This CD from innovative composer run label Innova in St. Paul, Minnesota, fits well into my collection of eastern classical music, that I’ve so far mostly gotten from labels like Ocora, Auvidis and Maison des Cultures du Monde. The gamelan, Javanese brand, which gets the first track going, is vibrant and beautiful as any other gamelan CD I’ve heard. The voice that comes in after a while, belonging to Hyunah Yu, lyric-coloratura soprano from South Korea, is a give-away though, to the fact that this is a highly western production. Her singing, though following somewhat eastern lines of melody, is in itself expressing the tune in a western way, with a certain vibrato that is not audible in eastern singing from the gamelan part of the world. This is no drawback, though, since this is a western production, and this combination of a western kind of voice and eastern instruments gives a special excitement to the recordings.

The composer of these pieces – Robert Macht, b.1958 - comes right out the eastern seaboard of the United States, in Baltimore, Maryland. He did spend a year in Java, studying the gamelan. He’s done a lot of musical sets for different dance companies, like Martha Graham Dance Company, Naked Feet Dance Company and others. This, of course, is pretty natural for the kind of percussive, dramatic idiom that he engages in. Another type of music that is often used in connection with dance companies is electroacoustic music. I’m for example thinking of Pierre Henry’s music for choreographics by Maurice Bèjart, as well as Jean Schwarz’s collaboration with Carolyn Carlson.

Macht is not all new to this medium, as he already released a CD called “Suite for Javanese Gamelan & Synthesizer” on the Dorian Discovery label in 1998.

These are on the whole very pleasant, eastern-sounding western compositions, though not affected by the plague of so called world music, with which I mean the kind of - more often than not - good-for-nothing fusion music that has become so widespread, making North African oud players abandon their own intonations for the western scale, which really is a shame, as the original, fantastic musicians of millennia-old traditions become just shadows of themselves in the name of the easy buck. No, this is not fusion, but something else, in its own right, which is why I like it. Track #3 – “Kaida” – is an especially lively and catchy song, with a skilled accompaniment on tabla by Indian pupil of Pandit Shyamal Bose of Calcutta. As the material is ever so slightly electronically manipulated, the musical experience of this piece gets bent out of shape and twisted into a spiral that carries the listener to another level of pleasure. It’s great. There is some instrument in here too that sounds like the bass of Jaco Pastorius, but I can’t figure out what it is. Hyunah Yu’s singing is absolutely invincible here!

Track #4 carries the exact rhythm of the holy temple gamelan of Le Gong Gede at Batur, Bali, though the texture is not by far that noisy! This CD doesn’t lack edge in any way, but most of all it soothes the ear, in real live pleasantness.

The gamelan has been extremely popular in the United States for many years. There even is an American Gamelan Institute, and forefront avant-garde composers like Pauline Oliveros use the gamelan at times, in for example the piece “the Lion’s Eye”, performed by Gamelan Son of Lion. Some ventures have become highly successful, like the Gamelan Pacifica. I’m sure Robert Macht and his fellow musicians will occupy an honorable place in that company!