Jody Diamond: In That Bright World: Music for Javanese Gamelan

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Jody Diamond (b. 1953) is a composer, performer, and scholar who has specialized in music for Indonesian gamelan for close to 40 years. Her compositions are played internationally; as a vocalist, she performs both experimental and traditional American and Javanese music. Diamond notes: "I composed these pieces for an American audience... My intention was to create for my own community a gamelan music that they could hear with a sense of musical feeling and connection. By using songs that would be familiar to them and could be followed through the musical journey of each piece, I also hoped to reveal gamelan structures, treatments, and variations that had evolved in the tradition of origin, thus creating not only a singularly American experience, but a deeper appreciation for the gamelan itself as a creative orchestra."

"This is a release that truly falls between the cracks, both in terms of its mixing of cultural traditions, and its very attitude towards what we call individual creativity. Jody Diamond (b. 1953) is one of the leading Western scholars and practitioners of Javanese gamelan...This is a collection of her own pieces composed for the medium, played by Indonesian master musicians with whom she has collaborated over many years...she's written music that is deeply respectful of and rooted in Javanese traditions, but with Western materials as the deep structural sources. The result is a transcultural product that is subtle in its syntheses. There's no facile quotation or appropriation of tropes from one practice to another, which is no mean feat...an additional note from the recording's supervisor, Joko Purwanto, suggests how happy and excited Indonesian musicians are that this sort of undertaking is occurring, because they feel that gamelan is now a world cultural resource, which needs all sorts of new inputs and approaches to maintain its vigor as a living, developing tradition. Diamond's work is a major contributor to this vitality." - Robert Carl, Fanfare

Album Notes

Personnel: Jody Diamond (vocals).

Liner Note Author: Judith Becker .

Recording information: Studio 19, Indonesia Institute of the Arts, Kurakarta,.

Editor: Travis Harrison.

Photographer: Kevin Mapp.

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