Pak Udjo's Workshop

To continue our super-Indonesian day, we were driven to Pak Udjo's Workshop, also known simply as Udjo. It's a workshop, shop-gallery and cultural centre in Bandung which focuses on angklung, traditional Indonesian bamboo chimes.

Once you arrive, and if you're lucky, you can catch a musical performance. I don't think there are lots of these per day - there's probably a schedule on their website. This is as strange as it is impressive - it probably makes more sense if you catch it from the start, though, which we failed to do. There are drums, gambang (gamelan) and of course the angklung themselves. Not to mention singing and dancing. I am told the music is to a pentatonic, i.e. five-note scale, similar to traditional Chinese music.

Once you're done with this, head down and through to the workshops. Here you can find the completed instruments. The base unit of an angklung is a small bamboo frame containing two or three pieces of bamboo tuned to the same tone, an octave apart. These are hung on hooks within much larger portable frames. The instrument is played by shaking the smaller frames to a tune. The performance is quite demanding as the instrument can be a couple of metres across, and it's not exactly slow music. I believe that there are regional variations between the chimes, but I'm not sure how this is applied.

Next you can see the angklung and gambang in various stages of construction. The chimes themselves are cut from bamboo to roughly the right length, then about half of the circumference of one half of the length is hacked away, using a machete. These rough bits will be passed to a (very skilled!) chap who shaves bits off until the correct note is achieved. Each chime takes perhaps 5 minutes to create; after 3 minutes I couldn't tell the difference between the note tapped on his xylophone and the note sounding when he struck the chime with his knife. Impressive stuff.

There's also a video about the construction of the chimes, but it was in Indonesian so I had no idea what was going on. Better just to watch the craftsmen producing them.

Lastly you can (and should) go and check out the shop, because it's full of bamboo instruments, puppets and some samples of the music. Because the whole complex is pretty forward-thinking and well set-up for local and foreign tourists, this is perhaps the best place in Bandung to buy handicraft souvenirs of traditional puppets and instruments. Certainly the best place I've seen, anyway, in my six weeks here. It is, of course, very busy - but it's worth the visit to watch the guy tuning bamboo, in the very least.