AW.: Javanese tunings

Johnny Reinhard inquired about Javanese tunings. The short answer is that
Javanese metallophones are tempered so that each _pathet_ (more or less
equivalent to the well-tempered idea of _key_) is recognizeable and playable
with voices and instruments without fixed pitch. Further, there are auxillary
pitches ("miring" or "minir") used in slendro which are variously represented
as either like western chromatic alterations or borrowings from a parallel
pelog scale.

How many pitches does that add up to? It depends upon how you count them. Do
you count beating unisons or stretched or shrunken octaves as separate
pitches? What about the differences between fixed and variable pitched
intervals, or from one gamelan to another? Most Javanese musicians will
probably think in terms of 11 abstract pitches total (5 slendro + 6
additional pelog pitches), while smaller differences between pitches probably
fall into the category of _embat_, or individual style.

At this point in time, it is safe to disregard Mantle Hood's writings
altogether. For a general introduction to pitch vocabularies, nothing is
better than Martopangrawit's articles in volume 1 of _Karawitan_. The best
contemporary account of Javanese tuning practice, and a critique of American
just intonation gamelan, is by Marc Perlman. Larry Polansky has written some
valuable articles on slendro, and my own article on Pelog in XH is
speculative music theory, not ethnomusicology, as are Erv Wilson's
meta-slendro and meta-pelog proposals.

The 19 tones Hood mentioned to J. Reinhard sound more like Sundanese theory
to me. Rothenberg was similarly confused in his use of data from his main
informant Bernhard Ijzendraat Suryabrata. A good summary of the Sundanese
theoretical tradition -- which has gone through a long series of attempts,
both theoretical and practical, to integrate all of the sundanese scales into
a single tuning -- is in Andrew Weintraub's UCB dissertation.

Daniel Wolf
Frankfurt