The Bates Gamelan Orchestra in March 2011. Photograph by Simone Schriger ’14.

In a program titled Mebarung! — a Balinese term for a sort of “battle of the bands” between gamelan ensembles — the Bates Gamelan Orchestra welcomes the Massachusetts group Gamelan Galak Tika for a joint performance at 3 p.m. Sunday, March 24, in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall, 75 Russell St.

Featuring two world premieres, and performances of dance as well as music, the concert is open to the public at no cost, but tickets are required. For more information, please contact 207-786-6135 or olinarts@bates.edu.

Gamelan is a classical genre of music indigenous to Bali and Java, in Indonesia. The instruments consist mostly of tuned percussion, and tend to be created in sets comprising a variety of instruments — Bates owns two sets. Singing and wind instruments are also part of the gamelan tradition.

Gamelan is a living musical force, sustained by Indonesian and Western composers who respect traditional idioms while staying contemporary in both compositional and performance practices.

Gamelan Galak Tika.

Peter Steele, visiting instructor of music at Bates, directs the Bates ensemble. Gamelan Galak Tika is directed by composer Evan Ziporyn, recently appointed inaugural director of the Center of Art, Science and Technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

“In Bali, mebarung performances showcase the brilliance of two competing gamelan groups on a shared stage,” Steele explains. “These events are hotly anticipated and typically show off a myriad of artistic styles, both classical and contemporary.”

The Bates concert features two new works by a prominent Balinese composer, I Dewa Ketut Alit. Also on the program, along with classical Javanese and Balinese pieces, are Ziporyn’s groundbreaking fusion works, “Tire Fire” and “Amok” for Balinese gamelan and electro-acoustic instruments.

Finally, the gamelans will accompany dances performed by students in the course World Dance Forms: Balinese Dance, taught by guest artist Shoko Yamamuro.

The Bates College Gamelan Orchestra is an Indonesian-music study and performance group that, among other roles, provides ceremonial music for college events. The gamelan plays music of West and Central Java, as well as new music for gamelan.

Steele is a doctoral candidate in ethnomusicology at Wesleyan University, where for four years he directed the Gamelan Wira Surya. His dissertation examines the global popularity of Balinese performing arts in the 21st century. Active as a performer and composer, Steele wrote “Mornings Well Augured” for the Bates gamelan to perform at the October 2012 installation ceremony for Bates President Clayton Spencer.

Gamelan Galak Tika has been at the forefront of innovative music for Balinese gamelan since 1993. The ensemble has performed at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, several Bang on a Can Marathons, the Cleveland Museum of Art and colleges throughout the Northeast. In 2005 the group toured Bali.

Galak Tika is dedicated to commissioning and performing new works by Balinese and American composers, as well as performing traditional Balinese music and dance. “Galak tika” is classical Javanese for “intense togetherness.”

Ziporyn is an American clarinetist, composer, the founder and director of Gamelan Galak Tika, and a founding member of the acclaimed Bang on a Can All-Stars. He writes boundary-crossing music with a downtown experimental sensibility. His compositions have been performed by Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Project and the Kronos Quartet, among other artists.

Alit is generally acknowledged as the leading composer of his generation in Bali. He has collaborated with dancers and musicians from around the world, including Ziporyn and Gamelan Galak Tika. He is regularly invited to teach and compose for gamelan outside Bali.

Seeking a wider path for his approach to new music in gamelan, Alit founded his own gamelan group in 2007, Gamelan Salukat, performing on a new set of instruments of Alit’s own tuning and design.

The Steel Pan Orchestra performs at the inauguration of President Clayton Spencer.

Three musical ensembles featuring Bates students will perform Dec. 5, 6 and 8 in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall, 75 Russell St.

Led by Tom Snow, the Bates Jazz Band performs a diverse array of styles at 7 p.m. Wednesday, Dec. 5. The band will offer jazz, Latin jazz, and blues by composers Cole Porter, Billy Strayhorn, Kenny Durham, Thelonious Monk and others. Snow is well-known in Maine and beyond as a jazz pianist.

