Through the Looking Glass

Do you remember those jewelry boxes for little girls that featured a small plastic ballerina which popped up and twirled steadily before a gilt-edged mirror until the lid was shut again? If it’s where you kept your sparkly treasures, be prepared for a flashback as Peter Griggs’s Through the Looking Glass unfolds. The music of Indonesia has served as a pinnacle of the exotic in the ethnomusicology departments of countless American universities, but the gamelan construction presented in Through the Looking Glass—two groups of identical instruments playing melodic figures in canon—is lovely and affecting in ways that can exist independently of the music’s heritage. The listener, invited to meditatively let go in the cyclic metallic hammering, might just as easily wander down paths close to home as be carried across oceans. Griggs’s work takes me back to childhood, when glittery pieces of cut glass stood in for the glamour of an adult world we did not comprehend.

–MS