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A Retrospect on a Century of Gamelan Tone MeasurementsAuthor(s): Roger VetterSource: Ethnomusicology, Vol. 33, No. 2, (Spring - Summer, 1989), pp. 217-227Published by: University of Illinois Press on behalf of Society for EthnomusicologyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/924396Accessed: 17/05/2008 09:12

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VOL 33, No. 2 ETHNOMUSICOLOGY SPRING/SUMMER 1989

A Retrospect on a Century of Gamelan Tone Measurements

ROGER VETTER GRINNELL COLLEGE

lexander Ellis's well-known work on tone measurements of "exotic" cales, published in 1884, has had a profound effect on the field of

ethnomusicology. Over the past century comparative musicologists and ethnomusicologists have made extensive use of the system of cents, first introduced in Ellis's 1884 publication, to represent and to conceptualize the intervallic structure of nonharmonic scales in a scientifically objective manner. The mathematical purity of this technology, if I may label the cents system as such, has lent itself particularly well to the comparative study of the tuning systems of peoples living far apart in time and space. An ever increasing data base of tone measurements and the application of the cents technology to it stimulated provocative---even controversial-comparative studies such as Hornbostel's theory of blown fifthsI and A. M. Jones's specu- lation on Indonesian colonization of parts of Africa (Jones 1961, 1964).2

Among the instruments that Ellis used to demonstrate the cents system in his original study were instruments from a Javanese gamelan. I would guess that Ellis's cents technology has been applied in the writings on Javanese music to a greater degree than in the literature on any other single tradition. This is perhaps due to the coexistence of two distinct, nonharmonic tuning systems in Javanese music which themselves are not standards, but concepts or models. When slkndro, an anhemitonic pentatonic tuning, and pclog, which is heptatonic, are realized in the tunings of gamelan sets, numerous manifestations of each tuning concept are met with. The existence

'Hornbostel's most definitive statement of his theory is to be found in Geiger and Scheel's Handbuch der Physik (Hornbostel 1927:425-49). Several of his contemporaries and students, including Lachmann, Sachs, Schneider, and Kunst, also published works that involved partial statements of the theory. For a summary of this literature see Kunst (1973:25). 2Some 50 years before Jones's presentation of this theory, Hornbostel (1911:610) proposed Indonesian and African contacts based on tone measurement data. Kunst (1936) further develops Hornbostel's idea with a greater amount of tone measurement data.

217

218 Ethnomusicology, Spring/Summer 1989

of hundreds of interpretations of each of two tuning concepts is going to be, quite naturally, of great interest to ethnomusicologists who, armed with the technology inherited from Ellis, have given much energy to the explica- tion of this musicological curiosity. The roster of scholars involved in this area of investigation includes Kunst (1973 [1934, 1949]), Bukofzer (1944), Jones (1963), Lentz (1965), Hood (1966), Surjodiningrat et al. (1972 [1969]), and Rahn (1978). Many more scholars would be included in this list if we were to consider the two neighboring traditions of Bali and Sunda (West Java).

In 1983, while carrying out research in Central Java, I commissioned a double gamelan, one set tuned to slndro, the other to p6log. Much of the construction, and all of the tuning, took place in the back yard of my house. Since my research activity at that time had nothing to do with the construction and tuning of this gamelan, I did not take full advantage of the situation by carefully documenting the tuning of the gamelan. However, I was present during most of the work and do remember much of what transpired. It wasn't until a few years later that my awareness of the literature on Javanese tuning systems, my experience of observing a gamelan being made and tuned, and the centennial of Ellis's cents technology converged in my mind. Centennials being appropriate times for retrospection, I began thinking about how Javanese tunings have been treated in the literature and how the tuner of my gamelan went about his task. As a result I noticed two very different, if not mutually exclusive, perspectives on tuning; these two per- spectives, described below, are what I shall consider in the remainder of this paper:

1) Ellis's cent system has encouraged an approach to the study of nonharmonic tuning systems in general and of Javanese tuning systems in particular that can be characterized as scientific and speculative, for it deals with the analysis of numerical data generated from tone measurements of artifacts, i.e., fully- tuned gamelan sets.

