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A note on musical notation I have chosen to devise a new staff for my musical transcriptions, rather than using either the standard Western staff or Javanese kepatihan 'cipher notation'. Western notation is useful for indicating irregular rhythms, semitones, and generally to convey vocal melodies to non-Indonesian readers in the most informative manner possible. But I am uncomfortable representing irregular Balinese pitch intervals through the grid ofWestern music's equidistant lines and spaces. Instead, I have developed a staff system in which the spaces come closer to reflecting Balinese intervals, and the lines represent a generalized Balinese series of pitches. My ultimate and quite simple intention is that the reader can still utilize his or her familiarity with a standard staff, adjust a bit, and then be able to hum a tune to facilitate an immediate musical impression, and to have some visual representation ofmelodic shape and variation, based on the transcription. For the convenience oflndonesianists who are used to thinking in terms ofthe kepatihan system's pitch numbers, I always link them with their corresponding Balinese names for gambelan or vocal pitch in this manner: nding (r), ndong (2), ndeng (3), ndung (5), ndang (6). Instrumentalgambelan pitch names are often spelled without the n, as ding, dong, deng, dung, and dang. The kepatihan system using numbers is not commonly used in Bali, so it would not be appropriate to have that system dominate. As I will discuss later, there is great variety oftunings from one set ofinstruments to another and no two gambelans are tuned identically. McPhee asserts, "In the last analysis, the tones ding, dong, deng, dung and dang are not fixed tones at all, but tonal zones which allow for endless modification of pitch ..." So when I assign approximate Western pitch equivalents to the Balinese pitches, this is even more ofa generalization, but one in which contemporary Balinese musical scholars also engage. As I will suggest in this book, even the traditional Balinese notation and terminology of ding, Musical Notation I xxv dong, deng, dung, and dang represent a highly generalized concept in the context ofvocal music. Any notation system, particularly when applied to an oral tradition, has its limitations in representating musical form but still can provide insights into particular aspects ofa music. Again, lines represent the pitches of the standard pelog or stendro tunings , as played ongambelan instruments. Notes in spaces (and in parenthesis ) indicate pamero, in-between pitches or miscellaneous deviations from the standard tuning, and their Western pitch equivalents are included (in parenthesis) with the other pitches at the left of the stafflines. The corresponding cipher pitches are indicated at the right end of the lines. An arrow just to the left ofa note indicates a chromatic quarter-tone higher or lower, depending on the direction the arrow is pointing. The staffs vary from example to example, with lines added here and dropped there, according to the melodic range of the given melody. One reason for this is that some melodies require ten lines, and with all the large interval spaces, the resulting staff would get cumbersome for most other melodies, some of which require only three lines. The more obvious reason is that I am representing different versions of sltindro and pelog by differently spaced lines. My suggestion is that, just before the reader approaches each transcription , he or she get oriented by humming (starting from the bottom) the sequence of pitches arranged vertically on the left or right, depending on one's choice of Western pitches or kepatihan numbers. When syllables in the lyrics are in parenthesis, they are not part of the word per se, but are meant to suggest a singer's way of shaping, extending, or transforming a vowel sound as it is vocalized. The use of Western rhythmic indications is not intended to imply a metric system. Notation without bar lines is used in much twentiethcentury Western music and is more appropriate for Balinese vocal music, which does not generally follow either a regular pulse or the colotomic phrasings of instrumental music. As is common with oral traditions, each rendition of a given melody can vary considerably. Consequently, my rhythmic and melodic notations represent only one ofmany possible ways ofrendering a tune. My first experiments with flexible staffs were carried out by hand, before I knew that the Finale computer program has a feature for creating custom staffs. Once I began using Finale with musical colleague Jose Evangelista, it seemed incumbent upon us to utilize the...

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