Erica Butler directs the Bates Steel Pan Orchestra in concert at 7 p.m. Thursday, Dec. 6. The program consists of “Got a Little Something for You” by Artiguan musician King Obstinate; Rihanna’s “Disturbia”; Bryan Adams’ “We’re In Heaven”; and the Blondie classic “Heart of Glass.” Butler performed for many years with the Atlantic Clarion Steel Band.

The Bates Gamelan Orchestra, directed by Peter Steele, performs at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, Dec. 8. Two guest artists will share the stage with the orchestra: I Dewa Made Suparta will perform Balinese masked dances and direct the ensemble on Balinese drums. Shoko Yamamuro will perform as a guest dancer.

The concert will feature new and traditional works, including the full version of “Mornings Well Augured,” which Steele, a visiting instructor in music, composed for the recent inauguration of Bates President Clayton Spencer.

The three concerts are open to the public at no cost, but tickets are required. For more information, please contact 207-786-6135 or olinarts@bates.edu.

The Bates Gamelan Orchestra in a March 2011 performance.

A piece by American composer Lou Harrison and music from central and west Java, in Indonesia, are on the program for a Bates College Gamelan Orchestra concert at 8 p.m. Thursday, Dec. 8, in the College Chapel, 275 College St.

The concert is open to the public at no cost. For more information, please contact 207-786-6135 or olinarts@bates.edu.

The Indonesian word “gamelan” usually refers to a collection of tuned percussion instruments that have been built and tuned to be used together.

Joining the ensemble are two members of the Bates music faculty: Alice Swanson Esty Professor of Music William Matthews, who will play flute, and violist Robert Dan of the applied music faculty. Here’s the program:

With Matthews’ flute taking the place of a vocal part, “Ladrang Wilujeng (pelog pathet barang)” is a popular piece often performed to welcome guests at weddings and other special events, and also to bring good luck.

“Palwa (pelog degung)” represents a style of gamelan music that’s emblematic of the Sundanese people of West Java.

Featuring violist Dan, “Threnody for Carlos Chavez (pelog degung)” is the Lou Harrison composition. Harrison, who died in 2003, was a staunch defender of musical multiculturalism and a composer gifted at combining different musical elements to create elegant pieces with great audience appeal. Written in 1978, this is one of the earliest of a number of his works that juxtapose Western solo instruments with gamelan accompaniment.

“Gonjing Miring,” a West Javanese piece, is an upbeat work often used to accompany performances of traditional dance and puppetry. One of the Bates Gamelan Orchestra’s favorite pieces, it emphasizes the use of “interlocking” to create a single composite melody: Two xylophone-like instruments take turns playing every other note of the fast-moving melody.

The orchestra, composed of Bates students, faculty and members of the community, uses two gamelan sets. “Gamelan Mawar Mekar” (“Blossom of Inspiration”), acquired by the college in 2001, is composed of iron and brass instruments and was made in Central Java in 1997.

Called a “gamelan degung,” the other set is a smaller, bronze chamber ensemble from West Java. It was donated to the college in 2007.

The Bates College Gamelan Orchestra, a student ensemble that plays music of Indonesia, and special guest artists perform Lou Harrison’s remarkable Double Concerto for Violin, Cello and Javanese Gamelan at 8 p.m. Saturday, March 12, in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall, 75 Russell St.

The concert is open to the public at no cost, but reservations are required. For reservations and more information, please contact 207-786-6135 or olinarts@bates.edu.

Titled Cross-Currents in Bronze, the orchestra’s program of contemporary music for the gamelan also features performances by Balinese dancer Shoko Yamamuro and a world premiere of music by composer Peter Steele.

“Gamelan” refers to the traditional orchestras, composed mainly of percussion but also making use of voice and string instruments, heard on the islands of Java and Bali. The Bates ensemble is conducted by Assistant Professor of Music Gina Fatone.

