Contexts - The Rough Guide to Bali and Lombok - page 469

have also had the option of attending a government-run high school and college dedicated
to the performing arts. Denpasar's month-long Bali Arts Festival showcases the best in the
performing arts, staging both new and traditional works by professional arts graduates and
village groups.
Balinese gamelan music
The national music of Bali is gamelan , a jangly clashing of syncopated sounds described
by the writer Miguel Covarrubias as being like “an oriental ultra-modern Bach fugue, an
astounding combination of bells, machinery and thunder”. The highly structured composi-
tions are produced by a group of twenty-five or more musicians playing a variety of bronze
percussion instruments - gongs, metallophones and cymbals - with a couple of optional wind
and stringed instruments and two drums. 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 incred-
ible speed: one study found that each instrumentalist played an average of seven notes per
second.
“Gamelan” is the Javanese word for the bronze instruments, and the music probably came
over from Java around the fourteenth century. The Balinese adapted it to suit their own per-
sonality, 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), has been around since the early 1900s, emerging at a time of great politic-
al upheaval when the status of Bali's royal houses was irreparably dented by Dutch colonial
aggression. Until then, Bali's music had been as palace-oriented as Javanese gamelan, but in
1915 village musicians from north Bali gave a public performance in the new kebyar style,
and the trend spread like wildfire, with whole orchestras turning their instruments in to be
melted down and recast in the new, more exuberant, timbres.
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 , and there are said to be 1500 active
gong kebyar on the island. In most communities, the seka is open only to men (the all-female
gamelan of Peliatan is a rare exception) but welcomes players between the ages of 8 and 80.
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 (few gong
compositions are ever notated), preferring instead to have it drummed into them by repetitive
practice. Whatever the occasion, gong players always dress in the ceremonial uniform of their
music club, and make appropriate blessings and ritual offerings. Like dancers, musicians are
acutely conscious of their role as entertainers of the gods.