Pelog

Pelog is one of the two essential scales of gamelan music native to Bali and Java, in Indonesia. The other scale commonly used is called slendro. Pelog has seven notes, but most pieces use a subset of only five of them.

Tuning

Since the tuning varies so widely from island to island, village to village, and even gamelan to gamelan, it is difficult to characterize in terms of intervals. One rough approximation expresses the seven pitches as a subset of 9-tone equal temperament. An analysis of 27 gamelans by Surjodiningrat (1972) revealed a statistical preference for this system of tuning. The large intervals fall between barang and bem, and between dada and pelog.

As in slendro, although the intervals vary from one gamelan to the next, the intervals between notes in a scale are very close to identical for different instruments within the same gamelan. The occasion for the word approximately is that it is common in Balinese gamelan that instruments are played in pairs which are tuned slightly apart so as to produce interference beating which are ideally at a consistent speed for all pairs of notes in all registers. It is thought that this contributes to the very "busy" and "shimmering" sound of gamelan ensembles. In the religious ceremonies that contain Gamelan, these interference beats are meant to give the listener a feeling of a god's presence or a stepping stone to a meditative state.

== hehehehe ==

Note names

The notes of the slendro scale can be designated in different ways; one common way is the use of numbers (often called by their names in Javanese, especially in a shortened form. An older set uses names derived from parts of the body. Notice that both systems have the same designations for 5 and 6.

Number	Javanese number		Traditional name
	Full name	Short name	Full name	Literal meaning
1	siji	ji	bem/panunggal	head
2	loro	ro	gulu	neck
3	telu	lu	dada	chest
4	papat	pat	pelog
5	lima	ma	lima	hand (five fingers)
6	enem	nem	nem	unknown
7	pitu	pi	barang	thing

Subsets

Though the full pelog scale has seven tones, usually only a five-tone subset is used (see the similar Western concept of mode). In fact, many gamelan instruments physically lack keys for two of the tones. For example, Gamelan gong kebyar instruments have no keys for barang or dada, because gong kebyar music is always played in the pelog selisir subset (tones 1, 2, 3, 5, and 6; heard in the audio example above). Different regions, such as Central Java or West Java (Sunda), use different subsets.

In Central Javanese gamelan, the pelog scale is traditionally divided into three pathet, which is roughly similar to a Western mode. Two of these, called pathet nem and pathet lima, use the subset of 1, 2, 3, 5, and 6; the third, pathet barang, uses 2, 3, 5, 6, and 7. The remaining two notes, including 4 in every pathet, is available for embellishments on most instruments, but they do not usually appear on gendér, gambang, or interpunctuating instruments.

External link

• The gamelan pelog scale of Central Java as an example of a non-harmonic musical scale