Reflecting on Ten Years of Gamelan in Buffalo - Buffalo Rising
Article snippets:
"When I moved back to Buffalo from Central Java in 2013, I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with what I’d learned there. I’d spent two years on a Darmasiswa scholarship in the village of Karagan, in Solo, just outside the old royal Kraton palace, studying gamelan, the bronze and iron percussion ensembles that have been at the center of Javanese musical life for over a thousand years. I’d lived within a close-knit artistic and cultural community there, learned the Indonesian language, played in community gatherings called klenengan hosted at teachers’ houses, played music at palaces, and slowly, fell in love with a tradition I never thought I’d encounter, let alone be welcomed into as a random guy from south Cheektowaga."
"We met in borrowed spaces around the west side. I think we had 4 different rehearsal spaces on Ferry alone, a former tanning salon and chicken wing factory, a now demolished apartment building, the space that is now “Vasilis Eggsperience”, and someone’s attic. People came because they were curious. Some had heard gamelan in a college music class decades ago. Others had never heard it at all and just wanted to try something they couldn’t easily describe to a friend. Others had heard me talking about it for two years and came so they wouldn’t have to listen to me talk about it anymore. The local Indonesian community quickly became a backbone of the project. What I noticed almost immediately was something I probably should have expected but didn’t. Buffalo has a real appetite for the unusual and the handmade. People showed up. They kept showing up."