View allAll Photos Tagged WOODHENGE
Pictures of some of the gardens in the grounds of the Castle.
Come and enjoy Herstmonceux Castle Gardens & Grounds, set within 300 acres of carefully managed woodland with themed formal gardens to the rear, the 15th century moated castle embodies the history of medieval England and the romance of renaissance Europe.
Starting at the front of the castle, visitors have the perfect opportunity to take some photographs before walking around to Chestnut Tree Walk and heading towards Chestnuts Tea Room and the Visitors Centre where you can refresh yourself, learn a little about the history of the castle and relax before taking a gentle stroll around our formal gardens.
As you head through the themed gardens you will work your way towards the woodland trails where you can enjoy a peaceful stroll and take in the carefully managed flora and fauna of the estate. Discoveries such as Woodhenge, 300 year old Chestnut Trees, the Folly and Secret Garden as well as our Lake and Moat Walk all add to the escapism of everyday life.
www.herstmonceux-castle.com/explore-gardens-grounds/
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Herstmonceux Castle, East Sussex
Grade l listed.
List Entry Number: 1272785
Statutory Address 1: Herstmonceux Castle, Herstmonceux Park
Listing NGR: TQ6463810388
National Grid Reference: TQ 64652 10335
Details
This list entry was subject to a Minor Amendment on 24/04/2020
TQ 61SW 13/406
HERSTMONCEUX HERSTMONCEUX PARK Herstmonceux Castle, with attached bridges to north and south and causeway with moat retaining walls to west.
GV I Castle/country house. c1441 (when licence to crenellate was granted) for Sir Roger Fiennes; further embellished mid C16 for Baroness and Lord Dacre; altered mid-late C17 for Lord Dacre; part demolished 1776-1777 for Robert Hare; restored and rebuilt early C20, mostly 1911-1912, for Lieutenant Colonel Claude Lowther and 1930s for Sir Paul Latham.
Red brick in English bond with some blue header diaper work; stone dressings; plain tile roofs. Square on plan with inner courtyard, this originally divided into four courts and containing Great Hall, but these and the internal walls of the castle demolished C18; south range and south ends of east and west ranges restored by Lowther, the remainder restored by Latham. Two storeys with attic and basement in parts; five x four wide bays with tapering polygonal towers at corners and between bays, taller at angles and centre. Built and restored in C15 style: exterior has one-light or two-light windows, some transomed; courtyard has more wider windows and some with cusped or round-headed lights; four-centred-arched or segmental-arched moulded or chamfered doorways with C20 studded board doors; tall plinth with moulded offset; moulded string below embattled parapet with roll moulded coping; rainwater pipes with decorative initialled heads; stacks with ribbed and corniced clustered flues; steeply-pitched roofs with roll-moulded coping, some with hipped ends.
South (entrance) elevation: three-storey central gate tower has tall recess containing wide, panelled door, window of two cusped, transomed lights above, and grooves for former drawbridge arms; on second floor two transomed windows of two round-headed lights flank coat of arms of Sir Roger Fiennes; flanking towers have gun ports at base, looped arrow slits, machicolated parapets with arrow slits to merlons, and towers rising above as drums. Projecting from gate tower is long bridge (mostly C20) of eight arches, that to centre wider and shallower, with cutwaters, stone parapet, and central corbelled embrasure with flanking tower buttresses.
North side: central gate towers formerly had rooms on lower floors, of which truncated walls and first-floor fireplace fragment remain; machicolated parapet; at left end of range C17 window openings with later eighteen-pane sashes. West side: attached causeway containing basement room and with three half-arched bridge on south side, walling returning as moat retaining walls; main range has a basement doorway with side-lights in chamfered embrasure.
East side: the second tower has C16 first-floor bow window; tall windows to central tower (which contains chapel); right half of range has older windows blocked and larger C17 replacement openings with later eighteen-pane sashes.
Courtyard: seven-bay arcade to north side and central corbelled stack with clock; three-bay 1930s Great Hall (now library) on west side with decorative tracery to windows and offset buttress; gable of former chapel on east side, has perpendicular tracery to window, a two-storey bay window and two crow-stepped gabled attic windows to its left; several doorways and a two-storey bay window to south side; hipped-roofed dormers; brick-lined well in south-west corner.
Interior: some original features survive, including fireplaces, privies, doorways, dungeon and brick-lined dovecote in south-east tower; other old features were brought in from elsewhere, including doors, fireplaces, panelling. In south range: porter's room has old fireplace and relocated linenfold door (found in cellar); reused traceried wood panelling in rebuilt dining room fireplace; stair hall has fine early C17 wooden stair (brought from Theobalds, Herts) with strapwork roundels between square vase balusters, elaborate relief decoration, and lion finials holding shields; at head of stair; elaborate doorcase of same period ribbed ceiling with pendant finials. Drummers Room has reused panelling, part dated 1697, with fluted pilasters and frieze and elaborately arcaded and fluted-pilastered overmantel. Green Room, on second floor, has restored fireplace with crests and beasts on hood; moulded beams and bosses; and reused traceried panel below courtyard window.
North range: very fine late C17 stair (brought from Wheatley Hall, Doncaster; possibly from the workshop of Grinling Gibbons) with baskets-of-flowers and pendant finials to newels, balustrades of open, leafy, scrollwork with flower roundels, and at head of stair two elaborately carved doorcases in similar style with shields in broken pediments. Former ball room has arched ceiling with decorative plasterwork; C17-style panelling; reused elaborately-decorated C17 wooden fireplace overmantel (from Madingley Hall, Cambs.) with two orders of caryatids and embossed panels.
East range: former chapel has reused C15 wooden screen (from France) set in west wall; former Drawing room has elaborate stone fireplace, 1930s in C16 style, and in ante room a reused richly decorated fireplace with griffins and portrait roundels. The C15 castle was well restored in the early C20 and the many fine features which were brought in at that time add to its importance.
Listing NGR: TQ6463810388
Sources
Books and journals
Calvert, D , The History of Herstmonceux Castle
Pevsner, N, Nairn, I, The Buildings of England: Sussex, (1965), 534-6
'Country Life' in 18 May, (1929), 702-709
'Country Life' in 7 December, (1935), 606-612
'Country Life' in 14 December, (1935)
Other
Register of Parks and Gardens of Special Historic Interest in England, Part 14 East Sussex,
historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1272785
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Before 1066 Herst (meaning forest or wood) was the name of a prominent local Anglo-Saxon family and ownership of the family's estate passed into the hands of the victorious Normans. In 1131 the manor and estates were transferred to Drogo de Monceux, a great grandson of William the Conqueror . Drogo's son Ingleram married Idonea de Herst, thus founding the Herstmonceux line.
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Herstmonceux Castle Gardens and Grounds is a 300 acre estate including woodland, formal themed gardens and of course a 15th century moated castle.
Made from red brick Herstmonceux Castle is one of the earliest examples of a brick built building in England.
Read more about the history here:-
www.herstmonceux-castle.com/history/
historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1000231
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HERSTMONCEUX CASTLE AND PLACE
Heritage Category: Park and Garden
Grade: II*
List Entry Number: 1000231
National Grid Reference: TQ 64645 10713
Details
A C15 castle, surrounded by a medieval park with significant surviving landscape and archaeological features, additional C18 landscape and built features and with new and restored elements from the C20.
HISTORIC DEVELOPMENT
The origin of the park at Herstmonceux is unrecorded but it seems likely that it was in existence by the C12. The estate, including the park, passed to the Fiennes family in 1330 and in 1441 Sir Roger Fiennes applied for a licence to build the present castle and to enlarge the park. In 1449 the estate passed to Sir Roger's son who later became Lord Dacre. The Dacre family sold the estate to George Naylor in 1708 and in 1775 the Hare-Naylor family abandoned the Castle and moved into Herstmonceux Place, in the north-west corner of the park. The Castle was virtually dismantled and became a picturesque ruin in the park. The estate was sold to Thomas Reed Kemp in 1807 and purchased from him in 1819 for John Gillon. He sold it in 1846 to H B Curteis of nearby Windmill Hill Place from whom it passed by succession to Herbert Curteis. The Castle and surrounding park were sold off in 1911, with Herstmonceux Place and Windmill Hill Place becoming separate entities again. Herstmonceux Place was purchased by the James family and retained a significant area of the park. The Castle was partly restored by the new owner, Colonel Claude Lowther. He died in 1929 and in 1932 the Castle estate, plus Herstmonceux Place, was purchased by Sir Paul Latham. He completed the restoration of the Castle and, with his architect, Walter Hines Godfrey (1881-1961), restored and developed the gardens.
Latham sold the Castle and its park to the Royal Greenwich Observatory in 1946 which erected a series of buildings to house the telescopes. Sir Paul Latham died in 1952 and in 1958 the remainder of the park was sold for agricultural use. Herstmonceux Place was sold and divided into apartments in 1960. In 1989 the Castle and its park were sold to a development company. The International Study Centre of Queen's University (Canada) subsequently purchased the estate and are the present owners. The Equatorial Telescope Group complex is run as a Science Centre.
DESCRIPTION
LOCATION, AREA, BOUNDARIES, LANDFORM, SETTING Herstmonceux Castle and park and Herstmonceux Place which together comprise the 148ha of the registered site lie just to the south of the A271 Hailsham to Battle road. The site is screened on its west side by a woodland belt along Church Road which runs south from the A271, past the west front of Herstmonceux Place to All Saints' church, which sits just outside the south-west corner of the park. To the west of Church Road and south-west of the park's southern boundary, hedged pasture merges into the flat, open landscape water systems of the Pevensey Levels. The east side of the site is bounded by Wartling Road and partly screened by Wartling Wood on its far side. Wartling village lies about 1km away across bordering farmland to the south-east. The northern boundary merges into farmland with small woods.
While the present east and west road boundaries of the park appear to be of early C15 origin and have remained unchanged since, the medieval park extended further to the south and also to the north and north-west, reaching the villages of Windmill Hill and of Gardener Street on the present A271. The estate had been reduced in size to about 160ha by the time a survey was made in 1570 (BM). The Castle is sited at the south end of a stream valley emerging from the very edge of the Weald onto the Pevensey Levels. The parkland rises to the north and east to sheltering wooded crests. To the north-west a high ridge separates the Castle from the site of Herstmonceux Place.
ENTRANCES AND APPROACHES The present main entrance to the Castle and the park is from Wartling Road in the south-east corner, a drive running c 700m westwards before turning north to the Castle's west-facing entrance front. There is a second entrance in the south-west corner on Church Lane beside West Lodge, built by Godfrey in 1933, the drive from here, known by its post-war name of Flamsteed Road, probably serving as the Castle's principal entrance in the C15 and connecting it with All Saints' church. Both entrances and drives are recorded on the 1570 survey, together with a third gate, Cowper's Gate, on the north boundary north-west of Comphurst Wood. In the C15 the west and east gates were linked by a medieval road which survives (1990s) as a well-defined track lying to the south of the present main entrance drive, which follows a C20 alignment.
PRINCIPAL BUILDING Herstmonceux Castle (listed grade I) stands in the centre of the shallow valley, its principal front facing south. It is square in plan, constructed in the newly fashionable red brick, and is surrounded by two water-filled arms of a moat. It was built from 1441 and replaced the former manor house. Service buildings probably lay to the west on the site of the present C20, cottage-style lodges, one of which serves as a visitor centre and tea room. The present main entrance is on the west. The Castle was largely dismantled in 1777, leaving only its gatehouse and exterior walls intact, and was restored, although to a new interior lay-out, between 1911 and 1932, work from 1929 being carried out by the architect Walter Hines. The central, enclosed courtyard is laid to lawn and an axial flagged path lined by Irish yews, this design being part of Col Lowther's work between 1911 and 1929.
Herstmonceux Place stands on the north-west boundary of the park and commands extensive views over it to the south and east. It has an entrance front of c 1720. Samuel Wyatt enlarged and added two new elevations to the house for the Hare-Naylor family when they moved here in 1775.
East of the Castle, on higher ground, stands the six-domed, former Equatorial Group Telescope building, erected in 1958 by the Royal Greenwich Observatory. It forms a prominent landmark for a considerable distance to the south and west.
GARDENS AND PLEASURE GROUNDS The area of formal gardens immediately around the Castle include the moat to the south and east and the extended walled garden to the north.
The present moat arms around the south and east sides of the Castle are part of what was presumably a complete square in the C15. An extension northwards from the eastern arm, into the stream valley to form a broad mere, may also be a C15 feature. The mere, which appears to have been restored by Latham, is now managed as a reed bed with the feeder stream running through two channels of open water southwards into the moat. The moat is recorded as already drained by the survey of 1570 and laid out with gardens by the late C18 (CL 1918). The moat was cleared and re-flooded in 1933 by Sir Paul Latham, the present southern arm having been extended to approximately double its original c 20m width by Col Lowther.
