The Gong Show

UNLESS YOU'VE RECENTLY RETURNED from Java, you might not realize that the strangely pleasing series of thumps and twangs and ethereal whistles sometimes echoing across campus emanate from a gamelan.

Yes, Indonesian orchestra music produced by tuned gongs, bamboo flutes and metal chimes—is alive and flourishing in the Upper Valley.

Thank Jody Diamond, a senior lecturer in the Asian and Middle Eastern studies program who for the past 16 years has invited Dartmouth students to remove their shoes, cross their legs and give her collection of hulking gamelan instruments, quite literally, their best shots.

And interest is swelling. This year, for the first time, she's teaching about gamelan all three trimesters, after regularly turning students away from her popular spring class, "History and Culture of Indonesia."

Also this winter for the first time, a gamelan performance lab (Music 50) has drummed up interest as a half-dozen students jam for credit.

Students like that the music doesn't require sheet music and is a relative snap to learn, says Diamond. "So many students tell me that their piano teachers once said, 'You're wasting your money,'" she says. "With gamelan, a lot of preconceived notions about musicality are not applicable."

Case in point, perhaps, is Jonathan Teller-Elsberg, a resident of Thetford, Vermont, who discovered gamelan when he lived in Colorado and is hoping to assemble an off-campus group here with Diamond's help.

"You get to bang on a thing with a hammer hard and fast," Teller-Elsberg says. "It's better than ultimate Frisbee."

Of course, it doesn't hurt to have a musical ear like Jordana Beeber '08, who learned violin as a child and a year ago quickly took to the slenthem, a bronzekeyed gamelan xylophone. By the end of last spring she was performing weekly on a two-stringed upright rebab. "Gamelan is more fluid than Western music, more about the group than the individual," Beeber says. "It's very accessible."

Surrounded by Sound Gamelan brings out the inner musician in students playing the kenong (left) and gong kemodong.