Gusti Putu Madé Geria’s Theory for Balinese Gamelan

Translator’s Introduction

[0.1] This essay and translation presents contributions to the theory of Balinese gamelan authored by Gusti Putu Madé Geria (Gree-ah; 1906–1983) of Buagan, South Bali. Geria had impact in several media: texts that named and classified gamelan instruments and performance practices, transcriptions of dozens of village repertoire items (and original compositions in their idiom) into Balinese notation, archival research, composition in contemporary genres, pedagogy, and performance. His writings had precedent in anonymous lontar (palm leaf manuscripts) of Balinese scribes, which in turn are heir to still older traditions of Hindu-Buddhist scholarship and aesthetics. Much of his painstaking work, preserved in undated personal notebooks using a combination of semantically rich Balinese and Old Javanese (Kawi) with a more neutral Indonesian, remains unpublished; some is available (see Bandem 2019). But when Geria began, state and state-run educational contexts for dissemination did not yet exist. He did the work to satisfy his desire to learn and preserve, and his distinction was to have focused on gamelan; however some of his contemporaries devoted their lives to promulgating other Balinese performing arts in their ways, so he was part of something broadly emergent.⁽¹⁾ His reputation grew throughout his lifetime and since his passing, beginning in traditional village oral networks and gathering prestige through the advent of a culture of publication. He is thus deservedly seen as a parent of modern Balinese musicology.

[0.2] As a young man living under Dutch rule and through Indonesia’s 1946 independence, Geria was among the last generation of musicians to serve at the Puri (palace) Pemecutan in the capital, Denpasar. Digging in the Puri’s archives he brought to light the (likely 18th–19th century) Prakempa, a lontar (palm-leaf manuscript) unique for its exclusive focus on gamelan. Prakempa (and the related Aji Gurnita lontar)⁽²⁾ are gnomic and cosmological, and unlikely to have been intended for any public. At the Puri, Geria was immersed in gamelan as well as in the realms of Hindu-Balinese poetry and its vocal practices, which bore many named conventions of poetic meter and form. It is generally understood that gamelan music did not possess such a nomenclature then, or, at least, there is no record, oral or written, of one. Geria adapted words used to label formal components of poetry for instrumental music, and invented outright—employing a cunning diversity of metaphoric, symbolic, and evocatively descriptive labels—a cornucopia of terms for instrument functions and melodic patterns. Awakening to Bali’s presence among other cultures nationally and internationally, Geria’s work connects the anonymous musical thought of the past to an emergent Indonesian and international culture of explicit musicological attribution.

[0.3] From 1952 to 1955 Geria, along with Balinese colleagues Nyoman Kaler and Nyoman Rembang, taught in Surakarta (Solo), Java at the young Konservatori Karawitan, Indonesia’s first higher education school of music and dance. In Solo, local histories of court and Dutch colonial power were more deeply entwined than those in “outlying” Bali. Even before the school’s founding, these conditions inspired some Javanese musicians to model Western attitudes toward knowledge standardization. A formal academic culture of publication, though later increasingly emphasized by the Ministry of Education, was yet to emerge, however. Faculty trained in village or court tradition were hired to teach, and whether or not they would morph adventitiously into publishing academics through the change of context, as some eventually did, was not an explicit consideration. Pedagogy was practice, as it still is. Yet by then some distinctive Javanese intellectual musicians were impelled to write about gamelan, so that by the 1950s the urge to theorize was not unheard of. This inspired Geria as well as Rembang (who was younger and whose own later writings were inspired by Geria’s).⁽³⁾

[0.4] Returning to Bali, Geria led the RRI (Radio Republik Indonesia) full-time resident gamelan in Denpasar. Its members were senior musicians of remarkable expertise, and all looked up to him. He also taught at Bali’s own fledgling conservatories, wrote, and composed. In 1981–82 I attended many daily rehearsals at RRI, spoke often with Geria, and learned some of his music. I grasped that he was a polymath, and understood the solace that thinking about his music provided for him. When he died the following year he (and his family) had entrusted his notebooks to I Made Bandem. Bandem (b. 1945) is a performer and scholar who was the first Balinese to earn a PhD in Ethnomusicology (at Wesleyan in 1980), and has served in multiple international and local academic, cultural, and political leadership positions over an influential career. Bandem translated, commented, and expanded upon Geria’s work in several of his Indonesian publications (1986, 1992, 2013, 2019). I better understood Geria’s fuller significance after reading these.

