MUSIC FOR THE GODS

Is gamelan in some way the pinnacle of music? I don’t know. But one of the serious musicians in the gamelan orchestra I’m in seems to think so. He says it’s pretty much all he listens to now. And this from a man who plays in a Sun Ra-influenced jazz band and displays an encyclopedic knowledge of not just music, but really cool music. Gamelan tends to produce obsession in its followers. It happened to Colin McPhee, the Canadian composer who derailed his up-and-coming career to go live and study in Bali in the ’30s, returning with the seeds that would spread the music in North America. And it happened to our instructor, a Montreal musicologist who was studying piano or something and then heard some gamelan and “just went crazy.” Off he went to Bali, too, returning after five years of intensive studies with a full orchestra of these enormous instruments. Beautiful madness.

Also overheard at last night’s gamelan orchestra rehearsal, from another of the hardcore musical types, during the learning of a tough bit:

Yeah, we had this with the African stuff as well; you can’t learn it if you think about it. Too complex. You just have to let your body learn it.

Yes, the gamelan is filled with musical eggheads who are heading up to the source of the great river, wide-eyed and awed. And then there’s me; clumsy, panting, counting furiously in my head, striking sour notes and just trying to avoid total embarrassment. Awaiting the day that I am taken aside and gently asked if perhaps I wouldn’t prefer to increase my usefulness to the group by giving up performance and taking up a new position as roadie.

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THIS CONFUSION, 2.0

In the large storage closet off the living room on one shelf we keep several small electrical utility appliances; there’s the iron, there’s Killer’s massive blow dryer (the girl has hair) and there are my electric hair clippers. I like to keep my hair under four millimeters in length. I shave my head once a week or so, in the bathroom over the sink, for easy clean-up. Anyway, I go to get the clippers to shave my head this morning, but I put myself on autopilot so I could use that time to compose a sonnet or analyze the mathematical efficiency of Bach’s fugue number one in C major from the Well-Tempered Clavier or plan the shrimp and red curry dinner I would be making later or something like that, and suddenly I realized that I was standing in the bathroom uncoiling the electrical cord from the iron. Not the hair clippers. The iron.

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