2) Through the ethnography-based study of tuners in the actual process of tuning, we might come to a totally different perspective on gamelan tuning than has been afforded us by the existing literature dealing with that topic.

What have we learned aboutJavanese tuning systems from the published literature? We have learned, indeed, that there are numerous interpretations of slndro and pilog. This point is clearly demonstrated in tables of frequency measurements and cents calculations of several gamelan sets published in the 1930s by Kunst (1973 [1934,1949]) and in the late 1960s by Surjodiningrat and his associates (Surjodiningrat et al. 1972 [1969]).3 We have also learned from Hood (1966), whose conclusions were reinforced by Surjodiningrat et al. (1972), that the tuning of a gamelan is more complex than can be represented by measurements of a single-octave instrument from any given

A Retrospect on a Century of Gamelan Tone Measurements 219

gamelan. Hood concludes, from detailed measurements of four gamelan sets (two tuned to sldndro, two to pdlog), that octaves within the total six-octave range of the gamelan are consciously stretched and compressed by a tuner (Hood 1966:36-37).

Other scholars have made use of tone measurements found in the above-mentioned works to fashion or support theories of tuning. Kunst, a firm supporter of Hornbostel's theory of blown fifths, went to great lengths to illustrate that various sldndro and pilog realizations could be derived in some regular manner from the 23-interval cycle of blown fifths (Kunst 1948). Bukofzer (1944) concludes, from carefully selected sets of tone measure- ments taken from Kunst (1973 [1934, 1949]), that the p6log system is the older of the two Javanese tuning concepts, and that the slndro system was derived by selecting five tones from the completep6log scale. More recently, Jay Rahn (1978) presents a theory that pilog tunings can best be predicted with an equidistant nine tone system with intervals of 133 cents each. Jones (1963), also looking for uniformities in pilog tunings, proposes that pilog tunings consist of six relatively fixed intervals that move up or down as a group in relation to the scale degree pilog (degree 4). On the other side of the coin, Donald Lentz (1965) proposes that Javanese and Balinese tunings, unlike Hindu and Chinese tuning systems, are atheoretical and do not have their roots in ordered and demonstrable acoustical phenomena.

On the surface, many of these theories are convincing. Theories ex- pressed in the mathematical purity of numbers take on a logic of their own and carry great validity for us. The results of such inquiries are often thought provoking and imaginative. But a number of aspects about these studies have come to bother me for the following reasons:

1) They deal only with the product of tuning and not with the individuals who do the tuning. It is not uncommon for authors in these studies to imply or say outright that the tuner's intent was to produce this or that intervallic pattern, even though the writers had no contact or communication with a tuner.

2) They all treat gamelan tone measurements as some sort of sacred and unvary- ing "truth." In reality, the embat, or intervallic structure, of a given gamelan

3The validity of the data derived from tone measurements of idiophones (in particular metal- lophones, xylophones, and gongs) itself has come into question recently by the German musicologist Albrecht Schneider (1988). He points out that spectral analysis of tones produced on such instruments show no clearly discernible fundamental but a rather dense and inharmoni- ous spectrum that gives rise to "auditory uncertainty." As a result, data generated by the use of standard ethnomusicological tone-measuring equipment, both past (the monochord) and present (strobo-tuners), may produce erroneous results. The ramifications of Schneider's research on our interpretation of the theories aboutJavanese tuning under discussion presently are great.

220 Ethnomusicology, Spring/Summer 1989

evolves through that set's existence. Different tuners work on it and impose their own interpretations of the tuning concepts on the tuning of the set. Tone measurements of the set only represent the tuning of a gamelan at the moment of measurement and do not take into consideration the random changes of pitch introduced by the natural aging of materials such as bronze, or the conscious changes introduced by tuners.

