Michael Tenzer (born 1957) is a composer, performer, and music educator and scholar.
Michael Tenzer (born 1957) is a composer, performer, and music educator and scholar.
Tenzer was born in New York City and studied music at Yale University (BA. 1978) and University of California, Berkeley (Ph.D. 1986). After teaching at Yale from 1986 to 1996, he moved to University of British Columbia where he teaches ethnomusicology, composition, music theory and gamelan performance, co-directs the doctoral program in ethnomusicology.
Tenzer's compositions for chamber, solo and orchestral media have been performed in North America, Europe, and Asia, featuring performers such as Pandit Swapan Chaudhuri (tabla), Alex Klein (oboe) and Evan Ziporyn (clarinet). His publications have been recognized with the Society for Ethnomusicology's Alan P. Merriam Prize (best book of 2000) and the 34th annual ASCAP-Deems Taylor award, and his research has been supported with grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and Fulbright. Among his composition prizes are a Library of Congress/Koussevitzky commission for a chamber work, Sources of Current. After its premiere the New York Times called it "deft, sophisticated and inventive." He received the Charles Ives Center award for his percussion quartet (1981), the DiLorenzo prize for the octet Daya (1985) for string quartet and clarinets, and the Morse Fellowship to complete his Symphony for Strings (1988). Tenzer's music is available on New World, Cantaloupe and Bali Stereo labels.
Since 1977, Tenzer has been deeply involved with the gamelan music of Bali, Indonesia. He carried out several years of research and writing about it on a series of fellowships, among them a Fulbright (1982), a grant from the Asian Cultural Council (1987) the Morse Fellowship (1989), and a National Endowment for the Humanities University Teacher's Fellowship (1994). An experienced performer and teacher of gamelan, Tenzer is the author of two books on the subject: Balinese Music (Periplus: 1991; 2nd ed. 1998) and Gamelan Gong Kebyar: The Art of 20th Century Balinese Music (University of Chicago Press 2000). More recently he published Analytical Studies in World Music (Oxford 2006). He was the first Western composer invited to compose for Balinese ensembles in Bali and has completed a series of works of an increasingly experimental character for the gamelan since 1982, among them Sinar Jegog (1985), Situ Banda ("Bridge of Monkeys"; 1989), Banyuari ("Tributary"; 1992), Talakalam for gamelan with tabla (1999), "Puser Belah" for 2 simultaneous gamelan ("Unstable Center"; 2003), and "Buk Katah" for gamelan with a nonet of brass, winds and piano ("Underleaf"; 2006). These works have been cited by Balinese critics as "an important and unique contribution to our cultural heritage". The last three compositions cited plus others are featured on the 2009 CD Let Others Name You on New World records. In 1979, Tenzer co-founded the Sekar Jaya gamelan ensemble in Berkeley, California, an organization of Americans dedicated to the performance of Balinese arts that is now internationally known. Since 1996 he has directed Gamelan Gita Asmara in Vancouver.
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Pelog is one of the essential tuning systems used in gamelan instruments that has a heptatonic scale. The other, older, scale commonly used is called slendro. Pelog has seven notes, but many gamelan ensembles only have keys for five of the pitches. Even in ensembles that have all seven notes, many pieces only use a subset of five notes, sometimes the additional 4th tone is also used in a piece like western accidentals.
Evan Ziporyn is an American composer of post-minimalist music with a cross-cultural orientation, drawing equally from classical music, avant-garde, various world music traditions, and jazz. Ziporyn has composed for a wide range of ensembles, including symphony orchestras, wind ensembles, many types of chamber groups, and solo works, sometimes involving electronics. Balinese gamelan, for which he has composed numerous works, has compositions. He is known for his solo performances on clarinet and bass clarinet; additionally, Ziporyn plays gender wayang and other Balinese instruments, saxophones, piano & keyboards, EWI, and Shona mbira.
Ingram Douglass Marshall was an American composer and a onetime student of Vladimir Ussachevsky and Morton Subotnick.
Kotekan is a style of playing fast interlocking parts in most varieties of Balinese Gamelan music, including Gamelan gong kebyar, Gamelan angklung, Gamelan jegog and others.
Shirish Korde, is a Ugandan composer of Indian ancestry. He is the Chair of the Music Department at the College of the Holy Cross and has previously been on the faculty of the Berklee College of Music, the New England Conservatory, and Brown University. Korde studied jazz and composition at the Berklee College of Music, analysis and composition at the New England Conservatory, and ethnomusicology at Brown University.
Mantle Hood was an American ethnomusicologist. Among other areas, he specialized in studying gamelan music from Indonesia. Hood pioneered, in the 1950s and 1960s, a new approach to the study of music, and the creation of the first American university program devoted to ethnomusicology, at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He was known for a suggestion, somewhat novel at the time, that his students learn to play the music they were studying.
