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Gamelan
 

A gamelan is a kind of musical ensemble of Indonesian origin typically featuring metallophones, xylophones, drums, and gongs. The term can be used to refer either to the set of instruments or the players of those instruments. The word "gamelan" comes from the Javanese word "gamel", meaning to strike or handle.

Instruments and characteristics

Gamelan orchestras are common to the Indonesian islands of Java, Madura, Bali, and Lombok (and other Sunda Islands), in a wide variety of ensemble sizes and formations. In Bali and Lombok today, and in Java through the 18th century, the term "gong" has been preferred to or synonymous with gamelan. Traditions of gamelan have long been established in the Philippines, Malaysia and Suriname due to emigration, trade, or diplomacy. More recently, through immigration and local enthusiasm, gamelan ensembles have become active throughout Europe, The Americas, Asia, and Australia.

Although gamelan ensembles sometimes include solo and choral voices, plucked and/or bowed string and wind instruments, they are most notable for the large number of metal percussion instruments. A central Javanese gamelan ensemble includes:

Metals used include bronze, brass, and iron, with a 10:3 copper-to-tin bronze alloy usually considered the best material. In addition, there are gamelan ensembles composed entirely of bamboo-keyed instruments, of bamboo flutes, of zithers, or of unaccompanied voices with the functions of metallophones or gongs in the metal ensemble transferred to surrogates.

Gamelan music typically is rhythmmically organized by nested cycles, a feature that ethnomusicologists call "colotomy." The most prominent colotomic part is the gong ageng which is said to rule the ensemble. Other instruments mark off shorter sections of time within that span. On top of this rhythmic framework, other instruments play a basic melody (balungan) and elaborating parts (panerusan, including singing and non-percussion instruments) in a complex heterophony.

Varieties of gamelan ensembles

Balinese gamelan varieties

Javanese gamelan varieties

Other Indonesian gamelan varieties

Non-Indonesian gamelan varieties

Cultural context

Gamelan is often used to accompany dance, wayang puppet performances, and rituals. It is especially associated with the royalty, such as the sultan of Yogyakarta, and is played when they visit. Certain gamelans are associated with rituals, such as the Gamelan Sekaten, which is used in celebration of Mawlid an-Nabi (Muhammad's birthday).

In the West, gamelan is often performed in a concert context, but may also incorporate dance or wayang.

Tuning

The tuning and construction of a gamelan orchestra is a complex process. Gamelans use four tuning systems: sléndro, pélog, 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. Colin McPhee (1996) remarks, "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." However, this is a view that is contested by some teachers of gamelan, and there have been efforts to combine multiple ensembles and tuning structures into one gamelan so as to ease transportation issues at the times of festivals. One such ensemble is gamelan Manikasanti, which can play the repertoire of many different ensembles.

A peculiarity of gamelans is that, although the intervals between notes in a scale are very close to identical for different instruments within each gamelan, the intervals vary from one gamelan to the next. The occasion for the word approximately is that it is common in Balinese gamelan that instruments are played in pairs which are tuned slightly apart so as to produce interference beating which are 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.

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 near-diatonic madenda scale and was played by Sundanese musicians.) 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 pentatonic scale appears in his music of this time and afterward, 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.

Direct homages to gamelan music are to be found in works for western instruments by Béla Bartók, Francis Poulenc, Olivier Messiaen, Colin McPhee and Benjamin Britten. In more recent times, American composers such as Barbara Benary, Lou Harrison, Dennis Murphy, 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. Experimental pop groups His Name is Alive and Xiu Xiu use Gamelan percussion in many songs. The experimental art-rock band King Crimson, while not using Gamelan instruments, used interlocking rhythmic paired guitars that were influenced by Gamelan. http://www.progressiveears.com/frippbook/ch09.htm

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.

Gamelan outside Indonesia

Australia

Most of the gamelans in Australia are associated with universities or schools. One of the most famous is the gamelan Digul, made in the Digul prison camp in 1927 and brought to Australia during World War II. http://www.monash.edu.au/muma/exhibitions/past/1999/gamelan.html and http://www.urpress.com/80460887.HTM

The Netherlands

The first gamelans outside of Indonesia were in the Netherlands, the country which had colonized the islands. Before World War II, the Javanese dancer Jodjana had a small gamelan group in the Netherlands, which accompanied his performances. He had to train Dutch musicians. Early during the war, the resistance fighter Bernard IJzerdraat Sr. was killed by the Germans. His son Bernard then left home and in Amsterdam heard a group of stranded javanese sailors play a gamelan at the Colonial Museum (later: Museum of the Tropics). He took lessons with them and soon started his own group with friends from his school in Haarlem. This became Babar Layar, the first serious gamelan group in the Netherlands. Babar Layar played in Yogyakarta style, after Bernard studied one full year in the kraton. They often accompanied Mas Pakun, a Yogyanese dancer who studied theology in Amsterdam. When Mantle Hood came to Amsterdam to write his dissertation on pathet, Bernard trained him to play gamelan. (Mas Pakun died a few years later in a tragic traffic accident after his return to Indonesia.) Mantle Hood later taught ethnomusicology in the U.S., and is regarded as the founding father of gamelan in that country. Bernard married a Sundanese wife and emigrated to Indonesia in 1954, where he became known as Suryabrata, working for RRI Jakarta and Universitas Nasional.

