TWENTY GOOD YEARS OF BALI BY THE BAY 

GAMELAN SEKAR JAYA

 Wayne Vitale

WBR: Viewed from a distance, the types of instrumentation used in indigenous music through-out the Philippine and Indonesian archipelagos appear very much alike. What distinguishes gamelan from the other regional styles?

VITALE: Well, in a very general sense, they're quite similar. Gongs and metallophones are instruments known throughout Southeast Asia. Also, pentatonic scales are common throughout the region. But when you say the word "gamelan," it usually refers specifically to the Indonesian version of these percussion orchestras which typically have bronze instruments, bronze suspended gongs. The two most famous gamelan traditions are Javanese and Balinese. Again, from a certain perspective they're very similar. Aside from the instruments themselves, the general idea of a large percussion orchestra that maintains a core repertoire, mostly in an oral tradition, and plays together as a kind of "club" is pretty much the same. But in stylistic terms they're very different. Javanese music is gentler, more atmospheric, more perfumed so to speak. Whereas Balinese musicSSthis is just kind of a surface impressionSSis much livelier, brasher, and energetic, although Balinese listeners tend to focus in on the central melody in the middle of it all which is much slower and more regular.

There are also plenty of differences in terms of the evolution and musical demographics. The most well known Javanese music was developed and maintained in a court tradition, and now it is carried on by a relatively small number of experts, most of whom are in academic institutions or those same courts. Bali, on the other hand, had a similar background, but all the religious connections to Bali-Hindu ceremony transformed it into a more popular, village-based tradition. I like to point out in lecture-demonstrations that, despite its sizeSSBali's about the size of Rhode Island, where I grew up!SSthere are more than 25 different kinds of gamelan orchestras on the island today. And literally thousands of active groups on the island.

VITALE: ... Made up of various sized bamboo marimbas. In fact almost all the gamelan types are organized the same, in a sense, as a Western string orchestraSSan entire family of similar instruments which in turn is divided into various sections. Each section covers a certain range and musical function, at least for traditional music. But instead of violins, violas, cellos, and so forth, you have a higher-range section of the ensemble that plays the melodies and faster melodic figurations, a medium-range section that carries the primary melodies at a slower rate, and a bass section which moves even slower. That's the idea with all the gamelan types, whether they are bamboo, iron, or bronze; the only difference is that most of them also have other, non-pitched instruments like drums and cymbals.

VITALE: Through three peopleSSI Wayan Suweca, Michael Tenzer, and Rachel Cooper. And through the situation at the time. In 1979 Michael had just returned from a long stay in Bali and returned with a whole set of gamelan instruments. Rachel is a dancer and musician, and had also just returned from Bali. She had been involved in other gamelan programs around California, including the Center for World Music in Berkeley. Suweca is ... well let's just say one of the best drummers and gamelan musicians in the whole islandSSand that's saying a lot! It was Sekar Jaya's great fortune that he was in the Bay Area at that point, though it took us years to realize how lucky we were. In the fall of 1979, the three of them organized a six-week workshop in Balinese dance and music. They had no idea what this would become. To make a very long story short, the six-week point came and went. Everyone was so excited. And it's still going on now, with no end in sight. In fact the ensemble is thriving more than everSSwe've got forty members, and five different ensembles within the organization.

Anyhow, as I said Rachel had been involved in the Center for World Music. But she wasn't the only one. A lot of the people who joined Sekar Jaya initially had already tried gamelan music in that program. Later, the Center moved back to San Diego, after kind of bouncing up and down the West Coast during the 70s. In its heyday, it was located at Berkeley's Julian Morgan Theater. The Center for World Music invited a lot of amazing artistsSS30 or 40 I thinkSSfrom all around the world, many at the same time, to teach classes and workshops. There were fantastic Indian artists, African artists, musicians and dancers from Java and Bali. Bob Brown, its director, had brilliant taste in musicians and dancers; he went out and chose the very best. It was an amazing thing that he did. So when this new workshop happenedSSit wasn't even called Sekar Jaya yetSSpeople were already primed from that experience and became a kind of core group. It was filled out by others who heard about the workshop, largely through a flier we circulated. We still have that flier on our wall, "Six Week Workshop in Gamelan Music and Dance," in Suweca's handwriting.

