Tuning a gamelan in 2010 with Garry Kvistad, owner of Woodstock Chimes.
Gamelan Tuning
I have been tuning Balinese instruments for many years, fueled by my lifelong studies of Balinese music and early interests in Western tunings: I had studied fortepiano with Malcolm Bilson at Cornell University, who taught me to tune both 12tet and “historical temperaments.” My entry into gamelan tuning started in Germany in the 1980s, where a friend, composer Dieter Mack, entrusted me to tune his gamelan. This trial-and-error process took me weeks (and a lot of head-scratching) but introduced me to the special challenges of gamelan tuning systems. Subsequent work sessions with gamelan smiths in Bali helped fill in the gaps in my understanding. Since then I’ve tuned about fifty complete gamelan sets in the US, Canada, Europe, and Bali, including gong kebyar, angklung, gender wayang, semar pegulingan, semerandana and, occasionally, gamelan degung.
Tuning a Balinese gamelan gong kebyar, a bronze orchestra of about 20 instruments, requires 3-4 days of labor intensive work. A complete gong kebyar in standard modern instrumentation has 162 tuned bronze keys and 22 tuned gong-chimes, plus another 8-10 punctuating gongs that are normally not re-tuned. Like gong smiths in contemporary Bali, I use a disc grinder for most of the work; previously hand files, scrapers, and hammers were used. Minor repairs and restoration are often part of the project.
On several occasions, I have engaged others in gamelan tuning, which makes a more efficient – and rewarding – work process. It becomes a true workshop, getting our hands dirty while discussing the many variables of tuning, intervals, octave treatment, resonators, characteristics of high-tin bronze alloys, and more. When I first tried this approach (in Amsterdam in the late 1990s) I assumed that training others would slow things down, but the opposite turned out to be true; the concepts and techniques are readily learned in a live setting. This experience inspired me to host a four-day Gamelan Tuning Workshop in 2019, the first-ever such event, with 12 participants. Our deep dive into the intracacies of tuning led to a series of articles co-authored with one of the guest presenters, music theorist and computer engineer William Sethares, on various aspects of Balinese tuning systems – unisons, octaves, regional variation, and more.
If you’re interested in having your gamelan tuned, please contact me and we can discuss the details.