3) There are gross inconsistencies in the treatment of the numerical data by the authors of tuning studies. Within a given gamelan the most minute discrepencies are interpreted as significant (even though they might not be audibly perceptible), while when comparing the tuning of one gamelan to that of another, or to that of a South American panpipe, the authors think nothing of overlooking discrepencies of 20 or 30 cents. They are not dealing with tuning as an artistic and functional aspect of musical behavior, they are dealing with it all too often as abstract numbers.

Rather than pursuing in greater detail the methodological and concep- tual merits and shortcomings of the above-mentioned literature and the ways in which the cents technology has encouraged such approaches, I will suggest future avenues of research that might lead us to a more thorough understanding of the Javanese perspective on gamelan tuning. Towards this end I will present some views about tuning as expressed by Javanese musi- cians and share some observations about the tuning of the gamelan I com- missioned.

Hardja Susilo, aJavanese musician and ethnomusicologist at the Univer- sity of Hawaii, made the following statement in response to what he felt was Kunst's overly cerebral treatment ofJavanese tuning in the third edition of Music in Java (Kunst 1973):

Javanese musical culture tolerates more variants of tuning systems than that of the west. When talking about embat, i.e., intervallic relationships, one may hear such remarks as mboten sekica (not comfortable), kirang sekkca (not quite comfortable), langkung sekkca (more comfortable), sekica (comfortable), and sek6ca sanget (very comfortable), as opposed to the western way, which differen- tiates right from wrong. (Susilo 1975:62)

This is a very different way of describing gamelan tunings, and immediately brings forth the question: What is meant by the word "sekdca" ("comfort- able")? I believe Susilo is referring to what is musically comfortable, i.e., what features of a given realization of slindro or pilog work successfully to accommodate in an aesthetically pleasing way a wide variety of musical circumstances inherent to gamelan performance practice.

It was not until a very few years ago that a more indigenously Javanese perspective on tuning surfaced in the literature. In his dissertation on Javanese vocal music, Martin Hatch (1980) begins to uncover some of the mysteries of gamelan tuning as explained to him by a respected Javanese musician-theoretician, the late R. L. Martopangrawit. Although far too cornm-

A Retrospect on a Century of Gamelan Tone Measurements 221

plex to go into detail here, the crux of the matter is that Javanese vocal music is mode-less while gamelan music is modal. To retain a vocally "com- fortable" interval structure in more than one mode in the fixed-pitch envi- ronment of a gamelan tuning is basically impossible. Thus, compromises are sought in, and ambiguities worked into, instrumental tunings to allow vocalists to retain their "natural" intervallic structure (i.e., the intervallic pattern they would use when singing unaccompanied) while singing with a gamelan. Hatch's discussion, interestingly enough, incorporates illustra- tions of relative interval sizes expressed in terms of "small-," "smallplus-," and "medium-"sized intervals, rather than in precise cents measurements. It was in such terms that the tuning theory was explained to him by Martopan- grawit.

Both Susilo's statement and Martopangrawit's theory as presented by Hatch seem to imply that the evaluation of a tuning, and probably the process of creating one as well, is deeply rooted in musical concerns rather than in a theoretical system based on orderly acoustical relationships. My experi- ence of watching the construction and tuning of my gamelan would support this view. In the following paragraphs I will describe the tuning process in some detail. The intention behind this description is to point out the poten- tialities of researching the process of tuning and the tuner himself.

The first step in putting my gamelan together was the ordering of the gong (gong ageng, gong suwukan, and kempul) and gong chime (bonang barung and bonangpanerus) instruments from a gamelan smith specializing in the making of iron gamelans.4 My tuner visited the gong smith before production commenced. At that time the tuner's only concern was the absolute pitch of the tumbuk, or common tone, between the sl&ndro and pilog tunings of a double gamelan. The absolute placement of that pitch is important because it will determine how well the ambitus of the gamelan will complement that of Javanese singers. The gamelan smith played for the tuner a commercial cassette of the gamelan used at the government radio station, Radio Republik Indonesia Yogyakarta. This cassette was what the gong smith used as his tuning guide. He would try to replicate, by ear, the

