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 outside Indonesia style steel slendro pelog gamelan, and a Javanese slendro bronce gamelan, both owned by the Embassy of Indonesia in Mexico City; and gamelan Asep Mangsa, a Javanese pelog gamelan, and gamelan Barudak, a Sundanese degung gamelan, both owned by Indra Swara. The first gamelans outside of Indonesia were in the Netherlands, the country which had colonized the islands. Before World War II, the Javanese dancer Jodjana had a small gamelan group in the Netherlands, which accompanied his performances. He had to train Dutch musicians. Early during the war, the resistance fighter Bernardus IJzerdraat was killed by the Germans. His son