A Reflection on Asian Music

The style of music that interested me the most this semester was Gamelan music. I have always been a fan of minimalism in Western music, including composers like Steve Reich, John Adams, and Philip Glass, and I feel that Gamelan music reinforces and justifies the concepts behind minimalism, emphasizing the presence of motion without the presence of harmonic progression. In fact, many modern minimalist composers, including Steve Reich and Philip Glass, have even composed new works for Gamelan ensemble. While it lacks harmonic progression in the Western sense, Gamelan relies on cyclical phrase structure, layering, texture, and timbre to give the music its sense of movement. I was also intrigued by the arrangement of instruments in the Gamelan ensemble, it being almost exclusively percussion (xylophones and gongs). The combination of the repetitive rhythmical layers and the saturating timbre of the gong puts me in an almost meditative state. However, just as crucial to the music as timbre is the specific tuning. Tuning the instruments in a Gamelan ensemble is a tedious process, though it may not sound that way to Western ears. Traditional Western music is based on a 7 note scale consisting of whole steps and half steps, a whole step being the sum of two half steps. These notes exist within the space of one octave. Gamelan music, on the other hand, primarily uses two scales: slendro and pelog. Slendro is a scale with five notes within the octave, all of which are evenly spaced. To Western ears, this sounds quite bizarre. In fact, because the 5 notes are evenly spaced within the span of one octave, many of the notes exist in between the notes of our Western scale. When I heard Gamelan music for the first time, I was perturbed by the music sounding "out of tune." I later learned that it was not in fact out of tune, but tuned to a scale very different from our own that my ears were simply not attuned to. However, since then I have learned to appreciate the "shimmering" quality produced by the unique tuning. It adds a different element to the music that is generally absent from Western tradition.