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
Gamelan Gadhon Gamelan Gadhon A Gamelan Gadhon is an ensemble consisting of the "soft" instruments of the Javanese gamelan. This can include rebab, gendér, gendér panerus, voice, slenthem, suling, siter, gong, kempul, kenong and kendhang. The rebab, a two-stringed fiddle, is the melodic leader of the ensemble. The rebab player signals changes between sections of a piece, and to a new piece. The gendér is a tube-resonated metallophone with fourteen keys suspended by string above metal tubes. The gender plays improvisatory patterns called cengkok which link one seleh note to the next. Each pattern can be played in many ways and the