Jody Diamond is an American composer, performer, writer, publisher, editor, and educator. She specializes in traditional and new music for Indonesian gamelan and is active internationally as a scholar, performer, and publisher.
Gamelan Sekar Jaya is a Balinese gamelan ensemble located in the San Francisco Bay Area. It has been called "the finest Balinese gamelan ensemble outside of Indonesia" by Indonesia's Tempo Magazine. It performs the music and dance of Bali in many different genres of Balinese gamelan, mainly gamelan gong kebyar, gamelan angklung, gender wayang, and gamelan jegog. Past performances have also featured ensembles playing in other styles as well, including gamelan joged bumbung, kecak, gender batel, gamelan gambuh, genggong, and beleganjur. GSJ has also performed contemporary pieces featuring instruments from the Western tradition.
(Joseph) Vincent McDermott was a classically trained American composer and ethnomusicologist. His works show particular influence from the musics of South and Southeast Asia, particularly the gamelan music of Java. He was among the second generation of American composers to create and promote new compositions for gamelan.
Loren Nerell is an American composer and performer of ambient American music and Balinese gamelan.
I Wayan Suweca is a highly respected performer of Balinese gamelan. Since the 1970s, he has taught and performed extensively throughout Asia, Europe, and America. In the early 1980s, along with his students Michael Tenzer and Rachel Ann Cooper, he founded and led the famous Sekar Jaya gamelan ensemble in Berkeley, California. In 1993, he cofounded the ensemble Giri Kedaton in Montreal. From 1982 to 2004, he was professor at the National Arts Academy of Indonesia (STSI) in Bali. From 1987 to 1993, he was a guest teacher at Université de Montréal in Canada and in Rochester, USA. For other students, See: List of music students by teacher: R to S#I Wayan Suweca.
I Nyoman Renbang (1937–2001) was an Indonesian musician, composer, teacher and instrument maker. He is considered by many ethnomusicologists as one of the most influential Balinese musicians and composers of the twentieth century.
Elaine "Ray" Barkin née Radoff was an American composer, writer, and educator.
Gambuh is an ancient form of Balinese dance-drama. It is accompanied by musicians in a gamelan gambuh ensemble.
Christine Southworth is an American composer of postminimal music and works with combinations of Western ensembles, electronics, and world music ensembles including Balinese gamelan and bagpipes. She performs Balinese gamelan and gender wayang with Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Gamelan Galak Tika, as well as Galician Gaita and Great Highland Bagpipes. She co-founded Ensemble Robot, a cooperative of engineers, artists and musicians working together to invent robotic musical instruments. She was also the general manager of Gamelan Galak Tika from 2004 through 2013. Her own music incorporates her work with Balinese gamelan and with technology and electronics, as well as reaching beyond these influences with an expanded palette of contemporary classical, jazz and rock, and world music from Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe.
I Made Subandi is a gamelan composer and performer from Gianyar, Bali.
Condong is a Balinese dance which is often performed as a preface to legong and accompanied by the semar pangulingan style of gamelan. The term also refers to a stock character, a quintessential representation of the maidservant, found in the condong dance, as well as the legong, gambuh, and arja dances.
Kebyar Duduk is a traditional Balinese dance created by a Balinese man I Ketut Marya and first performed publicly in 1925. Inspired by the development of the quick-paced gamelan gong kebyar, kebyar duduk is named for the seated and half-seated positions taken by the dancers. It does not convey a story, but is interpretative.
Keith Terry is an American percussionist, rhythm dancer, and educator. He is best known for pioneering the art form, Body Music. He is a soloist and the ensemble director of Crosspulse, an Oakland, California-based, non-profit organization dedicated to the creation and performance of rhythm-based intercultural music and dance. Crosspulse was founded by Terry with Deborah Lloyd and Jim Hogan and produces dance and music works ranging in size from solos and duos to ensembles of one hundred performers, touring ambitious and logistically complex performances throughout the world. In addition, Crosspulse produces educational and outreach programs for children and adults and audio and video recordings and books, including "The Rhythm of Math." His teaching method has been praised by music educators, especially within the Orff system. In 2008, Terry was honored with a Guggenheim Fellowship.
I Made Lebah (1905?-11/18/1996) was a musician and teacher from Peliatan, Ubud, Bali who taught Colin McPhee, Michael Tenzer, Evan Ziporyn and many students of Balinese music. He knew many of the seminal musicians and dancers from the birth of the Kebyar style. He was a co-founder of the Gunung Sari Gamelan ensemble and traveled all over the world leading performances of that group.
