Indonesian Influences in the Music of Elaine Barkin

Born in 1932, Elaine Barkin completed her doctoral degree in composition and theory at Brandeis University (1971), where she studied with Irving Fine, Harold Shapero, Arthur Berger, and Seymour Shifrin. In 1956-57, she further established herself in the contemporary music world by working at the Berlin Hochschule für Musik on a Fulbright Fellowship. Her main distinction as a composition and theory professor comes from her long career at the University of California in Los Angeles (1974-97), where she had the opportunity to collaborate with well-established intercultural composers such as Roy Travis and the school’s world-famous ethnomusicology faculty. In the 1980s, Barkin’s progressive compositional style was revitalized through her new interest in Indonesian gamelan music. In addition to participating in UCLA’s world-renowned Javanese and Balinese gamelan ensembles, she used a University of California Pacific Rim Research Grant as the opportunity to make five trips to Indonesia for the purpose of studying new music for gamelan. The ultimate products of her new interest include Indonesian-influenced compositions for Western instruments, music combining Indonesian with Western instruments, and works written exclusively for mixed gamelan instruments. Some of Barkin’s most impressive works in this realm are Lagu Kapal Kuning (originally for four-tone gamelan anklung and revised for five-tone gamelan anklung), Touching All Bases/Di Mana Mana for Balinese gamelan, double bass, and electronic percussion, and Legong Dreams for solo oboe, which freely utilizes figurations taken from Balinese legong dance melodies. Particular emphasis is placed on Gamélange for harp and mixed Balinese and Javanese gamelan (1993), an impressive composition that effectively combines the slendro/pelog scales and various Balinese/Javanese instruments (including kantilan, calung, ceng-ceng, bonang, saron) with fascinating writing for the solo harp.