Bates College presents a concert of Indonesian music featuring student musicians and a singer who is one of the Pacific nation’s leading classical recording artists at 8 p.m. Saturday, March 17, in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall, 75 Russell St.

Sponsored by the Bates music department, the concert is open to the public at no charge. For more information, please call 207-786-6135 or 207-753-6968.

Euis Komariah is considered one of the most talented, knowledgeable and versatile musicians from West Java. She and her accompanist Gangan Garmana, an award-winning virtuoso on a type of zither called a “kacapi,” will spend a 10-day residency at Bates, the first stop in a teaching and performing tour that will bring them also to Ohio, Pennsylvania, Georgia and California.

The concert also features the Bates gamelan ensemble and the concert debut of the college’s new, built-to-order “gamelan degung” — a small, classical chamber ensemble of metallophones and gongs used in traditional music of the West Javanese (Sundanese) aristocracy.

“The degung ensemble has its own scale and repertoire that is distinct from other types of gamelan orchestras, making it uniquely West Javanese and a source of pride for the Sundanese people,” explains assistant professor of music Gina Fatone, who directs Bates’ gamelan orchestra. The new instruments, which arrived in February, were a gift from David Lydgate of Hawaii, a patron of the West Javanese arts who wishes to spread awareness of classical Indonesian music in the United States.

“We are doubly thrilled to be able to debut our new degung ensemble at Bates with such prominent Indonesian performers,” Fatone says. “Opportunities for American gamelan students to study with Euis Komariah and her accompanist are very rare.”

Komariah has received critical acclaim as a vocalist in several Sundanese music genres, from popular to classical. Her specialty is the highly ornamented and technically virtuosic vocal style called “tembang Sunda,” another aristocratic musical genre of West Java. She is also a star in the “gamelan salendro” and “degung” music scenes in Bandung, West Java.

Unlike other female vocalists of her generation, Komariah plays musical instruments, which is typically the domain of male musicians. She is the primary artist on more than 50 recordings, including some that are available in the United States.

“It’s always enlightening to experience the talents of stars in other musical cultures,” Fatone adds. “The Bates music department is extremely lucky to be able to host these musicians. We are very excited.”

Although her 40-year career has brought her around the world, the six-week U.S. tour is Komariah’s first extended teaching engagement in this country.

She and Garmana will be in residence at Bates as Mellon Learning Associates, a program supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, March 9-18. They will work with members of the Bates gamelan orchestra in preparation for the joint performance on March 17.

A shadow-puppet performance of an ancient Indonesian story and an orchestral concert featuring a setting of four poems by a noted Maine poet will distinguish Bates among local arts presenters this weekend.

At 8 p.m. Friday, Nov. 12, the Bates College Orchestra presents a program including conductor Philip Carlsen’s setting of poems by renowned Maine writer Wesley McNair.

At 8 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 13, Indonesian puppet master Joko Susilo will present a shadow-puppet performance of “The Abduction of Sinta,” a central story from the Hindu epic Ramayana. Susilo will be accompanied by the Bates Gamelan Mawar Mekar (“blossom of inspiration”), an Indonesian-style gamelan orchestra, and guest musicians from New Hampshire and Minnesota.

Both events take place in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall at Bates, 75 Russell St., and are open to the public at no charge. For more information, please call 207-786-6135.

The orchestral concert features Four Journeys in Maine, a 1989 composition by Bates faculty member and orchestral director Philip Carlsen. This piece is a setting of works by award-winning poet McNair, author of the collections My Brother Running and Fire. McNair and Carlsen are colleagues at the University of Maine at Farmington, where the poet directs the creative writing program and Carlsen is a professor of music.

Soprano Christina Astrachan, of the Bates music faculty, is featured vocalist on the Carlsen work. Each movement of Four Journeys evokes a place, or a sense of place — a late-night drive in the country, a Farmington street in the snow, a decrepit building in the potato fields of Mars Hill, birdwatching on Monhegan Island.

The orchestra will also perform Haydn’s Symphony No. 99 in E-flat and Borodin’s In the Steppes of Central Asia.

Joko Susilo belongs to the eighth generation of “dalangs” — shadow-puppet masters — in his family, and also composes and teaches gamelan music. Although Indonesia today is predominantly Muslim, a period of Hindu rule beginning in the seventh century left a cultural legacy that remains robust.

“Wayang kulit,” the puppet theater form practiced by Susilo, derives many of its stories from the Hindu epics Mahabarata and Ramayana. On Nov. 13 he will perform a central episode from the latter.

It’s the story of the battle between Rama, a semi-divine king, and the demon-king Rawana. Rawana, smitten by the beauty of Rama’s wife, Sinta, asks a servant to help him kidnap her.