[0.5] To enable comparison with other music theories represented in this issue, Geria’s work needs to be culturally situated. Much of his rhetoric is of a piece with the Prakempa he brought to light. It is sometimes as if Geria ventriloquizes Prakempa’s putative author Siddartha Gautama (who, bearing the Buddha’s eponym, may have been a real person, a pseudonym, or an attribution for an assemblage of texts). Prakempa is an artifact of precolonial culture wherein a mix of languages (Balinese, Old Javanese, and Sanskrit) and intertextually-related expressive genres (music, dance, theater, visual arts) were widely but unequally pervasive in village, court, and priestly realms of society. Prakempa’s pivotal mandala-like illustration, the pangider bhuwana (dispersion around the cosmos; see Example 1) comprises heterarchical groupings of tones, letters, colors, gods, and parts of the body, each “installed” at one of ten cardinal direction points (North, Northeast, East, Southeast, South, Southwest, West, Northwest, and above and below the Center).⁽⁴⁾ These associations invoke the expertise of high priests, with their esoteric knowledge of niskala (the unseen, the metaphysical). But while Prakempa is a product of court culture and written in Old Javanese, its aim was to emplace Balinese music genres of all kinds in a universal context, humming with vital energy.

[0.6] Ambiguity and enigma are aspects of learning and knowledge in the intertwined Balinese and Javanese cultural spheres, even more so in the past as knowledge production was decentralized. Ambiguity has a positive valuation and reflects blends of indigenous beliefs with layers of accreted mysticism of Indic and Islamic origin, including Tantrism. Utama (2016) documents Tantrism’s embedded persistence in many of today’s Balinese material symbols, food, music, dance, and rituals, even if only priests or erudite persons could name these connections. Writers on Javanese music of Geria’s generation such as Sastrapusaka ([1953] 1984) evoke it, and Judith Becker explored the topic in depth (1993). Tantrism’s “subtle body,” like the pangider bhuwana, is a microcosm of the universe hosting energy points (chakras) and channels for energy flow via breath or fluid. When Geria associates sounds and instruments to parts of the body and bodily action, or to gods or to natural phenomena, he joins with Sastrapusaka and others. As Becker aptly wrote, “it takes a certain suspension of disbelief on the part of the reader to begin to approach Sastrapusaka’s story with sympathetic understanding” (59), as it does for reading Geria. But Geria gradually passes from Prakempa’s metaphysical style to a discourse on the play of tones and the concrete sensations they produce. Having sculpted these worlds as continuous, even a non-Balinese reader can connect the umwelt of precolonial Bali to an international emergent music theory based on earthly perception and cognition.

[0.7] Below in Part I Geria sets forth the significance of certain instruments, their construction, their sound, and the tones they produce. Parts II, III, and IV comprise lists of terms—some borrowed from Prakempa, others coined by him—describing performance practice. In Part II general qualities of instruments and their playing techniques are characterized. In both Parts I and II the rhetoric mirrors Prakempa. By Part III and IV we come to specific patterns and techniques, having entered a realm of insights based on particular linear-intervallic patterns and the motile impulses they evoke. Here we are closest to the notes themselves, hence what many would aver to be music analysis.⁽⁵⁾ I amplify Geria’s words with material from Bandem’s publications, merging this with bits taken from our 2022 discussions. Drawing also on my own experience with gamelan, I venture an English parsing of the referentiality Geria’s delightful lexicon has for Balinese musicians. Fundamentals of gamelan instrumentation and playing technique are explained as needed.⁽⁶⁾ Urged on by Bandem, I conclude with some comparative perspectives. In parts I–III Geria’s own writing is given in the left column and translated at right, with Balinese or classical Javanese terms retained. Further explanatory notes, fully in my own voice, are given in single-column format.

I. Niyan Pitegesing Rebab lan Suling (The Significance of Rebab and Suling)

[1.1] The bowed spike lute rebab and the bamboo end-blown flutes suling play the melody in the Gamelan Gambuh, an ensemble dating perhaps to as early as the fifteenth century, and commonly understood to be the crucial precursor of later gamelan composed of bronze keyed instruments and gongs. Gambuh, already rarely seen in Geria’s time, was nonetheless cultivated in the village of Pedungan, near to Geria’s home village Buagan, and at the Puri Pemecutan, where Geria trained, also very close by. These contexts were formative and may explain why his text begins as it does. N.B.: Sang Hyang, used often below, is an honorific for deities.

[1.2] Now Geria changes tack, introducing other ensembles and instruments, and dealing with their individual tones and intervals between them, musical functions, and in some cases their cosmological origins and source of energy in the human body. He begins with gamelan gender wayang, the quartet of ten-keyed metallophones that accompany Balinese shadow plays and other rituals. Then he briefly covers instruments of a large bronze gamelan, presumably a gamelan gong kebyar: kajar, a small mounted gong; the family of metallophones (from low to high register) possessing a single-octave-range jegogan, jublag, and panyacah; those with a two-octave-range giying, gangsa pemadé (not explicitly mentioned) and gangsa kantil(an); and last but not least, the hanging gongs, the kendang (drums) and cengeceng (cymbals).

