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.”
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.”
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