MAIN TOPIC
Live Tones Of
C
laude Debussy, a famous 19th
music. Historians and music experts
not the first gamelan performance in
century French composer, showed
have written that Claude Debussy’s
mainland Europe. Approximately a
his extraordinary admiration
subsequent musical compositions were
decade earlier, in 1879, gamelan players
for the uniqueness of gamelan after
greatly influenced by the gamelan music
from the Mangkunegaran Palace,
he saw a Gamelan performance at the
he listened to.
Central Java performed at The National
Exposition Universelle Paris in 1889. So amazed was Debussy with gamelan that he called, rather hyperbolically, Palestrina musical polyphony (Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina) like “children’s play” in the face of the exoticism of gamelan
I
12 INDONESIANA VOL. 13, 2022
Debussy, who later referred to gamelan as Javanese Rhapsodies, really got great inspiration in the creation of his musical works through references from gamelan. This gamelan performance in Paris which was witnessed by Debussy was indeed
Exhibition of Dutch and Colonial Industry in Arnhem, Netherlands. This means that from the 18th century to the 19th century, gamelan had wandered far beyond its area of origin, echoing to mainland Europe, at which time the industrial revolution had begun.
