Lou Harrison and the American Gamelan

Abstract

Since the inception of the first Indonesian music performance program in the United States in the 1950s, the number of gamelan in America has mushroomed. A gamelan-the word translates roughly as orchestra-is an ensemble comprising primarily pitched percussion. The main instruments of the ensemble are keyed metallophones with trough or tubular resonators, and knobbed gongs, some of which are suspended and some of which are laid horizontally on rope supports. The suspended gongs function in traditional compositions as colotomic markers delineating major structural points in the musical composition; the horizontal gongs traditionally serve a melodic function.' In 1983 Barbara Benary identified nearly a hundred imported or homemade gamelan in the United States; and by 1993, Soedarsono estimated that there were 200.2 Though initially a West Coast phenomenon (Mantle Hood, a student of the Dutch ethnomusicologist Jaap

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