Balinese Gamelan & Diesel Locomotives

In this episode of Recordings, E.T.C., Ed Canby reviews a record of Balinese music preformed by students in the Ethnomusicology Department at the University of California, Los Angeles. He notes that, more and more, people are beginning to not only recognize this music as being on equal footing with classical Western forms, but are also studying its composition and performing it in the same concert halls that would normally host programs of Bach or Beethoven. "We longer think of Western music as the universal music," states Canby. "Now we see that music students have learned to perform the music of wholly different musical culture on its own terms, not as adaptation into Western music or as a mere anthropological study of strange, alien cultures."

The music from Bali is followed by what Canby refers to as, "a genuine, authentic, really American sound on records" — a field recording of a diesel locomotive pulling into the train yard. "It's a kind of classical sound, classical in that it is produced for our ears solely for listening pleasure, not for any practical use. It's listening-sound. That is the generally popular definition of classical in our civilization here in the west — art for art's sake."

WNYC archives id: 58579