II. Nama-nama Pukulan Instrumen (Names for Instrument Playing Techniques)

[2.1] Here Geria names musical instruments trompong (row of tuned gongs played by a single musician), reyong (row of tuned gongs usually played by four musicians), gendér (metallophone played with a round-headed mallet in each hand), gambang (an instrument, also common in Java, with wooden slats for keys), gerantang (an instrument made from a row of tuned bamboo tubes suspended in a frame), genggong (a jew’s harp) plus rebab, suling and kendang (identified earlier). He mentions gamelan genres which I briefly describe below, retaining the Balinese terms he coined and defining them with some suggestion as to the resonances they would have for Balinese. NB. Other than the terms themselves, which remain in Balinese, Geria switches to Indonesian here and henceforth.

[2.2] Iber-iberan is a small bird such as a chicken or dove released to fly free during a cremation ritual, thus paralleling the human soul’s departure. The idea of lightness and freedom evoke the buoyancy and animation of semar pegulingan music.

[2.3] Gajah mina is a legendary fish with an elephant’s head, a traditional image of which festoons cremation towers for people in certain Balinese lineages. The reyong’s main musical function is to embellish melody, and the character of gajah mina is understood as wanting to follow, accompany, escort—and in this case via cremation—to the next world.

[2.4] There, Geria implicitly refers to the trompong used in gamelan gong gedé, which is larger than the one used in gamelan semar pegulingan, referenced here.

[2.5] Gamelan pelegongan is an ensemble similar to semar pegulingan that accompanies the iconic legong dance genre] is called tadah rawit [this means “of small and beautiful character,” a resonance much like the characterization of semar pegulingan in II.2 above.

[2.6] Quarreling bees; cf. I.5 above. This kind of gamelan features “quarrelling” contrapuntal and interlocking textures in a narrow ambitus, perhaps not unlike the inside of a hive. The bee metaphor gains richness with the common terms pengumbang and pengisep (the first from the word for bee, kumbang, and the second from isep, to sip, i.e., nectar) that name the lower and higher tones in Balinese paired tunings that create intense acoustical beats between “unisons” on pairs of otherwise identical instruments.

[2.7] The ubiquitous angklung gamelan has a four-tone scale and instruments with but four keys—a single octave. Though its music can be complex the instrument is quick to navigate. Capung manjus means bathing dragonfly; an idiom describing a “water-skimming” quick bath for a person as well.

[2.8] This means sudden love or crush and evokes the same deft quickness as II.8. The four tones of each octave of the angklung’s reyong are played by pairs of musicians—perhaps a matchmaking opportunity.

[2.9] Buta are potentially malevolent spirits that can be benevolent if properly placated; anggawasari combines anggawa, to bring, and sari, nectar or essence; thus, the essence-bringing buta. Nada are tones and semara is romantic or often erotic love. Geria thus associates the rebab with powerful human and unseen forces.

[2.10] Tunjung is lotus and arip is sleepy; suggesting that the flute finger holes opening and closing are like the lotus. Merdukomala is the name of an Old Javanese poetic meter; its constituent words merdu and komala both index sweetness, softness.

[2.11] Geleng is a word for head that also suggests focus and concentration; and asuh is diligent. The term suggests the watchful leadership role of the drum in the ensemble. Meganada literally means big sound, but it is also the name of the demon-king Rahwana’s powerful son (of the Ramayana epic).

[2.12] As well as being an instrument, in Bali gambang also names an ensemble usually comprising four gambang and two bronze metallophones. Kesa mura means irregular and free, which likely connotes the fact that gamelan gambang music is not regulated by gongs and conventional gong structures. Banyu marga means flowing water, suggesting the continuous rippling texture of gamelan gambang music.

[2.13] Gerantang joged bumbung refers to an ensemble of gerantang accompanying ngibing, a flirtation dance. Bramana ngisep sari means “beetle sips flower essence”; pangirik is a tickling sensation. The juxtaposed and somewhat incongruous imagery of beetle, flower, and tickling cunningly reveals the potential of ngibing, which in yesteryear led to more than flirtation.

[2.14] The genggong is a jew’s harp made with a wooden tongue set in a small frame held in the mouth. One vibrates the tongue by jerking a stick tied to a cord attached to the tongue; the sound is resonated by the oral cavity. Amebet means tide or wave, and lati is lips, thus, a wave of sound coming from the lips. Samas means four hundred and nyata means to drain or to dry—is Geria saying that after so many yanks one’s mouth is dry? None of my Balinese interlocutors know.

