Pangkur

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