Gamelan Workshop

“It is not a zoo; we live in it too,” admonished Jowi Taylor, a world music programmer at CKLN in Toronto. Once considered ‘exotic’, the gamelan orchestra captivated Europeans at the Paris World’s Fair of 1889. In particular, Debussy’s encounters with the music are well documented. It is speculated that the delicate nuances of Debussy’s piano music are evocative of the soft shimmering sounds of the Javanese percussion. A little over a century later, gamelans are played by fifth and sixth graders in elementary schools in Canada, the United States, Japan, Great Britain and France to name a few. In addition, most universities and colleges in the aforementioned countries have their own gamelan sets. While many sociological and political reasons can be cited to account for the popularity of the gamelan orchestra, of particular interest to music educators, is the learning process. This gamelan workshop will provide a hands-on, embodied session for its participants to explore the learning processes in gamelan music making. It will be a site where participants play at the interface of pedagogies found in community music and university settings. I aspire here to create ‘praxial’ moments reflecting the research done by Lucy Green in her book, Music, Informal Learning and the School: A New Classroom Pedagogy (Green, 2008)