What does Bali’s own musical speciality gamelan have to do with American minimalist composer Steve Reich and the Sydney Opera House? Read on to find out…
I spent most of October in Bali, Indonesia’s famous tropical island that’s a mecca for sun and sand worshippers. I was there checking out the diving in different locations, so I spent most of my time underwater. (If you want to read about diving at the USS Liberty shipwreck in Tulamben, follow the link). Pretty much everywhere you go in Bali, however, you will hear gamelan, Bali’s own bewitching form of music.
Composed mainly using percussion – drums, cymbals and bells – gamelan is melodic but mainly rhythmic and repetitive, layering different instruments over one another into a quite hypnotic sound. It’s perhaps a little bit of an acquired taste, but there’s something about it that’s immediately striking – it’s the sort of sound that makes you want to stop so you can hear more. (There’s some gamelan MP3s halfway down this page, although it’s not really the same as hearing it for real).
Opposite the Palm Garden Hotel where I stayed in Sanur (a very good hotel for $30 US a night, by the way) there was a Balinese temple where there was some kind of ceremony going on. The temple itself was packed with worshippers and I was too shy to go in so I hovered around outside for 10 minutes or so, simply listening to the music which echoed out from beyond the walls as the sun started to go down. Even though I was standing amongst a pack of parked cars on the road outside, it still felt quite magical.
Although I’d never heard gamelan before, it sounded eeriely similar to something else I knew – but what? I realised after a while it reminded me of the work of American composer Steve Reich, who has long been a champion of using the minimum of instruments to produce symphonies of sound revolving around repetition and rhythm. “Music For Pieces Of Wood” is a bona fide classic, and it is indeed 4 musicians banging bits of wood together to create something quite spectacular. A little searching turned up this excellent page which explains how Steve Reich’s Music For 18 Musicians is indeed based on the principles of gamelan, although not directly adapted from it.
I would have never put the two together if I hadn’t passed by that temple, and it’s made me keen to seek out some decent gamelan recordings – because there seems to be a wide variety of styles which makes some of it more frenetic than others. I’d definitely recommend seeing a live performance if you go to Bali. One of the stand-out moments of my travels in Australia was getting to see Steve Reich perform live at the Sydney Opera House, which I wrote about on my other books/culture site SpikeMagazine.com. It still seems faintly surreal that I had the good fortune to see him there, of all places, and I can say that the acoustics inside that place are incredible. Four years later, hearing gamelan in Bali helped transport me back to that night and conversely, being a fan of Steve Reich’s music also helped me appreciated another form of music I might otherwise have passed by.
This is another of the great things about travelling – there may be nothing new under the sun, but most of it still feels new to me.
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