Gong Javanese Gamelan Music Traditional and Religion

For the Javanese, it is the obligation of man to maintain the harmony of reality. This is expressed in the ancient high Javanese language as the virtue of mamayu hayuning bawono or “preserving the beauty of the world.” Harmony is the primary pillar of Kejawen, the indigenous mystic religion of Java. The cyclic properties of Javanese gamelan music and its relationship to the traditional perception of time in Java has been well considered by scholars such as Clifford Geertz, Alton and Judith Becker, Stanley Hoffman and David Goldsworthy, among others. These have illuminated the phenomenon of a musical system that perfectly reflects its culture’s organisation of time into cycles, subdivisions of cycles and concentric cycles rotating simultaneously within each other. Gamelan translates the complex layering and converging of cyclic time structures into a system of music. This system does more than simply point to and describe an idea of time, rather it is, in its most fundamental nature, time.

Within this system the gong, as Goldsworthy observes, serves as the harmonising element, whose stroke functions as the time-marker of each musical rotation, ‘bringing all together temporally in harmonious agreement’. This paper expands upon previous findings by demonstrating that the gong can in fact be understood as the ultimate symbol of the paradoxical unity of all things.

Harmony is the balance of opposing tensions. It is worth distinguishing this from the idea of equilibrium, which is the central point of the “beam” held in balance, so to speak. Equilibrium is thus a singularity, the unity of God. The state of harmony is, as it were, a biunity. It is what the Christian writer, Nicolas of Cusa, called the coincidentia oppositorum, the point of resolution of contraries, of dissolution of duality into Unity. The striving for harmony is present in every element of Javanese life and is elegantly embodied in the music of the gamelan orchestra.

The Javanese believe that cosmic harmony can be reached by constantly undertaking to maintain a correct relationship firstly with others in society, secondly with one’s own physical and spiritual self and lastly but most importantly, with God. The gong’s relationship to the rest of the gamelan orchestra represents each of these levels, thus constituting a comprehensive symbol of harmony. If the instruments of the orchestra and their music symbolise the struggle for harmony, it is the gong which incarnates the point at which these conflicts or dualities meet. The gong is the paradox of stillness within movement.

The principle of cosmic oneness or monism, is at the heart of many of the world’s mystical belief systems and Kejawen is no exception. It is necessary and always will be, to use symbols and metaphors to comprehend the paradox of unified Being that is no-time/no-space, all experience occurring simultaneously, nothing being separate from anything else and all things being one. How we express these inexpressible ideas varies from culture to culture.

Theologically speaking, the indigenous Javanese religion had a deity who represented this concept, known as Sang Hyang Tunggal, or the “Divine Oneness.” According to Javanese mythology, the gamelan orchestra originated from one gigantic gong which was created by the god Syang Hang Manikmayu for the purpose of communication with the other gods. As the need for more articulate communication arose, more and more gongs were created in different pitches. Finally the gamelan orchestra as we know it today came into existence, and still serves as a means of communication with divinity.