I have been taking classes in Javanese gamelan for some years now. This year as summer turned to autumn I found myself in a remote location in the north west of Scotland attending a retreat centred on the popular Indonesian music. This was in Poolewe, a village that sits where the Ewe river flows into Loch Ewe. For complicated reasons Poolewe hosts a gamelan set and a gamelan academic who has pitched up in the area runs a local gamelan group. She put the word out on the gamelan retreat to her various contacts in that world, which included the director of our gamelan class in the National Concert Hall, and somehow I was the only person in Dublin who signed up to attend.
I am a great believer in slow travel, so instead of flying I opted to make my way to Poolewe by surface travel, taking the train to Belfast and then on to Inverness by ferry, connecting bus and train (the combined sail rail ticket making this a very affordable option). The small Friday evening train to Inverness was surprisingly quiet and I enjoyed looking out the window at fields being encroached on by deer and rabbits.
I could have stayed overnight in Inverness and then gone on to Poolewe the next day but I opted to spend two nights in that town or city so that I could dip my toe into what it had to offer. The main thing I did there was visit the nearby Culloden battle site. As you know, this was where in 1746 the Hanoverian army of the Duke of Cumberland smashed the Jacobite army of Bonnie Prince Charlie, bringing an end to Jacobitism as a serious political cause and accelerating non-ideal change in the Scottish Highlands. In retrospect everyone loves the Jacobites so their defeat at Culloden is generally seen as a Bad Thing. You can stroll around the battle site for free but it is worth paying to visit the museum and paying a little bit extra again for a guided tour of the site. Our tour guide began by saying that he was no expert in the historical period but then went on to deliver a pithy but impressive summary of the odd politics of the time and the course of the conflict up to and following Culloden. Military history weirdoes like myself enjoyed the description of the battle tactics used by the respective armies and I was particularly struck by how the Highlanders in the Jacobite army were a highly disciplined fighting force and not the barbarian wildmen they are sometimes painted as by their supporters and opponents.
Culloden is a bleak site and there is something quite affecting about the various mounds marking mass graves of Jacobite dead that abound on it. Visiting it did make me want to read more about both the 1745 Jacobite rebellion and the consequences that flowed from it, including the Clearances. It was only the fact that my to-read pile is already enormous that stopped me picking up a load of books in the gift shop, although I did at least acquire a small bottle of Culloden single malt whisky.
Back in Inverness I picked up another bottle of whisky (my beloved's favourite, Benromach) and had a look at the famously enormous second hand bookshop Leakey's, but did not buy anything due to decision paralysis and not being on the hunt for anything in particular.
By now you might be wondering whether this travelogue will at any point feature any actual gamelan retreat action. Rest assured that I will soon be turning to the Javanese music, as the next day saw me leaving Inverness to head first north and then west on the Kyle of Lochalsh railway line, which brought me to Achnasheen. It was a small train of only two or so carriages and I knew there were several other gamelaners onboard. I was tempted to march through the train making bonang noises to see if I could sweat them out but I decided against it, partly out of shyness and partly because I reckoned I would probably be seeing enough of them over the coming week so perhaps it would be best not to peak too soon. At Achnasheen we were the only people who alighted so we soon made each other's acquaintances (apart from me, two Americans who had travelled all the way from Kentucky, and an Indonesian who had come all the way from Glasgow). We were met by a man who introduced himself as Mal and offered us some coffee from a flask with the option of pouring in some single malt whisky ("It's only Jura") to off the edge. I was the only one who partook. We learned that although Mal was not a gamelaner himself but his wife/partner was and they were going to be putting up some of the visitors. He drove us to Poolewe and there we met all the others.
But who were these attendees? Let me divide them into four categories. First of all there were music academics (broadly defined): people who play gamelan at an advanced level, have perhaps been to Java, and possibly also compose music for gamelan. Most of these people have spent some time in York, which seems to be ground zero for academic gamelan in the UK. The second set of people were members of Gamelan Naga Mas, a Glasgow-based community gamelan group. Some of these had been playing gamelan for a long time, some for shorter periods, and they had an appealing range of abilities for someone like me whose playing is a bit limited. The third category comprised local gamelan players. There weren't too many of them and their life commitments meant they weren't giving over all their time to the retreat, which meant I wasn't living in their pockets like I was with the others. However, quite a few of the locals were generously putting up attendees in their homes, so if I had been staying with them I would have been seeing a lot more of them (I and two others were staying in a holiday cottage that the local organiser had somehow got access to but I think pretty much everyone else was staying in someone's home). The fourth category was made up of randomers who had shown up on an "I'll give it a go!" basis, but this was basically a one-person category and that one person was me. I was such an outlier that one of the Glaswegians assumed I was some kind of music academic because I had traveled to the event and wasn't in their group.
