The University of Michigan’s Javanese gamelan, named Kyai Telaga Madu (“Venerable Lake of Honey”), was purchased by U-M musicologist Bill Malm in 1966. Two years later music prof Judith Becker formed an ensemble of students and community members to play the ensemble’s dozens of instruments. The gamelan is the classical Indonesian orchestra of hammered metal melody instruments, winds, drums, and a big gong. The instruments produce a labyrinth of cycles within cycles within cycles, and their sound carries something of the depth of Indonesia’s ancient cultures. The instruments aren’t hard to play at a basic level, and for forty-six years they’ve offered students the chance to experience a different way of looking at, and hearing, the world.
Other American universities also have gamelans, but Michigan’s is one of the first and one of the largest, and has spawned one of the deepest networks of connections between Americans and Indonesians. Although funding for its use has trended downward, the Venerable Lake of Honey has attracted visiting musicians, dancers, and puppeteers who are renowned in Java itself. The gamelan’s spring concerts, always free, have packed Hill Auditorium with townies and members of the university community. Javanese arts, wrote doctoral candidate Charley Sullivan, have been “a critical entry point to [Southeast Asia] for many people, including the children who come to the spring concerts and elementary students who receive class visits from our visiting artists or who take field trips to play the gamelan at the Stearns Collection.”
Trouble is, the gamelan is about to become homeless. It’s always lived at the School of Music on North Campus, but it’s attracted more liberal arts types from Central Campus than music students focused on recitals and exams and the Western musical tradition. The music school is about to undergo a renovation that will displace the gamelan from its longtime rehearsal room. In a letter to LS&A dean Susan Gelman, gamelan director Susan Pratt Walton noted that the music school “will have no home for the complete set of instruments after March 1, 2014.” Even when the work is finished, Walton says, there’s no guarantee that there will be a place for it on North Campus.
Becker and Walton hope LS&A will take on the gamelan–the orchestra, Walton notes, has “launched [students] into international studies. That happens over and over again.”LS&A hasn’t said no, but it hasn’t made any commitments, either. A combination of space limitations and an administrative transition, from the university presidency on down, has left a lot of decision making up in the air. “It’s not that nobody sympathizes; it’s ‘We think it’s a good idea, but it’s somebody else’s problem,'” Becker says. And a university facilities manager told Walton that there was “absolutely no space” for the gamelan anywhere on Central Campus.
If you’ve got extra space and think you’d like to hear the sound Claude Debussy described as “fantastically rich–melodically, rhythmically, texture (such orchestration!) and above all formally” around the house, Walton says she would “absolutely” explore the idea of a new off-campus home for the gamelan–as long as it’s close enough for students to get to. It can be stored fairly compactly, but needs a room about the size of a university classroom to set up.