The rectangular walled garden (listed grade II) stretches some 200m from the north face of the Castle, over rising ground. A strong formal axis is maintained northwards through the three main compartments. The first, closest to the Castle, contains a central flagged path, laid in 1995 to replace the previous grass surface, which is flanked each side by five free-standing sections of clipped yew hedge. There are rectangular lawns to either side with a flagged perimeter path and herbaceous borders along the east and west walls. A central set of steps leads up to the second, 50m long compartment, at the mid-point of which the path encompasses a circular rose bed, replacing a former pool. There are lawns to east and west. The north wall enclosing this garden is pierced by a central loggia which gives access to the third compartment which is divided by yew hedges into three smaller enclosures. The central one, beyond the loggia, contains a former lily pool or swimming pool which is now laid out to a box parterre. To the west is the tennis court and to the east, a rose garden. The walled garden appears to have been laid out soon after the Castle was built, but was extended before the C17. In the C18 it was in use as a kitchen garden and orchard and was redesigned by Col Lowther with a central axis flanked by roses and with herbaceous borders along the east and west walls. The present (1990s) formal treatment and the addition of the northernmost compartment and loggia were the work of Walter Hines Godfrey in 1933-5.
North-east of the Castle, the extended moat arm is fed by the stream which runs southwards down the valley feeding a tiered chain of pools and dams en route. The stream is culverted through the valley or 'Temple Field', which is now managed as a meadow. The ponds, which have been (1990s) partially cleared from the silted condition they were in in the early C20, were most likely formed by clay digging for the Castle's bricks and may also have numbered among the four stew ponds referred to in the survey of 1570.
The Temple Field is enclosed by woodland and the folly in the style of a little C18 house at its north-east end was built by Sir Paul Latham to serve as an eyecatcher from his rooms in the Castle. South of the Castle are open, level lawns which replace the arena constructed by Col Lowther. Further south, the present pasture landscape is part of a medieval system of water meadows and reed-bed irrigation for which the earthworks survive. There are extensive views over the Levels.
From the south-west corner of the moat, fragmented, linear groups of sweet chestnut trees follow a course northwards for a distance of 820m to the dam below the pond in Comphurst Wood. The trees line the route of the medieval, northern approach to the Castle but are most likely to have been planted by Sir Thomas Lennard in the C17 (Rodwell 1989). Trees are being restored to sections of the route in 1997.
The present gardens of Herstmonceux Place are laid to lawn with surrounding belts of ornamental shrubbery and trees to the north and south. The terrace on the south-east front was added by the James family in the early C20 and commands extensive views over the park to north, east and south.
PARK The present parkland extends over rising ground to the north-west, north and north-east of the Castle. The open areas are entirely under arable cultivation and virtually none of the scatter of clumps on the north-western slopes shown on the 1st edition OS map surveyed 1873(5 survive in the 1990s. The northern slopes have no parkland trees at all, and only a few individuals are shown on the OS 1st edition. The early C15 manor house was surrounded by a deer park, the survey of 1570 describing the park as bounded by a park pale, laid one third to lawns with 'great timber trees' and stocked with fallow deer. John Norden's map of 1595 shows the oval paled enclosure of the park with a central lake and south-flowing stream. There are few records of the park in the C18 and C19 and by the time of the Tithe survey in 1839, considerable areas of land had already been disparked and laid out to fields.
The park contains a number of woodlands, the largest areas lying to the north-west and north and north-east of Temple Field. Plantation Wood (to the north-east) contains mature C19 rhododendron shrubberies, winding walks and a cascade and is probably of C18 origin although partly replanted and extended west and south in the C20 by the RGO for commercial forestry purposes. The mixed woodland to the north and north-west is also of mid C20 origin, the north-western block on the ridge between Herstmonceux Castle and Place replacing the probably C18 Egg Plantation.
REFERENCES
Country Life, 43 (2 March 1918), pp 214-21; (9 March 1918), pp 242-8; (16 March 1918), pp 270-3; 65 (18 May 1929), pp 702-9; 78 (30 November 1935), pp 566-72; (7 December 1935), pp 606-12; (14 December 1935), pp 630-5 I Nairn and N Pevsner, The Buildings of England: Sussex (1965), pp 534-7 W Rodwell, Herstmonceux Castle, an Archaeological Assessment of the Park (1989) Garden History 17, no 2 (1989), pp 177-8
Maps Survey, 1570 (British Museum Add Mss 5679, fo.266) John Norden, Map of Sussex, 1595 W Gardner and T Gream, A Topographical Map of the County of Sussex..., 1" to 1 mile, surveyed 1795 Tithe map for Herstmonceux parish, 1839 (East Sussex Record Office)
OS Old Series, 1" to 1 mile, 1813 OS 6" to 1 mile: 1st edition surveyed 1875 2nd edition published 1899 3rd edition published 1910 OS 25" to 1 mile: 1st edition surveyed 1875 2nd edition published 1909
Description written: July 1998 Register Inspector: VCH Edited: March 2000
historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/100023...
Pictures of some of the gardens in the grounds of the Castle.
Come and enjoy Herstmonceux Castle Gardens & Grounds, set within 300 acres of carefully managed woodland with themed formal gardens to the rear, the 15th century moated castle embodies the history of medieval England and the romance of renaissance Europe.
Starting at the front of the castle, visitors have the perfect opportunity to take some photographs before walking around to Chestnut Tree Walk and heading towards Chestnuts Tea Room and the Visitors Centre where you can refresh yourself, learn a little about the history of the castle and relax before taking a gentle stroll around our formal gardens.
As you head through the themed gardens you will work your way towards the woodland trails where you can enjoy a peaceful stroll and take in the carefully managed flora and fauna of the estate. Discoveries such as Woodhenge, 300 year old Chestnut Trees, the Folly and Secret Garden as well as our Lake and Moat Walk all add to the escapism of everyday life.
www.herstmonceux-castle.com/explore-gardens-grounds/
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Herstmonceux Castle, East Sussex
Grade l listed.
List Entry Number: 1272785
Statutory Address 1: Herstmonceux Castle, Herstmonceux Park
Listing NGR: TQ6463810388
National Grid Reference: TQ 64652 10335
Details
This list entry was subject to a Minor Amendment on 24/04/2020
TQ 61SW 13/406
HERSTMONCEUX HERSTMONCEUX PARK Herstmonceux Castle, with attached bridges to north and south and causeway with moat retaining walls to west.
GV I Castle/country house. c1441 (when licence to crenellate was granted) for Sir Roger Fiennes; further embellished mid C16 for Baroness and Lord Dacre; altered mid-late C17 for Lord Dacre; part demolished 1776-1777 for Robert Hare; restored and rebuilt early C20, mostly 1911-1912, for Lieutenant Colonel Claude Lowther and 1930s for Sir Paul Latham.
Red brick in English bond with some blue header diaper work; stone dressings; plain tile roofs. Square on plan with inner courtyard, this originally divided into four courts and containing Great Hall, but these and the internal walls of the castle demolished C18; south range and south ends of east and west ranges restored by Lowther, the remainder restored by Latham. Two storeys with attic and basement in parts; five x four wide bays with tapering polygonal towers at corners and between bays, taller at angles and centre. Built and restored in C15 style: exterior has one-light or two-light windows, some transomed; courtyard has more wider windows and some with cusped or round-headed lights; four-centred-arched or segmental-arched moulded or chamfered doorways with C20 studded board doors; tall plinth with moulded offset; moulded string below embattled parapet with roll moulded coping; rainwater pipes with decorative initialled heads; stacks with ribbed and corniced clustered flues; steeply-pitched roofs with roll-moulded coping, some with hipped ends.
South (entrance) elevation: three-storey central gate tower has tall recess containing wide, panelled door, window of two cusped, transomed lights above, and grooves for former drawbridge arms; on second floor two transomed windows of two round-headed lights flank coat of arms of Sir Roger Fiennes; flanking towers have gun ports at base, looped arrow slits, machicolated parapets with arrow slits to merlons, and towers rising above as drums. Projecting from gate tower is long bridge (mostly C20) of eight arches, that to centre wider and shallower, with cutwaters, stone parapet, and central corbelled embrasure with flanking tower buttresses.
North side: central gate towers formerly had rooms on lower floors, of which truncated walls and first-floor fireplace fragment remain; machicolated parapet; at left end of range C17 window openings with later eighteen-pane sashes. West side: attached causeway containing basement room and with three half-arched bridge on south side, walling returning as moat retaining walls; main range has a basement doorway with side-lights in chamfered embrasure.
East side: the second tower has C16 first-floor bow window; tall windows to central tower (which contains chapel); right half of range has older windows blocked and larger C17 replacement openings with later eighteen-pane sashes.
Courtyard: seven-bay arcade to north side and central corbelled stack with clock; three-bay 1930s Great Hall (now library) on west side with decorative tracery to windows and offset buttress; gable of former chapel on east side, has perpendicular tracery to window, a two-storey bay window and two crow-stepped gabled attic windows to its left; several doorways and a two-storey bay window to south side; hipped-roofed dormers; brick-lined well in south-west corner.
Interior: some original features survive, including fireplaces, privies, doorways, dungeon and brick-lined dovecote in south-east tower; other old features were brought in from elsewhere, including doors, fireplaces, panelling. In south range: porter's room has old fireplace and relocated linenfold door (found in cellar); reused traceried wood panelling in rebuilt dining room fireplace; stair hall has fine early C17 wooden stair (brought from Theobalds, Herts) with strapwork roundels between square vase balusters, elaborate relief decoration, and lion finials holding shields; at head of stair; elaborate doorcase of same period ribbed ceiling with pendant finials. Drummers Room has reused panelling, part dated 1697, with fluted pilasters and frieze and elaborately arcaded and fluted-pilastered overmantel. Green Room, on second floor, has restored fireplace with crests and beasts on hood; moulded beams and bosses; and reused traceried panel below courtyard window.
North range: very fine late C17 stair (brought from Wheatley Hall, Doncaster; possibly from the workshop of Grinling Gibbons) with baskets-of-flowers and pendant finials to newels, balustrades of open, leafy, scrollwork with flower roundels, and at head of stair two elaborately carved doorcases in similar style with shields in broken pediments. Former ball room has arched ceiling with decorative plasterwork; C17-style panelling; reused elaborately-decorated C17 wooden fireplace overmantel (from Madingley Hall, Cambs.) with two orders of caryatids and embossed panels.
East range: former chapel has reused C15 wooden screen (from France) set in west wall; former Drawing room has elaborate stone fireplace, 1930s in C16 style, and in ante room a reused richly decorated fireplace with griffins and portrait roundels. The C15 castle was well restored in the early C20 and the many fine features which were brought in at that time add to its importance.
Listing NGR: TQ6463810388
Sources
Books and journals
Calvert, D , The History of Herstmonceux Castle
Pevsner, N, Nairn, I, The Buildings of England: Sussex, (1965), 534-6
'Country Life' in 18 May, (1929), 702-709
'Country Life' in 7 December, (1935), 606-612
'Country Life' in 14 December, (1935)
Other
Register of Parks and Gardens of Special Historic Interest in England, Part 14 East Sussex,
historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1272785
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Before 1066 Herst (meaning forest or wood) was the name of a prominent local Anglo-Saxon family and ownership of the family's estate passed into the hands of the victorious Normans. In 1131 the manor and estates were transferred to Drogo de Monceux, a great grandson of William the Conqueror . Drogo's son Ingleram married Idonea de Herst, thus founding the Herstmonceux line.
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Herstmonceux Castle Gardens and Grounds is a 300 acre estate including woodland, formal themed gardens and of course a 15th century moated castle.
Made from red brick Herstmonceux Castle is one of the earliest examples of a brick built building in England.
Read more about the history here:-
www.herstmonceux-castle.com/history/
historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1000231
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HERSTMONCEUX CASTLE AND PLACE
Heritage Category: Park and Garden
Grade: II*
List Entry Number: 1000231
National Grid Reference: TQ 64645 10713
Details
A C15 castle, surrounded by a medieval park with significant surviving landscape and archaeological features, additional C18 landscape and built features and with new and restored elements from the C20.
HISTORIC DEVELOPMENT
The origin of the park at Herstmonceux is unrecorded but it seems likely that it was in existence by the C12. The estate, including the park, passed to the Fiennes family in 1330 and in 1441 Sir Roger Fiennes applied for a licence to build the present castle and to enlarge the park. In 1449 the estate passed to Sir Roger's son who later became Lord Dacre. The Dacre family sold the estate to George Naylor in 1708 and in 1775 the Hare-Naylor family abandoned the Castle and moved into Herstmonceux Place, in the north-west corner of the park. The Castle was virtually dismantled and became a picturesque ruin in the park. The estate was sold to Thomas Reed Kemp in 1807 and purchased from him in 1819 for John Gillon. He sold it in 1846 to H B Curteis of nearby Windmill Hill Place from whom it passed by succession to Herbert Curteis. The Castle and surrounding park were sold off in 1911, with Herstmonceux Place and Windmill Hill Place becoming separate entities again. Herstmonceux Place was purchased by the James family and retained a significant area of the park. The Castle was partly restored by the new owner, Colonel Claude Lowther. He died in 1929 and in 1932 the Castle estate, plus Herstmonceux Place, was purchased by Sir Paul Latham. He completed the restoration of the Castle and, with his architect, Walter Hines Godfrey (1881-1961), restored and developed the gardens.
Latham sold the Castle and its park to the Royal Greenwich Observatory in 1946 which erected a series of buildings to house the telescopes. Sir Paul Latham died in 1952 and in 1958 the remainder of the park was sold for agricultural use. Herstmonceux Place was sold and divided into apartments in 1960. In 1989 the Castle and its park were sold to a development company. The International Study Centre of Queen's University (Canada) subsequently purchased the estate and are the present owners. The Equatorial Telescope Group complex is run as a Science Centre.
