Daniel Schmidt: composition and the design of American Gamelan (interview)

Daniel W. Schmidt is a composer and an instrument builder who has been involved in gamelan since 1970. He lives and works in Berkeley, California, and is the director of The Berkeley Gamelan. His innovative instruments are found across the country at several universities and colleges, including U.C. Berkeley, and he is presently an instructor at Sonoma State University, where he is building his first complete brass gamelan. This interview was conducted on several dates during the fall of 1984, in Berkeley and Oakland, California. Daniel Schmidt describes his compositional history, his self-devised tuning system, and his views on the character and future of new gamelan outside of Indonesia.