I am a socially awkward person who normally avoids occasions where I have to interact with people I don't know, but I had no fears ahead of the gamelan retreat. My sense was that it would be like an Unthanks singing weekend, with the attendees all friendly people with a shared interest. And so it was. Despite our different backgrounds and mix of prior acquaintances we gelled well together as a group and it was hanging out with all these lovely people that really made the week for me.
But what did we actually do? Well each day we had two sessions playing gamelan. These mostly saw us playing pieces for which scores had been printed, but we did also did a bit of improvised playing (something the Glasgow gamelan people are used to but which was new to me) and playing on some pieces where we learned off the score (or in my case sneakily wrote down the notes in a book). People swapped around instruments so they could try ones they weren't used to at home. Because I was staying in walking distance of the gamelan house, I kept finding myself staying on for an extra late night session with some of the advanced players who were also staying in the vicinity and had their own pieces they wanted to experiment with. This involved some playing above my pay grade and I really hope I didn't disgrace myself.
I did find playing with different people to my Dublin gamelan buds interesting, as it gave a sense of how our default ways of doing things are not everyones. Traditional gamelan pieces tend to start with a bukå, a short introduction played on one instrument, and in Dublin they are always played on the bonang (small-ish upside down pots), but at Poolewe the bukås were sometimes played on bonang but sometimes instead on the rebab, a stringed instrument. I was also struck by how overfamiliar I had become with the way Peter Moran, our group leader, uses drum cues to flag transitions in pieces. In Poolewe transitions were sometimes marked by different drum cues to the ones I was used to or by cues from different instruments entirely, which led to quite a few missed transitions from dopey me.
One other difference to what I am used to is that we played most of the Javanese pieces in the Surakarta style. The two big centres of Javanese gamelan are Surakarta (often referred to as Solo) and Yogyakarta (often referred to as Jogja). My understanding is that these broadly share the same repertoire but they do some things a bit differently. I think Solo style might be a bit more common in the West, for reasons that are unclear to me. But although the Glaswegians and the Poolewe people were used to primarily playing Solo style, my class in Dublin hews to the Jogja tradition; the fact that our gamelan set was a gift to the National Concert Hall from the Sultan of Yogyakarta is probably a factor here.
Most of the time I would not be able to tell you what the difference is between Solo and Jogja gamelan. However, one thing came up in Poolewe that provided a clear contrast between Solo and Jogja playing. Bear with me, this is a bit involved. There is gamelan instrument called the peking which is played with a little hammer. It has the same notes as the balungan instruments but it played more quickly, with the peking player doing two or sometimes four notes for every one that the balungan players do, with every second peking note lining up with the balungan.
In Jogja-style playing the peking players anticipate the notes of the balungan players. If the balungan players were playing 2 3 5 6, the peking player would play 2 2 3 3 5 5 6 6, with the second of each pair of notes lining up with balungan players hitting the same note.
In Solo-style playing, the peking players play after the balungan notes. So again if the balungan players are hitting 2 3 5 6, the peking player will still be playing 2 2 3 3 5 5 6 6, but it will be the first of each pair of notes that lines up with the balungan.
I don't want to go down the road of saying that either the Solo or Jogja styles are objectively better but to me the Solo way of playing peking is unnatural and wrong. A really big thing with gamelan is that it is end-weighted, with people playing towards where the piece (or a sub-unit of a piece) ends. That all breaks down if you are having an instrument that plays echoes of a note in a line and I can see why some have suggested that a gamelan jihad might be needed to bring Surakarta back to a more orthodox path.
That aside, I should also pay my respects to the instruments we were playing on. Most gamelan sets have male names, but the Poolewe set goes by Nyai Cabe Rawit (Madam Hot Chilli). The instruments are bronze and hail from central Java. Ginevra (one of the three event organisers and the Poolewe gamelan organiser) said that they are very old and have been through various owners before beginning their temporary residence in Poolewe. If I remember correctly she said that the bonangs in particular are over a hundred years old (I don't know if that means that the whole set was put together in stages) and should be played carefully as they had suffered some wear and tear. Poolewe also has only half the instruments that would make up a full set, as Madam Hot Chilli has just the instruments for the slendro tuning (the 5 point scale that runs from 1 to 6 with no 4, where the balungan instruments also have a low 6 below the 1 and a high 1 above the high 6), with the instruments for the 7 point pelog scale being mysteriously absent.
