An explicit goal of the festival is to support and encourage youth involvement in order to uphold the excellence of and veneration for the Carnatic tradition. Taking inspiration from the annual Thyagaraja Aradhana in Tiruvaiyaru, India, the festival has made waves in both the Indian and North American communities, attracting over 8,000 attendees for the 12-day event. I conclude by reflecting on potential paths for academic gamelan ensembles within the ever-shifting environment of collegiate ensemble instruction.Ĭarnatic Music Transplanted to America: Innovations of Youth in “Sustaining Sampradaya”ġ978 marked the first year of the Cleveland Thyagaraja Festival in Ohio. I suggest that the construction of transnational, transgenerational gamelan communities and the chameleon-like abilities of the ensembles to be incorporated into both traditionalist and experimental or activist situations has allowed gamelan communities to present both as Asian and post-Asian musical phenomena. This mode of representation of Indonesian musical communities and of Asian music more broadly has been a subject of much critique.īased on nearly a decade of research within American gamelan communities, this paper examines how gamelan communities have approached the task of representation. Often the only Asian music ensembles in their specific collegiate settings, gamelan have come to represent Indonesian, Southeast Asian, and Asian musical culture as a whole. American musicians-mostly white, though also Latinx and East Asian-provide the primary membership of such ensembles. Currently, there are approximately two hundred gamelan in the United States that give performances, half of which are anchored at collegiate institutions.
Due to the ensembles’ association with this foundational academic program, their impressive aural and visual presence, their approachability for novice musicians, and their clear ability to address cultural diversity initiatives, gamelan have spread across the country. The Indonesian-American community is small however, Indonesian gamelan (percussion orchestra) ensembles have gained an outsized presence within American academic music programs in the past six decades since the first two academic gamelan ensembles were founded at the University of California-Los Angeles. Gamelan Chameleon: Cultural Representation and Academic Asian-American Ensembles This panel explores the journeys that Indonesian, South Indian and Chinese musics have taken when they entered the halls of academia, employed as a part of youth identity formation, or became a site of memory and entertainment for seniors.Įlizabeth Clendinning (Wake Forest University) The musical traditions of Asia survive, thrive and are transformed in the United States for a wide variety of reasons. Chair: Jennifer Jones Wilson (Westminster Choir College)
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