American gamelan music. Lou Harrison and William Colvig, who met in 1967 in San Francisco, built a set of tuned percussion instruments that they called "an American gamelan" in order to differentiate it from Indonesian ensembles. It was first used in Harrison's work "La Koro Sutro" in 1972. These are now referred to as "Old Granddad", and Harrison wrote some pieces that can only be played on this set, including "La Koro Sutro". Lou Harrison spent some time with a Javanese gamelan in 1976 (when Kyai Udan Mas, now at the University of California, Berkeley, was in residence at San Jose State
Gamelan seven notes to the octave, with uneven intervals, usually played in five note subsets of the seven-tone collection. A full gamelan will include a set of instruments in each tuning, and classically only one tuning is used at a time. The precise tuning used differs from ensemble to ensemble, and gives each ensemble its own particular flavour. A set of gamelan instruments will be tuned to the same set of notes, but the tuning will vary from one gamelan to the next, including variations in the size of intervals. Colin McPhee , a Canadian composer who spent much time in