An ensemble for everyone

Since the beginning of recorded time, music has been bringing humans together.

At the University of Dayton, music is creating community thanks to one professor and her ensemsble made of many instruments with an important, inviting disclaimer: no music experience required.

Professor Heather MacLachlan is director of the University of Dayton’s Javanese Gamelan Ensemble. Sixteen years ago MacLachlan, an ethnomusicologist, began teaching students how to perform this venerable musical tradition from Indonesia that can include dozens of individual instruments.

MacLachlan’s experience with gamelan began when she joined Cornell University’s Javanese Gamelan Ensemble while a doctoral student. She said she was inspired to pursue a dissertation in ethnomusicology while training fellow educators at refugee camps in Thailand, where she learned firsthand the importance of music to many cultures. 

“I could clearly see and hear that music was an incredibly important part of people’s lives,” she said. “That really struck me because people had fled a war zone with almost nothing — and yet [music] was so important to them that they brought their bamboo flutes and in some cases very heavy gongs.”

The University purchased a custom-made 75-instrument gamelan set in February 2009 around the time when MacLachlan was applying to teach music at UD. She agreed to lead a demonstration lesson of how to play the instruments for the students during her campus interview.

The Javanese Gamelan Ensemble accepts all students regardless of musical ability, and all students learn the instruments together. The music is not notated, so MacLachlan teaches them by singing, demonstrating and explaining concepts. Returning members also help new students.

MacLachlan said gamelan is a musical experience for everyone.

“Gamelan is here to absolutely educate people about Indonesian culture, absolutely to sustain an amazing thousand-year-old musical tradition from another country,” she said, “but it is also here to give this message that everyone is welcome and capable of making significant music and belonging to a very complicated and beautiful musical tradition.”

Students share her sentiments. Junior Nadia Chapaska, an intervention specialist major who has no music education background, said she has always been impressed by those who could play instruments.

“I'm just happy I get to do this,” she said of joining the ensemble.

Alaina Imboden, a sociology and women and gender studies major in her second year of the UD Sinclair Academy, has been in the ensemble for three semesters and knew she wanted to join after seeing the UD gamelan ensemble perform at the Schuster Center when she was in high school.

She played percussion and sang in high school and said she adores the opportunity to learn new instruments and about various cultures.

“I really love the diversity of culture, not only in getting to learn an other-than-Western-style of music that’s this beautiful, ancient tradition from Indonesia but also getting to have people of different musical and cultural backgrounds come into gamelan,” she said.

Like Chapaska, Mohammed Altayeb also joined the ensemble with no prior musical experience. A master’s student studying electro-optics and photonics who came to UD from Saudi Arabia, Altayeb decided this semester to shift some of his time from studying science to learning music.

“It’s nice to see the other cultural music.”

“It’s not hard, but it’s weird for me because we don’t use music a lot in my area or my culture,” he said. “It’s nice to see the other cultural music. I really enjoy it.”

The group has a few public performances every year and has shared the stage with both the Dayton Philharmonic Orchestra and the Dayton Bach Society. One of their on-campus performances led to international acclaim after students from Sinclair Community College attended a 2023 concert and connected MacLachlan with an Indonesian TV station.

MacLachlan’s interview with the station and the gamelan’s performance were broadcast throughout Indonesia, and MacLachlan has the following message for the show’s viewers:

“We here at the University of Dayton really respect this incredible musical tradition that your ancestors developed over a thousand-year period, and we’re serious about it.”

“We here at the University of Dayton really respect this incredible musical tradition that your ancestors developed over a thousand-year period, and we’re serious about it. We’re not experts, but we’re learning it carefully and trying to play it as beautifully and accurately as possible because we respect it.”

The Javanese Gamelan Ensemble will perform this semester at 6 p.m. Friday, Nov. 22, as  part of a whole event that celebrates music from Asia, and at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, Dec. 4, as part of the Department of Music Christmas Festival. Both performances will be at the Roger Glass Center for the Arts.