Dennis Murphy (musician)

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.

About that time, the head of the economics department, L. Reed Tripp, returned from Java where he had been on a Ford Foundation grant.

The whole story is described in "The Autochthonous American Gamelan", Murphy's thesis written while working towards his PhD in ethnomusicology from Wesleyan University in Connecticut.

[3] He named the gamelan "Venerable Sir Voice of Thoom" and invented an entire cosmology and artificial language to go with it (Thoomese).

Instruments were hammered out of steel, or made from found objects such as a car hubcap, soup cans, or an antique milk-strainer.

He also wrote a number of plays which might be loosely categorized with the Theatre of the Absurd, among them "The Goat Painter" and "The Half-Moon Window".