Music & Dance
Submitted by postmaster on Fri, 04/11/2008 - 05:54.
In Bali, no temple festival or ceremony is complete without entertainment for the gods, attending guests, and the local people. Temple anniversaries are occasions for all night drama and dance perfomance, with different types of entertainment each concecutive night, sometimes lasting until morning.
The basic accompaniment to any such perfomance is provided by the local gamelan orchestra, a group of brass instruments, metalphones, tuned gongs, cymbals, and hand drums. The instruments are generally owned by the village, as they are extremely expensive and they are stored at the village banjar (meeting hall) and looked after with great pride. No Balinese music has been writen down or recorded until recently. Instead, it has been passed down from generation to generation purely by memory.