The servant transforms himself into a golden deer, which Sinta asks Rama to catch for her. “This evil deer tricks Rama away from Sinta, far away in the middle of the forest, so then Rawana can take Sinta from Rama,” Susilo explains.

“Rama’s friend, the gigantic bird Jatayu, tries to save Sinta,” he continues, but Rawana kills the bird and reclaims Sinta. Finally, Rama enlists the aid of a monkey god and his followers to fight Rawana, and an epic battle ensues between the monkey army and the giant soldiers of Rawana.

“The story ends with the reunion between Sinta and her husband, Rama,” says Susilo. “Happy ending.”

More than mere fantasy, the story and the epic from which it’s derived are rich in moral lessons, Susilo says. “In the puppets we have a lot of philosophy. If you watch the puppets it’s like you’re watching yourself in the mirror. You will find yourself, because many, many characters appear on the screen — ‘Oh, that’s like me.’ ”

“Rama is the incarnation of wisdom, the god of law,” and exemplifies good leadership, he continues, and the play will offer lessons, about leadership and other subjects, that won’t be lost on observers of contemporary politics. “It’s for everybody — for children, adults, all people.”

The guest artists are Jody Diamond, a New-Hampshire-based singer and international expert on gamelan, and Nicole Erickson, a gamelan musician from Minnesota.

Bates is unique in Maine and distinguished nationally for its resources in Indonesian performing arts, especially its extensive collection of shadow puppets — around 250 — on permanent loan by David Eisler, of Dover, N.H.

“Only a few schools in the United States have a complete set of puppets,” Susilo says. “There are more than 500 gamelan groups, but the complete puppets are very few.”

A lecturer in the music department at the University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand, he is teaching at Bates through the college’s first-ever grant from the Fulbright Scholar-in-Residence Program. He was born into a family of dalangs in a village in Central Java, Indonesia. At the age of 3, his father began taking him to performances, and at age 10 he performed his first all-night wayang kulit play.

He finished his doctorate at Otago in 2000. In the United States, Susilo has taught and performed at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C, at Dartmouth and at the University of Virginia, among other venues. Internationally he has worked in the United Kingdom, Australia and the Netherlands, and brought his Padhang Moncar gamelan group from Victoria University, Wellington, New Zealand, on tour in Indonesia.

The Memory of Salt, a play written by Lisa Maurizio, associate professor of classical and medieval studies at Bates College, will be performed at 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, May 21 and 22, in the college’s Perry Atrium, Pettengill Hall.

The public is invited to attend at no charge. For more information, please call 207-786-8391.

The story of a mother’s quest to bury her child, The Memory of Salt takes place in the aftermath of the Greek conquest of Troy (although the play’s simultaneous debut with the Brad Pitt film is coincidental).

“It looks at the question of desire and the degree to which it makes us human and binds us to one another,” says Maurizio, “or entraps us and compels us to do things that are perhaps not very good.”

The play features choreography by the incoming head of the Bates dance program and music by faculty and a resident scholar involved with the Bates gamelan, a type of Indonesian musical ensemble. In theatrical terms, Salt borrows from two traditions: ancient Greek and Japanese “noh” drama.

But it represents the culmination of a collaboration among Maurizio, director John Ambrosino — a 2001 Bates graduate and founder of the Boston theater company the Animus Ensemble — and the late Ellen Seeling, a theatrical designer and associate professor of theater at Bates.

The three shared a “vision of world theater,” said Maurizio, and earlier collaborated on Tereus in Fragments, which Maurizio wrote, Seeling designed and Ambrosino directed last year, both at Bates and in Boston with his own company to good reviews.

In particular, Maurizio, Seeling and Ambrosino were intrigued by the stylized aspects of ancient Greek theater and noh, traditions that emerged from very different cultures and historical periods but had in common a variety of formal devices or practices.

“Both began in outdoor theaters,” Maurizio says. “They began in religious festivals, they used all-male actors wearing masks, they involved music and dance, they have choruses, and they have only one to two protagonists.”

Maurizio credits the creative vision of her colleagues for the inspiration to write the piece. In particular, she says, “this play could not have happened without Ellen and I collaborating together three or four years ago” on other projects.

In the spirit of that collaboration, faculty from other areas contribute to the Salt production. Carol Dilley, visiting assistant professor of dance, provides choreography, while the music is created by visiting Fulbright scholar Joko Susilo, working with the Bates College Gamelan Mawar Mekar, led by Gina Fatone and Rose Pruiksma of the music faculty.

The Costas and Mary Maliotis Charitable Foundation provided significant funding for the project. Ambrosino’s participation is supported by the Mellon Learning Associates Program in the Humanities at Bates.