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GAMELAN OF CENTRAL JAVA - Colours
The colours of the Javanese gamelan - its timbres and voices - are presented in this collection of pieces, recorded in Surakarta between 1999 and 2001. This is music of the traditional repertoire - even when not taken directly from classical compositions, it still speaks the language of tradition. Small groups of instruments are heard - often just one at a time. And the pieces are selected sections of longer classical compositions, or short self-contained pieces, or improvisations on classical themes - all performed by outstanding Javanese musicians (with the exception of the Gong sequence). We shall in turn identify the instruments that are highlighted in the
CD, then touch upon scales, tuning, and “moods” of gamelan music,
and finally describe the content of each track.
Firstly we hear the bonang family of instruments. A bonang consists of
a double row of bronze kettles resting on a wooden frame. Each instrument
covers two octaves. There are three members in this family. Going
from low to high pitch range: the bonang panembung,
the bonang barung, and
the bonang panerus. All together (with overlapping
octaves) they cover four octaves. The bonang instruments belong
to the broader family of gongs,
which in fact comprises both “resting” and “hanging” gongs. The
hanging gongs are larger in size and sound in the lowest pitch range.
They come in various dimensions, with the largest (up to one metre
in diameter) and heaviest (around forty kilos) producing a very
deep and powerful tone that can be felt through your body if you
stand close enough. Hanging gongs are classified in three sub-groups,
where they are denominated as gong,
suwukan, kempul, from lower to higher pitches. One fascinating aspect is that the gongs,
regardless of shape and size, are made through an arduous process
of forging, with a long alternation of heating and hammering. The
making of a large gong ageng would require the effort of
a team of 4 or 5 men during at least two days. Gongs - as well as
all metallophones in a gamelan - need to be forged. Casting, which
could possibly be easier to do, would not at all confer the musical
qualities that are proper of the gamelan instruments. If the instruments
were cast instead of forged, the gamelan woud sound like a collection
of church bells. Next, we hear the gender. This refined instrument is characterised by its bronze keys
suspended over resonating tubes (originally made of bamboo). Its
sound is beautiful and long-lasting, and the playing technique very
demanding. It is played with two soft-padded disc-shaped mallets,
and each hand must simultaneously hit a note and damp the preceding
one. The gender family comprises the gender
proper, covering over two octaves, the gender
panerus with the same span in a higher pitch range, and the
slenthem or gender
panembung, a one-octave instrument in the low pitch range. The
latter is played with one mallet only and employed in a musical
role of its own - it plays the balungan, or “skeleton melody”, around which other instruments, including
the gender, play their ornamenting role. I would venture to say that the bonang and
especially the gender are the instruments of the gamelan most friendly-sounding
to the unaccustomed Western ear. The relative “unfriendliness” of
the sound of metallophones - more or less consciously perceived
by the lovers of Western classical instruments - has certainly to do not only with the different
scales employed but also with the physical characteristics of the
sound wave structures. While most Western instruments produce “friendly”
harmonics in addition to the basic tone,
metallophones produce what the physicists call partials instead, or secondary tones that are not in a “harmonious”
relationship with the basic one. The kemanak
is not a standard instrument in gamelan music. Rather, it is used
in certain types of sacred or ceremonial pieces, often in conjunction
with female singing and dances. The appeal that this unusual instrument
can generate is surprising if related to its limited and strictly
structured musical expression. It is a set of two banana-shaped
hand-held curled bronze plates, each one struck with a mallet and
producing a single note. It requires two musicians, which play the
two-note sequence in a prescribed fashion. Kendhang
is the Javanese name for the drum in the gamelan. The double-faced
hand-struck instrument has at least three versions - the kendhang gendhing (the largest), the ketipung (the smallest), and the ciblon or batangan (the
middle-sized). Each one has its own playing technique, always with
the important role of setting the pace of the piece and indicating
the tempo changes, much like the conductor in a Western orchestra. The middle-sized kendhang is normally used
in lively tempos and in dance pieces. “Ciblon” is a type of water-play
in Java, where, through hitting the water with appropriate hand-shapes,
young men can produce various rhythmic patterns. These patterns
are reproduced in the playing of the kendhang ciblon. The rebab
is a two-stringed bowed instrument of Arabic origin. The moveable
wooden bridge rests on stretched skin (usually goat or cow bladder).
