Pangkur

N.B.: This published score contains the mixed quartet version of the larger modular work Pangkur. Check the sextet score for the full (conductor) version.

Included in a series of projects exploring the aesthetics of Javanese gamelan music, Pangkur brings two independent works together to form an intricate tapestry of sound: one exists as a piano-percussion duo, and the other as a woodwind-string quartet. Both depend on the balungan (skeletal melodic structure) of Ladrang Pangkur, a song taken from the vast repertoire of the Javanese gendhing (gamelan vocal music) tradition. Within the space of the Ladrang Pangkur and excerpts of macapat texts, notions of perpetual motion, musical modularity and physical spatiality converge with imagery pertaining to multiplicity, otherness and distance.

Given the rise of global migration in a postmodern society, the discourse of space and spatiality becomes a crucial point in understanding how relationships work and intertwine within diverse geographic spaces. As a result, one’s conception of a singular trajectory among lived experiences no longer holds valid. Monolithic views of formalized structures like class, race, ethnicity and gender give way towards more fluid and malleable intersections, in which the work tries to address even within the context of a Westernized mode of music creation through modular forms, non-Western concepts of time and space, and material existing outside the hegemonies of knowledge.