Gamelan Magic: a return to Poolewe

Last September I spent a week in north west Scotland, attending a gamelan retreat with other aficionados of the popular Indonesian music. And in April I returned there. The local gamelan group were playing a concert but needed some extra players to fill out their line-up. Ginevra House, the Poolewe gamelan organiser, put out a call for ringers and when it became apparent that I would be able to get a lift from Glasgow with some members of that city's Gamelan Naga Mas ensemble I arranged to fly over and travel up with them.

My journey to Glasgow proved eventful. The initial plan was that I would fly over in late morning, pooter around central Glasgow, and then meet my gamelan buds at their rehearsal in the psychiatric hospital that is their set's home. In the airport I had to board a bus that would take me to the aeroplane, but when I did so the bus sat there for a bit and then it was announced that there was a problem with the plane and that it wouldn't be going anywhere for at least half an hour, so we had to get off the bus. And then we were told that the flight was cancelled and we had to pick up our checked baggage and await further instructions.

Eventually I was rebooked on a flight to London and then another to Glasgow, which meant that I wouldn't arrive until the early evening but my bag would at least be checked through all the way. But then when I landed in Glasgow, there was no sign of my bag. The baggage handling lady (reeling from an encounter with an irate flyer who seemed to think that the baggage handling lady was personally responsible for their lost luggage) took Ginevra's details and said they would send on my bag. I had naive hopes that the bag would arrive in Wester Ross around the same time that I did, but I should have taken her "So you'll be there until Monday?" question as a warning.

I had no time to explore central Glasgow and instead had to race out west to wander around the map-free hospital campus in an increasingly confused search for the gamelan's location. Once there I got to play a little bit on the Glasgow gamelan set. Then it was off to stay over in the nearby house where gamelan friend Thessa was cat-sitting (the cat did not take to me), which was near where we would meet the others in the morning.

There were five of us in the car. By an odd coincidence it turned out that three of my fellow travellers were former or current drummers and it was interesting listening to their percussion chat, particularly as they were all women while drumming is a stereotypically male endeavour. Our journey was a long one and we made a number of stops along the way: in Dunkeld (for lunch and a stroll), in a shopping centre outside Inverness (so we could pick up provisions and so that I could buy some clothes), and at Loch Maree where we saw a beautiful rainbow. While we were there some passing French tourists asked us to take their picture and then returned the favour.

We dropped our stuff in Ginevra's and then went over to Poolewe for a quick rehearsal and a reacquaintance with the Poolewe gamelan people (and a meeting with some we hadn't encountered on the September trip). This also involved working out the running order for the pieces we would be performing and who would be playing what. I was also reacquainting myself with the Poolewe gamelan set. Gamelan sets have names, and the Poolewe set is unusual in that it has a female name, Madam Hot Chilli. She is a venerable lady, and I understand some of the instruments to be over a 100 years old. Ginevra reminded us that some of them are a bit fragile and should not be hit too enthusiastically.

And then it was back to Ginevra's for dinner, chit-chat and bed. Ginevra lives with her father and had another family member visiting so I did find myself flashing back to how a much younger version of myself would behave when staying with friends and started worrying that I would commit some kind of terrible faux pas in front of the grown-ups. I had not got the memo about when we were meant to be getting up and was in a room on my own, so in the morning I lay in bed fearing that getting up would mean I would find myself having to talk to a grown-up on my own. Then it turned out that everyone was about to go to a morning rehearsal so I had to jump up and get ready very quickly.

After a last rehearsal we moved the instruments over to the village hall where afternoon concert was to take place. Gamelan instruments are bulky and heavy, and moving them from where they are stored to where concerts will be performed is always the least fun part of the gamelan experience and in this case involved multiple car trips and walking over some of the bulkier bits of kit. Once everything was there we set it all up (full disclosure, I slacked off a bit on this). We had a bit of a gap then and amusingly bumped into the French people we had met at Loch Maree, who were leaving their car by the village hall before going off for a stroll. We invited them to come to our concert (which involved a somewhat confusing explanation of what exactly gamelan music was, given their limited English and our limited French).

