by John Coast
Our Anak Agung, however, proud of what Pliatan had achieved in the past year, was offended and disappointed that he had not been approached about Colombo at all. To my counsel that this was a good thing and to let them go without resentment, he simply could not agree.
"Does John not think that Pliatan has a fine Legong and gamelan?" he had asked. "And have not we brought Mario from Tabanan to create a new dance? It is not good that they ignore us completely, these men from Denpasar!"
But I had replied, perhaps seeing more long-sightedly than he the difficulties that lay ahead, "Let them go, Agung Adji. I am glad that these people are always the ones to be called to Djakarta, to dance for the Army in Java, or to go to this Colombo Exhibition. For if we go abroad think of all the jealousy which we shall meet. Now, at the very least we shall be able to point out to the Denpasar people that it is our turn—that so far they have monopolized all the trips outside Bali." "That is perhaps true," he answered. But then he wagged his head again sadly, saying, "But my mouth tastes bitter."
And it was while the Colombo people were still rehearsing, and while the club was building their wet-weather shelter, and Anom, the gentlest and largest-eyed of the three Legongs, was learning a new Legong story in which she had to don the horrific mask of Rangda in the story of Tjalonarang the Witch, and was able to become in the most uncanny way the aged, doddering, gibbering female monster, that the inquiry from Singapore came. I was jubilant, for now my face, together with the club's, was saved.
"It is very fitting, Agung Adji," I laughed. "The Denpasar group wins one point, and we win one, also. Neither should be jealous of the other."
While Bali thus hummed with artistic rivalry, which we regarded secretly as an admirable thing and were proud to stir up, the President came again on a short rest visit, and he called dancers from the two opposing camps. The Pliatan club, though, actually danced in Gianjar, using the puri gamelan which was of inferior quality, and here once again I was to observe the struggle between the so-called New and the Old. The Raja of Gianjar, Anak Agung Gde Oka, was a pleasant and straightforward young man whom we had grown to like more than his ambitious elder brother. But both of them were the offspring of a father who had belonged to another era, a picturesque old man who still drove restlessly around Bali in a plum-coloured sedan, his fighting cocks in their cages up on the seat beside him, his human servants squatting on the floor beneath. It always fascinated me to see Gde Oka genuinely struggling with himself to be liberal in a way that all his traditions rebelled against.
During the last year I had consistently fought with him. In this, probably, I had lacked understanding, but it had infuriated me to see the casual way in which the club would be summoned like cattle to dance before distinguished political guests from Java. They would be fetched in trucks, very early, and would be kept waiting hours and hours, getting little or no food, seldom receiving anything at all for their labours, while the gamelan leaders would not even be introduced to the people before whom they played. I would then be unable to stop myself rocking with fury at this active feudalism—which admittedly chance alone had eradicated from my own country but a few hundreds of years earlier.
Luce and I, then, to embarrass Gde Oka, had often sat with the club on the ground in one of his puri's outer courtyards, declining to come in and sit with the guests, for in this way we tried to impress upon him that we disliked his using our friends as his serfs. The Balinese, of course, to whom this was all quite biasa, usual, saw nothing more than an inevitable evil in such things and accepted them with perfect placidity; yet they were vaguely pleased and puzzled at the strength of the rebel emotions they sensed in us.
When the President visited Bali, he always made his own little anti feudal demonstration. He would insist that the ordinary people, bare-breasted mothers, old men and women of the lowest caste, the poor and the far from clean, should sit with him and by him, taking precedence over even his own entourage. This example caused much embarrassment in the feudal Balinese heart, and both people and Raja slipped automatically back into their old accustomed ways as soon as he had left the island.
But as we had come to see more closely how Balinese society functioned, we tended more and more to become its observers only. We instinctively regretted, perhaps, that the caste system made our friends subservient before their Rajas, and we believed that no Rajas were essential to the continued existence of what we loved best in Balinese culture; but we had found, though, that Balinese politics, as in many other lands, were often largely matters of family history or family feuds among the various rulers, and that the modem political catch cries which we understood, were mostly weapons used by one grouping of families against traditional opponents.
By the time of this Presidential visit, therefore, though we still sat with the gamelan, we had also reached an amicable agreement with Gde Oka. As a man we liked him, and we recognized that he tried hard to look after his people in his naturally feudal way. He, on the other hand, irritated and suspicious as he must have been when he saw our leavening of his feudal bread, was glad nevertheless to see us helping the name of Gianjar by forcing the attention of outside Indonesia on Pliatan, which lay in the centre of his country.
This time the Legong danced in the morning and the President and his party of officials and correspondents drove off into the mountains to have their lunch with Theo Meier, who was finishing a painting for the Palace in Djakarta. Gde Oka accompanied them. And then there followed an interminable delay for the club, who waited and waited with empty bellies, squatting in one of the courtyards, and, as so often happened, no trucks came.
