S.E. Asian tuning data before WWII.

All of it is significant because many native orchestras and ensembles
had to start again "by ear" after their metallic instruments were
melted down for the war effort. This tuning data is microtonal and can
be used to make music. But where is it?

With regard to Central Java, which I know best, there are excellent pre-war inventories of gamelan, with considerable detail about the court instruments, which are considered the instruments of greater prestige and the tunings of which are often copied. Because of this date, it's clear that very few, if any of these instruments were melted down for metal, thus they survived the war intact, if unplayed and un-maintained. More damage has probably occured since then, as many older gamelan have been "modernised", that is, repaired, fitted with new cases, cracked gongs or bars replaced, and a certain amount of re-tuning, usually upward in pitch. (The natural drift of bronze, over many decades is upward in pitch, and this retuning is often simply to compensate for uneven reactions among the instruments to the higher general tessitura). However, we do have a sufficient number of early recordings and instrument measurements as well as the evidence of the large number of gamelan exported from Java to generally confirm the assumption that there has been no great change aside from a preference among purchasers of new gamelan to copy the tuning of RRI-Solo, itself orginally a court instrument.

With regard to Balinese gamelan, I am most familiar with East Balinese, "Bali Aga", gamelan salundhing. While salundhing bars are of smithed iron rather than bronze, so that the pitch can change radically by just hammering the bars, the evidence collected before the war suggests that the pitch has been extremely stable. With Gong Kebyar, the most popular style of Balinese ensemble, the tendency of newer ensembles has been to tune ever higher, with more narrow seconds and wider thirds, and with faster beating, but this is a tendency rather than universal, and, as the Balinese (outside of Bali Aga), with a very different court history in the colonial period and since give less prestige to heirloom instruments in favor of instruments that simply sound good, and the 5-toned kebyar tuning is, in principle, more robust than Javanese pelog (i.e. it cannot and does not modulate to other tonalities (pathet)), this is perhaps less of a concern. Finally, Bali is a hotbed of experimentation, and there are some interesting new ensembles with tuning designs -- some based on the salundhing model -- so I am actually more excited about these than concerned about the possibility that much, if any, has been lost.

Daniel Wolf