Word: gamelan
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Indonesians love peace as well. In the soft scented night each village resounds with the rhythmic, curiously tuneful gamelan music of bowl-shaped gongs, bamboo flutes, metal keys, two-stringed violins. Fluid-fingered dancers will hold an audience enchanted all the night long; wayang puppet shows, telling the heroic legends of the past, run from sunset to dawn. Yet together with the industriousness and mannered behavior of the Indonesian is the wild agony of the amok, when a man for no clear reason will throw off all restraint and race through his village wielding his razor-sharp parang against everything...
Bach to Balinese. It plays anything from Bach to esoteric jazz. There have been concerts on the Royal Watusi drums, and by the Balinese Gamelan Orchestra. Drama ranges from Eumenides to Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, poetry readings from Robert Frost to Allen (Howl) Ginsberg, lecturers from former Amherst President Alexander Meiklejohn to Alan Watts, expert on Zen Buddhism. Once a week Russian Specialist William Mandel reports for 15 minutes on what Russians are being told by their newspapers and magazines. No cause is too controversial to get a hearing. Example: KPFA gave air time to Congressman Robert Condon to defend himself...
...banging or rubbing each one separately) and record the sounds together on tape. Then he persuaded an engineer to build an electronic "brain" for the tower which "plays" the tones according to the effects of light, heat, humidity and surrounding noises. The result sounds rather like a Balinese gamelan: a succession of groans, bongings, sighs and muted tinkles. "This piece of sculpture," says Schoffer, "aside from its purely visual role, becomes the source of an emission of sonorous background directed towards the city...
Dancers of Bali Gamelan Orchestra (Columbia). Deep gongs, cymbals, gangsas (marimbas), reyongs (small tuned gongs), angklungs (rattles) and finger-drums, played with astonishing variety of tone and precisely stumbling rhythms by the Indonesian musicians now touring the U.S. (TiME, Oct. 6). Good fun, and a rattling good test for "hifi" phonographs...
...colored turbans, sitting comfortably behind gilded consoles, beating on xylophone-like strips of metal with wooden hammers. In the rear hung three huge, deep-humming brass gongs. At the foot of the temple steps, two men sat and fluttered butterfly fingers against tubular drums. The music of a Balinese gamelan can clang steel-hard or chime gold-soft, Manhattanites discovered -and the rhythm was as exact and exciting as a drum solo by Gene Krupa...