For Luce and myself, however, the whole of this performance was made remarkable by Raka. She had fallen off a bicycle which she was learning to ride only the previous day, and she danced before Sukarno with a large piece of plaster over the tendon on her heel, where she had an already infected wound. Before coming out of the bate where Luce and Gusti Kompiang, as usual, had been attending to all the dancers' make-up, the child had been silently weeping, her eyes wide with misery and hurt. Yet she had such an instinctive artistic sincerity that she insisted on going through with her dance, which she performed flawlessly.
Directly after the performance we raced her over in the jeep, together with Oka and Anom, to the house of Dr. Lucas in Tjampuang, and here her wound was firmly cleaned and gently dressed. And when the pain was over—and she sat on a big bamboo bench, I remember, crouching up against me in her fear of the unknown doctor, while her friends at first grimaced at her and then carefully looked away when they saw how agonizing the wound must be-when it was over she at once became her happy small self again. In fact, she was delighted to be the centre of so much attention, and maybe she sensed, too, that these crazy people, Luce and John, really did look upon her and her two friends as their own children. Anyhow, she chatted and joked in her lilting little voice all the way back to the puri, while we pleaded with her not to try riding a bicycle again for a few days.
And these, of course, were the incidents which brought us very close to Bali and these three children of ours in particular-compared with them, nothing else that happened was significant.
While we were waiting for a reply to my letter, in which I had suggested flying to Singapore in the first week of December, we had a visit from our friend Count Carl Douglas, the Swedish Charge d' Affaires, who brought with him the family Ahrenberg, who had been leading a Swedish industrial mission to Indonesia.
"Take us around. Talk Bali at us. Show us your dancers in Pliatan,” they commanded.
So Sampih and I straightaway went round to the garage in Denpasar, for that aged warrior, our jeep, was once more being patched up with wire and local ingenuity And by four-thirty it was ready again for the road, as gallant as ever.
That night, for a start, we took them to see the rehearsal of the new Legong story, with Anom being taught by old Gusti Biang her witch's role; and after this
Sampih and Raka ran through the Tumulilingan, which we were in the process of remoulding a little "This is astounding music," said Ahrenberg. "Do you plan to come to Stockholm? You would be a great success in Scandinavia." "If we could play there in the summer, we'd love to."
"On how many people have you tested your programme? Have you been able to try it out on a varied public opinion?"
"We reckon we've brought up to Pliatan about two hundred and fifty Americans or Europeans. We've learned from our audiences that we're on the right lines, but we've only had one theatrical expert here, an American named Martin Flavin. He thought the material terrific."
"But how about the Balinese? Do they want to leave Bali?"
"They want to go abroad all right. They want to see what foreign countries are like, and they want this as an honour for their club. Also, they are all poor people and they hope to make some money."
Ahrenberg pointed to the gamelan.
"Will you take a complete orchestra with you?" "We couldn't go otherwise."
"Could you tell us how the gamelan works, John?" asked Carl Douglas.
"You mean-how does the music fit together, how is it controlled, and so on?"
"Exactly that."
"Well, I'll ask the Anak Agung to help me, but I must warn you that there are many Balinese words which don't exist in Indonesian or English, and their musical concepts are quite different. However, we can try."
And at length, with the Anak Agung pointing and with me talking, I tried to explain.
"This gamelan is known as a Gong Gde—a great orchestra, and it's the equivalent of our symphony orchestra. We don't use a suling in it, which is a bamboo flute, and we don't use the rehab, which is a devilish two-stringed fiddle, perpetually off tone, and which I nicknamed the Cat's Voice when they once used it to see if I liked it. That means every instrument in this gamelan is percussive. Now the principles of Balinese orchestration and percussion, according to an inexpert Coast,3are these.
"First, most of the instruments are arranged in echoing pairs. And a piece of music is built up contrapuntally through palos and sangsi, which are two ingenious and interlocking patterns of music which fill in a composition."
"Have those two words—what were they, palos and sangsi? Have they any meaning?"
"Yes. I'll come back to that in a moment. Now I want to tell you about the second, connected principle. This is what I call the echo principle. A metallophone player strikes a true note on his instrument, and that is called the pengumbang note, the round, full note, and this is echoed by the answering note, called the pengisap, struck out almost simultaneously on the second metallophone of the pair. The two metallophones are tuned a quarter tone different, and hit the smallest fraction of a second after one another. In Bali, therefore, the sound ping! does not exist; a doubled sound exists instead—a sort of piying!”
FULL BALINESE ORCHESTRA: GONG GDE
1 and 2.
KENDANG, WADON & LANANG: drums, female and male.
8 nd 4.
G'YING: leading metallophones.
5 and 6.
GANGSA POLOs: "simple" metallophones.
7 and 8.
GANGSA SANGSI: "complex" metallophones.
9 and 10.
KANTILAN: "flower-parts" metallophones.
11 and 12.
TJALUNG: cello metallophones.
18and 14.
DJEGOGAN: double-bass metallophones.
15.
KEMPLI: tempo gong.
16.
