Indonesian drummer-composer Wahyu Roche.

Exemplifying the robust cross-cultural conversations that happen all the time at Bates College, guest artists from Indonesia, an Indonesian-style dancer from the U.S. and a Maine composer all have a part in the Bates College Gamelan Orchestra concert at 8 p.m. Saturday, March 31, in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall, 75 Russell St.

The event is free, although tickets are required because of limited seating. For more information, please contact 207-786-6135 or olinarts@bates.edu.

Joining the orchestra, which uses traditional Indonesian gamelan instruments to play music from that nation as well as by Western composers, are drummer-composer Wahyu Roche and dancer Achmad Farmis, both from Indonesia, and California-based dancer Ben Arcangel.

The program includes “Tango Tanggung,” a piece for gamelan instruments and cello by Philip Carlsen, professor of music at the University of Maine at Farmington.

Achmad Farmis performs an Indonesian dance style influenced by martial arts.

Directed by associate professor of music Gina Fatone, the Bates Gamelan Orchestra makes music with percussion — drums, tuned gongs and polyphonic instruments like xylophones and metallophones — as well as bamboo flutes, stringed instruments and occasionally voice. The orchestra plays music from West Java (Sunda) and Central Java. Participation in the orchestra is open to students of all levels of musical experience.

Farmis, visiting Bates for the first time, specializes in “pencak silat,” an Indonesian dance style influenced by martial arts. Fatone explains that her musicians will have to respond on their instruments to Farmis’ dance steps — a new challenge for them.

“Accompanying dance is a dramatically different way of interfacing with the music, and requires the development of more highly nuanced skills,” she says.

“For the student audience, as well as the audience from the community, the ability to showcase the intimate relationship between drumming and dance within traditional West Javanese arts enhances both the aesthetic and teaching power of the gamelan ensemble.”

Farmis will perform with Arcangel in “Hanuman’s Revenge,” a scene from the ancient Hindu epic “Ramayana.” In a solo performance, Arcangel, who has also performed at Bates previously, will perform a traditional, masked dance from the genre “topeng cirebon.”

Farmis has received numerous awards for his work in performance and composition, and represents Indonesia in cultural delegations throughout the world. He has performed and taught regularly in the U.S. for years, and is associated with the California-based Indonesian ensemble Harsonari.

Dancer Ben Arcangel returns to Bates.

Roche has been at Bates twice, including a guest residency in 2008. He is classically trained in gamelan drumming and singing. As a performer and teacher, Roche has performed in the United States, Australia, Singapore and Germany. As a member of the influential group Jugala, he opened for Mick Jagger during a 1989 concert in Jakarta.

As a dancer at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, Arcangel was awarded “Outstanding Performer” at the 10th National American College Dance Festival held at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. The award, presented by Dance Magazine, represents the highest honor among college and university dance students.

The Indonesian guests will work with students at Bates March 21-31 as Johnson Learning Associates. Farmis’ teaching will include training in a traditional West Javanese folk dancing that incorporates tuned bamboo rattles called “angklung.” Bates acquired a set of angklung several years ago, but the group has yet to perform with these instruments and learn the dancing traditionally associated with them.

Farmis will also teach pencak silat in a beginning modern dance course.

In the Bates curriculum the gamelan orchestra plays an important role in creating dialogue across disciplines. Besides music and dance, the group is a great resource for Bates students studying anthropology, cultural psychology and Asian studies.

The Bates Gamelan Orchestra in March 2011.

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.

In a youth-oriented program of music by Britten, Ravel and Beethoven, lecturer in music Philip Carlsen conducts the Bates College Orchestra at 8 p.m. Friday, Feb. 6.

Acclaimed since the 1960s as an experimental composer and pioneer in meditative music, Oliveros appears at 8 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 7.

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

In Olin Arts Center Concert Hall performances a week apart, Indonesian-style orchestra breaks new ground for the Maine music scene. A concert at 8 p.m. Friday, March 28, pairs the Gamelan Mawar Mekar with the Bates College Orchestra, a collaboration that may well be Maine’s first between the traditional Indonesian form and a Western-style orchestra.

A definite first is the premiere of a composition for the two ensembles by Maine composer Philip Carlsen, a visiting assistant professor of music at Bates and conductor of the orchestra.

Two other composers performing that night, American gamelan specialist Jody Diamond and Indonesian musician I.M. Harjito, also contribute works bridging Western and Indonesian sensibilities. Traditional gamelan works complete the evening.

Again at 8 p.m. the following Friday, April 4, the gamelan band shares a bill with two Caribbean-influenced ensembles: Bates’ own Steel Pan Rhythm Riders and special guests, the Bowdoin College World Music Ensemble.Both concerts are free and open to the public.

In its third year at Bates, the Gamelan Mawar Mekar (“blossom of inspiration”) has 13 members. The gamelan — a term referring to both the genre and the musical ensemble itself — is the traditional orchestra of Java and Bali. It’s a percussion-based music whose systems of pitch and timing are very different from the systems familiar to Americans.

The March 28 concert “shows what kind of exciting collaborations can occur when composers cross cultural divides and bring their own traditions to an encounter with something new,” says Rose Pruiksma, director of the Gamelan Mawar Mekar.

The program includes:
Carlsen’s Suite Mawar Mekar in its world premiere. The performance comprises two movements from a projected larger work. Jody Diamond performs as vocal soloist, singing texts from Tennyson’s Song of the Lotos-Eaters and Wordsworth’s Prelude.

Harjito’s Dhandhanggula, for gamelan and orchestra will also be performed. A renowned Indonesian musician, Harjito is an artist-in residence at Wesleyan University, where he teaches gamelan performance. This composition, which features a chorus singing in Javanese, was first composed for gamelan and then adapted for orchestral participation — one of the rare instances of such an adaptation by a Javanese composer.

Diamond’s Sabbath Bride will be performed. A major figure in American gamelan, Diamond is the founder and executive director of the American Gamelan Institute in Hanover, N.H., and a singer in the Javanese “pesindhen” style. Sabbath Bride is based on a Hebrew Sabbath melody.

The April 4 program is divided among the two Bates bands and the Bowdoin ensemble. The gamelan portion highlights the playing of Jesse Fox, a senior from Potomac, Md., who is a founding member of the ensemble and plays a type of xylophone called a “génder” (pronounced “ghen-dare”).

The Steel Pan Rhythm Riders play Caribbean calypso as well as jazz and other genres. The steel band was founded and is directed by assistant professor of music Linda Williams. On April 4 the band will concentrate on major Trinidadian composers Lord Kitchener, Len Boogsie Sharpe and David Rudder, Williams explains. She adds, “We especially acknowledge Sharpe’s tune Woman is Boss, because 16 of the 17 members of the band are female students. That’s a rare departure from previous years.”

Well-known Portland percussionist Michael Wingfield directs the Bowdoin College World Music Ensemble. For more information about both performances, please call 207-786-6135.