Listen!

Some examples of gamelan music. These two are good examples of the amazing sound... The one below is Colin McPhee...

The Music of Bali

The most powerful element for me in Bali’s magnetism is the music. The gamelan orchestra is absolutely unique in its sounds. Indeed the Ariadnean threads linking me to Bali are woven throughout of this music. Let me say if you have not heard a gamelan orchestra I dont think you have lived your life to the fullest. The sensation is delightful, strange, overwhelming, joyful, curiously sensual, even mysterious. The music is hard to describe!


It is actually a day after Mr. McPhee's birthday this post is 'reprised'... Here from his book "A House in Bali", is Colin McPhee’s description of the music:


“They gathered together in the early evening, after they had bathed in the stream that ran by the house. Sometimes they rehearsed with the little dancers, but more often it was for the sake of the music alone, and for hours the air would ring with swift, chiming sounds that rose and fell above the agitated throb of drums.


At first, as I listened from the house, the music was simply a delicious confusion, a strangely sensuous and quite unfathomable art, mysteriously aerial, aolian, filled with joy and radiance. Each night as the music started up I experienced the same sensation of freedom and indescribable freshness. There was none of the perfume and sultriness of so much music in the East, for there is nothing purer than the bright, clean sound of metal, cool and ringing and dissolving in the air. Nor was it personal and romantic, in the manner of our own effusive music, but rather, sound broken up into beautiful patterns.


It was, however, more than this, as I was to find out. Already I began to have a feeling of form and elaborate architecture. Gradually, the music revealed itself as being composed, as it were, of different strata of sound. Over a slow and chantlike bass that hummed with curious penetration the melody moved in the middle register, fluid, free, appearing and vanishing in the incessant, shimmering arabesques that rang high in the treble as though beaten out on a thousand little anvils…


Yet without effort, with eyes closed, or staring out into the night, as though each player were in an isolated world of his own, the men performed their isolaed parts with mysterious unity, fell upon the syncopated accents with hair’s-breadth precision. I wondered at their natural ease, the almost casual way in which they played. This, I thought, is the way music was meant to be, blithe, transparent, rejoicing the soul with its eager rhythm and lovely sound. As I listened to the musicians, watched them, I could think only of a flock of birds wheeling in the sky, turning with one accord, now this way, now that, and finally descending to the trees.”

Coming Back to Bali

 

I was talking to a friend of mine yesterday about Kasi, this site, and her initial comment was something like, “You know your posts are heavy with information but light on feelings and personal experience…”
 

My first response was simply, “Well I have never been to Bali… but simply been fascinated by its culture and music, and that area of the world… I don’t have the sort of personal experience you would like to hear…”
 

She actually made a further comment, before I was able to reply to her opening, along the lines of, “…I’d love to hear stories about when you were at such and such a beach, and the water was crystal clear and shallow for what seemed to be miles, so you waded out a ways and discovered the most amazing transparent little 'shrimpies', and spent a blissful half hour watching their little see-through hearts pump colorless blood through their little see-through selves, then later when you were walking the beach in the moonlight after a glorious dinner of steak and lobster, you saw little specks of purple light in the waves, and on further investigation discovered your little transparent 'shrimpies' were glowing purple in the moonlight.”
 

I finally said, after talking a little more about my fascination with the area, “… really it’s like a long distance relationship.” That comment to her, off the cuff so to speak, arrested my attention, making me think about my relationship with Bali, perhaps more than I wanted to think about it.

 

My relationship with my wife Michelle began like that, a long distance relationship over the internet and by email. Such relationships are fraught with uncertainty, not to mention fantasy as the above comment by my friend demonstrates, and often seem doomed almost from the beginning. They typically don’t last, require constant sustenance, and often seem too easy to let go. 
 

Sometimes they move beyond that stage, into a different place. My love for Michelle, and her feelings for me, carried us past the usual boundaries. When and where we crossed that line would be harder to put into words. 
 

My long distance relationship with Bali has waxed and waned but never disappeared. Some of the original fascination with the area, the people, the culture, and the music have survived. I think my feelings about Bali relate to my comment on the Home page that its “… something harder to associate with words or concepts, something that partakes in part of a nostalgic glimpse of our true state of being, this is what has captured my heart. So much so that the dream of living there one day has never quite let go of my soul.”
 

My answer to my friends comment would be that it is a simple thing like love; I cant quite let go of my feeling for Bali! Still I have a longer answer, a little bit more to the point.
 

There is a scene in Harvey, the movie starring Jimmy Stewart as Edwin P. Dowd about a pooka that has taken the guise of an invisible 6’8” rabbit and befriended him, a conversation, between Dr. Chumley and Edwin, about stopping clocks:
 

Edwin: Well, Harvey can look at your clock…and stop it. And you can go anywhere you like with anyone you like…and stay as long as you like. And when you get back, not one minute will have ticked by…
 

The Doctor: I’ve been spending my life among flyspecks…while miracles have been leaning on lampposts at Fifth and Fairfax… Tell me, Mr. Dowd,will he do this for you?
 

Edwin: Oh, he’d be willing at any time. But so far I haven’t been able to think of anyplace I’d rather be. I always have a wonderful time wherever I am, whomever I’m with. I’m having a fine time right here with you, Doctor.
 

The Doctor: Oh. Oh, l…I know where I’d go.
 

Edwin: Where?
 

The Doctor: I’d go to Akron. Akron! Oh, yes. 
 

Edwin is an unusual character. The movie is really about his wisdom in the midst of the chaos of the ordinary world, of what we take as our society. Bali is that to me, a refuge yes, but more than that, its a link to my deepest soul.