Feeling like 3 hours of American gamelan? I got you covered.

In the last few months, I had an immersion into the 'genre'. A story of how deeply personal obsession of Canadian composer Colin McPhee (and later his American counterpart Lou Harrison) resulted in the unlikely transplant of traditional Indonesian music culture into the ivied towers of American academia. A story somewhat related, but very different from musicological cliché about Exposition Universelle 1889, French musical impressionists and tiresome litanies about cultural colonialism.

While I was going through the written history, I also started to amass the recordings. In stark contrast to the abundance of bibliography - McPhee alone wrote three books - I was surprised to find that audio renderings are few and far between. Most of it out-of-print or released by tiny avant classical or uni-adjacent imprints. It took a while to source and process it. Most of what I encountered is gorgeous. Depressingly, obscure to anyone but people purposely researching the subject. Midway through this process I realized I should systematize the findings into a sort of digestible genre survey. I find it's a good way to remember things. And since not many people in their right mind would undertake similar deep-dive I decided to share it. The 'programme' is a lengthy one due to the nature of the material. So, I split it in 2 parts.

The timespan is from the 1930s (McPhee's brilliant proto-Reichian orchestral stylisation Tabuh-tabuhan) via postwar music by Harrison and minimalist gamelan by the 1970s downtown cohort (Barbara Benary, Philip Corner) + their West Coast counterparts (Daniel Schmidt, Daniel Lentz). With healthy dose of recent'ish pieces by Brian Baumbusch, Bill Alves and Michael Tenzer. I also included some sonorically sympathetic works by Partch and Cage which influenced all the above. There're also odder bits by Robert Turman, John L.Adams, Maggi Payne and R. Murray Schafer to keep things quirky. Now I don't know who would be interested in 3 hours of gamelan, but it's up there for the taking.

Full tracklist here:
https://snowsovgethen.com/journal/snows-ov-gethen-hermetic-journals-american-gamelan-part-i-ii

Hermetic Journals: American Gamelan Part I

Transmissions to the aether • des bruits colorés
https://snowsovgethen.com/

Hermetic Journals: American Gamelan Part I

Snows ov Gethen