balinese kebyar music breaks the five-tone barrier: new composition

BALINESE KEBYAR MUSICBREAKS THE FIVE-TONE BARRIER:

NEW COMPOSITION FORSEVEN-TONE GAMELAN

WAYNE VITALE

TEPPING FROM THE ROAD, over the elaborately carved threshold, and into the home of the Dewa family of Pengosekan is always a pleasure.

This comes in part from the dramatic change of scene: one leaves behind an insane road full of buzzing near-death motorcycles and roaring trucks, and enters the tropically luxuriant and relaxed atmosphere of a Balinese compound. Like many that retain traditional architecture, the Dewas’ home is composed of an array of small buildings (balé), each fronted by a sitting platform or porch, just 10 to 20 feet from each other. The propor-tions of this layout are comfortably human-sized, not surprising because traditional architects use measurements of the owner’s hands as the basis for the layout and spatial relations between buildings. The various balé

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Perspectives of New Music Vol. 40, no. 1 (Winter 2002): 5–69Copyright © 2002 Perspectives of New MusicLegally obtainable only at www.perspectivesofnewmusic.org

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are complemented by the lush gardening; everything is intertwined with flowers, vines, and broad-leafed tropical plants. In most homes, a visitor’s first order of business is full immersion in the long, relaxed Balinese wel-come, as the host invites you to kopi Bali, sweets, and conversation, sit-ting together on one of the balé.

But this is not most homes. The Dewas of Pengosekan are a family of brilliant gamelan musicians, and their home is also the seat of Sanggar Çudamani, a thriving center of music and dance famous throughout the area. Here the usual rites of greeting might be deferred for a moment, since, seated just a few steps away on a large and shaded pavilion, one of the world’s hottest orchestras is passionately playing the dance piece Taruna Jaya. The rehearsal is led by four young brothers, each a virtuosic player, who occupy key positions in the orchestra. Their father, himself a skilled drummer fluent in the intricacies and spontaneity of arja and legong drumming, is seated next to the gamelan. He is lost in peaceful contemplation, smoking a kretek, listening to every note. I am drawn to the low platform as if by magnetic attraction.

The group that the Dewa family leads and hosts in their home is, in its most characteristic manifestation, a kebyar ensemble: a large modern bronze gamelan orchestra played by about thirty musicians. It is not the standard kebyar set, however, but a gamelan semara dana, a hybrid gamelan created about fifteen years ago which combines the full seven-tone palette of older ritual and court gamelan ensembles with the instru-mentation of the normally five-tone gamelan gong kebyar. The young musicians are already polished players. They are accompanying a young dancer in preparation for an upcoming gamelan competition. Of course, as members of a sanggar or private arts club, they have many other roles, as teachers, organizers, or guardians of neighbors’ children who are studying dance at absurdly young ages. The musicians might also trans-form (in another dramatic scene change) into a team of prop and decora-tion makers for an upcoming temple event to which they’re invited to play, working and joking over a mountain of split bamboo, twine, colored paper, and carving knives. But at the moment, they’re doing what they seem to enjoy most, judging from the intensity of their rehearsals. They play not only with near technical perfection, but with that elusive quality that the Balinese call taksu—charisma, energy, mag-netism. Sparks emanate from each and every note as they accompany the fleeting and sharply etched expressions of the skilled seventeen-year old dancer. The smiles and the notes are both electric.

This is, of course, the appropriate attitude for a group playing this quintessential kebyar piece. Taruna Jaya (“Dance of the Victorious Youth”) is an eighty-year old work that has become a centerpiece and

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icon of the kebyar style. It is, by turns, fast, furious, powerful, slow, play-ful, sexual, innocent, defiant, audacious, teasing. The piece was revolu-tionary, in its every pore, from the moment of its birth (engendered by the teamwork of two great musician/dancers and their group in the North Balinese village of Jagaraga, circa 1920). Taruna Jaya is one of a triumvirate of formative kebyar pieces, all created between 1915 and 1925. The others, now known by the names Palawakia and Kebyar Duduk, are also in the repertoire of the Çudamani players, as they are of most groups. All three celebrate the wedding of movement and music in various ways, and find their energies in vivid dramatic contrasts—a startled wide-eyed expression morphs into a soft smile; a dancer suddenly picks up mallets and is transformed into a musician with elaborate impro-vised gestures; the music explodes, out of whisper, into cascading glis-sandi.

Now, after more than eight decades of development, kebyar’s raw sen-sationalism has been tempered by age and complexity; qualities such as skill, polish of presentation, unity of ensemble, and maturity are fre-quently mentioned. The Çudamani musicians manifest all these qualities to an unusual degree, even compared to far more experienced groups. In Taruna Jaya, part of what inspires them to such heights is their personal connection to this arrangement: Dewa Aji, the father of the group lead-ers, developed a set of drum variations for this work with his drumming partner from years gone by, Wayan Gandra from the village of Peliatan.1

Recently, in a gesture of support and local artistic pride, Dewa Aji and Gandra, two elder musical statesmen, trained these young sanggar play-ers (their “kids,” as they say) in an older and more “original” version of Taruna Jaya. It is the version they used to play dugas nika (“back then”), when they were shining lights on local stages. They conveyed this arrangement, including the unique drum variations, in all its dramatic inflection, stylistic uniqueness, and loving structural detail. In the process of absorbing it, the young taruna of this orchestra also infused their new/old rendition with great energy, re-creating the excitement that was part of its original genesis.

The birth of a new genre of Balinese music is taking place within and around this group and their peers in other parts of south Bali, through a similar regenerative process. One of the group’s founders, Dewa Ketut Alit, has composed new music for their gamelan semara dana which takes full advantage of the potential inherent in its hybrid design—a cross-fertilization of kebyar style with older seven-tone music and modal techniques. The work Geregel (a vocal term loosely meaning “vibrato” or “embellishment”), composed in the summer of 2000, is one of the most vibrant new works of Balinese instrumental composition in recent years,

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not only through its use of modal techniques in a kebyar setting, but in the ways they are exploited through innovative approaches to orchestra-tion, formal design, phrase structure, and vertical relationships.2 Alit has produced this work in Çudamani’s fertile musical atmosphere, a garage-band-like scene of young academy-trained musicians who play music, hang out together, drink beer at night, and discuss music and dance incessantly. They are immersed in gamelan competitions, temple festivals, recording sessions, and international projects. Alit is one of a handful of composers, most of whom are still in their thirties (Alit himself was only 28 when he composed Geregel) and working in the densely populated and artistically rich south and central regions of Bali, who are regarded as the island’s vanguard. They do not seek a break with the past: all con-tinue to receive the musical wisdom of their elders through intensive training as performers of older repertoire. Most are graduates of STSI, the National Academy of the Arts, and present their works in tried and true venues within STSI’s artistic sphere such as the annual gamelancompetitions of the Bali Arts Festival (Pesta Kesenian Bali). But they are also looking in new directions, by recombining and developing musical techniques, performance aesthetics, and dramatic conceptions through which the traditional reservoir of musical substance and knowledge can be re-interpreted.

The title Geregel illustrates this orientation. It is, for the composer, evocative of embellishment or ornamentation in a larger sense than its originally narrow vocal definition. He interprets it to mean, “Many roads leading to one goal,” (banyak jalan menuju yang satu) in which the roads represent differing variations, manifested in many musical layers and in the various sections of the orchestra. The goal they are headed towards is none other than the stroke of the large gong, the ultimate manifestation of unity (metric, tonal, aesthetic, and spiritual) in the gamelan tradition. But the various ways of getting to each gong are, for Alit, unique, idiosyncratic, and special to each player or section of the ensemble—a vision of combined personal expression that is both collec-tivist and individually expressive, a thoughtful re-interpretation of the gamelan aesthetic.

The background and specifics of what makes Geregel a significant work in the evolution of new Balinese music are the subjects of this study. Although it is probably not the first of its kind in any particular technical, modal, or orchestrational innovation, the particular way these dimensions are fused and given dramatic life in Geregel places it in a special category of new Balinese work, standing above the many tabuh kreasi baru (new instrumental works) created each year. As such it has undoubtedly played a role in the recent ground shift within the Balinese new music scene: In

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the eighteen months since Geregel’s creation, new and wildly experimen-tal seven-tone kebyar works are proliferating rapidly, especially in the Ubud area where there are several gamelan semara dana.3

THE BALINESE MODAL SYSTEM

As mentioned above, the gamelan semara dana combines the overall instrumentation, construction, and range of the ubiquitous five-tone gamelan gong kebyar with the seven-tone scale of the older and rarer gamelan semar pegulingan. It is, essentially, a gong kebyar expanded to include the two “other” notes of its parent heptatonic scale, the so-called pelog scale which has been known in Indonesia for as long as two millen-nia. In traditional terms, the seven-tone scale (saih pitu or “row of seven”) opens up the possibility to play in any of the modes, variously known as patut[an], saih, patet, or tetekep.4 A mode is formed by choos-ing five of the seven tones in a particular sequence of adjacent vs. skipped tones. Traditionally, that mode is then used for an entire piece or section within a piece. (Shifts between modes, involving pivoting on tones com-mon to both in what Balinese musicians now call modulasi, are increas-ingly common in recent seven-tone music and will be discussed below.)

It cannot be overemphasized how central the pentatonic tendency is to the Balinese musical conception. (Here “pentatonic” is used simply to mean a five-tone scale, rather than the particular black-key scales with which Western musicians often associate the term.) While there are notable exceptions—four-tone scales, for example, are employed in a few well-known gamelan types such as angklung, bebonangan, and the giant bamboo jegog; while certain rare modes are said to use all seven tones—they lie outside of the mainstream of the Balinese tonal impulse. The variety and proportion of interval sizes that can be formed within penta-tonic scales are, evidently, just right for the Balinese. A bronze gamelanpermanently tuned to selisir mode, as are the thousands of gamelan gong kebyar throughout the island, is not considered incomplete or lacking in any way. Its pentatonic tonal universe is made richly multi-dimensional by the vibrating intensity of the paired tuning system,5 the dense enhar-monic overtone spectrum produced by bronze percussion instruments struck with wooden mallets, and the wide range of frequency and timbre spanned from deepest gong tone to highest splash of the ceng-cengcymbals. (This is a large part of the reason that gamelan music tran-scribed directly to Western instruments seems so plain or timbrally flat: it loses several layers of tonal richness heard in the original gamelan orches-tration.)

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Yet another layer of complexity derives from the individuality of gamelan tunings. Since there is no absolute standard of reference, like A440 in the Western system, nor a precisely defined intervallic structure, each gamelan can be said to have a unique tuning, slightly (or dramati-cally) different than the next. This brings an individual character to each gamelan’s sound that is akin to that of a vineyard-designated vintage wine. A gamelan tuning is the unique result of the owner’s taste, the intended use of the gamelan, the particular gongsmith chosen, the age of the instruments, and other factors.6 Taken together, the attributes and complexity of this sonic universe are compelling even in a relatively simple composition; foreign listeners are often surprised, on first hearing of a Balinese gamelan, to learn that music of such richness is created with “only” five tones.

Once the seven-tone door is opened, another musical universe obtains—yet one in which the pentatonic impulse remains the predomi-nant force. This is a dimensional leap into a multi-pentatonic system of modal formation, as meaningful to Balinese musicians as the contrast between “diatonic” and “chromatic” is to a Western musician. In fact, hearing the various modes of saih pitu music makes one think of the term “chromatic” in its original, non-equal-tempered meaning—an array of distinctly colored strata, each with its own character and hue.

The chart of Example 1, familiar in general outline to any academy-trained musician in Bali, shows in simplified form how the modes are usually selected within the seven-tone pelog scale. “Usually,” because the identity and interrelationship of the modes as outlined in this chart are by no means uniform throughout Bali, between groups, or even between individual musicians who play in a single gamelan. While there is general agreement concerning the relationship of selisir, tembung, and sunaren, the two others—baro and lebeng—are often interpreted differently. There are many reasons for these discrepancies. From the most general perspec-tive, such variation is a normal feature of Bali’s highly integrated oral cul-ture, in which there is a great deal of consistency in underlying generative principle and much less so in the manifestation of surface detail and ter-minology. A comparison of religious offerings between neighboring vil-lages, an intricate and richly semiotic system, would reveal similar differences. The Balinese gloss for such diversity, which they implicitly approve, is lain desa lain adat (“different village, different customs”). For that reason, in the realm of religious practice and ritual law (adat), just as in music, the issue of regional variation versus standardization—one locally generated, the other externally imposed—has been the sub-ject of intense discussion for many decades, touching as it does not only on diversity but also issues of regional pride and autonomy versus central-ized authority.


On a more technical level, understanding the varying interpretations of mode would require tracing the evolution of seven-tone scales and their gradual transfer from one gamelan type to another, all within an essen-tially oral tradition. Seven-tone systems are found on a variety of older gamelan types, bringing a profusion of interpretations. Each uses a dif-ferent terminology, has a unique tuning, and applies its modal system somewhat differently in actual practice. The primary source for the semar pegulingan modal system was the courtly gambuh ensemble, in which the melodic material is carried exclusively by meter-long bamboo flutes, suling gambuh. As noted by McPhee (1966, 38–47) many changes occurred in the transferal of modal systems from gambuh to the bronze gamelan, in which all the keys have fixed pitches.