DESCRIPTION
LOCATION, AREA, BOUNDARIES, LANDFORM, SETTING Herstmonceux Castle and park and Herstmonceux Place which together comprise the 148ha of the registered site lie just to the south of the A271 Hailsham to Battle road. The site is screened on its west side by a woodland belt along Church Road which runs south from the A271, past the west front of Herstmonceux Place to All Saints' church, which sits just outside the south-west corner of the park. To the west of Church Road and south-west of the park's southern boundary, hedged pasture merges into the flat, open landscape water systems of the Pevensey Levels. The east side of the site is bounded by Wartling Road and partly screened by Wartling Wood on its far side. Wartling village lies about 1km away across bordering farmland to the south-east. The northern boundary merges into farmland with small woods.
While the present east and west road boundaries of the park appear to be of early C15 origin and have remained unchanged since, the medieval park extended further to the south and also to the north and north-west, reaching the villages of Windmill Hill and of Gardener Street on the present A271. The estate had been reduced in size to about 160ha by the time a survey was made in 1570 (BM). The Castle is sited at the south end of a stream valley emerging from the very edge of the Weald onto the Pevensey Levels. The parkland rises to the north and east to sheltering wooded crests. To the north-west a high ridge separates the Castle from the site of Herstmonceux Place.
ENTRANCES AND APPROACHES The present main entrance to the Castle and the park is from Wartling Road in the south-east corner, a drive running c 700m westwards before turning north to the Castle's west-facing entrance front. There is a second entrance in the south-west corner on Church Lane beside West Lodge, built by Godfrey in 1933, the drive from here, known by its post-war name of Flamsteed Road, probably serving as the Castle's principal entrance in the C15 and connecting it with All Saints' church. Both entrances and drives are recorded on the 1570 survey, together with a third gate, Cowper's Gate, on the north boundary north-west of Comphurst Wood. In the C15 the west and east gates were linked by a medieval road which survives (1990s) as a well-defined track lying to the south of the present main entrance drive, which follows a C20 alignment.
PRINCIPAL BUILDING Herstmonceux Castle (listed grade I) stands in the centre of the shallow valley, its principal front facing south. It is square in plan, constructed in the newly fashionable red brick, and is surrounded by two water-filled arms of a moat. It was built from 1441 and replaced the former manor house. Service buildings probably lay to the west on the site of the present C20, cottage-style lodges, one of which serves as a visitor centre and tea room. The present main entrance is on the west. The Castle was largely dismantled in 1777, leaving only its gatehouse and exterior walls intact, and was restored, although to a new interior lay-out, between 1911 and 1932, work from 1929 being carried out by the architect Walter Hines. The central, enclosed courtyard is laid to lawn and an axial flagged path lined by Irish yews, this design being part of Col Lowther's work between 1911 and 1929.
Herstmonceux Place stands on the north-west boundary of the park and commands extensive views over it to the south and east. It has an entrance front of c 1720. Samuel Wyatt enlarged and added two new elevations to the house for the Hare-Naylor family when they moved here in 1775.
East of the Castle, on higher ground, stands the six-domed, former Equatorial Group Telescope building, erected in 1958 by the Royal Greenwich Observatory. It forms a prominent landmark for a considerable distance to the south and west.
GARDENS AND PLEASURE GROUNDS The area of formal gardens immediately around the Castle include the moat to the south and east and the extended walled garden to the north.
The present moat arms around the south and east sides of the Castle are part of what was presumably a complete square in the C15. An extension northwards from the eastern arm, into the stream valley to form a broad mere, may also be a C15 feature. The mere, which appears to have been restored by Latham, is now managed as a reed bed with the feeder stream running through two channels of open water southwards into the moat. The moat is recorded as already drained by the survey of 1570 and laid out with gardens by the late C18 (CL 1918). The moat was cleared and re-flooded in 1933 by Sir Paul Latham, the present southern arm having been extended to approximately double its original c 20m width by Col Lowther.
The rectangular walled garden (listed grade II) stretches some 200m from the north face of the Castle, over rising ground. A strong formal axis is maintained northwards through the three main compartments. The first, closest to the Castle, contains a central flagged path, laid in 1995 to replace the previous grass surface, which is flanked each side by five free-standing sections of clipped yew hedge. There are rectangular lawns to either side with a flagged perimeter path and herbaceous borders along the east and west walls. A central set of steps leads up to the second, 50m long compartment, at the mid-point of which the path encompasses a circular rose bed, replacing a former pool. There are lawns to east and west. The north wall enclosing this garden is pierced by a central loggia which gives access to the third compartment which is divided by yew hedges into three smaller enclosures. The central one, beyond the loggia, contains a former lily pool or swimming pool which is now laid out to a box parterre. To the west is the tennis court and to the east, a rose garden. The walled garden appears to have been laid out soon after the Castle was built, but was extended before the C17. In the C18 it was in use as a kitchen garden and orchard and was redesigned by Col Lowther with a central axis flanked by roses and with herbaceous borders along the east and west walls. The present (1990s) formal treatment and the addition of the northernmost compartment and loggia were the work of Walter Hines Godfrey in 1933-5.
North-east of the Castle, the extended moat arm is fed by the stream which runs southwards down the valley feeding a tiered chain of pools and dams en route. The stream is culverted through the valley or 'Temple Field', which is now managed as a meadow. The ponds, which have been (1990s) partially cleared from the silted condition they were in in the early C20, were most likely formed by clay digging for the Castle's bricks and may also have numbered among the four stew ponds referred to in the survey of 1570.
The Temple Field is enclosed by woodland and the folly in the style of a little C18 house at its north-east end was built by Sir Paul Latham to serve as an eyecatcher from his rooms in the Castle. South of the Castle are open, level lawns which replace the arena constructed by Col Lowther. Further south, the present pasture landscape is part of a medieval system of water meadows and reed-bed irrigation for which the earthworks survive. There are extensive views over the Levels.
From the south-west corner of the moat, fragmented, linear groups of sweet chestnut trees follow a course northwards for a distance of 820m to the dam below the pond in Comphurst Wood. The trees line the route of the medieval, northern approach to the Castle but are most likely to have been planted by Sir Thomas Lennard in the C17 (Rodwell 1989). Trees are being restored to sections of the route in 1997.
The present gardens of Herstmonceux Place are laid to lawn with surrounding belts of ornamental shrubbery and trees to the north and south. The terrace on the south-east front was added by the James family in the early C20 and commands extensive views over the park to north, east and south.
PARK The present parkland extends over rising ground to the north-west, north and north-east of the Castle. The open areas are entirely under arable cultivation and virtually none of the scatter of clumps on the north-western slopes shown on the 1st edition OS map surveyed 1873(5 survive in the 1990s. The northern slopes have no parkland trees at all, and only a few individuals are shown on the OS 1st edition. The early C15 manor house was surrounded by a deer park, the survey of 1570 describing the park as bounded by a park pale, laid one third to lawns with 'great timber trees' and stocked with fallow deer. John Norden's map of 1595 shows the oval paled enclosure of the park with a central lake and south-flowing stream. There are few records of the park in the C18 and C19 and by the time of the Tithe survey in 1839, considerable areas of land had already been disparked and laid out to fields.
The park contains a number of woodlands, the largest areas lying to the north-west and north and north-east of Temple Field. Plantation Wood (to the north-east) contains mature C19 rhododendron shrubberies, winding walks and a cascade and is probably of C18 origin although partly replanted and extended west and south in the C20 by the RGO for commercial forestry purposes. The mixed woodland to the north and north-west is also of mid C20 origin, the north-western block on the ridge between Herstmonceux Castle and Place replacing the probably C18 Egg Plantation.
REFERENCES
Country Life, 43 (2 March 1918), pp 214-21; (9 March 1918), pp 242-8; (16 March 1918), pp 270-3; 65 (18 May 1929), pp 702-9; 78 (30 November 1935), pp 566-72; (7 December 1935), pp 606-12; (14 December 1935), pp 630-5 I Nairn and N Pevsner, The Buildings of England: Sussex (1965), pp 534-7 W Rodwell, Herstmonceux Castle, an Archaeological Assessment of the Park (1989) Garden History 17, no 2 (1989), pp 177-8
Maps Survey, 1570 (British Museum Add Mss 5679, fo.266) John Norden, Map of Sussex, 1595 W Gardner and T Gream, A Topographical Map of the County of Sussex..., 1" to 1 mile, surveyed 1795 Tithe map for Herstmonceux parish, 1839 (East Sussex Record Office)
OS Old Series, 1" to 1 mile, 1813 OS 6" to 1 mile: 1st edition surveyed 1875 2nd edition published 1899 3rd edition published 1910 OS 25" to 1 mile: 1st edition surveyed 1875 2nd edition published 1909
Description written: July 1998 Register Inspector: VCH Edited: March 2000
historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/100023...
Pictures of some of the gardens in the grounds of the Castle.
Detail: Elizabethan Garden.
Come and enjoy Herstmonceux Castle Gardens & Grounds, set within 300 acres of carefully managed woodland with themed formal gardens to the rear, the 15th century moated castle embodies the history of medieval England and the romance of renaissance Europe.
Starting at the front of the castle, visitors have the perfect opportunity to take some photographs before walking around to Chestnut Tree Walk and heading towards Chestnuts Tea Room and the Visitors Centre where you can refresh yourself, learn a little about the history of the castle and relax before taking a gentle stroll around our formal gardens.
As you head through the themed gardens you will work your way towards the woodland trails where you can enjoy a peaceful stroll and take in the carefully managed flora and fauna of the estate. Discoveries such as Woodhenge, 300 year old Chestnut Trees, the Folly and Secret Garden as well as our Lake and Moat Walk all add to the escapism of everyday life.
www.herstmonceux-castle.com/explore-gardens-grounds/
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HERSTMONCEUX CASTLE AND PLACE
Heritage Category: Park and Garden
Grade: II*
List Entry Number: 1000231
National Grid Reference: TQ 64645 10713
Details
A C15 castle, surrounded by a medieval park with significant surviving landscape and archaeological features, additional C18 landscape and built features and with new and restored elements from the C20.
HISTORIC DEVELOPMENT
The origin of the park at Herstmonceux is unrecorded but it seems likely that it was in existence by the C12. The estate, including the park, passed to the Fiennes family in 1330 and in 1441 Sir Roger Fiennes applied for a licence to build the present castle and to enlarge the park. In 1449 the estate passed to Sir Roger's son who later became Lord Dacre. The Dacre family sold the estate to George Naylor in 1708 and in 1775 the Hare-Naylor family abandoned the Castle and moved into Herstmonceux Place, in the north-west corner of the park. The Castle was virtually dismantled and became a picturesque ruin in the park. The estate was sold to Thomas Reed Kemp in 1807 and purchased from him in 1819 for John Gillon. He sold it in 1846 to H B Curteis of nearby Windmill Hill Place from whom it passed by succession to Herbert Curteis. The Castle and surrounding park were sold off in 1911, with Herstmonceux Place and Windmill Hill Place becoming separate entities again. Herstmonceux Place was purchased by the James family and retained a significant area of the park. The Castle was partly restored by the new owner, Colonel Claude Lowther. He died in 1929 and in 1932 the Castle estate, plus Herstmonceux Place, was purchased by Sir Paul Latham. He completed the restoration of the Castle and, with his architect, Walter Hines Godfrey (1881-1961), restored and developed the gardens.
Latham sold the Castle and its park to the Royal Greenwich Observatory in 1946 which erected a series of buildings to house the telescopes. Sir Paul Latham died in 1952 and in 1958 the remainder of the park was sold for agricultural use. Herstmonceux Place was sold and divided into apartments in 1960. In 1989 the Castle and its park were sold to a development company. The International Study Centre of Queen's University (Canada) subsequently purchased the estate and are the present owners. The Equatorial Telescope Group complex is run as a Science Centre.
DESCRIPTION
LOCATION, AREA, BOUNDARIES, LANDFORM, SETTING Herstmonceux Castle and park and Herstmonceux Place which together comprise the 148ha of the registered site lie just to the south of the A271 Hailsham to Battle road. The site is screened on its west side by a woodland belt along Church Road which runs south from the A271, past the west front of Herstmonceux Place to All Saints' church, which sits just outside the south-west corner of the park. To the west of Church Road and south-west of the park's southern boundary, hedged pasture merges into the flat, open landscape water systems of the Pevensey Levels. The east side of the site is bounded by Wartling Road and partly screened by Wartling Wood on its far side. Wartling village lies about 1km away across bordering farmland to the south-east. The northern boundary merges into farmland with small woods.
While the present east and west road boundaries of the park appear to be of early C15 origin and have remained unchanged since, the medieval park extended further to the south and also to the north and north-west, reaching the villages of Windmill Hill and of Gardener Street on the present A271. The estate had been reduced in size to about 160ha by the time a survey was made in 1570 (BM). The Castle is sited at the south end of a stream valley emerging from the very edge of the Weald onto the Pevensey Levels. The parkland rises to the north and east to sheltering wooded crests. To the north-west a high ridge separates the Castle from the site of Herstmonceux Place.
ENTRANCES AND APPROACHES The present main entrance to the Castle and the park is from Wartling Road in the south-east corner, a drive running c 700m westwards before turning north to the Castle's west-facing entrance front. There is a second entrance in the south-west corner on Church Lane beside West Lodge, built by Godfrey in 1933, the drive from here, known by its post-war name of Flamsteed Road, probably serving as the Castle's principal entrance in the C15 and connecting it with All Saints' church. Both entrances and drives are recorded on the 1570 survey, together with a third gate, Cowper's Gate, on the north boundary north-west of Comphurst Wood. In the C15 the west and east gates were linked by a medieval road which survives (1990s) as a well-defined track lying to the south of the present main entrance drive, which follows a C20 alignment.
