Gamelan

Hello!

Since my roots lie in Indonesia, I am really interested in the Indonesian culture and thus music.
Gamelan is a very important genre in the Indonesian music tradition and I would like to examine this percussion music further.

Do you have any composers, who write for gamelan orchestra in standard western notation?
Please, share them here!

It's most common in Indonesia to learn music by heart and to learn it by repeating the teacher, but this is one of the gamelan notations:

Maarten

Hi Maarten....

Debussy was influenced by gamelan music, which he knew about between 1887 and 1900, but he wrote for the piano, as far as I know.

Pagodes

29 minutes ago, Luis Hernández said:

Hi Maarten....

 

Debussy was influenced by gamelan music, which he knew about between 1887 and 1900, but he wrote for the piano, as far as I know.

Pagodes

 

 

Yes! I know it! 

However, I think the whole point if gamelan music is the orchestra and special instruments and to be honest, I do not like his estampes. :S

Our school has a very large world music department, and Gamelan is the first thing that we are taught.

When teaching to a mixed musical level class, we were taught it as numbers.

I don't know how these numbers would relate to Western Notation, and I think it would be easier for the instrumentalists (as well as yourself) to write it in numbers.

However, you will still need to know what each number corresponds to as a note, so I'm not sure how much this has helped.

4 hours ago, aMusicComposer said:

Our school has a very large world music department, and Gamelan is the first thing that we are taught.

When teaching to a mixed musical level class, we were taught it as numbers.

I don't know how these numbers would relate to Western Notation, and I think it would be easier for the instrumentalists (as well as yourself) to write it in numbers.

However, you will still need to know what each number corresponds to as a note, so I'm not sure how much this has helped.

 

Interesting! 

Could you maybe explain the technique for playing in numbers to me? 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamelan_notation

I read the article over and it's actually quite correct, for Wikipedia. Should give you the basics.

@Maarten Bauer

We are taught the numbers for each piece, along with the rhythm (Western notation.) It looked a bit like tablature for us, with the numbers and then a note value above them.

12 hours ago, Monarcheon said:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamelan_notation

I read the article over and it's actually quite correct, for Wikipedia. Should give you the basics.

 

Thank you! I will read the article. I see that there is a quite long article in German as well, so huray!

You may be interested in a video I recently released that analyzes Gamelan Slendro Tunings and sees how well "moment of Symmetry" scales can approximate them. (MOS scales are cool because they can all be notated by a generalized western notation, though I don't go into that in the video.) I'm currently working on a second video for Pelog. 

Feel free to ask any questions about the theory in the video, or if you're curious about how MOS scales can be represented using a generalized western notation 😃

If you would like a computer font for gamelan cipher notation, you can download KepatihanPro from the library of the American Gamelan Institute at http://www.gamelan.org.

There are also many scores for gamelan and inspired by gamelan, in many kinds of notation. If anyone would like more information, I'm glad to talk about it!

jody.diamond@gamelan.org