MUSIC

THE VILLAGE ORCHESTRAS

There is in Balinese music a unified range of sonorities tending towards one sound; with the exception of certain bamboo xylophones, an incidental bamboo flute, or a two-string violin, all of the instruments are metals struck with mallets; there is a general tone-colour of metallic percussions - tinkling, acid sonorities that can be clashing and violent or soft and delicate, but are never sweet and plaintive. Their musical phraseology is simpler, more confined within a margin of sobriety, than our expansive and unrestrained music.

The Balinese have developed their music to the point of having a special type of orchestra for every purpose, each differing from the others in sonority, in the instruments composing it, in the pieces played, and even in scale. (The Balinese scale, with certain exceptions, consists of five notes, named from low to high: ding, dong, deng, dung, dang, corresponding to our E, F, G, B, C.) The " concert " orchestra is entirely different from the one used for feasts, cremations, and processions.

The same holds true for the music employed for the various styles of plays and dances; the orchestra for marionette shadow-plays is radically different. from the one used for the dances of young girls, which is again different from that used for heroic plays. The general tone of Balinese music does not produce the nervous shock on Westerners such as the more " Oriental " Chinese or Indian music does.

Balinese music is readily acceptable to Western ears, perhaps because their compositions are performed by large musical ensembles in polyphonic harmonies and rhythms which are in a way reminiscent of our symphonic music.

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