Bali is the name given to an island in Indonesia whereby a musical style referred to as Gamelan is popular and unique. Its modern form, called the Gamelan Gong Kebyar, has become ridiculously appreciated by the people and is believed to emerge during the 1950s. According to Bonds (479), the players or the performers learned the art through repetition. This type of music can easily be distinguished from a previous genre, the Javanese Gamelan, which the princes mostly played. In the region, the love stems from the energy level with which the music is performed as it consists of changes in both tempo and dynamics.
When composing, a composer uses ostinatos which refer to repeated musical patterns. Every one of these has a unique tempo as well as length. The music is said to have had a massive influence on the last century’s performers and writers as well. For instance, Claude Debussy applied the shimmering type of sound in some of his piano pieces (Gold 182). This is important to note since it is an element that a listener notices easily about the genre (Bonds 480). It is only produced when melody instruments are intentionally tuned to tones slightly apart from each other. The one handling the instruments might pitch one of them somewhat higher than the other, and playing them together results in the shimmering effect.
The melody is played on gender, which refers to a collection of high-pitched bronze-keyed vibraphones. According to Bonds (480), the listener can notice that it is usually played at incredible speeds. This is achieved by every pair of musicians playing a single note. For instance, in the event, a melody consists of three notes in the Gamelan, C-D-E. Bonds (480) claims three different pairs for notes C, D, and E would be three different pairs. He adds that dynamics is an element of the Gamelan Gong Kebyar that can vary from one piece to another. More sudden tempo alterations mark a section’s termination and the beginning of another.
Works Cited
Bonds, Mark Evan. Listen to This. 4th ed., Pearson, 2018.
Gold, Lisa. “Bali 1928, Volume 1: Gamelan Gong Kebyar Music from Belaluan, Pangkung, Busungbiu—the Oldest New Music from Bali by Allan Evans and Edward Herbst.” Asian Music, vol. 47, no. 2, 2016, pp. 179–187.