A distinguished music program founded by Marc Benamou provides the building blocks for artmaking, scholarship, community and well-being.
A distinguished music program founded by Marc Benamou provides the building blocks for artmaking, scholarship, community and well-being.
Marc Benamou is a professor of ethnomusicology at Earlham College, a distinguished teacher and performer of Javanese gamelan, and a fount of knowledge on music and ethnomusicology. His laundry list of accomplishments includes publishing his book Rasa (an acclaimed and foundational gamelan text) and receiving a 2013 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to fund the transcription, cataloging, indexing, editing and translation of lyrics found on 500 commercial cassettes of central Javanese gamelan music.
During a conversation in the summer, Benamou and I spoke about the gamelan, the gamelan community at Earlham and the intense inner calm that comes from performing together. As two decades of Earlham music students know, a conversation with Marc Benamou is the perfect gateway to gamelan.
The road to the gamelan
During our Zoom call, Benamou sat on the floor, surrounded by a vast and varied array of bronze percussion instruments called the gamelan. Benamou is immensely proud of the collection – one of the most robust and complete anywhere outside of Indonesia – and exudes a profound sense of calm among these sacred instruments.
Gamelan, however, refers to more than just a collection of instruments: It is also the music that is performed on them and the people who perform that music in community with one another. Even more specifically, the gamelan is a musical performance ensemble that originates in Java, Indonesia, featuring percussion instruments mostly crafted from bronze and tuned to two specific scales (slendro tuning and pelog tuning) and the singular and trance-like music that is played on those instruments, which often accompanies all-night performances of Indonesian shadow puppetry and dance.
Benamou is a generous and expert caretaker of the gamelan in all its forms – the instruments, his students, and the rich musical and cultural traditions of Java.
But his ethnomusicological journey did not begin with the gamelan.
As an undergraduate music major at Oberlin College in Ohio, Benamou was serious about music. At the time, “music” in an academic setting meant the Western written tradition, featuring essentially only white male classical composers. Although Benamou’s undergraduate program allowed him to explore the classical music that he loved, it did not provide “an atmosphere where one could feel comfortable if one wasn’t totally at the top of your game – a complete fanatic who spent hours a day practicing and was comfortable playing in high pressure situations,” he said.
Benamou had long lived between cultures. His father was French and Jewish – mixed Ashkenazi and Sephardic – and his mother was Anglo-German American. He grew up in Michigan, Vermont, Paris, and is bilingual – French and English.
During his junior year, a friend invited him to a gamelan rehearsal and, unsurprisingly given his background and inclination towards expanding the boundaries of his own understanding, something clicked. Finding himself compelled by just about every aspect of the gamelan, Benamou quickly realized that he wanted to understand everything behind the music – beyond the notes and the rhythms – and he was excited to learn that he would be able to do so in a significantly less cutthroat context.
“Learning to play gamelan music for me was a process of unlearning everything I had learned,” Benamou said. “I loved being challenged in that way – having to rethink everything I knew about how music was put together.”
Building the Earlham gamelan
After developing his teaching and performing practice over several decades, Benamou was hired into a tenure-track professorship in the music department at Earlham. From the jump, he knew that bringing a gamelan ensemble to campus would meaningfully enrich the lives of Earlham’s music students – but he also understood the need to move slowly and start small so as not to impinge too heavily on the existing orchestral ecosystem.
Benamou founded a small and informal Javanese choral ensemble called larasmadyå. The repertoire combines choral singing – his area of expertise – with a rhythmic foundation created by frame drums called terbang and a set of tubular bells. The larasmadyå was a hit.
In the summer of 2003, Benamou traveled to Java to purchase (with his own money) a relatively inexpensive slendro gamelan set (made from brass instead of the traditional bronze) and borrowed a pelog set from Oberlin. For several years, the newborn gamelan ensemble would practice and perform on something borrowed and something of Benamou’s. The gamelan ensemble, too, was a hit.
Two years later, Benamou spent a sabbatical year in Java. Knowing that finding and acquiring a high-quality multi-instrument gamelan takes a great deal of hands-on on-site negotiation – “You may need to go to the instrument maker’s house and drink tea.” – he wanted to make the most of this rare opportunity. He asked Earlham’s then vice president for finance Dick Smith to earmark $20,000 for the purchase. When the go-ahead came through, Benamou embarked for Java. The making of the one-of-a-kind Earlham gamelan had begun.
It’s important to note that every gamelan in existence is sacred and singular. Each instrument is given a name and is understood to have a spirit.
One foundational example is the gong – arguably the most iconic symbol and feature of Javanese gamelan culture, and one that is often familiar to Westerners, making it an easier entry point to gamelan for the uninitiated. Gong, it turns out, is a Javanese word. The instruments are forged in a ceremonial process that, Benamou said, can be quite spiritually charged and requires high-level skill. Traditionally, a gong maker would fast for a week before beginning the process.
“You’re dealing with really fundamental elements of the world and the cosmos,” said Benamou. “You’re disturbing the earth to extract the metals. You’re using fire to melt them down. You’re using wind to fan the flames, and you’re using the brute force of a hammer that’s coming down and hitting that molten metal in a specific way. And when the gong is finished, you put it into water. You’re getting in touch with some really powerful forces.”
