You don’t need a degree from Juilliard to play music in Hyde Park.

You can simply head down to the Union Church Tuesday nights, where free beginners lessons in Javanese gamelan offer an ensemble music-making experience to anyone who can hold a mallet.

“I’m a dedicated amateur,” said Anne Northrup, a television documentary producer who co-teaches the classes with Carolyn Johnson, an administrator and lecturer at the University of Chicago.

Northrup and Johnson are board members of Chicago’s Friends of the Gamelan, Inc., a not-for-profit corporation that sponsors the lessons. “Gamelan offers a different way of playing music,” said Northrup, who has been playing since 1982. “I can do it on a regular basis without practicing four hours a day.”

The word “gamelan” is an Indonesian verb meaning “to strike.” It is also the Indonesian name for the ensemble of drum, gong, xylophone, metallophone and flute instruments used

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The trumpet wailed as it bent down a half step. Mingling with dripping alien drones for a beat, the note dribbled over throbbing bass notes and into a fatal battery of rimshots that left a heavy echo in the gallery air.

Applause.

Though the improvisational, post-bop jazz-trio Tigersmilk hadn’t made music together in almost a year and a half, during a rare 90-minute set in the gallery of the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago Oct. 12 they gelled, swung, and stopped on a dime, according to Hamza Walker, associate curator and concert organizer at the society for 13 years.

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Even in the dim nightclub light, the golden “Y” around his neck glittered. Clad in a pastel tuxedo and armed with only a microphone and recording device, Lord of the Yum Yum wailed and boomed, jived and gyrated, turning classical music into a wacky, modern performance piece.

After a half hour, Yum Yum took his bow and minutes later the man behind the act, Paul Velat, casually returned to the main floor of the Bucktown nightclub Subterranean. In comparison to his zany alter-ego, Velat seemed unassuming, dressed in jeans and drinking a $2 Schlitz from the bar. Though he spoke of his early years in punk rock bands as an influence, children inspire much of his routine, he said. While Velat indulges his passion for performance art on weekends as Yum Yum, during the week he teaches general music at Chicago elementary and middle schools.

“It’s mostly little kids,” said Velat, 33, about where he gets his ideas. “I tell them to do something like ‘Become something green.’ Their reactions are so important. They can go in a completely new direction.”

To Velat, his two jobs are not different.

“Teaching is very similar to performing. You make a lot of preparations. You’re up in front of a crowd. With teaching you’re trying to leave with something,” he said. “Well, I do try to leave the crowd with something too.”

In Bucktown on Sunday, Velat was one of six artists performing at the Consumatron.com First Annual Revue, an exhibition sponsored by the blog Consumatron.com to explore the different possibilities of performance art.

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