The April 26 concert by the Cornell Gamelan Ensemble will feature a piece inspired by Thailand’s royal anthem to celebrate and welcome Parkorn Wangpaiboonkit, who joined the music department as an assistant professor last fall. The concert will also include other gamelan pieces with a variety of styles and melodies.
The 7:30 p.m. concert will take place in the Groos Family Atrium of Klarman Hall and is free and open to the public. The ensemble, which was created at Cornell in 1972, consists of large mostly bronze percussion instruments and performs the most prominent form of traditional music in Indonesia.
The featured piece, “ladrang Siyem,” is a Javanese gamelan adaptation of the traditional anthem and was composed in homage to King Prajadhipok (Rama VII) of Thailand (then called Siam), who visited the Surakarta Palace in Java, Indonesia in 1929.
During the concert, Christopher J. Miller, senior lecturer in music and director of the ensemble, will join with Wangpaiboonkit to talk about the historical and musical idiosyncrasies of the original Siamese melody and its Javanese adaptation.
“The piece is standard repertoire for gamelan ensembles, but it’s distinctive and unique because of its melody,” Miller said. “There’s a vague sense that this is Thai music because it’s different than a typical Javanese melody.”
Though the tune is no longer the national anthem, Wangpaiboonkit said, all Thais recognize it as the royal anthem. The tune came about as the country was wrestling with regional diplomacy in the late nineteenth centuryand searching for an alternative song to honor the monarchy, which until that time was using the British “God Save the King” during its processions.
It is still played before everyday cultural activities, Wangpaiboonkit said, such as concerts and even in movie theatres. People generally stand for the anthem, though there is some growing political resistance to that practice.
Miller said the gamelan version of the anthem transforms the original tune quite radically, adding measures to fit the regular cycles of the gamelan style and altering phrasing. The Cornell performance will also include a small chorus singing.
“Without hearing the explanation of what’s going on in the piece, it’s not so easy to hear the Siamese melody,” Wangpaiboonkit said.
The Klarman Hall atrium is a perfect location for the concert, Miller said, because the acoustics resemble that of the grand pavilions called “pendhapa” where gamelan is played at Java’s royal palaces.
The gamelan ensemble, which is offered as a class, includes both students and community members. “It’s an approachable music to play,” Miller said. “You can participate right away playing the simpler parts, so it accommodates beginners as well as more advanced musicians.”
As part of a large contingent of Cornell faculty who are part of the Southeast Asian Program at Cornell and study the region, Wangpaiboonkit said he’s “thrilled to be surrounded by Southeast Asian specialists who are not only studying Southeast Asia, but bringing the contextual and specific insights of area studies to their primary field of expression.”
