In Bali, instruments are tuned slightly out of step so the music breathes.
Balinese gamelan instruments are built in pairs, one tuned a fraction higher than the other. Played together, they produce a shimmering pulse called ombak, 'wave', meant to evoke a beating heart. When Debussy heard Javanese gamelan in Paris in 1889, it changed how he thought about sound.
Gamelan is the traditional ensemble music of the Javanese, Sundanese and Balinese peoples of Indonesia. It is built mostly from percussion: bronze metallophones struck with mallets, gongs, and hand drums called kendang that keep the beat, joined by flutes, a bowed string instrument called the rebab, zithers and singers. Some surviving ensembles are very old; the sacred gamelans preserved at the Javanese courts are thought to date from the 12th century. In 2021 UNESCO added gamelan to its list of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.
Its tuning is unlike Western music's. Javanese gamelan uses two systems: sléndro, with five notes to the octave, and pélog, with seven unevenly spaced notes, usually played in five-note subsets. A full set has instruments in both, and there is no universal standard. Each gamelan is tuned as a unit, and the exact intervals vary from one set to the next, so that the Canadian composer Colin McPhee said there were as many scales as gamelans. Some teachers dispute that view.
In Bali, paired instruments are deliberately tuned slightly apart. The higher one is called the inhale and the lower the exhale, and together they create interference beats that ideally pulse at the same speed across the whole ensemble. The effect, ombak, gives Balinese gamelan its shimmer; in ceremonies it is meant to suggest the presence of a god or lead listeners toward meditation.
At the Paris Exposition of 1889, both Claude Debussy and Erik Satie heard Central Javanese musicians play. Scholars have found no direct quotation of gamelan in Debussy's music, but gamelan-like textures appear, notably in his piano piece 'Pagodes' of 1903. Its influence runs on through Cage's prepared piano, Britten, Messiaen and Steve Reich, and even the interlocking guitars of King Crimson's 1980s albums.
Source: Wikipedia — Gamelan · Text summarised from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
