‘Pangkur’ is the keystone of the repertoire of central Javanese gamelan, a tune that anyone acquainted with the music is likely to meet week in, week out. It’s ubiquitous because it can be played in myriad different ways by varying tuning, mode, instrumentation, rhythmic style, vocals, and so on.

But do you really need two whole CDs of it? That's a lot of ‘Pangkur’. There's some beautiful music on both, but the point seems to be more to educate than entertain. Pangkur One uses a full gamelan orchestra, with loud bronze percussion laying down the basic form and softer, elaborating instruments filling in the gaps. Pangkur Two is more diverse. It uses a smaller ensemble based around soft instruments such as metallophones, xylophone, zither and the two-string rebab fiddle, and foregrounds the singers, exploring the sung poetry that forms the piece's DNA. But it's still not what you'd call a varied diet.

This is the musical equivalent of academic publishing, aimed at devotees and completists more than someone who wanders into a record shop with a £20 note and an open mind. There's no effort to reach out – the liner notes will be impenetrable to anyone who doesn't already know the music's vocabulary – and the overall effect was to make me wish that someone would put together the gamelan equivalent of Buda's mighty Ethiopiques compilation; a disc that focuses on good tunes, aimed at people who are into music, rather than people who are into musicology.