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Hello Bali
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Hartford Advocate, Hello Bali >>
Nonesuch reissues 13 classic recordings of music from Indonesia and the South Pacific
by John Adamian
Remember the Minotaur scene from Fellini's Satyricon? OK, you might not have made it that far. The scene stands out, even in a movie of striking and bizarre images, because of Fellini's use of the Balinese monkey chant -- amazing and strange multi-layered music that managed to steal the scene from the surreal visuals.
Classic recordings of the monkey chant and other music from Indonesia and the South Pacific originally recorded and released in the 1960s, '70s and '80s as part of the Nonesuch Explorer Series are being reissued on CD this month, some for the first time.
The monkey chant, or ketjak singing as it's known, is traditionally performed by groups of 200 or more men seated in a temple courtyard. The music is like a rapid-fire game of ping-pong in which syllables are batted back and forth instead of a ball. The men are divided into groups, each chanting the syllable "tjak," in quick and successive volleys. The effect is like the sound of thousands of crickets on an autumn night, the whole becoming a swelling wash.
The batch of releases includes five CDs of music from Bali; four from Java, the most populous Indonesian island; one of pop music from West Java; one from Tahiti; and one from the South Pacific, including music from Tonga, Fiji and Western Samoa.
But there's much more to the set than just the monkey chant. This is the mother lode of gamelan -- the hypnotic ensemble of metal xylophone-like instruments and gongs -- with nine of the discs prominently featuring the orchestra. If you've never heard a gamelan orchestra (Wesleyan University in Middletown has a renowned gamelan ensemble that performs a couple times a year; they have staged performances of the monkey chant as well), it sounds something like an army of vibes players hammering away with deep gongs sounding slowly on the bottom end and higher-pitched instruments chiming in faster patterns up top.
With its fast and slow layers, it can be like the experience of speeding through the country in a car, with distant hilltops staying relatively fixed while the objects up close zip by. Gamelan has influenced such composers as Lou Harrison (who died recently) and Henry Cowell, and as a result, studies of it and other non-Western musical traditions have become a part of the training for many students of 20th century classical composition. Musicians in Bali and Java have been playing this rhythmically complex, ornate and hypnotic music since long before Steve Reich and Philip Glass were born.
The instruments played on Java: Court Gamelan, recorded in 1971, are heirloom artifacts made around 1755, just five years after Bach's death. J.S. Brandt Buys, who heard the orchestra in 1920, described it like this: "The gamelan gilds the time. The hours forget their usual course. The quarters shrink to golden minutes, minutes seem like blissful hours. Now in the softer moments, the music sounds as if I heard angels sing, now, when at half strength, as if I heard all the chimes in heaven. And then again, in the fullness of its mighty power, it is as if a storm of bronze thunders through my temples."
French composer Claude Debussy heard gamelan at an 1889 exposition in Paris, and he was transfixed by the shimmering timbres and sophisticated rhythms. But despite this music's appeal, the first commercial recordings of gamelan weren't made until the 1970s, excepting a few rare 78s. This music may have influence beyond the circumscribed field of composition or of world music -- influence beyond this world itself. Along with music from other parts of the world, recordings of Javanese court gamelan were launched into outer space with the Voyager spacecraft in 1977.
But the Nonesuch discs aren't limited to museum pieces. West Java, Tonggeret: Sudanese Jaipong and Other Popular Music features a pop style that caught on in the late '70s in Indonesia. The music is noteworthy because it was the first Indonesian pop genre that wasn't explicitly derived from outside influences like Western rock or Middle Eastern popular music. The style, known as Jaipongan, was based on a village genre in which a female singer and dancer, who often happened to be a prostitute, would dance with male spectators. The Jaipongan on this release has dense and bubbling percussion that shifts to moments of flashy and abrupt punctuation with expressive female singing. Fans of Nigerian juju or Indian film music willing to jump oceans will appreciate this disc.
For a good sampling of the music of the island, Bali: Gamelan and Kecak offers a mix of gamelan, some monkey chant and a handful of other oddities. This disc opens with a 12-minute recording from a gamelan parade. As floats with gamelan groups approach the microphones, the music swells and rumbles, with that juicy overlap of other groups from the parade making the already-thick mix even denser. Charles Ives eat your heart out.
The Balinese don't confine their music of the animal kingdom to monkeys either. The track of "Lagu Kodok" (frog song) is an unbelievable croakfest in which musicians mimic the sound of the frogs that fill the island's rice paddies.
"Sekar Sungsang," off the same disc, is another track showcasing a peculiar ensemble. The song features a duet of gengongs, a large Jews' harp. This is some impressively twangy music, with the gurgly hint of the didjaradoo but with much more precise rhythmic articulation.
OK, so maybe your CD collection is already gamelan-heavy, maybe you've already bulked up and burned out on the music of Indonesia. There's still more for the musical traveler. Anyone looking for fitting music to play while gazing at that Gauguin print or flipping through those journals of Captain Cook might be disappointed by the disc of music from Tahiti. There's a bit of swaying-palm Polynesian ukulele, but there's more chanting, war drumming, and some shell trumpet and nose flute thrown in, for fans of that kind of thing.
South Pacific: Island Music contains some tongue-twisting chanting, beautiful group choral singing that sounds like Sacred Harp singing from an island paradise, pan pipes accented with ankle rattles and a taste of slit log drumming.
And for those whose monthly allotted budget for world music CDs does not exceed $150, there is a sampler covering all the Indonesian recordings.
It may sound like a raft of releases to be floating at one time, but the people at Nonesuch are only just getting started. There are 92 titles in all, scheduled to be reissued in batches by geographical region through 2005. In the fall of 2002, Nonesuch released 14 reissues of recordings from Africa, and 10 discs from Tibet and Kashmir are slated for release in June of this year.
jadamian@hartfordadvocate.com 02/20/03 >> go there
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