Despite the variations, consensus is slowly emerging around the way in which these five “classical” modes are interpreted on bronze gamelans. This is partly the result of the increasing academization of Balinese music. The chart in Example 1 was created in 1959 by Nyoman Kaler, Gusti Putu Griya and Nyoman Rembang, three of Bali’s most widely recog-nized music scholars of the mid-twentieth century. This interpretation was then disseminated at KOKAR, the newly-formed Indonesian Conser-vatory of Music, at which they were all faculty or guest lecturers. Today it

116 159 258 172 120 185 190 116 159 258 172 120 185

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7-tone scale 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Selisir i o e u a i o e u a

Tembung u a i o e u a i o e

Sunaren u a i o e u a i o e

Baro i o e u a i o e u a

Lebeng* i o e eu u a ai i o e eu u a ai

c c# d d# e f f# g g# a a# b c c# d d# e f f# g g# a a# b c

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EXAMPLE 1: THE FIVE BALINESE CLASSICAL MODES:

THEIR FORMATION, INTERVALS (IN THE TUNING OF

GAMELAN ÇUDAMANI), AND NOTATION

* The extra tones in lebeng, labeled eu and ai and pronounced deungand daing, are named by combining their neighboring tone vowels.


is taught as mainstream musical theory at the two current music acade-mies, SMKI and STSI. The letters i, o, e, u, and a are short for ding, dong, deng, dung and dang, the Balinese solfège, which is explained below. Two complete octaves are shown, together with the tuning scheme of actual frequencies from the Çudamani instruments.

Examining closely the sequence of intervals in each of these modes (with the exception of lebeng, discussed below), it becomes clear that the same pattern is repeated throughout, created by the absent tones. The notes of a five-tone mode are always grouped in a sequence of three and two—that is, three consecutive scale degrees (separated by intervals of 116–258 cents in this gamelan’s tuning), followed by a larger interval (here 266–430 cents), two more consecutive scale degrees, finally fol-lowed by another larger interval as the pattern repeats itself in the next octave. This consistent intervallic grouping in a 3/2/3/2 pattern gener-ates the characteristic interval sequence of pelog. Such gapped-scale formation is one of the distinguishing features of Indonesian scales and modes in general.

Based on this sequence, each tone is assigned a solfège name that gives it a unique identity within the scale. The names for the tones are ding, dong, deng, dung, and dang, where ding is always the lowest of the group of three tones and the others fall in place accordingly. The relative dis-tances between notes are thus codified in the solfège, which plays an essential role in Balinese performance practice.7 To get a different view of these relationships, the modes could be reoriented according to their note identities—that is, hypothetically raise or lower the pitch of each mode until the note ding of each scale is the same, thus obtaining a com-parative look at their interval structures. (See Example 2.)

Selisir i o e u a i

c c# d d# e f f# g g# a a# b c c# d

Tembung i o e u a i

Sunaren i o e u a i

Baro i o e u a i

Lebeng i o e eu u a ai i

EXAMPLE 2: THE INTERVALLIC STRUCTURE OF FIVE MODES

COMPARED FROM A COMMON STARTING PITCH


Once a mode is chosen, the remaining two tones are external for the moment to that pentatonic formation. But one or both might reappear as pamero, “false” or auxiliary tones, used to add a striking melodic color at important moments in the music such as the approach to a gong tone or to an important structural downbeat.8 Even in bronze orchestras that use only one of the modes—that is, where all the keys and gongs are perma-nently tuned to a particular five-tone scale—these “blue notes” might reappear briefly, touched upon by the suling or a singer. In most cases the brevity of their appearance makes them strictly coloristic in nature, and brings no implied or perceived shift to another mode.

It should be noted that, among the various patutan, selisir is far and away the most commonly employed in the tuning of five-tone bronze gamelan and may be thought of as the default pelog mode. This alone may explain the numbering system, now in common use, in which dingof selisir is labeled as 1; a few earlier interpretation of Balinese modes pegged the starting point of the scale elsewhere.

As presented within this chart, one of the modes, the rarely used lebeng, seems to defy the 3/2 rule, and the Balinese modal conception in general, since it encompasses all seven scale tones. In fact, this is but one relatively recent interpretation among many. As interpreted at its source in the gambuh tradition, lebeng is indeed a pentatonic mode of gapped formation like the others. The problems arise since a few of the actual tones produced on the meter-long gambuh flutes fall in the cracks of the seven-tone scale, and seem to therefore lie outside the tonal matrix. Also, probably for that very reason, there are ambiguities in the solfège, so that players in a single ensemble sing tunes in lebeng in at least two different ways.9 When transferred to the gamelan semar pegulingan, the modes must, by the very nature of fixed-pitch bronze instruments, lie in the same matrix; musicians therefore have no choice but to force a square peg into a round hole and assign lebeng a place within it. While McPhee does report various pentatonic interpretations on bronze instruments in his research from the 1930s (1966, 39), modern experts in semar pegulingan saih pitu seem to have thrown up their hands by declaring lebeng an exception to the modal rule, including all seven pitches and with the same solfège as selisir. When asked, all claim that this inter-pretation is based on a single semar pegulingan work, Sumambang Jawa. However, this piece can easily be understood as a combination of two existing modes, sunaren and baro, with a few appearances of the remain-ing tone, pitch 1, as a pamero. (See Example 15 below.) While the use of all seven tones within a single piece is extremely rare, nowhere does Sumambang Jawa combine them in any balanced or consistent fashion; it remains as true to the pentatonic impulse as any other work.


RECENT ADDITIONS TO THE CHART OF PATUTAN

In recent years, the modal chart has been enlarged in ways that shed light on how Balinese composers regard the saih pitu universe. Through the re-emergence of interest in seven-tone music over the past two decades, musicians have learned that other patutan can be derived from the hepta-tonic set that were not part of the traditional gambuh/semar pegulinganmatrix, at least in the now-standard interpretation shown in Example 1. These additional modes fall into two groups. One consists of theoretical constructs that are logical extrapolations of the existing system—that is, the results of taking the 3/2 rule and applying it to other possible positions, even in the absence of existing repertoire that uses the result-ing modal constellations. Two such theoretical modes are shown in Example 3.10

The other newly defined group, the so-called slendro modes, requires a bit more elaboration. Their inclusion as possible subsets of the heptatonic pelog system brings up a strange contradiction between historical, cosmo-logical, and common-practice interpretations of Balinese music. Accord-ing to most scholars’ understanding, slendro and pelog scales trace separate historical roots and are considered independent tuning systems. Balinese musicians refer to them as the two distinct laras (tunings) of their music, as opposed to the various patutan (modes) found within pelog. If true, how can one be a subset of the other? Even from a strictly acoustic perspective their differences are clear. Slendro scales are charac-terized by a greater uniformity in interval size, which ranges only from an approximate major second to a minor third, and where, as McPhee puts it, “pelog-like steps approaching a semi-tone or major third are unknown.” He illustrates the differences between these two scales, repro-duced in Example 4. Slendro scales are almost always pentatonic, never larger, though in some gamelan types one note is omitted. Some versions


7-tone scale 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Pengenter o e u a i o e u a i

Pengenter Alit e u a i o e u a i o

EXAMPLE 3: TWO RECENTLY DESIGNATED THEORETICAL MODES


approximate a black-key scale on the piano. Others spread out the five tones more evenly within the octave, so that theorists are forever tempted to imagine an idealized scale of five exact 240-cent intervals to which it might be aspiring, though none exists in reality.11 Slendro and pelog scales are thought to have arrived in Java at different times, perhaps separated by several centuries.12

Their contrasting qualities and origins are borne out in contemporary practice. In both Java and Bali, slendro and pelog have found distinct instrumental homes and carry essentially distinct repertoire. Particular gamelan sets are tuned to one or the other system, which becomes a significant aspect of their identities, affecting the choice of repertoire and context—dramatic, social, ritual—in which it is played. In Bali, slendrotunings reside, most famously, on gamelan gender wayang, the small ensemble that accompanies the shadow puppet play; and gamelan angklung (which has both four- and five-tone variants), associated with death rituals. In Java, the two tunings are often juxtaposed for dramatic contrast: Since the mid-nineteenth century, double gamelan sets are used, in which instruments of a slendro-tuned gamelan are placed along-side those of a pelog gamelan. The players need only turn ninety degrees to access one or the other tunings and their distinctive sound worlds.

Considering all these differences, it is surprising that musicians are finding slendro scales within the pelog universe, as if they pulled a rabbit out of a hat. (One is reminded of the appearance of Hanuman, the great monkey-king of the Ramayana, in certain Balinese and Javanese inter-pretations of the Mahabharata, the “other” great Hindu epic poem. This is a shock at first, as if the character jumped, Disney-like, right out of the pages of one text and into the other.) This practice has entered the mus-ical mainstream over the last decade with the emergence of the gamelansemara dana. Uncovering its origins has engendered no small amount of

pelog (selisir) i o e u a igamelan gong, Gianyar

slendro i o e u a igender wayang, Kuta

c# d d# e f f# g g# a a# b c c#

EXAMPLE 4: COMPARISON OF SLENDRO AND PELOG SCALES

(ADAPTED FROM MCPHEE 1966, 52)


discussion amongst musicians and scholars, Balinese and foreign alike. It has been noted, for example, that antecedents exist in other parts of Indonesia. Sundanese dalang (puppeteers) have created multi-laras(“multiple tuning”) gamelan of spectacular appearance and sound pro-duction, which have allowed them to significantly enlarge not only the wayang repertoire but their own superstar status; experiments in this direction began in the mid-twentieth century and culminated with the creation of a seventeen-tone gamelan in 1969 (Weintraub 2001).13

Vocalists throughout Java and Bali are accustomed to intermixing the two scales; one example occurs in the combination called barang miring, in which Javanese rebab players and singers take brief pelog-like excursions within an otherwise clearly slendro melodic environment.14 Another is the Balinese dramatic vocal form arja, in which the only melodic instruments are voices and flute.

Other researchers point out that the mixing of the pelog and slendroscales, in an all-encompassing cosmological vision of sound and spirit, can be found in the two esoteric treatises, Aji Gurnita and Prakempa, written in the nineteenth century or perhaps earlier. These two texts, which share a large, previously composed section and may therefore represent the work of several authors,15 present a courtly and mystical cosmology of Balinese music, in which the notes of the scale are aligned with particular gods, sacred syllables, colors, and cardinal directions. All is tied together in a philosophy of complementary opposites, as expressed in the sexual union of male and female. One section of the Prakempa, for example, seeks a grand cosmology in which pelog, “the five waters,” unites with slendro, “the five fires,” in a ten-tone system (the dasasuara) producing in the listener a state of ecstatic rapture connecting the “inner and outer universes” (buana alit and buana agung). While the two treatises are important source documents for research into eighteenth- and nineteenth-century court-sponsored philosophy and musical ideal-izations, it is difficult to imagine them as reflecting musical practice.16

Nevertheless, present-day musicians share a high regard for these texts and increasingly turn to them for inspiration, terminology, and philo-sophical underpinning in the creation of new work.

While it is difficult to trace a direct line from any of these previous occurrences to the current slendro-within-pelog sleight of hand, their existence is not surprising. In Indonesia, slendro and pelog scales have co-existed for centuries; independent and varied examples of their cross-fertilization are inevitable. With the new gamelan semara dana, Balinese composers, like the Sundanese dalangs before them, are taking advantage of the evocative and referential powers of the two laras, so perfectly suited to a dramatic tradition obsessed with historical re-creation. From a


present-day composer’s point of view, this is straightforward: If certain constellations of notes in the seven-tone pelog system sound like slendro, why not use and name them as such?

Two interpretations of slendro-in-pelog modes, as given to me by Ketut Gede Asnawa, are shown in Example 5. Alternate solfège possibilities are also shown.17 Note that the 3/2 rule remains inviolate in each case, but the solfège does not always adhere to the usual rule in which the lowest of a three-note group is defined as ding. This reflects common solfège practice in the traditional slendro environments of angklung and gender wayang. In general, the greater variability of solfège use in slendro scales is probably the result of the greater uniformity of interval size compared to pelog. Note also that the intervals of these scales, in the particular (and typical) tuning of the Çudamani instruments, resemble neither the evenly spaced slendro scale described earlier nor the black-key pentatonic familiar of Western scales; they fall somewhere in-between as described by McPhee.

Finally, another new mode should be mentioned in passing. It is the one that evokes jegog, the four-tone gamelan of giant bamboo marimbas found originally in West Bali. The jegog mode is a striking collection of intervals, three large and one small. As with the slendro-within-pelogissue, the chances are small that the creators of the gamelan jegog actually derived its scale from seven-tone pelog. Rather, composers discovered after the fact that the jegog scale could be conjured on the a seven-tone gamelan and therefore started including it in their charts. None has yet, to my knowledge, used it in an actual composition. (The jegog mode is included in Example 6.)


7-tone scale 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Slendro Gede e u a i o e u a i o

alt. solfège 1 i o e u a i o e u aalt. solfège 2 o e u a i o e u a ialt. solfège 3 u a i o e u a i o e

Slendro Alit (o) e u a i (o) e u a i

alt. solfège (a) i o e u (a) i o e u

116 159 258 172 120 185 190 116 159 258 172 120 185interval, in cents

EXAMPLE 5: SLENDRO MODES WITHIN THE PELOG SCALE


THE COMPLETE CHART

By condensing the above discussion to essentials, and eliminating a few of the variants, the chart of Example 6 is generated. It is intended only for the sake of reference within this article, not an attempt at codification. The reasons are obvious, even in the narrowest scope: Dewa Alit himself refers to the two slendro modes in an opposite (and, to my knowledge, unique) manner, so that slendro gede becomes slendro alit and vice versa, though he does use the solfège shown here. He describes the mode pengenter, but does not use it in Geregel. He sees no use for the modes lebeng, baro, and jegog (the first has little meaning as a mode if described as including all seven tones; the second is essentially the same as slendro; the last is too specialized and remote from the mainstream bronze gamelan traditions). Thus, his tonal palette for Geregel encompasses only five modes: the three classical patutan around which there is general agreement (selisir, tembung, and sunaren) plus his own versions of the slendro modes.