In 1971, the ethnomusicologist Ernst Heins invited K.R.M.T. Ronosuripto of the Mangkunagaran palace, Surakarta to Amsterdam. This gave a new impetus to the performance of gamelan and Javanese dance in the Netherlands. Together with Mr and Mrs Ronosuripto, the Amsterdam Gamelan group played many concerts and performances with Javanese dance and shadow puppetry (wayang kulit). Rien Baartmans, who as a child had been taking lessons from Bernard IJzerdraat, studied wayang and kendhang with Pak Ripto, which very much stimulated his own group Ngesthi Raras in Haarlem.

In 1978 the new gamelan society Naga acquired a gamelan from Solo. This gamelan was used by several groups, performing traditional and modern music for gamelan. In the same year Elsje Plantema (a musician specializing in Javanese gamelan) and Rien Baartmans (dhalang) founded Raras Budaya, with the aim of performing wayang kulit in Dutch. Between 1980 and 1992, Raras Budaya performed numerous wayang plays. When Naga was dissolved in 1995, their gamelan was given to Raras Budaya, and is still used by gamelan groups conducted by Elsje Plantema and Jurrien Sligter (a musician who is interested in modern compositions for gamelan).

Today, several Javanese and Balinese gamelan groups are active in the Netherlands. Javanese style groups exist in Amsterdam, Delft, The Hague, Renkum and Arnhem. Balinese groups can be found in Amsterdam and The Hague. A Sundanese group exists in Leiden (Leyde).

North America

Gamelan music was introduced to the Western hemisphere at the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago. A Sundanese gamelan was imported as part of the Java Village exhibit and was acquired by the Field Museum of Natural History following the exposition. After the gamelan was restored in the late 1970s, it was used for instruction by a community arts organization, which gave its first performance in May of 1978. The organization incorporated in 1980 as Friends of the Gamelan and continues to perform with two central Javanese gamelan sets that it has acquired.

Many schools, universities and other institutions in North America own sets of Gamelan instruments. These gamelans are typically played by mixed-gender groups of students, a practice that's rare in Indonesia for religious reasons. Among the earliest such groups were Wesleyan University and UCLA University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Gamelan Burat Wangi and Gamelan Kyai Dorodasih at California Institute of the Arts [http://calarts.edu/schools/music/programs/indonesian.html" target="_blank" >*, Gamelan Galak Tika at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Gamelan Lila Muni at Eastman School of Music, Gamelan Semara Santi at Swarthmore College, Gamelan Saraswati at University of Maryland, College Park, Gamelan Kembang Atangi at Loyola Marymount University, Gamelan Giri Kusuma at Pomona College, and the Javanese Court Gamelan, “Son of the Good Earth,” at Creighton University.

There are also professional gamelan ensembles. Gamelan Son of Lion, a group that focuses on newly-composed music by both the composer-members of the group and invited composers from around the world.

Since 1979 a few gamelan ensembles have been organized as community arts organizations or clubs. The first Javanese community group was the Boston Village Gamelan in Massachusetts, and the first Balinese community group was Gamelan Sekar Jaya in California. Other community Balinese gamelan ensembles are Gamelan Mitra Kusuma in Washington, D.C., and Gamelan Tunas Mekar [http://www.tunasmekar.org/ in Denver. Gamelan Sari Raras is an active Javanese ensemble in Berkeley, California; the name was given to the group by Widiyanto (aka Midiyanto), and the instruments, brought to the U.S. from Java in 1971, are named Kyai Udan Mas, or Venerable Golden Rain. Gamelan X (formerly Onepeoplevoice) is based in Oakland.

United Kingdom

There are over fifty gamelans of various kinds in the United Kingdom, many of them based at colleges or community centres. University of York was the first British university to purchase a gamelan, named Kyai Sekar Patak; it is still played by students there. The oldest community Gamelan group in the UK is the Oxford Gamelan Society, which plays Kyai Madu Laras, donated to the University of Oxford's Bate Collection of musical instruments by the Indonesian ministry of Forestry in 1985. Other active groups exist at the University of Cambridge playing Gamelan Duta Laras, the University of Durham, Kingston University and City University London, amongst others. A program of classes usually runs at the South Bank Centre, which also has a performing group of gamelan professionals, the South Bank Gamelan Players. The Glasgow based Gamelan Naga Mas regularly gives performances and introductory workshops, teacher and special needs courses in Scotland.

See also

Further reading

  • Balinese Music (1991) by Michael Tenzer, ISBN 0945971303. Included is an excellent sampler CD of Balinese Music.
  • Gamelan: Cultural Interaction and Musical Development in Central Java (1995) by Sumarsam, ISBN 0226780104 (cloth) 0226780112 (paper)
  • Music in Java: History Its Theory and Its Technique (1949) edited by Jaap Kunst, ISBN 9024715199. An appendix of this book includes some statistical data on intervals in scales used by gamelans.
  • Gamelan Gong Kebyar: The Art of Twentieth-Century Balinese Music (2000) by Michael Tenzer, ISBN 0226792811 and ISBN 0226792838.
  • Music in Bali (1966) by Colin McPhee. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Footnotes

External links

Groups

Listening

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This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the "Gamelan".

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