Gamelan Revealed

Video Find of the Day

I fell in love with gamelan music when I was living out of my '69 Rambler in the 80s. I had a Radio Shack knockoff of a Walkman and a handful of discount cassette tapes for all my entertainment needs. One of them had gamelan music. I liked to try to imagine dances to it. I thought it might look something like this, which is from elibris, who has many beautiful videos of performances like this one.



I had much more trouble imagining the musicians playing the instruments. The liner notes said hammers were used. But what did the things hammered look like? Now with this next video, my find of the day, I can see. I especially enjoyed seeing the part where it looks like a guy is playing ashtrays. Look for that starting at 1 minute 59 seconds into the video.