In the summer of 2000 I spent almost a month in Bali, studying music and attending performances. When I returned home my head was full of Balinese music, and seemingly nothing else - every shred of music I imagined was in pentatonic scales and cyclic patterns.

Gineman is the result of this situation - another in the series of collisions between Indonesian music and my personal compositional idiom. In Bali, a gineman is the introductory section of a longer work for gamelan gong kebyar, characterized by fast, angular phrases. While this Gineman is certainly not a piece of Balinese music, it borrows the stop-and-start rhythms and unexpected outbursts of its namesake. My perceptions of Balinese modality and rhythmic cycle are also important to the piece, although in a more abstract fashion.

The harpsichord, closely associated with the European Baroque, may seem an unusual vehicle for music inspired by Bali. However, the two manuals and flexible tuning of the instrument enabled me to approximate the paired tunings that characterize the shimmering soundworld of the gamelan.

Gineman is dedicated to Mary Francis.

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