(If you are finding all these references to gamelan terms like balungan and so on confusing, have a look at my attempt to explain some basic gamelan concepts)
We did finish our week by playing a concert, but it wasn't all gamelan all the time as we had either the morning or afternoon each day for non-gamelan activities. People could branch off on their own (I did one day and regretted it) but mostly we stuck together. Twice I accompanied other people to the beach, with foolhardy gamelaners braving the water and going swimming or even snorkelling (in fairness they did have wetsuits but even so this did seem a bit on the crazy side). On another occasion I accompanied a York gamelaner on a trip to Gairloch, where we visited the local museum (built in the site of a nuclear observation post) and then explored the hills above the village, where there are fascinating but mysterious archaeological remains and boulders perched on the edge of mountain sides that look like they could roll down at any moment. I also went to the Inverewe Gardens, which are some botanical gardens that someone set up in the past. They were maybe worth seeing but not worth going to see (although I would perhaps have got more from them if I had more than a cursory interest in gardening and botany) and I was a bit envious of the others who had just gone on a long walk in nearby woods.
Our concert was meant to be in a village hall in Gairloch but it ended up being cancelled for various reasons, which saved us having to move all the instruments over there (moving gamelan instruments is a complete pain and might perhaps be the reason why gamelan has not actually conquered the world). And also one of our group developed a bit of a chill after some sea swimming and ended up testing positive for covid. So we ended up playing a concert basically for ourselves although we did have a couple of other people attending (basically spouses and partners of local gamelaners), although the performance was recorded and is due to appear on the internet at some point. Despite the fact that we were playing to a handful of people I still found myself gripped by pre-concert nerves, but I think this was because the real concert fear is disgracing yourself in front of your peers.
Here's a screenshot of our concert's setlist. The items with "piece" in their title were non-traditional pieces that were either works-in-progress (hence their lack of titles) or were semi-improvised pieces that had emerged during the week. The others were Javanese gamelan pieces, with the exception of "Ca' the Yowes".
Going through the pieces in order, "Baitå Kandas" is a lancaran, which for me is the default type of Javanese piece. It starts off repeating a straightforward four-line pattern but then things get a bit crazy when some of the balungan players (but not me thank God) started playing a double speed variation pattern called a mlaku. The second piece, "Wilujeng", is a ladrang, which is a more stately type of piece. I discovered at the gamelan retreat that this is probably the most played piece in the Javanese repertoire, as it is traditionally played at the start of concerts as the audience enters the venue and is apparently one of the first tunes people tend to learn when they start gamelan. I had however never played it before, which astonished some of the other gamelaners. It's an easy enough piece to play but it did feature some transitions from the main bit to a variation called a ngelik that featured singing. The transitions could be a bit tricky.
"Will's Piece" was our first foray into non-traditional music, a newly composed work in progress from William Barnardo. It had an entertaining structure, in that everyone played the same notes in the same sequence but at different speeds. So some players bashed them out at one speed while others did so twice as fast and another set of players were four times as fast. And everyone kept repeating until the piece ends. I'm looking forward to hearing a recording of this as it was a lot of fun to play but while in the midst of it you could easily lose the big picture of how it all locked together. I did find both in rehearsals and at the concert that when repeating I had a tendency to miss the first line and start on the second before realising my mistake and stopping but being unable to find my way back into where I should be. I don't know if this recurring mistake on my part was straightforwardly down to my being an idiot or if the way the piece was presented on the page tricked my eye into jumping to the wrong line. Nevertheless I did really like playing it and there was a lot of fun to be had playing it when everyone lines up on its last note.
"Grompol Mataram" was another ladrang and not particularly challenging from my point of view (it may have been for other people or maybe I was playing so badly that I was slipping into false confidence). And "Pariwisåtå" was another ladrang but with a good bit of singing about how great it is to be going on holidays in Indonesia and visiting all the different islands. At one stage I was down to sing on this rather than play but I was finding it a bit of a struggle and wasn't really getting on with the off-beat clapping the singers have to do at some points, so I slunk off to play a balungan instrument. This piece again featured a lot of stressful transitions where it speeded up and slowed down to facilitate singing and to facilitate different types of singing, and then it also had a transition straight into "John's Piece", which was another work in progress from John Jacobs. This was a kind of traditional/modern hybrid. It had a balungan line that felt very traditional and like something that could have leapt from a Javanese lancaran, but over it we had one musician playing a slide trumpet and another a trombone. Gamelan and western instruments use different scales which makes it hard to combine them, but with slide instruments it is possible for the brass players to move to Javanese notes. I think what made this piece so enjoyable to play was that it was loud and fast, with a frenetic and kinetic quality that propelled the players through to the finale. I look forward to hearing a recording of this.
