GAMELAN & DANCE

Balinese Musicians

 The art plays an essential part in daily Balinese Life especially music and dance as it's associated almost exclusively with religious practices. 

Traditionally, Balinese dancers and musicians have always learn their craft from the experts in their village and by imitating other performers. In the 1960's, however, the government felt that Bali's traditional arts were in danger of dying out and so two schools for the performing arts were founded: one for children of high school age, now located in Batu Bulan; the other for advanced degree-level students, next to the Taman Budaya Arts Center in Denpasar. Feelings about these two establishment have been mixed, with some performers anticipating a gradual whittling away of the traditional variety of forms and styles as graduates of the schools return to teach a blander, more standardized technique to the younger in their home villages.

The traditional music of Bali is Gamelan, a jangly clashing of syncopated sounds. The highly structured compositions are in fact produced by a group of 25 or more musicians seated cross-legged on the ground at a variety of bronze percussion instruments - gongs, metallophones, and cymbals - with a couple of optional wind and stringed instruments. All gamelan music is written for instruments tuned either to a five - or ( less commonly ) a seven-tone scale, and most is performed at an incredible speed: one recent study of a gamelan performance found that each instrumentalist played an average of seven notes per second.

Gamelan is actually the Javanese word for the bronze instruments, and the music probably came over from Java around the fourteenth century, but the Balinese duly adapted it to suit their own personality, and now the sounds of the Javanese and Balinese gamelan are distinctive even to the untrained ear. Where Javanese gamelan music is restrained and rather courtly, Balinese is loud and flashy, boisterous and speedy, full of dramatic stops and starts. This modern Balinese style, known as Gong Kebyar ( Gong means orchestra, Kebyar translates aptly, as lightning flashes ),

Over eighty years later, gamelan orchestras are an essential part of village life. Every banjar that can afford to buy a set of instruments has its own seka or music Club, In most communities the seka is open to men and  some villages have female gamelan orchestras too. It has no restrictions on age, welcoming keen players of any standard and experience between the ages of about eight and eighty. Players are not professional musicians; they all do other jobs during the daytime.Rehearsals generally happen after nightfall, either in the bale banjar or in the temple's bale gong pavilion.  Some particularly keen seka practice several times a week throughout the year, others just get together in the week before a performance. There's special Gong music for every occasion - for sacred and secular dances, cremations, odalan festivities and wayang kulit shows - but players never learn from scores ( in fact few gong compositions are ever notated ), preferring instead to have it drummed into them by repetitive practice. Whatever the occasion, gong players always dress up the ceremonial uniform of their music club, and make appropriate blessings and ritual offerings to the deities. Like dancers, musicians are acutely conscious of their roles as entertainers of the god.

The type of music that a seka plays depends on the make up of its particular gamelan orchestra, and every single gong on the island sounds slightly different. Balinese can supposedly find their way around the island in the dark by recognizing the distinctive tones of the various local gamelan. Although the gamelan kebyar is currently by far the most fashionable style of music in Bali, and therefore the most common type of orchestra, there are over twenty other different ensemble variations on the islands as well. The smallest ensemble is the four piece Gender wayang that traditionally accompanies the wayang kulit shadow-play performances; the largest is the old fashioned classical Javanese-style orchestra comprising fifty instruments, known as the gamelan gong. Most gamelan instruments are huge and far too heavy to be easily transported, so nearly every banjar also possesses a portable orchestra known as a gamelan angklung, specially designed around a set of miniature four-keyed metallaphones, for playing in prossesions and at unusual venues-at cremations for example, or at sea-shore festivals. The classic sounds of the Balinese gamelan are produced mainly by bronze instruments, but there are also a few orchestras composed entirely of bamboo instruments - split bamboo tubes, marimbas and flutes. These ensembles are a particular specialty of western Bali, where they are known as gamelan joged bumbung and gamelan joged.

The most common orchestra, the gong kebyar, is composed of at least 25 individual instruments, and always features half a dozen tuned gongs, several sets of metallophones, two drums, a few sets of cymbals and one or more flutes. the leader  of the orchestra is always one of two drum players, whose job it is to link the different elements of the orchestra, as well as to take leads from the dancers during performances. This he does by fluttering or raising his hands from his seated position close to the front of the stage. Holding a double ended cylindrical drum, the kendang, on his lap he controls the tempo of the piece by beating out the rhythm, usually with his hands, on both drum heads.

Cast in bronze and set in beautifully carved jack-fruit wood frames - often painted red and decorated with gold leaf - the metal xylophones or metallophones create the distinctive clanging and shimmering gamelan sound. They come in a variety of forms, but the principle is the same for all versions. A series of bronze bars or keys are strung loosely together ( the smallest metallophone has four keys, the biggest fourteen) and suspended over bamboo resonators. Players strike each key with a small wood or metal-tipped mallet held in the right hand, while simultaneously dampening the last key with the finger and thumb of the left hand. Since the kebyar is often played incredibly fast, metallophone players phenomenal coordination to move up and down the "keyboard", striking and dampening two different keys at the same time. The most common metallophones used for the kebyar are the Gangsa, which come in three varieties. The largest and deepest toned is the ugal, which carries the melody, while the higher-pitched pemade, and a corresponding number of kantil, pitched higher still, add trills and melodies.

Center stage is nearly always dominated by the long row of ten or more bronze kettle-gongs ( flattened bells with knobs on the top) strung together and set into an ornament-ally carved wooden frame. This is the trompong, and is always played by one extremely dextrous player, who sits cross-legged before it and stretches to the left and right to embellish the melody by beating the individual gongs. There are, in fact, normally two trompong in an orchestra; the second one known as a reyong, and played by four people sitting side by side. The large bronze gong, suspended from a frame at the back of the orchestra, gives structure to every musical composition, its mellow tones marking off the beginning and end of each melody.

In among these major players are several minor and occasional ones. These include sets of different sized cymbals ( cengceng), bamboo flutes or suling, and the classical two-stringed violin, the rebab. Some orchestras also enliven their performances with guest spots from the genggong, a simple palm wood Jew's harp, Whose haunting vibrations sound a bit like the didgeridoo and are most popularity used for the frog dance.