To the Forge
(I'm publishing this in September, but it was really written in August. I sneakily backdated it. My sincere apologies to all the dedicated fans of this blog whose mental catalogue of everything I've ever written is now chronologically confused.)
After my introduction to playing gamelan, I got curious about how these metal instruments are made. Before doing nearly enough background research, I impulsively asked my teacher Putu if he knew anyone who makes gangsa (the instrument I'm learning to play). He immediately offered to call his gamelan supplier, who runs a forge in the Bangkled area (maybe an hour northeast of Ubud), and see if I could visit the workshop (this sounded far more exciting than going back to my room and reading Wikipedia).
One of my goals for Indonesia was to finesse my way into an instrument makers workshop. I really had no plan for how this was going to happen, so I was positively stoked that it came together so soon. Previous fellows have told me the Watson experience sometimes rides on meeting the right people at the right time. I was pessimistically skeptical that I'd have the same luck, but so far I've been proved wrong.
Putu kindly offered to take me to the forge on the back of his motorbike and spend the better part of his Saturday translating so I could ask the forgers questions about their work. We rode for an hour down rural, winding roads, heading north towards Mt. Batu. Eventually we rolled into a family complex on the outskirts of a small village. The complex seemed more hospitable to gamelan than it was to humans. Metal bars and wood scraps for instrument bodies were strewn everywhere; it required great agility to avoid tripping over gamelan paraphernalia. In the background, a rhythmic metal clinking echoed through the quiet property. Putu took me towards the noise, where we found his friend Ketut Suarnata working on a set of bars for a gender wayang (a type of gamelan instrument).
Safety standards here are wonderfully relaxed. Ketut sat casually, gloveless and in flip-flops, perched between a million-degree oven pumping out molten-hot metal and an automatic anvil slamming down thousands of pounds of pressure every second. I watched him for a time go back and forth between the anvil and the oven, reheating and pounding iron bars over and over again. This is the first step in making the metal, xylophone-like bars for gamelan instruments.
Ketut tells me he's been forging these bars since he was 17 and learned the family trade from his father. From what I've learned, this is pretty much how gamelan manufacturing works in Bali: you're born into it. Another gamelan scholar, Vaughn Hatch, whom I worked with a week later, confirmed this to me: it's almost impossible to be taken seriously in the forging business without a family legacy. (Needless to say, this explained why my joke to Ketut that I was there because I wanted to become a gamelan artisan back in Minnesota didn't quite elicit the laugh I was hoping for.)
Alas. I figured this was probably as close as I'd get to becoming a craftsman myself, so I asked tons of questions. Like we were in some kind of metallic petting zoo, Putu led me around and let me play all sorts of instruments lying around. Hours of playing and conversation left me with so many new thoughts. Here are some I'm still thinking about, in no particular order (I could weave this into beautiful prose, but I'm in a bullet-point mood today):
- An entire gamelan set is most often tuned by one single maker. Ketut uses a digital tuner to get things roughly to the right pitch, but after that he tunes instruments entirely by ear. In this way, gamelan sets are unique expressions of the ears of the person who tuned them. You can't really mix and match. The so-called imperfection of tuning by ear actually gives each gamelan set part of its unique sound.
- The major pentatonic scale, which sounds "happy" to Western-trained musicians, expresses "sadness" in Balinese gamelan. This is maybe a little reductive, but the general relativity of scale and emotion is fascinating to me. (This is according to Putu; I'm not sure if it's a universally shared opinion.)
- Ketut has made thousands of gamelan. If he hadn't taken over the craft from his father, no one would have. Just like Pindekan, the tradition depends on a generational passing of the torch.
- The tuning process for instruments like gangsa involves cutting bars to the right length, but also precisely shaping the hollow cavities underneath the bars. (After a bar is cut to the right length, Ketut will hit it, listen, and then make precise dents in the resonating chamber to perfect the sound.) I had no idea this was part of the tuning process.
Your Regularly Scheduled Indulgent Musing:
Friends and family already know this about me, but I spend an unhealthy amount of time grappling with my general distaste for AI music. Melissa Scott, my first musicology professor, planted a question in my head three years ago: "What is lost when we automate music?" It's a deep, thorny, unanswerable question. I think about it all the time.
At the gamelan forge, I found an answer to this question that I hadn't considered before: we lose the memory, skill, and working lives of people who are dedicated to the craft of actually making instruments. There's a certain expertise, a familial tradition, a way of life even, attached to the tactile craft of instrument-making that is uprooted when music comes from software rather than instruments. In the discourse about automated music, a lot of focus is rightfully put on the eradication of artistic choice, but it struck me here that the eradication of instrument-making practices is also completely relevant to the conversation. Of course, this gets complicated, because instruments have been made in factories, with various degrees of automation, for decades. And so maybe we'd agree that the threat posed to instrument-building isn't new (and maybe isn't even exactly a threat?)…
I'd like to give you a warm welcome to the inescapable Möbius-strip thought-loop prison of discussing automation and art! Come join me.
A different professor of mine (and recent partner in my lucrative exporting business), Andrea put it another way. He once told me that in music, "turning the knobs" is like crucially important to him. That is to say, there's a level of physical, tactile engagement with the music-making process that seems (to many people) inseparable from the craft itself. Instrument building, I think, is a sort of extension of this. There's all of this (sometimes overlooked) tactile interface at every step of the music-ing process, and it's all really important.
I imagine, fancifully, that when a gamelan instrument is finally played, it's more than the sum of its parts: it's a collaboration between a guy in flip-flops stoking a fire, the masterful ear of a tuner, a composer like Putu, and the player themselves. Thinking about music as a sort of stratified collaboration between inventors, engineers, material suppliers, players, and composers is totally new for me. It's so much wider than the way I normally think of music. It's also impossible to ignore after seeing how the sausage (gamelan sausage, that is) gets made.
One of the reasons I convinced myself to apply for the Watson was my professor Dave Bailey's infectious mantra: "the map is not the territory." He preached to me that there are certain things you can never learn from a secondary source; there are things best learned, or only learned, by being somewhere. I got kind of obsessed with this thought.
This afternoon in Bangkled was nothing, if not an afternoon spent deep in the Territory. What I understood from watching Ketut isn't something I would've felt reading from afar. The thoughts I've written here are somewhat analytic, and I've tried to put them into words as best I can, but the feelings, sounds, and smells are information that can never totally be expressed in another medium.
What I hadn't quite come to terms with about the Territory, before this year, is that it requires REAL travel time to get where you're going: days to find the right person, find a translator, think of questions, drive out, etc. The payoff is so real, but it's slow and adjusting to this pace is harder than I could’ve imagined.
As always, this blog is for you my lovely reader, but it’s still also for me: to remember why I'm doing this, to appreciate everyone who's shared their time and knowledge with me, and to chronicle the parts of this fellowship that really, truly, stretch me.
Much love for making it this far
