GAMELAN TARUNA MEKAR TUNJUK

Works by I Made Arnawa

NOTES by Dieter Mack

I Madé Arnawa (*1960) from Tunjuk/Tabanan is one of the most prolific contemporary composers in Bali. After studying at ISI Denpasar, he quickly became a staff member and one of the leading teachers. In 2000 he was one of the first composition students at the new Master program (S 2) at ISI Surakarta. Here he came also in contact with various contemporary Western music principles. In composing after this period, he had a convincing ability of transforming these principles and techniques into his own artistic realm, thus enriching the scope of contemporary Balinese music. No wonder that he was (and still is) very often invited to Europe and America for various artistic purposes. Some of these stays abroad had been realized with his own group sekaha “Taruna Mekar”, the village gamelan club of Tunjuk/Tabanan. Although almost no one in that orchestra is a professional musician (most players are farmers), the ensemble has achieved an amazing artistic standard which is also due to the very good social atmosphere created by their leader.
The present recordings offer a broad palette of Arnawa’s and also the orchestra’s artistic level.

„Kebo lan Dung“ (2013)
I Madé Arnawa always had a certain fondness for the so-called „kreasi lelambatan“. And this is a good example of his unique way of arranging and transforming such traditional forms. The piece starts with a complex kebyang or pangawit, the opening section of such a composition and normally the main playground for unique elements. However, Arnawa closely follows the traditional way of introducing the main pitches of the scale, starting on the unusual note dung (the fourth pitch of the basic selisir scale: a rough analogy to a well-tempered scale would be a f# in a scale like b – c – d – f# – g ). This also explains the word “dung” in the title.
After that long and complex (mainly through ongoing tempo changes and different instrumentations) beginning section, the main body, the pangawak, starts at around 4:20 and is repeated at 8:25. An intensified short transition leads to the final section, a mixture between the more conventional pangecet and the typical final section pekaad. The unique feature here is a 10-beat gong cycle sounding very natural instead of being “constructed”. This ongoing repeated gong cycle is varied in many different ways by Arnawa’s unique arrangements.
Kebo means water buffalo in Balinese language and lan is a connecting word. As the water buffalo is a symbol of strength (often referred to in the Dewa Yadnya ceremony), Arnawa wants to stress the strength of the dung pitch in this piece. Here Arnawa, so-to-speak, combines nature with a peculiar pitch in music.

“Prana Jiwa” (2014)
There is no specific genre that may become the framework for this very unique piece. There are a lot of contemporary tendencies too, including a sort of meditative atmosphere of the music, referring to models from other, mainly Asian, cultures. Especially the notion of Tibet may occur, at least in regard to the additional use of Chinese bells, Tibetan bowls and vocal drone-like sounds on a single pitch with vowel variations. Arnawa stresses his philosophy of connecting macro- and microcosmos with this type of articulation, achieving a kind of peaceful harmony of human existence.

“Genta Hradaya” (2014)
Once again Arnawa strongly connects his religious consciousness with a piece of music. He says: “How can I express my deepest spiritual feelings in order to praise God in an art work as a form of offering”?
This equally unique composition uses a secularized 7-tone gamelan selunding mainly made of custom-built iron instruments. The gamelan selunding is the oldest Balinese gamelan which is still in use mainly in East Bali as a completely ceremonial gamelan. However, young composers have used secularized instruments of that type in order to compose new pieces, making especially use of the unique 7-tone scale. Here Arnawa has composed a real chamber-music-like piece with lots of intricate melodic variations and even counterpoint structures on the basis of the seven-tone lebeng scale. The complex use of all pitches also leads to “quasi-harmonic” sounds which Arnawa has started to experiment with since 2009.

“Perbawa” (2005)
This composition had become the signature piece for the famous and widely acclaimed concert of the “Taruna Mekar” group led by Arnawa during the “Contemporary Gamelan Festival” in October 2005 at the “House of World Cultures” in Berlin during the festival “Spaces and Shadows”, with art presentations from Southeast Asia. The gamelan festival itself was curated by the writer of these notes, presenting four groups from Indonesia, including some cross-cultural commissions for the respective groups. In this case the Sundanese composer Oya Yukarya had composed a piece for “Taruna Mekar”.
However the opening piece was “Perbawa” by I Madé Arnawa. It is one of his most complex compositions that hardly refers to any Balinese model. According to Arnawa, he was inspired by this writer’s concerto “Vuh” (2000) for solo percussion and brass, woodwind & percussion orchestra. Although I have written that “reference piece”, it is not at all obvious where these influences have taken place in Arnawa’s composition. However, I see it as a positive sign that Arnawa was inspired, on the one hand, but then turned that influence into something completely individual.
The piece operates with a lot of changes in instrumentation, overlapping of scale-pitches and a continuous change of gong cycles, leading to a cumulative section with a fascinating poly-metric structure that reminds us even of aspects of the music of Conlon Nancarrow (which Arnawa knew as well). Formally there is no exact reference to any current Balinese model, and even the general principle of cyclic structures in Balinese music has mostly been left behind.

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