VITALE: Well, over the years it seems like every possible type of person has shown up. There's a wide range of backgrounds, a wide range of approaches that they bring to this music. Some people went to Bali just as tourists, and the music they heard there blew their minds. Then they came back and heard they could do actually learn that music here. So they just tried it out, with no idea of where it would take them. That was the case for Jim and Maddie Hogan, two of our founding members who are still playing with the group, still as devoted as ever. Other people were more like myself or Michael, who were getting formal musical educations at universities, and then "discovered" Balinese musicSSa life-changing musical experience, especially after a few years in the dusty halls of academia. Others found their way into the group by attending one of our concerts, joining a workshop, or whatever. In those days the word "gamelan" has such a buzz to it. Even in February 1980, when we did our first concert, there wasn't even room in the hall to fit all the people who showed up. It was so thrilling for us. People are always coming up to us after shows and saying, "this is fantastic, how can I get involved?" Now we have regular workshops in gamelan and dance. Somehow it always works out that there are enough talented people around to keep the group full. In the workshops there are often at least one or two who really stand out as talented; if there's an opening in the group we invite them to join. At this point Gamelan Sekar Jaya has three large ensembles, the gamelan gong kebyarSSour original and largest orchestra, which takes between 25 and 30 musiciansSSthe gamelan angklung, which takes 18 to 20, and now a gamelan joged, a kind of bamboo orchestra of about 12 players. Some people can't get enough and play in two or more ensemblesSSquite a time commitment.

VITALE: No, I didn't join until a couple of months later. Michael Tenzer and I were classmates at the time at U.C. Berkeley, studying music theory and composition. He told me about the gamelan: "Wayne, I do this thing, Balinese gamelan music"SSI didn't even know where Bali wasSS"you have to check it out."

Anyhow, a couple of months after I started as a grad student, Michael coaxed me to sit in on a Sekar Jaya rehearsal. Suweca, the teacher, told me to play the kajar, which is the beat-keeping instru-ment. Of course, in my smug feeling as a trained musician, I thought "this will be a piece of cake; I'll just sit here and play the beat; what could be easier?" The piece they were doingSSI still remember this vividlySSwas Sekar Ginotan, which in the middle has this irregular phrase, nine and a half beats, played twice. The second time through the pulse is shifted because of the half-beat. So I was sitting there playing and suddenly heard the musical world turn upside down. It blew my mind ... I just couldn't figure out what was going on. Not that it was such a unique thing, but the music was put together in such a perfect and unexpected way. It was one of those moments, where the music just grabbed me and pulled me in. And that was that, really.

I was ready for it, too, because my music education at U.C. Berkeley was not the most exciting thing in the world at that time, to put it mildly. It wasn't what I expected when I moved to Berkeley from the East Coast. I thought Berkeley was going to be a center of liberal thinking and excitement and exposure to new music. Well, I did get that exposure, but not in the UC music department. The other thingSSthe contrast was so tangible to meSwas that in Sekar Jaya we sat there and learned directly from a master musician, who was a performer, a composer, and a scholar, all wrapped up in one. In Bali those are not yet pulled apart into different roles. Suweca would literally give us the music, hand it to us, show us exactly what to play, and we'd imitate him; go over and over it again until we knew it, without notation. Everything was learned by heart, a tradition that we still maintain. I know it's not unique in the world, but I loved the fact that this was a truly complex and formally sophisticated musicSSnot an improvised, groove musicSSthat was all learned by heart. It seemed to combine different things from my own background. It gave me what I always loved about Western classical music. But at the same time, it had the rhythmic drive and interest of rock and roll, which I had played as a teenager.