The gamelans at many other Western institutions can only approximate some of the sounds and instrumentations that are foundational to Javanese gamelan practice in Java. In contrast, the Earlham gamelan includes instruments rarely seen outside of Indonesia – a testament to Benamou’s efforts to painstakingly accruing instruments of the widest variety and the highest caliber.
Gamelan in the snow
“In the winter, I’d walk from my house across campus, and I’d pass this old condemned building, and you could hear the instruments resonating outside of the building,” said ethnomusicologist Oriana Filiaci ’11. “I thought: This is wild. I never thought I’d hear this music in the middle of snow flurries and snowflakes. I was so proud to be Javanese. I was so proud to be Indonesian.”
Filiaci grew up first in Indonesia and later in the U.S. She arrived at Earlham intending to major in international studies or linguistics, but quickly fell in love with the art program – and, soon thereafter, with the Javanese gamelan.
“Having grown up in and being Javanese myself, I felt super at home with the way Marc taught and led the ensemble,” she said. “He was very, very traditional, even more traditional than my current teacher here in Hawai’i. For example, they don’t use notation at Earlham – they learn everything by mind and by heart – and that offers a much more authentic, traditional, and deep way of connecting to the music and each other.”
After Earlham, Filiaci applied to graduate programs to further study gamelan music, and she looks back fondly on her time in the Earlham gamelan program in large part because of how it helped shape her worldview beyond the gamelan.
“Being rooted in traditions, grounded in traditions, in your culture and ancestry, can help you understand how to be a compassionate human being when you’re dealing with things like warfare, climate change, genocide, all of the different injustices that we face,” she said. “Marc is so good at talking about these things in a way that is relevant even to Western college students in Indiana.”
Community through gamelan
For Neon Guzmán Delgado ‘24, the Earlham gamelan was a space for untangling big questions about connection, community and culture.
“Marc’s pedagogy is unique,” they said. “He is so dedicated to teaching you how a Javanese musician would think about gamelan – and that includes all these different philosophical concepts. He doesn’t explain them as philosophical, but they’re concepts that you still have to grapple with.”
“It was central to me rethinking the way I interpret pretty much everything,” said Guzmán Delgado, who chose Earlham because of Benamou and the ethnomusicology program, and double majored in music and in peace and global studies.
This idea that the gamelan was itself a kind of social organism – a collective that becomes a whole – recurred in my conversations with ensemble members, who shared that studying with Benamou transformed their understanding of what it meant to be part of a collective.
“The gamelan ensemble is a single organism that can only function when people are attuned to each other,” Benamou said.
Filiaci echoed this: “You show up to a gamelan, to an ensemble, and that particular instrument was crafted, created, forged in tune with the other instruments in that ensemble – the one organism that is that one ensemble.”
Understandably, the gamelan community – at Earlham and internationally – is tightly knit. Sarah Wilks, an ensemble member who stumbled upon the gamelan in a shared storage space while a member of the percussion ensemble at Earlham, sees this tight-knit nature as core to performing the deeply complex music: “If you’ve never been a part of the gamelan and you see them playing, it looks and sounds very confusing, and some parts look almost impossible to learn, but with a lot of patience and practice, it’s doable. It’s exciting to see all of that come together. You develop a small community because you’re the only ones possibly in Indiana doing this activity, struggling together.”
This challenge draws all kinds of folks to the ensemble.
“There were people who had been musicians for years, and people who had never picked up an instrument in their life and could not play Western music to save their lives,” Wilks said. “Marc was always excited to take in non-musician students.”
Malik Barrett, an assistant professor in the math department at Earlham and current member of the gamelan ensemble, was one of those non-musicians.
“The fact that we have such a great instructor like Marc at an institution like Earlham really calls attention to the unique experience that once could have here, how disparate things are brought together, where someone like me in the math department is sitting down with someone like Marc in the music department,” said Barrett.
Well-being through music
When I ask Benamou to reflect on why he teaches and plays gamelan, he paused.
“I wish I were really confident that I was doing something that I knew was really helping the world,” he said. “Sometimes I wonder about that. I believe what I’m doing is contributing positively to the world, but sometimes I see other things that need to be done in the world and think: Ah! Maybe I should be doing that instead.”
That self-reflection is one quality that makes Benamou such a beloved teacher. Though he has immersed himself in an extremely specific corner of the musical world – learning every note and story and cultural practice and historical fact and figure – he understands the importance of situating his work in the context of a wider world.
“It’s fair to say that the Earlham music department is somewhat unusual in the degree to which they really try to act according to the principle that all musics are worthy of study,” he said. “We do feel that our students come out of here with a respect for all different kinds of musics in their DNA.”
This openness allows students to better achieve the other desired effect of a life in gamelan: a profound tranquility and inner peace.
“There’s something almost trance-like about it when you’re playing it,” said Wilks. “You do have to pay attention to where the piece is going and what you and the other members are doing, but it’s very calming when it goes right. It’s tranquil.”
“Gamelan music is music that says: ‘All is well with the world,” Benamou said. “When you are in the presence of gamelan music, you are in the presence of well-being.”
By Jake Stepansky Photos by Josh Smith