Javanese sindhen
Tulungagung, East Java, Indonesia
Photo courtesy of Peter McElhinney
Indonesian gamelan music has been beguiling international audiences as far back as 1889, when the first gamelan ensemble performed in Europe, famously catching the ear of composer Claude Debussy. The music’s allure is easy to grasp: haunting and ethereal, hammered out on a battery of metal percussion instruments that sound like nothing else, but difficult to replicate outside of the islands of Bali and Java. Though there are now dedicated gamelan ensembles in cities and universities worldwide, few can fully achieve the sound produced by musicians steeped in the tradition their whole lives. Enter Peni Candra Rini, one of Indonesia’s most celebrated contemporary artists—a singer, composer, and educator dedicated to preserving and sharing the musical traditions of gamelan, while pushing the music into new territory.
Peni Candra Rini is a master of sindhen, a solo style of female gamelan singing, named for the female singers who perform with gamelan ensembles. These ensembles can consist of as many as five musicians up to full orchestra, reflecting the many contexts in which the music is performed—from accompanying village shadow puppet shows, to dance performances, to concert halls, and even court and temple music. Gamelan takes its name from the Indonesian phrase “to hammer,” and the music is played primarily on percussion instruments, featuring elaborately carved tuned bronze gongs, bronze-keyed instruments, and drums all tuned to the same five-note scale. They are often accompanied by zithers, woodwinds, fiddles, and vocals. The music is based around repetitive central melodies that are built and elaborated on with improvisations to achieve an effect known as ombak, which describes the shimmering, wavelike sonics of so much beaten metal.
Hailing from the village of Ngentrong in East Java, Candra Rini was born in 1983 into a family of traditional artists and musicians. Her father was a master shadow puppeteer, and she grew up steeped in gamelan tradition. Peni formally studied gamelan music and performance practice (karawitan) at the Indonesian Arts Institute in Surakarta, where she was a student of renowned Javanese composer Rahayu Supanggah and earned her doctorate in Musical Arts in 2021. Her own music—traditional, neotraditional, and experimental—never loses the quality and feeling of ombak. Candra Rini’s multiple solo albums, from her 2010 debut Bramara to her most recent release, Atom (2019), have garnered critical praise abroad and popular acclaim at home, leading to international collaborations with such artists as Kronos Quartet, Meredith Monk, Robert Wilson, and more. Her current project is a traditional ensemble inspired by the earthy Javanese village gamelan music that she grew up performing—with strings and gamelan, but a more danceable, beat-oriented departure from the more refined styles favored by Indonesia’s national conservatory system.
Candra Rini’s work as a musician and as an academic on faculty at the Indonesian Institute of the Arts has received awards and support from the Aga Khan Foundation, the Asian Cultural Council, the U.S. State Department, the Fulbright Program, the Indonesian government, and more. She performs all over the world, from traditional performances in small Javanese villages to Carnegie Hall.
Peni Candra Rini’s appearance at the Richmond Folk Festival is supported in part by the Department of Music at the University of Richmond.