VITALE: Notation has existed for centuries in Bali but it's seldom used in the actual playing of music. That is, there is a kind of notation used to document pieces, but it's just a way to keep a record of a piece and not part of the performance practice. And traditionallySSthis is changing nowSSit only records the main melody notes of the pieces, sometimes called the core tones or "pokok." That's the slow moving tune which usually moves at a steady rate throughout a piece or section. Some-times the notation also shows the important points at which the gongs are played, the punctuation of the music. But even then the notation is no more than a sketch or outline that doesn't try to capture all the detail of the interlocking parts or drum rhythms. As the Balinese might say, the notation just shows you the skeleton, without the "fleshing out" of the faster parts. It's like a jazz chartSSyou can pin a tune down to a few lines and chords. Again, this is speaking traditionally. If musicians in Bali want to revive a piece from the lelambatan repertoireSSthe body of classical instrumental music played in the templeSSthey might get the main tones of the piece from a notation. That is, if there's no one around who remembers it. Once the teacher learns or remembers those tones, he teaches the tune directly to the players, by imitation, and then fleshes out the other, faster parts according to more or less established rules and stylistic constraints.

VITALE: Well, not all new work is notated, except perhaps as a compositional aid for the composer. But if you mean, how can the groups in Bali learn and remember so much music, that's a different question. A particular group doesn't even try to know all the pieces that there are in their performance tradition. It's impossible. They only learn a certain number of pieces, which they maintain and use for the purposes at hand, for the amount of time that they need it. Sometimes they'll add to their core repertoire, if for example a neighboring group has a good piece. In that case it takes a proactive effort to learn that piece as well. What's interesting is that a composition never occurs exactly the same in different placesSSit will always be in a slightly altered or varied form. That's one of the wonderful things about an oral tradition. But there's no feeling of necessity to learn a piece just because some other group plays it. They'll make their own tunes with whatever resources they have. You just can't compare it to a Western classical tradition where every orchestra, sooner or later, is going to play Beethoven's symphonies, pretty much just like he notated them. Again, Bali is much closer to the jazz tradition. John Coltrane might have written tunes that many groups want to play, but different jazz groups will make their own versions, apply all their own techniques and way of improvising. Copying it exactly is just not as much fun. On top of that, in Bali there's an element of pride: Each group wants to have their own unique version. Each group develops a special style and soundSSpartly a result of the particular set of instruments they playSSbut also meaning special details of inflection and phrasing and ornamentation and so forth, which are uniquely their own.

Balinese Dancer I Nyoman Wenten
enlivened Gamelan Sekar Jaya's
August, 1999 outdoor festival

WBR: With such emphasis on variation, have subgenres of gamelan emerged?

VITALE: The background is that here, in the Western tradition, music has been relegated in large part to the realm of entertainment and pure art music. That kind of thing is now happening in Bali, at least in certain genres. But traditionally music is played for a particular reason. You're having a ceremony at your home, you've got to have music and dance. There are particular dances that belong with particular ceremonies: a very sacred ritual happening in the inner courtyard of a temple requires particular dances and forms that go along with enacting the ritual itself, and are even considered a part of it. You don't play them on other occasions. Other pieces or forms are more secular in nature. Your village might be having a fund-raising event, having a new building constructed or whatever, and you need to raise funds. So you'll put on an evening of much more "entertainment" type of music and dance. And the same general rule applies hereSSyou wouldn't play it in the inner courtyard of the temple. This is nothing unique or unusualSSwe have it too, even more so in the past. But it's much more clear and characteristic in Bali than in our culture.

VITALE: Yes. But once again, this is nothing unique. Any good string quartet or orchestra spends a lot of time unifying and blending their sound. The musicians want to make their tone and touch the same, their vibrato matched, and so forth. All musicians ultimately want to meld and create a unified soundSSwell, let's say most! But getting to that point is very different process when you're not playing off a score. You can pay much closer attention cognitively to what everyone else in the ensemble is doing, and to unifying your part precisely with all the other parts, synchronizing it exactly. In Western music this kind of attention might happen more in the realm of pitchSSthink of the fineness of pitch control of any good chorus or orchestraSSwhile in Bali it's more in the realm of rhythm. A lot of the parts are interlocking. So to be able to do that in a way that make sense and works, you have to be very closely synchronized with your partners. That's the only way the parts can come together and form a seamless whole, not two parts but something that sounds as if a single musician's playing them. That's one of the beauties of it.

