Southern Exposure New Music Series presents Gamelan Galak Tika
Saturday, March 29th, 7:30 p.m.
USC School of Music Recital Hall, 813 Assembly Street (next to the Koger Center), 2nd Floor
Related events:
Lecture by Evan Ziporyn,
composer, performer, and director of Gamelan Galak Tika
Friday, March 28th, 2:30-4:00 p.m., USC School of Music, Room 210
Sponsored by the Carolina Institute for Leadership and Engagement in
Music
Lecture /workshop on Balinese music and dance
by Gamelan Galak Tika director Evan Ziporyn,
and dancers I Made Bandem and Ni Lu Suasti Widjaja
Saturday, March 29th, 1:00-2:30 p.m., USC School of Music, Recital
Hall
All events are free and open to the public
The Southern Exposure New Music Series ends its 2007-2008 season with a
grand finale performance by the electrifying 22-member Gamelan Galak
Tika. The word gamelan means to hammer, and the term
generally refers to the large percussion orchestras of Java and Bali.
Based in Boston, Gamelan Galak Tika performs not only traditional
Balinese music and dance but also contemporary works by Balinese and
American composers, including Tire Fire, a genre-defying tour de
force composition by the gamelan's director, Evan Ziporyn, scored for
gamelan, electric guitars, electric bass, and keyboard. This Southern
Exposure performance also features two of the world's most prominent
Balinese dancers, I Made Bandem and Ni Lu Suasti Widjaja. Gamelan Galak
Tika has performed to critical acclaim in venues such as Lincoln Center,
the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Bang on a Can Marathon, and Zankel
Hall in New York, and their performance here is jointly sponsored by
Southern Exposure, Asian Arts Week, the Arts Institute at USC, the
Walker Institute of International and Area Studies, and the Carolina
Institute for Leadership and Engagement in Music. So mark your
calendars, and please join us for an unforgettable evening of music and
dance!
For more information about Gamelan Galak Tika:
http://www.galaktika.org/
For more information on Evan Ziporyn, the director of Gamelan Galak
Tika:
http://www.ziporyn.com/
For more information on the Southern Exposure New Music Series:
John Fitz Rogers
Associate Professor of Composition
Artistic Director, Southern Exposure New Music Series
School of Music / University of South Carolina
jrogers@mozart.sc.edu / (803) 576-5753
http://www.johnfitzrogers.com
CONCERT PROGRAM:
Beleganjur (2007) Dewa Ketut Alit
Gamelan Beleganjur, literally gamelan of walking soldiers,
originally had martial connotations. Like the marching band, it is now
an essential part of processionals, parades, and pageants. Unlike its
western analogue, however, this mainly concerns welcoming Hindu gods to
and scaring unwanted demons from temple ceremonies. Recent years have
seen a huge resurgence of the form, and the efforts of many composers
and ensembles have reinvented the genre. Dewa Ketut Alit made this
version for Galak Tika during his spring 2007 residency; he retains the
classical gong structures and overall form while updating the reong
(tuned pot) melodies and kopyak (cymbal) rhythms.
Tire Fire (1994) Evan Ziporyn
Thomas Carr, keyboard
Eli Kao, electric guitar
Blake Newman, electric bass
Eddie Whalen, electric guitar
"Tire Fire's very instrumentation (Balinese gamelan with electric
guitars) hints at Ziporyn's intentions for this piece. Over the years he
had witnessed many well-meaning but ill-informed and hastily mounted
intercultural experiments. Often these amounted to little more than the
juxtaposition of gestures from different traditions held together by
earnest please for tolerance and global unity. Although Tire Fire ends
with its own ecstatic affirmation, much of it represents a savage
critique of the unreflective and simplistic cultural vision implicit in
some intercultural performance. Bringing together a gamelan--a unique,
handcrafted product, tuned to a non-standardized scale--with
factory-made guitars, tuned to a standard tempered scale, dependent on
the centralized electric generators of an industrialized society--Tire
Fire reminds us of the depth of cultural differences. Its dissonant
clashes invite us to take the reality of cross-cultural conflict as
seriously as we take the hope of cross-cultural understanding." - Marc
Perlman
Legong Kraton: Condong (late 19th century)
This classical dance defines the pelegongan style in both sound and
movement. Its roots are believed to date back to the East Balinese
courts of the 16th century, but tradition has it that this version was
dreamed in the 19th century by Dewa Agung Anom Karna in Ketewel village,
where it is still performed. The full legong - 90 minutes long and
seldom performed - takes its traditionally pre-adolescent female dancers
through an array of character transformations, not always apparent to
the audience: the same dancer will be at various points princess or
king, human or animal. The norm today is to perform one excerpt or
another, following a single storyline. All begin with the virtuoso solo
turn by the condong (female attendant), which will be performed today.
Her sole narrative function is to lay out fans for the princesses.
Ni Lu Suasti Widjaja, dancer
Oleg Tambulilingan (1952) I Nyoman Mario
Balinese music and dance were first brought to America by the famed
Gong Peliatan in the early 1950s. This dance - a straightforward
romance between two bumblebees - was composed by Bali's most famous
dancer in response to concerns that Balinese dance was too abstract and
classical for American audiences. It is since become standard
repertoire and is now used in sacred as well as secular contexts.
Ni Lu Suasti Widjaja, female bumblebee
I Made Bandem, male bumblebee
Kebyar Duduk (1925) I Nyoman Mario
This kebyar classic was conceived as a solo vehicle by its
composer/choreographer, in response to his attending a performance of
Taruna Jaya. Like its inspiration, it expresses the range of emotions of
an idealized young man, "from sweet flirtatiousness through bashfulness,
melancholy, and angry bravado" (Bandem amd DeBoer). As the title
indicates, most of the dance takes place in a crouch, a hallmark of
kebyar dance in general, which we like to believe indicates a desire to
level caste distinctions and earmark this style as belonging to the
culture as a whole.
I Made Bandem, dancer
