A
gamelan is a
traditional musical ensemble from
Indonesia, typically from the islands of
Java and
Bali, featuring a variety of
instruments such as
metallophones,
xylophones,
kendang (drums) and
gongs;
bamboo flutes, bowed and plucked
strings.
Vocalists may also be included. For most Indonesians, gamelan music is an integral part of Indonesian culture.
[1]
The term refers more to the set of instruments than to the players of those instruments. A gamelan is a set of instruments as a distinct entity, built and tuned to stay together – instruments from different gamelan are generally not interchangeable.
Terminology
The word
gamelan, referring only to the instruments, comes from the low Javanese word
gamel, referring to a type of hammer like a blacksmith's hammer.
[2] The term
karawitan refers to the playing of gamelan instruments, and comes from the word
rawit, meaning 'intricate' or 'finely worked'.
[2] The word derives from the
Javanese word of
Sanskrit origin,
rawit, which refers to the smooth, elegant sense idealised in Javanese music. Another word from this root,
pangrawit, means a person with that sense, and is used as an honorific when discussing esteemed gamelan musicians. The high Javanese word for
gamelan is
gangsa, formed either from the words
tembaga and
rejasa (copper and tin) or
tiga and
sedasa (three and ten), referring to the materials used in bronze gamelan construction or their proportions.
[3]
History of gamelan music
Musicians performing musical ensemble, bas-relief of
Borobudur
Gamelan orchestra (1870-1891)
The gamelan predates the
Hindu-Buddhist culture that dominated Indonesia in its earliest records and instead represents a native art form. The instruments developed into their current form during the
Majapahit Empire.
[4] In contrast to the heavy
Indian influence in other art forms, the only obvious
Indian influence in gamelan music is in the Javanese style of singing.
[5]
In Javanese mythology, the gamelan was created by Sang Hyang Guru in
Saka era 167 (c. AD 230), the god who ruled as king of all Java from a palace on the Maendra mountain in
Medang Kamulan (now
Mount Lawu). He needed a signal to summon the gods and thus invented the gong. For more complex messages, he invented two other Gongs, thus forming the original gamelan set.
[6]
The earliest image of a musical ensemble is found on the 8th century
Borobudur temple, Central Java. Musical instruments such as the bamboo flute, bells, drums in various sizes, lute, and bowed and plucked string instruments were identified in this image. However it lacks metallophones and xylophones. Nevertheless, the image of this musical ensemble is suggested to be the ancient form of the gamelan.
In the palaces of
Java are the oldest known ensembles, the
Munggang and Kodokngorek gamelans, apparently from the 12th century. These formed the basis of a "loud style". A different, "soft style" developed out of the
kemanak tradition and is related to the traditions of singing
Javanese poetry, in a manner which is often believed to be similar to performance of modern
bedhaya dance. In the 17th century, these loud and soft styles mixed, and to a large extent the variety of modern gamelan styles of Bali, Java, and Sunda resulted from different ways of mixing these elements. Thus, despite the seeming diversity of styles, many of the same theoretical concepts, instruments, and techniques are shared between the styles.
[7]
Varieties of gamelan ensembles
Javanese gamelan in Malaysia
There is a variation of gamelan ensembles are distinguished by their collection of instruments and use of voice, tunings, repertoire, style, and cultural context. In general, no two gamelan ensembles are the same, and those that arose in prestigious courts are often considered to have their own style. Certain styles may also be shared by nearby ensembles, leading to a regional style.
The varieties are generally grouped geographically, with the principal division between the styles favored by the
Balinese,
Javanese, and
Sundanese peoples. The Madurese also had their own style of gamelan, although it is no longer in use, and the last orchestra is kept at the Sumenep palace.
[8] Sundanese gamelan is often associated with
Gamelan Degung, a Sundanese musical ensemble that utilises a subset of modified gamelan instruments with a particular mode of
pelog scale. Balinese gamelan is often associated with the virtuosity and rapid changes of tempo and dynamics of
Gamelan gong kebyar, its best-known style. Other popular Balinese styles include Gamelan and
kecak, also known as the "monkey chant." Javanese gamelan was largely dominated by the courts of the 19th century central Javanese rulers, each with its own style, but overall is known for a slower, more meditative style than that of Bali. Although Javanese gamelan can be made from steel, the better instruments are made of cast brass. The two kinds of instruments are tuned in different ways.
