Gongs once told Chinese officials on the road who had to bow first
In imperial China, a procession escorting an official was preceded by a gong, and the count of strokes signalled rank. Two dignitaries approaching each other could tell, before they met, which one owed the other a bow. The instrument itself, and its name, trace back to Southeast Asia.
The word gong comes from Java. The oldest possible pictures of the instrument appear on the Ngọc Lũ bronze drum of northern Vietnam's Dong Son culture, from around the third to second century BC, which seems to show ensembles of seven gongs. Chinese records of the sixth century AD are the first sure written mention, describing it as a foreign import from a land between Tibet and Burma. Annam, Java, Burma and southern China became the great manufacturing centres. Some gongs are loud enough to carry about eight kilometres, and early uses may have included summoning workers from the fields.
Physics sorts gongs into two voices. A flat disc vibrates in many patterns at once and produces a wash of sound rather than a clear pitch; orchestras call this a tam-tam. A gong with a raised central knob, the boss or nipple, rings with a definite note, and sets of them can play melodies, as in the Philippine kulintang. Javanese makers go further, building some big bossed gongs to pulse with a slow beat of roughly one to five cycles a second. In the Javanese gamelan the largest, the gong ageng, can reach a metre across and is struck the least. Chinese opera uses a pair: the larger, falling in pitch, announces major characters and dramatic moments, while the smaller, rising one heralds lesser figures and comedy.
Europe met the tam-tam in 1790, when François-Joseph Gossec brought it into the orchestra. Berlioz recommended it for mourning or scenes of extreme horror, and Bellini and Wagner used it in opera. Stravinsky pushed its technique in The Rite of Spring with quickly damped strokes and a triangle beater scraped across its face.
Playing a large one well takes finesse. A skilled percussionist primes it with a near-silent tap so the main stroke blooms faster. Since the 1990s the Welsh metalworker Steve Hubback has made sculptural gongs in abstract shapes, played by Evelyn Glennie among others.
Source: Gong