4The favored, and most expensive, material of construction for the gongs and keys of a gamelan is of course bronze. Financial constraints necessitated my choice of iron over bronze. Although bronze instruments produce a richer tone that is more appealing to the Javanese than the tone of instruments made from iron, iron instruments, and especially iron gongs, are much easier to tune than their bronze counterparts. The pitch of an iron gong can be adjusted up or down with ease and little risk of permanent damage by cold hammering; bronze gongs can have their pitch altered by hammering, which could result in cracking the gong, or by scraping, which permanently removes metal and reduces a tuner's options for future pitch adjustments. I would suspect that the approach a tuner uses in the tuning of an iron gamelan would be somewhat different from that he would use in the tuning of a bronze gamelan because of the difficulties and risks involved in adjusting the pitch of bronze gongs.

222 Ethnomusicology, Spring/Summer 1989

tuning of the gamelan on the cassette. My tuner said that the tumbuk was fine, and asked the gong smith to replicate that pitch. At that time, the tuner was basically unconcerned about the rest of the tones in the two tuning systems.

When, several weeks later, the gongs were finished, the tuner was satisfied with the common tone. In fact, that tone was the only one he requested to hear; he was not even interested in hearing the slkndro and pilog scales to which the smith had tuned the gongs as a set. The tuner did, however, ask to hear the gong ageng, the largest and lowest-pitched gong in a gamelan, in relation to the tumbuk. He was not satisfied with the gong ageng that was made for my gamelan, and asked to hear two other gong ageng that he saw in the room. One of these did satisfy him, and it was quickly agreed that it would be substituted for the one originally assigned to the gongs I had ordered. When I later questioned my tuner about his choice, he remarked that he wanted the gong ageng to be tuned to the scale degree just below the tumbuk in the sldndro scale (the tumbuk in my gamelan is the scale degree nem, or 6, in both slOndro and pilog tunings, so the gong ageng would be tuned to slndro lima, or 5), which also coincided with the pitch two scale degrees below the tumbuk in the pilog scale (with the note name "pilog," carrying the cipher designation 4). He also mentioned that the ombak (lit.: "wave," i.e., the amplitude and speed of the vibrato built into a gong's sound) of the first gong ageng was not satisfying. The ombak of the gong he selected was not perfect, but lumayan (adequate, reasonably satisfactory). However, his concern with the gong's ombak was secondary to that of its pitch.

After arranging for transportation to carry the 63 newly acquired gongs to my house, two makeshift bonang racks were constructed by pounding bamboo stakes into the ground and tying strands of plastic raffia to them to simulate the ropes upon which the bonang kettles rest on a real rancakan (casing). The tuner then placed the gongs of the p6log bonang barung on one of the racks and started playing the appropriate part for that instrument for several pieces. He would frequently stop, lift up one of the gongs, and adjust its pitch by pounding on it from its inside or top with the butt of a hammer.5 He played parts both for pieces using the bem scale (a pentatonic selection from the total pilog scale, consisting of degrees 1-2-3-5-6) and the barang scale (another pentatonic selection, degrees 7-2-3-5-6). He paid special attention to pitch 2, adjusting it up and down several times and explaining to me that it was difficult to position that particular pitch so that

5By cold hammering the flat surface (rai) around the knob (pencu) of a gong from the top the pitch of the gong is lowered. The pitch can be raised by hammering the same surface from the inside of the gong.

A Retrospect on a Century of Gamelan Tone Measurements 223

it would sound right going to both pitch 1 and 7. Placing pitch 2 to sound natural going to pitch 1 in pieces using the pilog bem scale, and placing pitch 2 to sound correct going to pitch 7 in

p.log barang pieces, would be

easy if you had separate pilog gamelans for each scale. But, since one gamelan is used to play gendhing (gamelan pieces) in both scales, part of the tuner's task is to work out some sort of compromise with the placement of plog pitch 2 so that it can be almost right for gendhing in both pdlog bem and p6log barang.

