The National Concert Hall (NCH) in Dublin is a very imposing building. It is a massive stone structure which would not be out of place as a Monarchial residence. It reminds me of the majesty of some buildings in places like Paris or London: buildings fit for Kings and Queens. Wikipedia tells me that it was built for an art exhibition for an international expo, which makes sense: everyone tends to step up when the world is watching. There’s a Philip Glass concert tonight, which I would normally be very excited for — I missed this same group on my Birthday, when they were in Cambridge and I in Edinburgh, but now our paths are finally crossing. Except, tonight I won’t see them either.

Instead, I’m here to see the NCH’s gamelan rehearsal. It’s tucked away up several floors, past the main auditorium. I got lost at one point trying to find toilets, and I’m pretty sure I walked past the musicians who were performing in the Glassworks concert. This gamelan had an incredible story to get here: the liner notes in the group’s most recent CD, by Peter Moran, detail how the Sultan of Yogyakarta commissioned this gamelan, with one caveat: the group had to commit to playing specifically Yogyakarta-style gamelan, not a broader sense of Javanese gamelan which is also possible on these instruments.

I once again find myself reflecting on how funny the transmission of culture across the world is. Here is a gamelan that came into creation from the equivalent of a Javanese King, some 12,000 kilometres away. It is bitterly cold tonight, the complete opposite of a typical temperature in the equatorial Indonesia, and yet Peter still offers me a selection of Indonesian teas he has imported back from his time overseas, as if this was only some far-flung region of Indonesia and not separated by the entire Asian, African, and European continents. The group has travelled to Indonesia numerous times; they have performed in festivals and learned from gamelan masters. Some of their performances have, according to the recounts in the liner notes, brought the house down: fun arrangements of popular songs which drive the crowd crazy.

So, the group is clearly firmly embedded in Indonesian tradition: they have an edict to perform in Yogyakarta style, and their performances are well-liked in Indonesia when they travel there (compare this to, say Salukat, in Bali, a very avant-garde ensemble, which is not very popular with the general public). But, the group also performs new works. They’ve been involved in new theatrical productions and festivals performing new pieces, and collaborating with musicians with no gamelan experience. The other gamelan I saw in Ireland, the Irish Gamelan Orchestra in Cork, also experiments with collaborative processes. The Cork University gamelan student ensemble, which I was generously allowed to sit in on, encourages fiddles instead of the Javanese rebab, which can result in a true merging of multiple cultures.

I’ve been thinking about what makes a cultural tradition specific to that culture. The Balinese gamelan developed because at some point it was imported from Java, and remained a Hindu tradition after the Islamification of Java and the Hindus migrated to Bali. This resulted in the Balinese tradition and Javanese tradition developing in different ways, from the slow and refined Javanese to the loud and fast Balinese. So if a gamelan is transported from Java or Bali to another country, and that country puts its own spin on it, when does the cultural tradition become something new. 100 years in the future, will we talk about the Irish gamelan as a genre like we do Javanese and Balinese? Musical traditions evolve and change with time, and so it is not unreasonable that these cultures could all share a fundamental tradition, but develop into their own unique styles. Something to reflect on — when does culture make a tradition, and when does a tradition separate from its culture of origin? Javanese and Balinese were already distinct genres when the Dutch invaders arrived, but would view gamelan differently if we could see these changes happen in real time? I have no answers to these questions (yet), but I think the idea of tradition constantly changing and the results of this in new cultural settings is worth exploring further.