Lessons

I've now had two lessons with Mas Darsono. He's a very nice guy, quiet, laughs a lot, has worked/studied in the States and has fluent English. More importantly in this context perhaps is that he is a fluent and experienced teacher. Anecdotaly, it can be tricky learning from some of the older generation of gamelan musicians, who may not have a good sense of what to teach a Western player, or how to break it down. So we chatted, I played him a couple of things I half-knew, and he was polite enough to say 'good - ok', although actually it was far south of ok, I think.

So he took me back to the basics, but also covering some new ground; lancaran drumming, starting in irama tanggung and transitioning to lancar, using a piece with which I was only vaguely familiar as a model, Tropongbang (Pl 5). I don't know whether this is the way he always works, or whether he took a judgement call on where I seemed to be coming from, but he started out by writing out the whole thing, drumming and balungan, rather than teaching me orally. This was a mild shock to the system; in Bali we got absolutely classic aural teaching, going over and over sometimes quite complex tunes, gradually trying to figure out the syncopations just by listening and following.

So, after a moment or two I got my head back around Javanese notation - rhythmically it is kind of written, not backwards exactly, the strong beat is at the end of the bar - I was succesfuly sight-reading the tricky syncopated rhythm for a gongan of lancaran in tanggung, but quite unable to do it without looking at the dots! Overnight I went and did the homework, memorised the whole thing including the balungan, and came back the next day able to concentrate on actually listening to the balungan (which Darsono played), and leading the transitions correctly. This morning I did a little slow motion practice to try to clean up my articulation at key points.

The plan next is for me to tackle ladrang, specifically Wilujeng; this makes a whole lot of sense as Mags is learning that piece on the gendèr, so in theory we might be able to play it together sometime.

In other news; there is some politics around the use of the gamelan room here at Cakra. The owner has been trying to impose an oddly illogical fee for using the gamelan during a lesson; but not for practice. Together with Anthony from the New York group, we are supposed to be having a meeting with the owner over this, and the feeling is that we are going to try to take some sort of a stand. Everyone here including the staff seems to think this is a ridiculous idea, especially as the Cakra is apparently very highly priced by local standards, and not really that amazing in terms of facilities. The argument is that we are effectively already paying a gamelan surcharge on our room rates...

(Hmm. Anyone know if it possible to type an ellipsis in Windows as a single character, rather than as three dots? How?)

Great experience this morning; dawn tour round the area of the kraton from an expat Australian guy called Randall, who gave us a complete cultural and historical rundown of Java from the beginning of written records up to the current election. Seriously! The guy was amazingly knowledgeable; most memorable point has to be the buffalo he showed us which is an official, titled member of the royal family, and who produces... holy poo?

Oh, and did I mention that tonight we're all going to a wayang in Boyolali? Bring. It.On!