116 159 258 172 120 185 190 116 159 258 172 120 185

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7-tone scale 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Selisir i o e u a i o e u a

Tembung u a i o e u a i o e

Sunaren u a i o e u a i o e

Baro i o e u a i o e u a

Lebeng i o e eu u a ai i o e eu u a ai

Pengenter o e u a i o e u a i

Slendro Gede e u a i o e u a i o

Slendro Alit (o) e u a i (o) e u a i

Jegog i o e u i o e u


5m

m

m

m

m

m

EXAMPLE 6: A COMPLETE CHART OF BALINESE PATUTAN


TRADITIONAL MODAL USE

As the preceding description implies, the typical composition for seven-tone ensemble such as gambuh or semar pegulingan remains confined to a particular pentatonic mode throughout, with at most brief appearances of pamero. However the reality on the ground reveals a more complex picture. Example 7 offers a preliminary survey of modal use, based on the large collection of seven-tone works transcribed by Wayan Rai (1996).

As Example 7 shows, a significant number of works in this sample use a combination of two modes, either in short excursions from a predominant mode into new territory, or in more extended and balanced combination. In most of these combinations, each mode is clearly defined, and the manner of switching between them is straightforward, as described below. However in a few cases the “other” tonal territory is not a 3/2 gapped-scale formation at all, but a collection that includes four, or sometimes five, adjacent tones. These instances are relatively brief, but long enough so that the extra tones do not seem to be mere pamero. They form areas of striking tonal contrast within the span of the entire work. The internal mechanics of how these unusual tonal collections are introduced, which tones are emphasized, and how they might relate motivically or structurally to the surrounding material, remain to be identified in future analysis. Such analysis may reveal, among other

One mode onl y

pure with occasional pamer o

Tabuh Gari II selisir Gineman Selisir selisirTabuh Gari III selisir Bapang Selisir selisirGodeg Miring tembung Perong Condong selisirBiakalang baro Gending Lasem selisir

Sekar Gadung baroLengker Cenik selisir

Two or more modes

brief e xcur sion(s) fr om a primar y mode extended combination

Gending Subandar selisir / sunaren / 2345 Langsing Tuban selisir / tembung / 1234Tabuh Gari selisir / 2345 Bapang Selukat sunaren / 2346Gending Tembung tembung / selisir Sumambang Jawa sunaren / baro (+ pamero)Bapang Gede tembung / selisir Gending Dagang 2345 / selisirBremara sunaren / 67123

EXAMPLE 7: A SURVEY OF SEVEN-TONE WORKS FOR

GAMELAN SEMAR PEGULINGAN , AND THEIR USE OF MODES


things, additional facets of Balinese modal and melodic practice relating to hierarchy within any single five-tone collection—the approach clearly articulated in Javanese conceptions of pathet but thus far barely touched upon in the Balinese musical discourse.18

Even in the absence of such theory, certain general principles can be articulated regarding the way modal combination operates in traditional contexts, which will help frame the innovations taking place in newer work.

1. A single work never utilizes more than two modes in any clearly manifested fashion. When there is a third tonal area, its appearance is too brief to establish a new mode, and might instead be con-sidered the result of a few reiterations of a pamero tone.

2. Two modes combined within a single work are always closely related, together comprising a total of six tones (see Example 8). For that reason the combinations selisir-baro or tembung-sunarenare never found. Also, works that use two modes rarely touch upon the remaining, seventh tone as a pamero.19

3. Changes between modes tend to happen before or after stressed points in the larger metric or formal framework, such as a structural downbeat articulated by jegogan and/or gong, or the start of a new section, rather than coinciding with them.

As an illustration of these three principles, a selection from the semar pegulingan piece Langsing Tuban is notated in Example 9, which shows a typical—and, according to Ketut Gede Asnawa, archetypal—modal shift.20 Note that the solfège, of primary importance in Balinese melodic conception, must shift along with the mode, a phenomenon now referred to as modulasi. This reinterpretation is often felt to take place before the actual appearance of the foreign tone, at a point where the melodic contour will, in later retrospect, suggest. The combination of modes found here, selisir and tembung, is one of the most common, due both to selisir’s general predominance, and to the fact that a modal shift

&

m

selisir

m

m

55 5

5 5

5

55

sunaren

5 5

55

sunaren

baro

EXAMPLE 8: TWO CLOSELY RELATED MODES


can be easily effected through simple melodic toggling between pitch 4, here notated as F� (for tembung) and pitch 3, here notated as E (for seli-sir). Moreover, the shift takes place a few beats before gong, thereby pre-paring the next section just before the actual structural boundary.21

MEANING OF THE PATUTAN

Aside from the content and etymology of these modes, what do they mean to a Balinese listener? They are clearly not abstract collections of

EXAMPLE 9: A SHIFT FROM TEMBUNG TO SELISIR IN THE

INSTRUMENTAL PIECE LANGSING TUBAN . THE VOWELS

BELOW THE JUBLAG LINE INDICATE THE SOLFÈGE


tones used to paint on a tabula rasa musical canvas. In fact, they are imbued with many associations and latent meanings. Certain modes derive their perceived character from the type of gamelan most closely identified with them, which in turn brings associations to repertoire and ritual function. Such a connection is clear, for example, in the two slendromodes, precisely because they made the categorical jump from the other laras of Indonesian music and are now encompassed within the pelog sys-tem. Slendro alit, as mentioned above, evokes the sound of a gamelan angklung, one of sweet melancholy and even sadness to the Balinese ear since it traditionally accompanies cremations and other death rituals.

Slendro is also the laras of the gamelan gender wayang, the quartet of instruments which accompanies the Balinese shadow puppet play and for which a distinct and complex musical language has evolved. Wayangmusic already traces an intertwining relationship with that of kebyar in exchange of repertoire and techniques of elaboration, most notably dur-ing in the late 1970s. One section of Geregel further mines these tech-niques and musical vocabulary (see Example 21). Finally, perhaps as a cumulative result of the performance contexts of both slendro gamelantypes (or, one might argue, a cause for their use in such contexts), slendroscales are associated with the supernatural. This is exploited in recent dra-matic accompaniment using seven-tone gamelan, where the appearance of demonic figures or voices from the “unseen world” (niskala) are painted in slendro colors.

However these may be considered a secondary tier of relationships, due to slendro’s late assimilation into the pelog system. The core of five original gambuh-derived modes (selisir, tembung, sunaren, baro, and leb-eng) derive their perceived qualities not through association with ritual or ceremony per se, but from the rarefied courtly drama of gambuh plays. Each is closely allied with one or more stock characters—king, princess, prime minister, retainer, buffoon, warrior—that appear in the course of the play. Through study of gambuh practice, some Balinese composers and scholars have mapped out direct connections between mode and character type, as shown in Example 10.

A quick scan of qualities and characters makes it clear that this is no list of distinct affects, like those associated with the Western medieval modes; all carry connotations of nobility and rank. Rather, this interpretation suggests that the modes might be placed along a continuum that reflects characteristics of strength, refinedness, and, to a lesser degree, gender. (See Example 11.)

This is reflected as well in the widely held conception that tembung is “low,” (and therefore the strongest in affect) sunaren lies in the “middle” and selisir is “high” (and therefore the sweetest and most refined)—a


conception that bears little relationship to the pelog scale as interpreted on modern seven-tone bronze instruments.22

In fact, interviews with musicians in different areas of Bali, and with those who perform in various genres, reveal that there is no consensus around either of these characterizations of Balinese modes. While Rai’s formulation is shared by several of the most prominent composers in Denpasar and STSI circles and is disseminated to students and colleagues through the musical accompaniments they create to dramatic works, it is not universal, as they themselves recognize.23 Performers of gambuh, for example, point out that characterization is the net result of a multitude of musical and dramatic aspects, including tempo, drumming pattern, form, voice quality, costume, bearing, and movement vocabulary. A particular mode may be used to accompany a variety of characters and cannot be pegged to a single inherent quality. Thus, the baro mode accompanies the strong prince, Prabu Keras, but also the gentle and wise priest, Begawan Melayu—both high-ranking males, but of decidedly different character. Selisir is even harder to pin down, since it is the default mode

EXAMPLE 10: MODE/CHARACTER RELATIONSHIPS IN THE GAMBUH PLAY

ACCORDING TO RAI (1996, 79–80; 100)

Patutan quality associated character

Selisir sweet, bright, refined, elegant noble refined male or female,or their attendants

Tembung big, sharp, strong, muscular, heroic noble high-ranking male, e.g., king or prime minister

Sunaren less strong than Tembung noble, gentle, dull-witted, or eccentric

Baro strong, muscular, heroic noble, male-only

Lebeng refined, regal; same as Selisir noble, high-ranking, central figures, e.g., Prince Panji

EXAMPLE 11: POSSIBLE CONTINUUM OF RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN

MODE AND CHARACTER IN THE GAMBUH PLAY

Strong, coarse, male Sweet, refined, female or male

Tembung Baro Sunaren Lebeng Selisir


of the ubiquitous gamelan gong kebyar. Though relative to other modes it is said to convey “sweet” or “refined” qualities, it is used in kebyarmusic over a wide range of technical, affective, and dramatic contexts, which have evolved over the many decades of kebyar’s predominance. Many composers and gamelan tuners maintain that each individual degree within the selisir scale has a unique quality—a concept probably deriving from the esoteric cosmology of the Prakempa, but also reflected in actual performance practice:

Heard in relation to specific musical contexts, scale tones are felt to have individual character and affect. The acoustic reasons for this are evident from the fact that they are separated by unequal intervals. Beyond this, on the compositional level, the gong tone of a melody (the final scale tone, which coincides with a stroke of the large gong) is an indicator of the music’s mood. Ding as gong tone is often described as heroic or majestic, dong as sensual or demonic, dengchildish (also supernatural or frightening), dung feminine and grace-ful, and dang martial and aggressive. Musicians are not rigid or even in general agreement on these linkages, but most hold opinions on them. (Tenzer 2000, 36)

Thus, it is evident that the modal “affects” are themselves affected and shaped by a wide range of factors, some stylistic, some genre-specific, and others esoteric. Composition in seven-tone contexts is for that reason a highly subjective art: the rich colors of the patutan shift, chameleon-like, relative to who is looking and what he or she is trying to find. This fits comfortably in the Balinese aesthetic of context-dependence, desa-kala-patra (“place-time-situation”). Far from creating disagreements or diver-gent schools of thought amongst Balinese musicians, such ambiguities are embraced as a source of freedom and stimulant to creativity:

On the one hand many Balinese scholars are interested in developing a more comprehensive modal theory, on the other they are afraid that more theories and rules would stifle the rich variation among the different areas of Bali. As a result, a kind of agreed silence has been established by many of the professors at the conservatories regarding this subject. Some Balinese composers and teachers feel that the lack of comprehensive theories directly contributes to the vibrant state of Balinese composition today. (McGraw 2000, 76)

The fluid nature of modal character makes it a perfect subject for that most popular pastime of Balinese artists and philosophers, free and poetic


reinterpretation of source materials. At one moment a ritual gamelan is conjured, at another a musical technique or texture is borrowed, and at another the association to character-type comes to the fore. Whether the high rate of modal change in Geregel (see Example 15) still allows these myriad associations to rise to the surface for the Balinese listener, is an open question. Perhaps this points to a new freedom—to simply ignore all such associations, as Alit admittedly does in several sections of Geregel. With the emergence of the new gamelan semara dana, composers are now able to play with modal materials in new ways, as if modern painters re-discovered the startling hues of ancient pigments and began mixing them freely together.

THE REBIRTH OF THE GAMELAN SEMAR PEGULINGAN

Other deep resonances of the two extra tones become evident by glancing back over the last hundred years at the intertwining histories of the two gamelan types that are the immediate parents of the gamelan semara dana. Beyond their associations to ritual and drama, particular gamelan types are historical entities which embody a constellation of val-ues deriving from their original genesis and use. It was not a simple act of artistic synthesis to fuse the gamelan semar pegulingan saih pitu, the essence of ancient courtly prestige and refinement, with the gong kebyar, the twentieth-century gamelan of sensational popular performance. It was akin, rather, to a merging of social lineage, an intermarriage between families of differing castes and economic classes.

Born in the Balinese courts of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, the seven-tone semar pegulingan is considered truly klasik by Balinese musicians. Unlike kebyar, which first appeared in their grandparents’ life-times and is still regarded as the modern ensemble of the masses, semar pegulingan is felt to embody a fully evolved style descended from another time and sensibility, a product of the rarefied atmosphere of the Balinese courts. In fact, it barely survived into our own era: seven-tone semar pegulingan became almost completely extinct in the early twentieth century. As Wayan Rai reports, the decline of the feudal system in late nineteenth-century Bali meant that court orchestras declined as well, since the rajas and princes could no longer adequately support them. For the semar pegulingan, this was the loss of its native habitat. The oblitera-tion of royal privilege and power was epitomized in the famed puputan(the suicidal “final wars” of confrontation with the Dutch colonizers) of 1906–8, during which two of the most famous heirloom court orchestras


were deliberately burned as part of the self-immolation of the rajas, their families, and possessions. The heyday of sweet bronze gamelan tones lulling the raja and his concubines to sweet dreams in his sleeping cham-bers was gone.24

The coup-de-grace was, ironically, the birth of the kebyar style in 1914. As the new music and dance style swept the island, the popular craze cre-ated an immediate demand for new instruments. Whereas older and usable gamelan instruments are now rarely destroyed for recycling—their value is better realized by selling them to a wealthy individual—in those days of scarce wealth it was the norm. Almost all the remaining semar pegulingan were melted down within the next two decades and re-fashioned into gamelan gong kebyar. So complete was the disappearance that Colin McPhee mourned, in his famous treatise Music in Bali, the “vanished” semar pegulingan.

In fact the style and repertoire had not died. The sole surviving court musician of Badung, who had barely escaped the slaughter and suicide of the puputan, was inspired to recreate the court tradition. He oversaw the creation of a new gamelan semar pegulingan and resurrection of the seven-tone repertoire. Though this group itself eventually declined in the 1940s, again a victim of war, the gamelan and its music survived by being relocated to the village of Pagan Kelod, where it remains—performed, studied, and documented. A nearly identical process occurred in the court of Klungkung, where a few surviving musicians commissioned a gongsmith to make a new set and then revived the stately court com-positions; this gamelan now survives in the adjacent village of Kamasan.