PRINCIPAL BUILDING Herstmonceux Castle (listed grade I) stands in the centre of the shallow valley, its principal front facing south. It is square in plan, constructed in the newly fashionable red brick, and is surrounded by two water-filled arms of a moat. It was built from 1441 and replaced the former manor house. Service buildings probably lay to the west on the site of the present C20, cottage-style lodges, one of which serves as a visitor centre and tea room. The present main entrance is on the west. The Castle was largely dismantled in 1777, leaving only its gatehouse and exterior walls intact, and was restored, although to a new interior lay-out, between 1911 and 1932, work from 1929 being carried out by the architect Walter Hines. The central, enclosed courtyard is laid to lawn and an axial flagged path lined by Irish yews, this design being part of Col Lowther's work between 1911 and 1929.
Herstmonceux Place stands on the north-west boundary of the park and commands extensive views over it to the south and east. It has an entrance front of c 1720. Samuel Wyatt enlarged and added two new elevations to the house for the Hare-Naylor family when they moved here in 1775.
East of the Castle, on higher ground, stands the six-domed, former Equatorial Group Telescope building, erected in 1958 by the Royal Greenwich Observatory. It forms a prominent landmark for a considerable distance to the south and west.
GARDENS AND PLEASURE GROUNDS The area of formal gardens immediately around the Castle include the moat to the south and east and the extended walled garden to the north.
The present moat arms around the south and east sides of the Castle are part of what was presumably a complete square in the C15. An extension northwards from the eastern arm, into the stream valley to form a broad mere, may also be a C15 feature. The mere, which appears to have been restored by Latham, is now managed as a reed bed with the feeder stream running through two channels of open water southwards into the moat. The moat is recorded as already drained by the survey of 1570 and laid out with gardens by the late C18 (CL 1918). The moat was cleared and re-flooded in 1933 by Sir Paul Latham, the present southern arm having been extended to approximately double its original c 20m width by Col Lowther.
The rectangular walled garden (listed grade II) stretches some 200m from the north face of the Castle, over rising ground. A strong formal axis is maintained northwards through the three main compartments. The first, closest to the Castle, contains a central flagged path, laid in 1995 to replace the previous grass surface, which is flanked each side by five free-standing sections of clipped yew hedge. There are rectangular lawns to either side with a flagged perimeter path and herbaceous borders along the east and west walls. A central set of steps leads up to the second, 50m long compartment, at the mid-point of which the path encompasses a circular rose bed, replacing a former pool. There are lawns to east and west. The north wall enclosing this garden is pierced by a central loggia which gives access to the third compartment which is divided by yew hedges into three smaller enclosures. The central one, beyond the loggia, contains a former lily pool or swimming pool which is now laid out to a box parterre. To the west is the tennis court and to the east, a rose garden. The walled garden appears to have been laid out soon after the Castle was built, but was extended before the C17. In the C18 it was in use as a kitchen garden and orchard and was redesigned by Col Lowther with a central axis flanked by roses and with herbaceous borders along the east and west walls. The present (1990s) formal treatment and the addition of the northernmost compartment and loggia were the work of Walter Hines Godfrey in 1933-5.
North-east of the Castle, the extended moat arm is fed by the stream which runs southwards down the valley feeding a tiered chain of pools and dams en route. The stream is culverted through the valley or 'Temple Field', which is now managed as a meadow. The ponds, which have been (1990s) partially cleared from the silted condition they were in in the early C20, were most likely formed by clay digging for the Castle's bricks and may also have numbered among the four stew ponds referred to in the survey of 1570.
The Temple Field is enclosed by woodland and the folly in the style of a little C18 house at its north-east end was built by Sir Paul Latham to serve as an eyecatcher from his rooms in the Castle. South of the Castle are open, level lawns which replace the arena constructed by Col Lowther. Further south, the present pasture landscape is part of a medieval system of water meadows and reed-bed irrigation for which the earthworks survive. There are extensive views over the Levels.
From the south-west corner of the moat, fragmented, linear groups of sweet chestnut trees follow a course northwards for a distance of 820m to the dam below the pond in Comphurst Wood. The trees line the route of the medieval, northern approach to the Castle but are most likely to have been planted by Sir Thomas Lennard in the C17 (Rodwell 1989). Trees are being restored to sections of the route in 1997.
The present gardens of Herstmonceux Place are laid to lawn with surrounding belts of ornamental shrubbery and trees to the north and south. The terrace on the south-east front was added by the James family in the early C20 and commands extensive views over the park to north, east and south.
PARK The present parkland extends over rising ground to the north-west, north and north-east of the Castle. The open areas are entirely under arable cultivation and virtually none of the scatter of clumps on the north-western slopes shown on the 1st edition OS map surveyed 1873(5 survive in the 1990s. The northern slopes have no parkland trees at all, and only a few individuals are shown on the OS 1st edition. The early C15 manor house was surrounded by a deer park, the survey of 1570 describing the park as bounded by a park pale, laid one third to lawns with 'great timber trees' and stocked with fallow deer. John Norden's map of 1595 shows the oval paled enclosure of the park with a central lake and south-flowing stream. There are few records of the park in the C18 and C19 and by the time of the Tithe survey in 1839, considerable areas of land had already been disparked and laid out to fields.
The park contains a number of woodlands, the largest areas lying to the north-west and north and north-east of Temple Field. Plantation Wood (to the north-east) contains mature C19 rhododendron shrubberies, winding walks and a cascade and is probably of C18 origin although partly replanted and extended west and south in the C20 by the RGO for commercial forestry purposes. The mixed woodland to the north and north-west is also of mid C20 origin, the north-western block on the ridge between Herstmonceux Castle and Place replacing the probably C18 Egg Plantation.
REFERENCES
Country Life, 43 (2 March 1918), pp 214-21; (9 March 1918), pp 242-8; (16 March 1918), pp 270-3; 65 (18 May 1929), pp 702-9; 78 (30 November 1935), pp 566-72; (7 December 1935), pp 606-12; (14 December 1935), pp 630-5 I Nairn and N Pevsner, The Buildings of England: Sussex (1965), pp 534-7 W Rodwell, Herstmonceux Castle, an Archaeological Assessment of the Park (1989) Garden History 17, no 2 (1989), pp 177-8
Maps Survey, 1570 (British Museum Add Mss 5679, fo.266) John Norden, Map of Sussex, 1595 W Gardner and T Gream, A Topographical Map of the County of Sussex..., 1" to 1 mile, surveyed 1795 Tithe map for Herstmonceux parish, 1839 (East Sussex Record Office)
OS Old Series, 1" to 1 mile, 1813 OS 6" to 1 mile: 1st edition surveyed 1875 2nd edition published 1899 3rd edition published 1910 OS 25" to 1 mile: 1st edition surveyed 1875 2nd edition published 1909
Description written: July 1998 Register Inspector: VCH Edited: March 2000
historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/100023...
3653BC, 21st December, Woodhenge, Hampshire, near Stonehenge. For weeks the days had been getting darker and for many living in the village food was becoming scarcer. But this wasn’t anything unusual, we had been living like this for a long time. Mum and dad were aging and their life was drawing to a close, now and then they told stories of their parents and grandparents as far back as memory went of how we used to hunt and gather food. Now we farmed the land and food was not quite as scarce as it had been. We still had to be careful though, otherwise there would be nothing to eat as the days got lighter. We knew that as that time in the seasons we would start planting the seeds, but it would be a long time until we could eat the crops. But for now we could look forward to the feast we were about to have at Winter Solstice, that darkest time of year, just before life would begin again. As we prepared for the feast and looked forward to meeting at the ceremonial ground, the sun continued to escape us and the days remained cold and dark. We daily looked at the sun, anticipating the day when it would shine along the central axis, marking the point when the darkness would turn back and the light would come bringing new life.
This build was inspired following a recent to Stonehenge.
Woodhenge is a monument dating back to the Neolithic c.2300BC. It consisted of six concentric rings of timber posts, evidence has also been found of standing stones within the site. The positions of the timber posts have been marked by concrete pillars to give some indication of the layout of the site to visitors. The site surrounded by a ditch and bank, which has been dated to similar time to stone phases of stonehenge which is about 2km away.
see: www.english-heritage.org.uk/daysout/properties/woodhenge/...
Kite Aerial Photograph
19 June 2012 @ 6.02am
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Guess who was stood out on the Avenue at Stonehenge with his kite at quarter to five in the morning hoping for a break in the heavy low clouds billowing across Salisbury Plain...
To escape the relentless heat of the desert . . . a midday nap . . . perchance to dream. Ahhhh . . . and one of my favorite dreams . . . a visit to Woodhenge. Let me open my nostrils and draw in the refreshing ocean air. But wait! What is that shimmering object on top of that wooden icon? I am drawn to it. I cannot take my eyes off this object! It is taking control of my mind!
"Greetings, Clara. I am called Eye-gor from the far away galaxy known as Oculon."
"Eye-gor? Oculon? That reminds me, I must see about having my eyes checked out. Things have been getting a little blurry lately."
"Never mind, Clara. I have information that must be patterned into your camel brain. We of Oculon have been waiting patiently for anyone on your planet to reach a suitable awareness worthy of being taken to the next level of evolution."
"Worthy? I always thought we camels were now the highest form of life. Why, do you know we can go 30 days without water?"
"Don't be foolish, Clara. We are talking here about evolution of the mind. Now prepare yourself to receive our patterning - try not to think of anything . . ."
"Okay, let's see . . . I could think of the ancient political system in the long gone United States . . . that ended up to be nothing more than petty children squabbling . . ."
"We have finished, Clara. You are free to leave. Perhaps we will contact future generations of your offspring to see what progress has been made . . . if any."
"Offspring? Wow, I had better get busy and find a suitable camel companion. I was engaged once - but his family did not think I was a worthy partner."
"You are still here? Begone, camel!"
.
Zero 2000 pinhole camera with Kodak Ektar 100 film. Atlantic Ocean in the distance. Riis Park, Rockaway, NY.
Woodhenge near Stonehenge circa 2500BC
Concrete posts placed there in 1925 mark where wooden ones long since rotted away
20150721-6447
Als je op deze foto klikt (dan wordt hij groter), zie je het blauwe puntje, waar je de zee en de lucht ziet, de plek waar het allemaal om draait.
In 1996 these fossil oak-logs were dredged from the bottom of the river Waal (= in background). Carbon-14-research showed that they were over 8.400 years old. As a temporary artifacts, the logs were erected, set on display and left to deteriorate. It looks now like a sort of "Woodhenge".
Pictures of some of the gardens in the grounds of the Castle.
Come and enjoy Herstmonceux Castle Gardens & Grounds, set within 300 acres of carefully managed woodland with themed formal gardens to the rear, the 15th century moated castle embodies the history of medieval England and the romance of renaissance Europe.
Starting at the front of the castle, visitors have the perfect opportunity to take some photographs before walking around to Chestnut Tree Walk and heading towards Chestnuts Tea Room and the Visitors Centre where you can refresh yourself, learn a little about the history of the castle and relax before taking a gentle stroll around our formal gardens.
As you head through the themed gardens you will work your way towards the woodland trails where you can enjoy a peaceful stroll and take in the carefully managed flora and fauna of the estate. Discoveries such as Woodhenge, 300 year old Chestnut Trees, the Folly and Secret Garden as well as our Lake and Moat Walk all add to the escapism of everyday life.
www.herstmonceux-castle.com/explore-gardens-grounds/
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Herstmonceux Castle, East Sussex
Grade l listed.
List Entry Number: 1272785
Statutory Address 1: Herstmonceux Castle, Herstmonceux Park
Listing NGR: TQ6463810388
National Grid Reference: TQ 64652 10335
Details
This list entry was subject to a Minor Amendment on 24/04/2020
TQ 61SW 13/406
HERSTMONCEUX HERSTMONCEUX PARK Herstmonceux Castle, with attached bridges to north and south and causeway with moat retaining walls to west.
GV I Castle/country house. c1441 (when licence to crenellate was granted) for Sir Roger Fiennes; further embellished mid C16 for Baroness and Lord Dacre; altered mid-late C17 for Lord Dacre; part demolished 1776-1777 for Robert Hare; restored and rebuilt early C20, mostly 1911-1912, for Lieutenant Colonel Claude Lowther and 1930s for Sir Paul Latham.
Red brick in English bond with some blue header diaper work; stone dressings; plain tile roofs. Square on plan with inner courtyard, this originally divided into four courts and containing Great Hall, but these and the internal walls of the castle demolished C18; south range and south ends of east and west ranges restored by Lowther, the remainder restored by Latham. Two storeys with attic and basement in parts; five x four wide bays with tapering polygonal towers at corners and between bays, taller at angles and centre. Built and restored in C15 style: exterior has one-light or two-light windows, some transomed; courtyard has more wider windows and some with cusped or round-headed lights; four-centred-arched or segmental-arched moulded or chamfered doorways with C20 studded board doors; tall plinth with moulded offset; moulded string below embattled parapet with roll moulded coping; rainwater pipes with decorative initialled heads; stacks with ribbed and corniced clustered flues; steeply-pitched roofs with roll-moulded coping, some with hipped ends.
