How are Balinese Gamelan Instruments Tuned? Part II

A gamelan tuner will either choose to tune an ensemble by himself or in a pair; the latter being less reliable because you are using two potentially different sets of ears, therefore a different sense of hearing. Before starting, an auspicious day must be chosen, using the Hindu Saka calendar as a guide. On the chosen day, before the gamelan instruments are disassembled, special offerings are made to request permission to the God of Sound as well as the spirit which is thought to reside in the gamelan. Only then can the labour intensive process begin.
 
First the tuner and his assistants must take the keys off the instruments and put them in orderly piles. The tuner will then start with an instrument which carries the core melody, and this instrument will serve as the reference point for the rest. The keyed instruments are always tuned first, with the pots and gongs following suit.
 
Now tuning bronze or iron instruments is not like tuning a piano, guitar or violin. You cannot just tweak knobs or tighten strings. You must file and grind them to alter the sound. The tuner works on one key at a time, by anchoring them with his feet and grinding or scraping them either manually with a homemade metal plane or an electric grinder. To make the pitch of the key higher, he files it shorter by scraping off the ends, and to make it lower, he files it thinner by scraping the top or the bottom.
 
Once all of the instruments have been tuned, their bamboo or plastic resonators must be altered in pitch to match. To make the tube higher in pitch, cement is poured into it which makes it shallower, and to make it lower, a bamboo insert is affixed onto the inside of the top of the tube.
 
After many hours and a whole heap of sweat, the time-consuming process is complete and, when it is played, the ensemble will shimmer with a new and vibrant collective voice.
 
Copyright@ Kulture Kid 2006
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