Harrison, who died in 2003, was an American composer particularly distinguished by his work incorporating gamelan instruments into the Western idiom. Playing the solo string parts in the Harrison concerto are Deborah Greitzer, a member of the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra’s first violin section, and Linda Jennings, assistant professor of cello at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. Percussionist Nancy Smith of the Portland Symphony Orchestra also performs in the concerto.

Greitzer, whose daughter Esther Kendall graduated from Bates in 2010, approached Fatone about a Bates performance of the Harrison concerto last year, Fatone explains. “Deborah and Linda were going to perform it in Bali in summer 2010, and she wanted to find venues for additional performances in the States,” she says.

“Little did she know I am a huge fan of Lou Harrison, who has written numerous Indonesian-inspired pieces for gamelan and Western instruments. I was thrilled.”

The work consists of three movements, with the violin, cello and certain percussion pieces being the only Western instruments involved. The gamelan orchestra and strings play together in the outer movements, while the middle section is for strings and percussion only.

That second movement “is Harrison at his finest, drawing on his many years of meditation on the ‘proper melody,’ ” writes Larry Polansky, a composer at Dartmouth College. “The listener can hardly believe how long the phrases breathe, soar and propel themselves past any prior expectations.”

As a whole, the concerto is “a radical and highly successful experiment in the combination of traditional Javanese forms with Western ones,” notes Polansky.

“Almost all our players this academic year are new to gamelan, and I’m especially impressed with how they adjusted to rehearsing with the violin” during several sessions with Greitzer in January, says Fatone. “It helps that the students really love the piece.”

She adds, “I think the challenge is greater for the Western string players, however, because they have to adjust their tuning to the gamelan,” which uses pitch intervals slightly different from mainstream Western music.

Steele, a doctoral student at Wesleyan University researching the relationship between music and language in Balinese performance, composed “Reaches of Time” for the Bates ensemble. The piece combines a contemporary sensibility with strong influences from traditional Balinese musical structure.

Yamamuro, one of Japan’s leading performers of Balinese dance, will perform two pieces. One is a traditional Balinese dance to orient the Bates audience to the idioms of that style. The other, called “Aoi Tori” (“Bluebird”), is a contemporary-style dance, with electronic music by Steele, that Yamamuro created to explore the paradoxical relationship between happiness and desire.

Continuing the evening’s Balinese theme is a gamelan performance of a piece by I Ketut Alit, a famous Balinese composer who worked with the Bates ensemble last fall.

Greitzer has been a member of the first violin section of the Buffalo Philharmonic for more than 30 years. She has appeared as a soloist with the Philharmonic and other orchestras, and has performed as a soloist and chamber musician in Europe, the United States and Canada.

Jennings is an active solo, chamber and orchestral musician who has performed in the U.S., Europe, Mexico and Asia. She is a member of several chamber ensembles and is known as a proponent of string music education.

The participation of Yamamuro and Steele is made possible by the Freeman Foundation.

As the semester draws to a close, Bates concerts in early December spotlight student achievement across a diverse array of musical styles.

The College Choir, directed by John Corrie, performs at 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, Dec. 3 and 4, in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall, 75 Russell St.

The Steel Pan Orchestra takes the Olin stage at 7 p.m. Monday, Dec. 6.

Led by Maine jazz pianist Tom Snow, the Bates College Jazz Band swings the Olin auditorium at 7 p.m. Wednesday, Dec. 8

Finally, the college’s Gamelan Orchestra, directed by Assistant Professor of Music Gina Fatone, presents a program including an excerpt from Lou Harrison’s Concerto for Violin, Cello and Javanese Gamelan at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Dec. 9. This concert will be held in Chase Hall Lounge, 56 Campus Ave.

Admission is free to all concerts, but due to limited seating, tickets are required for the choir and jazz band performances. For more information, please contact 207-786-6135 or this olinarts@bates.edu.

For the choir’s winter concert, the ensemble will perform a selection of opera choruses ranging from familiar to little-known masterpieces.  In addition to leading the choir, teaching voice and serving as the chapel organist at Bates, Corrie is artistic director for the Maine Music Society, a local orchestral and choral organization.