III. Arti dalam Pukulan, Misalnya dalam pukulan Trompong (Kinds of playing techniques, for example on the trompong)

[3.1] Geria’s focus in Parts III and IV is on two kinds of melodic embellishment: non-interlocking and interlocking. The non-interlocking embellishment shown in Part III is for a single player and allows improvisatory freedom in both rhythm and pitch so long as one arrives at periodic goal tones (also played on the single-octave jegogan instruments); the examples shown are thus models, one of many possible realizations. Geria’s examples all apply to the trompong, an instrument forefronted in prestigious court gamelan—the palegongan, semar pagulingan, and the gong gdé. I show both the kepatihan (cipher notation) provided and my own modified 3-line staff for the trompong and, when needed, a single-line staff for jegogan. Geria notated his examples on particular pitches in a five-tone pélog, conventionally numbered 1,2,3,5, and 6. But they could be played at any transposition. To convey this my additional three-line staff shows pitch contour only, and only when there is a specific pitch goal. The instrument is played with a long string-wound mallet in each hand and Geria’s terms sometimes apply to the ‘sticking’, that is which hand plays which tone. Some notations thus indicate LH and RH.

[3.2] Balinese scale tone solmization is ding (1), dong (2), deng (3), dung (5), and dang (6). Tones 4 (deung) and 7 (daing) are only invoked for pélog’s seven-tone parent scale. The latter only appears in III.1, At the time Geria was writing the five-tone pélog was nearly ubiquitous in Bali and gamelan using the seven-tone one were heard much less frequently. These examples are paired with videos III.1–8.

[3.3]Nyiliasih means to love one another, here in reference to the graceful motion of the two hands crossing over one another.

[3.4] “Lines” refers to the grace notes and special technique for playing two adjacent notes with the same hand, glancing off one gong’s boss and using the momentum to propel it to the next one.

[3.5] The initial note of each pair is in a subordinate metric position and the final stroke coincides with a significant goal tone played on the mid and low-range metallophones and often other instruments too.

[3.6] This is often heard in unmeasured passages called gineman trompong.

[3.7] Since the trompong plays a lead role, what is meant by “followers” is the rest of the musicians in the gamelan; in Example III.6 the direction is the goal tone (6) and the trompong’s prior arrival on 6 is an anticipation.

[3.8] As the tones within the repeat signs repeat, the player may at will substitute those on the right from time to time.

[3.9] Geria here iterates many of the above terms, indicating that these embellishments can be used as intros. (There is no corresponding video.)

IV. Soal Ubit-Ubitan Sekati (Refined interlocking (ubit-ubitan) techniques)

[4.1] Balinese interlocking patterns are played by pairs of musicians and on some instruments may involve improvisation, though in a different way than the patterns in Part III (see Tilley 2019). But Geria only addresses a type called ubit-ubitan, played on the upper-register gangsa (metallophone family). Most gamelan have eight gangsa. In ubit-ubitan rhythm and contour are fully specified, though patterns may perch on any set of scale degrees depending on the surrounding musical context. With one exception (IV.6) these patterns are very common and I speculate (since Geria’s list is not comprehensive) that they were chosen for that reason. Unlike the examples in Part III, for which a goal tone is shown only when a specific one is presupposed, these patterns are all aligned to melodic contours in slower-moving instruments. In a typical musical situation, the patterns would repeat one or more times before the music leads elsewhere.

[4.2] Geria’s cipher notation is given, as well as modified staff notation using two two-line staves with the ubit-ubitan above and the slower moving gending line below.⁽⁸⁾ On the ubit-ubitan staff the stems-down part is known as polos (basic). The stems-up part is the sangsih (different or complementary). As most Balinese music has an end-accented character, the staff notation places the beginning of a four-note group apart and unbeamed at the end of each pattern. The three tones that complete it on repeat are shown at the beginning. Boxes identify a repeating segment.

[4.3] Geria provided only the classification and gave no explanation for why he chose the names he did, but they conceal rich semantic and associative thought. My interpretations below were discussed with and endorsed by Made Bandem (conversations December 2022). Also with Bandem’s assent I reorder the presentation of the patterns from short to long and simple to complex. Geria gave no rationale for his original order, which, per Bandem 1992, was IV.11, 1, 4, 5, 7, 9, 10, 13, 14, 2, 3, 8, 12, 6.⁽⁹⁾ These examples are paired with videos IV.1-14.

[4.4] Gagaboran, lalonggoran, kale, and pangecet are the names for different kinds of gong-cycle forms in dance pieces of the gamelan palegongan repertoire.

