Dennis Murphy

Who was Dennis Murphy?

Dennis Murphy was a composer, musician, instrument maker, artist, and playwright.

Dennis Murphy was one of the fathers of American gamelan. Lou Harrison credits Murphy as being the first North American to build gamelan instruments. He composed numerous works and shadow plays for gamelan.

Starting around 1959 or 1960, while earning a Master's degree in theory and composition at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in Madison, Murphy got interested in gamelan during a survey course which included a section on ethnomusicology. He heard a recording of Javanese gamelan and was hooked. About that time, the head of the economics department, L. Reed Tripp, returned from Java where he had been on a Ford Foundation grant. While in Indonesia, Tripp's two young sons became involved with a children's gamelan group. The boys loved it so much that their parents bought a small slendro gamelan and shipped it to their home in Madison. Then Mrs. Tripp called Bob Crane, a composition professor, and asked if he knew anyone who would like to try Javanese Gamelan. So Crane, Murphy and his wife Pat, and few more people started learning what the children could show them, and it went from there.