How Balinese Gamelan is Made

One day, Balot invited me to the gamelan factory that made his own personal set of gamelan. I had to meet him in a small village in Gianyar, where all of the gongsmiths lived. As I told you in a later post, each village in Bali has their own craft. I lived in the village of wood carvers. Everyday, I would watch them carve sculptures of Hindu gods by hand on their main pavilion day in and day out. One village over is where gongsmiths live. Unlike the wood carvers where each household had their own “factory”, the gold smiths all worked at a few main gamelan factories.

Balot took me into the main pavilion of the property where all the frames for the instruments sat in various stages of completion. Balot then took me to the very first step of making the gongs: measuring the ratio of metal. Most gamelan are made with bronze, which is a mixture of tin and copper. Other lesser quality gamelan are made of iron. Even though iron is a sturdier and stronger metal that may last longer without chipping or breaking, bronze gives more of a shimmery and pointed sound that can be heard over iron bars.

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After measuring the metal, it is then melted in a giant open-air furnace. This is an incredibly hot and dangerous job. It’s essentially a pit of fire. These men are melting and forging this metal in flip flops and bare hands. All while calmly smoking a cigarette on the side of their mouth. I thought it was so insane they have been doing this for so long, they are practically on autopilot while sticking their hands in a pit of fire. They mold it, then fire it, mold it, then fire it again. Mold, fire, repeat, until the metal is in the desired bar shape. This step can take days, which is quite difficult because they have to make the bars all at relatively the same time because the bars need to be as consistent as possible throughout all the instruments. Because of this, its essentially impossible to mix and match different gamelan sets because they are all tuned to their specific set. Each instrument is unique and one of a kind.

 

After the bars and gongs have been forged, they are then tuned by scrapping off parts of the gong or adding extra bronze to the underside of the bars. There is no standard tuning for Balinese gamelan. Within a particular gamelan set, there is also a purposeful detuning of notes produced by pairs of instruments.  This results in a characteristic ‘vibration’ in the sound waves, a natural phenomenon related to electronic ‘phase shifting.’ To our Westernized ears, this would sound out of tune, but that shimmer is something almost religious to the Balinese. It’s the marriage of two different sounds that are opposite, but work perfectly together in harmony. The gongsmiths tune it to the way the buyer wants its to sound. Some want it more flat (low), others want it more sharp (high). Others want it way more dissonant, or out of tune, than usual. There is no wrong answer.

 

After the tuning process, the frames of the instruments are then built. You can have frames made as modern or as traditional as you want. The most common is a red base coat with gold accents of Hindu gods depicting ancient Balinese stories. After the frames are made and painted, the resonators are placed inside. Resonators are the tubes that make the bars “sing”. Imagine a Texas football game and you are sitting at the very top of the bleachers. You wouldn’t be able to hear what the cheerleaders are saying if they were just yelling. They use a megaphone to project their voice all the way to the back. That is what a resonator is for the metal bars. That’s how you can hear gamelan from even as far as a kilometer away! Resonators are traditionally made with bamboo, but because of the humidity and heat, bamboo has the tendency to expand and break quite quickly. The more modern gamelan are now made with PVC pipes because they are less fragile and won’t expand in humidity.

 

The last step is to string the bars and gongs onto their frames and BAM. You have yourself a brand spanking new gamelan set. As you can see, these are incredibly ornate instruments that take 6 to 12 months to make a single set. It was an absolutely amazing experience to see gamelan in the making! If you want to see actual video of this incredible process, there are videos at the end of this blog!

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Bali was such an enriching experience. I have never been somewhere that has so much culture. To anyone interested in visiting Bali, please look farther than the 4 star resorts and beach parties. Actually go out and listen to gamelan. Go see a traditional Balinese dance recital. Visit a temple. The culture here is just so prevalent and colorful. You cannot miss it. Thank you to everyone I met in Bali, this was such an unforgettable two months!

Next Stop: Holiday with Mom and Dad in Australia and New Zealand!

FUN FACTS:

-One time with Balot and some of his friends, it was dinner time and one of the guys went out to get dinner for all of us. The traditional way to have “take-away” meals in Bali is to wrap the fried rice in a banana leaf that is folded up around your chicken satay sticks. So when you open it, it looks something like this:

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-Women aren’t allowed to enter Hindu temples when they are menstrating.
-I didn’t just go to traditional gamelan concerts. Bali is all about the punk rock scene and I was lucky enough to see a couple of shows from the more famous punk rock bands. When you think of punk, you think of anger, go against society, stick it to the man or the government. In Bali, they use punk music to talk about social and environmental issues that are occurring in present day. Many of the musicians are political and environmental activists who use their music and local fame to create awareness of what is happening in Bali that should be changed and what to do to change it. You can see a really interesting article about the environmentally-charged punk rock scene HERE

 

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Real life Eat, Pray, Love

While in Bali, I stayed with a lovely Balinese family in a village just outside of the touristy streets of Ubud. I was the only non-Balinese in the entire village. My host, Wayan, was a wood carver, which has been the family profession for generations. I stayed in a very traditional Balinese compound with Wayan and his entire extended family. They were incredibly welcoming and invited me to religious ceremonies, taught me about Balinese Hinduism and how make offerings, and introduced me to an entirely new perspective on the relationship between music and spirituality.

