On July 13th 1987, thirty-five people met on the lawn of a large house in the Pennine village of Cragg Vale. Brought together by local composer Mick Wilson, the group included a handful of professional musicians, others who had some musical experience, and the biggest group of all – those who had never played a musical instrument and were mystified by black dots on staves.
Mick, together with another founder member Sally Martin, had built all of the original instruments from scrap and scrounged materials as part of a project with York University’s gamelan. Once the project was over, Mick decided to form a community band.
Within a short space of time Cragg Vale Gamelan was performing regularly in public and by 1990 was being invited to play for a week at a festival in Devon.
Though Cragg Vale Gamelan was inspired by the music and other art forms of Indonesia, we always shied away from trying to emulate that culture. We preferred to develop in our own unique way.
Everyone in the band, including its artistic and musical directors, was a volunteer, committed to a professional ethos.
Through the early 1990s we developed a shadow play ‘The World’, a lip-sync puppet opera ‘Dangerous Beasts’, a concerto for gamelan and alto sax and a mixed media suite ‘Lifelines’ which incorporated dance and was inspired by the work of a visual artist in the band.
In 1993 founder member Dave Nelson took over as musical director. Innumerable projects took place over the following 10 years, from Revelation, a street theatre piece involving giant puppets, a reworking of Lifelines, a considerable expansion of our basic repertoire with pieces written by several band members, collaborations with a local community choir and also with Whitewood and Fleming Theatre and Music, and the development of a new street show ‘Voyage’.
For many years we took the gamelan into schools for workshops with children. We particularly enjoy working with children and young people with disabilities.
Several years ago three members of the band worked at the Royal National School for the Deaf in Manchester, building instruments, composing music and creating a shadow play. More recently a 30-minute piece called ‘Concerto for a Million Trees’ was written as part of a major arts project with hearing impaired children in Burnley. This was assimilated into the gamelan's repertoire and performed at venues around the country.
Nearly every summer we were asked to take part in a music festival; we have played three times at Sidmouth International Festival in Devon – camping for the whole week, running workshops and performing – and twice at Towersey Village Festival as well as shorter stays at Stroud Festival and an arts festival in Darlington.
Our final performance was in July 2005 as part of Hebden Bridge Arts Festival. We played to a sell-out audience and performed the Concerto for a Million Trees and then, having been joined by around 25 ex-members who had rehearsed with us in the afternoon, we played a selection from our repertoire's back catalogue.