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
Javanese Court Gamelan Javanese Court Gamelan Note: the first cover is of the first CD issue of the album, released during the 1990s. Javanese Court Gamelan is a recording of the gamelan of the Paku Alaman court in Yogyakarta, Java, Indonesia. It was recorded by ethnomusicologist Robert E. Brown. It was issued on compact disc on April 17, 1991 with the original contents. It was remastered and reissued under the name Java: Court Gamelan on January 28, 2003 with a cover of a photograph of Borobudur. The gamelan in the recording is an heirloom gamelan, made in 1755 for Paku Alam I. The