Erica Butler directs the Steel Pan Orchestra, which performs music of the West Indies on authentic instruments.

The jazz band performs bossa nova, funk and classic swing. The upcoming program includes tunes by Tower of Power, Pat Metheny, Billy Strayhorn and Count Basie.

The final concert showcases the gamelan, a traditional Indonesian percussion ensemble that also often includes vocals, flutes and stringed instruments. Bates has two sets of gamelan instruments, a large Central Javanese gamelan and a smaller Sundanese set, and both will be featured.

In addition to the Harrison excerpt, the program includes a composition in Balinese style arranged by top Balinese contemporary composer I Dewa Ketut Alit, who has been in residence this fall, and two West Javanese songs sung by guest vocalist Jennifer Woodruff, visiting assistant professor in the music department.

By Kelly Cox ’11

Adorned in bright red and exuberant gold fashionings, Barbara Byers ’10 stomped and feigned tears and anger in her portrayal of the Hindu demon god Ravana.

Byers was performing a “tari topeng,” a traditional style of narrative dance from West Java, Indonesia, whose characters are represented by ornate masks. Byers embodied the demon from the Hindu epic Ramayana with confident, crisp motion that meshed seamlessly with the accompanying gamelan music.

This resident of Elkins, W.V., offered the performance as part of an Oct. 7 presentation on student experiences made possible by the Phillips Student Fellowship program at Bates. Also presenting was Chomba Kaluba ’10 of Mpika, Zambia.

The fellowships support student experiences in a foreign culture. They allow undergraduates to pursue service-learning, volunteer work or career exploration while developing a global perspective. Byers, an interdisciplinary major in music and dance, spent two months last summer studying in Indonesia.

Kaluba, a sociology and anthropology major, used his fellowship to support volunteer work with Safe Passage, a nonprofit that supports children who survive by scavenging the city dump in Guatemala City, Guatemala.

Byers, who had never studied abroad before her Phillips adventure, told listeners at the Skelton Lounge gathering that time in a dramatically different culture nourished her deep interest in music and dance. “Being immersed in these arts infused me with a desire for a quality of sound in my work that’s strongly reminiscent of Indonesia,” she said.

The dance, she explained, was an important symbol of Indonesian identity, independence and tradition. Jingling ankle bells, swinging her sampur — a sash essential to the costume — Byers balanced a headdress and inhabited an intensely expressive mask with an ease and confidence reflecting her intense study.

Byers discovered her passion for traditional Indonesian performance as a member of the Bates Gamelan Orchestra, which performs the percussion-rich court music called gamelan. She worked with renowned Javanese musician and composer Nano Suratno during his campus residency last spring, and Suratno invited her to work with him in Indonesia.

She studied several instruments, including the suling, a bamboo flute, and the kacapi, a plucked zither. Byers also worked with artists including choreographer Pak Ahmad, who taught her the tari topeng that she performed at the presentation.

Kaluba spent a month last summer teaching English and leading art projects with children of families working the Guatemala City dump.

“My volunteer opportunity made me realize how my education can impact others, especially in communities with many problems,” Kaluba commented. Such experience “always helps me understand how to work with others and how to be part of a change I want to see.”

Kaluba’s presentation included footage of the Guatemala City dump, a source of income and food for many families who live in shacks nearby. The video showed young and old sorting through trash for materials that they could eat or sell. Hundreds of people forage here rain or shine to meet their daily needs. Chomba also showed clips of his teaching the children English.

Known around campus for the toy buses and motorcycles he creates from recycled materials, Kaluba shared this craft with children from the dump. This gave them an opportunity for self-expression and potential income from the sale of the toys. He also traveled to Antigua to assess consumer interest in them, and found that they appeal to tourists.

“The opportunity given by the Phillips Fellowship helped me understand how life is lived in other parts of the world,” he said. “I now appreciate things that others may take for granted. My time helping others is what makes me appreciate life most.”