The extraordinary value and precious museum-like quality of this rep-ertoire, rescued like a treasure from a distant era, no doubt affected musi-cians’ sensibilities and regard for it. For many decades (until the 1980s), the primary impulse was one of simple restoration, requiring the revival of the gamelan type itself as well as the collective memory around these heirloom pieces. To this laudable end, the academies, KOKAR (later SMKI) and ASTI (later STSI) played an important role, in accord with their mission regarding the preservation of Balinese arts. The fact that the tonal resources of the gamelan semara dana are only now being fully exploited may be a reflection of the persistence of this attitude: it took some time for feelings of reverence for the seven-tone repertoire and associated modal techniques to give way to familiarity for the average young musician, which in turn helped open the door to experimentation with these resources. As ethnomusicologist Marc Perlman points out, SMKI and STSI also played a converse, and perhaps unwitting, role in this change and in the creation of the gamelan semara dana: by main-taining seven-tone gamelan semar pegulingan in their collections, side by side with many other gamelan types, all have become increasingly de-


coupled from their native contexts—ritual, feudal, and social. While the academy’s faculty and administration do maintain essential aspects of reli-gious custom (offerings are made to gamelan instruments on auspicious days) and occasionally use them in traditional contexts on and off-campus, these gamelan have become, more than ever before, mere sets of musical instruments, demystified, sitting side by side and ready for class-room use. The loosening of intense social and religious constraints helped make their cross-fertilization possible, awaiting only the right needs and circumstances.25

THE GAMELAN SEMARA DANA

Once the various potentialities had converged, the actual creation of gamelan semara dana happened quickly. As McGraw recounts (2000), the process traced a lively back-and-forth bounce between evolving needs, means, and the experimentation to bring them together—the typ-ical fuel mix of instrumental development. Originally, the goal in creating the gamelan semara dana was to tap into a wider stylistic and orchestra-tional palette for the accompaniment of dramatic works, primarily the large-scale dance dramas known as sendratari (from seni-drama-tari, lit-erally “art-drama-dance”) born in the 1960s. The first productions were semi-serialized reenactments of stories from the Ramayana and Mahab-harata epics, both very much alive in Bali-Hindu culture. Wayan Berata is credited with creating the form, primarily as composer of the music for the first sendratari productions. One of his first innovations was to put two complete, and contrasting, orchestras on stage. The first such combi-nation was of pelog ensembles: the ponderous and majestic gamelan gong gede (“orchestra of the large gongs”) with the sweet-toned gamelan semar pegulingan. Though nominally in the same pentatonic scalar sys-tem, the coloristic contrasts between their tunings (both in interval struc-ture and overall tonal height) and timbre (both in sound color and sheer volume) could be used to heighten or underline dramatic contrasts, par-ticularly along the refined-strong (alus-keras) continuum: the alus char-acters were accompanied by semar pegulingan, the keras ones by gong gede.

From that jumping-off point, and in light of Berata’s stature as a com-poser, teacher, and gamelan tuner, the next steps seem almost inevitable. An initial fascination with stark contrasts gave way to subtler consider-ations as he sought the means to effect a more seamless switch between gamelan. Since none of the notes of the two gamelan in his first experiment were exactly the same, each changeover was readily, and at times jarringly, apparent. If, on the other hand, a tone of one gamelan


could be tuned in exact unison to a tone of the other gamelan, it could act as a musical pivot point or bridge between the two sets of instru-ments, similar to a modulasi between modes. Such a bridge was already familiar to Javanese musicians working with side-by-side pelog and slendro gamelan, who name the common tone tumbuk. Since Berata was working with two pelog sets, he went even further, completely re-tuning two pre-existing gamelan so that all, rather than only one, of their cor-responding keys were identical in pitch. He did this by lowering and adjusting the pitches of a seven-tone semar pegulingan to match those of a five-tone gong kebyar.26 Now, one could end a phrase on any note of the gong kebyar, allow it to ring, and pick up again on the same note of the semar pegulingan without a tuning shift. Well-trained players could bridge the gap so smoothly that the changeover was imperceptible to the audience. The “drama” of the switch would only become apparent when the other notes of the seven-tone scale were brought into play. Also, the Javanese style of side-by-side gamelan combination, with one rather than two sets of musicians, was first tried at about this point.

With the creation of such matched gamelan sets, the possibility to put everything on a single “keyboard” was suddenly in the air. Berata’s immediate goal was an orchestra that could function as either semar pegulingan or gong kebyar, depending on the choice of notes and a few minor changes in instrumentation, described below. He completed work on this first hybrid orchestra in 1983. It was dubbed gamelan genta pinara pitu (“Gamelan of Seven Sounds”) by STSI’s director at that time, Made Bandem, who is reported to have found the name in the Prakempa, which he was currently translating.27 The new gamelan was used, to great effect, by Nyoman Windha in the work Kindama, a sendratari with choreography by Swasthi Bandem that was premiered two years later (see Example 13).

However Berata perceived a shortcoming in the new gamelan: the range of the gangsa instruments was one note less than that of a contem-porary gamelan gong kebyar, since it omitted the lowest tone, dong. This was the result of the precise way in which Berata intermingled the two gamelan types: he decided to add the two extra tones in the higher regis-ter only (creating the full seven-tone complement in that range), while leaving the lower register in selisir. But he also removed the lowest tone, dong, so that the total number of keys was eleven (see Example 12). This was the result of circumstances: Berata had adapted the wooden cases (tatak) of a pre-existing gamelan gong kebyar for his experimental set; eleven keys were the most he could squeeze on the normally ten-keyed gangsa cases.28 While the omission of that note was not an issue for new music composed for this gamelan, Berata felt it would compromise per-formances of pre-existing kebyar works by forcing players to rearrange


low-register passages.29 His next version of a hybrid gamelan therefore included the low dong, resulting in twelve-keyed gangsa. Similar consid-erations informed the creation of the new reong (also shown in Example 12), which went from a kebyar-like low range to a semar pegulingan-esque high range.

In terms of available keys, the new gamelan therefore had everything of both its parents. This second-generation hybrid orchestra was dubbed by Berata gamelan semara dana (or smara dana, semaradahana), named after a twelfth-century epic poem about Semara, the Hindu god of love.30 It appears to be in stable or semi-final form considering the degree to which it has flourished—there are now about twenty-five sets in use, with an increasing number of new orders being received by Balinese gongsmiths.

There are several other important differences in instrumentation between the two source gamelans that must be observed to play their respective repertoire on the gamelan semara dana. Most prominently, semar pegulingan music uses no reong, with its characteristic repertoire of melodic elaboration and agogic ocak-ocakan patterns allied to the drum composition. Instead, a similar instrument, trompong, is played by a single musician in free melodic elaborations, replacing the more incisive ugal of the gong kebyar as the lead melody instrument. Likewise, smaller drums, kendang krumpungan, are used for gamelan semar pegulingan, and are played in a style different from kebyar’s heavier strokes. It features

&5

55

55

5 5 5 5 5 5 5notated pitch

5

mm

m

mm

5m

5m5 5

5

7-tone scale 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 1 2 3 4 5

Semar Pegulingangangsa i o e eu u a ai

Gong Kebyargangsa o e u a i o e u a ireong e u a i o e u a i o e u

Semara Danagangsa o e u a i o e eu u a ai ireong e u a i o e eu u a ai i o e eu u

m

EXAMPLE 12: THE LAYOUT OF GANGSA AND REONG KEYS OF TWO

SOURCE GAMELAN (SEMAR PEGULINGAN AND GONG KEBYAR) AND

RESULTING HYBRID (GAMELAN SEMARA DANA)


the delicate semi-improvised interplay of resonant rim-strokes, as well as a repertoire of characteristic angsel, musical breaks.

Once these few switches are made, Balinese musicians feel that the new gamelan semara dana is entirely capable of delivering the music of the semar pegulingan as well as that of the gong kebyar, with negligible com-promise on either side.31 This is precisely what Berata intended—a multi-purpose gamelan capable of delivering distinct musical styles without switching instruments, not a new instrumental asset that could be the medium for stylistic and modal synthesis.32 This orientation helps explain the approximate fifteen-year delay between the creation of this gamelanand its full exploitation as a vehicle for seven-tone kebyar music, apparent in Geregel.

THE CONVERGENCE OF KEBYAR AND SEVEN-TONE MUSIC

Despite the various constraints between style, gamelan type, and reper-toire, a glance at new compositions in the late 1970s and 1980s shows a clear trajectory towards the incorporation of modal techniques into the mainstream musical language, preparing the way for the freedoms evi-dent in Geregel. Innovations took place on several levels, from that of conceptual (the new awareness that contrasting modes could be used dramatically to evoke other gamelans, styles, and extra-musical contexts), to instrumental (the increasing use of seven-tone gamelan, multiple gamelan sets, and the semara dana), to the purely musical techniques of modal and stylistic manipulation. Seen in retrospect, this was a true con-vergence of kebyar and semar pegulingan saih pitu styles, as each started to be infused with elements of the other. The actual creation of the hybrid gamelan took place not at the beginning of this musical evolution, but in its midst, and was both an expression of a process already under-way and a vehicle for further change.

Eka Dasa Rudra (premiered at the Festival of Young Composers, Pekan Komponis Muda, in Jakarta in 1979), was one of the earliest and formative works in this development. It opened the door to stylistic com-bination through its new dramatic conception: the composer, Komang Astita, sought to re-create the atmosphere of the religious ceremony for which it is named, a once-in-a-lifetime, island-wide ritual purification of the cosmos. As in almost all large-scale Balinese ceremonies, several types of gamelan accompanied specific ritual events in various locations. Some-times two or more orchestras play so closely together that their sounds overlap, intermingle, clash, and collide, creating that desirable state of bustling, multi-level activity (ramé) thought to please humans and


visiting deities alike. In dramatizing the ceremony, Astita used a seven-tone semar pegulingan to which was added a large array of hanging gongs, kulkul (slit drums used as ceremonial signals), a bedug drum, and assorted found instruments. The stage was filled with instruments and players, who would alternately or simultaneously sing sacred melodies, beat the kulkul, and play excerpts of music that evoke various sacred ensembles and repertoire—angklung, lelambatan music of the gamelan gong (kebyar), and traditional semar pegulingan pieces, among others. Thus the idea of using modal contrast on a single seven-tone gamelan as a means of evoking distinct styles, with associated repertoire and instru-mentation, was introduced. Selected sections of Eka Dasa Rudra were later rearranged as a purely instrumental work for gamelan semar pegulingan, entitled Semara Winangun (circa 1981).

Several years later, two new sendratari works were performed during the 1985 Bali Arts Festival that demonstrated the growing interest in seven-tone music. One was the Satya, with music by Ketut Gede Asnawa and choreography by his classmate Made Wiratini; it was created as their graduation piece from ASTI. In its instrumentation Asnawa combined two gamelan sets, the seven-tone semar pegulingan with gong kebyar, inspired no doubt by Pak Berata’s concurrent experiments in this direc-tion. While the overall point of departure and stylistic frame in Satya is that of semar pegulingan style, kebyar textures emerge as striking dra-matic contrasts. In this way Asnawa moved towards a greater inter-mingling or interpenetration of these two styles, along with their respective orchestrational techniques. Each remained, however, essen-tially distinct, since the composer’s goal was (like Berata’s) to use stylistic juxtaposition for dramatic contrast and/or characterization, and not to attempt to hybridize them. Thus, semar pegulingan style sections never employ reong or ocak-ocakan patterns; kebyar sections are always in selisirmode, and the overall orchestrational texture and structuring of colo-tomic and melodic patterns remain in similar stylistic accord—either one or the other, briefly overlapping but never completely wedded.

Nyoman Windha’s Kindama (also an ASTI graduation work, with choreography by Swasthi Bandem) went much further. It was the first and only work to use the newly fashioned gamelan genta pinara pitu, which Windha skillfully exploited. Inspired by Berata’s instrumental melding, Windha crafted sections that reflected it in corresponding stylis-tic combinations, now true fusions of not only semar pegulingan and kebyar, but other styles as well including angklung, leluangan, and a quo-tation of Javanese gamelan. The first slow section of the work (pengadeng), for example, combines kebyar orchestration and drumming, syncopated reong elaboration based on leluangan style, and modal shifts


between selisir and tembung. This section of Kindama may well be the first clear expression of seven-tone tonal resources within kebyar textures. And while the means of effecting the modal shifts in this section remain in accord with traditional principles as outlined above (Example 8), other passages in Kindama push the limits of one in particular, that of formal positioning. Many modal shifts take place directly at formal boundaries, in alignment with dramatic changes in texture, tempo, melodic contour, and other features. They arrive without preparation, and are not the result of melodic manipulation in the classical manner. An element of freedom is clearly evident.

One passage in particular concentrates and frames the essence of stylis-tic and modal contrast in a striking fashion. After a lengthy first section, entirely in tembung mode and semar pegulingan style/orchestration, a kebyar-like passage suddenly bursts in—the first full orchestral texture of the piece—within which a phrase is stated first in tembung and then immediately restated in selisir (see Example 13). The introduction of a new mode is combined with an extreme ritardando, coming to rest with the gong stroke that begins the first slow section of the work, the pengadeng with leluangan elaboration described above. This bridge thereby divides the piece, in a concentrated and dramatically effective manner, between the semar pegulingan-based introduction, and the broad kebyar-style pengawak that it prepares. Through passages such as this, Kindama set a high water mark for seven-tone, multi-stylistic com-position that would not be surpassed for at least a decade.

