Gamelan

Bronze ensembles of Java and Bali, where gongs, metallophones and drums ring out a cycle that marks time

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Gamelan is the bronze ensemble music of Java and Bali, where gongs, metallophones and drums ring out a cycle and the ensemble itself marks time.

Origins and era

Metallophones and drums already appear in eighth- and ninth-century reliefs at Borobudur, and the courts and temples of Java and Bali later developed their own line-ups. The Central Javanese courts of Yogyakarta and Surakarta preserved a large repertoire, while Balinese village temples played faster with denser interlocking. The 1889 Paris Exposition brought a Javanese gamelan, and Debussy and later Western composers heard the sound. In the twentieth century Colin McPhee and Lou Harrison wrote it into Western works.

What you hear

Metallophones, gongs of several sizes, drums, flute and voices make up the ensemble. Melody is layered across metallophones, one layer stating the skeleton and another adding figuration, so the parts interlock. Gongs mark phrases at fixed intervals and create a cyclical sense of time. Tuning divides into slendro and pelog, pitches do not follow twelve-tone equal temperament, and the same melody sounds different in each system. There is no conductor; drums and collective habit carry the piece.

Key figures

Gamelan rarely carries individual authorship, since repertoire belongs to a court or a village. In Java Ki Nartosabdho was known for shadow-puppet accompaniment and composition, and in Bali village ensembles keep technique alive through competitions and temple rituals. Debussy, Colin McPhee and Lou Harrison are its best-known outside responders.

Lineage

Hindu-Buddhist court bronze instruments, shadow puppetry and ritual feed in; Western impressionist harmony, minimalist repetition, film scores and pop sampling come out, and after the 1950s American universities and composers built their own gamelan ensembles, turning it into a playable contemporary medium. It turned an ensemble sense of time into a compositional resource others could borrow.

Common misunderstandings

Gamelan is not a single style, since Java and Bali differ in line-up, tempo and function. Nor is it only percussion, because flute and voices belong to the ensemble. Taking slendro's five tones as the whole of gamelan ignores pelog's seven and the coexistence of two tuning systems.

Sources

• Colin McPhee, Music in Bali（Yale University Press, 1966），用于核对巴厘编制与调律
• The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., entry Gamelan，用于交叉核对爪哇宫廷传统与年代

Used for fact-checking only; all prose is original.