6 minute read
Live Tones of Gamelan
Live Tones Of
Claude Debussy, a famous 19th century French composer, showed his extraordinary admiration for the uniqueness of gamelan after he saw a Gamelan performance at the Exposition Universelle Paris in 1889. So amazed was Debussy with gamelan that he called, rather hyperbolically, Palestrina musical polyphony (Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina) like “children’s play” in the face of the exoticism of gamelan music. Historians and music experts have written that Claude Debussy’s subsequent musical compositions were greatly influenced by the gamelan music he listened to.
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Debussy, who later referred to gamelan as Javanese Rhapsodies, really got great inspiration in the creation of his musical works through references from gamelan. This gamelan performance in Paris which was witnessed by Debussy was indeed not the first gamelan performance in mainland Europe. Approximately a decade earlier, in 1879, gamelan players from the Mangkunegaran Palace, Central Java performed at The National Exhibition of Dutch and Colonial Industry in Arnhem, Netherlands. This means
that from the 18th century to the 19th century, gamelan had wandered far beyond its area of origin, echoing to mainland Europe, at which time the industrial revolution had begun.
The maker of harmonious tones
- Danang Daniel
Since then, many European and American ethnomusicologists and researchers have conducted research on Indonesian gamelan. Jaap Kunst, Mantle Hood, Alan P. Meriam, and Judith Becker are some of the ethnomusicologists and Western scholars who have produced many researches on gamelan through approaches from their respective disciplines. Not only coming to do research work, European and American nations also at certain historical periods began to bring in experts from Indonesia to introduce gamelan in their country.
For example, Hardja Susilo, who started, in the 1960s, teaching gamelan to several students at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), America. Now, after more than 60 years since Hardjo Susilo taught karawitan in the United States, there have been many karawitan groups scattered in various countries in America, Europe and Asia.
Gamelan or Karawitan?
The presence of gamelan which is seen as the influence of the entry of metal culture into the archipelago proves at a time that the people of the archipelago have mastered the science and technology of metallurgy for a long time. Hints and historical records about the existence of gamelan in the archipelago are still recorded on temple reliefs in Java, including Dieng Temple (750 AD), Sari Temple (750 AD), Borobudur Temple (824 AD) and Prambanan Temple (850 AD).
The information stored in inscriptions and ancient literary works helps reconstruct the early traces of gamelan development in the archipelago. Mantle Hood even mentions that by 300 AD Javanese metalworkers had developed
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bronze casting and forging technology and created new types of artifacts, including bronze gongs with pencon (Hood, 1980). In Java, especially Solo and Yogyakarta, gamelan monggang, gamelan kodhok ngorek, and gamelan sekaten are considered to represent gamelan in the early days of its emergence.
Rahayu Supanggah (the late), an ethnomusicologist, an academic, a karawitan player, and a composer from the Indonesia Institute of Arts
(ISI) Surakarta prefers to call gamelan a karawitan. Perhaps, Rahayu Supanggah sees the word ‘karawitan’ has more
accentuation of depth of meaning and is more philosophical than the word gamelan which tends to accentuate aspects of the instrument or organology.
The term karawitan is formed from the
word ‘rawit’ (Javanese) which means small, complicated, smooth. This understanding associates gamelan not only as a musical art but contains the essence of a musical
activity whose main goal is to train one’s subtlety of feelings. Musical nuances that present a broad, majestic, and meditative impression are indeed the hallmark of the musical repertoire it produces. For the majority of the ears of the younger generation, especially those born and raised in the millennial era, karawitan music is considered as music that ‘makes sleepy’ and is less exciting.
Such an assumption may not be entirely wrong because in the musical psychology approach, the dominant character of karawitan music affects brain waves,
namely performing superposition and ‘manipulating’ brain wave frequencies from beta frequencies, which is a type of brain frequency that indicates brain activity is in a tense, awake situation. , rumbling, and ‘full’, towards a quieter, meditative gamma frequency. This slowed and meditative thought wave situation is then ‘read’ as something that ‘causes sleepiness’.
Of course, not all gamelan music repertoires are as meditative as that, especially if you look at the performance of Balinese gamelan music, which is mostly more energetic. Javanese gamelan music and Sundanese gamelan music also have a more ‘enthusiastic’ musical
presentation through certain garap concepts. However, the character of gamelan music which has a unikum and distinctive structure of regularity is attributed as a manifestation of the ideal
concept of one’s inner condition and personal qualities that are in harmony with the laws of the universe.
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Diversity Orchestration
UNESCO has designated Indonesian gamelan as an intangible cultural heritage on December 15, 2021 at a session in Paris. This UNESCO decision implies that the value of gamelan is not primarily related to its physical elements, but how
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high its contribution and value to teach, strengthen, and create social values for society from time to time. The logical consequence of this appreciation of the world is the responsibility for a more systematic effort to maintain the spirit of the Indonesian gamelan as an important part of the survival of the community.
A proactive stance has been taken by ISI Surakarta which immediately initiated the establishment of the Gamelan Study Center shortly after the UNESCO decision. Dr. Aton Rustandi Mulayana, M.Sn, an academic from ISI Surakarta who is a
member of the team proposing gamelan academic texts to UNESCO, said that the
purpose of establishing the Gamelan Study Center was motivated by historical considerations that the Indonesia Institute of Arts (ISI) Surakarta had the responsibility to continue the action plan which have been listed in the proposed gamelan script through a series of gamelan preservation programs.
Of course, efforts to preserve gamelan and hope for gamelan sustainability are not in line with the ‘old-fashioned’ attitude
of being stuck in the past. The valuable nature of gamelan opens the horizons of our minds to the attitude of
always growing and changing but still holding on to the basic values that we all share. Gamelan was born from the past and then adapted to natural resources and various dynamics of people’s lives, recognized new needs, and then responded to new situations by providing a place for the community to try new approaches to existing values and had a dialogue with old values that were in line with the context.
What happened throughout the historicity of gamelan in the context of people’s lives shows a masterpiece that reveals the important interaction of human values on the development of science and technology, as well as represents the unique tradition of the life of a nation. Gamelan is a harmonization of diversity orchestration that is born from playing together in a group that works together, empathizes and understands. The more prominent skills, knowledge, and technical skills of a musician in a gamelan group are not used to dominate or make other musicians feel inferior, but make
a greater contribution to blending into the complex musical texture and making each member of the group feel to be something (being something).
The gamelan ensemble is a combination of bronze instruments equipped with bamboo and wooden instruments depicting a fusion between the people and the rulers, a symbolic language that has been stored since centuries ago as an accumulation of local knowledge that has high value for the continuation of Indonesian civilization through a system of harmonious cooperation and does not negate each other. (Lardianto Budhi, Ethnomusicology
