Pulau Dewata is one of the names of the island of Bali, literally, “The Island of Gods”.
I have often recalled hearing a piece of music on CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) Radio 2 back in the late 1980s. Radio 2 was still mostly broadcasting classical music, an odd specialty considering there were only 2 CBC radio stations. They’ve since expanded to 3 stations and have changed Radio 2 to be more contemporary.
The piece of music that I remember (and taped so eventually listened to it numerous times) was a performance of something that the announcer described as being titled “Cool ow de Wata” (ow as in “ouch”, wata kind of like “water”). The Montreal Symphony Orchestra was conducted by Charles Dutoit. The piece was a percussive piece that hopped along, lurched, and then periodically ground to a halt. If I recall correctly it was inspired by gamelan music. The composer was Claude Vivier, a Canadian composer.
Fast forward 20 years and curious as I was about this distant memory I googled Claude Vivier. At first I didn’t turn up anything relevant. There were few recordings of his music and few references to it. At a Marc-Andre Hamelin concert, after the concert waiting for an autograph of my sheet music of some of Alkan’s piano music (how’s that for being geeky), I asked Marc-Andre Hamelin if he was familiar at all with Claude Vivier’s music and mentioned the name of the piece I had heard before (without knowing how to spell it). Hamelin said yes he knew the piece and that it could be played on the piano. He recommended looking in the CBC store or archives since they would surely have a recording for sale. I didn’t pursue finding the recording.
Fast forward another couple of years and a trip to Bali was pending. I googled this piece of music again and more Vivier results turned up. The piece was called Pulau Dewata, in other words “Bali”. There still aren’t a ton of recordings of it. The only free one online now is a not so great performance. I recall the Montreal Symphony playing it pretty well. I highly recommend hearing some original Balinese and Indonesian gamelan music to hear the authentic sound.
If you’re interested in hearing the not so great performance of Vivier’s musc, you can listen to it here.