Our Crowdfunding Groups
Thank you for supporting the Emory Gamelan Ensemble Momentum campaign. This crowdfunding campaign has ended, but you can still support our project.
Give Today!
We are so grateful for the members of our extended gamelan community who have decided to sustain and enrich our ensemble's tradition at Emory. Through your support, we were able to raise $3,348 and reach 55 percent of our goal. This alone is a considerable success.
Additionally, Emory Gamelan Ensemble is happy to announce that we have also won a generous grant from the David Goldwasser Series in Religion and the Arts of the Emory College Center for Creativity & Arts. This, in combination with your generous support, will allow us to achieve our dream of bringing an Indonesian Gamelan Master to Emory!
A four-week artist residency will culminate in a musical shadow puppet performance in the spring of 2019. We hope to see you there, and at our upcoming performance on December 8. We are deeply grateful for your support!
The final gong of our campaign will sound on Sunday, November 11. This means we have less than a week to reach our $6,000 goal.
It's quite a long way to go, but we believe in the power of the gamelan community! You helped us to advance another 5 percent towards our goal last week, and we're particularly grateful to those whose outreach brought new fans and friends to our group.
As we make this final push, consider longtime ensemble member Neil Fried's testimonial to what success in our campaign will mean for the group:
"As musical director, I do what I can to lead this group-- but there's nothing like having a Javanese master such as Mas Darsono come and not only teach the group, but also show me how to teach and lead the group after he's gone. This experience enables me to drive the ensemble to higher levels of competency and bring gamelan to our Atlanta community on a more authentic basis."
See the ensemble learning from the master in the clip below, and please continue to support our cause by sharing via Twitter and Facebook, and emailing out the link, momentum.emory.edu/gamelan.
Thank you!
Thanks to everyone who has supported us in our effort to give Emory's gamelan program an educator who is truly a master.
While working on techniques learned in Darsono's one-on-one workshops and rehearsing the four new pieces he taught us, the halfway point of our Momentum Campaign timeline snuck past us!
We are currently at 32% of our $6,000 goal. This is great, but with 12 days left, we appreciate continued support in spreading the word about our cause.
Please email out the link below or share via Twitter and Facebook.
Thank you so much and please enjoy our video Halloween card below!
To everyone who has already supported our campaign through gifts and/or sharing, thank you!
Your gift got us off to a strong start toward our fundraising goal, and lent extra invigoration to our rehearsals and preparation for last week's performance at Emory's Cannon Chapel. Working both remotely and in close contact with Darsono Hadiraharjo, we were able to add new color to our standard repertoire, as well as expand it with two new pieces. One of these is a composition by Darsono himself, and it was an honor to be entrusted to bring it to life.
Even last minute changes to venue accessibility couldn't throw us off, and we were able to deliver a performance that delighted audience members and garnered in a favorable review from ArtsAtl: https://artsatl.com/review-emorys-gamelan-ensemble-rises-up-in-concert-with-a-master-javenese-musician/.
This kind of exposure is crucial in our ongoing effort to support the Emory Gamelan Ensemble, and we ask that you please help us spread the word by sharing the link to our campaign page which will help us keep up our current momentum toward our goal. You can also share easily via Twitter and Facebook!
Enjoy this clip of us performing Darsono's "Ketawang Panembah Slendro Sanga."
As we prepare for tomorrow's concert, we are so thankful to those who have supported us in this early stage of our Momentum campaign. Darsono is visiting Emory to lead our performance, and we've already learned so much! In celebrating this progress, we have to remember that there's still a long way to go to meet our goal of artist residency.
If you are able, please come and enjoy the gamelan with us tomorrow, October 13 at 4 p.m. at Cannon Chapel. Additionally, we would like to ask you to please share our Momentum campaign with anyone who is already a fan or who might enjoy the discovery.
Share easily by Facebook and Twitter, or send the link, http://momentum.emory.edu/Gamelan, by email.
The peking is a small, shining instrument that plays more notes in a cycle, usually ahead of anyone else. Therefore, many larger instruments look to peking for leadership in any given moment.
A two-handed instrument, the bonang requires more dedication to play with confidence. When it has the opportunity, the bonang section can bloom into flowers that greatly enrich the performance.
(Forgive us for thinking binarily in our wordplay) The singular sound of the gendèr is even more delicate than the decision of the size of a gift that you might donate to our ensemble.
This instrument combo creates a steady, but intermittent metronome that moves the song cycle forward in less frequent, but steady chunks.
Most drums keep a beat. Often the kendang will dance around a specific pulse, while somehow still delivering a sense of a driving beat. Another power of this instrument is its ability to signal huge shifts in tempo and style, or even shifts from one part of a song to the next.
The gong is the most boss instrument in all the gamelan. All of those mentioned above play through cycles in gamelan music. The punctuation for these cycles is the gong. It launches each song into motion, and brings each song to a close. Its sound is deep and resonant, as much felt in the chest as it is heard by the ear.