learning to play the gamelon!

what a nice surprise it was to come back from my walk on the beach this morning and find the gamelon chimes that the farmer promised me in a week already sitting there waitng for me! the security guard is the gardeners son and both of them are gamelon players...the gardener having taught his son at a young age, and he himself an excellent player...so the guard agreed to teach me my first lesson...whow!!!slow down!! he "gameloned out "about 100 notes and said "now you tryZ"and handed me the sticks...everything about balinese music is entirely different than western music, as far as i can tell...the scale, the rhythm, the harmony...
i wanted to try and learn just the way he was teaching me, and not to impose my western skills to it, ( which would have meant, giving each chime a number and taking a piece of paper and writing down the melody according to counts and notes...but i thought, lets just try and listen, internalize it, relax, and let the body learn this....ugh!! i was thrown back to when i was studying tai chi for the first time with my japanese teacher....who did the same thing...just demonstrated and said, "now you"....and since i couldn't fathom even the first step or remember it a minute later, i felt so incompetent! incapable, stupid...
and i tried everything: writing , drawing, photographing, with words, with pictures...anything,,,just to have some control and success..and in the end when i told him after weeks, that i just can't do it...he laughed and said that it took him 2 years to learn it, and that israelis always want everything quick so he thought i do too...and that it will come in time,. just relax. no clock is ticking...and today, 10 years later, i still do tai chi every morning and laugh at how flowing and simple it is, and how excrutiatingly difficult it was in the beginning...so...that is the gamelon...and i just asked him to repeat about 100 times what he played..and i try and try and forget, and ask again. and we shall see....and haddie came and saw me trying and said: can't you just play whatever you want on it? and not have to copy him? and i realized that , sure, i can, but what interests me and fascinates me is just this balinese music, in addition to a hand made musical instrument from bamboo pieces...and i would like to enter that world too..so ...we shall hear!