Essay About Indonesian Music

Gamelan Music in Indonesia

Indonesia is the largest archipelago in the world that consists of 17,508 islands (International Religious Freedom Report). Indonesia has more than 300 ethnic groups that have different cultural backgrounds. Music is one of the important heritage cultural aspects that depict the uniqueness of Indonesia. Indonesian music is developed in all regions of the island and is a hereditary habit, which is still run by the local community. The music is spread almost throughout the country and each region has different unique characteristics.

The type of music that is popular in Indonesia is traditional music. Traditional music reflects or accentuates the characteristics of “Indonesianness”,

Each region creates different styles, whereas Western music has the same kind of music in every province or state. Also, some instruments that are used in Indonesia do not have exact scale or melody that produced the sounds and pitches like in western music. In Western music, instruments such as piano and violin has exact chords to produced specific sounds, while Indonesian instrument such as gongs (one of gamelan orchestra instrument) produces the sounds by hitting the gongs layers without knowing which chord is played and sometimes it makes it hard for foreigners understand the sounds and they think the sounds are out of tune. However, there is a same characteristic between Indonesian traditional music and Western music, which is that both types of music are created based on culturals aspect such as war and

Traditional music is determined by the type of tribes in Indonesia such as Java, Bali, Batak, Sundanese, and etc. In addition, each ethnic group that lives in Indonesia has a different kind of music. Almost every county in the region has local music or traditional music with songs and have different instruments. Local music in Indonesia is still simple and thick with religion and cultural aspects. Therefore, traditional music is a hallmark of wealth in Indonesia that is rich heritage functions as a medium for religion rituals, entertainment, medium of self-expression, and communication.

The differences between Western music and Indonesian traditional music:

- Gamelan scales do not have twelve equal semitones like in Western music. The Javanese Gamlean pitches especially Slendro scale. The slendro has five pitches (1 – 2 – 3 – 5 – 6) and skip the pitch 4.

- The Gamlean does not have an exact chord or tuning to produce specific sounds, in contrast all instruments in Western music have equal tuning system. For example, different layers of gongs creates different euphonious stream of sounds texture (e.g. shimmering effect).

- The Gamelan rhythmic and metric type is Colotomic structure, whereas Western music has Homorhythm and Polyrhythm