Outside of the main core on
Java and
Bali, gamelans have spread through migration and cultural interest, new styles sometimes resulting as well. Malay gamelans are designed in ways that are similar to the Javanese gamelan except they lack most of the elaborating instruments and are tuned in a near-equidistant slendro, often using a western Bb or C as a tuning basis. Javanese emigrants to Suriname play gamelan in a style close to that found in Central Javanese villages. Gamelan is also related to the
Filipino kulintang ensemble. There is also a wide variety of gamelan in the West, including both traditional and experimental ensembles.
In oral Javanese culture distinctions are made between complete or incomplete, archaic and modern, and large standard and small village gamelan (On Concepts and Classifications of Musical Instruments, Margaret Kartomi, 1990, U. of Chicago Press, p. 91). The various archaic ensembles are distinguished by their unique combinations of instruments and possession of obsolete instruments such as the bell-tree (
byong) in the 3-toned
gamelan kodhok ngorek. Regionally variable village gamelan are often distinguished from standard gamelan (which have the
rebab as the main melodic instrument) by their inclusion of a double-reed wind (
selompret,
slompret, or
sompret) in addition to variable drum and gong components, with some also including the shaken bamboo
angklung or other instruments not usually associated with gamelan.
Cultural context
In Indonesia, gamelan often accompanies dance,
wayang puppet performances, or rituals and ceremonies. Typically players in the gamelan will be familiar with dance moves and poetry, while dancers are able to play in the ensemble.
[9] In
wayang, the
dalang (puppeteer) must have a thorough knowledge of gamelan, as he gives the cues for the music. Gamelan can be performed by itself – in "klenengan" style, or for radio broadcasts – but concerts in the Western style are not traditional.
[10]
Gamelan's role in rituals is so important that there is a Javanese saying, "It is not official until the gong is hung".
[11] Some performances are associated with royalty, such as visits by the
sultan of Yogyakarta. Certain gamelans are associated with specific rituals, such as the
Gamelan Sekaten, which is used in celebration of
Mawlid an-Nabi (
Muhammad's birthday). In
Bali, almost all religious rituals include gamelan performance. Gamelan is also used in the ceremonies of the
Catholic church in Indonesia.
[12] Certain pieces are designated for starting and ending performances or ceremonies. When an "ending" piece (such as "
Udan Mas") is begun, the audience will know that the event is nearly finished and will begin to leave. Certain pieces are also believed to possess magic powers, and can be used to ward off evil spirits.
[11]
Gamelan is frequently played on the radio. For example, the
Pura Pakualaman gamelan performs live on the radio every Minggu Pon (a day in the 35-day cycle of the
Javanese calendar).
[11] In major towns, the
Radio Republik Indonesia employs professional musicians and actors, and broadcast programs of a wide variety of gamelan music and drama.
[13]
In the court tradition of central
Java, gamelan is often played in the
pendopo, an open pavilion with a cavernous, double-pitched roof, no side walls, and a hard marble or tile floor. The instruments are placed on a platform to one side, which allows the sound to reverberate in the roof space and enhances the acoustics.
[14]
In
Bali, the Gamelan instruments are all kept together in a balé, a large open space with a roof over the top of it and several open sides. Gambelan (the
Balinese term) are owned by
banjars, nobility or temples and kept in their respective compounds.
In case of banjar ownership the instruments are all kept there together because people believe that all the instruments belong to the community as a whole and that no one person has ownership over an instrument. Not only is this where the instruments are stored, but this is also the practice space for the sekaha (Gamelan orchestra group). The open walls allow for the music to flow out into the community where the rest of the people may enjoy it. Inside closed rooms Balinese gamelan is inaudible, because it easily tresspasses the
threshold of pain. This does not apply to small ensembles like a gamelan
gendér.
The sekaha is led by a single instructor whose job it is in the community to lead this group and to come up with new pieces. When they are working on a new piece, the instructor will lead the group in practice and help the group form the new music as they are practicing. When the instructor creates a new song, he leaves enough open for interpretation that the group can improvise, so the group will write the music as they practice it.
There are many styles in Balinese gamelan.
Kebyar is one of the most recent ones. Some Balinese Gamelan groups constantly change their music by taking older pieces they know and mixing them together, as well as trying new variations on their music. Their music constantly changes because they believe that music should grow and change; the only exception to this is with their most sacred songs which they do not change. A single new piece of music can take several months before it is completed.
Men and women usually perform in separate groups, with the exception in Java of the
pesindhen, the female singer who performs with male groups.
[13]
In the twenty-five countries outside of Indonesia that have gamelan, music is often performed in a concert context or as part of ceremonies of expat communities
[15]. It may also incorporate
dance or
wayang.
Tuning
The tuning and construction of a gamelan orchestra is a complex process.
