Balinese music consists of music unique to various ethnic and religious groups inhabiting the island of Bali, and music that its citizens acknowledge as belonging to the whole region.
This divide is crossed by the gap between tradition and modernity: Balinese music includes traditional music (rural or religious) as well as relatively modern pop music. A style that is proper a group of other islands may be adopted by other Balinese people and a become national style. This is the case of musical genres originating from the Moluccas, or songs of the country of Batak north of Sumatra.
Balinese music is represented mostly by the music of gamelan altogether composed of 60 to 80 musical instruments with different varieties in each villages. Many of these musical ensembles accompany many forms of theater in Indonesia.
Instrumental music, gendhing uses pentatonic scales and heptatonic Laras Laras Slendro Pelog, which requires twice the number of instruments, making the tuning quite risky.
Gamelan music
Gamelan music in Bali was dedicated to cults and temples for centuries. Modern gamelan was born from the fusion of two styles of play in the seventeenth century. Smooth style, for interior and shadow theater, played with a gong, kempul, kenong, ketuk, kempyang, slentem, gender, gambang, celempung, line shells, and suling rebab, plus a couple of discrete singers (and gerong pesindhen ) whose words are hardly important. And strong style, for outdoor ceremonies played with a gong kempul, kenong, ketuk, kempyang, Saron, Bonang and kendang, that the master-drum heads.
Altogether, Balinese music is completely different from any known style of music. It is a completely new art to people listening to it for the first time, often giving the impression of coming from a completely different world.
Denpasar Time