Eat

Wayan and his wife would knock on my door promptly at 8 am everyday and serve me a traditional Balinese breakfast with Balinese coffee everyday. I usually had no idea what I was eating, but it would usually consisted of sticky rice wrapped in banana leaves, a fried egg, and my favorite, dadar gulung (pictured below).

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Dadar gulung is an Indonesian snack that directly translates to “pancake” or “omelette”. It’s a green-colored rolled pancake made of rice flour and stuffed with shaved coconut and palm sugar. The green color naturally comes from paste of the pandan leaves which is added to the rice flour. In modern times, a lot of the time, they use food coloring and make crazy bright orange and pink dadar gulung, but the traditional and natural color is green.

It was always easy to eat well when in the presence of Wayan’s family. While Wayan would carve wood and work on his new villas across the street, his wife would run the village “warung”, or restaurant. Each village would have a local warung and they would serve the exact same thing. I never minded because typical Balinese food consists of chicken satay, rice, and a fried egg on top with freshly squeezed juice of your choice for around 3USD.

Pray

The layout of a traditional Balinese compound, including the one where I lived, is focused on a strict ancient architectural guide with the goal of a house that is “in harmony” with the law of the cosmos of Balinese Hinduism. Spacial orientation is crucially considered in Balinese architecture. In Hinduism, each object in the universe has an ideal location; this must be correctly aligned at all times to achieve harmony in the universe and a perfect state of being. The two main cardinal directions in the Balinese Universe are Mount Agung, the mountain of the Gods, and the sea, the abode of the demons and spirits.

The compound is made up of multiple small buildings and are structured in terms of the human body. The family temple is the head, the guest pavilion (where I lived) are the arms, the central courtyard is the navel, the hearth is the sexual organs, and the kitchen is the feet. Traditionally, none of the small buildings in the compound have walls, except for the room where the head of the house slept, but more and more Balinese people have modernized their compounds to include walled bedrooms and bathrooms.

Below you can see an example of the compound layout and pictures of where I stayed.

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Love (Music)

I was able to be apart of Narwastu’s Gong Kebyar Gamelan Ensemble. Narwastu is an arts organization that serves as a community for artists who are interested in learning Balinese music, dance, and visual art. Founded by Jonathan and Tina Bailey in 2005, Narwastu began as a small group of people wanting to learn to play Balinese gamelan. 12 years later, it has grown into a large community of Balinese and expats alike and acts as a platform to express their art and passion. From spirituality, to advocacy for women’s rights, all the way to an art program administered at the Kerobokan Prison in Bali, the goal of Narwastu is to bring people together from all walks of life in order to create art. “Artists are empowered in the process to follow their artistic path and to, in turn, support their community as the interpreters and visionaries of the future” (taken from the Narwastu website at narwastu.org).

Three days a week, I would go to gamelan rehearsal with the other members of Narwastu. I Nyoman Darsane, a local Balinese painter, would let us use his art studio for gamelan practice and small concerts. While we would practice, he would peacefully sit outside and paint traditional Balinese scenes and periodically come in on rehearsal and play with us.The entire 25 piece gamelan ensemble would always be set up outside on the main outdoor pavilion. When it would rain (which it rains a lot in Bali), you would have to pull down bamboo shades to protect the instruments from the rain. It was always surreal to play spiritual Balinese music with locals while it would rain.

Gamelan is an incredibly sacred instrument used for many religious and cultural purposes. Just like the different styles of songs you sing in church, there are multiple styles of gamelan ensembles depending on the function. There are specific ensembles for weddings, funerals, and other religious ceremonies. Gong Kebyar (the type of ensemble I played in) is made up of 25 instruments and is played in secular and sacred settings, typically accompanying the traditional dances of Bali. The musical scale is made up of a 5-tone system (I will go into more detail about this in a later post). Kebyar means “the process of flowering”, which refers to the explosive changes in tempo and dynamics, characteristic of this style.

I’ll go more into detail about my classes and how you are even supposed to make music with these little hammers and metal bars, so tune in next time and learn more about the amazing world of GAMELAN

Terima Kasih! (Thank you in Bahasa)