VITALE: This is a pretty esoteric realmSSeven for most Balinese musiciansSSbut there are two cosmological treatises that deal with this. One's called the Prakempa; the other's the Aji Gurnita. There's debate about when they were written, anywhere from two or three hundred years ago to a hundred years ago. They deal with the nature of the universe and how sound and music fit into it. For example, each of the seven tones of the Balinese parent scale has an association with a compass direction, a color, a particular god, a particular mythological weapon, and a particular letter in the Balinese alphabet. It's a wonderful cosmology for any musician to encounter. One of the treatises also deals with what happens when these tones come together, unite, producing various states of rapture and so forth.

VITALE: There are origin myths for Balinese music, but as far as I know not for the tradition as a whole. That is, apart from the cosmological treatises I just talked about. But particular ensembles have creation myths associated with them. For example, there's a type of orchestra with iron keys called selunding. One of the well known selunding orchestra is said to have been washed up out of the ocean, a gift from the gods. That's the case for several ritual ensembles: this one fell out of the sky, or washed up out of the ocean, or somehow magically appeared. Certain dance forms also have stories behind them. A famous one is legong, which is said to be the "dance of the divine nymphs." A certain prince in 19th century BaliSSa very powerful one, spiritually speakingSSwent into a trance and saw this celestial dance being performed by young girls in heaven. When he woke, he summoned mask makers to carve the faces of the young women he saw. He taught palace musicians the melodies of the music he had heard. This dance became called "legong bidadari," which is still being performed in an unbroken tradition in that village, Ketewel. Later it spread to the rest of Bali, in a new arrangement that doesn't use the masks. Traditionally it is performed by prepubescent girls.

There's also a lot of mythology connected with gamelan instruments because they are, like all objects in the Bali-Hindu universe, imbued with spiritual power. Bali is about 90% Hindu, in their own special variant of Hinduism that blended preexisting animist religions with imported Indian beliefs. The Balinese place an unusually high importance on the spirits that reside in various objects. There are certain auspicious days on their calendar on which they give offerings to a whole class of objects, like animals, plants, metal objects, and so forth. It used to be all pointed metal objectsSSritual swords called kris, mainly. Nowadays the Balinese, in their ever-adaptable way, include cars, trucks, motorcycles, computers . . . ! There's also a special day for their art objects, such as their shadow puppets. In a gamelan orchestra, the keys and the gongs are thought to have spirits residing in them. That means, for example, that you'd never step over an instrument for fear of offending the spiritual power of that gamelan. And whenever you put on a performance, you do a little ceremony first and present offerings to the gamelan, the large suspended gong that is considered the spiritual heart of the ensemble.

VITALE: The large gong is, musically speaking, the period at the end of the sentenceSSin other words, it's struck on the main downbeat at the end of a phrase or cycle. Other medium or small gongs mark the interior nodes, like the quarter-way point or half-way point. Then there is the "kempli." One of the ways the kempli is played is to dampen it with one hand and strike the boss with a mallet, to keep the beat. That's important because the music is so complex and syncopated that you need an instrument which can glue it all together, keep it on track so that one part of the orchestra doesn't veer off and get desynchronized from the rest. In some pieces the kempli is also used as a punctuating gong for some of the inter-nodal points. The kendang is a two-headed conical wooden drum. Typically there's two of them in a gamelan, playing interlocking rhythms; together they lead the ensemble in dynamics, tempos, and underlining the dance movements. Balinese music is famous for interlocking rhythms. Paired instruments are often thought of as consisting of a female and male partners. That's the case in the gangsa section as well.

WBR: What about the low instrumentsSSthe jegogan, jublag, and penyacah?

