Balinese Gamelan / Irama plays Baleganjur music in 1994 Part 1

This is a part 1 performance of Gamelan Ensemble Irama, a group from Amsterdam that I played in in the nineties. It's a performance in the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam, Autumn 1994. At the time Irama played in several formations several forms of Balinese gamelan. Also playing in this video are the two founders of Irama, Henrice Vonck (in red, on ceng-ceng) and Sinta Wullur (on reyong) and at the time I was also a member of the ensemble. Here we play the 'marching band'-like procession music of Bali, which is called 'baleganjur'. In its traditional form it's played with cymbals and big and small gongs at processions during important occassions. In the eighties baleganjur suddenly became more popular and in particular youngsters began to experiment with the musical format and the instruments and soon all over Bali many baleganjur competitions were organised where groups presented thier latest compositions. As far as I know baleganjur is still very popular in this contest context. In this video Irama plays a competition piece from the village of Krambitan, North-West Bali, written by a few nineteen year old boys. Irama-drummer and orchestra leader Henri Nagelberg learned the piece while doing research on Bali in the early nineties. Baleganjur is great energetic music, with great interlocking repetitive patterns and for the melody in fact only the four notes of the reyong are used. This is the well that many western minimal composers drunk from to get inspired. I will always love this music. I'm hardly visible in this video, but you can surely hear me all the time, with my (invisible) right hand I produce the constant metronome sound on the kajar and with my left hand I play half the kajar-tempo on the kempli. Evrything is organised along 8 beat gong frases. All instrument groups -2 drums, 2 players on reyong, 5 players of ceng-ceng cymbals- play interlocking patterns. The organising principles of baleganjur (and other Balinese gamelan music) offer endless possibilities to wave together beautiful patterns and compositions. The footage I use here comes from an old vhs-video, that contained two video-recordings of our performance. The picture quality -from 15 years ago- is quite bad, but I think the music is interesting enough to present on Youtube. I've combined the two available video-recordings, alternating from one to the other wherever it was possible and/or musically interesting. Not so easy, cause the original footage wasn't 'score'-directed, the two filmers at the time (among them my brother) didn't know the piece and filmed on an intuitive basis. Still, in combining their footage I've tried to make the best of their shots. This video shows part 1 of the performance. Elsewhere on my channel you'll find part 2. Hope you'll like it!

Author: PieterdeRooijHolland
Keywords: Pieter de Rooij Netherlands Amsterdam Bali baleganjur balaganjur beleganjur gamelan Irama Tropenmuseum
Added: February 22, 2009