A few years after this (1988), a significant collection of works from the traditional seven-tone repertoire was revived at ASTI, culminating in a two-volume cassette release on the most popular local recording label, Bali Record. The pieces recorded included both new arrangements of gambuh and pre-existing semar pegulingan pieces, and included the par-ticipation of faculty and senior students. (In fact, one of the com-positions, Langsing Tuban, had already been arranged from its gambuhoriginal by Ketut Gede Asnawa as part of his 1985 graduation concert, and was performed together with Satya.)33 This recording project had a great deal to do with further spreading interest in saih pitu repertoire, since by then cassettes had become one of the primary media of musical exchange in Bali.

From the opposite direction, and during the same period, the main-stream kebyar tradition began to reveal musicians’ increasing familiarity with seven-tone resources. At first, these occurrences were either quite brief, transitional, or layered upon a musical core which remained essentially pentatonic, generated from the selisir tones of kebyar music. This is no surprise, since initial experiments in this direction predated the


creation of the gamelan semara dana, and for that reason kebyar music utilized, by definition, gamelan gong kebyar instrumentation. The only instruments capable of exploring unusual scales were the bamboo flutes (suling) or, rarely, voice—the only non-percussion instruments in the orchestra, which lie in a distinct orchestrational stratum and are peri-pheral to the primary musical architecture. Even after the new hybrid gamelans were created, composers continued to utilize normal gong kebyar instrumentation, assigning seven-tone excursions to flutes and voice only. The reason for this has to do with performance context: the single most important forum for new kebyar works has been, and contin-ues to be, the island-wide gamelan competitions (Mrdangga Utsawa) of the Bali Arts Festival (Pesta Kesenian Bali). Since Festival rules dictate the type of gamelan used—five-tone gamelan gong kebyar of explicitly defined instrumentation—almost all experimentation in the mainstream musical tradition of kebyar was done on this standardized set. The gamelan semara dana was still a new and rare beast, unfamiliar and unavailable to most musicians, and in any case regarded as a specialized medium for dramatic accompaniment as typified in the few new seven-

EXAMPLE 13: EXCERPT FROM KINDAMA , BY NYOMAN WINDHA, IN ITS

ORIGINAL SENDRATARI ARRANGEMENT (1985)


tone works mentioned above. The overwhelming majority of composers were born and bred in the pentatonic world of kebyar (some say, “ruled” by it); and felt no compositional necessity to break free, in Harry Partch-like fashion, of its scalar limitations. Their imaginations were sufficiently preoccupied in the many other spheres—rhythmic, melodic, orches-trational, stylistic, formal—in which development of the contemporary kebyar vernacular was taking place.

In light of the above, it is not surprising that the first excursions of keb-yar music into extended scales happened quite unobtrusively, as the two rogue notes, with all their latent powers and meanings, tiptoed into keb-yar space. One of their first appearances came about through a layering of distinct traditions, as the normally ametric and unaccompanied vocal melodies known as kidung, which frequently make use of six or even seven tones, started to be combined with five-tone gamelan. This was primarily the handiwork of Wayan Sinti, who collaborated with the highly regarded musician and scholar Nyoman Rembang in the goal of re-introducing religious vocal music to secular gamelan performance. The floating and hauntingly beautiful kidung melodies, originally allied with the seven-tone gamelan gambang ritual orchestra (in a manner and tradition now apparently lost), were accompanied by five-tone gamelan gong kebyar. The earliest product of Sinti and Rembang’s collaboration was Gita Suadita, premiered at the 1978 all-Bali gamelan competitions. Although such works, known collectively as gegitaan, were not immed-iately popular, this thread was later picked up and promoted by the local government. The eventual result was a new choral/gamelan form called sandhya gita, which appeared in the mid-1980s. In it, seven-tone vocal melodies are often used, sometimes in two- or three-part textures based on a Western choral aesthetic—but always with normal gamelan gong kebyar accompaniment (Wallis 1995).

The other, more important, locus of tonal expansion was within the ametric and freely ornamented flute solos that typically introduced the first major cyclic section of tabuh kreasi in then-current form. This prac-tice was a natural application of a long-established practice. Flute players have always had the freedom to accompany singers on momentary excur-sions into distant tonal territories as needed, for example in arja, topeng, or other dramatic vocal forms. In the tabuh kreasi context, inclusion of a flute solo (traceable, perhaps, to the bird-like suling trills of the piece Gambang Suling, a Javanese tune adapted to Balinese gamelan, ca. 1955) was as much the innovation as the appearance of tones foreign to the kebyar scale. That fact, combined with the contrasting texture and char-acter of these sections—a single suling is no more than a delicate flutter compared to the dense metallic texture of a full bronze gamelan—gave


these tones more the character of pamero, simple coloristic or borrowed tones, than signposts of newly established modes.34 This remained the overall impression even after the solo player was replaced by a whole chorus of flutes, as later became the norm.

By the late 1980s, familiarity with seven-tone scales had grown, and the two extra tones started to take on a life of their own even in the over-whelmingly selisir environment of kebyar. They started cropping up not only in flute solos, but in the middle of orchestral textures, in passages that effected true shifts into modal territory. This was accomplished through a neat orchestrational trick: the bronze instruments would sim-ply rest at the precise moments the two added pitches (numbers 4 and 7 in the chart) were played by the suling—leaving out a quarter-note here, an eighth-note there—as if keys for those tones existed throughout the orchestra but simply weren’t struck. With enough suling players, the brief bronze dropouts were relatively unnoticeable, and a pseudo seven-tone gamelan could be conjured into momentary existence. An example of this occurs in Windha’s work Jagra Parwata, played during the 1991 Festival by the kebyar group from the village of Munduk in the northern Balinese district of Buleleng.35 Windha pairs the modal innovation with a formal one: in the middle of the bapang—the fast and showy central sec-tion of tabuh kreasi which typically feature virtuosic drum variations and tutti orchestral interjections—he unexpectedly eases back the tempo and ushers in a lilting 64-beat tune in sunaren mode, accompanied by drum patterns deriving from pengecet meters (see Example 14; see also the Appendix for an explanation of notation). The effect of this phrase was so novel that, during the excitement of its premiere performance in the heat of festival competition, the crowd of six thousand burst into applause.36

More complex use of seven-tone materials was made in the following years by Wayan Gede Yudana, whose radical musical innovations have played an important role in Balinese musical development by encourag-ing a more experimental approach to the composition of kebyar instru-mental music. In several of his mid-1990s tabuh kreasi, Yudana’s seven-tone flute lines attained a new level of integration within the total con-ception of the work, a result of their textural complexity, combination with other gamelan instruments, extended length, and novel placement (appearing periodically throughout the piece rather than in the opening sections only). The entire fabric of his pieces was so experimental, that the excursion into new tonal territory did not seem an anomaly of estab-lished kebyar style; it was but one strangely crafted element among many.37

By the late 1990s, the gamelan semara dana had proliferated not only throughout Ubud but Denpasar as well, and the momentum of


EXAMPLE 14: EXCERPT FROM THE BAPANG OF JAGRA PARWATA

(KENDANG , CENG-CENG , AND KAJAR OMITTED)


innovation with seven-tone materials started to be felt by many compos-ers. In 1998, Ketut Suandita, a student at STSI, presented as his gradua-tion piece a highly concentrated work for gamelan semara dana entitled Maha Yuga, performed by the virtuosic musicians from the Denpasar-based club, Sanggar Printing Mas. Here, finally, seven-tone materials were treated with near-complete freedom, in a stylistic and orches-trational context that was overwhelmingly kebyar-based. Maha Yugamade abundantly clear that the seven-tone colors could now be treated freely, as unconstrained but richly associative elements in kebyar instru-mental composition.

THE INNOVATIONS OF GEREGEL

In light of its background, Dewa Alit’s Geregel can be seen as a synthesis of innovations, tendencies, and latent possibilities that had been in the air for several years. Like many pivotal works in the development of musical styles, its achievements lie not in any single technical breakthrough (most of which had already happened in others’ works) but in the stunning way that these potentialities are realized.

In terms of modal use, perhaps the most immediate way to demon-strate the degree to which Alit has departed from traditional models is a graph of the entire piece, along a real-time axis, comparing Geregel with two traditional seven-tone semar pegulingan pieces that use more than one mode (see Example 15). While such a graphic should be read with care since it distorts the psychological time of musical perception, it makes the relative use of modal contrast clear. Note that, in contrast even to certain classical models, nowhere in Geregel is there any ambiguity in mode whatsoever. While Alit may occasionally combine more than one mode vertically, and often switch rapidly between them horizontally, his colors always remain pure. On the other hand, one of the most striking sections of the piece (occurring twice in the pengecet, and described in detail in Example 24) combines selisir with slendro gede mode, covering all seven tones and therefore in contrast to the classical principle of com-bining only closely related modes.

Formally, Geregel lies in an unusual and particular relationship to the usual tripartite formula gineman/bapang/pengecet of mid-to-late twentieth-century tabuh kreasi style (summarized in Example 16), itself a reinterpretation of the classical kawitan/pengawak/pengecet form that originated in gambuh and gong gede repertoire.38

The difficulties arise because Geregel diverges from this layout on sev-eral levels affecting fore- to middle-ground structure, rendering this


archetypal design obscure. The composer himself claims to have thrown out all normative models of formal construction in this work. Although he uses a tripartite designation of sections—he mentions kawitan (with kotekan), bapang, and pengecet (with penyuwud)—these were for him mere wadah, “empty vessels,” to be filled with new material. Retaining these names was, to him, a mere convention and practical convenience, since they offer a means to communicate formal positions to the musi-cians in rehearsal.

Despite this claim, some of the landmarks of tabuh kreasi formal arche-type are still faintly recognizable: the cyclic islands of the kotekan, bapangand gambangan-like closing section (his penyuwud) all occur in more or less typical formal positions and retain a generic resemblance to their models. In the most general terms, we still see aspects of the three-part design operating in the proportion and relative position of cyclic,

EXAMPLE 15: REAL-TIME GRAPH OF THE PATUTAN USED IN TWO

TRADITIONAL PIECES, AND IN GEREGEL

minutes 0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16

partialrepeat

partialrepeat

overlapping areas = ambiguous modal useLANGSING TUBAN

tembung

selisir

SUMAMBANG JAWA

sunaren

baro

GEREGEL

selisir

tembung

sunaren

slendro alit

slendro gede

kawitan pemalpal pengawak pengecet pekaad(many repetitions) (3x)

kawitan pengawak pengecet(2x) (2x)

a a' b c d

kawitan/kotekan group bapang pengecet penyuwud(2x)


regularly metrical material compared to transitional and/or ametric, irregular material. As a result the overall dramatic arch of tabuh kreasiform is still traceable through opening, middle, and closing areas, despite the many strange detours along the way.

Contextualizating the piece within such a conventional model requires, however, some double-edged sword work; it can both reveal and distract us from what makes it so special. More than a form to be filled or discarded, the kawitan/bapang/pengecet framework was a famil-iar place for Alit to hang his hat while he peered over a workbench filled with strange and exciting gizmos, old reliable parts, and new tools; his fascinated delight in taking things apart and putting them back together again in novel or eccentric rearrangements is apparent throughout. For example, the section Alit labels as bapang, while based characteristically on a short ostinato and featuring drum variations, is a bizarre assembly: the ostinato is no single eight-beat line with jublag and jegogan abstrac-tion, but a three-voice contrapuntal texture played on the low instrument group, six beats long, in tembung mode. Above this backdrop and around the drum variations, the gangsas intersperse dry, staccato inter-locking patterns, in selisir, deliberately reminiscent of vocal kecak texture.

1. Gineman/kotekan group

a. Gineman: Opening statements for the gangsa, reong, and low instrument groups,typically ametric and/or fragmented, separated by pauses which highlight theinstruments’ long sustain. Alternately, a kebyar opening: a dynamic orchestral tutti ofshort ametric phrases.

b. Kotekan: A single, long, regularly pulsed melody with elaborate interlockingfiguration (kotekan) played predominantly or entirely by the gangsa group; repeatedonce or twice.

2. Bapang group

a. Peralihan (transition): lead-in to bapang proper

b. Bapang: The next large cyclic island, often consisting of one or more ostinati(typically 8, 16 or 32 beats in length) in very fast tempi; elaborated with passagessuccessively highlighting the various instrumental sections (kendang/ceng-ceng,reong, gangsa), with occasional tutti orchestral interjections.

3. Pengecet (or gambangan)

a. Peralihan (transition): lead-in to pengecet proper

b. Pengecet: A series of full orchestral statements in a medium or medium-fasttempo, often in a balanced phrase structure (e.g. 8 + 8 or 16 + 16 beats). The overallatmosphere is that of relaxed and regular tunefulness, in contrast to the dynamicmaterial of previous sections.

c. Short codetta (penyuwud)

EXAMPLE 16: TYPICAL FORMAL LAYOUT OF A

LATE-TWENTIETH-CENTURY TABUH KREASI


The extended section that Alit refers to as a pengecet (it occupies, in real time, about half the piece’s total length) has even less kinship to tra-ditional models. Here, instead of the preceding, so-called bapang section, is found some of the material we might expect in a bapang—fast tempi, boldly drawn full orchestra textures with rhythmic ocak-ocakan, and keb-yar outbursts. But strange things happen in the wake of these kebyar out-bursts: several seem to become unraveled and peter out, almost questioningly, into nowhere: long silences for the entire orchestra. A couple of the phrases are then restarted in further kebyar episodes, as if the music had just lost its way temporarily. At another point, the long silence following one such phrase is dotted by pointillist gineman-type fragments, only to gallop onward to a fake finish. And twice these kebyarsections suddenly veer off into slow sections of completely alien charac-ter, orchestration, and metric design. Taken together, the net result is a collage-like conglomeration of vividly contrasting stuff that has little to do with the squarely assertive character of most bapang. For that reason it is difficult to dismiss Alit’s designation as a simple misnomer. On the other hand, none of this material, either separately and certainly not in this unique amalgam, reveals the regular, balanced phrase structure and relaxed character of most contemporary pengecet sections, as glossed in Example 16. Clearly Alit’s goal lies in exploring new dramatic designs and (as he would say) atmospheres, by playing with the sequence and assembly of recognizable materials, almost in a cubist fashion, in the sec-tion in which composers are usually content to coast along on stylistic autopilot.

