtown Boston. Musical performances by the Gamelan Galak Tika of M.I.T., The Berklee West African Drummers and Dancers, Riversong, Made in the Shade, Josh Baumer, Liz Carlisle, and Scott Fruhan were staged on both sides of the river throughout the evening. "I think it's really far more important than people realize to have a culture around the park," said Julie Stone of Friends of Herder Park. "There are a lot of groups that would like to integrate the arts more in ways that bring people together."

The Boston Phoenix, November 28 - December 5, 2002

BY MARCIA B. SIEGEL

Review of:
December 2002 MIT Concert

Gongsville
Gamelan Galak Tika at MIT

Not one but two gamelans rocked from the stage of Kresge Auditorium a week ago Sunday as MIT’s Gamelan Galak Tika inaugurated a series of concerts to celebrate its 10th anniversary. Gamelan can signify both a set of tuned percussive instruments and the ensemble of musicians who play them. Gamelan Galak Tika was started in 1993 by Evan Ziporyn and two Balinese artists who were doing graduate work in the Boston area. The group now numbers 29, plus dancers who are part of every performance. For this concert, the founder-mentors, Topeng dancer I Nyoman Catra and musician/composer Desak Made Suarti Laksmi, now based at Wesleyan University and Holy Cross College respectively, returned to appear with the group.... [to read this review: The Boston Phoenix, November 28 - December 5, 2002 ]

The Boston Phoenix, 12/16/1999

by Marcia B. Siegel

Review of:
December 1999 Concert

Gong games
Gamelan Galak Tika at MIT

Balinese performing arts don't separate into neat packages labeled "music," "dance," "drama." They're all interconnected, and all drawn from spiritual traditions. The most spectacular dance entertainments draw their movement vocabulary from ancient temple rites, and all performances begin with a prayer. Gamelan Galak Tika's concert last Friday night at MIT's Kresge Auditorium spanned all these ideas in an hour and a half of sparkling interplay.... [to read this review: The Boston Phoenix, 12/16/1999]