Kaluba, who has launched a foundation to support literacy in remote areas of Zambia and has worked with the homeless in Maine and Washington, D.C., was named Volunteer of the Year in 2007 by the Boys and Girls Club of Southern Maine for his work in South Portland. He is currently working on a documentary that will include footage of community projects he has conducted in Guatemala as well as in Tanzania, Zambia and Honduras.

The Phillips Student Fellowship was established by Charles F. Phillips, fourth president of Bates, along with his wife, Evelyn. The deadline to apply for a fellowship for the upcoming summer is Feb. 1, 2010.

The Bates College Gamelan Orchestra, joined by professional guest artists from Indonesia, performs in concert at 8 p.m. Saturday, March 14, in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall, 75 Russell St.

A few days earlier, a public workshop in Indonesian dance featuring two guest artists from Saturday’s program takes place at noon Wednesday, March 11, in the Olin concert hall.

Both events are open to the public at no cost. For more information, please contact 207-786-6135 or olinarts@bates.edu.

The March 14 program is dedicated entirely to West Javan, or Sundanese, music. Guest artists include Wahyu Roche, a virtuosic drummer, and Ening Rumbini, a dancer who specializes in “jaipongan,” a popular Sundanese dance. Roche and Rumbini will perform both by themselves and with the orchestra. They will also lead the March 11 dance workshop.

The concert also features singer Rina Oesman, who performs in a classical Indonesian style, and her accompanist, Andrew Bouchard, who plays the “kacapi,” a stringed instrument similar to the zither. All four artists live in Bandung, West Java.

The Bates orchestra will perform music from a variety of Indonesian genres including “tembang Sunda,” a formal style of sung Sundanese poetry, and “degung kawih,” an ornamented style of singing accompanied by the “gamelan degung,” a smaller chamber ensemble used in traditional music of the aristocracy.

Roche is a member of Jugala, a pioneering jaipongan group in Indonesia. The group opened for Mick Jagger in Jakarta in 1989. Roche currently performs as a freelance musician for several groups, has written music for the influential workshop theater founded by the playwright Rendra, and recently released his debut album as a vocalist.

Rumbini is a leading dancer of jaipongan, a modern popular style based on martial arts and village forms of dance. She has performed throughout Southeast Asia.

Unusually for a woman, Oesman studied with several master musicians and began performing when she was young. After winning first place in a prestigious vocal contest, she became a member of Jugala and began to tour internationally.

Bouchard began playing gamelan in 1984 at the University of California, Santa Cruz, under the direction of master drummer Undang Sumarna. From 1995 to 1998 Bouchard studied a variety of traditional instruments in West Java. He received a master’s in ethnomusicology from UCSC.

In addition to public performances, the Bates Gamelan Orchestra makes a distinctive contribution to ceremonial events and is increasingly integrated into the arts and cultural curriculum.

The orchestra will perform on two sets of instruments, a complete Central Javanese set made by an artisan called Mulyadi, and a degung set acquired by the college in 2007 through the generosity of a private donor, Tony Lydgate, of Kaua’i, Hawaii. The degung instruments were made in Bandung, West Java, in 2006 by Asep Ahum.

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.

Sponsored by the music department, the festival is open to the public at no cost. For more information, call 207-786-6135.

“We’re extending our world music celebration this year from a single concert to two days in order to highlight our students’ wide-ranging interests in musics that lie outside their home culture,” says Gina Fatone, visiting assistant professor of music.

Weekend performances include music from Zimbabwe and the Caribbean, but a prevalent theme of the weekend is gamelan, the percussion-based music of Bali and Java. Performers will include Bates’ own Gamelan Mawar Mekar, which plays in the Javanese tradition, and MIT’s Gamelan Galak Tika.

Individual student projects are the basis for lecture-presentations Saturday afternoon and a concert Sunday evening. (A full schedule appears below.)

The Bates gamelan ensemble, the college’s Blazing Sun Steel Orchestra and Bowdoin’s Vadzimu All-Stars, playing traditional music from Zimbabwe, appear in concert Saturday evening. Gamelan Galak Tika performs Sunday afternoon.