[4.5] An aling-aling is a wall at the gateway to almost all Balinese homes that forces someone coming in to turn immediately left or right. Its purpose is to prevent buta kala (malevolent powers believed to travel only in straight lines) from entering. This is one of two of Geria’s ubit-ubitan that does not feature interlocking rhythms. The three-note motive 123 in the polos (523 in the sangsih) repeats throughout, constantly backing up and trying again like a buta kala ramming into an aling-aling. At the end, at last, the 3 of the sangsih and polos aligns with the gending.

[4.6] IV.2 through IV.5 can be discussed together since they are similar and all paired with the same oscillating two-note gending pattern. Gagelut and gagulet are assonant synonyms meaning hug, embrace, or even wrestle. The patterns are of a subtype called ubitan telu (telu = three) in which the two parts use a total of three tones, sharing an inner tone; hence embracing. These are indeed ubiquitous in the repertoire. Kabelit and kabelet, similarly related as words, mean stuck, stubborn, unmoving. They are of subtype called ubitan empat (empat = four) in which the two parts use two different but scale-adjacent tones each. When sounded the lower tone of the polos and the upper tone of the sangsih coincide, creating a dyad that protrudes from the texture to create a syncopated 3+2+3 cross-rhythm (the greyed notes). While the inner tones jostle, this prominent interval is “stuck” in its place.

[4.7] Gagejer (from gejer, to shake) is an anomaly in that (according to several people I asked) it does not appear anywhere in the repertoire, though perhaps it did in Geria’s lifetime or his own compositions. Like IV.1 the parts do not interlock.

[4.8] This pattern is kabelet (stuck) at first, and then it ngecog (jumps). The jumping is the iterated leap over a scale tone: 3 to 6 (skipping 5) in the sangsih and 5 to 1 (next octave, skipping 6) in the polos, though their composite creates a stepwise line as the slanted rectangles show. This pattern is thus longer than previous ones and contains no internal repetition of its initial motive as all previous ones do.

[4.9] Tulak is to refuse, and wali to return or go back. The opening 3-note pattern with a down-then-leap-up contour (162) repeats, but once the polos 6 in the middle is reached, matching the gending, the contour pattern inverts to up-then-leap-down (126; dotted box) and returns to its point of origin.

[4.10] Oles-olesan is swiping or wiping, an apt description of the repeating pattern 32.23. in the polos. The mallet’s path on the keys needs a lateral wrist motion leftward for 32 and rightward for 23— just as one would move the hand back and forth with a cloth or paint brush, or glide a finger across a phone screen.

[4.11] Nyendok, to scoop (from sendok, spoon), evokes the opening 23 in the sangsih, which enters below the polos, scooping the composite pattern 235 upwards. N.B.: That feature notwithstanding, this ubitan telu pattern is much like gagelut and gagulet (IV.2 and 3) but Geria sets it in a gending twice as long (as the lower boxes show).

[4.12] Geria likely meant babaru to mean a whiplike inner force or strength. This is doubly apt.⁽¹⁰⁾ Here the boxed motive recurs transposed up a step, then inverts (dotted box) to return to the starting point. In one sense the pattern conveys a directed kinetic motion Balinese call majalan, and always fits with gending, whose goal tones change for every iteration of the pattern (moving 5-6-5 3 in the example). It conveys energetic motion and is often played at fast tempi. In a more concretely physical sense playing the polos or sangsih requires a whipping or flicking motion with the wrist of the mallet hand. The polos’s 5.35.35 slashes to the right (35); ditto for the sangsih’s 3.23.23.

[4.13] In this playful term, aling-aling is the entrance wall described for IV.1 and cunguh temisi is a snail’s nose. The repeating 231 is much like IV.1 itself, but once the pattern breaks (in grey) the process begins anew. Perhaps it is like a snail persistently approaching the wall, and indeed the process is snail-paced in the sense that the larger repeating unit (boxed) is longer than others described thus far except IV.9. When I asked Bandem (conversations, December 2022) for other possibilities, he said “have you ever had a good look at a snail’s nose? It’s very convoluted!” N.B.: snails have four noses, or proboscises, but Geria was likely thinking of the many folds and ridges on the face of Lissachatina fulica.

[4.14] Nyalimput—to stumble or trip—with its eight-beat gending, is, along with its relative Nyalimped (Example IV.14) the longest pattern in Geria’s ubit-ubitan collection, and it has a distinctive profile. The jutting dyad 63, shown in grey, occurs eleven times. It recurs at an interval of three subdivisions except thrice—and this is where the tripping happens. At the two solid-boxed moments the distance is two, and in the dotted box it is four. Elsewhere 63s are equally spaced at a nice 3-against-4 cross-rhythmic gait, only to stumble again the next time around.

