Gamelan Son of Lion, based in New York, is not a traditional Indonesian gamelan but an ensemble "specializing in contemporary pieces written for the instruments of the Javanese gamelan percussion orchestra." That's a larger category than you might think; around 1980, when the earliest of these pieces was composed, a gamelan became a common part of the music curriculum at many small American colleges. Although it might have seemed useful, if only as a point of reference, no traditional gamelan music is included, and the program as a whole evinces little engagement with Indonesian material; in the one work with an Indonesian text, Lisa Karrer's Kacapi (2003), the words are mispronounced, and "Sundanese" is described as a musical form when in fact it is the name of an ethnic group. This said, the music is generally engaging, and it serves as an interesting case study in how instrumentation affects form. Gamelan music, like the North Indian forms in which it is ultimately rooted, is built on rhythmic cycles; their ends are marked by the sounding of a giant gong, and smaller instruments elaborate layers of various kinds. The most successful pieces here are those that rely on cycles or on the hocket-like patterns by which different layers fit together. Laura Liben's Traffic, in which a 13-beat measure gradually contracts to a two-beat unit and then expands again, depicts a passage from countryside to city, and
Denman Maroney's Gamelan Around (2006) is based on a short figure treated as a "rhythmic canon": the figure is played at different speeds until its statements finally coincide. Conversely, perhaps the least successful works are the most gimmicky, the ones that force Western forms or programmatic ideas onto the gamelan. An exception is Barbara Benary's Jigalullaby (2006), where a set of Gaelic lullabies is worked into an Indonesian texture. Indonesia has a vigorous experimental scene encompassing traditional as well as Western-inspired popular forms, and a work such as
Miguel Frasconi's Telling Time for gamelan and glass (2008), with tuned glasses adding a lovely textural counterpoint to the percussive gamelan instruments, would be well received there. Listeners who have played one of the gamelan instruments at some point in their lives (try it sometime; like West African ensembles, those of Indonesia tend to be structured with roles for players of various abilities) will be intrigued by this music.