On an extended tour of the orient, Godowsky came to Java in early 1923 and stayed for several weeks, playing concerts nearly every day and absorbing the ubiquitous sounds of the gamelan—the Indonesian percussion orchestra—as Colin McPhee was to do just over a decade later on Bali. On his return to the United States, the dozen "phonoramas" of the Java Suite were written out over winter 1924 and spring the following year. None but the most accomplished virtuosos can look at them without being at once fascinated and appalled, for, while their gamelan-informed, teasingly syncopated textures sprawl busily over the entire keyboard, pounding pentatonic evocations of Javanese melody, often polyphonically elaborated, must emerge from the relentless figuration with plangent clarity. Godowsky in propria persona is a bit like Kreisler or Sarasate or Ignaz Friedman—an elegant Old World gentleman speaking the language of a vanished era lived in brilliant salons while performing shoulder-to-shoulder with such artists as Friedman, Josef Hofmann, and Rachmaninov before brilliant international audiences. But let him take on for a moment the mask of Bach or Chopin or Schubert or Johann Strauss II—or the exotic atavism of gamelan—and his imagination is, paradoxically, liberated. In a preface to the score, Godowsky notes, "Although some of the following compositions, or parts thereof, express my impressions in the native music-idiom as I understand it, I have neither borrowed nor imitated actual Javanese tunes, designs or harmonies in any of the movements excepting the third: Hari Besaar. Here I made use of two fragments of authentic Javanese melodies, one called Krawitan, the other, Kanjut." Comparison with McPhee's Balinese Ceremonial Music is revealing; for all its resourcefulness in transferring the compositional practices of Balinese musicians to two pianos, it is essentially a work of ethnomusicology, where Godowsky's Java Suite (like McPhee's orchestral Tabuh-Tabuhan) is a delectable dozen imaginative flights evoking Javanese royalty, puppet shadow plays enacting episodes from Hindu epics, chattering monkeys, or the Bromo volcano, in waves of gamelan-like sonority. Adventurous pianists occasionally perform the Java Suite's meltingly seductive (and relatively easy) "Gardens of Buitenzorg"—"a spacious palace...situated in a large park which forms part of the most famous Botanical Gardens in the world"—beginning with a ravishing private recording by Godowsky himself (made in 1935 and showing, through furious crackle, no sign of the stroke that ended his career in 1930), though the remainder of the suite has been almost wholly neglected.

© Adrian Corleonis, Rovi