Clifford Johnson Tribute Post 2

I didn’t take any pictures, but Monday night, I went to a Balinese gamelan concert on campus, put on by a group of twenty-odd students from a couple of Asian music classes, aided by some visiting musicians from Bali. There were also dance performances by three students, and one visiting Balinese dancer (who is actually a student at Kansas State, if I heard the introduction correctly…).

I’ve never heard gamelan music before, so I’m not sure what it’s supposed to sound like, but it seemed like the students did a very good job. There were also a couple of breaks during which they explained various aspects of the instruments and costumes, which was helpful. Interestingly, the gamelan consists of nearly matched pairs of instruments (gongs and xylophones, basically) that are tuned to have very slightly different resonant frequencies. They use the beat note between the different tones as an essential component of the music. Everywhere you go, you find science…

The Nott was pretty crowded, so I wound up moving up to the second floor, which doubles as an art gallery. There’s currently a show on weapons and aggression in art, which I took the opportunity to check out. The most interesting works of the lot were probably by Michael Oatman, who does very complicated collages of pictures cut out of old books, and a sculptor named Susan Graham, who unfortunately shares a name with some sort of opera singer, thus confounding my attempts to find pictures of her work on Google. They had a bunch of really cool sculptures of guns that she did in lace-like ceramic, though, which were eye-catching.

And then I went home and made chili for the pot-luck luncheon we had yesterday in the department. I even bought the ingredients at the Co-Op, which is almost like a farmer’s market.

Really, it’s hard to have more of a Clifford Johnson day than that… Without taking pictures, anyway.