Gambuh I is a slow-moving, atmospheric, electronics-dominated work by a leading West Coast minimalist composer. The title is the name of its primary sound source, the mid-range Balinese bamboo flute called the gambuh. Ingram Marshall, who was born in 1942 in Mount Vernon, NY, traveled to California to study at CalArts as a teaching assistant to Morton Subotnick, with whom he had already studied in New York City. Marshall has remained a part of the San Francisco arts scene since. He accepts the term minimalist as a kind of shorthand description to exclude the sort of composer he is not. This work is a result of compositional approaches and technical training learned during his period of studies with Subotnick, plus his experiences with Indonesian music. At CalArts, he also studied with K.R.T. Wasitodipura, a leading Javanese musician. This led Marshall to obtain a summer study trip to Indonesia for further studies of the gamelan traditions of Java and Bali. This piece is highly representative of what he brought back from this trip. Rather than electing to imitate the typically ringing, ostinato-layered sound of this music, Marshall took more interest into the islands' approach to musical time and structure. A sense of slow, long-term musical motion became central to much of his work and has become highly influential on other composers. Marshall composed several pieces with the title Gambuh. They are live/electronic pieces that are related to each other and might almost be considered alternative versions of each other. He typically performed them himself on gambuh with the analog synthesizers of the day serving to treat the sound and generate additional sounds and a battery of tape systems to create various delay effects. In general, it began with Marshall experimenting on a Buchla 200 modular music system synthesizer to create various sorts of drones while playing the gambuh and he began to play this music in 1972. By 1975, he had reached a more or less definitive version that he recorded as Gambuh I. Despite its dreamy, close-to-new-age effect, there is an edginess to the music created by the clashes between two tuning systems. He set up the synthesizer to play the closest equivalent of Western musical notes to the Indonesian scales that the gambuh produces. It is the tension between these notes that produces the dark harmonic effect of the composition. Eventually, Marshall incorporated the basic structure of Gambuh into other, more fixed-form works, especially his Fragility Cycle.

© Joseph Stevenson, All Music Guide