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The UK Gamelan Network site is for anyone who is interested in gamelan music and the related performing arts of Java, Bali and Sunda.

On this site you will find news and information on gamelan, dance and wayang in the UK, performances, opportunities to play and resources for education. There's an e-mail list, reviews, and Seleh Notes, the UK's only regular publication devoted to gamelan music and the related performing arts of Indonesia.

Australia is geographically close to Indonesia. There are numerous cultural contacts between Indonesia and Australian universities, many of whom possess gamelans. Such is the case of the University of New England in Armidale (near Sydney) where a group called Naga Swara plays two gamelans : a(n iron?) degung and an iron pèlog from Solo. The pèlog gamelan arrived in the Music Department in 1978.

A couple living in Lucerne and playing the Balinese gendèr wayang since 1996. These professional musicians use a repertoire mainly of Badung and Sukawati. On their site, we can find RealAudio samples, scores & compact discs to order and résumés of the two musicians.

In English and German.

In the Malay peninsula, some royal courts of Pahang and Trengganu used their gamelans during ceremonies. Today, several universities in the country give life again to this beautiful style of gamelan. The Universiti Putra Malaysia music academy hosts a Website, in English, about the different musical traditions and forms we can find in Malaysia. The site is rich in musical samples, of which several are of gamelan in VivoActive and RealAudio formats.

From a map, we can go to different states of the federation to see their respective music styles with MIDI and RealAudio samples. In particular, we find the Javanese influence in Johor with the kuda kepang, the barongan (akin to the réog of Java) and the presence of angklung. In Kelantan, we find wayang kulit (but the accompaniement is not gamelan), kertok kelapa (single-keyed xylophones) and a dance (tari asyik) whose music has received an influence from gamelan.

The Website of the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, of Northern Illinois University, is a mine of information on Southeast Asian culture. On the pages about gamelan, we can see and hear (RealAudio) several instruments and groups of instruments from Java and Bali.

This Genevan association wants to make known music and arts – dance, puppets, etc. – of the other traditions through concerts and festivals. But also, to give the possibility to some musicians to approach through practice those traditions by organizing training periods and workshops during wich information as complete as possible is offered to them about other musical traditions and their context.

Among the workshops, one finds a Balinese gamelan, the Gamelan Angklung of Geneva, and a Javanese gamelan, Kyai Gandrung, displayed at the Ethnographic Museum.

Ethnographic Museum of Geneva

Second in Switzerland by the size of its collections, this museum maintains abnout 100 000 objects and documents bearing witness to traditional civilizations of the five continents. The ethnomusicology department, linked to the Ethnomusicology Workshops, bears a collection of about 3000 musical instruments. Among these, it is worth pointing out a salunding gamelan.

The museum includes now a new MUSIQUES space. There is situated the Javanese gamelan Kyai Gandrung.

The music academy of Basel city (in Switzerland, near Freiburg in Germany) includes a studio for non European music. Balinese, Indian and Japanese music are represented there. The Balinese music workshop collaborates with the gamelan of Freiburg.

Thanks to this site, one discovers, astonished, that France conceals an unsuspected wealth of gamelans. One is left amazed by this. One learns that there are Javanese, Balinese gamelans, some in activity, others forgotten under dust. Compulsory passage also if one is looking for contact with French speaking persons having to do with gamelan.

Cité de la Musique

The Parc de la Villette, in Paris, includes among others the Cité des Sciences and the Cité de la Musique. This second one contains no less than two Javanese gamelans. One is displayed in the Musée de la Musique. The other, called Sekar Wangi, is situated in the gamelan room where it is played at workshop times.

The one in the Musée de la Musique was transfered from the Musée de l'Homme. It is a seléndro gamelan of Cirébon. The other one, Sekar Wangi is a seprangkat gamelan of Java's center.

The AGI (American Gamelan Institute) is an organization that all gamelan player or researcher has to know. Its site offers a directory of gamelans in the USA, some having their own site. One sees that gamelans in activity are numerous in the USA, it is therefore not astonishing that such a site has been done in this country.

The AGI publishes the Balungan journal, a mine of information that is absolutely necessary to have in the hands.

World fusion music is a new genre taking inspiration from several traditional music to create new combinaisons. Ancient Future is a world fusion group and it is even the group that has spoken for the first time of world fusion music. With jazz and rock as basis, this group draws from African, Balinese, Indian, Middle Eastern, South-American, European and Far-Eastern traditions.

Their site contains MIDI examples of Balinese gamelan as well as of their own compositions. The chapter about the group's history contains RealAudio and MPEG2 samples in which one can hear Balinese frogs taking part to the compositions.

Two MIDI pieces of their site seem not to be linked to any of their pages :

• Gambang – Excerpt of a piece that the Balinese master Lotring had conceived for his gong pelègongan.
• Liar Samas – Other piece of the same master.

As in the USA, Japan is a country where one is interested in gamelan, mostly Balinese. This Japanese site, among many others, illustrates well this fact. One finds there MIDI samples, transcriptions, photos of Japanese students attending gamelan lessons, etc. The site concerns Balinese gamelan.

The site offers a list of interesting MIDI files, one among which (Sagara Madu) that comes from the tingklik repertoire. This tingklik MIDI is the only one on the Web that we know of.