Gamelan Of Indonesia

The most famous music of Indonesia must be that of the gamelan orchestra, whether of Java and Bali. One of the first westerners to comment on it was Sir Francis Drake, in 1580, who recorded in the log of the Golden Hind that he had heard music ' of a very strange kind, yet the sound was pleasant and delightful' . Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles sent back to London a set of gamelan instruments at the beginning of the 19th century and at the Grand Universal Exhibition of 1889 in Paris there were performances by Javanese players and dancers on a gamelan from Cirebon which had been presented to the Paris Conservatoire a couple of years before. It was these performances which Claude Debussy found so enthralling and which were to have considerable influence on some of his subsequent works.
The majority of gamelan instruments are made of metal - usually bronze but occasionally iron. These divide into two groups: metallophones, and gongs with central knobs or bosses. In addition there are hand drums, an end-blown bamboo flute and a two-stringed rebab, or fiddle, of Arabic origin. All the instruments except the rebab and the hand drums are stuck by a variety of mallets, and this style of playing gives the gamelan its name: -an, the striking action of gamelan, a hammer.
The gamelan can be played in two modes, loud and soft, and in two tunings, slendro and pelog. The slendro tuning is a pentatonic scale, having five notes and no semi-tones. The difference between this and the black notes on a piano is that the intervals are more or less equal, whereas the black notes on a piano have clear differences between whole tones and minor thirds. The pelog tuning has seven notes though not all are always used. In both cases the intervals between the notes are not precisely equal and each gamelan will have its own personality depending on how it is tuned. This tuning, or embat, is considered very important and allows a sharp ear to distinguish one gamelan from another. Since the instruments (with the exception of the rebab ) cannot be returned, a full Javanese gamelan has many of its instruments duplicated - one in the slendro tuning and one in the pelog.

The gongs are all circular and are struck on their central protruding boss. The larger ones are suspended vertically from a bar and are struck with a round-headed, padded mallet. The smaller gongs are supported horizontally on cords strung across a wooden frame with the central boss uppermost, and are played by hitting the boss with sticks lightly padded with string wound round them. The gongs provide the structural framework of the music and the embellishment and infilling.

The saran family of bronze metallophone plates over a wooden resonator, and their cousins the slentem, in which the plates are suspended over tuned bamboo resonators, are the crucial instruments of the gamelan: they provide the nuclear melody of the piece from which the parts of all the other instruments can be deduced. There is also a xylophone called the gambang whose plates are made of hardwood, struck by round disks mounted on the ends of horn sticks. It is an embellishing instrument. The flute and the rebab have considerable rhythmic elasticity and are used with the (usually female ) human voice for ornamentation.

The Balinese gamelan is superficially the same as the Javanese but, in fact, the ensembles are different and the music pronouncedly so. The Balinese gamelan underwent a revolution early in this century when a new form of playing and dancing called kebyar evolved. This is much more exuberant than the more courtly and dignified music of Central Java. Unpadded wooden mallets give a brighter, louder and more ' tinkly' sound to the metallophones than the padded mallets of Java.

In Sulawesi a xylophone orchestra of plates mounted on wooden frames without any resonators is played most often at harvest time. Flutes are played all over the archipelago, together with a variety of drums and stringed instruments like the 36 two-stringed hasapi of the Toba Batak and the sapeh of the Dayaks which is a flat lute with rattan strings. The Dayaks of the interior of Kalimantan have an ancient instrument known since the Bronze Age, called a kledi, which can be seen on the bas-reliefs of Borobudur. It is a gourd with six or eight bamboo canes sticking out of it and it is played like a mouth organ.