Balinese gamelan and western jazz were two different musical forms never looking to be paired. Yet a marriage between the two was managed on Friday night with musicians creating delicious melodies for music lovers.
Students and lecturers from the School of Music at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign performed in the Ksirarnawa Theater at the Denpasar Art Center, giving the audience a new perspective on the combination of traditional and modern music.
The artists, who were grouped in the East and West Ensembles, explored the possibility of combining these two different types of musics.
They divided their performances into three phases. First came Balinese traditional music with various innovations, then secondly contemporary music followed by the jazz session with the gamelan touch.
The show was opened by a Kebyar Ding Sempati musical piece with a Sekar Taman dance (welcoming dance) performed by two Balinese and two foreign dancers.
The 20-strong gamelan musical ensemble had only three Balinese musicians. The rests were Americans and a Taiwanese.
Gamelan group members wearing traditional Balinese outfits were led by I Ketut Gede Asnawa, the university's gamelan instructor.
They all seemed really accustomed to the up-and-down rhythm of Balinese music, which is both extremely complex and vibrant.
The audience may have easily thought the piece was being played by the all-Balinese gamelan group.
The second piece titled "Reverberation" was a composed by Taiwanese student Ming Ching Chiu through combining elements from Chinese, Western and Balinese music. He mixed Balinese traditional gending with Western music's beat techniques.
The result was quite unique.
Ida Bagus Rai, a music studio owner in Denpasar, thought the piece, which didn't follow traditional Balinese music's principles, was funny and more like child's play.
He pointed out how the players beat the gamelan from right to left.
"In real Balinese music, we are not allowed to do that because it lowers its spiritual and aesthetic value," Rai said.
He said Balinese music was bound to strict rules as its original purpose was religious.
"Butok. We shall respect his creativity," he said.
The third piece was composed by Stephen Taylor with the title "Silent, Black, Outside". It was inspired by a short poem by Ursula K. LeGuin depicting a religious ceremony of a future religion.
Taylor mixed gamelan sounds with electronic music.
The second phase of the show was three contemporary percussion pieces, which can be classified as percussion theater.
First was a piece titled "Punya Korek Api?" (Do you have a match?). This unique piece only use matches as musical instrument with Afro-Cuban rhythm and visual elements played by four people.
The next was "Musik Meja" (table music) and was created by Thierry de Mey, a Belgian theater director and a percussionist. Three players moved harmoniously to create music by striking wooden boards.
The third piece was "Kepala Bicara" (Talking Head) from an American Composer Mark Ford that used drum membrane as its instrument.
The show closed with three beautiful jazz performances from the East-West Jazz Quartet and gamelan group. A piece composed by Taylor Briggs tried to balance both Western jazz and Balinese elements.
Asnawa said the most difficult thing he had encountered when teaching the gamelan to foreigners was introducing them to the Eastern dynamic and the cultural concepts.
"In music, they basically use odd tap, while we use even tap," he said.
He added that he was glad to see his students being creative.
"They create new pieces of music based on their own culture and musical tastes," he said.
However, they did not get rid of kotekan (interlocking parts), which exists in most varieties of Balinese gamelan, in their creations.
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