South (entrance) elevation: three-storey central gate tower has tall recess containing wide, panelled door, window of two cusped, transomed lights above, and grooves for former drawbridge arms; on second floor two transomed windows of two round-headed lights flank coat of arms of Sir Roger Fiennes; flanking towers have gun ports at base, looped arrow slits, machicolated parapets with arrow slits to merlons, and towers rising above as drums. Projecting from gate tower is long bridge (mostly C20) of eight arches, that to centre wider and shallower, with cutwaters, stone parapet, and central corbelled embrasure with flanking tower buttresses.
North side: central gate towers formerly had rooms on lower floors, of which truncated walls and first-floor fireplace fragment remain; machicolated parapet; at left end of range C17 window openings with later eighteen-pane sashes. West side: attached causeway containing basement room and with three half-arched bridge on south side, walling returning as moat retaining walls; main range has a basement doorway with side-lights in chamfered embrasure.
East side: the second tower has C16 first-floor bow window; tall windows to central tower (which contains chapel); right half of range has older windows blocked and larger C17 replacement openings with later eighteen-pane sashes.
Courtyard: seven-bay arcade to north side and central corbelled stack with clock; three-bay 1930s Great Hall (now library) on west side with decorative tracery to windows and offset buttress; gable of former chapel on east side, has perpendicular tracery to window, a two-storey bay window and two crow-stepped gabled attic windows to its left; several doorways and a two-storey bay window to south side; hipped-roofed dormers; brick-lined well in south-west corner.
Interior: some original features survive, including fireplaces, privies, doorways, dungeon and brick-lined dovecote in south-east tower; other old features were brought in from elsewhere, including doors, fireplaces, panelling. In south range: porter's room has old fireplace and relocated linenfold door (found in cellar); reused traceried wood panelling in rebuilt dining room fireplace; stair hall has fine early C17 wooden stair (brought from Theobalds, Herts) with strapwork roundels between square vase balusters, elaborate relief decoration, and lion finials holding shields; at head of stair; elaborate doorcase of same period ribbed ceiling with pendant finials. Drummers Room has reused panelling, part dated 1697, with fluted pilasters and frieze and elaborately arcaded and fluted-pilastered overmantel. Green Room, on second floor, has restored fireplace with crests and beasts on hood; moulded beams and bosses; and reused traceried panel below courtyard window.
North range: very fine late C17 stair (brought from Wheatley Hall, Doncaster; possibly from the workshop of Grinling Gibbons) with baskets-of-flowers and pendant finials to newels, balustrades of open, leafy, scrollwork with flower roundels, and at head of stair two elaborately carved doorcases in similar style with shields in broken pediments. Former ball room has arched ceiling with decorative plasterwork; C17-style panelling; reused elaborately-decorated C17 wooden fireplace overmantel (from Madingley Hall, Cambs.) with two orders of caryatids and embossed panels.
East range: former chapel has reused C15 wooden screen (from France) set in west wall; former Drawing room has elaborate stone fireplace, 1930s in C16 style, and in ante room a reused richly decorated fireplace with griffins and portrait roundels. The C15 castle was well restored in the early C20 and the many fine features which were brought in at that time add to its importance.
Listing NGR: TQ6463810388
Sources
Books and journals
Calvert, D , The History of Herstmonceux Castle
Pevsner, N, Nairn, I, The Buildings of England: Sussex, (1965), 534-6
'Country Life' in 18 May, (1929), 702-709
'Country Life' in 7 December, (1935), 606-612
'Country Life' in 14 December, (1935)
Other
Register of Parks and Gardens of Special Historic Interest in England, Part 14 East Sussex,
historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1272785
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Before 1066 Herst (meaning forest or wood) was the name of a prominent local Anglo-Saxon family and ownership of the family's estate passed into the hands of the victorious Normans. In 1131 the manor and estates were transferred to Drogo de Monceux, a great grandson of William the Conqueror . Drogo's son Ingleram married Idonea de Herst, thus founding the Herstmonceux line.
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Herstmonceux Castle Gardens and Grounds is a 300 acre estate including woodland, formal themed gardens and of course a 15th century moated castle.
Made from red brick Herstmonceux Castle is one of the earliest examples of a brick built building in England.
Read more about the history here:-
www.herstmonceux-castle.com/history/
historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1000231
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HERSTMONCEUX CASTLE AND PLACE
Heritage Category: Park and Garden
Grade: II*
List Entry Number: 1000231
National Grid Reference: TQ 64645 10713
Details
A C15 castle, surrounded by a medieval park with significant surviving landscape and archaeological features, additional C18 landscape and built features and with new and restored elements from the C20.
HISTORIC DEVELOPMENT
The origin of the park at Herstmonceux is unrecorded but it seems likely that it was in existence by the C12. The estate, including the park, passed to the Fiennes family in 1330 and in 1441 Sir Roger Fiennes applied for a licence to build the present castle and to enlarge the park. In 1449 the estate passed to Sir Roger's son who later became Lord Dacre. The Dacre family sold the estate to George Naylor in 1708 and in 1775 the Hare-Naylor family abandoned the Castle and moved into Herstmonceux Place, in the north-west corner of the park. The Castle was virtually dismantled and became a picturesque ruin in the park. The estate was sold to Thomas Reed Kemp in 1807 and purchased from him in 1819 for John Gillon. He sold it in 1846 to H B Curteis of nearby Windmill Hill Place from whom it passed by succession to Herbert Curteis. The Castle and surrounding park were sold off in 1911, with Herstmonceux Place and Windmill Hill Place becoming separate entities again. Herstmonceux Place was purchased by the James family and retained a significant area of the park. The Castle was partly restored by the new owner, Colonel Claude Lowther. He died in 1929 and in 1932 the Castle estate, plus Herstmonceux Place, was purchased by Sir Paul Latham. He completed the restoration of the Castle and, with his architect, Walter Hines Godfrey (1881-1961), restored and developed the gardens.
Latham sold the Castle and its park to the Royal Greenwich Observatory in 1946 which erected a series of buildings to house the telescopes. Sir Paul Latham died in 1952 and in 1958 the remainder of the park was sold for agricultural use. Herstmonceux Place was sold and divided into apartments in 1960. In 1989 the Castle and its park were sold to a development company. The International Study Centre of Queen's University (Canada) subsequently purchased the estate and are the present owners. The Equatorial Telescope Group complex is run as a Science Centre.
DESCRIPTION
LOCATION, AREA, BOUNDARIES, LANDFORM, SETTING Herstmonceux Castle and park and Herstmonceux Place which together comprise the 148ha of the registered site lie just to the south of the A271 Hailsham to Battle road. The site is screened on its west side by a woodland belt along Church Road which runs south from the A271, past the west front of Herstmonceux Place to All Saints' church, which sits just outside the south-west corner of the park. To the west of Church Road and south-west of the park's southern boundary, hedged pasture merges into the flat, open landscape water systems of the Pevensey Levels. The east side of the site is bounded by Wartling Road and partly screened by Wartling Wood on its far side. Wartling village lies about 1km away across bordering farmland to the south-east. The northern boundary merges into farmland with small woods.
While the present east and west road boundaries of the park appear to be of early C15 origin and have remained unchanged since, the medieval park extended further to the south and also to the north and north-west, reaching the villages of Windmill Hill and of Gardener Street on the present A271. The estate had been reduced in size to about 160ha by the time a survey was made in 1570 (BM). The Castle is sited at the south end of a stream valley emerging from the very edge of the Weald onto the Pevensey Levels. The parkland rises to the north and east to sheltering wooded crests. To the north-west a high ridge separates the Castle from the site of Herstmonceux Place.
ENTRANCES AND APPROACHES The present main entrance to the Castle and the park is from Wartling Road in the south-east corner, a drive running c 700m westwards before turning north to the Castle's west-facing entrance front. There is a second entrance in the south-west corner on Church Lane beside West Lodge, built by Godfrey in 1933, the drive from here, known by its post-war name of Flamsteed Road, probably serving as the Castle's principal entrance in the C15 and connecting it with All Saints' church. Both entrances and drives are recorded on the 1570 survey, together with a third gate, Cowper's Gate, on the north boundary north-west of Comphurst Wood. In the C15 the west and east gates were linked by a medieval road which survives (1990s) as a well-defined track lying to the south of the present main entrance drive, which follows a C20 alignment.
PRINCIPAL BUILDING Herstmonceux Castle (listed grade I) stands in the centre of the shallow valley, its principal front facing south. It is square in plan, constructed in the newly fashionable red brick, and is surrounded by two water-filled arms of a moat. It was built from 1441 and replaced the former manor house. Service buildings probably lay to the west on the site of the present C20, cottage-style lodges, one of which serves as a visitor centre and tea room. The present main entrance is on the west. The Castle was largely dismantled in 1777, leaving only its gatehouse and exterior walls intact, and was restored, although to a new interior lay-out, between 1911 and 1932, work from 1929 being carried out by the architect Walter Hines. The central, enclosed courtyard is laid to lawn and an axial flagged path lined by Irish yews, this design being part of Col Lowther's work between 1911 and 1929.
Herstmonceux Place stands on the north-west boundary of the park and commands extensive views over it to the south and east. It has an entrance front of c 1720. Samuel Wyatt enlarged and added two new elevations to the house for the Hare-Naylor family when they moved here in 1775.
East of the Castle, on higher ground, stands the six-domed, former Equatorial Group Telescope building, erected in 1958 by the Royal Greenwich Observatory. It forms a prominent landmark for a considerable distance to the south and west.
GARDENS AND PLEASURE GROUNDS The area of formal gardens immediately around the Castle include the moat to the south and east and the extended walled garden to the north.
The present moat arms around the south and east sides of the Castle are part of what was presumably a complete square in the C15. An extension northwards from the eastern arm, into the stream valley to form a broad mere, may also be a C15 feature. The mere, which appears to have been restored by Latham, is now managed as a reed bed with the feeder stream running through two channels of open water southwards into the moat. The moat is recorded as already drained by the survey of 1570 and laid out with gardens by the late C18 (CL 1918). The moat was cleared and re-flooded in 1933 by Sir Paul Latham, the present southern arm having been extended to approximately double its original c 20m width by Col Lowther.
The rectangular walled garden (listed grade II) stretches some 200m from the north face of the Castle, over rising ground. A strong formal axis is maintained northwards through the three main compartments. The first, closest to the Castle, contains a central flagged path, laid in 1995 to replace the previous grass surface, which is flanked each side by five free-standing sections of clipped yew hedge. There are rectangular lawns to either side with a flagged perimeter path and herbaceous borders along the east and west walls. A central set of steps leads up to the second, 50m long compartment, at the mid-point of which the path encompasses a circular rose bed, replacing a former pool. There are lawns to east and west. The north wall enclosing this garden is pierced by a central loggia which gives access to the third compartment which is divided by yew hedges into three smaller enclosures. The central one, beyond the loggia, contains a former lily pool or swimming pool which is now laid out to a box parterre. To the west is the tennis court and to the east, a rose garden. The walled garden appears to have been laid out soon after the Castle was built, but was extended before the C17. In the C18 it was in use as a kitchen garden and orchard and was redesigned by Col Lowther with a central axis flanked by roses and with herbaceous borders along the east and west walls. The present (1990s) formal treatment and the addition of the northernmost compartment and loggia were the work of Walter Hines Godfrey in 1933-5.
North-east of the Castle, the extended moat arm is fed by the stream which runs southwards down the valley feeding a tiered chain of pools and dams en route. The stream is culverted through the valley or 'Temple Field', which is now managed as a meadow. The ponds, which have been (1990s) partially cleared from the silted condition they were in in the early C20, were most likely formed by clay digging for the Castle's bricks and may also have numbered among the four stew ponds referred to in the survey of 1570.
The Temple Field is enclosed by woodland and the folly in the style of a little C18 house at its north-east end was built by Sir Paul Latham to serve as an eyecatcher from his rooms in the Castle. South of the Castle are open, level lawns which replace the arena constructed by Col Lowther. Further south, the present pasture landscape is part of a medieval system of water meadows and reed-bed irrigation for which the earthworks survive. There are extensive views over the Levels.
From the south-west corner of the moat, fragmented, linear groups of sweet chestnut trees follow a course northwards for a distance of 820m to the dam below the pond in Comphurst Wood. The trees line the route of the medieval, northern approach to the Castle but are most likely to have been planted by Sir Thomas Lennard in the C17 (Rodwell 1989). Trees are being restored to sections of the route in 1997.
The present gardens of Herstmonceux Place are laid to lawn with surrounding belts of ornamental shrubbery and trees to the north and south. The terrace on the south-east front was added by the James family in the early C20 and commands extensive views over the park to north, east and south.
PARK The present parkland extends over rising ground to the north-west, north and north-east of the Castle. The open areas are entirely under arable cultivation and virtually none of the scatter of clumps on the north-western slopes shown on the 1st edition OS map surveyed 1873(5 survive in the 1990s. The northern slopes have no parkland trees at all, and only a few individuals are shown on the OS 1st edition. The early C15 manor house was surrounded by a deer park, the survey of 1570 describing the park as bounded by a park pale, laid one third to lawns with 'great timber trees' and stocked with fallow deer. John Norden's map of 1595 shows the oval paled enclosure of the park with a central lake and south-flowing stream. There are few records of the park in the C18 and C19 and by the time of the Tithe survey in 1839, considerable areas of land had already been disparked and laid out to fields.
