pelog tuning

i'm looking for some information about the pelog scale in balinese gamelan =
especially
concerning the gamelan jégog.
If someone has a clue, don't hesitate
thank you

On Mon, 12 Jan 2004 12:37:58 -0000, "touness" <touness@yahoo.fr> wrote:

>i'm looking for some information about the pelog scale in balinese gamelan =
>especially
>concerning the gamelan jégog.
>If someone has a clue, don't hesitate
>thank you

Since no one else has replied, and I finally found one of the books on
Balinese music I was looking for, here's the information I have:

"Jegog is tuned to an unusual and haunting 4-tone scale which, it is
speculated, was derived from tones 2, 3, 5, and 7 of the full 7-tone pelog
(see Chapter Three). All of the instruments have 8 tubes. On the jegogan
and the two calungs tuned an octave above them, the 4 right-hand tubes
duplicate the tones of those on the left, enabling the players to play
rolling melodies by alternating left and right hand strokes between notes
of the same pitch." Michael Tenzer, _Balinese Music_ (ISBN 0-945971-30-3),
p. 91-92)

In the few recordings I've heard, the jegog scale sounds similar to a
4:5:6:7 chord. Pelog scales in general are quite variable, so there isn't a
single description that would apply to all of them, but in general they
consist of 7 unequally spaced notes, with two of the steps between notes
more or less larger than the other five, or (more typically), a five-note
subset of this tuning. Dividing the octave into nine equal steps (9-ET)
gives a rough approximation to a general pelog scale (omitting the fourth
and ninth steps in the 9-note scale), but no actual pelog scale is that
regular. The phrygian mode is another rough approximation; a typical 5-note
pelog might be something like D Eb F A Bb (although the interval between
"F" and "G" in this scale is usually wider than the interval between "G"
and "A", so it doesn't map well to a meantone tuning). But some pelog
tunings sound more like the Japanese mode "hirajoshi" (D E F A Bb) than the
phrygian mode, and others split the minor third into roughly equal parts.

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