This process of making subtle adjustments to the tuning that had been given to the p6log bonang barung by the gong smith went on for well over an hour before my tuner was satisfied with the tuning of this one instrument. He then proceeded to retune the p6log bonangpanerus in accordance with the bonang barung and then spent a long time playing bonang barung parts for sl6ndro gendhing and adjusting pitches on the slndro bonang barung. When he was satisfied with the tuning of the sl6ndro bonang barung, he then tuned the sllndro bonang panerus. The tuner and his main assistant then played several gendhing from both tuning systems, the tuner playing the bonang barung part, the assistant the bonang panerus part. Satisfied with the results, he said these instruments would serve as his baku (lit.: "base" or "foundation") tuning until the keys for the multi-octave metallophones called gend'r barung were made.

In a double gamelan there are three gend&r barung, one tuned to sl&ndro, and one each to the pentatonic pilog scales, p6log bem and p6log barang. As the keys for each of these gend&rs were finished, they were tuned by filing and cold hammering to the tunings of the gong chimes. Over the ensuing several weeks the tuner spent many hours on each of the three sets of gend&r keys playing characteristic two-part melodic formulae and isolated octaves and fifths. He would constantly make subtle pitch adjust- ments by cold hammering the keys. At one point in this process I had noticed that the interval on the slWndro gend&r between the tone above the tumbuk (slkndro pitch barang, with the cipher 1) in the instrument's middle octave and that same tone an octave above was excruciatingly wide. The next day I asked the tuner about that octave. He said he was eventually going to narrow that interval, although not to a perfect octave. That octave, he said, had to be somewhat out of tune in order to make the overall tuning work comfortably, i.e., musically, in all of the modes (pathet) of the slndro tuning. In other words, he was again consciously introducing an ambiguity into the instrumental tuning to make it musically, and, perhaps more spe- cifically, vocally, comfortable for performance in a variety of musical situa- tions.

Once the three gend&r were tuned to his satisfaction, work proceded on the tuning of the rest of the metallophones (slenthem, saron demung,

224 Ethnomusicology, Spring/Summer 1989

saron barung, peking, and the kenong rent&ng6), all of them single octave, and the xylophones (gambang), which cover a range of nearly four octaves. The lowest-register single-octave metallophones were tuned to the lowest octave of the gendbr, and the middle-register metallophones to the middle octave of the gend&r. Successively higher octaves were tuned to the upper octave of the gendr (which is incomplete, including only scale degrees 1-2-3) or octave duplications of tones from the middle register (degrees 5 and 6). In other words, any ambiguities or compromises worked into the tunings of the gendrs were replicated in the corresponding octaves of the other instruments.

Once all of the keyed instruments were tuned, the tuner returned to the gong chimes and retuned them to the final embat worked out on the gend&rs. The final instruments to be tuned were the larger-sized gongs (the gong suwukan and the kempul). The gong ageng, which the tuner had so carefully selected several months earlier, did not require any adjustment to its tuning.

Throughout the tuning process the tuner never used any sort of tone- measuring equipment, nor did he consult a sound recording, an instrument from another gamelan, or any other pitch standard or model. The only pitch which remained unaltered throughout the entire construction and tuning process was the tumbuk, the pitch 6 of both the sl&ndro andpilog systems. The tuner seemed always concerned with seeking comfortable compromises between vying musical considerations. The importance of "process" in the tuning of my gamelan was made clear when the tuner returned to the bonang barung and bonangpanerus, his original baku, after tuning all the metallophones. He had to make minor adjustments to the tuning of the majority of those gongs to bring them in line with the final solution he had arrived at on the gendcrs.

In retrospect, I find intriguing and well worth further investigation certain aspects of the tuning process I witnessed:

1) It would seem in the case of my gamelan that tunings do not begin from theories expressed in frequency ratios or some other acoustical construct. Rather, they seem to begin from the tuning of another gamelan. For my gamelan, it was the tuning of the local radio'station gamelan as approximated by the gamelan smith from a commercial cassette.

2) A tuner does not begin with a hard and fast idea of the end product. If he did, all gamelans tuned by him would likely end up with the same embat. Rather, he works on refining the existing tuning of a gamelan to make it as "sekeca," or "comfortable" (from a musical standpoint) as possible.

