There are nearly forty different types of gamelan in Bali,
each with its own distinct repertoire called ‘gending
or ‘tabuh’. These gending may vary in style and
sometimes nomenclature from village to village but generally
they are recognizable enough for people to say “oh that’s
such and such with this variation” etc. Some repertoire
is impressively large. For example, the four-tone angklung,
even with such a limited tonal range, has a staggering four
hundred plus gending to its name. In addition, some
musicians know more than a hundred gending of any one type
of gamelan – this is a great deal of music to commit
to memory in any musical world!
Even though Balinese gamelan has its original traditional
notation system, this is rarely employed for learning purposes.
It is only seen as a reference point for rare ceremonial music.
The cremation music of the gambang, for example, is preserved
on ancient palm-leaf manuscripts called lontar. Teachers or
scholars of this type of gamelan will refer to these manuscripts
from time to time, particularly when teaching a group. The
types of gamelan which have written manuscripts, however,
can be counted on one hand. When I say musical manuscripts,
I don’t mean anything that resemble European musical
notation. In fact, all that is recorded is the core melody.
Time, rhythm, dynamics, incidentals and all the ornamental
parts, including the drums, are not mentioned. These aspects
are left up to the interpretation of the teachers or musicians
themselves, explaining why there is so much regional musical
variation in Bali.
Since the introduction of Western and Javanese notation in
the academies, some composers have recorded their compositions
in more detail. Nonetheless, the most popular way to preserve
and conserve both traditional and modern gamelan music is
by audio or video recordings. Fortunately, more and more musicians
are seeing the importance of documenting the repertoire of
rarely heard traditional music and slowly more efforts are
being made to immortalizing near-extinct repertoire.
Copyright@ Kulture Kid 2006
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