Walk into a gamelan session at the University of California, Berkeley, and you might be surprised. The students hunched over bronze keys and hanging gongs aren't in Yogyakarta or Solo — they're in California, learning the dense, interlocking rhythms of Javanese music from a man who grew up watching his father perform wayang kulit in Wonogiri, Central Java.

That man is Ki Midiyanto. Born into a family of dalangs and pengrawit (gamelan musicians), he has spent more than three decades quietly doing something remarkable: transplanting one of Indonesia's most complex living art forms into the heart of an American university.

Who Is Ki Midiyanto and What Does He Do at UC Berkeley ?

Ki Midiyanto is a Javanese gamelan teacher and co-director of Gamelan Sari Raras at the University of California, Berkeley. He teaches students and members of the Bay Area community how to play traditional Javanese gamelan, and regularly stages full performances complete with wayang kulit (shadow puppetry), dalang (puppeteer), and sinden (female vocalist). He first began teaching at UC Berkeley in 1988, alongside Professor Ben Brinner, making their ensemble one of the longest-running Javanese gamelan programs at any American university.

"Dari Wonogiri hingga University of California, Berkeley, Ki Midiyanto membawa gamelan Jawa melintasi budaya dan generasi."

Why Did He Pause — and Why Did He Come Back?

In 1991, Ki Midiyanto stepped away from Berkeley to pursue higher education in the United States. He enrolled at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon, where he earned a Master of Arts in Education. It was a deliberate move: he didn't just want to perform Javanese culture abroad, he wanted to understand how to teach it effectively across cultural gaps.

He returned to UC Berkeley in 2004 and hasn't stopped since. Today, Gamelan Sari Raras performs every semester, drawing an ensemble of students and local Bay Area residents who learn to play the instruments while keeping the Central Javanese tradition — its tuning, its etiquette, its spiritual texture — intact.

What Is Gamelan Sari Raras?

Gamelan Sari Raras is the performing ensemble Ki Midiyanto co-founded at UC Berkeley. The group is composed of both enrolled students and members of the wider Bay Area community. What makes it unusual is its strict adherence to Central Javanese tradition: the instrumentation, the playing style, and the full theatrical staging with wayang kulit remain true to how it would be performed in Java. It's not a "world music" hybrid — it's the real thing, practiced seriously, thousands of miles from where it was born.

How Is He Preserving Gamelan Back Home in Indonesia?
Teaching at an American university is only half of Ki Midiyanto's story. Since the year 2000, he has also run a free gamelan foundation in his hometown of Wonogiri, Central Java. Children between the ages of 5 and 15 can learn gamelan at no cost — a deliberate move to ensure the tradition survives not just in California lecture halls, but in the community that gave birth to it.

The counterintuitive fact here: the man most responsible for exporting Javanese gamelan to the United States is equally invested in making sure the next generation in Wonogiri never has to go abroad to find it.