[4.15] Nyalimped means twisted, deformed. The gending is the same as in Nyalimput (Example IV.13), the polos and sangsih are perched on the same tones, and the 63 dyad occurs eleven times here as well, but in a more irregular configuration. Counting from the left it recurs at constantly changing gaps of 3, 2, 3, 4, 3, 3, 4, 3, 2, 3, and (wrapping to the beginning) 2 subdivisions. None of the foregoing examples are remotely as unpredictable as this.

Conclusion: Resonance of Geria’s Concepts in Bali and Abroad

[5.1] Example 2 sorts Geria’s terms into four guiding categories based on their lexical fields. Within these no continua are suggested: for example “action and perception” qualities enumerated in Part IV (like swiping, hugging, tripping, and being stuck) exist along no single line.They are independent of one another, and tease us with an awareness of how utterly distinctive the patterns were for him. Those from Part II are well-distributed among the fields and reference aspects of both seen and unseen worlds. Some fit in more than one column. It is not difficult to imaginatively correlate an image of an elephant-headed fish (II.3) ornamenting a bier, or actual bathing dragonflies (II.8) with musical qualities, and we must remember that these striking images are naturalized components of Balinese thought. But it is more immediate and neutral to accept the terms from Parts III and IV, heavily weighted toward human embodiment and sensory experience, as cross-culturally pertinent music theory. Where elephant-fish is a metaphor for the instrument reyong, cajoling us to make a comparison we might not have made, swiping (IV.9) is a true analogy of wrist motion to melodic contour; indeed the contour is a consequence of the motion once one is at an instrument with mallet in hand.

[5.2] My commentaries link terms in Part IV to granular details of musical processes that neither Geria nor Bandem touch upon. In so doing I articulate a confidence that Geria would have been supremely aware of everything I hear and construe, and much more besides. Thus I habilitate him as a music analyst. How could he not be? He knew these genres, types, and patterns, and felt them deeply throughout a rich musical life, and cared enough to communicate about them. His theory, though, makes no pretense of being comprehensive or unified, though it reflects much of what is common and standardized in practice. It is an intuitively generated set of judgments about what to include and name and what to exclude, made by an expert who was a composer and performer and thought “in music.” The intuition is shaped by deeply embodied experience and habituated thought, and we should not lose sight of the ultimate particularity of each such view of the world.

[5.3] To introduce some cross-cultural perspective, Example 3 reproduces my typology of ubit-ubitan patterns, based also on sensitivity to contour but differently than Geria (Tenzer 2000a, 225; Tenzer 2000b). I separate ubit-ubitan into two collections, ubit telu (ubit “three”, shown at left) and ubit empat (ubit “four”, shown at right). This is such a quotidian distinction for Balinese that Geria did perhaps not even consider invoking it. In ubit telu patterns, three contiguous scale-tone pitches are used, and the polos and sangsih parts always share the middle pitch. In ubit empat a fourth pitch is added such that each part has its own two pitches, and when the low part sounds its lower pitch, the high part always sounds its higher one. This generates dyads that protrude from the texture as cross-rhythms when patterns repeat. Aside from this, though, the collections of ubit telu and ubit empat patterns are identical from the standpoint of the contours of the lower three pitches in each.

[5.4] In the large and important repertoire of “classical” pelegongan style, a significant preponderance of ubit-ubitan patterns follow a few simple rules known to all gamelan players: they last two beats at a rate of four tones per beat, and are classified either stable (ngubeng) or motile (majalan), depending on the direction of the underlying melody. For brevity, I limit the discussion to stable patterns here.⁽¹¹⁾ In search of a theoretical Occam’s razor, I also observed that successions of four tones must use all three pitches with none immediately repeated, and this must hold for all rotations of the pattern (to facilitate repetition). These constraints afford a sole “master contour” XYXZ YXYZ.⁽¹²⁾ The columns in the two halves of Example 3 are differentiated by which of the three pitches is assigned to X: the lowest at left, the middle one in the middle, and the highest at right. The eight rows comprise rotations of the contour, yielding a total of 48 possible patterns: 24 each ubit telu and ubit empat.

[5.5] If the ubit telu/empat distinction was too generic for Geria to have even considered it viable as a basis, I was drawn to it. It was an ethnographic datum indexing a high-order concept, and to be generic is to systematically generalize—a theoretical desideratum according to what I held true. There is a problem, however, as it turns out that only fourteen of the 48 patterns generated in Example 3 (marked with asterisks) actually appear with any frequency in the repertoire, and neither I nor Balinese friends can explain why the rest are virtually absent, despite agreement that they satisfy the rules. Of this subset only five—gagulet, gagelut, nyendok, kabelet and kabelit—are in Geria’s collection too (and so labeled in the example).

