Love it or hate it, nothing is as evocative of Bali as the gamelan. And there is nothing so maddening, humbling and entertaining as learning to play in one. My musical career began and abruptly ended several decades ago, when our grade 5 class was studying the recorder. I couldn’t learn to read music and memorized the first two bars of the ‘The Old French Song’ by playing it so often that my poor father bricked my instrument into the basement wall one night when I was in bed. He still talks about it. I quit piano lessons after the first month because I couldn’t make the connection between the squiggles on the score and what my hands were supposed to be doing. The sight of a piano keyboard still makes me apprehensive.But the gamelan seemed less structured, somehow.
The players at performances seemed to spend a lot of time drinking tea, smoking cigarettes and cheerfully telling each other lies. So I decided to join the Ubud women’s gamelan group. I’d done my homework — nearly all the instruments were percussion and none of them had more than 10 keys. Small boys could do it. How hard could this be? Well, harder then I thought.We are 25 women, about half from Bali and Java and the rest from North and South America, Europe and the Middle East. Our ages span half a century. Pak Gus and Pak Made have been engaged to teach us, which they do by simply playing the same music over and over many times a night. We sit staring glazedly at them as we hammer away, trying to interpret the apparently random shrugs, scowls and twitches which they use to direct us. To the Western mind, which expects to learn new subjects intellectually, this is maddening. There are no diagrams, explanations, demonstrations or written music.
The few women who had a clue what they were doing just played doggedly on, and the rest of us struggled to follow. Eventually, numbered labels were stuck to the bronze keys and some of us started to scribble scores in the vein of 141414125224225141. This helped quite a lot. So did the beer which was consumed in quantity by the tamu during each practice.A gamelan has several types of instruments. Most of them have between four and ten bronze keys and play the melody, harmony and background bongs. They are played by hitting the keys with a little hammer, then pinching off the sound as you go on to the next key. This can get quite complicated when the tempo increases. A placid grandmother sits between two big gongs and whacks them at intervals. Then there is the fiendishly difficult reyong, a series of graduated fixed gongs which are played bonkbonkbonk or bonkbonk bonkbonk or bonk bonk bonkbonk depending on the melody and the players’ state of confusion. The reyong players, my Wayan among them, wear permanent expressions of intense concentration and bewilderment.
Finally there are two big drums and a tjeng-tjeng, a carved wooden turtle with 6 upturned cymbals fastened on its back, upon which another 2 cymbals are played. All these sections play completely different tunes and tempos at the same time. When played well, they knit together into a harmonious, complex tapestry of sound. When played by us for the first three months, the result was a discordant cacophony that made our teachers wince.By the time I joined the gamelan, the group had already been together for a couple of months. The only instruments still free were the flute and the tjeng-tjeng. A flute is very much like a recorder, so I sat on the floor to acquaint myself with the turtle. It seemed straightforward enough, and I would be merrily clashing away until Pak Gus started sending me huge black scowls. I had never had any instruction and had no idea what I was doing wrong. Too loud? Not loud enough? Wrong wrist action? But I was left to puzzle it over as he went on to shake three fingers at the reyong or roar "Dah dah DAH DAH!" at the baffled drummers.I began to enjoy my four hours a week in the crystal cave of harmonics. During the breaks while the teachers smoked, the women showed each other where the music went up and down and how to tell when to stop. I learned when to make crisp little sounds on the tjeng-tjeng and when to really give it the works. Ours was a very public education, being held at the Ubud Library in plain sight of bemused tourists and curious Balinese. Laurie’s two year old son would caper about trouserless during our practice, occasionally grabbing a pair of drumsticks to show us how it should be done, and politely applauding us at the end of each set.
He was our only fan. We were hopelessly bad. All through December we practiced madly for our first gig, booked at the big temple in Pengosekan for mid-January. Every night more Balinese men appeared to encourage us and help with the tricky bits. We clonked and clashed and bonged determinedly through our two party pieces as the expression on Pak Gus’ face grew ever bleaker.Then one night we got it. Like magic, the music finally entered our energy fields, which is the only way I can describe it, and became part of us.
Our hands flew instinctively through the complex rhythms; we grinned and shouted and played on and on. Pak Gus smiled for the first time. The band of watching Balinese men clapped, which they had never done before. At last we were ready for Prime Time.On the appointed evening we donned, with varying degrees of grace, our uniforms of bright turquoise kebaya and sarong. To those unfamiliar with pakaian adat, or traditional dress, most Western women find it painfully uncomfortable in the tropical heat. A balcony bra and broad elastic waist cincher form the infrastructure, over which is pulled the tube top, a ‘new tradition’ reaching from under the arms to the hips. Then the sarong is knotted tightly on, the kebaya buttoned up and the sash tied. It is all very tight and very hot. I decided to minimize the agony by forgoing the bra on the assumption that the newfangled tube top would hold the fort, so to speak.
Just after dark, we climbed the temple steps for our premier performance. Twenty-five turquoise bottoms perched on tiny wooden stools and fifty nervous hands picked up our hammers, sticks and cymbals in unison under Pak Gus’ watchful eye. The drummers tapped our cue, and we began to play.We played well, and we played for much longer than usual as a modest audience of friends, relatives and Balinese watched us politely. Playing the gamelan can be quite energetic during the fast parts and requires both hands, constantly. Halfway through the second piece my tube top drifted from its moorings. Susan’s nose began to run. Beth got a bug in her kebaya.
Like true professionals we soldiered on with bland smiles, concealing our misadventures from the spectators whose eyes, fortunately, were beginning to glaze over…Flushed with victory, we returned to our next practice session to find ourselves at the bottom of the learning curve once more. Pak Gus has launched us on our third piece of music, without diagrams, explanations, demonstrations or written music. But we are figuring it out much faster now. I’m sure the bookings will start pouring in any day.
Gamelan Gado Gado still needs new members to increase the variety of instruments we play and to replace women who are leaving. If you live in Ubud and might be interested in joining us, drop in to our practice sessions at Pondok Pekak Library on the football field, Wednesday and Saturday between 6 — 8 pm.
