Gamelan Music

This article is about gamelan music. A Gamelan is a bronze orchestra found in various cultures in Southeast Asia which uses upwards of about 13 people.

Core Melody:

It has a core melody calledl Pokok in Bali and Balungan in java. It acts as a skeleton on which all the other parts are based. This is called heterophony but Southeast Asian heterophony is very unusual in that it doesn't have just a melodic line and then another with simple embellishments. It has several simultaneous embellishments that make the original melody virtually unrecognizeable in the new part to the uninitiated. Anyway, the skeleton is played on the Calung in Bali and the Slenthem in Java. It's also played on the Kenongs and Kempul in Java if there are enough of each. The skeleton is related loosely to the Cantus firums of church music and Gregorian chant where a sacred melody was placed in the bass and played two or three times as slow as the original then this became the basis for a new composition.

Melody:

Bali and Java have melodic cadences which are encluturated and not at all what westerners would consider to be a melodic cadence such as the leading tone in classical music going to a member of the next chord or chromatic notes resolving as in jazz. Bali and Java utilize a scale known as Slendro which was and is used in the religious services and edifices for Buddhist and Hindu in Bali and Buddhist and muslim in Java. The Slendro scale is considered to be more dignified and less passionate than the newer scale known as Pelog which sounds angry or sad to the Indonesians because it was developed after the Dutch invasion and a mass suicide of Indonesians upon the prospect of being captured. Pelog is thought to sound like the warfare and soldiers in an altercation. It quickly became popular and is a fairly recent development. The music of pelog of which the Kebyar style in Bali is an example, was never an elitist music of the courts. Balinese Kebyar using pelog is loud, fast, has a grand finale and uses a rhythmic breakdown as a transition after the introduction.

In Bali there are a set of instrumnts that play an interlocking rhythm which are tuned about a quarter step apart and this produces binaural beats. Bali also utlizes cymbals called Ceng Ceng which are not normally used in Javanese music.

The gamelan in Java accompanies performances of the puppet show known as Wayan Kulit usually retelling the Ramayana.

Gamelan composition is colotomic. In processs... More later....

About The Music 5

Traditionalists looking at Buddhists, Muslims and Hindus see only irreconcilable differences which are quite real. We and the other 1/3rd of America see more of the similarities which are also just as real and want to see how Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism will inform western spirituality and how western spirituality can inform the Eastern. And how a relationship with actual Buddhists, Muslims and Hindus can enrich our lives.

I want a musical form that carries the message of open minded dialogue between cultures, faiths and real people which is why I'm attracted to Indochina and Indonesia. India was, of course, Hindu and China has a long history of Buddhism. Indochina has absorbed the best and worst from both of these immensely important cultures.

So, the dialogue between China and India/ Buddhism and Hinduism has been taking place most intensely in Indochina. Also, from a Buddhist perspective, and while standing in Asia, Christianity and Islam look almost identical. This is the kind of perspective required to move forward now and in the future.

Joseph Campbell said that now, the only appropriae in-group is as a world citizen. I believe this is correct.

My music sometimes uses Middle Eastern rhythms because I want to include Middle Eastern peoples in my world and be included by them in theirs not because of a European feeling of exoticism that doesn't know who the musicians that they're appropriating music from are or their histories. I don't want the styles of electronica either that are empty of context and content.

About 1/4th of America, if you believe some estimates, are the cultural creatives. They're not perfect either. Much of the New age faction seems to think that you can toss logic completely out the wind and buy spirituality.

Maybe that's good for my business but I believe that real spirituality comes from relationships with other peole and with nature. So I'm very serious about having a relationship with people who visit my site whether or not they buy anything. What they seem to want to buy is sometimes Hindu iconography and either Hindu or Buddhist ideas.

In the case of hindu mythology, westerners who adopt it are fooling themselves if they think they can graft an alien religion onto themselves, plagued by all the same problems as our own, while cutting off their own root.