Interlocking Sounds, Interlocking Communities

The chapter introduces Indonesian gamelan (percussion orchestra) and the roles that it has played in college world music education in North America and in the discipline of ethnomusicology. The chapter presents a musical overview of gamelan and its original cultural contexts in Indonesia, including religious ceremonies, tourist audiences, and local entertainment. Then it introduces new contexts that gamelan has come to occupy in North America, including performances on concert stages, at outdoor festivals, in prisons, and, most pertinent to this book, in collegiate music halls. Finally, the chapter introduces the premise of the volume—a biography-based examination of the way academic world music ensembles impact local and transnational educational and musical communities—and the book’s primary goal: that of suggesting ways to construct more sustainable academic music communities.

Pan Rising: Women and the Steelband Movement

This chapter examines the ways that women have contributed to the steelband movement in Trinidad and Tobago over the course of its history, and the roles that they are now playing as pannists, arrangers, and educators. On the surface, steel pan music seems to differ from calypso or soca in terms of performativity: as instrumental music, its conventions and practices are distinct from those of the genres of vocal music. However, the participation of women in the world of pan closely parallels their changing roles in various forms of expressive culture in Trinidad. The chapter considers the steelband movement's dramatic transformations reminiscent of those of calypso and Carnival during the 1940s and 1950s, including the rise of the Trinidad All-Steel Percussion Orchestra (TASPO) and the middle-class involvement with the movement.