SFist Interviews: House in Bali's Evan Ziporyn

How did you chose the bay area for the US premiere?

Cal performances got very interested in the piece, and got in line first, so we are doing it there. Berkeley is where I started learning about and playing gamelan. The Bay Area has been the American center for Indonesian culture. So it kinda makes sense both from their point of view, and from my point of view. It feels like coming home.

How did you end up in Berkeley?

I was playing in the Bay Area, I was also incidentally getting a doctorate in composition at Cal. ... I came for the gamelan and I stayed for the doctorate.

Many people from you bio are from the East Coast, do you feel part of the East Coast musical establishment?

Terry Riley is not from the East Coast, he lives in Northern California. And Steve Reich also lived in the bay area, he was a student at Mills. Meredith [Monk], I guess, I work with her because I live in the East coast, and because she's great. I've never considered myself an East Coast composer. I was born in Chicago, spent most of my formative years in Indonesia or in California. And I feel a lot closer to that sensibility musically, actually.

We don't hear much of gamelan, but we hear of its second-hand influence on classical composers, like Ravel or Poulenc. Did you study these composers?

Well, Ravel is unbelievable, and actually I recently have been thinking a lot about Mother Goose suite, where that one movement feels like he is channeling a gamelan sensibility. My admiration for Ravel goes way beyond gamelan. He is quite underrated, to be honest. He's considered a bit light.

The gamelan came to France at the end of the 19th century, it was the Paris exhibition. At least Debussy checked it out and was mesmerized, and went back to it day after day and wrote about it and was profoundly affected by it. Also Ravel knew about it. I don't know what's Ravel direct contact with it was. But that's how it got started. It was also part of the general modern European art scene, especially in Paris. Everybody was being influence by non-Western arts. This was true of visual arts as well as music.

People would just find these new sounds and it would resonate with their way of thinking. I think that, to be honest, it just has to do with accessibility. The history of music is, everybody is kinda hearing what's happening in the next village, and trying to figure out how to do it. In the Renaissance, the next village is just one village over. In the 20th century you get music from all over the world. People who were into it, like Debussy and Ravel, it was just blowing their minds.

How did you get involved in the Indonesian music?

I had a record, I was by inclination always interested by music from other places, from my parents and just from my own education. I was always listening to, at that time, in this country, there were just a couple of record labels that were putting records from around the world. Nonesuch explorer series, or folkways, stuff like that. I just heard this gamelan record when I was working in a record store in 1979. And it was just so weird and so cool, and so much like I have been trying to do, and so different from anything I had ever heard, that I had to find out more about it. So, kinda coincidentally, I heard about this group that was starting up in Oakland, that was playing this music. I was in New Haven, Connecticut, I was a Yale student, I was 19 years old, and I called the guy up who ran it, and I said: can I come up and play with your group? And he said, yeah, come over the summer. So I just rode the bus across the country and started playing with the group.

What instrument were you playing?

It was a gamelan group, so I was playing gamelan instruments, so I had to learn to play the instruments. You have to basically start from square one. That was very appealing to me, it was totally outside of my experience as a musician. I'm a clarinetist and a pianist, I was playing classical music and jazz, I was trying to play rock-n-roll, everything was very weighted by history and precedent. Certainly, here's this thing I know nothing about, that is very interesting, very syncopated and communal. Recall this was 1979, so those kinds of ideas, egalitarianism, the fact that there is no written tradition, the fact that it was this interesting set of people doing it, opened up this doorway into this whole world that I knew nothing about. It just followed from there.

What is the story of A House in Bali?

What I was doing in the late 70s, early 80s, although I did not know it at the time, was pretty much exactly what the author of the memoir, Colin McPhee, had done 50 years before me. He was at that time a young composer, and he heard gamelan and it captivated him, and he immediately set for Bali to study it. Of course, in those days, hearing it, there was only one record available of the music, and like a 78. So he had to take a steam ship for a couple months to get to Bali. There was no other Westerners there, his journey was more epic than mine. And he ended up staying there more or less continuously for 6 or 7 years and came back and wrote this wonderful book about it.

The story obviously really speaks to me. Also, coincidentally, or maybe not so coincidentally, when I went to Bali first in the 1980s, my teacher was someone who had been a good friend of his, and told me stories about him. At this point he was an old man, and McPhee was dead, but my teacher provided kind of a direct link. I was living in the same part of the island, there were all sort of ways I felt really connected with the story.

The other thing was, when I got back to the US and over the course of several years, I've been involved with the gamelan a lot, I formed my own group, I composed lot of music that tries to build a bridge between what I learned and played in Bali and what I learned and played here. I'm made a lot of pieces which combined gamelan instruments with Western instruments, trying to combine ideas from Bali's gamelan into my pieces of western music. And, doing an opera on this subject was a way to work in that idiom that includes a very large palette, and to bring my favorite performers from both cultures together, and do something that was meaningful to us, and hopefully to the audience as well.

Who are the performers?

On the American side, I've been leading a musical double life. I have been leading my own gamelan and leaning back towards Bali, but I also have been playing with a New Music group in New-York called Bang on a can. We come [to the Bay Area] every few years, we came at Yerba Buena, less than two years ago. We came here right after the 2004 election, we came at Davies we played with Philip Glass.

I have been working with Bang on a Can, and we had been doing other projects that involve world music, and I just wanted to take it to another level. So it's BoaC, and 3 really amazing western trained opera singers, two I have worked with them before, and one, the lead, Mark Molomot, we just found in audition. It's kind of an unprecedented collaboration, BoaC has not worked with such vocalists before.

And then we got this gamelan, Gamelan Salukat, of young men from the Ubud area, a 16 member gamelan from that area, which is led Dewa Ketut Alit who is a really incredible musician and composer. And then there are four traditional Balinese performers, who are dancers and singers. I've got these two parallel musics going on at once. I have BoaC and the opera singers on one side, and the gamelan and the Balinese performers on the other.

For me, this is a really large, almost playground to do what I've been trying to do in relatively smaller scale projects, when I would write for gamelan and orchestra. That would be doing it in one way, that would last for fifteen or twenty minutes. Or bringing in, working with players with BoaC from China, or with Burmese drummer. It's really important experience for me, because they allow you to make this kind of connection with those traditions and this musical sensibility that we otherwise don't have. This project is just doing that in a much, much larger way.

Why are the singers amplified?

That's because everything is very loud. At least the gamelan itself, you would need a real Wagnerian singer to sing over gamelan, it's pretty loud. And Bang on a can is an electric ensemble, with drums and guitar. The type of voice that I want, I don't want that really by necessity overblown style that you get in grand dramatic opera, I want to take advantage of the technology that we do in any other ensemble, so they're amplified.

Do you have any Bay area idiosyncratic story?

Ah,come one, everything that happens in the Bay area only happens in the bay area, where do you begin? I was born in 1959 and I came out to the bay area to visit some family friends with my parents when I was eight years old in 1968. We took a trip, they were living up in Marin, I did not know where any of those places were, I was just a kid, we took a side trip to this district called haight-ashbury, and they had those strange creatures called the hippies. In 1968. And I thought that was the greatest thing ever, and I was: that's what I want to be when I grow up. You would not know by looking at me with balding head. I always felt there was something about the sensibility of California that made complete sense to me. I'm happy to be coming back and bringing my work there.

MIT does not sound to hippie to us!

There are a lot of people doing a lot of weird things at MIT.

A House in Bali plays twice at Zellerbach, this Saturday 9/26 at 8pm, and Sunday 9/27 at 7pm. If you found this page looking to buy or rent a house in Bali and read through anyway, woah, thanks, and go here or here.