The bow is made of wood and horse hair tied loosely. The fingers
press the strings, but not against the neck of the instrument. It
is a difficult instrument to play - with an important role particularly
in music that has the female voice. The sound of the rebab is perhaps
a “problematic” one for a Western music lover unaccustomed to Javanese
gamelan - sound on the harsh side and pitches at times seemingly
unprecise could explain the “problem”, if and when it is felt. The pesindhen,
female singer, is an important element of gamelan music, except of
course in purely instrumental pieces. Also the male voice has a role,
both in solo and as a chorus (gerong),
but we do not have examples in this CD. In the West one female singer,
surrounded by an orchestra, would be considered a soloist and a particular
attention would be paid to her; the audience would be more demanding
than with respect to the other musicians; judgements would tend to
go to extremes - diva or not diva. This is not the case with Javanese
tradition, where the pesindhen ranks equally with the other instruments
of the gamelan. But we must hasten to add that nowadays the Western
outlook concerning the singing lady seems to affect increasingly the
Javanese gamelan scene. Musically, characteristic of the pesindhen
role is a broad rhythmic elasticity and a wealth of ornamentation.
She does not sing “the” melody of the piece - such “melody” in fact
does not exist the way we know it in the West (with the exception
of certain pieces, including Anglirmendung). We need to mention two more instruments
that can be heard in the last piece of this CD. The suling is the only wind instrument in the gamelan. It is a flute made
of bamboo and played vertically. Its role is one of pure ornamentation
(quite different from the role it has in the music of West Java).
The late distinguished musician and teacher Bapak Suhardi of Yogyakarta
used to say that the suling should “sing like a bird”. The gambang
is the only instrument that gives us the sound of wood, struck by
two long sticks made of supple buffalo horn ending with a padded
disc. We like to quote here the pioneering Dutch ethnomusicologist
Jaap Kunst (“Music in Java”): “A good gambang-player should give
the impression of making the sticks dance across the keys. The sound
has a mellow quality: it entirely lacks the macabre sound of the
European xilophones.” The above description does not include other
instruments of the gamelan not
present in this CD - notably the saron
family. The saron, one of the easiest instruments to play, well
represents the so-called “loud instruments”, where bronze (or iron)
bars are struck with a wooden hammer. Scales, tuning, and “moods” The gamelan music of Central Java uses two
scales: a seven-note scale called pelog
and a five-note scale called slendro.
The pieces are in one of the two scales (although occasionally a
piece can be adapted from one scale to the other), thus a normal
gamelan has two distinct sets of instruments, one tuned to pelog
the other to slendro. Two essential aspects are to be considered
from the Western point of view: a) the tones of the Javanese scales
do not coincide with the tones of the 12-note tempered scale, and
b) each gamelan has tones (pitches) that are often noticeably different
from those of any other gamelan. Only by chance - or deliberate
purpose - two gamelans may have precisely equal tones, and only
by chance tones of a gamelan may precisely coincide with those of
the Western scale. One consequence of the differences in
tuning among gamelans is that a given piece may sound different
if played on different gamelans. Another consequence is that instruments
do belong to a given gamelan - they cannot be traded around from
one gamelan to the other. (This aspect would lead us to spiritual
and mystical sides of the gamelan story that we cannot deal with
here.) Each of the two scales, pelog and slendro,
tends to confer a general “mood” of its own to the music. The difference
is made mainly by the fact that intervals in the slendro scale tend
to be rather similar, while pelog has unequal intervals (sometimes
by relatively large extent) between its notes. The result, making
allowance for the subjectivity of the matter, is that the slendro
scale sounds “sunny” and as if in a major key, while pieces in pelog
sound relatively “sombre” and as if in a minor key. The listener
can make a judgement of his own on this matter by noting the laras
or scale (pelog or slendro) of the various pieces of this CD, except
for tracks 3, 4, 9, and 13 where no laras is established (either
because the instrument is not (or not quite) a tuned one, as is
the case with the kendhang, or because both scales are employed).
A comparison even more focused can be made by listening to pairs
of pieces that employ the same instrument(s) but in different scales
- namely, tracks 1 and 8, tracks 2 and 10, tracks 6 and 7. We
need to mention that in the gamelan music of Central Java there
is a further three-fold distinction - the pathet
- within each scale. The pathet of pelog can be lima, nem, or barang, while for slendro it can be nem, sanga,
or manyura. The pathet
is something rather elusive for the Western ear. The newcomer into
gamelan may not be able to tell the difference, and even someone
more knowledgeable may just “feel” the changes from one pathet to
the other, but without having a precise notion of what is happening.
To simplify the matter, what happens is that each pathet elects
certain notes as the ones to be played more frequently and/or the
ones to be played at certain crucial points of the piece. Track
1 10:19 - Bonang
pelog - Two gongan (cycles of the large gong) of Gendhing TUKUNG,
Recordings
made in Surakarta in 1999, 2000, and 2001 YANTRA
PRODUCTIONS |