People actually showed up for the concert (including the French people), which was nice. Here is a quick run through of the pieces we played:

• Lancaran Baita Kandhas: This is a lancaran, one of the simpler kinds of gamelan piece. I was playing kempul (small hanging gongs) and the main gong on this, structural instruments that contribute little to the melody but are important for marking time. For these you play far less notes than the people on the balungan line that makes up the skeleton of the piece, but the notes must be played at the right time or people will start worrying that they have lost their place. So kempul and gong is actually quite stressful to play, and in this case made harder by the piece getting faster and faster as we went through it. I think I managed but the smaller gongs did start flapping around a bit, particularly later in the piece.
• Ladrang Wilujeng: the most famous of all gamelan pieces. I think I was playing the kanongs on this, which are a set of upside down pots, but also I was playing the ketuk, which is another upside down pot but one that makes a deliberately dull sound. This was a bit non-standard for me, as in my Dublin group the kanong and ketuk are played by different people. Like the kempul, the kanong is a structural instrument, so you play less notes than the balungan players. The pattern on this piece was something like hitting the ketuk instead of the kanong every fourth time you hit something. You're also meant not to hit the ketuk just once but to give it follow-up taps creating a kind of bouncing ball sound. I never mastered that.
• Ca' the Yowes: Margaret Smith of Glasgow's Gamelan Naga Mas had arranged this Robert Burns classic (as noted in my account of the September gamelan retreat) and now I was part of the singing group for this while others played the instruments. The gamelan arrangement is based on a beautifully simple descending and ascending line that then breaks into embellishments. We did have people joining in with the singing but I am never clear on whether this sounds as beautiful and moving to listeners as it does to us when we play it.
• Ladrang Parawisata: I was singing with others on this one too. Parawisata is that rare example of a Javanese gamelan tune where I know the name of its creator, in this case Ki Nartosabdho, an important figure 20th century gamelan (both music and the puppetry that accompanies it). He is credited with helping to push forward the form and ensure its continued popularity. With Parawisata I think he put the words to a pre-existing tune, and the lyrics are about going on holidays in the Indonesian archipelago. In the first part the singing is fast and lively, evoking the excitement of going on holiday; then in the section half the singing is slower, perhaps evoking the tiredness you might feel at the end of a day's holiday fun as you return to where you are staying.
• Lancaran Baita Kandhas workshop: after an interval Ginevra invited the audience to have a go at playing Baita Kandhas themselves. So a randomer played the kempul and gong part while I supervised, saying "you've fucked it up again" every time she hit a wrong note.
• Improv: in my Dublin group we never improvise but it seems to be much more of a thing in Scotland. For this we started off playing a traditional piece and then slid into improv. Like all improv it may have been more fun for the performers than the audience.
• Ladrang Mugirahayu: I was singing on this one as well, with Ginevra and local gamelaner Chloe. Gamelan has no concept of harmony so it's like no one ever thought "why not have a woman sing the high parts and a bloke sing the law ones?" and instead gamelan pieces often expect the singer to have an unlikely and impractical range. The vocal on this starts at a pitch I found almost completely unmanageably high but then dropped at times to chthonic depths that would pose difficulties most lady singers. There is an element of technique to this and it's a technique I haven't mastered, but it was fun giving this a go.
• Lancaran Bendrong: a straightforward piece to finish off with.

And then we were done. After bringing the instruments back to the gamelan cottage we repaired to Chateau Ginevra to party like only gamelaners can party. While we were chopping vegetables for dinner I mentioned the Beach Boys song "Vegetables" and was a bit surprised that only Ginevra was familiar with it. After dinner we drank various things, notably a whisky from Dublin (for which one of my Dublin gamelan buds was the master distiller until Diageo made her redundant) and some mead courtesy of Ginevra's nephew, which was tasty and interesting.

