Gamelan for schools
Single workshops and 10-week courses available
Gamelan workshops
Gloucestershire Academy of music can provide either one-off, single workshops for schools or a 10-week course of gamelan-inspired percussion.
Gamelan Workshops for schools take place at Barbican House, Gloucester. We can accommodate class sizes of up to 30 children. Workshops last 90 minutes and are delivered by a gamelan specialist tutor. We start our sessions with an introduction to the gamelan, a look at our huge world map to find Indonesia and a discussion about the importance of the gamelan in Indonesian culture. With large classes, we split the group into two. Half of the group have a practical session on the gamelan while the other half watch/listen/carry out gamelan related tasks and drawing of the amazing instruments. The groups swap over.
One-off workshops cost £80.
Please contact our Schools Administrator, Karin Lythell, using the link below.
We are able to provide a special deal for schools with a high pupil premium percentage and for very small, rurally isolated schools. These schools need only pay £30 to book the workshop AND we are able to subsidise their travel by £100 per workshop. Please contact Karin to discuss your school context.
For the last two years, we have been delivering a very successful 10-week tuned percussion course that is inspired by the gamelan. The first session of the course takes place at Barbican House. Children visit the building for a 90-minute workshop led by one of our specialist tutors. This session introduces them to the instruments of the gamelan and the place of music in Indonesian culture.
For the following 8 weeks, the tutor visits your school to deliver a 1-hour session in the classroom. Using tuned percussion, the pupils explore the musical conventions of the gamelan, compose their own gamelan-inspired music and learn percussion skills. We use the school's own tuned percussion, but can supplement this with class percussion sets which we borrow from Colwell Arts Centre.
The tenth and final week of the course is held back at Barbican House on the real gamelan instruments. Here, the children rehearse and perform the music they have created back in school. We encourage schools to invite parents to come along to Barbican House to listen to the performance or record the performance to share with the parents digitally.
This course costs £399.
We welcome visits from special schools and from secondary schools. A gamelan workshop is particularly relevant to the KS3 music curriculum.
