American gamelan materials including aluminum, tin cans, car hubcaps, steel, antique milk-strainers, etc. "American gamelan" may also describe the original music of American ensembles working with traditional instruments. Dennis Murphy is often credited as being the first American to build instruments modeled on those of the Javanese gamelan, circa 1960. This work led to his doctoral thesis at Wesleyan University, entitled "The Autochthonous American Gamelan". Murphy started a gamelan group with his instruments at Goddard College in Vermont in 1967; that group later became the community-based Plainfield Village Gamelan. There have been other American builders of gamelan as well, on both the
American gamelan East and West coasts. Following Murphy's model was Barbara Benary, who built the instruments still used today for Gamelan Son of Lion. On the West coast, the airline industry made aluminum affordable, and this became the material of choice for several gamelan builders. Daniel Schmidt, a composer-builder, built an ensemble called "The Berkeley Gamelan" (independent of the University of California, Berkeley) as well as the set of instruments that would develop into Gamelan Pacifica in Seattle. Paul Dresher also used aluminum. Harrison worked with John Cage in the 40s on percussion compositions with found metal objects, resulting in alternate scaled