Carnegie Hall

Gamelan Dharma Swara—which translates as “a duty of perpetuating sound”—is one of the US’s preeminent Balinese music and dance ensembles, and has been captivating audiences around the world with its raucous and wondrous performances for more than 33 years.

The group performs a spellbinding blend of iconic traditional pieces paired with bold contemporary compositions, spanning some 500 years, and has been called “thrilling, mesmerizing, and powerful” (The New York Times) and “sublime, receiving perhaps the weekend’s most rapturous response” (The New Yorker).

The first non-Balinese gamelan invited to compete in the prestigious Bali Arts Festival, the group has toured Bali and performed at Lincoln Center at the invitation of The New York Philharmonic, BAM, MOMA, Central Park SummerStage, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum, Symphony Space, The Asia Society, National Sawdust, and Basilica Hudson, and at Yale, Princeton, and Columbia universities.

Gamelan Dharma Swara has commissioned and premiered works by contemporary composers including leading Balinese composer Gusti Komin—who has worked with the group as artist-in-residence since 2017, and whose composition Sari Ing Kerta the group premiered in 2018—in addition to Joel Mellin (Synesthesia, which had its world premiere in 2012), Nerissa Campbell (Legian 1983 / Breathe My War from 2016), and Matthew Welch (Bhima Swarga from 2006). The group has also performed works by many seminal Balinese composers, including Made Subandi’s Kupu-Kupu Kuning (which had its US premiere in 2011) and Dewa Ketut Alit’s Cecanangan and Geregel, which had its US premiere in 2015.

The group plays on instruments made by pande Made Sukerta in Bali in 2017, and they combine the popular 20th-century five-tone tuning gong kebyar with the 16th- and 17th-century seven-tone tuning semar pagulingan, making it possible to play a wide range of traditional and contemporary repertoire. Gamelan Dharma Swara is proudly women-led, spearheaded by president and ugal player Victoria Lo Mellin and vice-president and dancer Miranda Danusugondo. Based in Queens, New York, the most diverse county in the US, the group maintains a commitment to its long-standing core values of celebrating community and promoting inclusion.