There were some interesting conversations. One thing I came to realise is that we have it pretty handy in Dublin with our gamelan set that lives in the National Concert Hall. In the UK recent years have seen a gamelan retrenchment, with many institutions getting rid of their sets or locking them up in storage and forgetting about them. Gamelan sets are big and if you've ever seen one you might think that the key barrier to making gamelan music more widely known in the west is the expense involved in acquiring the instruments. But actually acquiring a set is the easy bit. At one point the Indonesian embassy was giving away sets to anyone who talked a good game, while the National Concert Hall set was acquired for nuppence on foot of a well-crafted begging letter to the sultan of Yogyakarta. But once you have the set you need somewhere to store it and you need someone who knows what they are about to run gamelan groups, both of which consume resources, resources many UK institutions have decided they are no longer willing to provide. Ginevra thought this was a product of the same insular mindset that gave rise to Brexit, with institutions deciding that it wasn't worth their while funding funny music from the other side of the world. I wondered if it might also be a general post-austerity thing, with gamelan a niche music that resource-depleted institutions find it easy to give up on.

I was also talking to Ginevra about the history of gamelan notation. Gamelan used to be an entirely oral tradition, with people just remembering the tunes (people were cleverer in the past). The first attempts at notation came from western musicologists who thought the music was in danger of dying out and should be recorded for posterity first (which reminded of the way folk song collectors in the West thought they were saving a dying tradition for posterity). These early attempts failed because the musicologists approached gamelan like western compositions and tried to notate all the parts, only to be thrown by how different ensembles would play pieces very differently, with pieces even coming out differently when played again by the same ensemble. The modern gamelan notation was developed more collaboratively by gamelan musicians and musicologists. This reflected the fact that much of how a piece is played is based on subjective interpretation. This isn't improvisation as such, more a decision by groups as to how they will approach a piece and what choices they will make about how to play it. Gamelan notation only explicitly states the notes played by the balungan players who provide the skeleton to a piece, with other musicians working out their part from that in a process called garap. Ginevra did however refer to some guy who has extensively studied gamelan and reached the conclusion that actually you only really need to notate what is played on the rebab, a stringed instrument, with everyone else being able to garap their part from that; that would be like a score for a western symphony only covering the lead violin and telling everyone else to work it out for themselves.

And I was recommended two books, one about gamelan and one which wasn't. One is Gamelan: Cultural Interaction and Musical Development in Central Java by Sumarsam, which Ginevra reckoned would be the kind of book I would like if I was interested in reading more about the history of the gamelan tradition of central Java. The other was A World Appears: a Journey into Consciousness by Michael Pollan, which is one of those books that explores the mysterious world of consciousness. I find consciousness interesting as a topic. It feels important to me that I am conscious, yet there seems always to be at least the possibility that consciousness is the illusory by-product of mechanistic processes. I'm hoping the book will make it into paperback at some point.

Another fun thing we did in Poolewe was go for a walk in the woods. A friend and neighbour of Ginevra's guided us on our perambulations and while there wasn't much musical content to all this it was very enjoyable.

On our way back we took the scenic route, which meant we saw a convoy of boy racers fly by in their Porsches. But also were able to gaze upon Gruinard, better known (to me) as Anthrax Island. This was where the British ran biological warfare experiments in the Second World War, dropping anthrax bombs on the island to observe the effects on the sheep who lived there. The tide of the Second World War ended before the RAF was able to use anthrax bombs against Germany, but Gruinard remained contaminated. Spores would periodically blow over to the mainland, killing livestock; generous pay-outs and liberal use of D-Notices suppressed discussion of Gruinard's taint. Decontamination work finally began in the 1980s and the island was declared free of anthrax in 1990, but I would not set foot on it or eat anything grown there.

And so back to Glasgow and then on to the airport, where I was reunited with my bag (which perhaps unsurprisingly had not made the journey to Gairloch) and made my way home. There I received a message from one of my carmates saying that when she got home she had hopped in the shower only to find a tick stuck to her leg. I checked and sure enough I had a tick too, which Iremoved with tweezers like you are meant to and then got a precautionary course of antibiotics from the croaker. I don't seem to have come down with Lyme disease yet but I do find I now have an insatiable thirst for human blood. I've also become obsessed with the idea of arranging 2 Unlimited's "No Limits" for gamelan but I'm not sure if these things are related.

More picures.

A Scottish Gamelan Retreat

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)