All Topics  
Pelog

 

 
   Email Print
   Bookmark   Link
 

 

Pelog
 
 
  Topics Pelog Topic Home

Pelog is one of the two essential scales of gamelan
Gamelan

File:Javanese Gamelan.jpgA gamelan is a musical ensemble from Indonesia, typically from the islands of Bali or Java, featuring a variety of instruments such as metallophones, xylophones, drums and gongs; bamboo flutes, bowed and plucked strings....
 music native to Bali
Bali

Bali is an Indonesian island located at , the westernmost of the Lesser Sunda Islands, lying between Java to the west and Lombok to the east. It is one of the country's 33 Provinces of Indonesia with the provincial capital at Denpasar towards the south of the island....
 and Java, in Indonesia
Indonesia

The Republic of Indonesia , is a transcontinental country in Southeast Asia and Oceania. Comprising Islands of Indonesia, it is the world's largest Archipelago state....
. The other scale commonly used is called slendro
Slendro

Slendro is a pentatonic scale , one of the two most common scales used in Indonesian gamelan music, the other being p?log....
. Pelog has seven notes, but many gamelan ensembles only have keys for five of the pitches. Even in ensembles that have all seven notes, many pieces only use a subset of five notes.
e the tuning varies so widely from island to island, village to village, and even gamelan to gamelan, it is difficult to characterize in terms of intervals.






Discussion
Ask a question about 'Pelog'
Start a new discussion about 'Pelog'
Answer questions from other users
Full Discussion Forum



Encyclopedia


Pelog is one of the two essential scales of gamelan
Gamelan

File:Javanese Gamelan.jpgA gamelan is a musical ensemble from Indonesia, typically from the islands of Bali or Java, featuring a variety of instruments such as metallophones, xylophones, drums and gongs; bamboo flutes, bowed and plucked strings....
 music native to Bali
Bali

Bali is an Indonesian island located at , the westernmost of the Lesser Sunda Islands, lying between Java to the west and Lombok to the east. It is one of the country's 33 Provinces of Indonesia with the provincial capital at Denpasar towards the south of the island....
 and Java, in Indonesia
Indonesia

The Republic of Indonesia , is a transcontinental country in Southeast Asia and Oceania. Comprising Islands of Indonesia, it is the world's largest Archipelago state....
. The other scale commonly used is called slendro
Slendro

Slendro is a pentatonic scale , one of the two most common scales used in Indonesian gamelan music, the other being p?log....
. Pelog has seven notes, but many gamelan ensembles only have keys for five of the pitches. Even in ensembles that have all seven notes, many pieces only use a subset of five notes.

Tuning

Since the tuning varies so widely from island to island, village to village, and even gamelan to gamelan, it is difficult to characterize in terms of intervals. One rough approximation expresses the seven pitches of Central Javanese pelog as a subset of 9-tone equal temperament
Equal temperament

Equal temperament is a musical temperament, or a system of Musical tuning in which every pair of adjacent notes has an identical frequency ratios....
. An analysis of 27 Central Javanese gamelans by Surjodiningrat (1972) revealed a statistical preference for this system of tuning.

As in slendro, although the intervals vary from one gamelan to the next, the intervals between notes in a scale are very close to identical for different instruments within the same Javanese gamelan. This is not the case in Bali, where instruments are played in pairs which are tuned slightly apart so as to produce interference beating
Beat (acoustics)

In acoustics, a beat is an interference between two sounds of slightly different frequency, perceived as periodic variations in volume whose rate is the difference between the two frequencies....
. The beating is ideally at a consistent speed for all pairs of notes in all registers. This contributes to the very "agitated" and "shimmering" sound of gamelan ensembles. In the religious ceremonies that contain Gamelan, these interference beats are meant to give the listener a feeling of a god's presence or a stepping stone to a meditative state.

Note names in Java

The notes of the slendro scale can be designated in different ways; In Java, one common way is the use of numbers (often called by their names in Javanese
Javanese language

Javanese is the language of the people in the central and eastern parts of the island of Java, in Indonesia. In addition, there are also some pockets of Javanese speakers in the northern coast of western Java....
, especially in a shortened form. An older set uses names derived from parts of the body. Notice that both systems have the same designations for 5 and 6.

Number Javanese number Traditional name
Full name Short name Full name Literal meaning
1 siji ji Bem head
2 loro ro Gulu neck
3 telu lu Dhadha chest
4 papat pat papat four
5 lima ma lima five
6 enem nem nem six
7 pitu pi barang thing


Subsets


Java

Though the full pelog scale has seven tones, usually only a five-tone subset is used (see the similar Western concept of mode
Musical mode

Mode is a term from Western music theory having three senses: the rhythmic relationship between long and short values in the late medieval period; in early medieval theory, Interval ; and, most commonly, a concept involving Musical scale and melody type ....
). In fact, many gamelan instruments physically lack keys for two of the tones. Different regions, such as Central Java or West Java (Sunda), use different subsets. In Central Javanese gamelan, the pelog scale is traditionally divided into three pathet
Pathet

The pathet is an organizing concept in gamelan music. It is difficult to explain, but is similar to the melody types, that is, for example, mode s, ragas, or maqamat, of other musics....
 (modes). Two of these, called pathet nem and pathet lima, use the subset of 1, 2, 3, 5, and 6; the third, pathet barang, uses 2, 3, 5, 6, and 7. The remaining two notes, including 4 in every pathet, are available for embellishments on most instruments, but they do not usually appear on gend้r
Gender

Gender comprises a range of differences between man and woman, extending from the biological to the social. Biologically, the male gender is defined by the presence of a Y-chromosome, and its absence in the female gender....
, gambang
Gambang

A gambang, properly called a gambang kayu is a xylophone-like instrument used among peoples of Indonesia and the southern Philippines in gamelan and kulintang, with wooden bars as opposed to the metallic ones of the more typical metallophones in a gamelan....
, or interpunctuating instruments.

Bali

In Bali, all seven tones are used in gamelan semar pegulingan
Gamelan semar pegulingan

Gamelan semar pegulingan is an old variety of the Music of Bali gamelan. Dating back from around the 17th century, the style is sweeter and more reserved than the more popular and progressive Gamelan Gong Kebyar....
 and gamelan gambuh. All seven tones are rarely heard in a single traditional composition. Like in Java, five-tone modes are used. There are three modes, selisir, tembung and sunaren. Gamelan gong kebyar
Gamelan gong kebyar

Gamelan gong kebyar is a modern style or musical genre of Balinese gamelan modernism . Kebyar means "the process of flowering", and refers to the explosive changes in tempo and dynamics characteristic of the style....
 instruments have five keys in the pelog selisir mode (heard in the audio example above). Unlike Java, there are only five names for the notes, and the same five names are used in all three modes. The modes all start on the note named ding, and then continue going up the scale to dong, deng, dung and dang. This means that the same pitch will have a different name in a different mode. The modes are arranged as follows:

Balinese modes
Tone Selisir Tembung Sunaren
1 ding dung —
2 dong dang dung
3 deng — dang
4 — ding —
5 dung dong ding
6 dang deng dong
7 — — deng


External links