The park contains a number of woodlands, the largest areas lying to the north-west and north and north-east of Temple Field. Plantation Wood (to the north-east) contains mature C19 rhododendron shrubberies, winding walks and a cascade and is probably of C18 origin although partly replanted and extended west and south in the C20 by the RGO for commercial forestry purposes. The mixed woodland to the north and north-west is also of mid C20 origin, the north-western block on the ridge between Herstmonceux Castle and Place replacing the probably C18 Egg Plantation.
REFERENCES
Country Life, 43 (2 March 1918), pp 214-21; (9 March 1918), pp 242-8; (16 March 1918), pp 270-3; 65 (18 May 1929), pp 702-9; 78 (30 November 1935), pp 566-72; (7 December 1935), pp 606-12; (14 December 1935), pp 630-5 I Nairn and N Pevsner, The Buildings of England: Sussex (1965), pp 534-7 W Rodwell, Herstmonceux Castle, an Archaeological Assessment of the Park (1989) Garden History 17, no 2 (1989), pp 177-8
Maps Survey, 1570 (British Museum Add Mss 5679, fo.266) John Norden, Map of Sussex, 1595 W Gardner and T Gream, A Topographical Map of the County of Sussex..., 1" to 1 mile, surveyed 1795 Tithe map for Herstmonceux parish, 1839 (East Sussex Record Office)
OS Old Series, 1" to 1 mile, 1813 OS 6" to 1 mile: 1st edition surveyed 1875 2nd edition published 1899 3rd edition published 1910 OS 25" to 1 mile: 1st edition surveyed 1875 2nd edition published 1909
Description written: July 1998 Register Inspector: VCH Edited: March 2000
historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/100023...
Herstmonceux Castle, East Sussex.
Grade l listed.
Picture of the guided tour of the Castle.
Detail: Inner Court Yard.
Herstmonceux Castle is a brick-built castle, dating from the 15th century. It is one of the oldest significant brick buildings still standing in England. It dates from 1441.
Construction began under the then owner, Sir Roger Fiennes, and was continued after his death in 1449 by his son, Lord Dacre.
The castle was dismantled in 1777 leaving the exterior walls standing and remained a ruin until the early 20th century.
Radical restoration work was undertaken by Colonel Claude Lowther in 1913 to transform the ruined building into a residence and, based on a design by the architect, Walter Godfrey, this work was completed by Sir Paul Latham in 1933. The existing interiors largely date to this period.
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Herstmonceux Castle, East Sussex
Before 1066 Herst (meaning forest or wood) was the name of a prominent local Anglo-Saxon family and ownership of the family's estate passed into the hands of the victorious Normans. In 1131 the manor and estates were transferred to Drogo de Monceux, a great grandson of William the Conqueror . Drogo's son Ingleram married Idonea de Herst, thus founding the Herstmonceux line.
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Herstmonceux Castle Gardens and Grounds is a 300 acre estate including woodland, formal themed gardens and of course a 15th century moated castle.
Made from red brick Herstmonceux Castle is one of the earliest examples of a brick built building in England.
Read more about the history here:-
www.herstmonceux-castle.com/history/
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Pictures of some of the gardens in the grounds of the Castle.
Come and enjoy Herstmonceux Castle Gardens & Grounds, set within 300 acres of carefully managed woodland with themed formal gardens to the rear, the 15th century moated castle embodies the history of medieval England and the romance of renaissance Europe.
Starting at the front of the castle, visitors have the perfect opportunity to take some photographs before walking around to Chestnut Tree Walk and heading towards Chestnuts Tea Room and the Visitors Centre where you can refresh yourself, learn a little about the history of the castle and relax before taking a gentle stroll around our formal gardens.
As you head through the themed gardens you will work your way towards the woodland trails where you can enjoy a peaceful stroll and take in the carefully managed flora and fauna of the estate. Discoveries such as Woodhenge, 300 year old Chestnut Trees, the Folly and Secret Garden as well as our Lake and Moat Walk all add to the escapism of everyday life.
www.herstmonceux-castle.com/explore-gardens-grounds/
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Herstmonceux Castle, East Sussex
Grade l listed.
List Entry Number: 1272785
Statutory Address 1: Herstmonceux Castle, Herstmonceux Park
Listing NGR: TQ6463810388
National Grid Reference: TQ 64652 10335
Details
This list entry was subject to a Minor Amendment on 24/04/2020
TQ 61SW 13/406
HERSTMONCEUX HERSTMONCEUX PARK Herstmonceux Castle, with attached bridges to north and south and causeway with moat retaining walls to west.
GV I Castle/country house. c1441 (when licence to crenellate was granted) for Sir Roger Fiennes; further embellished mid C16 for Baroness and Lord Dacre; altered mid-late C17 for Lord Dacre; part demolished 1776-1777 for Robert Hare; restored and rebuilt early C20, mostly 1911-1912, for Lieutenant Colonel Claude Lowther and 1930s for Sir Paul Latham.
Red brick in English bond with some blue header diaper work; stone dressings; plain tile roofs. Square on plan with inner courtyard, this originally divided into four courts and containing Great Hall, but these and the internal walls of the castle demolished C18; south range and south ends of east and west ranges restored by Lowther, the remainder restored by Latham. Two storeys with attic and basement in parts; five x four wide bays with tapering polygonal towers at corners and between bays, taller at angles and centre. Built and restored in C15 style: exterior has one-light or two-light windows, some transomed; courtyard has more wider windows and some with cusped or round-headed lights; four-centred-arched or segmental-arched moulded or chamfered doorways with C20 studded board doors; tall plinth with moulded offset; moulded string below embattled parapet with roll moulded coping; rainwater pipes with decorative initialled heads; stacks with ribbed and corniced clustered flues; steeply-pitched roofs with roll-moulded coping, some with hipped ends.
South (entrance) elevation: three-storey central gate tower has tall recess containing wide, panelled door, window of two cusped, transomed lights above, and grooves for former drawbridge arms; on second floor two transomed windows of two round-headed lights flank coat of arms of Sir Roger Fiennes; flanking towers have gun ports at base, looped arrow slits, machicolated parapets with arrow slits to merlons, and towers rising above as drums. Projecting from gate tower is long bridge (mostly C20) of eight arches, that to centre wider and shallower, with cutwaters, stone parapet, and central corbelled embrasure with flanking tower buttresses.
North side: central gate towers formerly had rooms on lower floors, of which truncated walls and first-floor fireplace fragment remain; machicolated parapet; at left end of range C17 window openings with later eighteen-pane sashes. West side: attached causeway containing basement room and with three half-arched bridge on south side, walling returning as moat retaining walls; main range has a basement doorway with side-lights in chamfered embrasure.
East side: the second tower has C16 first-floor bow window; tall windows to central tower (which contains chapel); right half of range has older windows blocked and larger C17 replacement openings with later eighteen-pane sashes.
Courtyard: seven-bay arcade to north side and central corbelled stack with clock; three-bay 1930s Great Hall (now library) on west side with decorative tracery to windows and offset buttress; gable of former chapel on east side, has perpendicular tracery to window, a two-storey bay window and two crow-stepped gabled attic windows to its left; several doorways and a two-storey bay window to south side; hipped-roofed dormers; brick-lined well in south-west corner.
Interior: some original features survive, including fireplaces, privies, doorways, dungeon and brick-lined dovecote in south-east tower; other old features were brought in from elsewhere, including doors, fireplaces, panelling. In south range: porter's room has old fireplace and relocated linenfold door (found in cellar); reused traceried wood panelling in rebuilt dining room fireplace; stair hall has fine early C17 wooden stair (brought from Theobalds, Herts) with strapwork roundels between square vase balusters, elaborate relief decoration, and lion finials holding shields; at head of stair; elaborate doorcase of same period ribbed ceiling with pendant finials. Drummers Room has reused panelling, part dated 1697, with fluted pilasters and frieze and elaborately arcaded and fluted-pilastered overmantel. Green Room, on second floor, has restored fireplace with crests and beasts on hood; moulded beams and bosses; and reused traceried panel below courtyard window.
North range: very fine late C17 stair (brought from Wheatley Hall, Doncaster; possibly from the workshop of Grinling Gibbons) with baskets-of-flowers and pendant finials to newels, balustrades of open, leafy, scrollwork with flower roundels, and at head of stair two elaborately carved doorcases in similar style with shields in broken pediments. Former ball room has arched ceiling with decorative plasterwork; C17-style panelling; reused elaborately-decorated C17 wooden fireplace overmantel (from Madingley Hall, Cambs.) with two orders of caryatids and embossed panels.
East range: former chapel has reused C15 wooden screen (from France) set in west wall; former Drawing room has elaborate stone fireplace, 1930s in C16 style, and in ante room a reused richly decorated fireplace with griffins and portrait roundels. The C15 castle was well restored in the early C20 and the many fine features which were brought in at that time add to its importance.
Listing NGR: TQ6463810388
Sources
Books and journals
Calvert, D , The History of Herstmonceux Castle
Pevsner, N, Nairn, I, The Buildings of England: Sussex, (1965), 534-6
'Country Life' in 18 May, (1929), 702-709
'Country Life' in 7 December, (1935), 606-612
'Country Life' in 14 December, (1935)
Other
Register of Parks and Gardens of Special Historic Interest in England, Part 14 East Sussex,
historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1272785
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HERSTMONCEUX CASTLE AND PLACE
Heritage Category: Park and Garden
Grade: II*
List Entry Number: 1000231
National Grid Reference: TQ 64645 10713
Details
A C15 castle, surrounded by a medieval park with significant surviving landscape and archaeological features, additional C18 landscape and built features and with new and restored elements from the C20.
HISTORIC DEVELOPMENT
The origin of the park at Herstmonceux is unrecorded but it seems likely that it was in existence by the C12. The estate, including the park, passed to the Fiennes family in 1330 and in 1441 Sir Roger Fiennes applied for a licence to build the present castle and to enlarge the park. In 1449 the estate passed to Sir Roger's son who later became Lord Dacre. The Dacre family sold the estate to George Naylor in 1708 and in 1775 the Hare-Naylor family abandoned the Castle and moved into Herstmonceux Place, in the north-west corner of the park. The Castle was virtually dismantled and became a picturesque ruin in the park. The estate was sold to Thomas Reed Kemp in 1807 and purchased from him in 1819 for John Gillon. He sold it in 1846 to H B Curteis of nearby Windmill Hill Place from whom it passed by succession to Herbert Curteis. The Castle and surrounding park were sold off in 1911, with Herstmonceux Place and Windmill Hill Place becoming separate entities again. Herstmonceux Place was purchased by the James family and retained a significant area of the park. The Castle was partly restored by the new owner, Colonel Claude Lowther. He died in 1929 and in 1932 the Castle estate, plus Herstmonceux Place, was purchased by Sir Paul Latham. He completed the restoration of the Castle and, with his architect, Walter Hines Godfrey (1881-1961), restored and developed the gardens.
Latham sold the Castle and its park to the Royal Greenwich Observatory in 1946 which erected a series of buildings to house the telescopes. Sir Paul Latham died in 1952 and in 1958 the remainder of the park was sold for agricultural use. Herstmonceux Place was sold and divided into apartments in 1960. In 1989 the Castle and its park were sold to a development company. The International Study Centre of Queen's University (Canada) subsequently purchased the estate and are the present owners. The Equatorial Telescope Group complex is run as a Science Centre.
DESCRIPTION
LOCATION, AREA, BOUNDARIES, LANDFORM, SETTING Herstmonceux Castle and park and Herstmonceux Place which together comprise the 148ha of the registered site lie just to the south of the A271 Hailsham to Battle road. The site is screened on its west side by a woodland belt along Church Road which runs south from the A271, past the west front of Herstmonceux Place to All Saints' church, which sits just outside the south-west corner of the park. To the west of Church Road and south-west of the park's southern boundary, hedged pasture merges into the flat, open landscape water systems of the Pevensey Levels. The east side of the site is bounded by Wartling Road and partly screened by Wartling Wood on its far side. Wartling village lies about 1km away across bordering farmland to the south-east. The northern boundary merges into farmland with small woods.
While the present east and west road boundaries of the park appear to be of early C15 origin and have remained unchanged since, the medieval park extended further to the south and also to the north and north-west, reaching the villages of Windmill Hill and of Gardener Street on the present A271. The estate had been reduced in size to about 160ha by the time a survey was made in 1570 (BM). The Castle is sited at the south end of a stream valley emerging from the very edge of the Weald onto the Pevensey Levels. The parkland rises to the north and east to sheltering wooded crests. To the north-west a high ridge separates the Castle from the site of Herstmonceux Place.
ENTRANCES AND APPROACHES The present main entrance to the Castle and the park is from Wartling Road in the south-east corner, a drive running c 700m westwards before turning north to the Castle's west-facing entrance front. There is a second entrance in the south-west corner on Church Lane beside West Lodge, built by Godfrey in 1933, the drive from here, known by its post-war name of Flamsteed Road, probably serving as the Castle's principal entrance in the C15 and connecting it with All Saints' church. Both entrances and drives are recorded on the 1570 survey, together with a third gate, Cowper's Gate, on the north boundary north-west of Comphurst Wood. In the C15 the west and east gates were linked by a medieval road which survives (1990s) as a well-defined track lying to the south of the present main entrance drive, which follows a C20 alignment.
