gamelan rehearsal last night
Sep. 23rd, 2004 08:28 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ganainmI had to skip last week's rehearsal--work kept me in San Francisco until 8:00 p.m., and I was beat by the time I got home. This week was a different story. We only played two pieces, but God it was good.
We're rehearsing for an outdoor event this Sunday, and "outdoors" means "loud". I played kenong on the first piece, bonang on the second; the kenong plays only once every 32 beats, so I had lots of time to just sink into the music--sitting next to four demung players whacking two-foot-long bronze keys as hard as they could--God it was loud. The bronze ringing in my ears, one little clump of neurons in my head tracking the drum so I'd get my one-in-thirty-two-beats strokes in at just the right time, about six more neurons keeping track of pitches--the part used only three, so it was easy to remember--it was heaven, or near it.
We finished the piece, the director looked at his watch, and said, "Well, that's more than half of the concert!" Thirty minutes is a really short time when even the short version of a piece can be twenty minutes long . . . .
Then for the second piece I got asked to play the bonang, which is much more prominent--if the kenong plays octuply-augmented whole notes, the bonang plays eighth or sixteenth notes, and while the kenong really just marks points in the temporal cycle of a piece, the bonang leads, embellishes, and to an extent creates the melody--and I barely remembered the part from last year. But after some confusion--"really good players don't have to know what they're doing!"--it came back to me, mostly.
I stayed a little after everyone else left, to woodshed that bonang part a little; some small changes had been made in the score, which is problematic when you're playing mostly from memory. The piece, gendhing "Dwirodometo", is associated with opulent barbaric courts in the shadow-puppet theater; it's clangy and rough, or at least as rough as Javanese court gamelan allows itself to be; it suits me to a T.
I left with Schubert's "An Die Musik" running through my head:
Du holde Kunst, in wieviel grauen Stunden,
Wo mich des Lebens wilder Kreis umstrickt,
Hast du mein Herz zu warmer Lieb entzunden,
Hast mich in eine beßre Welt entrückt!
We're rehearsing for an outdoor event this Sunday, and "outdoors" means "loud". I played kenong on the first piece, bonang on the second; the kenong plays only once every 32 beats, so I had lots of time to just sink into the music--sitting next to four demung players whacking two-foot-long bronze keys as hard as they could--God it was loud. The bronze ringing in my ears, one little clump of neurons in my head tracking the drum so I'd get my one-in-thirty-two-beats strokes in at just the right time, about six more neurons keeping track of pitches--the part used only three, so it was easy to remember--it was heaven, or near it.
We finished the piece, the director looked at his watch, and said, "Well, that's more than half of the concert!" Thirty minutes is a really short time when even the short version of a piece can be twenty minutes long . . . .
Then for the second piece I got asked to play the bonang, which is much more prominent--if the kenong plays octuply-augmented whole notes, the bonang plays eighth or sixteenth notes, and while the kenong really just marks points in the temporal cycle of a piece, the bonang leads, embellishes, and to an extent creates the melody--and I barely remembered the part from last year. But after some confusion--"really good players don't have to know what they're doing!"--it came back to me, mostly.
I stayed a little after everyone else left, to woodshed that bonang part a little; some small changes had been made in the score, which is problematic when you're playing mostly from memory. The piece, gendhing "Dwirodometo", is associated with opulent barbaric courts in the shadow-puppet theater; it's clangy and rough, or at least as rough as Javanese court gamelan allows itself to be; it suits me to a T.
I left with Schubert's "An Die Musik" running through my head:
Du holde Kunst, in wieviel grauen Stunden,
Wo mich des Lebens wilder Kreis umstrickt,
Hast du mein Herz zu warmer Lieb entzunden,
Hast mich in eine beßre Welt entrückt!
