How to Use gamelan in a Sentence

gamelan

noun
  • The birds didn’t take to the gamelan right away, Sulzer told me.
    — Burkhard Bilger, The New Yorker, 27 Mar. 2023
  • Indonesia and its gamelan orchestras didn’t seem so far away.
    — Los Angeles Times, 10 Dec. 2021
  • The gamelan musicians also lined the back of the stage at the Broad Stage.
    — Mark Swed, latimes.com, 20 Feb. 2018
  • Her voice sounds pure and soft over a tangle of synthesizers, gamelan, harp, and drum machine.
    — Amanda Petrusich, The New Yorker, 17 Mar. 2025
  • Somewhere down a hallway behind him, there were four separate gamelans awaiting their fate.
    — David Murphy, Philly.com, 12 Apr. 2018
  • The things often summoned up her Java stories of gamelans, sate-sellers, cicadas and warm rain.
    — The Economist, 5 Sep. 2019
  • Tracks like these more directly emulate gamelan music.
    — Sam Goldner, Pitchfork, 13 Apr. 2026
  • The tones suggest Indonesian gamelan music, but with less structured sonic patterns.
    — Mark Jenkins, Washington Post, 17 Feb. 2023
  • The Javanese gamelan is an ensemble of metal percussion, drums, strings, bamboo flutes and vocals.
    — John Von Rhein, chicagotribune.com, 11 May 2017
  • The classical dance involved exquisite hand gestures and halting body movements set to a gamelan orchestra.
    — Scott Mowbray Amrita Chandradas, New York Times, 20 Jan. 2025
  • This Balinese composer combines two different gamelan scales in his latest project.
    — New York Times, 22 Dec. 2022
  • Trumpets and flutes were predictably popular, but so were the gongs and xylophones of an Indonesian gamelan orchestra.
    — Burkhard Bilger, The New Yorker, 27 Mar. 2023
  • Architectonics takes this murky style and plunges it to a new deep, incorporating the bronze gong and chime sounds of gamelan while burying his rhythms in dense, dubby layers of incense smoke.
    — Sam Goldner, Pitchfork, 13 Apr. 2026
  • In college, Melody studied Balinese gamelan and Brazilian sambas.
    — Matt Wake | [email protected], al, 22 Mar. 2022
  • Games of the youths are accompanied by dancing, percussive tinklings inspired by Balinese gamelan music.
    — Scott Cantrell, Dallas News, 15 Apr. 2020
  • The barrage of sounds and effects is so overstimulating that trying to suss out whatever occasional folk signifiers peek through (a gamelan here, a pan-flute there) can leave you with egg on your face.
    — H.d. Angel, Pitchfork, 7 Jan. 2026
  • Accompanied by a gamelan (orchestra) of percussion instruments, the art form immerses audiences in rich narratives that can last all night.
    — Karen Gardiner, Condé Nast Traveler, 24 Oct. 2023
  • In spite of a few rough edges in coordination early on, the gamelan section at the end of the first movement was hypnotic, exotic, and most certainly Romantic.
    — Jeffery Johnson, courant.com, 17 Feb. 2018
  • The piece reflects when Debussy first heard a Javanese gamelan at the Paris Exposition of 1889.
    — Special To The Oregonian, OregonLive.com, 10 Mar. 2018
  • Also on the first floor is the Experience Gallery, where would-be musicians can practice on an Indonesian gamelan, a banjo, bongos, ukulele and more.
    — Susan Glaser, cleveland, 10 Mar. 2022
  • Delivered over gamelan ensembles and other traditional instrumentation, the song pleads for the city to return to its roots as a humble town without the new hotels, malls, and hectic traffic that now clog the city.
    — Jon Emont, Foreign Affairs, 9 June 2015
  • The dancers were accompanied by a 40-piece gamelan orchestra in which players used mallets to produce rapid, rhythmic and hypnotic music on banks of percussion instruments.
    — Seth Mydans, New York Times, 13 Mar. 2020
  • Returning to Mission Dolores, the festival will focus on the composer’s gamelan masterpieces.
    — Georgia Rowe, The Mercury News, 14 Feb. 2017
  • He was often treated as an outsider artist for his protean interests, which included Indonesian gamelans, Esperanto and microtones.
    — Carolina A. Miranda, latimes.com, 19 May 2017
  • Western audiences would likely experience a learning curve with sonifications that employ, say, the sound of a Javanese gamelan, but a framework that contains such options can flex and adapt to the data’s needs.
    — Timmy Broderick, Scientific American, 5 Jan. 2023
  • One of the temporary musical tracks McDonagh used was, surprisingly, a piece of Indonesian gamelan music.
    — Tim Greiving, Los Angeles Times, 17 Nov. 2022
  • Sampling gamelan, marimba, mbira, and other idiophones, Friedman summons a microtonal riot of weightless pings that disorients and delights in equal measure.
    — Daniel Bromfield, Pitchfork, 9 Apr. 2026
  • On his latest album, the Russian producer crafts distinctive dub techno rhythms inspired by the chiming repetitions of Indonesian gamelan music.
    — Sam Goldner, Pitchfork, 13 Apr. 2026
  • The meal was made more captivating by traditional Balinese entertainment, which included dance practice for young local girls, their instructor, and a small gamelan orchestra.
    — Kathryn Romeyn, Travel + Leisure, 28 Sep. 2025
  • Beat communicated with advanced and exotic languages, its wide-ranging vocabulary including experimental, art-rock,pop, jazz, funk, new-wave and gamelan elements.
    — Bob Gendron, Chicago Tribune, 2 Nov. 2024

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'gamelan.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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