The grand pauses of this pengecet—rests of astonishing duration for any tabuh kreasi, which riddle the latter half of the work like the holes in Swiss cheese—also merit special note in contextualizing Geregel. Aside from the dramatic value of these rests on a local level, they create unprec-edented textural openings in the sonic world of the tabuh kreasi. No other tabuh kreasi has them. They are breaches in the monolithic wall of metallic gamelan sound, allowing air and light inside. Although young composers understand “breath” quite well, having been well trained by their teachers to appreciate its power in classical forms, they find it diffi-cult in their own compositions to resist filling every possible space with ornate detail. Alit seems to know this, since he plays with our surprise: following a series of such long rests, an assertive tutti kebyar statement breaks in and drives relentlessly towards a conclusive gong, seeming to end it all. Here, in live performance, the musicians put their heads down on their instruments as if to say, “Sorry, it’s all over.” But a moment later they pop upright again as a melodic fragment sneaks back in on the two jublag, and the piece is again re-started (to inevitable applause at the false-ending effect).39 In the immediate drama of seeing Geregel


performed live, these grand pauses and foiled expectations, combined with the work’s many other innovations of form and mode, leave the lis-tener thinking, “What just happened?”—a confused and thoughtful afterglow of impressions.

In vertical construction, Geregel also reaches far beyond typical tabuhkreasi textures. The degree of contrapuntal interplay between the various sections is as great or greater than other Balinese kreasi to date. Alit does not accomplish this by piling on additional strata within the total texture, but by subdividing the various sections of the orchestra, while giving each greater independence and/or a novel way of interrelating to the others. The gangsa, for example, are almost always divided between the four pemade and the four higher-octave kantilan; the low instrument group is often divided into independent lines for the pairs of penyacah, jublag, and jegogan. Even the reong (whose four players usually work as an indivisible team) is divided, in one section, between two lower and two higher players moving in separate melodic and metric strata. These divisions are occasionally further augmented by the vertical combination of modes, such as the bapang-with-kecak mentioned above, in tembungand selisir. In fact, the interpart relationships seem so contrapuntally con-ceived, and the orchestrational strands so distinct, that at certain moments it is difficult to hear Geregel in the usual heterophonic terms. In this regard it only stretches, but never breaks, the primary vertical force of the unison and octave, as is evident in several excerpts discussed below.

SELECTED EXCERPTS

The very first phrases of Geregel already stake out the new turf the piece will explore with a sense of expectant drama. Part of the drama is bor-rowed from the tabuh kreasi style and kebyar music in general, in which the most characteristic opening gambit is the presentation of a series of short contrasting phrases, each pausing on a tone that is allowed to ring out in a long vibrating decay. Such an opening section is known as a gineman, a descendent of the classical gineman trompong in which the player of this lead melody instrument improvised a short lead-in to the piece proper, pausing with repeated notes on the important pitches. In modern contexts, the opening phrases of a gineman are often treated as small semi-independent islands, ranging in texture from simple unison lines to fast, metered outbursts of interlocking frenzy. The vibrating pauses in between help create a sense of wide-eyed expectation; “any-thing” might follow—though, in most kreasi, what does follow is pre-dictable stuff. In Geregel, it is not. The piece launches with a statement of “interlocking octaves” resounding through the gangsa and low


metallophone families. This is an opening of such uniqueness that its unambiguous re-statements later in the piece (it will occur four more times, in varied orchestration, to announce new sections) become clear formal markers.40 The octaves are followed by two short contrasting melodic statements, first from the two jublag and then the suling group, both with jegogan underlining. The jublag line picks up the tempo of the opening in a short upward melodic flourish; this is answered by sustained tones from the suling group, moving at a freer, more tranquil pace. But the little drama of their contrast is bathed in a strange light: they are both in slendro alit mode—our first hint that we are off on a unique excursion (see Example 17).

Following this is a short fast motif played by the kantilan, still in slendro alit. Aside from the mode, this is the kind of fast and rhythmically jagged outburst that we would expect in the opening phrases of a tabuh

EXAMPLE 17: THE OPENING “INTERLOCKING OCTAVES”

AND FOLLOWING TWO PHRASES OF GEREGEL


kreasi. But it is followed immediately by its restatement in selisir mode, now played by the entire gangsa section. Then, as if to declare in no uneven terms his intent to explore new modal relationships, Alit presents the fragment a third time, now in a combination of those two modes plus a third, tembung, creating arresting parallelisms (Example 18).

Herein, in microcosm, lies the special drama of Geregel, the kebyar sen-sationalist promise admirably fulfilled. Not only are the seven-tone materials laid out unequivocally in the first few phrases, but the modal contrasts are underlined with a heavy marker. Patutan are often defined as moods, or “atmospheres” (suasana), and by allowing the atmospheres to clash, lightning-like, in the immediate dramatic foreground, Alit has

EXAMPLE 18: THE CLASH OF PATUTAN


made plain his awareness of their powers. We sense the mad scientist at work.

Having introduced selisir, three mysterious tremolo swells emerge from the reong, and suddenly we’re off on a galloping swirl of interlock-ing reong parts over a nimble melody of changing meters. Each measure is repeated, and a miniature AABBAA form is created. The return of AA finds an angular kantilan countermelody added (see Example 19).

EXAMPLE 19: THE AABBAA PHRASE OF REONG FIGURATION


The generative rhythmic device here is the constant shifting between duple and triple groups, represented in this transcription by the 54(divided into 2 + 3) and 34 meters. Playing with these elements on a beat-to-beat level is characteristic of current tabuh kreasi language, a natural outgrowth of the 3:2 crossrhythm that is the basic stuff of interlocking patterns. This will shortly be picked up and developed on a faster level of subdivision (eighth notes), fomenting some beat ambiguities in the process.

The next phrase, notated in Example 20, begins with a simple exten-sion of the previous one, with the “A” material now taken over by the gangsas. The orchestrational change is heightened by another modal one: the music has shifted upwards into tembung—the third clearly expressed mode of the piece, barely a minute out of the gate. The rapid gangsa figuration reaches into the instruments’ upper registers, while metric ambiguities multiply in the penyacah/jublag tune as a half-beat is dropped. Without a beat-keeping kajar to spell it out, it’s left to melodic grouping and jegogan reinforcement to suggest a new beat (or obscure the previous one). The modal shifting continues, as the tune drops down into selisir before reaching upwards once more into tembung. This is a natural alliance of mode and register considering the layout of the gangsakeys on this gamelan, since the lower registers of both gangsa and reongcontain only the notes of selisir, while the higher octaves contain all seven tones (see Example 12 above). Finally, a cadence-like melodic gesture brings a clear downbeat and pause on dong of tembung (here, the note F�), and a short solo of the two kendang pops out.

Immediately following the brief drum solo is the first restatement of the opening’s interlocking octaves, along with the two melodic slendrophrases that follow, all unaltered, as shown earlier in Example 14. We realize that the first point of larger formal articulation has been reached. But following the tranquil suling melody is something new: a kotekan, in the proper sense of the word,41 entirely in slendro alit and in a relaxed medium-fast tempo (by Balinese standards) of � = 132 (see Example 21). This is the first cyclic section of the piece, which starts quite simply on gong without the usual lead-in or preparation, perhaps in accord with its cheerful character. The kotekan is repeated twice with changing dynamic profiles, a routine compositional process.

In this section the composer reveals his skills and willingness to re-examine kebyar materials. First, the nature of the contrapuntal treatment is quite un-Balinese. Normally, melodic structure is characterized both by a clear hierarchy of metric stratification, as each part moves at twice or four times the rate of the one below; and heterophonic organization, whereby all parts meet regularly in unisons or octaves. In more


EXAMPLE 20: EXTENSION INTO TEMBUNG MODE; BEAT AMBIGUITIES;

THE FIRST ENTRY OF KENDANG


conventional terms, all melodic parts (i.e., excluding drums, ceng-ceng, and punctuating gongs) are either faster elaborations or slower distilla-tions of a core melody. Here, such organizing principles are not ignored, but freely reinterpreted. A core melody (the prevailing “tune” of the sec-tion, doubled by the suling) is indeed present. But the other parts weave around it in unusual ways. The jegogan line, for example, is an elegant countermelody rather than simple abstraction. Not only is it crafted rhythmically to move mostly during the pauses (i.e., the held tones) of the jublag line, but its undulations in two-note, short-long groups (bracketed in Example 21) are loose metric expansions of the two-note groups in the jublag line. The two top lines, for pemade and kantilan, relate to one another in a similar contrapuntal manner, though inverted: the lower line is the faster one. Taken together, the two upper lines show a kinship in metric interrelationship and melodic contour, contrasting with that of the lower lines.

One result of all this counterpoint is many clashes—vertical simultane-ities of neighboring or two-degree-distant scale tones, by Balinese reck-oning—which can be found at almost every jegogan tone. Here there are

EXAMPLE 20 (CONT.)


EXAMPLE 21: THE “KOTEKAN ,” IN SLENDRO ALIT MODE


two possible factors at work. From the kebyar perspective, such simul-taneities are the “dissonance” of the current musical vernacular, and represent the pulling apart of essential musical glue of traditional models. This is analogous to late nineteenth-century chromaticism in European music, where an expansion of certain aspects of tonal harmony threatened—but did not yet override—the gravitational forces that held the system together. In Bali, the analogous primal force is the gong tone, the point of metric resolution and unison convergence. In this section, both the gong tone (on ding of slendro alit, here G�) and the main internal downbeat of the phrase (on dang, here F�, indicated in Example 21) indeed act as polarizing axes around their respective notes. But these two primary points are somewhat “impure”: though brief and (as the composer points out) probably unnoticeable, the pemade part falls on adjacent tones at those precise moments. Similarly, a scan of vertical events at each jegogan tone reveals only a general, not complete, conver-gence around unisons and octaves.42

The other possible factor at work in these slight clashes is the mode itself, through its associations to non-kebyar gamelan styles. Slendro is the patutan of gender wayang music, the accompaniment to the Balinese shadow puppet play. Gender music contrasts with that of larger bronze gamelan ensembles, since the players usually execute both the core mel-ody (with their left hands) and its elaboration (in their right). The co-existence of both lines on a single instrumental plane has affected their interrelationship, since the melodic strands can overlap or intermingle. Though different in function, the two parts are identical in timbre: both are played with hard mallets and have the same richly metallic attack partials (unlike large gamelan in which the contrasting timbres of rubber-tipped vs. hard mallets help differentiate the pokok from elaborating parts). On the gender, the left hands are thereby able to jump into the fray and participate in percussive interlocking patterns. At other moments, the normal relationship is turned upside down, as the players’ right hands carry the core melody while the left elaborates in interlocking figurations. And sometimes both parts are involved in textures that sim-ply leave aside the usual dichotomy of core melody and elaboration. In this milieu, simultaneities of adjacent tones (as opposed to the more acceptable unison, octave, and four-note kempyung) regularly occur. The nature of slendro scales themselves no doubt also play a role in allowing these freedoms. Since every interval is a major second or larger, simul-taneities of adjacent tones are less clashing than they would be in a typical pelog scale. Wayang music, in short, uses a language of traditionally greater vertical freedom, which Alit may be borrowing as desirable baggage of the slendro scale.


This section shows yet another curious feature: the fastest part, played by the four pemade, resembles in its rhythmic shape and dispersion of rests one part of an interlocking pair in modern kebyar language. But where is the other part? Leaving it out seems like sacrilege from a Balinese composer, for whom interlocking elaborations form the pre-dominant surface texture and substance of most pieces, and whose entire performance aesthetic is shot through with expressions of comple-mentary dualities or opposites (the ruwa bhineda principle). The reason can be surmised by looking at the total fabric of this section. If a comple-mentary interlocking part were included, following the usual practice, the composite of the two parts would be a continuous or near-continuous stream of notes at the fastest level of subdivision (here notated as sixteenth notes). Example 22 shows such a hypothetical part added to the original line. If played in a balanced and well-coordinated fashion, the individuality of each part would be, as in all kotekan, sub-sumed in the composite. That would cause the quirky offbeats and dis-junct contours of the original, un-paired part to effectively disappear, along with its motivic relationship to the kantilan line.43 Transparency would be also lost since the interlocking gangsas would form a denser line than the others, compromising the contrapuntal clarity that is obviously Alit’s goal.

EXAMPLE 22: A HYPOTHETICAL SECOND INTERLOCKING PART ADDED

TO THE SLENDRO KOTEKAN


A side effect of this treatment is a curious little in-joke: in the context of prevailing stylistic norms in kebyar, this section’s attributes, including tempo, melodic contour, and formal position, give it the character of “the kotekan” of the piece, a landmark feature of modern tabuh kreasiform.44 But by leaving out one of the parts Alit has removed the essence of kotekan itself, so that what remains are all the attributes of “the kotekan” except the very one for which it is named.

Skipping ahead to the pengecet, we arrive at one of the most striking passages in the entire work (Example 23), featuring an eccentric melody in slendro gede mode for the suling/jublag/penyacah group. The contour of this melody, as well as the metric design, modal combination, and orchestration of the other parts, make the passage unlike anything else in Geregel, and certainly an anomaly in its placement among the bapang-like full orchestral textures that surround it. The melody, prominently heard (the gangsa, kendang, and ceng-ceng are silent), is distinguished not only by its mode, found nowhere else in the piece, but by its unusual leaps and off-beat note repetitions in the approach to gong. It is cast in further relief by the fact that the other parts, reong and jegogan, are in selisir, and relate to it in oblique ways on several levels.

