The Music of Bali

A special paradise….

Balinese gamelan Cudamani

And ubiquitous means?

• “Music is ubiquitous in Bali; its abundance is far out of proportion to the dimensions of the island. The Hindu-Balinese religion requires gamelan for the successful completion of most of the tens of thousands of ceremonies undertaken yearly.”

• --Michael Tenzer: Balinese Music

Music is everywhere

• “It is part of everyday life. A young boy plowing the fields on the back of a water buffalo plays a small bamboo flute. Street vendors play gongs to indicate whether they are selling noodles or shrimp chips. Martial arts are accompanied by drums, gongs, and oboes, and bull-racing has its own appropriate rhythmic accompaniment.”

TongtongCD Music for the Gods, cut 3 example of bull racing

Music for...• Rituals. More rituals. And, yes, even more

rituals.

• entertaining the gods in lavish ways during festivals

• for offerings at the temple or blessing a house

• for spilling cremated souls’ ashes into the sea (kelod)

• for the exorcism of evil spirits• for the ritual filing of teeth gamelan for tooth filing example of tooth filing

• for nearly everything...

for DANCE!for DANCE!

Balinese dance

• In Bali, music and dance are WEDDED in spirit, nuance, structure--even terminology.

• Balinese choreography is a manifestation of the music that accompanies it.

• Music and dance present a “reflective duet”.

• They are “two realizations of the same abstract beauty”.

For the gods, dance is as important as music.

Performers?

• To participate in music and dance is a very fortunate thing for a person.

• It is, in fact, a coveted privilege.

Gamelan• The linguistic root of the word is “gamel”,

which means to hit or to manipulate with the hands

• A gamelan is a group of instruments, most of which are bronze percussion instruments.

• suspended gongs and kettles, xylophone

• some strings and winds

• singing by both men and women

• DIVERSE BODY OF INSTRUMENTS

Perhaps even the kitchen sink...

The gamelan “orchestra” then includes...

• instruments which are linear in function, such as the voice and the suling (bamboo flute), which elaborate and ornament the melodies

• and...

• instruments which articulate and punctuate the structure of the melodies in a vertical way (gongs)

Tuning systems for Java’s gamelan

• Usually one of two possibilities: (text p 283)

– Slendro: a 5 tone system, nearly equal intervals– Pelog: a 7 tone system, large and small

intervals– Some gamelan are entirely one or the other– Some are double, with a full set of instruments

for each tuning

Tuning systems in Bali

• Scale tones are named as follows:

• ding, dong, deng, dung, and dang

• Full range is 21 tones, from a low ding to the high ding four registers above

• Larger gaps (350-450 cents) between deng/dung and dang/next octave ding

• Smaller intervals (80-200 cents) between others

Pitch…..okay then

• The absolute pitch for ding varies within a range of about 300 cents (100 cents in a Western minor second)

• It’s usually close to the Western C or C#, but it can vary up to or beyond a D#

• Range is about 130Hz to 2080 Hz

• GONGS are outside the gamut…near 65Hz to match the ding

Just when you were getting it...

• Java’s term pelog is used to label Bali’s gamelan types, but the Balinese call it saih piut. There are often only 5 tones, not 7, but they are subsets (patutan) of the full collection

• Saih pitu is often called tetekep pitu (seven fingerings--wait, weren’t we just talking about 5 tones?

Other tuning considerations

• The patutan of saih pitu are called saih lima. To extract a patutan from the 7 tones, you take any origin tone, go three conjunct steps, skip one, take two more, skip the remaining degree

• patutan selisir uses 123(-) 56 (-)

• patutan tembung uses 456(-)12(-)

• ding is always the first step of any patutan

• (moveable…..that is, WAAAAAYYY moveable “do”)

Shimmery quality

• Instruments are tuned in pairs, with one intentionally tuned slightly higher than the other.

• This results in fast “beats” in the overtones.

• We might say these are “out of tune”.

• In Bali, these are “in tune”.

After all of that….

• The tuning systems work primarily at a conceptual level.

• “Acoustically speaking, all of these notions are, to varying extents, fictions.” Tenzer

• Ah, tuning: let’s leave it to the masters, members of the Pande clan who work in one of three main areas in Bali.

Text mentions….(p.315)

• 1) strictly instrumental--not exactly

• 2) characterized by changes in tempo and loudness (often abrupt)

• 3) dazzling technical mastery

• 4) fast interlocking rhythms with asymmetrical groupings