Gamelan and Semiotics I’ve been thinking lots about the semiotics of sound and music, particularly regarding gamelan. Semiotics is essentially the idea saying that music often represents something that it doesn’t inherently represent. It sounds more complicated than it is, because a few examples show quite clearly how this can be. Usually music is an […]
Last week, I had the pleasure of assisting with a wayang gamelan performance for the 60th anniversary of the Indonesia Project at ANU. If you’ve never seen wayang before, a form of Indonesian (mainly Javanese and Balinese) theatre. It uses shadow puppets, which has a big screen with a light projected onto it, with the […]
Something I’ve been developing in Indonesia is a concept of how music evolves. We’re all familiar with the biological concept of evolution: organisms have random traits introduced into generations, and the traits which stick end up becoming more and more common, resulting in a species that is more successful in its environment. The story I […]
This week, I’ve been continuing to practice kendang, which is the drum that leads a gamelan ensemble. It’s quite difficult to get the right procession of sounds on it, so my teacher encourages me to just practice getting the sounds out first: like the Karate Kid, I need to have those basics down pat, and […]
This week, I had the pleasure of joining in a Hindu ceremony in my local village in Bali. It was meant to start at 3pm, at 3pm I went out of my house and Grandma (not my Grandma, but she’s the Grandma of the homestay I live in and sure acts very grandmotherly towards me, […]
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 […]
Out of all the cities I visited on my Europe trip, Paris was the only one that I had visited before (other than London, but I barely spent any time there at all). I was heading there specifically because of a gamelan that I’d found when searching up groups to go and visit – gamelan […]
I always thought the UK was a train country. By that, I mean you always hear about how good the trains are there, how easy they are to take, and how connected the country is. I also think the Victorian steam era of the UK heavily features the development of its rail network, so it’s […]
The past two weeks I’ve had the pleasure of taking part in a marimba ensemble workshop. These marimbas aren’t orchestral marimbas, though, which I have some very minor experience playing. These marimbas are Zimbabwean: handcrafted and in four different ranges (soprano, alto, tenor, bass). It was a lot of fun to learn an unfamiliar (ie […]
Before I had travelled to Bali, I played in an Balinese gamelan (traditional ensemble) in Canberra. Friends there often expressed a sense of regret or sadness about the current state of Bali. “It used to be a beautiful, natural island,” they would say, “but now it has become overrun with resorts and tourists”. They would […]