Metrically, the section is another cyclic island, seven slow beats in length—though the metric rate, as expressed by the beat-keeping kajar, has been shifted to a quarter-speed of the surrounding material, so that the section occupies 28 beats of space relative to it. In typical fashion for such a change in irama (metric level), one stratum of elaborating parts has been correspondingly subdivided, with the result that its density ends up the same as the fastest stratum of the previous section’s texture. The net effect might be compared to a highly elastic canvas stretched out to twice or quadruple its length, with the newly available space filled in with ornate detail. Changes between irama, an important feature in both Balinese and Javanese music (and highly codified in the latter), are nor-mally effected by a gradual process between sections: as the music under-goes a ritardando (or, in the opposite direction, accelerando), a point is reached at which various strata are subdivided (or condensed) and related changes are introduced, so that the new texture is established before the structural downbeat—normally marked by a gong stroke—that marks the new section.

In this case, however, the new metric texture arrives quite suddenly at the gong stroke, fully formed, highlighting the abrupt change in mode and other striking attributes of the section. The metric retooling pene-trates into the elaborating parts, which are played entirely on reong in an unusual division of parts. Rather than doubling at the octave, the two lower and two upper reong players are decoupled and play separate composite parts. The upper pair, now the fastest level of subdivision


EXAMPLE 23: EXCERPT FROM THE PENGECET OF GEREGEL


mentioned above, moves at twice the rate of the lower pair, so that the two are cast in distinct melodic and metric layers. Adding to the strange-ness of the orchestration, the higher part also features agogic ocak-ocakanduring the last several beats, seldom heard unallied to kendang and ceng-ceng. In a parallel manner, the two jegogan are decoupled from the melody group, their normal partners, and instead accompany the reong in its selisir explorations. Note also the syncopated placement of kempur and kemong strokes, reinforcing, together with the jegogan, vertical align-ments of structural tones at unexpected points in the horizontal flow.

The last section of Geregel, the penyuwud, also manifests unique modal and textural construction. Alit again puts a combination of modes on dis-play in a new frame, treating them not as the basis of melodic construc-tion, but as vertically cast pitch fields that are contrasted successively. The result is an almost chordal effect, as a single dense texture is “re-harmonized” in a steadily rotating progression through three modes, selisir, slendro alit, and tembung. The patterning of the texture has a great deal to do with the chordal impression: both the pokok melody and its elaborations span, within each eight-beat gongan, all the notes of the cur-rent mode in unusually disjunct and angular contours, almost an arpeg-giation. This shape is projected into the kantilan part, here doubled by suling, in a mid-rate stratum of elaboration (represented in Example 23 by eighth notes), and into the pemade parts in a web-like figuration at the fastest rate. This particular style of interlocking figuration, with its many repeating notes and leaps, is not new; it originates in complex two-hand techniques developed for the sacred bamboo ensemble gambang, which were first borrowed in a composition for large bronze gamelan in the early twentieth century.45

Alit’s use and placement of gambangan-like kotekan is, therefore, no innovation. But its characteristic texture is exploited in a new way by the block-like manner of cycling through the three modes. Each shift takes place directly on the gong stroke, with no melodic preparation of any kind, in contrast to the traditional treatment of modal change as a melodic process that takes place before, after, but seldom exactly on, a structural downbeat. The result is a kaleidoscopic effect of shifting colors. Example 24 illustrates the contrasts for the first twelve gongan, four repetitions in each of the three modes. Reong, kendang, ceng-ceng, and kajar are omitted here, since they impose yet another overlay on a larger formal level, discussed below.

This thick texture undergoes unusual rhythmic and metric manipu-lations. The kajar, normally the rock-steady and constant beat keeper in such a texture, instead alternates at each eight-beat gongan between on-beat and off-beat playing, as shown in Example 25.


EXAMPLE 24: THE PENYUWUD (FINAL) SECTION OF GEREGEL

(REONG , KENDANG , CENG-CENG , AND KAJAR OMITTED)


Allied with the kajar is a complex rhythmic ocak-ocakan part per-formed by reong, kendang, and ceng-ceng, shown in Example 26. (For clarity the kendang and ceng-ceng are not notated, since they are realiza-tions of the same part.) In synchronization with the kajar beat shifts, the ocak-ocakan is also divided into two eight-beat halves; in the second eight the reong byot chords are moved over one-sixteenth note to more syncopated positions. Despite the fact that everything else in this texture remains solidly and steadily in eight, these rhythmic manipulations con-vey an impression that the beat is inverted every other gongan, as if a half beat were being added and then again subtracted.

Following this, the reong and kendang fill out the next two eight-beat gongan of each modal area with more typical elaboration (not notated here): the reong with an interlocking melodic figuration, and the kendangwith improvised drumming based on arja style.

One of the challenges of performing this section is that the drummers must suddenly switch to different sized drums with each modal change: the largest, kebyar-style drums are played with selisir; medium-sized kendang bebancian with slendro alit; and smallest kendang krumpunganwith tembung. Here Alit does not intend a stylistic contrast per se, but a straightforward orchestrational one resulting from the varying timbre of each drum type, from heavy and incisive (kebyar) to light and ringing (krumpungan). This is another instance of the composer simply playing

EXAMPLE 25: THE KAJAR PART OF GEREGEL ’S PENYUWUD SECTION

EXAMPLE 26: THE OCAK-OCAKAN IN GEREGEL ’S PENYUWUD SECTION

(KENDANG AND CENG-CENG NOT SHOWN)


with color, momentarily leaving aside associations to gamelan type, style, and religious context. The freedom and ease with which he moves across such boundaries is part of Geregel’s brilliance.

This penyuwud section, and thus the entire piece, ends with a progressive elimination and condensation of parts, as if the texture of the music is being peeled back or disassembled. After the first cycle through the three modes and return to selisir, the ocak-ocakan are completely eliminated, thereby shortening each modal area from four to two

EXAMPLE 27: A GRAPHIC REPRESENTATION OF THE

PENYUWUD ’S FORMAL PROCESS

ocak-ocakan free drumming; reongmelodic fi guration

kajar: on beat off beat on beat off beat

G G G G Ga |

f| |p | |

b |f

| |p | |

c |f

| |p | |

a |f

| |

b |p kantilan:

f

| |

c | reong / kendang /

|ceng-ceng: f

|reong out

a | pemade: f

| kendang / ceng-ceng out

b | |pemade out

c | |kantilan out

a | |(G)

key

a = selisir,w/ large drums

b = slendro alit,w/ med. drums

c = tembung,w/ small drums


gongan. At the same time, Alit uses a well-known device of dynamic shading in kebyar orchestration, whereby successive sections of the orchestra play loudly while the others remain quiet. The effect is like stepping momentarily into the spotlight and then stepping back again. After this, in the third cycle around the three modes, yet another gonganis eliminated, so that the length of each is reduced to just one eight-beat gongan. And now the instrumental families taken even a further step back, into complete silence, as they drop out one by one. All that is left in the final cycle is the low instrument group, with punctuating gongs, back again in the home turf of selisir. This entire process is graphically illus-trated in Example 27. Approached in this way, the final gong seems to arrive undramatically, an impression of deceptive simplicity considering the sophistication of the preceding process, and indeed of the entire work before it.


APPENDIX: KEY TO NOTATION


NOTES

With gratitude to many friends for their assistance and support: Dewa Ketut Alit, the composer of Geregel, for many hours of interviews, tran-scription sessions (of originally non-notated music), and far-ranging musical discussions; to Michael Tenzer, for editorial and research assis-tance as well as his book, Gamelan Gong Keybar (2000), which is refer-enced throughout this article and forms its most substantial scholarly foundation; to Peter Simcich, who engraved all musical examples; to Sarah Willner for extensive editorial suggestions and unflagging support; to Christopher Burns for assistance with music notation software; and to Edmundo Luna for editorial assistance.

1. Gandra is well known in his own right through membership in the near legendary Seka Gong Gunung Sari of Peliatan (known to many simply as “Gong Peliatan”), the orchestra which toured the Europe and U.S. starting in the 1930s.

2. The immediate motivation for its composition was the tour to Bali of the San Francisco-based group Gamelan Sekar Jaya. The Çudamani orchestra, and the village of Pengosekan as a whole, invited Sekar Jaya to a mabarung performance—a traditional battle-of-the-bands competition between two gamelan groups—at their village pavilion (wantilan), which took place on July 2, 2000. Dewa Alit reports that the members of the sanggar requested a new piece from him for the occasion.

3. Andy McGraw, personal communication from Bali (November 2001).

4. A note on terminology, both Balinese and English: the Balinese terms translated simply as “mode” in this article have varying shades of meaning and association with particular gamelan types and reper-toire; here I use only patutan. According to musician and scholar Wayan Sinti, the term patut(an) means “tuning” and is associated with the traditions of semar pegulingan, pelegongan, gong kebyar, angklung, and gender wayang (which he groups in the so-called madia or “middle” aged traditions); the term saih means “row” or “scale,” and is associated with the kuno (“ancient”) gamelan types gambang, luang, selonding, all of which are connected with vocal tra-ditions; while the term tetekep (“closings”) refers to the stopping of the holes on the suling, the end-blown bamboo flute that features


prominently in the gamelan gambuh. There is also the Javanese term pat(h)et, which is becoming more widely known in Bali (Alit himself uses this word); however since the Javanese pathet system is so devel-oped, both musically and theoretically, and since it refers to some-thing closely related to, yet clearly distinct from, the Balinese “modes” herein described, it is avoided. The Javanese sense of pathetis, in fact, closer to the most common understanding of the English term “mode”—a hierarchical ordering of tones within a particular scalar collection, rather than a selection of tonal subsets from a larger parent scale. It is still a matter of debate whether Balinese patutanembody such an internal hierarchy in any consistent manner. (See also note 18 below.) Thus they might themselves arguably be termed mere scales. However reference to the patutan as “modes” is already widespread in literature on Balinese music. In addition, changes between patutan—within a single work, or between works—carry such constellations of associations and subjectively perceived qualities (described elsewhere in this article) as to warrant the use of “mode” rather than the more abstract or neutral quality suggested by “scale.”

5. In fact, it could be argued that the evolution of the paired tuning system was made possible by the limited scalar environment, where there is enough tonal space to accommodate the extra bandwidth taken up by each paired unison. This is especially noticeable on the lowest instruments: since paired tuning retains the same beat rate throughout the entire range, from the lowest jegogan tones all the way up to kantilan, lower paired unisons are proportionately much farther apart than higher ones. For the two jegogan, achieving a typi-cal beat rate of about 7–8 Hz requires a span (penyorog) between paired tones of 50–100 cents, which approaches the size of the smaller scalar intervals themselves (roughly a semi-tone or slightly larger). Such potential interference is clearly noticed: some gong-smiths artificially flatten the very lowest note on the jegogan, ding, so that it is further away from its upper neighbor, dong—otherwise the high partner note, pengisep, of ding approaches too closely the lower partner note, pengumbang, of dong.

6. While this oft-repeated observation remains true, the degree of dif-ference in tuning between sets has become smaller in recent years. Traditionally, regional tastes, intended repertoire, and other factors relating to the individual identity of the group ordering the instru-ments favored a larger diversity of tunings, both in overall tonal height (generally how high or low the tuning sat), interval structure, and treatment of octaves. In the last three or four decades, the effects


of mass media such as the cassette, radio, and television industries; the emergence of the academy performing groups as meta-regional “super stars,” and the dissemination of academy-created music and academy-trained musicians to the villages, have all encouraged a standardization of taste. Now, when confronted with the question of tuning in ordering a new set, most buyers simply request “STSI tun-ing.” Fortunately, many older gamelan sets are still in use, thus pre-serving a degree of diversity. And the re-awakening of interest in seven-tone music may help re-stimulate interest in unusual and indi-vidualized tunings.

7. The ding-dong-deng solfège is universally known and used in Bali. It provides a clear sense of orientation within the scale, and an un-ambiguous means of communication between musicians. Any musi-cian can convey melodies to another with near perfect accuracy—no matter how much variation might exist between their respective gamelan tunings, or in abilities of a musician to sing in tune. Identi-fying the sequence of notes in this way also facilitates the transposi-tion of tunes from one mode to another, or between different kinds of gamelan.

8. Other terms are sometimes used. In selisir, pitch 4 is also known as penyorog, “pushed tone,” while pitch 7 is pemanis, “sweetened tone” (Rai 1996, 97).

9. Richter (1992, 211; 216). This is part of a larger phenomenon. In the actual practice of playing the suling gambuh, there are several notes that either do not line up in perfect unisons, or fall completely in the cracks (between consecutive tones) of the other modes. Another, related, factor is that octaves produced on the suling gam-buh are strikingly irregular, sometimes to the point that they are quite transformed in the outer registers. Most octaves are stretched while others are perfect or compressed, for varying (and perhaps unintended) reasons of fingering, melodic contour, and the micro-management of the flutes’ strange overtones. Richter presents a fre-quency chart that demonstrates these irregularities. Balinese musi-cians seem to delight in such idiosyncratic bends in the road from one register to the next, placing relatively little value on consistent octaves—a tendency which carries over into the tuning practices of bronze gamelans.

10. The two versions of pengenter were designated by Nyoman Kaler, and are reported in Tenzer (2000, 28–9, footnote 8); and McGraw (1998, 4); the informant in both cases was Wayan Berata. Wayan


Sinti, a theorist, composer, and former student of Nyoman Kaler, has defined another theoretical mode, which he calls patut panji. Sinti arrived at this through an investigation of the seven-tone ritual orchestras gambang and gong luang, comparing them with the modes of the semar pegulingan in the creation of his own modal chart. For that reason it varies in several particulars from other inter-pretations. The other of Sinti’s theoretical modes, named—just as Kaler’s—pengenter, is the same as the baro of the “standard” chart. His version of baro, meanwhile, is different from any other, 1-346-7. Sinti’s seven-tone system became the basis for an entirely new gamelan type, dubbed Gamelan Manikasanti, for which he is now creating or re-arranging compositions that exploit his unusual modal interpretations.

