'Jinto' guitar, crap, and a great gamelan show

1) to Wim Hoogewerf:

Check this message from the archive:

http://www.onelist.com/message/tuning/8889?&start=8880

for a little bit of info about Robin Perry's 'Jinto' guitar
(which is on loan here to Sonic Arts) as well as another
one he showed me when I visited him in Virginia.

2) to Joe Pehrson (and Paul Erlich):

By 'a lot of crap around here lately' I wasn't referring to
anything informative that anyone has posted about periodicity
blocks or anything else.

I was referring to the ignorant flame-war-type one-liners that
were being posted with screenfuls of quotes from previous postings,
and about which I was merely echoing the complaints others had
already sent in.

(And Paul, thanks very much for having the courtesy to send
your message, which was more strongly critical than Joe's,
to me privately rather than posting it to the List.)

3) to all:

I was priveleged tonight to go along with Brian McLaren,
Jonathan Glasier, and John Chalmers to the Javanese Wayang Kulit
"Hanuman the Messenger", a Javanese shadow-puppet show with
Gamelan.

The performance took place in a pretty hillside setting in
the backyard of a house in the Olivenhain section of Encinitas.

The dalang (puppeteer) Putro Widiyanto gave not only a great
performance manipulating the puppets, but also exhibited a
mastery of storytelling as he blended traditional Javanese
dialog with lengthy improvised English bits that were almost
always comical and sometimes hilarious.

Widiyanto frequently alluded to the 9-hour length of a
traditional performance, often adding in a subtly humorous
way that this mostly-American audience would only have to
endure it for an hour and a half. In fact, he shortened
the final 3rd Act by two scenes, ending abruptly but skillfully
after the first scene, because it was 'getting cold'.

The truth is, for at least the entire hour and a half the California
night had already been much colder than any outdoor audience in Java
would have experienced, and just about everyone had blankets and
jackets on by the end.

The musicians were from the SDSU [San Diego State University]
Javanese Gamelan (Djoko Walujo, musical director). The music,
played and sung generally between the scenes of the story,
was evocative, using a variety of pentatonic scales that had
some very xenharmonic intervals in them. The gamelan section
I liked most was the one just after the end of the story,
before the closing song. It had 'major' sound, with a type
of 'major 7th' as part of the melody, but with some instruments
adding a really funky 'neutral-tending-to minor 7th' in some parts.

The performance will be repeated Sunday in Escondido, and Monday
evening at the SDSU campus. It was suggested to me by Danlee
Mitchell (who monitored several video cameras) that those performances
will probably be musically tighter, and the one at SDSU is indoors.

-monz

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