Indonesia is an archipelago in Southeast Asia between the Indian and Pacific oceans. Gamelan is the Indonesian term for a musical ensemble. These ensembles are made up of a mixture of instruments of all types: membranophones, idiophones, chordophones, and aerophones. Occasionally, singers are included.

     Gamelan music influenced a number of twentieth-century American composers. Henry Cowell became one of its foremost exponents. Cowell’s father exposed him to a variety of music, especially the music of China, Japan, and Tahiti. In 1914, Cowell began studying at the University of California at Berkley with the musicologist Charles Seeger. In the later 1920s Cowell was in New York teaching. While there, he won a Guggenheim Foundation grant to study in Berlin. In Berlin he studied gamelan music with Raden Mas Jodjhana of Java.

     Cowell’s music reflects many of the characteristics of the international music he absorbed. One of the percussive influences present in his music is the use of tone clusters, the simultaneous hitting of adjacent keys on the piano. Another piano technique that Cowell devised was to have the performer silently displace keys so those strings would be undamped and then have the performer reach over with the other hand and strum those strings. This is most manifest in his piece The Banshee.

     Chinese culture has also influenced contemporary American composers. Music in China has always been conceived as a system that reflects the order of the universe. The Chinese believed that the foundation tone, or huang chung, had a social, cosmological, and mystical influence. From this mystical tone, the Chinese musical system derived twelve tones or lu. In modern performance, most Chinese music is based on a pentatonic scale.

     John Cage, a student of Henry Cowell, was influenced by a great deal of non-Western music, especially the music of China. Cage traveled widely to absorb different influences and get new ideas. In addition to studying with Cowell, he studied with Arnold Schonberg. In 1940, Cage was hired to provide music for a dance production. Restricted to a solo, he wanted to develop a way of expanding the percussive effects to fit the African character of the dance. The result was a prepared piano with a variety of materials on and between the strings and hammers. Cage wrote numerous pieces for prepared piano throughout his career.

    Cage was influenced by more than Chinese culture. In the mid-1940s he became interested in Zen Buddhism. He also studied with an Indian singer. But Harvard University’s anechoic chamber had probably the most profound effect on him. After spending time there, completely isolated from sounds of the outside world, he became aware of the sounds of his own body. This led to a different approach to music and one of his most famous compositions, 4’33”.   

QUESTIONS AND TOPICS 

1. The two most distinct types of Indonesian gamelan music are Javanese and Balinese. The differences between these types are slight, however, and might be missed by the casual listener. The differences have to do with tempo, types of instruments used, and rhythmic and dynamic changes. Balinese gamelan is also characterized by the kotek, the sharing of a melody by trading notes of different pitches (interlocking). Javanese gamelan shows more Muslim influence.

2. Gamelan music influenced composers of the nineteenth century as well as contemporary composers. Claude Debussy was aware of and used elements of the gamelan in some of his music. In his Nocturnes, he used Javanese scale patterns and rhythmic patterns. Igor Stravinsky was influenced by Asian and African music. His approach to rhythm was developed from African polyrhythm.

3. Aleatoric, or chance music, can take many forms. It was not an invention of the twentieth century, either. Musical games in the eighteenth century involved creating melodies by rolling dice and piecing together composed phrases.

FURTHER TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION

1. Ask your students about their reaction to Cage’s 4’33”. How does this fit with their understanding of music?

2. Much of non-Western music focuses on rhythm and melody. These cultures haven’t developed a complex harmonic system with specific chords and chord progressions. Harmony is a result of polyphonic textures being created and the use of drones.