MUSIC

THE VILLAGE ORCHESTRAS

Although we had heard enthusiastic reports about the splendid music of Bali, its subtle beauty and vigour came to us as a revelation on our first night on the island. It is customary to hold a concert of Balinese music in the hotel gardens the night that the weekly boat arrives from Surabaya bringing new visitors.

We had experienced disappointments on such occasions elsewhere and we were fully prepared to hear another of the denatured versions of native entertainment usually concocted for tourists. We distrusted the twenty-five or thirty young men who, nude above the waist and wearing sashes of blue silk, sat cross-legged around a square formed by impressive instruments in elaborate carved frames.

There were metallophones, instruments with bronze keys like xylophones, sets of polished bronze bowls arranged from low to high like the notes of the scale, great bronze gongs, and many kinds of small cymbals. There were also two long drums wrapped in black and white chequered cloth.

Quietly, as if to indicate the piece to be played, someone started to beat out a tune on one of the high metallophones; others joined in, gradually increasing the volume of the playful melody, and soon they were all playing music the like of which we had never heard. It was a pure music like tinkling bells, interwoven with the fast humming of the cymbals, onomatopoetically called tjeng-tjeng, and punctuated here and there by booming gongs, the whole controlled by the masterful leadership of the two drummers, who, with the tips of their fingers, beat impossible rhythms on the double heads of their drums, each differently tuned.

Suddenly, with a crash, they all struck a sonorous chord and stopped, all but the four boys playing on the reyong, who, in perfect unison and as if moved by a single impulse, beat the inverted bronze bowls with padded sticks, ringing out rippling chords, sinuous melodies that broke at unexpected places into resonant accents or rolled into fast syncopation.

When the reyong solo was over, the rest joined in again, building up the themes until they reached a furious climax that faded away into the original theme, but enriched by rhapsodical ornamentation on the high instruments against the measured basses and occasional reverberations of the deep gongs. It was an Oriental ultra-modern Bach fugue, an astounding combination of bells, machinery, and thunder.

All of the pieces they played that evening were masterpieces of musical structure, simple, but rich and alive, violent and at the same time refined, having little in common with the spirit of the over-refined, somewhat precious music we had heard in Java.

links [ 1 ] - [ 2 ] - [ 3 ] - [ 4 ]