Indian Art and Letters

Author(s): India Society
Publisher: India Society

Page 75

ine Music of Java The scales in use may be arranged in two systems, called in Javanese Ilog and slendro.
The absolute lack of historical and musicological dates left until lately Il scope for all sorts of suppositions as to the origin of these musical scales.
According to Professor Land, the pélog-scales must be comparatively ew; he supposed them to be of Perso-Arab origin; at least, he has advanced is as a more or less tenable hypothesis. Raden Mas Surjåputrå seems
have accepted, for pélog at any rate, a more or less close connection with le scales of Hindostan, but at other times again he seems to have thought lat, after all, they might be of pure Javanese origin.
According to popular belief, slendro is the gift of a Hindu god and pélog transformation of sléndro by the hands of irreverent and bold man.
Since the last few years we know, with fairly great certainty, thanks specially to Professor von Hornbostel and his masterly theory of the “blown ths" ("Blask winten "), that the Javanese scales—and a great many others -have come from China, and have their origin, perhaps, in a still more stant land, with a still older culture-namely, in Central Asia, in Turkestan.
There cannot be any doubt about the fact that sléndro came to Java and ali a good many centuries after pélog. Pélog was perhaps already imported
Malay-Polynesian peoples, who came to Java many centuries before our hristian era. Sléndro seems to have entered Java simultaneously with a ter culture in the middle of the eighth century A.D., when the dynasty of the ailendras ruled the central parts of the island, and to have derived its name om that same royal family : gamelan sléndro = gamelan Çailéndrå. At first seems to have remained restricted to the centre of the island, where it supanted for the greater part the old pélog. Later on, probably in consequence
political changes, slendro made its entry into the west and the east of Java, id subsequently into Bali. According to recent discoveries, we may take it for anted that very soon after Java began to play a part in history the two nal systems existed side by side Sléndro was intended for the accompanient of the wayang purwå-viz., the shadow plays when they represent lindu myths; while pélog was intimately connected with the characteristicly Indonesian pre-Hindu art, or, better still, non-Hindu art, with certain remonies, several forms of the dance, and with the wayang gedog, repreinting the Pandji cyclus, which is purely Java-Polynesian.
In its complete form pélog has seven tones to the octave—that is to say, seems to have seven tones to the octave, but in reality that heptatonic scale only a conglomerate, only the least common multiple of a group of pentanic scales with unequal intervals, in which from time to time there appears
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