[5.6] The remainder of Geria’s patterns described in IV above are of either four or eight beats and do not conform to the two-beat template I used (there is also the anomalous gagejer, IV.6). I was fully familiar with these common longer patterns when I theorized them, but considered them instances of creativity or expressive potential within oral tradition, hence not core to a theoretical approach. Geria evidently felt he needed to include them precisely for their expressivity. He called upon his musical experience to single out what was distinctive within the familiar pool of shared resources. Exemplification, not abstraction, served his purpose. He was no more comprehensive than me, however, since his scheme omits nine patterns appearing in my typology (and numerous longer ones that neither of us touch upon) that are also common and shared. I preferred to limit my scope to something abstract that could be set out comprehensively, intentionally separating out expressive aspects of practice. Example 4 contrasts premises and features of Geria’s ubit-ubitan theory and mine, the sole shared feature (#5) being the relevance of contour.

[5.7] It is hardly surprising that there is no culturally neutral realm for theorizing, nor would we expect any two writers not to diverge significantly. Made Bandem, heir to Geria’s notebooks whose Indonesian publications infuse the translation and commentary above, was keen that Geria’s writings be placed in relation to international strains of musical thought for an English readership outside of the Indonesian (largely Javanese) musicological community with which they are in family relation already.⁽¹³⁾ A larger context is also possible because Geria is far from alone in the wider world of music. But as we welcome many voices into an international colloquy of music theories we will be assembling a puzzle built of many such partial and evocative pieces, and are wise to minimize expectations that they will eventually fit coherently.

[5.8] Stephen Blum compares lexicons, metaphors, and categories offered by music experts of the world—Geria’s kin—as reported by the ethnomusicologists who have studied them, and concludes that consistency in lexical fields is common, but completeness is rare. And he recommends, among other things, “patience, with long-term commitment to language communities and readiness (even eagerness) to recognize and correct errors and misunderstandings” (2023, 127), adding that “Ethnomusicologists should not assume that musicians with whom we converse would prefer clear, scientifically precise concepts to the evocative metaphors of their theorizing and teaching” (99). On that point we intensify our curiosity about the many shades of theory to discover, the ways in which they will overlap and remain distinct, and the unsuspected channels their confluences will sculpt.

Michael Tenzer
University of British Columbia
School of Music
6361 Memorial Rd
Vancouver, BC
V6T 1Z2
michael.tenzer@ubc.ca

Works Cited

Bandem, I Made. 1986. Prakempa: Sebuah Lontar Gambelan Bali. Denpasar.

—————. 1992. Ubit-ubitan: Sebuah Teknik Permainan Gamelan Bali. Denpasar.

—————. 2013. Gamelan Bali Diatas Panggung Sejarah. BP Stikom Bali.

—————. 2019. Gong & Pelegongan: Jejak Historis dan Estetis Mpu Ageng I Gusti Putu Made Geria. BP Stikom Bali.

Becker, Judith. 1993. Gamelan Stories: Tantrism, Islam, and Aesthetics in Central Java. Arizona State University Program for Asian Studies.

Becker, Judith and Alan Feinstein, eds. 1984, 1987, 1988. Karawitan: Source Readings in Javanese Gamelan and Vocal Music, vols. 1–3. Center for Southeast Asian Studies, University of Michigan.

Blum, Stephen. 2023. Music Theory in Ethnomusicology. Oxford University Press.

Clampitt, David. 1997. Pairwise Well-formed Scales: Structural and Transformational Properties. PhD diss., State University of New York at Buffalo.

Geria, Gusti Putu Madé. Undated. Set of handwritten notebooks in the collection of I Madé Bandem.

Herbst Edward. 2015. Bali 1928: Lotring and the Sources of Gamelan Tradition (accompanying text to the Bali 1928 Project, vol. 3). World Arbiter.

Hunter, Thomas. 1989. Aji Ghurnita. Museum Bali. No. III c. 2390. Denpasar, Bali, Indonesia (unpublished).

Perlman, Marc. 2004. Unplayed Melodies: Javanese Gamelan and the Genesis of Music Theory. University of California Press.

Rembang, Nyoman. 1973. Gambelan Gambuh dan Gambelan-gambelan Lainnya di Bali. Kertas Kerja pada Workshop Gambuh, 25 Agustus s/d 1 September 1973.

—————. 1984/1985a. Hasil Pendokumentasian Notasi Gending-Gending Lelambatan Klasik Pegongan Daerah Bali. Proyek Pengembangan Kesenian Bali, Departemen Pendidikan dan Kebudayaan.

—————. 1984/1985b. Sekelumit Cara-cara Pembuatan Gamelan Bali. Proyek Pengembangan Kesenian Bali, Departemen Pendidikan dan Kebudayaan.

