| 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. |
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