11. McPhee comments on this theory (which probably originated with Jaap Kunst) by illustrating an “equidistant pentatonic” scale along-side an actual slendro scale—and then denying its existence in prac-tice: “While Chart 8 may prepare the reader for the strangeness of the slendro system, it cannot be said that it is ever approached in Balinese practice. When Balinese slendro tunings are examined, each is found to create a scale composed of intervals of recognizably dif-ferent size” (1966, 50). However, it should be noted that experi-mental gamelan tunings utilizing equidistant slendro intervals have been created outside of Bali, but these have only been a realization of this same theoretical model.

12. Opinions differ on the historical sequence. McPhee quotes Jaap Kunst from a 1934 lecture, “The Music of Java,” as saying, “There cannot be any doubt about the fact that sléndro came to Java and Bali a good many centuries after pélog. Pélog was perhaps already imported by Malay-Polynesian peoples who came to Java many cen-turies before our Christian era. Sléndro seems to have entered Java simultaneously with a later culture in the eighth century AD, when the dynasty of Çailéndras ruled the central parts of the island, and to have derived its name from that same royal family; gamelan sléndro = gamelan Çailéndra.” (1966, 37, footnote 4). Warsadiningrat (1979, 35–8) claims an opposite, and equally distant, historical relationship: “In the year 287 Saka [365 A.D.] . . . Sang Hyang Éndra created a gamelan, called suréndra, which commonly came to be called sléndro. . . In the year 1086 Saka [1164 A.D.] . . . Prabu Jaya Lengkara of Purwa Carita (the great-grandfather of Radén Panji Inu Kartapati, Crown Prince of Jenggala) . . . created a gamelan that imitated the sléndro gamelan but with different intervals in the laras [scale]. . . .


The sound of the laras was very beautiful. . . . Thus this laras was called laras pélag. It eventually came to be called laras pélog. Pélagmeans ‘good,’ ‘beautiful,’ and ‘noble’” (original brackets and italics).

13. Weintraub describes experimental work in developing an all-inclusive slendro/pelog gamelan by theorist R.M.A. Kusumadinata (known also as Pa Machyar) and Jaap Kunst, who worked together in the 1920s and 1930s. They “attempted to develop all-inclusive slendroand pelog ‘systems’ which encompassed tones played on the fixed-pitch instruments (rebab and voice). In 1969, Pa Machyar actually did develop a set with a 17-tone octave called ‘Ki Pembayun,’ which was commissioned, but never played, for the Festival Ramayana at Prambanan in 1971 . . . According to some musicians who partici-pated in the rehearsals, it was too difficult to play/not worth learn-ing how to play. Musicians say they don’t know what happened to it, but it was probably retuned and divided up into several playable sets.” (Weintraub, quoted here from a 1996 email discussion of mul-tiple tuning antecedents to the Balinese gamelan semara dana.)

14. Marc Perlman and the Javanese musician Widianto, both in personal communications (September and November 2001, respectively).

15. Tom Hunter, in the introduction to a translation of the Aji Gurnita(unpublished, 1998).

16. Vickers (1985, 147). For an attempt in the opposite direction—to draw a direct connection between the scalar intermixing described in the Aji Gurnita and Prakempa and actual musical practice—see Richter (1992).

17. The alternate solfège number 1 for slendro gede, and that for slendro alit, were suggested by Ketut Gede Asnawa (personal communica-tion, November 2001) and are based on considerations of consis-tency with other modes in the pelog context; alternate solfège number 2 is from Wayan Berata (Tenzer 2000, 27–8, footnote 8); and reflects common practice for gender wayang. Alternate solfège number 3 is from Dewa Putu Berata, older brother of Alit and direc-tor of Sanggar Çudamani.

18. Tenzer (2000, 129), but see also McGraw (2000, 75). Rai’s thesis (1996) does indeed explore this aspect of mode in Balinese music, but with Western harmonic terms—tonic, dominant, subdominant, etc.—borrowed from Mantle Hood’s theory (see Hood 1990). While Rai’s work is an important first step in bringing the issues into the discourse, especially in its application of a single theoretical


model to a large sample of seven-tone pieces, an interpretation based more directly on traditional Balinese melodic and modal conception is now needed.

19. There are only two exceptions in Rai’s sample that touch on all seven tones. One is Sumambang Jawa; this fact explains in part why it has been designated as the one expression of a seven-tone mode, lebeng. But, as described above, this interpretation is misleading since the work is easily understood as a combination of sunaren and baro. The other is Gending Subandar, but in this case the work is clearly in seli-sir, with two secondary tonal areas that both might be considered the result of pamero reiterations (and therefore explained by the first principle).

20. Personal communication, November 2001.

21. This suggests a parallel to irama shifts (described later in this article) in choice of formal position. Both are an expressions of a more gen-eral principle of formal design in gamelan music, especially in extended classical meters: areas of greatest activity, density, and change tend to appear just before large structural downbeats and/or formal boundaries, while complementary areas of calm, sparseness, and stasis tend to appear just after such points. The structural down-beats in questions may be at the level of the palet (a single “line” within a larger gongan, ending with a punctuating stroke such as kempur), the gongan, or (to borrow Tenzer’s terminology) at a larger, metacycle level.

22. McPhee (1966, 39) illustrates scales from gambuh and semar pegul-ingan ensembles of the 1930s as starting on ding of tembung (which he also labels as the first tone of the seven-tone scale), rather than ding of selisir. In this configuration, tembung is indeed lowest if we use a common solfège starting point; however, the relationship of sunaren and selisir does not fit to the current low-middle-high con-ception. This can only be achieved by combining aspects of the older interpretation (starting point of the scales) with those of the current one (the interrelationship of the modes). Such difficulties notwith-standing, the low-middle-high conception is widespread, and gong-smiths report using it in setting the overall pitch of a new gamelanhigher or lower in accord with the stated wishes of the buyer.

23. See McGraw (2000, 71–3) for a more complete description of these composers’ characterizations of the modes, as well as their freedoms and attitudes in interpreting them.


24. For a more detailed study of the decline of the semar pegulingan see Rai (1996, 5–16).

25. Marc Perlman, personal communication, September 2001.

26. McGraw (2000, 67) quotes Berata that these two gamelan were owned by KOKAR, now SMKI. Regarding their overall pitch levels, it was the norm up until that point that semar pegulingan be tuned generally higher than gong kebyar. That difference has now disap-peared in the creation and tuning of most new instruments, partly through this very process of hybridization. Thus, for example, the extreme contrasts between the powerfully low tones of the gamelan gong kebyar of Perean, and the sweetly delicate high pitch of the gamelan semar pegulingan saih pitu of Pagan Kelod, are seldom to be found in recent gamelan sets.

27. Rai (1996, 16) freely translates this as “Heavenly Gamelan in the system of seven tones.” (genta = “gamelan,” pinara = “sounds,” and pitu = “seven”; the heavenly reference is probably Rai’s acknowl-edgement of the sacred textual source). Concerning the Prakempa, Bandem’s translation appeared two years later, in 1986.

28. Ketut Gede Asnawa, personal communication, September 2001.

29. This is the reason that instrumental evolution tends in the direction of a widening tonal spectrum, which accommodates the most reper-toire on a single instrument—the same inexorable expansion that the piano underwent in the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries. A coun-tervailing constraint, specific to gamelan, is responsible for the fact that certain instruments (e.g., jublag and jegogan) have remained, with rare exception, limited to one octave in range, despite the ease in which they might have been expanded in five-tone ensembles. This may be due to the fact that a deliberately limited range requires “folding over” at the extremes to follow the course of a melody that will, on other instruments of wider range, be realized fully (i.e. in the form that would be sung as the true melody). This infolding adds melodic interest on a local level, and contributes to desirable octave ambiguities on a larger orchestrational level. (See also Tenzer 1999, 57.)

30. The name is highly evocative: Semaradahana is a twelfth-century Javanese epic poem (kakawin) which relates the story of Semara’s destruction by the god Siwa. Semara (also known as Kamajaya) was consumed in self-sacrifice by a ray of fire from the third eye of Siwa, angry at being awakened from a deep meditation. The story also


describes at length Semara’s parting from his wife Dewa Ratih, who grieves at his impending death. Dana in modern Balinese also means “donation” or “alms,” as in the donations offered to a temple for a major ceremony or renovation. (Ed Herbst, email communication, May, 2001.) Thus, love (with associated meanings of attraction, magnetism, and the pairing of opposites) is contrasted with fire (with associations to death and destruction, Siwa’s potent realms; as well as rebirth, as in the forging of gamelan keys), but also allied with gener-osity and wealth. All are directly associated with the Balinese musical and dramatic aesthetic.

31. For the sake of reference and summary, some of these compromises include: tuning (the distinctive qualities of each source gamelan are melded together, as discussed above); timbre (the characteristic sound qualities of each—delicate/refined versus strong/incisive—are similarly melded); technical challenge (playing virtuosic kebyar reper-toire on the semara dana demands leaping over the extra notes, often at breakneck speeds); and, in general, the loss of aesthetic and cultural value surrounding individualized and specialized gamelan.

32. Although Berata achieved his immediate goal, neither the gamelan genta pinara pitu nor the gamelan semara dana ever caught on as the gamelan of choice in sendratari accompaniment, at least in STSI productions. The former, of which there was only one example, did not remain in Bali long; in 1987 it was purchased first by the Wye Institute of Maryland and then by ethnomusicologist Mantle Hood, who moved it first to the University of Maryland-Baltimore County and eventually to his own home in Ellicott City, Maryland (Rai 1996, 18). The latter, meanwhile, has flourished predominantly in the Ubud area, of which Alit’s village Pengosekan is a part. While several gamelan semara dana of Ubud have been used for occasional sendratari productions, the STSI-owned example has not. McGraw speculates that players there might find the grandeur of multiple gamelans on stage more in accord with “oversized scale of sendratariperformances” compared to the more normal-sized gamelan semara dana (2000, 69).

33. Asnawa’s 1985 arrangement of Langsing Tuban added a series of intricate, interlocking phrases during the opening gineman, reminis-cent of kebyar style in their shape, speed, and separation by dramatic pauses; these were removed in the later, more classically restrained arrangements that were worked up for the Bali Record sessions.


34. An example of such a flute solo occurs in Grehing Kaulu, by Nyoman Windha (1988), which may be heard on the cassette “Festi-val Gong Kebyar 1988” (Bali Records B742).

35. Windha later rearranged Jagra Parwata for gamelan semara dana, so that this and other such passages in the work could be orches-trated using that gamelan’s full seven-tone resources.

36. This moment was captured in a live recording, and can be heard in the first track of “Music of the Gamelan Gong Kebyar” Volume 2 (Vital Records 501). The passage in question occurs at 7:40, with a repetition at 9:18. In the interest of fair reporting it should be noted that Festival audiences burst into applause during just about any pas-sage they like, just as they are prone to jeering and catcalls for the opposite reason.

37. A good examples of Yudana’s handling of seven-tone flute melodies occurs in Rada Dara, the tabuh kreasi composed for the Kodya dis-trict’s representative to the gamelan competitions of 1996.

38. See Tenzer (2000, 365–8 and elsewhere) for an in-depth description of the relationship between the classical and modern interpretations of tripartite form, summarizing these formal archetypes in their gen-eral features, their “religious, philosophical, and aesthetic moorings,” and their widely divergent expression in particular instrumental and dance compositions.

39. While the placement is effective, this is not Alit’s innovation: such stage theatrics are already well-known in Balinese performances, and are a natural extension of the flashy crowd-pleasing gestures that have been part of kebyar’s heritage from the start.

40. That a Balinese composer would use formal markers in this way—almost motivically—is itself unusual. Most composers are reluctant to re-visit material in latter sections of a composition; to them it is already “used up.” In Geregel, Alit has tried to express a formal image of many arches, in which sections start and end with the same material. This explains the placement and variation of the interlock-ing octaves.

41. Kotekan in its most widely used and generalized sense, simply means “interlocking melodic figuration,” which pervades the fabric of most Balinese music. In the present case, it is a specific formal designation, referring to a discrete section—most often the first regularly pulsed, cyclic section of tabuh kreasi—that features elaborate interlocking


melodies played by the gangsa group. There is also a narrower sense, where kotekan refers to a particular sub-group of interlocking figura-tion patterns, characterized by two-note units in each part. The rapid sideways shift of the mallet needed to play the two-note units explains its etymology: kotekan derives from ngotek, “to slide.”

42. The degree of “dissonance” found in this passage is mild compared to some other contemporary instrumental pieces. Wayan Gede Yudana, allows quite striking and frequent simultaneities to emerge in his tabuh kreasi as a result of re-conceptualizing the pokok/elabo-ration relationship—for example, creating a “conceptual” pokok (i.e. one that is never played), then composing an elaboration of it in one stratum, which in turn acts as a pokok for an elaboration in another stratum, and so on in a chain-like fashion. In such a scheme the basic heterophonic principle of unison/octave convergence operates only in the background.

43. One of the most intriguing aspects of current kebyar interlocking techniques lies in this contrast between part and composite. Often the individual parts seem more interesting and varied alone than they do in combination. In a certain sense, the gamelan musicians get more satisfaction in perception of musical structure than does the lis-tener.

44. See note 41 for a discussion of the various meanings of kotekan.

45. The first re-arrangement for large bronze gamelan, entitled simply Gambangan, was composed by Wayan Lotring, circa 1930. Through it, gambangan textures became popular and later found a niche in the pengecet sections of tabuh kreasi. See Tenzer (2000, 65–7) for a description of gambangan textures in kebyar orchestration.


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