The next thing on the programme is listed as "Vanya's Piece" but actually it was three pieces, all improvisations to poetry written during the retreat by Vanya Indira, one of the Glasgow gamelaners. With all three of them the improvisation was rehearsed and to some extent guided so that we weren't flying blind in the concert. Vanya's first poem talked of walking on the seashore and for this one we played the instruments with our fingers, trying to create a shimmering sound that evoked the sound of the sea. I think this worked very well but it gained an added poignancy when Vanya told us that the poem's lines about feeling a sense of displacement and disconnection were not dealing with a general sense of distance from faraway loved ones but a feeling of concern from the relative safety of Scotland regarding loved ones in Indonesia, where the country has been gripped by unrest against the authoritarian turn of the current government. The second piece had words talking about a naughty yet loveable goat who keeps getting into scrapes, and for this I tried to evoke a little goat jumping around on rocks by playing notes that sounded like one of the cloven-hoofed animals scampering about. Because I am a bit slow it took me a while to register that the goat in the poem is a metaphor and the goat is actually a person, in fact one of the Glasgow gamelan group who is prone to climbing on things and behaving in a manner that is not always the most sensible but yet not un-endearing. And then the last poem was another poignant one about distance and separation with a more romantic-adjacent theme that I tried to evoke when playing. I'm curious as to all three of these will sound on our recording but they were very enjoyable to play on.
And then "Ca' the Yowes". This saw some of our number sing this Scottish traditional setting to music of a Robbie Burns poem (which may actually have been written by Isabel Pagan). This is in the Scots dialect and so on the face of it is largely incomprehensible to anglophones, except that there is something about the tune that makes it very evocative of romantic yearning. In our performance some people sang it, led by one of the Glasgow gamelaners, while the musicians either played a very simple descending and ascending pattern or semi-improvised variations on it that never got over fussy. I think this might have been my favourite of all the pieces we played over the week and I found it extremely poignant. As I said, it was very evocative of romantic yearning with its lyrics about snuggling up with a "bonnie dearie", and perhaps the poignancy for me came from being far away from my beloved and, unlike Burns, not given to extracurricular snuggling..
But then we had "Simon's Piece", another work in progress, this time composed by J Simon van der Walt. This was deliberately very far removed from the traditional Javanese structures and featured both slide trumpet and electronics as well as gamelan instruments. I have heard a recording of this and it sounds pretty deranged, while actually playing it felt like you were in the heart of the maelstrom. It begins with some of the balungan players hitting repeated low 6 notes while everyone else is also playing low 6 notes at any speed they like so long as they are faster. Meanwhile the electronics are cooking up what sounds like the entire BBC Radiophonic Workshop and Simon and John Jacobs were blasting out something on the brass. Then on a signal we moved from low 6 to 1 and then to 2 before stopping playing and instead vocalising before it all comes to a halt. It was so much fun to play on and I can only wonder what it sounds like to listen to. There is a recording of it here, although the electronics seemed more intense in the room.
The last piece in our concert was "Subåkaståwå", a ketawang. This was a gentle Javanese piece ideal for settling the horses after Simon's onslaught and bringing the concert to a quiet end. I feel however that I should mention one piece we played casually later, a ladrang called "Mugirahayu". The real USP of this one for me was the vocal line, primarily or solely sung by Ginevra House, the Poolewe gamelan organiser. I can be a bit unimpressed by the singing in gamelan, particularly when done by westerners: it's not what draws people into gamelan and often sounds quite odd, and not in a good way. But "Mugirahayu" was a wonderfully stately tune that went so well with Ginevra's beautiful singing that I am sorry we did not actually finish with it.
After that it's all anticlimactic journeying home. Will gave me a lift to Inverness on which we had fascinating conversations about various things and then I took the train to Glasgow with big plans to spend the journey admiring the scenery that were quashed by my somehow ending up in an aisle seat surrounded by some boisterous older ladies. I did at least manage to finish my reading of Octavia Butler's cheerful Parable of the Sower. And then after spending a night in Glasgow it was on home to Dublin by bus and train.
The final verdict: the gamelan retreat was one of the most enjoyable things I have done with my time. I'm not sure if it has seen my gamelan playing improve, as I still feel like I am terrible at things like playing offbeats or anything to do with bonangs. But I felt like I was able to pick up pieces quickly and not get lost as readily as I have done at home. So perhaps I have got better or perhaps I have fallen into delusional confidence. The real pay-off though was all the new friends made and the invitations to visit different gamelan groups across these islands.
I have also started thinking a bit about composing for the gamelan, in particular trying to apply semi-understood serialist principles of crazy people like Schoenberg or Boulez to the form. Lets see what unlistenable nonsense that brings us to.
More Culloden pictures: Flickr; Instagram
More Poolewe and environs pictures: Flickr; Instagram (Madam Hot Chilli), Instagram (hanging out), Instagram (on the beach), Instagram (above Gairloch)
