Gamelan Welcomes New International Students to Durham

The Durham University Gamelan Society played 3 hours of soothing background music in the café of the Calman Learning Centre last Friday as international students trooped up to the fourth floor to attend the International Students Fair. This event is not nearly so exciting as the Societies Fair this week aimed at undergraduates, where all the university societies recruit new members. The international students mostly got advice on, guess what, "Living in England": how to open a bank account, get a broadband provider, find out about religious services, and what the Durham Student Union does.
   Nevertheless, it was the second year of Javanese gamelan playing at this "international" event, which I think is a nice ethnic outreach showing we value other cultures and their musics; not like being faced with a string quartet or anything. Now, to get some of those international students playing in the gamelan, as this wayang golek puppet entices with his paper advertisement... (The group meets Wednesdays from about 2:30 to 5:30pm in the University Observatory, and welcomes new members. See www.durhamgamelan.org.uk)
   This was the first public performance on the University's new pélog gamelan set - a different tuning system from the sléndro set that has been there for some 40 years. There are more than 80 sets of Indonesian gamelan instruments in the UK and Ireland at present.

(Ironic that this international students welcome event, attended by a large number of Asian and a few African students, was held in the Calman Learning Centre, named for recent Vice-Chancellor Sir Kenneth Calman. It was during Calman's autocratic reign that degree programmes in Chinese, Japanese, Arabic and some other "non-Western" languages and subjects were terminated without any justification other than a desire to focus resources on the University's "core" interests, i.e. the West. [Additionally the Linguistics Department was "traded" to another university for theologians; Durham Theology encompasses Christian, Biblical and Jewish studies but ignores other religions - Buddhism, Islam, etc.] Calman later admitted regretting this course of events, and some East Asian language teaching is being revived. Too late to cancel the embarrassment to the University. Ironic also that the Durham business school now reportedly has some 900 students from China - but never mind, they all speak English, no need for anyone to learn Chinese in this modern world, is there? – dweeb)