REYONG: battery of 12 syncopation gongs.
17 and 18.
TJENG-TJENG: cymbals.
19.
KEMPUR: small gong.
20.
GONG: large gong.
“John, John-give us some examples. This is not at all easy to follow. The principles are quite strange to us."
"Maybe I'd best begin again. Let's take the drums. There are two, the male and the female, one slightly larger than the other and of slightly different pitch. When you hear them played, you will observe that they beat out their rhythms in an interlocking pattern which makes the two drums become one drum. It is impossible to separate one drum from the other when they play. The Balinese word for drum, incidentally, is gupakan, and to drum is to gupak. This is purely onomatopoeic. Gu is the deep noise of the flat hand hitting the centre of the large end of the drum, and pak is the light noise that the tips of the fingers make when they flip the edge of the smaller drum skin.''
I looked around, but they all nodded intelligently, so I continued. "Now the drums control the tempo of the gamelan. The two of them together are the conductors. But almost equally important is the leading metallophone player—he's far more important than a first violin, for example. In this gamelan Made Lebah plays the leading metallophone, which is known as the g'ying. But with it he not only leads the melody—he can also influence the tempo if he thinks the drummers are going too fast or too slow; and since the metallophone section quite often plays when the drums are silent, the g'ying player then becomes the conductor. You could even say it was a matter of personality. A brilliant g'ying player could always, through his tabuh, or style of playing, dominate and lead a mediocre drummer."
"That seems clear so far,” said Douglas, tipping experimentally with his fingers on the end of a small Legong drum.
"It's clear so far," I replied, "because this is the easy part to explain. But let's go a little further. The tempo is also underlined or shaded by the two cymbals players, whose tjeng-tjeng chatter and clash and sometimes nearly drown the melodious metallophones; by the big gong and the smaller gong, called kumpur, and lastly, in our gamelan, by the kempli, which is a single gong, small and held on the knee of the boy who sits next to Made Lebah, and who pounds it with as regular a beat as any westerner could desire. That's all for the tempo section.''
I paused a moment. Then:
"Now we come to the counterpoint, and this is where I wish I were a musician. Let's look at the metallophones first. Lebahs' g'ying is the slightly larger metallophone in the centre of the front row. He, on the echo principle, is at one with the g'ying exactly behind him. All the metallophones, incidentally, have ten leaves, or keys, of brass alloyed with silver, and the scale is one of five tones peculiar to the Balinese; but each pair is tuned that fraction of a tone apart."
"You mean, then," interjected Douglas, "that this echo comes a fraction of a second behind the playing of the first metallophone in a pair, and, say, a fraction of a tone below the first metallophone?"
"Exactly that. To come back to the counterpoint, though. On Lebah's right sits Bregeg, and he plays the counterpoint part known as polos, which means "the simple"; and on Lebah's left is the fat Kuwus, who plays the second counterpoint part called sangsi, which means "the complex.” But in order that all the tones of the metallophones blend and become reverberatingly one, the player sitting behind Bregeg echoes Kuwus, and the man behind Kuwus echoes Bregeg, all on diagonals. The four metallophones that play this simple and complex counterpoint (both equally tricky to follow for me), are known as gangsas. At the back you will see the kantilans, two smaller gangsas, which fit into the counterpoint patterns, too, but which perform the highly ornamental "flower parts.” They play very, very fast, putting in those highly elusive and cascading arabesques of sound which give the enchanting surface colouration to Balinese music."
Our friends
had now reached the stage of pulling out their handkerchiefs to wipe surreptitiously at their brows, but I was nearing the end, so I plunged on.
"You see the two pairs of heavier, taller metallophones, played by men seated on stools, and with only five keys each? The deeper-voiced pair are the djegogan and might be compared to the western double bass; the smaller pair are the tjalung, and are something of cello, viola and second violin. Their tones are nearer to those of a cello, but they are often given the main melody to hold, though in simplified forms.
And lastly there is the magnificent reyong. That’s it—that long battery of a dozen gongs of diminishing size with the four men seated on the floor behind it. Whereas the metallophones are played with wooden hammers like tiny ice picks, the reyong is hit by two stubby batons in the hands of each player, and can make two types of sound. If the player hits the edges of his gongs, they make a harsh ke-tjek ke-tjek ke-tjek noise; but if he hits them throbbingly and square on the inch-high knobs you see sticking up an inch from each gong's centre, then the reyong brings forth a full and thrilling sound, deeply melodious and rich and warm. The gongs vibrate superbly because they are all threaded on hide strings, and don't touch the wooden frame at all."
"But how does it fit into the gamelan?" they asked me.
"I just don't know! I recognize it as the most explosive instrument of them all, but its syncopations, after living with them for a year or so, are still a mystery to me. Sometimes it seems merely a great battery of syncopated gongs; sometimes it out-clacks the cymbals; yet it can alternate with the metallophones and take the melody and the counterpoint parts away from them. It's the most baffling instrument—and only few Balinese can master it."