Leopold Godowsky visited Java on a journey through the Far East that began in Japan on October 13, 1922, and ended in Honolulu on May 25, 1923. A trip that took the pianist- composer to Hong Kong, Shanghai, Beijing, Singapore, Java and the Philippines.
Japan and China only half pleased him; too crowded, too many people. Only in Java, which with forty million inhabitants he also found a tad too crowded, did he truly fall under the spell of Asia. Everything about the island charmed him: the princely cities of Solo (Surakarta) and Djokja (Yokyakarta), the cratons, the markets, sawas, volcanoes, the sunrise from the rim of the crater of the Bromo, the five hundred Buddha statues on the Borobudur, the wajang puppetry, the oldest district of Batavia, Kota Tua, the gardens of Buitenzorg. But what really overwhelmed him was that he found a highly refined culture that derived its eloquence from an instrument that, like the piano, is a percussion instrument: the gamelan.
In Java, Leopold Godowsky did not compose a note, but the gamelan music lingered in his ears for weeks, months, years, eventually resulting in his finest work, the Java Suite, fifty minutes of music that can be listened to like a travelogue.