PRINCIPAL BUILDING Herstmonceux Castle (listed grade I) stands in the centre of the shallow valley, its principal front facing south. It is square in plan, constructed in the newly fashionable red brick, and is surrounded by two water-filled arms of a moat. It was built from 1441 and replaced the former manor house. Service buildings probably lay to the west on the site of the present C20, cottage-style lodges, one of which serves as a visitor centre and tea room. The present main entrance is on the west. The Castle was largely dismantled in 1777, leaving only its gatehouse and exterior walls intact, and was restored, although to a new interior lay-out, between 1911 and 1932, work from 1929 being carried out by the architect Walter Hines. The central, enclosed courtyard is laid to lawn and an axial flagged path lined by Irish yews, this design being part of Col Lowther's work between 1911 and 1929.
Herstmonceux Place stands on the north-west boundary of the park and commands extensive views over it to the south and east. It has an entrance front of c 1720. Samuel Wyatt enlarged and added two new elevations to the house for the Hare-Naylor family when they moved here in 1775.
East of the Castle, on higher ground, stands the six-domed, former Equatorial Group Telescope building, erected in 1958 by the Royal Greenwich Observatory. It forms a prominent landmark for a considerable distance to the south and west.
GARDENS AND PLEASURE GROUNDS The area of formal gardens immediately around the Castle include the moat to the south and east and the extended walled garden to the north.
The present moat arms around the south and east sides of the Castle are part of what was presumably a complete square in the C15. An extension northwards from the eastern arm, into the stream valley to form a broad mere, may also be a C15 feature. The mere, which appears to have been restored by Latham, is now managed as a reed bed with the feeder stream running through two channels of open water southwards into the moat. The moat is recorded as already drained by the survey of 1570 and laid out with gardens by the late C18 (CL 1918). The moat was cleared and re-flooded in 1933 by Sir Paul Latham, the present southern arm having been extended to approximately double its original c 20m width by Col Lowther.
The rectangular walled garden (listed grade II) stretches some 200m from the north face of the Castle, over rising ground. A strong formal axis is maintained northwards through the three main compartments. The first, closest to the Castle, contains a central flagged path, laid in 1995 to replace the previous grass surface, which is flanked each side by five free-standing sections of clipped yew hedge. There are rectangular lawns to either side with a flagged perimeter path and herbaceous borders along the east and west walls. A central set of steps leads up to the second, 50m long compartment, at the mid-point of which the path encompasses a circular rose bed, replacing a former pool. There are lawns to east and west. The north wall enclosing this garden is pierced by a central loggia which gives access to the third compartment which is divided by yew hedges into three smaller enclosures. The central one, beyond the loggia, contains a former lily pool or swimming pool which is now laid out to a box parterre. To the west is the tennis court and to the east, a rose garden. The walled garden appears to have been laid out soon after the Castle was built, but was extended before the C17. In the C18 it was in use as a kitchen garden and orchard and was redesigned by Col Lowther with a central axis flanked by roses and with herbaceous borders along the east and west walls. The present (1990s) formal treatment and the addition of the northernmost compartment and loggia were the work of Walter Hines Godfrey in 1933-5.
North-east of the Castle, the extended moat arm is fed by the stream which runs southwards down the valley feeding a tiered chain of pools and dams en route. The stream is culverted through the valley or 'Temple Field', which is now managed as a meadow. The ponds, which have been (1990s) partially cleared from the silted condition they were in in the early C20, were most likely formed by clay digging for the Castle's bricks and may also have numbered among the four stew ponds referred to in the survey of 1570.
The Temple Field is enclosed by woodland and the folly in the style of a little C18 house at its north-east end was built by Sir Paul Latham to serve as an eyecatcher from his rooms in the Castle. South of the Castle are open, level lawns which replace the arena constructed by Col Lowther. Further south, the present pasture landscape is part of a medieval system of water meadows and reed-bed irrigation for which the earthworks survive. There are extensive views over the Levels.
From the south-west corner of the moat, fragmented, linear groups of sweet chestnut trees follow a course northwards for a distance of 820m to the dam below the pond in Comphurst Wood. The trees line the route of the medieval, northern approach to the Castle but are most likely to have been planted by Sir Thomas Lennard in the C17 (Rodwell 1989). Trees are being restored to sections of the route in 1997.
The present gardens of Herstmonceux Place are laid to lawn with surrounding belts of ornamental shrubbery and trees to the north and south. The terrace on the south-east front was added by the James family in the early C20 and commands extensive views over the park to north, east and south.
PARK The present parkland extends over rising ground to the north-west, north and north-east of the Castle. The open areas are entirely under arable cultivation and virtually none of the scatter of clumps on the north-western slopes shown on the 1st edition OS map surveyed 1873(5 survive in the 1990s. The northern slopes have no parkland trees at all, and only a few individuals are shown on the OS 1st edition. The early C15 manor house was surrounded by a deer park, the survey of 1570 describing the park as bounded by a park pale, laid one third to lawns with 'great timber trees' and stocked with fallow deer. John Norden's map of 1595 shows the oval paled enclosure of the park with a central lake and south-flowing stream. There are few records of the park in the C18 and C19 and by the time of the Tithe survey in 1839, considerable areas of land had already been disparked and laid out to fields.
The park contains a number of woodlands, the largest areas lying to the north-west and north and north-east of Temple Field. Plantation Wood (to the north-east) contains mature C19 rhododendron shrubberies, winding walks and a cascade and is probably of C18 origin although partly replanted and extended west and south in the C20 by the RGO for commercial forestry purposes. The mixed woodland to the north and north-west is also of mid C20 origin, the north-western block on the ridge between Herstmonceux Castle and Place replacing the probably C18 Egg Plantation.
REFERENCES
Country Life, 43 (2 March 1918), pp 214-21; (9 March 1918), pp 242-8; (16 March 1918), pp 270-3; 65 (18 May 1929), pp 702-9; 78 (30 November 1935), pp 566-72; (7 December 1935), pp 606-12; (14 December 1935), pp 630-5 I Nairn and N Pevsner, The Buildings of England: Sussex (1965), pp 534-7 W Rodwell, Herstmonceux Castle, an Archaeological Assessment of the Park (1989) Garden History 17, no 2 (1989), pp 177-8
Maps Survey, 1570 (British Museum Add Mss 5679, fo.266) John Norden, Map of Sussex, 1595 W Gardner and T Gream, A Topographical Map of the County of Sussex..., 1" to 1 mile, surveyed 1795 Tithe map for Herstmonceux parish, 1839 (East Sussex Record Office)
OS Old Series, 1" to 1 mile, 1813 OS 6" to 1 mile: 1st edition surveyed 1875 2nd edition published 1899 3rd edition published 1910 OS 25" to 1 mile: 1st edition surveyed 1875 2nd edition published 1909
Description written: July 1998 Register Inspector: VCH Edited: March 2000
historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/100023...
Gamelan is traditional ensemble music of Java and Bali in Indonesia, made up predominantly of percussive instruments. The most common instruments are metallophones played by mallets as well as a set of hand played drums called kendhang which register the beat. Other instruments include xylophones, bamboo flutes, bowed instrument called rebab, and even vocalists called sindhen.
Although the popularity of gamelan has declined since the introduction of pop music, gamelan is still commonly played in formal occasions and in many traditional Indonesian ceremonies. For most Indonesians, gamelan is an integral part of Indonesian culture.
TERMINOLOGY
The word gamelan comes from the low Javanese word gamel, which may refer to a type of mallet used to strike instruments or the act of striking with a mallet. The term karawitan refers to the playing of gamelan instruments, and comes from the word rawit, meaning 'intricate' or 'finely worked'. The word derives from the Javanese word of Sanskrit origin, rawit, which refers to the sense of smoothness and elegance idealized in Javanese music. Another word from this root, pangrawit, means a person with such sense, and is used as an honorific when discussing esteemed gamelan musicians. The high Javanese word for gamelan is gangsa, formed either from the words tembaga and rejasa referring to the materials used in bronze gamelan construction (copper and tin), or tiga and sedasa referring to their proportions (three and ten).
HISTORY
The gamelan predates the Hindu-Buddhist culture that dominated Indonesia in its earliest records and instead represents a native art form. The instruments developed into their current form during the Majapahit Empire. In contrast to the heavy Indian influence in other art forms, the only obvious Indian influence in gamelan music is in the Javanese style of singing, and in the themes of the Wayang kulit (shadow puppet plays).
In Javanese mythology, the gamelan was created by Sang Hyang Guru in Saka era 167 (c. AD 230), the god who ruled as king of all Java from a palace on the Maendra mountain in Medang Kamulan (now Mount Lawu). He needed a signal to summon the gods and thus invented the gong. For more complex messages, he invented two other gongs, thus forming the original gamelan set.
The earliest image of a musical ensemble is found on the 8th century Borobudur temple, Central Java. Musical instruments such as the bamboo flute, bells, drums in various sizes, lute, and bowed and plucked string instruments were identified in this image. However it lacks metallophones and xylophones. Nevertheless, the image of this musical ensemble is suggested to be the ancient form of the gamelan.
In the palaces of Java are the oldest known ensembles, the Munggang and Kodokngorek gamelans, apparently from the 12th century. These formed the basis of a "loud style". A different, "soft style" developed out of the kemanak tradition and is related to the traditions of singing Javanese poetry, in a manner which is often believed to be similar to performance of modern bedhaya dance. In the 17th century, these loud and soft styles mixed, and to a large extent the variety of modern gamelan styles of Bali, Java, and Sunda resulted from different ways of mixing these elements. Thus, despite the seeming diversity of styles, many of the same theoretical concepts, instruments, and techniques are shared between the styles.
INSTRUMENTS
A gamelan is primarily constituted from metallophones while other instruments such as flute (suling) and zither (celempung) are discretionary. Hand played drums called kendhang however is essential despite not being a metallophone as it control the tempo and rhythm of pieces as well as the transitions from one section to another.
VARIETIES
They are distinguished by their collection of instruments and use of voice, tunings, repertoire, style, and cultural context. In general, no two gamelan ensembles are the same, and those that arose in prestigious courts are often considered to have their own style. Certain styles may also be shared by nearby ensembles, leading to a regional style.
The varieties are generally grouped geographically, with the principal division between the styles favored by the Balinese, Javanese, and Sundanese peoples. The Madurese also had their own style of gamelan, although it is no longer in use, and the last orchestra is kept at the Sumenep palace. Sundanese gamelan is often associated with Gamelan Degung, a Sundanese musical ensemble that utilises a subset of modified gamelan instruments with a particular mode of pelog scale. Balinese gamelan is often associated with the virtuosity and rapid changes of tempo and dynamics of Gamelan gong kebyar, its best-known style. Other popular Balinese styles include Gamelan and kecak, also known as the "monkey chant." Javanese gamelan was largely dominated by the courts of the 19th century central Javanese rulers, each with its own style, but overall is known for a slower, more meditative style than that of Bali. Although Javanese gamelan can be made from steel, the better instruments are made of cast brass. The two kinds of instruments are tuned in different ways.
Outside of the main core on Java and Bali, gamelans have spread through migration and cultural interest, new styles sometimes resulting as well. Malay gamelans are designed in ways that are similar to the Javanese gamelan except they lack most of the elaborating instruments and are tuned in a near-equidistant slendro, often using a western B♭ or C as a tuning basis. Javanese emigrants to Suriname play gamelan in a style close to that found in Central Javanese villages. Gamelan is also related to the Filipino kulintang ensemble. There is also a wide variety of gamelan in the West, including both traditional and experimental ensembles.
In oral Javanese culture distinctions are made between complete or incomplete, archaic and modern, and large standard and small village gamelan. The various archaic ensembles are distinguished by their unique combinations of instruments and possession of obsolete instruments such as the bell-tree (byong) in the 3-toned gamelan kodhok ngorek. Regionally variable village gamelan are often distinguished from standard gamelan (which have the rebab as the main melodic instrument) by their inclusion of a double-reed wind (selompret, slompret, or sompret) in addition to variable drum and gong components, with some also including the shaken bamboo angklung or other instruments not usually associated with gamelan.
CULTURAL CONTEXT
In Indonesia, gamelan often accompanies dance, wayang puppet performances, or rituals and ceremonies. Typically players in the gamelan will be familiar with dance moves and poetry, while dancers are able to play in the ensemble. In wayang, the dalang (puppeteer) must have a thorough knowledge of gamelan, as he gives the cues for the music. Gamelan can be performed by itself – in "klenengan" style, or for radio broadcasts – but concerts in the Western style are not traditional.
Gamelan's role in rituals is so important that there is a Javanese saying, "It is not official until the gong is hung". Some performances are associated with royalty, such as visits by the sultan of Yogyakarta. Certain gamelans are associated with specific rituals, such as the Gamelan Sekaten, which is used in celebration of Mawlid an-Nabi (Muhammad's birthday). In Bali, almost all religious rituals include gamelan performance. Gamelan is also used in the ceremonies of the Catholic church in Indonesia. Certain pieces are designated for starting and ending performances or ceremonies. When an "ending" piece (such as "Udan Mas") is begun, the audience will know that the event is nearly finished and will begin to leave. Certain pieces are also believed to possess magic powers, and can be used to ward off evil spirits.
