Classical: Orchestral manoeuvres

The showpiece of the 1889 World Exhibition in Paris was the newly built Eiffel Tower, but visitors who didn't like the controversial edifice might find other metal structures to entertain and instruct them. Claude Debussy, fresh from the Wagnerian pilgrimage to Bayrcuth, was bewitched by the Oriental pavilions, where he saw a Javanese gamelan orchestra. Recalling the experience later, he wrote that the players' "conservatoire is the sea's eternal rhythm, the wind among the leaves, the thousand sounds of nature which they understand without consulting an arbitrary treatise... Javanese music is based on a type of counterpoint, which makes Palestrina's seem child's play. If we listen without European prejudice to the charm of their percussion, we must admit that our percussion is like primitive noises at a country fair."

In the last hundred years, Western percussion has developed an astonishing complexity, yet gamelan retains its fascination. In Britain alone, there are several dozen of these ornately carved, elaborately revered percussion orchestras, playing music ancient and modern, Eastern and Western. This weekend, in performances preceding the London Philharmonic's evening concert of Olivier Messiacn's Turangalita Symphony (a work borrowing from the gamelan soundworld) London's South Bank Centre will be filled with the gamelan noises, sounds and sweet airs.

The South Bank has had a gamelan since 1987. Composer Alec Roth, its first artistic director, recalls his "Road to Damascus experience" at the 1979 Durham Oriental Music Festival: "It was an emotional shock, a recognition that affected me deeply, but which I didn't understand at all. It wasn't just music, it was dance, shadow-theatre and music. I wanted to know how it worked. Having trained as a conductor, I was intrigued by an orchestral tradition that didn't have a conductor. I bought recordings, read the guide books, and built my fantasy. I'd fly to Djakarta, get off the plane and hear the gamelan twinkling through the palm trees. The reality was brutally different. I arrived in Djakarta on December 20th, 1980: the date is etched on my memory; I collapsed into my hotel room turned the radio on, excited that I was going to hear the gamelan. Instead, I heard Bing Crosby singing "White Christmas". A rude awakening to the fact that Indonesia is a 20th-century country. In Central Java, though, gamelan is a living tradition, under pressure, like most traditional musics that confront Western influence, but holding its own. There are centres of conservatism where the attitude is `We must preserve this wonderful tradition', and you can only sympathise. And there are other, perhaps healthier centres, that insist that to survive, an artform must satisfy the needs of the next generation: so there's experimentation and development, which have been controversial, but the result is a period of wonderful creativity over the last 20 years or so."

That creativity has captivated others, including Symon Clarke, whose involvement with the group Alpha Beta Gamelan is a mark of the way Western composers include gamelan in the contemporary instrumentarium. Like Roth, Clarke went to Indonesia in the 1980s: "When I returned, I began to incorporate the music's ideas into my pieces, getting Western instruments to sound like a gamelan. I don't think you can do that successfully, and I was getting more and more exasperated by what I was writing. Then I discovered there was a gamelan at the South Bank, and I've been playing there ever since. Over the past five years, I've written almost exclusively for gamelan. There are difficult lessons to learn: the Javanese leave out notes, rather than putting them in, as we do in the West. And on a good, bronze gamelan, the sound becomes sort of separated from the instruments, it just sits above the orchestra, stunningly beautiful, but with its own tensions, its own angst. It's not Western, chromatic, Wagnerian angst, but it's there. You absorb what the Javanese do so as to reuse it without sounding like pastiche Javanese."

Another composer making his own gamelan music is Adrian Lee, for whom "The gamelan is there as an option, just as much as any Western instrument, or indeed as any of the other traditions I'm familiar with." Much of Lee's gamelan writing has been for the theatre: recalling his score for Robert Lepage's 1992 National Theatre production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, he says, "Lepage stated that he wanted a gamelan ensemble to be associated with the forest, and a feeling of baroque music for the court. The challenge was to get the two worlds to live together." This returns gamelan to one of it sources, as music for shadow theatre, puppetry and dance dramas, but Lee strives not simply to recreate gamelan tradition: "When they come here, Indonesian composers worry that they only hear traditional music being played. They're concerned with bringing the gamelan into contemporary music. Although the tradition is rich, they want it to develop, and that puts the gamelan right in line with where Western composers find themselves, after a century and a half of exploring the way percussion can be used in the orchestra."

For Alec Roth, a composer much involved in community and educational projects, the gamelan has a fascination beyond its sound: "Cultural values are embedded in the music. You learn by playing one of the easy instruments, then you progress through the gamelan until you've learnt all the instruments; and the instruments at the front of the orchestra take a lifetime to learn. It's extraordinary to have invented a musical system which encompasses such a range of skill. People like Debussy and Messiaen took the sound, the musical forms and techniques, which I classify as the musical hardware. What interests me is the musical software: the way the music is put together. But I'm not Javanese, I'm Western, and I want to make music that means something to the musicians and audiences I work with."

The London Philharmonic plays Olivier Turangalita Symphony, 8pm Saturday 21 March, Royal Festival Hall (0171-960 4242); gamelan music from 6pm, preceded by workshops and performances throughout the afternoon from 12.30pm. For details of all South Bank gamelan activities, including classes, call 0171-921 0848.