Gamelan

Gamelan is a traditional Indonesian musical ensemble, centered on Java and Bali, built primarily around tuned percussion, gongs, metallophones such as the bonang and saron, and drums such as the kendang, sometimes joined by the suling bamboo flute and the bowed or plucked rebab. The name comes from the Javanese gamel, a blacksmith's hammer. Gamelan music featured prominently in Indonesian court life from the eighth through the eleventh centuries among the Hindu and Buddhist kingdoms of Java, Bali, and Sumatra, and sculpted reliefs depicting gamelan musicians survive on the eighth-century Buddhist monument at Borobudur, evidence of its presence under the Srivijaya empire. The ensemble reached its modern form under the Majapahit empire, which sponsored court performance arts across Java and Bali. Each gamelan is individually tuned, most often to one of two scale systems, the five-tone slendro or the seven-tone pelog, so that no two ensembles share an identical sound; it is unlike the atlas's other art forms in being a communal court and village tradition, sustained and elaborated by ensembles and gamelan makers rather than by a lineage of individually credited composers in the way Western art history tracks Music.