Estimated read time: 2-3 minutes
This archived news story is available only for your personal, non-commercial use. Information in the story may be outdated or superseded by additional information. Reading or replaying the story in its archived form does not constitute a republication of the story.
AMERICAN FORK — One cool fall evening, the sound slips out under a glass door just off Main Street, American Fork — repetitive metal bell tones, slightly detuned. Even the shortest fragment tells the listener this is not the music of small-town Utah.
Percussionist Gavin Ryan imported it, literally, from Indonesia.
It is a gamelan, a percussion ensemble of mostly metallophones from Bali.
Ryan fell in love with the music at BYU, which also maintains a gamelan. The instruments' place in the Balinese community-oriented society rang true for the musician.
The gamelan is the soundtrack of Bali. It accompanies religious ceremonies and social events there. The instruments are owned by the community and played by the community.
There are no gamelan solos. There are interlocking parts that must be practiced and performed together.
“There’s not really a way to play gamelan as a solo instrument,” Ryan says. “So it really depends on the community coming together and practicing.”
Ryan saw it as an analogue to the church choir or the community band concerts in his home town.
“That sense of community is kind of reflected in Utah, as well, sometimes so the instruments are quite a bit different than things we’ve seen but similar to a church choir,” he says. “You get that same aspect from it.”
So he raised money online and spent his own to buy a gamelan and enlisted family, friends and music students to form a community gamelan. The word “gamelan” itself, he says, means orchestra.
“That’s how that music exists in Bali. It’s a community thing. It’s a family thing,” says Jeremy Grimshaw, an associate professor of music at BYU who directs a gamelan there and plays with Ryan’s group. “It was cool to see that happening in that way here in Utah.”
Gamelan music, said Cody Ryan, Gavin’s brother and a member of the group, is an acquired taste.
“Like once you get a little more exposed to it, you can hear melodies,” he says. “When you first hear it, it sounds like pots and pans banging together.”
Ryan now has two sets of instruments. One, bright red and gold, is used in Bali to accompany cremation ceremonies. The other — with darker tones — is played for puppet shows and tooth-filing ceremonies. In Bali, canines and incisors are filed down to sooth the savage aspects of the soul. This gamelan plays just for the sake of the music.
After the rehearsal, the group packs up the instruments so they can be placed in storage. The next morning, Gavin Ryan was flying to Bali for a year-long Fulbright Fellowship. He’ll be studying music in Bali and Java. He says, though, that the gamelan music will continue when he returns.