VITALE: In this section of the gamelan, they're all paired instruments, two of each. Jegogan is the largest, lowest metallophone instrument, with five keys, for one octave worth of notes. Jublag is essentially same thing but an octave higher. They're very important actually, even though they don't always stand out so much in the texture. But they play the pokok or core melody, a regular succession of tones around which everything else is based. Penyacah are yet an octave higher but often have seven keysSSin other words, stretching beyond a single octave. They also play the pokok tones, but at twice the rate as the jublag. As you move up the ladder, the instruments play successively faster. It's a very elegant system.

VITALE: We emphasize five styles. First of all, the Gamelan Gong Kebyar. This is the orchestra we've been describing in this list of instruments. It's the most popular large bronze gamelan ensemble in Bali. It came into its present form in the early part of the century, somewhere around 1914, though it continued to evolve after that. The word "kebyar" refers to this very flamboyant, fiery, dynamic style of music that has rapid passages contrasted suddenly with slower passages. It's also very complex rhythmically. Sekar Jaya also has a Gamelan Angklung, which is similar overallSSthe same kinds of instruments and in roughly the same number. But it employs the four-tone scale, part of the slendro family of tunings. It's an older style than kebyar and was traditionally associated with the Pura Dalem, a particular Balinese temple that's oriented towards the ocean, towards the darker forces in the universe, associated with death rituals, cremations, and so forth. That was the Angklung's roots. Nowadays it's flowered into a concert orchestra in its own right and often plays a lot of same dance repertoire as the Gong Kebyar.

Sekar Jaya dancers Joyce King and Mimi Prather

One of our newest ensembles is the Gamelan Joged. Joged is a dance of flirtation and is accom-panied by a bamboo gamelan. It's one of the exceptions in the Balinese dance tradition, which tends to be classical in nature, with many set choreographies that can be played in a concert presentation. Whereas Joged is a flirtation dance where a succession of young women first perform a short solo, but then start the "main attraction" which is picking guys out of the audience to dance with in a flirtatious improvisation. There's a lot of hamming it up and laughing. Traditionally this was per-formed in the street, just blocking it off for a few hours so that anyone who came by would check it out. Our joged players also perform on a gamelan known as Jegog, another bamboo orchestra that uses bamboo of enormous proportions. The bass instruments are often more than 10 feet in length and a foot in diameterSSif you can imagine bamboo tubes that size. They produce incredible bass tones that can be heard for miles. They play extremely energetic, exuberant music. It originated in west Bali, the only place in Bali where you find this enormous bamboo. But what we have is kind of a chamber version of that, made from shorter, flat pieces of bambooSSmuch more portable! The other thing is that, if you take whole tubes of bamboo out of a humid, tropical climate, it tends to split apart and become unusable. Fortunately the Bay Area happens to be okay because the humidity seldom gets too low, usually around 40 or 50%.

VITALE: It's extremely vigorous in Java and in Bali. It's like what TV might dream to be in some other, higher existence. It's on a screen, and the audience gathers around it and watches this program, so to speak. But since it's live and has mythology and philosophy and humor and singing and live music, it's everything rolled together in one multidimensional art form. The music that accompanies it is very complex. It's also quite difficult technically, because you play different parts with each hand. The pokokSSthe main melody tonesSSare played with the left hand. The figuration and more rapid melodies are played with the right hand. And those are also done in interlocking pairs between the instruments. So the music is very intricate, very beautiful.

It's interesting that this all came out of the temple tradition. In a temple festival the participants, the congregation, wants to create a maximum saturation of good thingsSSornateness and beauty in the decorations and offerings and dress and traditional costume. There are often recitations from sacred texts and gamelan being played in the middle courtyard. In fact sometimes there will be two or more groups set up in different courtyards in the temple, all playing at the same time. What happened was that, as this evolved, the sense of pride that groups take in what they do created a feeling of competition between themSSnot in a bad sense, but in the sense of who could make the best showing, and offer a more sensational and beautiful performance for this temple ceremony. That's especially the case when one of the groups is from outside the village. They were seen as representing their village and its traditions. And slowly that grew into more formalized competition between groups, which then came out of the temple and became what is now the gamelan festival. The word in Balinese is "mabarung," which means exactly this kind of head-to-head competition.

