GAMELAN

Music: R. Murray Schafer

The prolific and innovative Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer (1993–2021) was fascinated by the ways musical sound could create profound relationships between performer, audience, and space, and he was especially interested in non-Western musical influences. His “Gamelan” for four voices from 1979 uses musical procedures and textures loosely drawn from Balinese gamelan music, including the use of traditional Balinese solmization syllables (the rough equivalent of “do-re-mi” in European music) as “text” for this work. Not only do the syllables represent specific pitches in Balinese musical modes, they also have an onomatopoetic quality, mimicking the striking of percussion instruments and the ringing of bells. In the context of this concert, the bell- like sounds invoke the celebratory sound of bells ringing around the world.