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 Council counsel). These two terms capture the Gamelan Council’s goal of harmoniously unifying the arrays of forces and ideas affecting the areas on which the Gamelan Council focuses its efforts. The Gamelan Council operates predominantly in 73 states and territories on, near, and around the Pacific Rim, including every jurisdiction with a coastline on the Pacific Ocean and several other, significant population centres adjacent to or closely linked to the Pacific Rim (e.g., India, Nepal, and Pakistan). In 2010, the Gamelan Council also commenced pilot projects in both (a) Central Asia (i.e., Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan) and (b) South America