6The kenong rent&ng is a keyed version of the kenong, which is a gong instrument. The keys of a kenong rEnt~ng are about the same size as those of the slenthem, but have knobs raised at their center.

A Retrospect on a Century of Gamelan Tone Measurements 225

3) The evaluation of the tuning by playing appropriate melodic patterns on instruments, especially on the gendir, illustrates that a basic concern on the part of the tuner is that the tuning works musically, not mathematically.

4) Tuners themselves constitute an aspect of tuning that deserves further study. The tuner of my gamelan, Raden Riyo Mangkuasmara, is the head musician in the sultan's palace of Yogyakarta, where he is also responsible for main- taining the tunings of the palace's 18 gamelan sets (these are all single gamelans, tuned either to sldndro or to pl1og). He is a competent and practicing musician. I would be curious to know if most tuners who are considered good by peer concensus are active musicians, or if they are craftsmen working in the profession of gamelan construction. An interesting side note to this is that when tuning palace gamelans, R R Mangkuasmara never touches the instruments themselves. He listens, then instructs an assis- tant, who is an apprentice gong smith, as to whether the pitch of a gong or key needs to be raised or lowered. It would seem that, at least in his case, the art of tuning involves musically-based decisions and strategies that emerge from years of performance experience. For most gamelan smiths and mer- chants, I would guess that tuning involves little or no knowledge of perform- ance considerations, only approximation of "in-house" models.7

5) As for discrepancies found between individual tones in different octaves of the same gamelan, it would be useful to question tuners as to whether these are intentional, accidental, or insignificant. Given the nature of the materials from which gamelans are made, the tools and the level of technology used in their tuning, and the fact that they are tuned totally by ear, I question how far we should allow our theoretical analyses of tone measurement data to go without considering at some point the tuners themselves. I do not think it is wrong to speculate from scientifically gathered data, but I do think it questionable when ethnomusicologists, in their generation of theories, almost totally ignore the indigenous perspective. I think we need some sort of balance in our methodology.

Gamelan tuning, especially when executed by a tuner who is an ac- complished musician, is a process guided by musical sensibilities and experi- ence. An understanding of this process cannot be fully extrapolated from the analysis of tone-measurement data generated from finished products, that is, fully-tuned gamelans. If we are seeking an understanding ofJavanese tuning, I think we will eventually have to study tuners in action, not just tunings. We will have to consider what musical and technological concerns and constraints come to bear upon the tuner during the process of creating

7For instance, just south of the city of Yogyakarta, in the village of Peleman, lives the well-to-do gamelan merchant Pak Dermo. At his house, someone wishing to purchase, for example, a gend&r tuned to slndro can choose from several instruments tuned, for all intents and purposes, identically. He also sells entire gamelan, consisting for the most part of keys and gongs which originated from several gamelan he has purchased. I would not be surprised if these were tuned alike by his craftsmen following some house standard. In any case, Pak Dermo, a former ox-cart driver, most certainly does not do the tuning himself, for he told me that he does not know how to perform gamelan music and that he is not musical.

226 Ethnomusicology, Spring/Summer 1989

a tuning or while altering an existing one. For methodological inspiration we might look to Wachsmann's documentation of the tuning of an Ugandan xylophone (Wachsmann 1957)8 and to Berliner's documentation of the con- struction and tuning of a Shona mbira (Berliner 1980).9 We might have to accept the fact that the Javanese tuning concepts of slndro and pilog do not lend themselves to be understood in terms of cents alone. Our continued efforts to reduce Javanese tunings to numerical representations and subject them to Western patterns of analytical logic, regardless of how fruitful these avenues of investigation may prove to be, will add little to our knowledge of the culturally significant factors that surround the art of tuning in Java. If, during the next century, tuners become the focus of our investigations of Javanese tone systems, perhaps new insights into the mysteries of sldndro and p6log and their place within the greater coherence of gamelan perfor- mance aesthetics will surface.

REFERENCES Berliner, Paul

1980 "John Kunaka, Mbira Maker." African Arts 14/1:61-67. Bukofzer, Manfred F.

