Today, the Composers Symposium entered a new phase, what I call OBF Part II. There are a lot of different things going on over the next five days that I look forward to participating and observing. Today, I participated in the festivals's gamelan ensemble.
The University of Oregon has an extremely nice Balinese gamelan set. It has all of the necessary instruments to make a complete ensemble. Today, we focused on making music as a community. One of the many themes explored at this festival is community, and the gamelan was an extension of this.
One of the things I thought about was the paradigm of instrument vs. ensemble and vice versa. One of the challenges associated with playing in a gamelan is making sure that everyone strikes their instrument and dampens at the exact same time, ensuring that a cacophony of metal does not happen. I thought it was pretty cool how when everyone started thinking about the corporate sound, well, the individual strikes disappeared and the ensemble produced a sound together.
As individual players, if we try and feel the big overall picture, we eventually end up losing ourselves in the essence of the large sound. By contributing our individual identities selflessly, we all made the ensemble work. I think it's pretty neat how being selfless contributes to the overall sound of the gamelan "instrument." The gamelan ensemble is essentially our instrument.
A kind of reverse picture exists with the notion of Bach's solo works for violin and cello. In a lot of these pieces, we find that each of the chords might have four stems. The individual player focuses on making an ensemble sound from a solo instrument. This "I" approach, while not bad or good, is somewhat incompatible with the gamelan approach, as gamelan is prefaced on the "we."
I'm too tired to write anymore, and it's improv time. See ya'll tomorrow.
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