Striking a new chord in culture with neighbors

Students from Guangxi Arts University use padded sticks and mallets to strike bronze percussion instruments laid out onstage, forming beautiful melodies that echo across a conference hall in Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region's Beihai city.

The students are performing gamelan, an ensemble form indigenous to Indonesia, which features xylophones, drums, gongs and other instruments.

"In 2015, our university started to hire teachers from Bandung to teach students how to play Indonesian music and opened gamelan electives for students. Later, we founded the first gamelan orchestra in China," says Chu Zhuo, the orchestra leader.

Situated near several Southeast Asian countries, the university has benefitted from its geographical advantage and developed well-rounded study programs related to musical genres found around the ASEAN region.

"The university has collected more than 300 types of traditional instruments from Southeast Asian countries," says Chu. "We also have faculty and international students from these countries to teach us how to play their local instruments."

Randy Geovani Putra, an Indonesian teacher in Chu's orchestra, says Guangxi Arts University has been organizing its annual China-ASEAN music week since 2012 to provide gamelan enthusiasts a platform to promote the art form.

He has run gamelan workshops and delivered related speeches at the university, while integrating elements of Chinese folk music into gamelan performances.

"I was inspired to compose pieces that use both gamelan and traditional Chinese instruments like the flute, guzheng (zither) and erhu (two-stringed fiddle)," says Putra. "I can feel the harmony created by these different musical elements."

Putra and his students were invited to perform at the third Belt and Road International Symposium on Cultural and Artistic Exchanges and Cooperation on Dec 19, since the Chinese gamelan orchestra is among the positive outcomes of international cultural exchanges in recent years.