Gamelan Outside Indonesia - The Netherlands

The Netherlands

The first gamelans outside of Indonesia were in the Netherlands, the country which had colonized the islands. Before World War II, the Javanese dancer Jodjana had a small gamelan group in the Netherlands, which accompanied his performances. He had to train Dutch musicians. Early during the war, the resistance fighter Bernard IJzerdraat Sr. was killed by the Germans. His son Bernard then left home and in Amsterdam heard a group of stranded Javanese sailors play a gamelan at the Colonial Museum (later: Museum of the Tropics). He took lessons with them and soon started his own group with friends from his school in Haarlem. In this he received help from Jaap Kunst who taught him to transcribe the then existing 78 rpm recordings and who allowed him to use the beautiful antique Yogyanese gamelan set in the museum. This became Babar Layar, the first serious gamelan group in the Netherlands. Babar Layar played in Yogyakarta style, after Bernard studied one full year in the kraton. They often accompanied Mas Pakun, a Yogyanese dancer who studied theology in Amsterdam. When Mantle Hood came to Amsterdam to write his dissertation on pathet, Bernard trained him to play gamelan. (Mas Pakun died a few years later in a tragic traffic accident after his return to Indonesia.) Mantle Hood later taught ethnomusicology in the U.S., and is regarded as the founding father of gamelan in that country. Bernard married a Sundanese wife and emigrated to Indonesia in 1954, where he became known as Suryabrata, working for RRI Jakarta and Universitas Nasional.

In 1971, the ethnomusicologist Ernst Heins invited K.R.M.T. Ronosuripto of the Mangkunagaran palace, Surakarta to Amsterdam. This gave a new impetus to the performance of gamelan and Javanese dance in the Netherlands. Together with Mr and Mrs Ronosuripto, the Amsterdam Gamelan group played many concerts and performances with Javanese dance and shadow puppetry (wayang kulit). Rien Baartmans, who as a child had been taking lessons from Bernard IJzerdraat, studied wayang and kendhang with Pak Ripto, which very much stimulated his own group Ngesthi Raras in Haarlem.

In 1978 the new gamelan society Naga, founded by Rob van Albada, acquired a gamelan from Solo. This gamelan was used by several groups, performing traditional and modern music for gamelan. In the same year Elsje Plantema (a musician specializing in Javanese gamelan) and Rien Baartmans (dhalang) founded Raras Budaya, with the aim of performing wayang kulit in Dutch. Between 1980 and 1992, Raras Budaya performed numerous wayang plays. When Naga was dissolved in 1995, their gamelan was given to Raras Budaya, and is still used by gamelan groups conducted by Elsje Plantema. After Rien Baartmans died in 1993, Elsje Plantema changed focus. Without dhalang, her new ensemble Widosari concentrated on traditional and modern gamelan music, and projects with dancers, Javanese dhalangs (Sri Djoko Raharjo, Joko Susilo and others), composers like I Wayan Sadra, Al. Suwardi and Sinta Wullur, and the combination of gamelan and western instruments. Nowadays, several Javanese and Balinese gamelan groups are active in the Netherlands. Javanese style groups exist in Amsterdam, Delft, The Hague, Renkum and Arnhem. Balinese groups can be found in Amsterdam and The Hague. A Sundanese group exists in Leiden (Leyde).