The Music of Bali A special paradise…. Balinese gamelan Cudamani.
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Transcript of The Music of Bali A special paradise…. Balinese gamelan Cudamani.
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