Archipelago: a fusion of Javanese and Irish Traditional Music

Danger, fusion. This was a concert in the National Concert Hall's Studio by the UCD Traditional Music Group and the UCD Gamelan Orchestra. For anyone reading this who is not familiar with Dublin institutes of higher education, UCD is an abbreviation for University College Dublin. The two student groups here both operate under Dr Peter Moran, who is also the director of the gamelan group I play in and of the NCH Gamelan Orchestra. The concert was a game of two halves, with the two groups playing separately to show off their work, but it was still Irish-music dominated for reasons that will be discussed.

The first half saw the UCD Traditional Music Group playing together on pieces they had been taught by Paddy Glackin (celebrated fiddler known for his solo work but also his sometime membership of The Bothy Band) and learned themselves through field work. They also played their own original compositions. I was struck by how the pieces the students had learned from Paddy Glackin saw them playing together in a large group, while the student compositions all involved solo rather than group play, with the exception of two pieces where each composer played with the other (but in this case the two had previous and were well used to playing together). It was very enjoyable but I don't really have the vocabulary to say too much about the pieces apart from expressing my admiration for them.

Then we had the UCD Gamelan Orchestra, playing the archipelago project with some special guest stars: Mark Redmond (uillean pipes, tin whistle), Viktória Sinkarová (guitar) and Liam Ó Maonlaí (bodhran, vocals). The pieces (or was it one long piece broken up into sections?) were composed and arranged by Moran and Sinkarová with Anon Suneko; Suneko unfortunately could not make the concert because the Trump War had disrupted travel from Indonesia. This half saw the UCD Gamelan Orchestra play gamelan arrangements of Irish (and occasionally Scottish) traditional music (or new music derived therefrom). I'm a bit suspicious of this kind of fusion and whenever I hear of it my first thought is always "why?". There's a question of perspective here. Some people really like exploring what gamelan instruments can do, and part of that is seeing how western pieces have to be adapted to be playable on them (as previously noted, gamelan tunings do not line up with notes on western scales); for many people this is the answer to my "Why?" question. But I am more interested in exploring the repertoire of central Java.

Nevertheless, it did feel like a lot of thought had gone into this piece and overall it worked for me. Crucially it felt like a serious cross-cultural engagement and not a semi-colonialist imposition of western musical forms onto gamelan instruments. The students are going to be recording this as an album and I think it would be worth picking up; it might even be a free download on Bandcamp like the UCD Traditional Music Practices' Seven Springs album (see: here).

The only real quibble I would have with this concert was that they didn't include a traditional Javanese gamelan piece in the programme, as I think it would be useful to give people a sense of what unfused Javanese music sounds like. It might also have been interesting to arrange a gamelan piece for performance by the UCD Traditional Music Group. It feels like people are always arranging western tunes for gamelan instruments but it is far less common for people to try things the other way round.

Liam Ó Maonlaí was an interesting presence here. To people of my vintage he is very famous as the lead-singer of the Hothouse Flowers, who had a monster hit with "Don't Go" after performing it at half-time during the Eurovision. I'm unclear as to how famous he is now with the young people but to me he was the most famous person I have ever seen at a gamelan concert. I was impressed by how he just got on with things and didn't turn proceedings into the Liam Ó Maonlaí Gamelan Experience.