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Gamelan is native to Indonesia, more especially in two adjacent islands : Java and Bali. The ultimate origin is in Java. This type of orchestra represents, in fact, an elaborate form of the instruments one finds in the whole of South-East Asia, that is : gongs, gong chimes and other percussion.
South-East Asia is really a geographical area of melodic percussion whose southern part bears the most accomplished form of these instruments, as much organologically as orchestrally. This southern zone unfolds itself as an archipelago, the world's largest, whose greater part is Indonesia.
Gong chimes and other related melodic percussions are of course specific to South-East Asia but are not the only instruments. One also comes across strings, winds, voice, as in the rest of the world. South-East Asian gongs are all knobbed. To the north and outside this geographical area, there is China which knows flat gongs and knobbed gongs. But in there, they are not organized into chimes. Is the north too cold ? Or is it too far-off the Indonesian equatorial zone ? For gamelan does not only content itself with assembling gongs into chimes, it organizes chimes, metallophones and xylophones in orchestra ! What has come over them, these Javanese or these Balinese, to have invented such an intricate music ? Is it the tropical moisture or the exuberant vegetation of their surroundings ?
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