Gamelan Kusuma Laras To Present 2025's KLENÈNGAN: CLASSICAL JAVANESE MUSIC IN AN INFORMAL SETTING
The event is presented by Gamelan Kusuma Laras and the Consulate General of the Republic of Indonesia.
By: Gillian Blum Nov. 15, 2025
Gamelan Kusuma Laras will present an evening of Javanese music for the public in the klenengan format.
An informal music event in Java, a klenèngan features musicians who gather for a kind of jam session, often arranged by a family for a special event. Typically lasting until late at night, audience members are intimately involved, integrating the social with the musical. Guests come and go as they wish, quietly chat with other audience members, and immerse themselves in a transporting evening of music that draws from the Javanese classical repertoire.
Throughout its 42-year existence, Gamelan Kusuma Laras has mesmerized audiences with its renditions of traditional Javanese music on instruments created for the Indonesian consulate in New York around the 1964-65 World’s Fair in Flushing Meadows, Queens.
The NYC-based classical Javanese gamelan (orchestra of gongs, bronze metallophones, xylophones, zither, bowed lute, drums, and solo and choral voices), comprised of Americans and Indonesians, is under the artistic direction of I.M. Harjito, one of the finest Javanese musicians living today.
Featured special guests include classical Javanese musician and educator Darsono Hadiraharjo, a graduate of Indonesia’s state conservatory for the traditional performing arts in Surakarta who hails from an illustrious multi-generational family of professional musicians and dhalang (shadow puppet masters).
Also performing will be the incomparable Peni Candrarini as lead solo vocalist. Peni is a world renowned, award-winning Javanese singer, composer, and faculty member at the Indonesian Institute of the Arts. She is a master of several traditional forms and is regarded as one of Indonesia’s most daring young composers.
Gamelan Kusuma Laras, which rehearses and performs at the Indonesian Consulate in Manhattan, has been active in the New York City cultural scene since 1983. Since then, the ensemble has been presented at a wide variety of venues, including Roulette, the American Museum of Natural History, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum, Symphony Space, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Bard College, Vassar College, Wesleyan University, Princeton University, the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, Riverside Church, Cooper Hewitt Museum, Lincoln Center Out-of-Doors Festival, Lincoln Center White Light Festival, and the Yogyakarta International Gamelan Festival.
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