VITALE: Three times. By 1985, word had gotten back to Bali of what we were doing. The governor of Bali extended an invitation to us to come perform in the Bali Arts Festival, not as a competing group but as an actSSor should I say sensation?SSin our own right. This was an unprecedented event. Well, we were scared to death of this invitation! Here we were going to Bali to play Balinese music: we thought we might be laughed off the stage. We didn't have a clue how Balinese audiences would respond. So we practiced like insane people for the entire year leading up to this event. We worked up this new repertoire, which included pieces not only of traditional Balinese music and dance but also new works that we had composed.

VITALE: Right . . . we didn't know whether we'd be accepted or not. But the fact wasSSto make another long story shortSSthe Balinese loved it. They thought it was wonderful, startling. We played in every region of Bali. Our first concert was in this large, open-air pavilion. There were thousands of people there, crammed into every corner, to see this group of "tourists" play gamelan. You have to understand: Bali is a tourist destination. So almost all of the contact the average Balinese has with Westerners is seeing them as bodies lying around on beaches, spreading their money around, buying handicrafts, and generally being "ugly tourists." Yet suddenly here was this group dressed up in Balinese formal attire seated behind a gamelan playing their music and performing their dance. This was a spectacle not to be missed. From the very first concert, people were screaming. We were stunned. The TV crews came in; reporters from the National Radio and from all the local newspapers descended on us. One editorial said that "a cultural bomb had been dropped." Fortunately, we had the foresight to bring a video crew that did a documentary on the whole event. Needless to say, they got their money's worth. That video later won an award and played on PBS several times.

That was the first tour, back in 1985. Since then we've toured two more times. All three tours have been very, very successful, though very different. And each of our tours has had a real effect on the Balinese musical scene because we brought more and more compositions of our own. I've contributed pieces, as well as other members of the group. And these pieces get noticed in musical circles in Bali, where they actually have an effect on the evolution of modern Balinese music and danceSSsomething that we take very seriously.

VITALE: We've been up and down the coastSSSouthern California several times, both San Diego and LA; Portland, Eugene, and Vancouver. A few years ago we did an East Coast tour of five cities, between New York and Boston. Audience reaction has been fantastic; we've had wonderful responses to all our tours. Even before we had any reputation, the fact that we were doing this music was enough to attract large audiences. I guess "gamelan" is still a buzz word! In the Bay Area, too, despite all these years it's been here. I think it's still an area that people come to because they want to be exposed to a wide variety of music and dance. The "gateway to Asia" thing is really true. The other part is, we always try to include the very best Balinese musicians and dancers in our shows. That's always been part of the draw, and the reason we can continue to have sell-out crowds after 20 years.

VITALE: Well at the beginning it wasn't at all formalized or even regular. In 1979 Suweca just happened to be in the Bay AreaSSit was pure luck for us. He had just finished a tenures at Brown and UCLA and didn't have other work at that time. So this "workshop" evolved into his job, in effect. Every month all of us would sit around and take out our wallets and put our money down on the tableSSand that would be Suweca's pay for the month. We gave him whatever we could to help him survive. After he left, we weren't sure at first how to keep things going. It was just a catch-as-catch-can situation for a couple of years. If a Balinese artist was involved in a program at, say, San Diego State, we would invite him up for the summer. In 1983, we became a nonprofit so we could get grants to support these artists, to bring them for longer and longer periods. Now, at this point, it's formalized into yearly residencies, with both a musician and dancer in residence for 9 or 10 months, from September to June. The artists that we invite often compose music and make new choreographies for us, too, something they really enjoy. So we're constantly premiering new works by our guest directors. In a way we've become kind of a laboratory for them, a place to experiment and expand. Often they try things with us that they might not have the opportunity or inclination to do at home. They can challenge the boundaries of the art, which helps them develop in new ways and is something they can take home with them and continue to develop. Our audiences also really respond to the new work. We do a concert with, say, a world premiere by Nyoman Windha, one of Bali's finest composers, and anyone who knows anything about Balinese music will want to see it.