[16] Javanese gamelans use two
tuning systems:
sléndro and
pélog. There are other tuning systems such as
degung (exclusive to Sunda, or West Java), and
madenda (also known as
diatonis, similar to a European
natural minor scale). In central Javanese gamelan,
sléndro is a system with five notes to the
diapason (
octave), fairly evenly spaced, while
pélog has seven notes to the octave, with uneven intervals, usually played in five note subsets of the seven-tone collection. This results in sound quite different from music played in a western tuning system. Many gamelan orchestras will include instruments in each tuning, but each individual instrument will only be able to play notes in one. The precise tuning used differs from ensemble to ensemble, and give each ensemble its own particular flavour. The intervals between notes in a scale are very close to identical for different instruments
within each gamelan, but the intervals vary from one gamelan to the next.
Colin McPhee remarked, "Deviations in what is considered the same scale are so large that one might with reason state that there are as many scales as there are gamelans."
[17] However, this view is contested by some teachers of gamelan, and there have been efforts to combine multiple ensembles and tuning structures into one gamelan to ease transportation at festival time. One such ensemble is gamelan Manikasanti, which can play the repertoire of many different ensembles.
Balinese gamelan instruments are commonly played in pairs which are tuned slightly apart to produce interference
beats, ideally at a consistent speed for all pairs of notes in all registers. It is thought that this contributes to the very "busy" and "shimmering" sound of gamelan ensembles. In the religious ceremonies that contain gamelan, these interference beats are meant to give the listener a feeling of a god's presence or a stepping stone to a meditative state. The scale roughly approximates that of the phrygian mode of the Western major scale (E-E on the white keys of the piano), with the notes EFGBC corresponding to the note positions 12356 in the slendro scale used by most gamelan.
[18]
As well as the non-western octave and the use of beats,
Javanese gamelan uses a combination of tempo and density known as
Irama, relating how many beats on the
saron panerus instrument there are to notes in the core melody or
balungan; density is considered primary.
[19]
Notation
Gamelan music is traditionally not notated and began as an
oral tradition. In the 19th century, however, the kratons of
Yogyakarta and
Surakarta developed distinct notations for transcribing the repertoire. These were not used to read the music, which was memorized, but to preserve pieces in the court records. The Yogyanese notation is a checkerboard notation, which uses six or seven vertical lines to represent notes of higher pitch in the
balungan (core melody), and horizontal lines which represent the series of beats, read downward with time. The fourth vertical line and every fourth horizontal line (completing a
gatra) are darkened for legibility. Symbols on the left indicate the
colotomic structure of gongs and so forth, while specific drum features are notated in symbols to the right. The Solonese notation reads horizontally, like Western notation, but does not use barlines. Instead, note values and rests are squiggled between the notes.
[20]
Today this notation is relatively rare, and has been replaced by
kepatihan notation, which is a cipher system. Kepatihan notation developed around 1900 at the
kepatihan in Surakarta. The pitches are numbered (see the articles on the scales
slendro and
pélog for an explanation of how), and are read across with dots and lines indicating the register and time values. Like the palace notations, however, they record only the balungan part, and to a large extent what is heard relies on memorized patterns the performers call upon during performance. However, teachers have also devised certain notations, generally using kepatihan principles, for the
cengkok (melodic patterns) of each
elaborating instrument. In ethnomusicological studies, transcriptions are often made onto a Western staff, sometimes with unusual
clefs.
[21]
Influence on Western music
The gamelan has been appreciated by several western composers of
classical music, most famously
Claude Debussy who heard a Javanese gamelan play at the
Paris Exposition of 1889 (
World's Fair). (The gamelan Debussy heard was in the
slendro scale and was played by Central Javanese musicians.
[22]) Despite his enthusiasm, direct citations of gamelan scales, melodies, rhythms, or ensemble textures have not been located in any of Debussy's own compositions. However, the equal-tempered
whole tone scale appears in his music of this time and afterward,
[23] and a Javanese gamelan-like heterophonic texture is emulated on occasion, particularly in "Pagodes", from
Estampes (solo piano, 1903), in which the
great gong's
cyclic punctuation is symbolized by a prominent perfect fifth.
The composer
Erik Satie, an influential contemporary of Debussy, also heard the Javanese gamelan play at the Paris Exposition of 1889. The repetitively hypnotic effects of the gamelan were incorporated into Satie's exotic
Gnossienne set for piano.
