For most of us, an utterance is a spoken expression. Ralph Waldo Emerson, describing the impulse to share a religious belief, said that “if utterance is denied, the thought lies like a burden on the man.”

For Gina Fatone, an ethnomusicologist who studies the psychology of music transmission, the term is both broader and more specific: Utterances “include physical gestures as well as vocalizations of all sorts,” she says.  “They are multimodal, and can include non-linguistic thought and communication.”

At a rehearsal of the �ֲ���ý Gamelan Orchestra in February, Associate Professor of Music Gina Fatone gives cues to Jade Donaldson ’18 of Wayne, N.J.

An associate professor of music, Fatone studies how people learn to play musical instruments and the intersection of music, gesture, and cognition. Her use of the term “utterance,” she says, is borrowed from gesture studies, where it typically describes a unit of communication.

The word “utterance” gets at something we often take for granted, Fatone says: that learning to play an instrument doesn’t always involve actually playing the instrument. Conducting-like gestures — utterances made with the hands by teachers — helps musicians find a more expressive way to play, creating a neurological connection between motion and sound.

Many teachers also use metaphors to get certain sounds out of their students. “There’s the image of stretching and relaxing an elastic band to get at a more pliable rhythm, for example,” Fatone says. It’s a metaphor valuable for students who are a bit too dependent on the metronome.

Fatone shares another example: how people learn the , a South Asian drum played in pairs. Traditionally, before they’re even allowed to touch the drums, tabla learners have to be able to speak what they’re going to play, using a specialized system of vocables that represent drum strokes.

From there, “their hands can much more easily utter the correct sounds on the instrument, because learning the voice of the drum with their own voice first has embedded the music in their system in a highly nuanced way that’s very salient,” Fatone says.

The utterances, in this case, are both the vocalizations — the singing — and the playing of the drums themselves.

“They can be conflated in our minds and our bodies so that we experience them as one unitary utterance,” she says.

Defining utterances more broadly, in other words, show us that music is more than sound. It’s where images, thought, and body come together in one expression.

A chorus of music rehearsals and practices often fills the halls of the Olin Arts Center. On Wednesday evening, the music included the Gamelan Ensemble, led by Associate Professor of Music Gina Fatone.

Featuring an array of metallophones and drums, gamelan is a percussion-based genre from the Indonesian cultures of Java and Bali. The arrangements are intricate, often involving precise interlocking patterns between different instruments to create a larger sound.

The rhythmic stress of gamelan is distinctive, with the accents generally falling at the end of the bar, which is difficult for an ear accustomed to Western music. “Being asked to hear it differently in a very fundamental way is challenging,” said Fatone.

Kinsey Moser '18 of Burke, Va., concentrates while learning a new pattern.

Moser strikes a metallophone known as a saron.

The �ֲ���ý Gamelan Ensemble, led by Associate Professor of Music Gina Fatone, rehearses at the Olin Arts Center in February.

Maddie McLean ’17 of Hood River, Ore., often seen belting out an Adele song with the Crosstones, is a newcomer to gamelan.

“A cappella is such a different beast: You have someone conducting. With this, you have to really listen to each other,” says McLean, who says that listening is helping to improve her counting and rhythm.

Kinsey Moser ’18 of Burke, Va., who grew up with traditional Korean music and dance, says she “wanted something completely different, and I didn’t think I could find another ensemble like this outside of college.”

Lecturer in Asian Studies Keiko Konoeda, in her second year at �ֲ���ý, is encouraging students in her classes to join. Konoeda finds some similarity to the gamelan in her past experiences. “Some of the music in gamelan sounds like old traditional Japanese,” she says.

From left, Kinsey Moser ’18 of Burke, Va., Lecturer in Asian Studies Keiko Konoeda, and Jade Donaldson ’18 of Wayne, N.J., practice the gamelan.

�ֲ���ý College presents performances of Indonesian shadow puppetry and gamelan music at 8 p.m. Friday, March 19, and 3 p.m. Saturday, March 20, in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall, 75 Russell St.

The performances are open to the public at no cost.

The performers are the Gamelan Mawar Mekar (“blossom of inspiration”), �ֲ���ý’ own gamelan orchestra; singer Jody Diamond, a New-Hampshire based international expert on gamelan; and puppetry master Joko Susilo, a visiting Fulbright scholar at �ֲ���ý this year and a lecturer in the Department of Music at the University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand.

�ֲ���ý is unique in Maine and distinguished nationally for its resources in these performing arts, including the 4-year-old gamelan ensemble and an extensive collection of shadow puppets — around 250 — on permanent loan by David Eisler, of Dover, N.H.

The gamelan is the traditional orchestra of Java and Bali that is most familiar to the rest of the world. Its gongs, drums and xylophones are played according to systems of pitch and timing very different from typical Western music. The players in the �ֲ���ý ensemble include students and faculty, and work under the direction of visiting assistant professors of music Gina Fatone and Rose Pruiksma.

The shadow-puppet story for the performances, Pruiksma explains, comes from the Mahabharata, an ancient Hindu epic of India brought to Java by Indian colonists hundreds of years ago. Titled Bima Builds a Kingdom, the tale depicts the character Bima cutting down a magic forest, fighting giants, falling under a magic spell and being freed by an ogre.

“While a traditional performance of this story could last all night, our version will be about an hour and a half long,” Pruiksma says.

The gamelan will also take part in �ֲ���ý’ World Music Weekend next month. The group will perform with the �ֲ���ý Steel Pan Orchestra on Saturday, April 3, and will welcome MIT’s Balinese Gamelan Galak Tika for a concert on Sunday, April 4.