Page 4 | Exploring for Nonesuch

Kraton Yogyakarta - Court Gamelan Volume III

Contents

Exploring for Nonesuch (1)

Recording at Paku Alaman (2)

The Mangkunegaran (3)

Kraton Yogyakarta (4)

Bali recordings (5)

Javanese
Court Gamelan
Vol III

To order from Amazon see
CD reviews

Seleh Notes Volume 10 Number 3 June 2003

© Robert Brown

 


Arrangements for recording the third court gamelan, from the Kraton, or main court, in Yogyakarta, were made by my old friend, dancer Benedictus Suharto, who had been Wesleyan’s first Javanese visiting artist.

The Yogya kraton style contrasts strongly with both the Paku Alaman and Mangkunegaran styles. We had arranged a programme that took advantage of the well-known soran, or loud-playing approach, for which the Yogya kraton is well-known, with several simultaneous instances of interlocking imbalen in the piece ‘Sumyar’, where no one is actually playing the melody per se, but all are breaking it up into simultaneous rhythmic and melodic variations.

Kraton Solo

Two recordings in the Kraton Solo (Surakarta), made some years ago will complete the Court Gamelan series. Besides being the most inaccessible of the courts, the first recording had to be made in a glass-enclosed dining pavilion, where the sound ricocheted in a disturbing manner.

One sinden, a female singer who was apparently a member of the royal family and couldn’t be asked not to participate (which she did in every single piece), struck me as unacceptably out of tune during the first recording.

Eight years later another recording session produced a clearer sound in a different area of the kraton, following a radio broadcast with several leading Solonese singers, but knowledgeable Javanese musicians seem to like some pieces from the older recording, ricochets or not, and their tolerance of pitch variation is apparently greater than mine.

I will have at least a couple of years to think my way through this problem, since Nonesuch cannot consider any new recordings until the present Explorer Series re-release is completed in 2005.

With luck, I will one day complete my own little series of Javanese court gamelans as they sounded 20 or 30 years ago, and can conclude my original plan to cover the main modes and principal musical forms.

 

Go to next page