Last night was the English Language/Linguistics Department banquet for graduating seniors. I'm a graduating senior (hooray!) so I got to go, along with my buddies the Butlers, and some other random classmates I've gotten to know over the years.
The banquet was held in the Hinckley Alumni and Visitor's Center (which we students think should totally have the nickname "Havoc" by now). It's hard not to notice the center when you're on the north side of campus, but until last night it was always the building for the "grown-ups" or the "elite"--those who, because of their achievements in academics, are accustomed to fancy dinners and expensive furniture.
So we were very excited to get to go inside it for the first time. It was like a rite of passage. We're graduating! We get to go in the fancy building now because we're going to be alumni!
And fancy it was. It felt a lot like my grandpa's house. Even Starla said so, and she's only been to my grandpa's house once. Almost four years ago. The feeling was uncanny.
I felt really tacky taking pictures, but it was just a beautiful building, and the dining hall was gorgeous.
The food was amazing. I contained myself enough to not take photos of every course, but here's what the settings looked like when we first showed up.
We had spinach-apple-bacon salad, dinner rolls, grilled honey-lemon chicken, asparagus spears, some gourmet cheesy potato side, and high-quality white grape juice (the Mormon version of wine, I guess). I can't even remember the name of the chocolate dessert because it was so fancy, but mine (pictured above) was a cherry souffle with white chocolate cream on top and whole cherries at the bottom.
It was all amazingly delicious, and I was grateful to my parents for teaching me how to eat such a formal meal. I made sure to butter my roll one bite at a time, rather than slather the whole roll with the whole butter ball as I normally would. :)
When the meal was mostly finished, the program started. Mostly it was an awards ceremony, for those crazy studious people who are graduating with a 3.9 or higher. I was not one of those people.
There were three very memorable parts of the program. First, there was a eulogy for a student who passed away unexpectedly last year, one day after his first child was born. I never knew him, but he was in our department, and many of the professors knew him very well, so it was a very solemn moment.
Then towards the end there was a series of toasts (minus the alcohol) for a professor who's retiring after almost forty years. I never knew him, either, but the stories people told about him made me wish I'd known him (he's in Linguistics, not ELang, though, so there was really no occasion for us to meet).
The highlight of the event was a performance by a gamelan group. For those of you who (like me before last night) have no idea what gamelan is, here's the Wikipedia summary:
A gamelan is a traditional musical ensemble from Indonesia, typically from the islands of Java and Bali, featuring a variety of instruments such as metallophones, xylophones, kendang (drums) and gongs; bamboo flutes, bowed and plucked strings. Vocalists may also be included. For most Indonesians, gamelan music is an integral part of Indonesian culture.[1]The term refers more to the set of instruments than to the players of those instruments. A gamelan is a set of instruments as a distinct entity, built and tuned to stay together – instruments from different gamelan are generally not interchangeable.
The pictures can't give you even close to a good idea of what this kind of music sounded like, so here's a video of the same group when they performed at the DeJong Concert Hall.
Also, search for "BYU Gamelan Bintang Wahyu" on YouTube, and you'll find a video of them playing at the Tabernacle last year. For some reason, that one wouldn't load onto my blog.
It was beautiful, in a surreal kind of way. The first song sounded like raindrops on a tin roof--discordant and haunting. But there was one player in the middle of the group who kind of led the others, and at multiple points throughout the song he'd suddenly bang his mallet harder than the others, and in unison the others would chime in. It was like lightning cracking and rain intensifying. It was mesmerizing.
The second song used those bamboo rattles pictured above, and the instrumentalists played them like a bell choir. Each rattle had a slightly different sound. All together, they sounded like skeleton bones rattling together. If you closed your eyes and listened, you could imagine a bunch of skeletons dancing together. Appropriately, they said that song is often played at funerals.
The final song was super fast compared to the others. All the xylophone-like instruments played in major chords (unlike the other songs), but then there were flautists playing along, and their tunes were very minor key. It seemed almost grating at first, but then the more I listened the more I realized that the musicians were extremely skilled, the musical sound is just so different from what I usually hear.
I love learning about different cultures, and I feel like you can learn a lot about a people from the music they produce.
Maybe you can tell from the video a bit, but what I found most impressive about playing the gamelan was that those playing the xylophone-type instruments had to not only hit the right chimes at the right time, but then they had to use their other hand to still the chimes a second later. It was like a bizarre game of Simon or Bop-It, with the mallet leading the way, and the free hand following close behind. I can't imagine the kind of concentration you'd need to play so fast and so accurately.
In conclusion, it was a very memorable night. It was a nice way to remind me that I have accomplished something big in my life. Graduating from college is no easy feat. I'll be so proud to call myself a BYU alumna.
