Daniel Schmidt
In My Arms, Many Flowers

THE REVIEW

"gamelan: an instrumental ensemble primarily used in Java and Bali, mostly consisting of percussion instruments (particularly metallophones), sometimes supplemented by string instruments and some types of vertical flutes." (Enciclopedia Treccani)

Daniel Schmidt (b. 1942) could only have lived his life for the sound produced by the percussion of bronze and aluminum, or rather: for the asceticism that seems attainable through them. This is the only way to explain the symbiosis between the instrument and the musician that, right from the start, anyone can discern in these four compositions that Schmidt recorded together with the Berkeley gamelan players between 1978 and 1982, but that (for some reason unknown to me) he released only three and a half decades later.

This Terry Riley of the Balinese sound, blending in a candidly spontaneous manner musicology, minimalism, and alchemical familiarity with aluminum and its malleability, seems to accomplish the immense task of persuading the instrument to tune in to what aligns with its nature, which he (just like the Taoist cook who spared his knives) merely accommodates. This labor limae—not only compositional but also, I imagine, of the kind that leaves shavings—or game of patience, both artisanal and disorienting, has nothing, absolutely nothing to do with experimental composition at the desk, nor with ethnological curiosity (or, even worse, new-age curiosity) of much world-music, but solely and exclusively with the sublime need to make things sound by themselves, not by claiming to tame them, but by submitting to them.

Therefore, if you wonder how the instruments communicate with each other over in Java when no Javanese person is listening, listen to "In My Arms, Many Flowers".

P.S. I'm not giving star ratings because I find it senseless to grade music.