All the way from Indonesia via Singapore

Jeanette Tjoeng and her team of musicians from Singapore, ‘BronzAge Gamelan’ held a workshop at Hyderabad Literary Festival 2016, demonstrating the variants of Gamelan music, a traditional ensemble belonging to Indonesia

Gamelan music is traditional to Indonesia, so much so that the Gamelan ensembles are intrinsically woven into their culture. Jeanette Tjoeng and her team of musicians from Singapore, who call themselves ‘BronzAge Gamelan’ gave an engaging lecture-demonstration at Hyderabad Literary Festival. The audience learned all about the music and even tried their hands at the instruments with the guidance of the five musicians present at the workshop.

The gamelan orchestra is comprised of several types of mallet instruments. A mallet resembles a hammer, some made of rubber and others out of wood. The mallets are used to gently tap on the instruments to produce a pleasant timbre of sound. Five basic instruments used are: boning (a collection of smaller gongs resembling pots and kettles), peking, cempress, gongs. The large hanging gongs can even be 1.25m in diameter.

Gamelan takes on different sub-genres of music such as classical, folk songs, new compositions like fusion, abstract, pop, rock and jazz. Gamelan music can be equated in some ways to jazz in that each of the instruments is played on a different scale, in varying rhythms, which finally blends and comes together.

Jeanette Tjoeng, a certified music teacher and instructor explained that while there are eight notes on the traditional Western tonal scale, Gamelan music has only five (in the order of 1-2-3-5-6). Certain rules are regarded as important in order to respect the music. The top-most rule being, that the instruments are played sitting on the floor, which is referred to as a ‘humble’ manner of playing.

As explained by Jeanette Tjoeng, there exist three main styles of Gamelan: Javanese (from Java), Balinese (from Bali) and Sudanese (from Sudan). While they all share the same instruments and musical principles, the structure is unique to each. An easy way of identifying, she says, is that the Javanese Gamelan tends to be subtle and gentle, with a more traditional interpretation.

The Javanese version is also the oldest known. Whereas, Balinese is more dynamic in nature as Western influences in Bali gave rise to a fusion of the music tradition there. Sudanese Gamelan on the other hand is more melodious in nature. Gamelan is often used to accompany plays, shadow puppetry and such. The introduction of Gamelan to the enthusiastic group of young and old present in at the HLF workshop, was insightful and fun, all the same.