Gamelan

On Friday 20th March, Y5B visited Redbridge Music Centre. The children learned to play a range of Indonesian percussion instruments.Here's what two of them wrote:

Charlotte -
On the 20th of March 2009, Y5B went to Redbridge music centre. We left at 1.00 pm. It took us half an hour to get there, but it was a very healthy walk for us. We couldn’t have asked for a better day to go because it was a beautiful day. When we got there at half past 1, a man called Mr. Homes came over and told us what we were going to do. When we all saw the instruments we were all a bit confused because we hadn’t seen those instruments before in our lives. We had to guess what country the instruments had come from. Some of us said India and some of us said China, he said we were half right because they come from Indonesia. We had to be separated into 2 groups. There was group 1 and group 2. Group 1 went in first but they had to take our shoes off as a sign of respect. When we went in we were put with an instrument and then we went through what beaters we had to play them with. Gamelan instruments originate from two countries – Java and Bali. We played on the Java instruments. There are 600 different instruments. We saw 15 percussion instruments.We watched a film at the end about the instruments. We really enjoyed it and didn’t what to leave. We had a great day.


Anil -
On the 20th of March we went to the Music Center in Redbridge. First we had to walk from the school to the Center. The walk took about 20 minutes. When we arrived to play the music we had to take of our shoes as a sign of respect. There was different kinds of instruments to play, which originated from Bali and Java, Indonesia. We concentrated on Java because it our first time and Bali was too quick for us. When we started to play we learnt that it was a skill passed from generation to generation, the Indonesians had to learn through memory as each part of the instrument had no letters or numbers to them. We were lucky because we had numbers to help us . We where split in to two groups while one group was playing, the other one was sketching their favorite instruments. There was an instrument called a-gong. Everyone liked it because it was big and made lots of noise, but still all of them where good to play. While we were coming back we had good time and it was healthy walk back. We really enjoyed it. It was fantastic.