1944 "The Evolution of Javanese Tone-systems." In Papers Read at the International Congress of Musicology Held at New York, September 11th to 16th, 1939, ed. A. Mendel, G. Reese, and G. Chase, 241-50. New York: American Musicological Society.

Ellis, A. J. 1884 "Tonometrical Observations on Some Existing Nonharmonic Musical Scales." Pro-

ceedings of the Royal Society 37:368-85. Hatch, Martin F.

1980 "Lagu, Laras, Layang: Rethinking Melody in Javanese Music." Ph.D. dissertation, Cornell University.

Hood, Mantle 1966 "Slendro and Pelog Redefined; With a Note on Laboratory Methods, by Max Harrell."

Selected Reports in Ethnomusicology 1/1:28-48.

8Wachsmann documented the fine-tuning of a newly constructed amadinda xylophone by taking tone measurements before the tuning process began and of every alteration made by the tuner in his search for a satisfying product. Comments made by the tuner and others in attendance were recorded as well. One can clearly follow how the tuner creates the final product by scrutinizing intervals melodically and harmonically (in octaves). The tuning proce- dure documented by Wachsmann is uncannily similar to the one I witnessed during the tuning of my gamelan, from the nature of the tuning system (an unstandardized anhemitonic pentatonic scale) to the criteria for making alterations to the pitches of individual keys and the means of evaluating the results.

9Although presented in more general terms than Wachsmann's study and without tone measure- ments, Berliner's account gives one a good perspective on the close relationship between tuning and the process of construction. Berliner points out that an mbira maker once made 111 tuning checks, mostly by ear rather than by comparison to a model, during a single stage in the construction of an mbira (Berliner 1980:66).

A Retrospect on a Century of Gamelan Tone Measurements 227

Hornbostel, E. M. von 1911 "Ober ein akustisches Kriterium fiir KulturzusammenhAinge." Zeitschrift fifr

Ethnologie 43:601-15. 1927 "Musikalische Tonsysteme." In Handbuch der Physik, ed. H. Geiger and K Scheel,

vol. 8:425-49. Berlin: Springer. Jones, A. M.

1961 "Indonesia and Africa: The Xylophone as a Culture-indicator." African Music 2/3:36- 47.

1963 'Towards anAssessment of theJavanese Pelog Scale." Ethnomusicology 7/1:22-25. 1964 Africa and Indonesia: The Evidence of the Xylophone and Other Musical and

Cultural Factors. Leiden: E. J. Brill. Kunst, Jaap

1936 "A Musicological Argument for Cultural Relationship between Indonesia--Probably the Isle of Java-and Central Africa." Proceedings of the Musical Association 62:57- 76. Also appears in German in Anthropos 31:131-40.

1948 Around von Hornbostel's Theory of the Cycle of Blown Fifths. Amsterdam: Royal Institute for the Indies, Mededeling 76.

1973 Music in Java. 3rd ed., enl. Ed. E. L. Heins. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. (1st ed., 1934; 2nd ed., 1949.)

Lentz, Donald 1965 The Gamelan Music of Java and Bali: An Artistic Anomaly Complimentary to

Primary Tonal Theoretical Systems. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Rahn, Jay

1978 "Javanese Pelog Tunings Reconsidered." Yearbook of the International Folk Music Council 10:69-82.

Schneider, Albrecht 1988 "Psychological Theory and Comparative Musicology." Paper presented at the His-

tory of Ethnomusicology Conference, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, April 14-17.

Surjodiningrat, Wasisto, et al. 1972 Tone Measurements of Outstanding Javanese Gamelans in Jogjakarta and

Surakarta. 2nd ed., rev. Jogjakarta: Gadjah Mada University Press. (1st ed., in Indonesian, 1969)

Susilo, Hardja 1975 Review of Music in Java, 3rd ed. by Jaap Kunst. Asian Music 7/1:58-68.

Wachsmann, Klaus 1957 "A Study of Norms in the Tribal Music of Uganda." Ethnomusicology 1/11:9-16.