Sastrapusaka, Bendecitus Yusuf Harjamulya. [1953] 1984 . Wedha Pradangga Kawedhar [Knowledge of Gamelan Revealed]. Translated by R. Anderson Sutton. In Karawitan: Source Readings in Javanese Gamelan and Vocal Music, ed. Judith Becker and Alan Feinstein, vol. 1, 305–33. Center for Southeast Asian Studies, University of Michigan.

Steele, Peter. 2007. Innovative Approaches to Melodic Elaboration in Contemporary Kreasi Baru. MA Thesis, University of British Columbia.

Sumerta, Gede Budi, Ida Bagus Made Ludi Paryatna, and Ida Ayu Putu Purnami. 2022. “Analisis Unsur Intrinsik Dan Nilai Pendidikan Karakter Dalam Geguritan Ginal-Ginul.” Jurnal Pendidikan Bahasa Bali Undiksha 9 (i).

Tenzer, Michael. 2000a. Gamelan Gong Kebyar: The Art of Twentieth Century Balinese Music. University of Chicago Press.

—————. 2000b. “Theory and Analysis of Melody in Balinese Gamelan.” Music Theory Online 6 (2). https://www.mtosmt.org/issues/mto.00.6.2/mto.6.2.tenzer_frames.html

Tilley, Leslie. 2019. Making it Up Together: The Art of Collective Improvisation in Bali and Beyond. University of Chicago Press.

Utama, I. W. B. 2016. “The Existence and the Sustainability of the Tantrism in Bali.” International Journal of Linguistics, Literature and Culture 2 (4): 53–63.

Footnotes

1. See Herbst (2015) for a history of many people in this scene.
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2. See Becker (1993, 103–5) for Thomas Hunter’s (otherwise unpublished ) translation of part of Aji Gurnita.
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3. Becker and Feinstein (1984, 1987, 1988) present many of these early writings in translation, and Perlman (2004, 117–26) synopsizes the social conditions for music theory in early to mid-twentieth century Java. See also Rembang 1973, 1984/85a and 1984/85b.
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4. For example, at center-right (3:00 on the circle in Example 1), moving down the right column and then the left, there are seven aspects: 1): the direction is east (timur), 2) the musical tone is dang, a solmization for one of the tones of the pélog scale (this word is written in both columns for reasons I do not know), 3) dang’s sacred syllable is ksang, 4) the bodily location is the heart wherein dwells Sang Sadyojata, a manifestation of Siva (the word “Sang” as used here is an honorific for deities), 5) the deity manifested in the east is Içwara, 6) the letter is sang, eighth in the Balinese aksara alphabet, and 7) the color is white (putih). N.B.: There are inconsistencies in the mandala as a whole, as not all directions are shown as having the same number of aspects, and there are some “stray” words not clearly linked to a specific direction (see further Hunter 1989 and Bandem 1986).
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5. Geria’s selection is not comprehensive, though, as there are many common patterns not on his list.
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6. Geria’s original Balinese is retained here, quoted from Bandem (2019, 68–74).
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7. This alternative term for ngembat, from the English “octave,” is a loan word Geria probably learned when teaching in Java.
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8. Gending has many meanings, including “composition” or “piece” or even “form”; here it refers to the slower-moving structural melodic lines that most Balinese would call pokok or bantang.
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9. In addition to the commentary on my own prior publication addressing this topic, offered at the end of this article, see also Steele (2007, 41–43) for more consideration of Geria’s collection discussed here.
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10. A search yielded a sole occurrence of babaru in a citation of geguritan (an important genre of Balinese poetic song) describing a (metaphorical) horse ridden into battle to defeat the demons within the self (Sumerta et al. 2022). Correspondence with one of the article’s authors suggests defining it as a religious/spiritual guide whose teachings can be used as a whip to subdue these demons (Gede Budi Sumerta, email of February 27, 2023). Bandem concurs, but Geria was mum.
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11. See fuller discussion in Tenzer (2000a, 220–31).
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12. The swapping of X and Y in relation to the stable Z in the two halves of the pattern is an example of David Clampitt’s “pairwise symmetry” (1997, 2–4). Thanks to Rick Cohn and Leigh van Handel for this insight.
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13. Dissemination of Geria’s classifications and their currency in Bali itself is uneven. Some teachers at the conservatory introduce them in class, and some musicians in village contexts encounter them informally, perhaps through networks tracing to Bandem, his writings, or his colleagues. But there is little reason or need for practicing musicians to use them in the context of rehearsal or performance. In villages the learning of traditional repertoires such as those Geria addressed remains, as ever, oral and rote.
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