What is a gamelan?
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What is a gamelan? |
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Small crystals glitter in the ethereal sky, pour down as a rain of hundreds of metal leaves, fall as heavy bronze pebbles onto the resplendent ocean.
Its music, made up of beats, blows and strokes, of complementary and synchronized rhythms, of nested and infinite cycles, is of an absurd but true beauty, an encounter among the rarest on earth.
It is a lively, dynamic, rhythmical, colorful, gay music. It is sometimes exuberant, by and by peaceful, violent, liquid. Fast as a torrent of lava or slow as a large peaceful river, it flows inexorably in an ordered entanglement of eternal rhythms and cycles. Rhythms are full of tone, nothing is dried up.
It has the brightness, the splendor of molten gold that is reflected in all directions and the majesty of a volcano rumbling in thick clouds.
It can be delicate and scented like a shower of flower petals or sweet like a honey river. It has the clarity of the full moon that is reflected in a pond surrounded by bamboos where a few silvery butterflies come to disturb the moon's image from time to time.
The rhythm pulsation is the gamelan's heartbeat. The drum is the gamelan's blood. The low and slow sounds are the trunks and the branches, the high and fast sounds are the leaves and flowers.
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| About the site… | Date of this page : 1 OCT 2006 |
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