Here’s the full schedule:

Saturday, April 3:

1 p.m. — Paul Heckler, class of 2004, discusses Scottish Highland piping traditions, Olin Third Floor Lounge

2 p.m. — Gregory Rosenthal, class of 2005, on the “ch’in,” a kind of zither, as a vehicle for communion with nature in ancient China, Olin Room 1043 p.m. — Alex Bushe, class of 2006, discusses rembetika, the “music of the Greek underground,” Olin Room 104

8 p.m. — Concert featuring Blazing Sun Steel Orchestra, Gamelan Mawar Mekar and the Vadzimu All-Stars, Olin Concert Hall (the student trio Gefilte Dog performs a mix of Brazilian and klezmer music during the post-concert reception)

Sunday, April 4:

3 p.m. — Concert featuring MIT’s Gamelan Galak Tika, playing music of Bali, Olin Concert Hall

8 p.m. — Concert featuring the senior thesis composition of Mike Silvers, a cantata for choir and instrumental ensemble based on Brazilian folk literature and rhythms; Olin Concert Hall.   ”Gamelan” means “to hammer,” but the term refers to the large percussion orchestras of Java and Bali. The primary instruments are gongs, metallophones and hand drums, embellished with cymbals, vocals, bamboo flutes and spiked fiddles.

Audiences familiar with Javanese gamelan will notice striking differences in sound and style that distinguish Balinese music from that of Java, its island neighbor to the west. The Balinese is generally louder, faster and expresses a more frenetic energy. “There is an overall vibrancy that is truly Balinese,” Fatone explains .

Bates’ 4-year-old Gamelan Mawar Mekar (“blossom of inspiration”) is directed by Fatone and Rose Pruiksma, visiting assistant professor of music. Bates is unique in Maine and distinguished nationally for its resources in Indonesian performing arts — in addition to the gamelan, the college has the use of an extensive collection of shadow puppets.

Its name meaning “intense togetherness” in classical Javanese, the 30-member Gamelan Galak Tika comprises MIT students, staff and community. Its founder and director is Evan Ziporyn, associate professor of music at MIT. Learn more at the gamelan’s Web site: http://www.galaktika.org/aboutgt.shtml.

Thanks to the college’s first-ever grant from the Fulbright Scholar-in-Residence Program, an expert in traditional Indonesian forms of music and shadow puppetry is currently in residence at Bates College.

Joko Susilo comes to Bates from New Zealand, where he is a lecturer in the Department of Music at the University of Otago, Dunedin. He is both a “dhalang” — a master in the Indonesian shadow puppet tradition called “wayang” — and a composer of music for the percussion orchestra called gamelan, which is closely connected with the puppetry style.

Bates is unique in Maine and distinguished nationally for its resources in these Indonesian performing arts. The college has its own gamelan instruments and a 4-year-old gamelan performing ensemble, the Gamelan Mawar Mekar (“blossom of inspiration”). It also has the use of an extensive collection of puppets — around 250 — on permanent loan by David Eisler, of Dover, N.H.

The gamelan is the traditional orchestra of Java and Bali that is most familiar to the rest of the world. Its gongs, drums and xylophones are played according to systems of pitch and timing very different from typical Western music. The players in the Bates ensemble include students and faculty, and work under the direction of visiting assistant professors of music Gina Fatone and Rose Pruiksma.

Bates audiences can hear and see the Gamelan Mawar Mekar in concert this spring. On Friday, March 19, the gamelan musicians will accompany a puppet performance by Susilo. The gamelan will also take center stage at Bates’ World Music Weekend, April 2-3, when the group will perform with the Bates Steel Pan Orchestra on Saturday, April 3, and will welcome MIT’s Balinese Gamelan Galak Tika for a concert on Sunday, April 4.

During the past three years Bates has welcomed visiting artists in a variety of Indonesian traditions, Pruiskma says. “In each instance, our ensemble became stronger and brought some outstanding performances to the whole Bates and the larger community.”