Agungan or Gong Sounds

For an "orchestra of 6 gong families drums and flutes, 15mins. Decay's densities, colors, sounds struck with sticks, hands, sliding palms. Uses six gong-families or qualities of gong-sounds to project the variety of sounds than can be produced within a certain homogenousness of sounds - the sounds of gongs. In this artificial orchestra, a musical permutation of sound-events is based on isolated sounds produced by the people who play these instruments; however, the organization of these sounds is not a mere copy of native musical invention. Rather, it is a result of new concepts seeking to draw out the physical qualities of non-pitch sounds. Some of these qualities are sound-density (when the peal of about 60 gongs are heard together in a mixture of time delays); color (mixtures of scale-structures, instrumental blends, types of attacks, effect sounded by mallets of varies materials, hand-slides, dampening, etc); and rhythm (there is no metric regularity of phrases anywhere).

*program notes 'Music of Today: A concert of avant garde and Asian music', 4 & 5 February 1966, UP College of Music.