Culture and Special Events

Gamelan music is comparable to only two things: moonlight and flowing water. It is pure and mysterious like moonlight and always changing like flowing water. The term gamelan refers to the musical instruments comprising an orchestra. It derives from gamel, an old Javanese word for handler or hammer, and appropriately most of the instruments in the orchestra are percussive. The interlocking rhythmic and melodic pattern found in gamelan music are said by some to originate in the rhythms of the lesung, stone or wooden mortars used for husking rice.
Others ascribe these patterns to the rhythmic chanting of frogs in the rice fields after dusk or the cacophony of roosters crowing at dawn.

Though gamelan ensembles most commonly perform as an accompaniment to a dancer or in a theater, the music is also enjoyed for its own sake, often in connection with royal or religious festivities.

In Java, the music and theatrical arts reached their height of refinement in the Islamic court of the 18^th and 19^th centuries, despite the fact that renowned sets of instruments supposedly date from the Majapahit era centuries earlier in East Java. The aristocratic refinement of the gamelan in Java has resulted in a music that is slow, stately and mystical in feeling, designed to be heard in the large audience hall of the aristocratic home and to convey a sense of awesome power and emotion control.