VITALE: The whole list includes more than 20 artists at this point. Just to mention a few: I Wayan Suweca, our founding music director, is here with us again now for our 20th Anniversary Festival. Another person who goes way back with us and had a lot to do with putting our group on the map is I Wayan Dibia, who's also going to join us for this anniversary. He's now the director of STSI, so it's quite a coup to get him here. He's a brilliant, brilliant choreographer, a scholar, and quite a visionary artist who's fortunately in the position of being the head of the largest performing arts institution in Bali. I Wayan Rai, who's a great musician and scholar, is also a senior member of the music faculty at STSI. He's here again now along with his wife, the dancer I Gusti Ayu Srinatih. I Dewa Putu Berata was one of our guest music directors in the past and will arrive here again soon; he's one of Bali's most charismatic musicians and director of a new music and dance center in Bali. Every time I think about the artists we=re bringing for this festival, I'm amazed myself!

The dramatic side was the other side of this whole project, very demanding and difficult because it touched upon many aspects of interpretation of this epic, which is more than a thousand years old. To make a long story short, the way we divided it out between our two companiesSSyou know it's a battle of good and evil as many of these epics are ultimatelySSwas very simple: they took good and we took evil. It was a stroke of genius by I Ketut Kodi, who was one our guest dancers at that point. It allowed the contrasts between the two traditions to actually have meaning and significance in the drama, rather than trying to make them go away or reduce everything to the lowest common denominatorSSa common mistake in cross-cultural collaborations. So it was ultimately very rewarding because we came up with a wonderful production that was received very well.

VITALE: The idea to do something with film arose from one of our members, Tom Ballinger. We're always looking for new things to try and everyone thought it sounded great, at least in the abstract. But it remained just an ember of an idea for a few years, until, through more or less chance connections in the group, we hooked up with Richard Marriott and the Club Foot Orchestra. Their claim to fame has been the live accompaniment of silent films. We found two silent films that were both made in Bali in the 30s; they became the candidates for our project. Even though the other one had promise, and was in many ways a more interesting and "grittier" film, we decided on Legong. It was the last two-color Technicolor film ever made, apparently, and had been recently restored by UCLA. It was filmed by a Hollywood crew, but with an all-Balinese cast, and shot on location in Bali. It's a very simple love story. Richard Marriott and I Made Subandi, who was our guest music director last year, became the artistic collaborators. They composed a new score that was wonderfulSSit really complemented the film so that the whole was greater than the sum of the parts. We performed it at four shows at the Castro Theater, last May. It was very satisfying. We're trying now to get the piece up again and bring it on tour to Los Angeles or New York.

VITALE: Quite a bit. A couple of pieces first appeared on a CD by New World Records, which wasn't focused on Gamelan Sekar Jaya per se but on composers within the troupe: myself, Michael Tenzer, Evan Ziporyn. That's their focusSSAmeri-can composers. The title of that CD is American Works for Balinese Gamelan Orchestra. A couple of years after that, we made our own CD; we called it simply Balinese Music in America. Plus every time we go to Bali, we make arrangements with cassette companies there to release our pieces, which has a lot to do with the effect of this group in Bali. I also have my own recording company, Vital Records, which specializes in Balinese music. We have a new release, entitled Music of the Gambuh Theater; the first-ever recording of a particular kind of Balinese music.

VITALE: Well, if you mean Balinese as opposed to Indonesian, there's only one other professional company: Shadow Light Productions, based in San Francisco. They're great. That's Larry Reed's company, and he specializes in Wayang, the shadow puppet play. He's taken it to new and very exciting levels by using a sophisticated array of lights that allows all sorts of cinemagraphic effects. We've collaborated with him several times in the past. In fact, several of our musicians play with his group. But open the focus a little wider, there are all sorts of interesting activities. For example, the Sierra School in Albany employs one of our members, Maddie Hogan. She convinced the school to buy a gamelan angklung. She teaches the kids on this and they're incredible. In fact, one of our newest members, who=s only 15 years old, is one of Maddie's former students. So it's already a generational thing.