[24]
Direct homages to gamelan music are to be found in works for western instruments by
John Cage, particularly his
prepared piano pieces,
Colin McPhee,
Lou Harrison,
Béla Bartók,
Francis Poulenc,
Olivier Messiaen,
Pierre Boulez,
Bronislaw Kaper and
Benjamin Britten. In more recent times,
American composers such as
Henry Brant,
Steve Reich,
Philip Glass,
Dennis Murphy,
Loren Nerell,
Michael Tenzer,
Evan Ziporyn,
Daniel James Wolf and
Jody Diamond as well as
Australian composers such as
Peter Sculthorpe,
Andrew Schultz and
Ross Edwards have written several works with parts for gamelan instruments or full gamelan ensembles.
I Nyoman Windha is among contemporary Indonesian composers that have written compositions using western instruments along with Gamelan. Hungarian composer
György Ligeti wrote a piano étude called
Galamb Borong influenced by gamelan.
American folk guitarist
John Fahey included elements of gamelan in many of his late-60s sound collages, and again in his 1997 collaboration with
Cul de Sac,
The Epiphany of Glenn Jones. Influenced by gamelan,
[25] Robert Fripp used rhythmically interlocking guitars in his duets with
Adrian Belew in the
1981–1984 trilogy of albums (
Discipline,
Beat,
Three of a Perfect Pair) by rock band
King Crimson[26][27] and in "
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" on Fripp's album with
The League of Crafty Guitarists.
[28] The gamelan has also been used by British multi-instrumentalist
Mike Oldfield at least three times, "Woodhenge" (1979), "The Wind Chimes (Part II)" (1987) and "Nightshade" (2005).
On the debut EP of
Sonic Youth the track 'She's not Alone' has a gamelan timbre. Experimental pop groups
The Residents,
23 Skidoo (whose 1984 album was even titled
Urban Gamelan),
Mouse on Mars,
His Name Is Alive,
Xiu Xiu,
Macha,
Saudade,
The Raincoats and the
Sun City Girls have used gamelan percussion. Avant-garde performance band
Melted Men uses Balinese gamelan instruments as well as gamelan-influenced costumes and dance in their shows. The
Moodswinger built by
Yuri Landman gives gamelan–like clock and bell sounds, because of its
3rd bridge construction. Indonesian-Dutch composer
Sinta Wullur has integrated Western music and gamelan for opera.
Influence on contemporary music
In contemporary
Indonesian music scene, some groups fuse contemporary westernized
jazz fusion music with the legacy of traditional
ethnic music traditions of their people. In the case of
Krakatau and
SambaSunda, the bands from West Java, the traditional Sundanese
kacapi suling and gamelan degung Sunda orchestra is performed alongside drum set, keyboard and guitars. Other bands such as Bossanova Java were fused Javanese music with
bossanova, while the Kulkul band fuse jazz with Balinese gamelan.
The Indonesian singer
Anggun, often incorporated Indonesian traditional tunes of gamelan and tembang style of singing in her works. Typical gamelan tunes can be trace in several songs in her album
Snow on the Sahara such as "
Snow on the Sahara", "
A Rose in the Wind", and also in her collaboration works with
Deep Forest on "Deep Blue Sea" on their 2002 album,
Music Detected. Philippines born Indonesian singer
Maribeth Pascua also featuring gamelan tunes in her songs
Denpasar Moon and
Borobudur.
Recently, many Americans were first introduced to the sounds of gamelan by the popular anime film
Akira. Gamelan elements are used in this film to punctuate several exciting fight scenes, as well as to symbolize the emerging psychic powers of the tragic hero, Tetsuo. The gamelan in the film's score was performed by the members of the
Japanese musical collective
Geinoh Yamashirogumi, using their
semar pegulingan and
jegog ensembles. Gamelan and kecak are also used in the soundtrack to the video games
Secret of Mana and
Sonic Unleashed. The two opening credits of 1998 Japanese
Anime Neo Ranga use Balinese music (Kecak and
Gamelan gong kebyar). Each "waking up" of Ranga in the anime uses the Gong Kebyar theme. The musical soundtrack for the Sci Fi Channel series
Battlestar Galactica features extensive use of the gamelan, particularly in the 3rd season,
[29] as do
Alexandre Desplat's scores for
Girl With A Pearl Earring and
The Golden Compass.
James Newton Howard, who composed
Disney's 2001 feature film
Atlantis: The Lost Empire, chose Gamelan for the musical theme of the Altanteans.
[30]
Loops of gamelan music appear in electronic music. An early example is the Texas band
Drain's album
Offspeed and In There, which contains two tracks where trip-hop beats are matched with gamelan loops from Java and Bali and recent popular examples include the
Sofa Surfers' piece
Gamelan, or
EXEC_PURGER/.#AURICA extracting, a song sung by
Haruka Shimotsuki as part of the
Ar tonelico: Melody of Elemia soundtracks.
Javanese Gamelan (video)
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