Kembangan in the music of Lou Harrison.

Publication: Perspectives of New Music

Publication Date: 22-JUN-01

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COPYRIGHT 2001 University of Washington

LOU HARRISON'S MUSIC is best known for its intercultural connections. Since his first exposure to non-Western music through his study with Henry Cowell in 1935, HARRISON has been exploring a wealth of compositional and aesthetic perspectives from around the planet, although he is primarily associated with the tradition of the Javanese gamelan. The resulting influences do not lie just in the more obvious surface features such as cross-cultural instrumentation, but also in deep structural principles that he has adapted to his own unique--and undeniably Western--voice. Javanese gamelan music, like Harrison's own, is primarily a melodic music; a gamelan performance exfoliates the basic inner melody into an amazingly elaborate and coherent polyphony through a variety of principles very different from those that guide European polyphony. Chief among these structural processes is the one known as kembangan.

Kembangan is a noun in the Javanese language which literally means "flowering," but in music refers poetically to the intricate melodic figurations that characterize Javanese gamelan music. Some Western musicologists have referred to these rhythmically dense melodies as "elaborations" of the principal, or "core," melody, but such a term, with its connotation of nonessential decoration, is not really sufficient. Kembangan is not optional ornamentation, though it is true that, within certain strict guidelines, improvisation and personal taste can help shape the most rhythmically dense melodies in the gamelan texture. Instead, kembangan describes the ways in which a melody can "bloom" from a skeletal basis to elaborate filigrees that fit together, fractal-like, at different levels of density. The resulting complex melodic, tonal, and metrical hierarchy is at the heart of the structure of Javanese gamelan music, a structure which thus strongly appealed to the melodicist Harrison.

In his gamelan music, which he started composing in 1976, Harrison uses techniques such as "melodicles" and quintal counterpoint, both of which he learned during his studies with Henry Cowell (c. 1935-8), as well as decidedly Western experimentation involving new modes and formal structures. Nevertheless, these innovations remain faithful to a deeper Javanese spirit of kembangan, and to the gamelan ideals of community, balance, and harmony on multiple levels.

THE STRUCTURE OF JAVANESE MUSIC

At the center of the hierarchy of Javanese gamelan music is the core melody, sometimes known as the lagu ("tune") of the work. It is represented in a somewhat spare, rhythmically simple form within the span of about an octave by the saron and slenthern metallophones that often dominate the texture of Javanese gamelan music. This representation of the fundamental melody is called the balungan, Depending on the metrical form (bentuk) and the rhythmic density relative to the balungan (irama), the so-called colotomic instruments will interpunctuate every other, every fourth, every eighth, and so on, beat. The pattern of cyclical interpunctuation, or colotomy, not only forms the supporting pillars of the structure of a piece but also forms further slow layers of melody in the texture.

The rhythmic density of each colotomic instrument is roughly proportional to its pitch. Thus the high kettle-gong kempyang may play every other balungan note, while the slightly larger kethuk kettle-gong usually plays half as many notes per phrase as the kempyang; the even larger and lower kenong kettle-gongs and kempul hanging gongs are played more slowly yet, while the largest gong is slowest of all, punctuating the ending of the melodic phrase. Though some of these relationships and the instruments used may change depending on the form, irama, and style, they are nearly always in powers of two. While the kempyang, kethuk, and gong generally have only one pitch, the kenong, kempul, and bonang panembung (optional set of kettle-gongs) usually have a whole scale available and most often play the pitch corresponding to the coincident balungan pitch.

Metrical stress is reversed from the Western concept: in any division of two, it is the second that receives more stress--the "upbeat" rather than the "downbeat." Thus the correspondences are usually at the end of the metrical unit. Example 1 shows the notation for these instruments for the first major section of the traditional piece Pangkur. Such a section which ends with a gong stroke is called a gongan or gong cycle and would be repeated many times in performance. (Numbers in Example 1 and following examples refer to scale degrees in the slendro tuning system. (1) T and G indicate notes for kethuk and gong since there is no change in pitch; kempyang is not used. The first kempul note in a gong cycle is frequently left out (wela) in Central Javanese style.)

The melodies played by the bonang panembung or the kempul and kenong are thus "abstractions" of the balungan, doubling those pitches that fall at metrically important points in the hierarchy. However, to hear these melodies only as interpunctuations that form the supporting pillars of the form is only part of the story. They can, and should, be heard as melodies in their own right. In a sense, the balungan is an "elaboration" of the slower bonang panembung melody just as the bonang panembung melody is an "abstraction" of the balungan.

A well-composed lagu melody should sound good at a variety of different levels and in its relationship to the pathet. Pathet is sometimes translated as "mode," though the concept includes more than the scale of available tones. Javanese pathet are characterized by certain melodic figures, especially cadential motives, in addition to tones which tend to be stressed metrically and melodically (as "tonics") and others which are used less frequently or at less important points. In pathet manyura of the slendro tuning system, the pathet of Example 1, tone 6 is the most stressed and 5 most avoided. The most characteristic cadential motive in pathet manyura is 3 2 1 6. Example 2 is the Pangkur balungan in a more concise form. (The colotomic pattern is collapsed to a single line shown only once above the top line, but it is repeated for each line, except for the wela kempul stroke as noted above. T again stands for kethuk, N for kenong, and P for kempul. The gong is now indicated by a circle.)

This balungan clearly shows how the characteristic cadential motive at the end of the first kenong phrase (first line) emphasizes the stressed tone 6 by putting it at the end and most metrically stressed point in the phrase. The stressed tone is also heard on the final, and most important, beat,...

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