Gamelan

Gamelan refers to the bronze percussion orchestras of Java and Bali, typically twenty to thirty players performing on tuned gongs (gong ageng, kempul), single- and multi-octave metallophones (saron, gendér, slenthem), kettle gongs (bonang), the two-headed kendhang drum that leads tempo, plus rebab fiddle, suling bamboo flute and male and female vocalists. The tuning systems are unique to each ensemble: sléndro (a five-note tuning, roughly equidistant) and pélog (a seven-note tuning, asymmetric). Pieces unfold in nested cyclic structures called colotomy, where larger gong strokes mark the longest cycle and faster metallophone patterns subdivide it. Javanese gamelan is slow and meditative; Balinese gamelan gong kebyar is fast, jagged and explosive.

Court gamelan in Java traces back to the Hindu-Buddhist Majapahit empire, codified at the Yogyakarta and Surakarta kratons (royal palaces) from the seventeenth century. Balinese gamelan was historically tied to temple ritual and the dramatic dance-theatres of legong and barong. The 1889 Paris Exposition, where a Javanese troupe performed, was a turning point in Western musical history — Claude Debussy famously absorbed gamelan's textures into Pagodes (1903). After Indonesian independence in 1945 the state promoted gamelan as national heritage; university and conservatory programs in the US, UK, Japan and the Netherlands now host their own ensembles, often donated outright by the Indonesian government.

The colotomic structure is the key listening framework: the largest gong (gong ageng) marks the end of each long cycle, the smaller gongs subdivide, and the metallophones move in graduated speeds — the faster the instrument, the more ornamented its line. Listen for the tuning itself, especially in pélog: the intervals will sound out of tune against a Western frame of reference, but they are precisely tuned within the ensemble's own scale. The kendhang drum's signals (ladrang, ketawang patterns) cue tempo changes.

Java: Court Gamelan (Nonesuch Explorer Series, 1971) introduced the central Javanese tradition to Western listeners and remains a standard recording. For Bali, Music from the Morning of the World (Nonesuch 1967) and Gamelan Gong Kebyar (Smithsonian Folkways) show the more aggressive contemporary form. Lou Harrison's Pacifika Rondo and works by Evan Ziporyn are useful entry points to gamelan-influenced Western composition.

Debussy heard the Javanese ensemble at the 1889 Paris Exposition and wrote afterwards that Javanese music contained every nuance of meaning, even the unnameable ones, and made Palestrina seem like child's play. The cellist Yo-Yo Ma's Silkroad Ensemble has commissioned new works for gamelan; Steve Reich and Lou Harrison built parts of their own compositional languages around its cyclic patterns.