Javanese Gamelan music for piano

[john pitts]

PianoStreet members may be interested in my new book
Extreme Heterophony: a study in Javanese Gamelan for one or more pianists
Published Advent 2021 – available from https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09MBR4WNL https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B09MBR4WNL or www.pianoraga.com
A new book for inquisitive pianists – either solo or in duets/duos/triet or multiple piano ensembles – to discover, step into, and explore music for gamelan orchestra from the Indonesian island of Java – what it is, how it works, and how to begin to play it.

Karawitan is the classical music of Central Java.  Gamelan ensembles consist of between c.5 and c.20 musicians on a range of tuned metal percussion and gongs, xylophone, plucked zithers, bowed string lute, bamboo flute, singers and drums.  Almost every aspect of the music – including its core concepts, texture, metre, structures, sounds, tunings, scales, and aural tradition – is a world away from notated western classical music.

This book is a deep dive into a single well-known composition in the central Javanese repertoire – Ketawang Puspawarna – composed by Prince Mangkunegara IV of Surakarta in the 1800s.  Its layers have been systematically taken apart and transformed into several individual stand-alone (or perform-together) piano pieces.  This has both an educational and artistic purpose.  Each piano ‘piece’ demonstrates one or more layers from within the gamelan ensemble, and how the core theme (the ‘skeleton melody’) may be fleshed out by each player.  They give interested pianists a performer’s insight into how this music is built, by being able to explore some of the intricacies of the musical construction of each instrument’s line – as far as it is possible on a piano – along with a downloadable backing track (see https://pianoraag.wordpress.com/extreme-heterophony-a-study-in-javanese-gamelan-for-one-or-more-pianists-2021/). As gamelan music is fundamentally music for ensemble, each piano adaptation is designed to be played both on its own and also in any combination with any of the others – with multiple possible duet combinations (and a triet) at one piano, or duos or multiple-duets at two (or up to seven!) pianos.

“Extreme Heterophony” refers to a foundational principle of how this music is constructed – akin to a theme and variations, but where c.10 types of related but widely diverse, decorative variations are all performed simultaneously – creating a rich, vibrant, exciting texture – and where the theme itself isn’t directly played.  Many of these ‘variations’ or elaborations are part-learned, part-improvised within defined parameters.  Some are independent of the pulse.  For everyone else, the metre is end-weighted and beats are grouped with the notes leading into them – for newcomers extraordinarily counterintuitive.  It is a profoundly different way of experiencing metre.  It means that each player constantly looks forward and works out their style of elaboration in relation to the goal note on the 4th beat at the end of each group of notes in the theme.

Learning to perform Javanese gamelan music requires an approach and mindset entirely distinct from the European classical canon.  This book takes its own approach too, designed for its specific audience of pianists.  It seeks to provide pianists with an accessible window into this extraordinary music, using appropriately comprehensible (and sensitively chosen) western terminology and staff notation.  It goes into just enough detail to get a feel for how the music works – how the notes are chosen – and enough to begin to explore it practically on a piano.  The thorny issues of using any kind of fixed notation, or of playing this music on the equally-tempered piano, are dealt with sympathetically – with the aim of providing a useful resource to pianists (and composers, improvisers and teachers) seeking to broaden their musical horizons in this enigmatic and alluring sound-world.