Gamelan Kusuma Laras Presents An Evening Of Javanese Music For The Public This Month

Gamelan Kusuma Laras presents an evening of Javanese music for the public in the klenengan format. An informal music event in Java, a klenèngan features musicians who gather for a kind of jam session, often arranged by a family for a special event. Typically lasting until late at night, audience members are intimately involved, integrating the social with the musical. Guests come and go as they wish, quietly chat with other audience members, and immerse themselves in a transporting evening of music that draws from the Javanese classical repertoire.

Throughout its 39-year existence, Gamelan Kusuma Laras has mesmerized audiences with its renditions of traditional Javanese music on instruments created for the Indonesia Pavilion at the 1964-65 World's Fair in Flushing Meadows, Queens. The NYC-based classical Javanese gamelan (orchestra of gongs, bronze metallophones, xylophones, zither, bowed lute, drums, and solo and choral voices), comprised of Americans and Indonesians, is under the artistic direction of I.M Harjito, one of the finest Javanese musicians living today. I.M Harjito is currently on the faculty of the World Music Program at Wesleyan University in Middletown, CT.

Featured special guests include classical Javanese musician and educator Darsono Hadiraharjo, a graduate of Indonesia's state conservatory for the traditional performing arts in Surakarta who hails from an illustrious multi-generational family of professional musicians and dhalang (shadow puppet masters). He is currently teaching gamelan at Yale University. Also performing will be the incomparable Heni Savitri as lead solo vocalist. Ms. Savitri is a graduate on Indonesia's state conservatory for traditional performing arts in Surakarta, which she represented in competitions while also performing in shadow plays. She is the featured singer with the University of California Berkeley gamelan, and performs widely as a guest with many gamelan ensembles around the US and in Indonesia.

Gamelan Kusuma Laras, which rehearses and performs at the Indonesian Consulate in Manhattan, has been active in the New York City cultural scene since its inception in 1983. Since then, the ensemble has been presented at a wide variety of venues, including Roulette, the American Museum of Natural History, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum, Symphony Space, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Bard College, Vassar College, Wesleyan University, Princeton University, the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, Riverside Church, Cooper Hewitt Museum, Lincoln Center Out0of-Doors Festival, Lincoln Center White Light Festival, and the Jogjakarta International Gamelan Festival.

The ensemble is under the direction of I.M. Harjito, a composer of traditional and innovative works for gamelan and a faculty member at Wesleyan University.