Gamelan Community Gathering — Contemporary Music for Gamelan

Gamelan Community Gathering — Contemporary Music for Gamelan is an event dedicated to the exploration of gamelan as an orchestral organism through contemporary composition, uncovering gamelan's culture, forms, and languages.

Gamelan is a traditional Indonesian ensemble built primarily from bronze and bamboo instruments, each occupying a distinct layer within a highly integrated musical architecture.

Contemporary Music for Gamelan emerges as a parallel dimension of the already established Gamelan Community Gathering, founded by Sara Andreacchio and Sigrid Winter of the Basel-based ensemble Gamelan Saraswara, and dedicated to traditional Balinese music and dance. Not a continuation — a different question posed to the same instruments.
The project originates in a journey. In 2025, through the Global Research Trip of Pro Helvetia, Ivan Liuzzo encountered in Indonesia a highly active and diverse contemporary music scene: the Mi-Reng festival, the work of composers such as Dewa Alit, I Wayan Gde Yudane, Wayan Sudirana, and Arham Aryadi; or ensembles like Nata Swara, Yuganada, Salukat.

This first edition of GCG - Contemporary Music for Gamelan focuses on the theme of reduction. In gamelan, each instrument exists as part of a complete orchestral system: no single element is conceived to stand alone. Moving between solo works and small ensembles, the concert programme challenges this logic: it draws attention to individual voices, isolated timbres, and relationships between instruments rarely heard in such close proximity.
Before the concert, an artist talk with Dieter Mack, Septian Dwi Cahyo, and Krishna Sutedja offers a first point of orientation, opening the space in which the following works unfold.

The concert opens with Arham Aryadi's Gong (2012), the most elementary gesture possible: a solo gong. The instrument that orients the entire orchestra, that marks time and closes phrases, is here stripped of all context. Aryadi works across three resonance points of the instrument, using variations in mallet technique to create timbral colour. Reduction becomes amplification.

Dieter Mack's Selisih Baru (2018) follows. Selisih in Indonesian means difference, discourse, conflict in a positive sense; baru means new. After ten years spent in Indonesia studying Balinese gamelan, Mack builds an imaginary dialogue between cello and baritone saxophone — two instruments of similar register, where similarity is not resolution but the field in which differences become audible. Both musicians sing through their instruments, adding a harmonic layer that belongs to neither tradition alone. The piece is not written for gamelan, and yet it carries decades of exchange between European composition and Indonesian musical culture.

Septian Dwi Cahyo's [Es] (2026, world premiere) closes the first half. A text by Fanon — postcolonial thinker, cited here through Mignolo — is transcribed into Hanacaraka, the Javanese alphabet. That transcription becomes an intervallic system, woven into a Cellular Automata pattern. But the automation is not total: spaces remain where the system stalls, hesitates, breathes.

— interval —

After the interval, Ivan Liuzzo's Orizzonte – Ascensione I (2026, world premiere, supported by Kanton Basel-Stadt) opens the second half. The piece works within a research into the phenomenal perception of sound. The instruments do not emerge: they withdraw. Pianissimo dynamic is not a volume marking but a mode of perceptual crisis — the moment at which sound begins to merge with what surrounds it: body sounds, electrical hum, the resonances of the room. The sinusoidal tones make audible what normally remains below the threshold of attention.

Werner Kaegi's Dialogue (3rd version, 1983–84) follows. The computer proposes sound events drawn from the linguistic repertoire of the Javanese percussionist; the kendhang recognises and imitates them. Then the metamorphosis begins: the synthesised sounds shift until the instrument can no longer follow. The gap between the two worlds does not close — it becomes the subject of the piece. Kaegi, who passed away in March 2024 at the age of 97, was among the founding figures of European electroacoustic music.

"I enter into dialogue with the Javanese musician: I offer him sound events synthesised on the computer, which he recognises and imitates. At a certain point I introduce significant changes. The percussionist remains faithful to his tradition and tries to follow me — until the metamorphosis of my synthesised sounds is so far advanced that he can no longer succeed, due to the limitations of his instrument."

Werner Kaegi, programme note, first performance

The evening closes with Krishna Sutedja's Khatulistiwa (2026, world premiere). The equator — khatulistiwa — is an invisible line that divides the earth while holding it in balance. The Pelog tuning of the Balinese Gong Kebyar and the Slendro of the Gender Wayang do not merge — they orbit around an imagined centre. Electronics transform the kendhang into a hybrid rhythmic engine. Two vocal traditions — Balinese and Western — move in parallel, as expressions of ritual and memory that orbit around a centre neither can name.

The GCG - Contemporary Music for Gamelan event forms the evening culmination of a full day dedicated to gamelan at Sommercasino Basel, beginning with the Gamelan Community Gathering, dedicated to the traditional Balinese music, from 11 am to 5 pm.

Throughout the evening programme, food will be provided by Indomeal.

Curator's Note

My experience with gamelan started in 2022 with Gamelan Saraswara in Basel. On the side, the way things often begin before they come to occupy a central place. Then, I met Krishna Sutedja, who shared names, ensembles, and experimentations — opening a world I had not yet seen.

In 2025, Pro Helvetia gave me the opportunity to go to Bali. I spent most of a month with Danker Schaareman, ethnomusicologist of Balinese sacred music and the founder of the Basel gamelan group in the 1970s. A month shaped by conversations, journeys into East Bali, and the beginning of explorations that will last a lifetime. In Bali, I also encountered the Mi-Reng festival and a vivid, radical compositional scene: composers such as Dewa Alit, I Wayan Gde Yudane, Wayan Sudirana, Arham Aryadi, and Septian Dwi Cahyo; or ensembles like Nata Swara, Yuganada, Salukat. This encounter reshaped how I think about composition, transmission, and pedagogy.

This event emerges from that journey. Not as documentation — as a response. I invited some of the composers I met there, with whom this first edition could take shape, and developed a programme that does not attempt to represent contemporary Indonesian gamelan music. Instead, it seeks to open a space in which these voices can resonate in Basel, alongside European and Indonesian musicians, in configurations that gamelan does not traditionally foresee.

Ivan Liuzzo

 

Supported by Kanton Basel-Stadt Kultur · Fachausschuss Musik BS/BL 
In collaboration with Avidi Lumi CH and Indomeal

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