This year we are excited to welcome four international guest artists:

Shoko Yamamuro

A leading Balinese dancer praised by The Boston Globe for her remarkable agility, Shoko Yamamuro regularly performs with California-based Gamelan Sekar Jaya and joins the ensemble to perform Topeng Keras. Before moving to the Bay Area, she was dance director for Gamelan Dharma Swara and has taught courses and workshops at Columbia, Wesleyan, Bard College, Colgate University, Bates College and MIT.

Dan siapa lagi?

---Our Director---

I Putu Swaryandana Ichi Oka, known as Ryan, is originally from Tabanan, and grew up in Ubud, Bali. Since he was young, he studied Balinese gamelan music, culminating in a B.A. (2019) and M.A. (2022) from the Indonesian Institute of the Arts in Denpasar. He is also a member of Cudamani, a well-known performing arts group based in Pengosekan, Ubud. As a Balinese musician, teacher, and composer, he has taught and composed actively all over the island and toured abroad several times. Some composition highlights are “Legong Swatika” for Cudamani's 2021 US East Coast Tour and “Anglelana Lamuk” for the Bali Arts Festival in 2022. After moving to Vancouver for UBC's Andrew Fellowship artist residency, he has composed for Gamelan Gita Asmara, Gamelan Bike Bike, as well as a saxophone quartet piece for the Orpheus Quartet and several pieces for chamber ensembles. Ryan is currently completing his DMA in Music Composition at the UBC School of Music, focusing on applying Balinese compositional techniques to Western instruments and incorporating Western instruments into gamelan ensembles.

---Our Founder---

Michael Tenzer is a Professor of Ethnomusicology at the UBC School of Music. Before moving to Vancouver he co-founded the thriving California Bay Area group Gamelan Sekar Jaya. In 1996, he moved to Vancouver and founded Gamelan Gita Asmara. In the 1980s-2000s, he composed several works for Balinese Gamelan that incorporated the rhythmic language of Karnatak (South Indian) music. Michael's award-winning writings on Balinese gamelan music are widely recognised as highly significant scholarly works.

GGA's members this year are:

Jack Adams, Bruce Baghemil, Wendy Chen, Dave Dagta, Leonard Gao, Meris Goodman, Janam Jaswani, Nirmal Kaur, Colin MacDonald, Oscar Murakami-Smith, Risa Murakami-Smith, Sylvain Paradis, I Putu Swaryandana Ichi Oka, Paul Patko, Eshantha Peiris, Shruti Ramani, Bero Saker, John Marvin Scott, Michael Tenzer, Luke Vincent. 

For making our 2026 concert season possible, we are thankful for a generous donation from the Vancouver Foundation.

Garum (2025) 8'

by I Putu Swaryandana Ichi Oka (1997–)

The title means "nutmeg," which comes from the seeds of a tree native to Maluku, Eastern Indonesia. The fragrant flavours of these seeds were what first brought the Portuguese and Dutch to colonise Indonesia beginning in the 1500s. Garum is in the courtly semar pegulingan style, a genre whose original context is playing sweet melodies for royalty while they made sweet love. Our director, Ryan, weaves in multiple modes, taking full advantage of the melodic colours of our semaradana instruments. It also features solo trompong (gong-row) playing, which ornaments the main melody. Ryan dedicated this composition to his late Aunt, who died very young.

Gambangan (a.k.a. Gambang Kuta) (c.1920s) 4'

by I Wayan Lotring (1887–1983)

The gambang is an ancient bamboo xylophone (pictured above) instrument formerly found across Bali but now relatively rare. Using forked mallets, the gambang ornaments very old Hindu melodies played in a syncopated 5+3 rhythm. Created in the 1920s by the oldest known Balinese composer, Lotring, Gambangan pays homage to this ancient style by transferring patterns from the gambang instrument into the more recent style known as pelegongan. This is a prime example of a broader compositional practice where older styles are reworked into newer pieces, a kind of "musical recycling" that has invigorated musical practices for centuries. In Balinese Hinduism, this practice is not seen as a taint on the composer's originality; rather it is an act of good karma and respect to use music of the past again. This concept musically parallels the cycles of rebirth called samsara.

Gambangan 2.0 (2026) 5'

by I Putu Swaryandana Ichi Oka (1997–)

Inspired by Gambangan, our director wondered what music Lotring might have created had he lived a century later. Though this piece has the same underlying melodic pattern (5+3) as the source music (Gambang) instead of a quadruple beat division as in most traditional gamelan music, Swaryandana divides the beat into five to make a quintuple division of the beat. Additionally, the piece's melody is allowed to freely traverse the seven notes of our gamelan semaradana, rather than being restricted to five. These two features reflect recent Balinese compositional styles, and thus brings Gambangan (itself a reworking of an even older style) into the 21st century.

Longitude II (for reong Semaradana and two saxophones) (2026) 8'

by I Putu Swaryandana Ichi Oka (1997–)
Colin MacDonald and Luke Vincent, saxophones

This composition is the second in an ongoing project called Longitude. In these compositions I seek to blur the imagined boundaries of “east” and “west” by blending compositional ideas from Balinese and Western music. In Longitude II, the interlocking polyphonic patterns on the reyong (Balinese gong row) interact and dialog with flowing saxophone lines, grooving together in an 11-beat framework. The reyong patterns maintain the social cooperation of traditional playing technique, but explore the melodic domain more freely without being constrained by Balinese five-tone modes. The saxophone melodies respond to the reyong parts while adding chromatic inflections. The ensemble roles fluctuate throughout the composition, sharing textural prominence between the instruments. As a whole, these techniques reflect the goal of creating a give-and-take of musical ideas.

[program note by Putu Swaryandana]

Sate Lilit (2024, rev. 2025) 8'

by I Putu Swaryandana Ichi Oka (1997–)

Named for a tasty skewer of minced meat distinctive to Balinese cuisine, this piece has a playful energy. Sate Lilit shares some features with the rhythmic complexity of Gambangan 2.0, but builds them out over multiple sections. In the first section, the melodic cycle is ambiguous about its allegiance to duple or triple time. In the slower second section, the reong and gangsa instruments flit between these two divisions, even playing them simultaneously. Finally, an 11-beat pattern of 3+3+3+2 is repeated by all.

Oleg Tamulilingan (1951) 15'

music by Pan Sukra, choreography by I Ketut Maria (1898–1968)

This dance piece tells an abstract story of two bees in courtship. You will see our two dancers, Shoko Yamamuro and Dewa Ayu Larassanti, with wing-like attachments to their costumes, frolicking in a garden. The two bees dance around flirtatiously before a light embrace right at the end. Created for the 1952 Europe/US tour of the famous Peliatan gamelan group, it has the rambunctious rhythms and sudden mood shifts iconic of the 20th century kebyar oeuvre alongside classical legong dance elements.

Program notes by Oscar Smith, March 2026

Photo credit: via https://edwardherbst.net/