Introduction To Gamelan

The gamelan is at the center of the art-music tradition of Indonesia. It may range in size from a few to over 75 instruments. The basic melodic instrument is the saron (bronze xylophone), accompanied by various gongs, a kind of violin, a recorder-flute and/or a zither; the group is led by a drummer. As in medieval Western music, there are two kinds of gamelan playing, one emphasizing the bronze instruments (comparable to medieval haut, or loud, consorts) and the other the wind and stringed instruments (bas, or soft, groups). A similar differentiation exists in Indochinese music in the contrast between the percussion-dominated pi phat band of Thailand and the string-dominated mahori bands of Thailand and Cambodia. Gamelan playing, particularly of the softer type, often accompanies solo and unison choral singing of classical poetry (music is connected with most of Indonesian literature). Southeast Asian vocal performance--like that of a great deal of non-Western art music--is characterized by tense, high, often nasal voice production; this is one of many alternatives being explored by the more experimental 20th-century Western composers and performers.

Gamelan Orchestra

The gamelan is the indigenous orchestra of Java and Bali, consisting largely of several varieties of gongs and various sets of tuned instruments that are struck with mallets.
The gongs are either suspended vertically or, as with the knobbed-centre, kettle-shaped bonang, placed flat. Percussive melodic instruments include sets of tuned bonangs, xylophones (the gambang kayu), and metallophones (these are instruments with a series of tuned metal plates, either suspended over a resonance trough or on resonance tubes).
A sustained melody is played either by the bamboo flute (the suling) or by a bowed string instrument (rebab) or is sung--the last especially when, as often occurs, the gamelan is used to accompany theatrical performances, or wayang. The voice is then part of the orchestral texture. Dominating these two groups of instruments is the drum (the kendang), which unites them and acts as leader.

No two gamelans are precisely alike tonally, for each instrument is tuned only to the gamelan for which it is intended rather than to an external standard of pitch. A gamelan typically consists of two sets of instruments, one tuned to the scale of slendro (in which the octave is divided into five tones roughly equidistant) and the other to pelog (a scale consisting of seven notes of varying intervals of which five are given principal stress). The modes (patet) of gamelan music are determined by the relative placement on either scale of the basic note (dong) and its fifth above and fifth below. (A fifth is an interval more or less the size of that formed by five adjacent white keys on a piano.)

The highly developed polyphony (multipart music) or heterophony (music in which one part varies a melody played simultaneously in another part) of the gamelan has a rhythmic origin. A nuclear theme extends over a number of "bars" (almost invariably in 4/4 time), against which other instruments play a largely independent countermelody. Another group plays rhythmic paraphrases of this theme, and a fourth group fills out the texture with delicate rhythmic patterns. Highly important are the punctuating, or colotomic, instruments that divide the musical sentence, marking, as it were, the commas, semicolons, and periods. This last-named function is done with the big gong. Over this shimmering, variegated pattern of hammered sound floats the uninterrupted melodic line of the voice, the flute, or the rebab.

Colotomic structure, in music, is the use of specified instruments to mark off established time intervals. In the tuned percussion ensembles (gamelan) of Java and Bali, for instance, a musical unit of 16 measures may be marked by four instruments: a small gong striking once every odd-numbered measure; a larger gong striking each 4th, 8th, 12th, and 16th measure; another gong striking each 6th, 10th, and 14th; and the large gong ageng sounding in the 16th.
Other examples of colotomic structure occur in the gagaku, or court music, of Japan (two- and four-measure divisions marked by a drum and hanging gong) and in the pi phat (percussion and oboe) ensembles of Thailand.