Gamelan Kingston
new music for gamelan
Meet The Team
About Us
Jody Diamond
co-director
Jody Diamond is an American composer, performer, writer, publisher, editor, and educator. She specializes in traditional and new music for Indonesian gamelan and is active internationally as a scholar, performer, publisher and founder of American Gamelan Institute since 1981. https://www.gamelan.org/
Sasha Bogdanowitsch
co-director
Sasha Bogdanowitsch is a composer, vocalist, multi-instrumentalist and educator, whose work includes original songs, music for theater, dance and film, inter- disciplinary performance, concert music and sound baths, often influenced by his studies of world, folk and contemporary musics. He currently performs solo as Timbre Tree and as a member of Lyraccord, LoomSong, Gamelan Kingston and the Hogfiddle Consort.
Phyllis Chen
Phyllis Chen is an American composer, sound artist, and pianist. A member of the International Contemporary Ensemble, she co-composed their 2016 album On The Nature Of Thingness and is a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Theory and Composition at SUNY New Paltz. http://www.phyllischen.net/
Katie Down
Katie Down is a sound artist, music psychotherapist, licensed creative arts therapist, improviser and multi-instrumentalist.
She teaches clown, voice, creative play, Deep Listening, and sound painting for improvisers, theatre makers, movers and musicians and is the co-curator for the Arts and Wellbeing Gathering based in the Hudson Valley. Katie's creative and healing arts space,
Sound Well Center is based in Marlboro, NY where she hosts workshops, classes, retreats, events, films, and healing arts offerings.
Dean Jones
Dean Jones is a musical omnivore. Dean spends most of his time in No Parking Studio, his straw bale recording studio in Rosendale NY. For the past 25 years he's been producing and engineering his own music and other folks. He has a Grammy and a Latin Grammy and fond memories of his Granny. For 15 years Dean was the one-man band and narrator for the Arm of the Sea Theater, traveling to schools and festivals around the country.
He's quite proud to have co-produced four fundraising albums for Spare the Rock Records, featuring Pete Seeger, They Might Be Giants, Antibalas, Rhett Miller and many other artists.
Michael Jones
Michael Jones is a percussionist and conductor based in the Hudson Valley, New York. His work focuses on championing new pieces of the 21st century as well as works from the 20th century avant-garde. He currently serves as Percussion Teaching Fellow at Bard College.
Henry Lowengard
A long time microtonal and drone enthusiast, Henry Lowengard can be found walking around uptown Kingston, humming Harry Partch tunes to himself. When he's not writing musical instruments to be played by silicon logic, he is strumming and tuning autoharps, and since 2017 or so, has been a pair of many hands in gamelan groups.
Gavin Ryan
Gavin Ryan is a composer-performer specializing in percussion, gamelan, modular synthesizer and electronics. A native of Payson, Utah, he has performed and taught throughout the United States, as well as Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Philippines, Haiti and China. He has a DMA in Percussion Performance from University of Michigan
Peter Wetzler
Peter Wetzler is a pianist/composer/performer writing music for film, tv theater and multimedia. Currently hosting a weekly Radio Show “Sound Forms: Classical Music and Beyond” on Radio Kingston, playing with the Gamelan Klngston, PeterPeter (duo with Peter Einhorn and special guests) and solo piano and free music with John Beaulieu.