Gamelan is frequently played on the radio. For example, the Pura Pakualaman gamelan performs live on the radio every Minggu Pon (a day in the 35-day cycle of the Javanese calendar). In major towns, the Radio Republik Indonesia employs professional musicians and actors, and broadcast programs of a wide variety of gamelan music and drama.
In the court tradition of central Java, gamelan is often played in the pendopo, an open pavilion with a cavernous, double-pitched roof, no side walls, and a hard marble or tile floor. The instruments are placed on a platform to one side, which allows the sound to reverberate in the roof space and enhances the acoustics.
In Bali, the Gamelan instruments are all kept together in a balé, a large open space with a roof over the top of it and several open sides. Gambelan (the Balinese term) are owned by a banjar, nobility or temples and kept in their respective compounds.
In case of banjar ownership the instruments are all kept there together because people believe that all the instruments belong to the community as a whole and that no one person has ownership over an instrument. Not only is this where the instruments are stored, but this is also the practice space for the sekaha (Gamelan orchestra group). The open walls allow for the music to flow out into the community where the rest of the people may enjoy it. Balinese gamelan cannot be heard inside closed rooms, because it easily crosses the threshold of pain. This does not apply to small ensembles like a gamelan gendér.
The sekaha is led by a single instructor whose job it is in the community to lead this group and to come up with new pieces. When they are working on a new piece, the instructor will lead the group in practice and help the group form the new music as they are practicing. When the instructor creates a new song, he leaves enough open for interpretation that the group can improvise, so the group will write the music as they practice it.
There are many styles in Balinese gamelan. Kebyar is one of the most recent ones. Some Balinese Gamelan groups constantly change their music by taking older pieces they know and mixing them together, as well as trying new variations on their music. Their music constantly changes because they believe that music should grow and change; the only exception to this is with their most sacred songs which they do not change. A single new piece of music can take several months before it is completed.
Men and women usually perform in separate groups, with the exception in Java of the pesindhen, the female singer who performs with male groups.
In the twenty-five countries outside of Indonesia that have gamelan, music is often performed in a concert context or as part of ceremonies of expat communities. It may also incorporate dance or wayang.
TUNING
The tuning and construction of a gamelan orchestra is a complex process. Javanese gamelans use two tuning systems: sléndro and pélog. There are other tuning systems such as degung (exclusive to Sunda, or West Java), and madenda (also known as diatonis, similar to a European natural minor scale). In central Javanese gamelan, sléndro is a system with five notes to the octave, fairly evenly spaced, while pélog has seven notes to the octave, with uneven intervals, usually played in five note subsets of the seven-tone collection. This results in sound quite different from music played in a western tuning system. Many gamelan orchestras will include instruments in each tuning, but each individual instrument will only be able to play notes in one. The precise tuning used differs from ensemble to ensemble, and give each ensemble its own particular flavour. The intervals between notes in a scale are very close to identical for different instruments within each gamelan, but the intervals vary from one gamelan to the next.
Colin McPhee remarked, "Deviations in what is considered the same scale are so large that one might with reason state that there are as many scales as there are gamelans." However, this view is contested by some teachers of gamelan, and there have been efforts to combine multiple ensembles and tuning structures into one gamelan to ease transportation at festival time. One such ensemble is gamelan Manikasanti, which can play the repertoire of many different ensembles.
Balinese gamelan instruments are commonly played in pairs which are tuned slightly apart to produce interference beats, ideally at a consistent speed for all pairs of notes in all registers. This concept is referred to as "ombak," translating to "wave," communicating the idea of cyclical undulation. One instrument, tuned slightly higher, is thought of as the "inhale," and the other, slightly lower, is called the "exhale." When the inhale and the exhale are combined, beating is produced, meant to represent the beating of the heart, or the symbol of being alive. 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. The scale roughly approximates that of the phrygian mode of the Western major scale (E-E on the white keys of the piano), with the notes EFGBC corresponding to the note positions 12356 in the slendro scale used by most gamelan.
As well as the non-western octave and the use of beats, Javanese gamelan uses a combination of tempo and density known as Irama, relating how many beats on the saron panerus instrument there are to notes in the core melody or balungan; density is considered primary.
NOTATION
Gamelan music is traditionally not notated and began as an oral tradition. In the 19th century, however, the kraton (palaces) of Yogyakarta and Surakarta developed distinct notations for transcribing the repertoire. These were not used to read the music, which was memorized, but to preserve pieces in the court records. The Yogyanese notation is a checkerboard notation, which uses six or seven vertical lines to represent notes of higher pitch in the balungan (melodic framework), and horizontal lines which represent the series of beats, read downward with time. The fourth vertical line and every fourth horizontal line (completing a gatra) are darkened for legibility. Symbols on the left indicate the colotomic or metric structure of gongs and so forth, while specific drum features are notated in symbols to the right. The Solonese notation reads horizontally, like Western notation, but does not use barlines. Instead, note values and rests are squiggled between the notes.
Today this notation is relatively rare, and has been replaced by kepatihan notation, which is a cipher system. Kepatihan notation developed around 1900 at the kepatihan Palace in Surakarta, which had become a high-school conservatory. The pitches are numbered (see the articles on the scales slendro and pélog for an explanation of how), and are read across with dots below or above the numbers indicating the register, and lines above notes showing time values; In vocal notation, there are also brackets under groups of notes to indicate melisma. Like the palace notation, however, Kepatihan records mostly the balungan part and its metric phrases as marked by a variety of gongs. The other parts are created in real time, and depend on the knowledge each musician has of his instrument, and his awareness of what others are playing; this "realization" is sometimes called "garap." Some teachers have also devised certain notations, generally using kepatihan principles, for the cengkok (melodic patterns) of the elaborating instruments. Some ethnomusicologists, trained in European music, may make transcriptions onto a Western staff. This entails particular challenges of tuning and time, sometimes resulting in unusual clefs.
INFLUENCE ON WESTERN MUSIC
The gamelan has been appreciated by several western composers of classical music, most famously Claude Debussy who heard a Javanese gamelan in the premiere of Louis-Albert Bourgault-Ducoudray's Rapsodie Cambodgienne at the Paris Exposition of 1889 (World's Fair). The work had been written seven years earlier in 1882, but received its premiere only in 1889. The gamelan Debussy heard in it was in the slendro scale and was played by Central Javanese musicians. Despite his enthusiasm, direct citations of gamelan scales, melodies, rhythms, or ensemble textures have not been located in any of Debussy's own compositions. However, the equal-tempered whole tone scale appears in his music of this time and afterward, and a Javanese gamelan-like heterophonic texture is emulated on occasion, particularly in "Pagodes", from Estampes (solo piano, 1903), in which the great gong's cyclic punctuation is symbolized by a prominent perfect fifth.
The composer Erik Satie, an influential contemporary of Debussy, also heard the Javanese gamelan play at the Paris Exposition of 1889. The repetitively hypnotic effects of the gamelan were incorporated into Satie's exotic Gnossienne set for piano.
Direct homages to gamelan music are to be found in works for western instruments by John Cage, particularly his prepared piano pieces, Colin McPhee, Lou Harrison, Béla Bartók, Francis Poulenc, Olivier Messiaen, Pierre Boulez, Bronislaw Kaper and Benjamin Britten. In more recent times, American composers such as Henry Brant, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Dennis Murphy, Loren Nerell, Michael Tenzer, Evan Ziporyn, Daniel James Wolf and Jody Diamond as well as Australian composers such as Peter Sculthorpe, Andrew Schultz and Ross Edwards have written several works with parts for gamelan instruments or full gamelan ensembles. I Nyoman Windha is among contemporary Indonesian composers that have written compositions using western instruments along with Gamelan. Hungarian composer György Ligeti wrote a piano étude called Galamb Borong influenced by gamelan. Avant-garde composer Harry Partch, one of America's most idiosyncratic composers, was also influenced by Gamelan, both in his microtonal compositions and the instruments he built for their performance
American folk guitarist John Fahey included elements of gamelan in many of his late-1960s sound collages, and again in his 1997 collaboration with Cul de Sac, The Epiphany of Glenn Jones. Influenced by gamelan, Robert Fripp used rhythmically interlocking guitars in his duets with Adrian Belew in the 1981–1984 trilogy of albums (Discipline, Beat, Three of a Perfect Pair) by rock band King Crimson and with The League of Crafty Guitarists. The gamelan has also been used by British multi-instrumentalist Mike Oldfield at least three times, "Woodhenge" (1979), "The Wind Chimes (Part II)" (1987) and "Nightshade" (2005).
On the debut EP of Sonic Youth the track 'She's not Alone' has a gamelan timbre. Experimental pop groups The Residents, 23 Skidoo (whose 1984 album was even titled Urban Gamelan), Mouse on Mars, His Name Is Alive, Xiu Xiu, Macha, Saudade, The Raincoats and the Sun City Girls have used gamelan percussion. Avant-garde performance band Melted Men uses Balinese gamelan instruments as well as gamelan-influenced costumes and dance in their shows. The Moodswinger built by Yuri Landman gives gamelan–like clock and bell sounds, because of its 3rd bridge construction. Indonesian-Dutch composer Sinta Wullur has integrated Western music and gamelan for opera.
INFLUENCE ON CONTEMPORARY MUSIC
In contemporary Indonesian music scene, some groups fuse contemporary westernized jazz fusion music with the legacy of traditional ethnic music traditions of their people. In the case of Krakatau and SambaSunda, the bands from West Java, the traditional Sundanese kacapi suling and gamelan degung Sunda orchestra is performed alongside drum set, keyboard and guitars. Other bands such as Bossanova Java were fused Javanese music with bossa nova, while the Kulkul band fuse jazz with Balinese gamelan.
The Indonesian singer Anggun, often incorporated Indonesian traditional tunes of gamelan and tembang style of singing in her works. Typical gamelan tunes can be trace in several songs in her album Snow on the Sahara such as "Snow on the Sahara", "A Rose in the Wind", and also in her collaboration works with Deep Forest on "Deep Blue Sea" on their 2002 album, Music Detected. Philippines born Indonesian singer Maribeth Pascua also featuring gamelan tunes in her songs Denpasar Moon and Borobudur.
Beyond Indonesia, gamelan has also had an influence on Japanese popular music, specifically the synthpop band Yellow Magic Orchestra. Their 1981 record Technodelic, one of the first albums to heavily rely on samples and loops, made use of gamelan elements and samples. Yellow Magic Orchestra member Ryuichi Sakamoto also used gamelan elements for his soundtrack to the 1983 British-Japanese film Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, which won him the 1983 BAFTA Award for Best Film Music.
Later, many Americans were first introduced to the sounds of gamelan by the popular 1988 Japanese anime film Akira. Gamelan elements are used in this film to punctuate several exciting fight scenes, as well as to symbolize the emerging psychic powers of the tragic hero, Tetsuo. The gamelan in the film's score was performed by the members of the Japanese musical collective Geinoh Yamashirogumi, using their semar pegulingan and jegog ensembles. Gamelan and kecak are also used in the soundtrack to the video games Secret of Mana and Sonic Unleashed. The two opening credits of 1998 Japanese Anime Neo Ranga use Balinese music (Kecak and Gamelan gong kebyar). Each "waking up" of Ranga in the anime uses the Gong Kebyar theme. The musical soundtrack for the Sci Fi Channel series Battlestar Galactica features extensive use of the gamelan, particularly in the 3rd season, as do Alexandre Desplat's scores for Girl With A Pearl Earring and The Golden Compass. James Newton Howard, who composed Disney's 2001 feature film Atlantis: The Lost Empire, chose Gamelan for the musical theme of the Altanteans.
Loops of gamelan music appear in electronic music. An early example is the Texas band Drain's album Offspeed and In There, which contains two tracks where trip-hop beats are matched with gamelan loops from Java and Bali and recent popular examples include the Sofa Surfers' piece Gamelan, or EXEC_PURGER/.#AURICA extracting, a song sung by Haruka Shimotsuki as part of the Ar tonelico: Melody of Elemia soundtracks.
Gamelan influences can also be heard in the 2006 hip hop song, Tokyo Drift (Fast & Furious), by Teriyaki Boyz.
In the Regular Show episode "150-Piece Kit", a gamelan is mentioned to be part of the eponymous kit.
GAMELAN OUTSIDE INDONESIA
Gamelan is also found outside of Indonesia. There are forms of gamelan that have developed outside Indonesia, such as American gamelan in the United States and Malay Gamelan in Malaysia. Gamelan has also become quite widespread along the South East of Sri Lanka, particularly with the Tamil community, and in Colombo, at the Indonesian Embassy.
WIKIPEDIA
A wealthy African businessman chose me to photograph his most recent acquisition – a vintage 1963 Chevrolet Corvette Sting-Ray. “Spare no expense,” he said. So off I went on his private jet to a desert locale somewhere near Woodhenge, I believe. The days were long and hot – and there was this annoying camel that kept wandering into the frame. But in the end, my client was satisfied and now has several pictures of his prized possession hanging in the rooms of his palatial estate.
Zero 2000 pinhole camera with Kodak Ektar 100 film. Riis Park, Rockaway, NY
Gamelan is traditional ensemble music of Java and Bali in Indonesia, made up predominantly of percussive instruments. The most common instruments are metallophones played by mallets as well as a set of hand played drums called kendhang which register the beat. Other instruments include xylophones, bamboo flutes, bowed instrument called rebab, and even vocalists called sindhen.
Although the popularity of gamelan has declined since the introduction of pop music, gamelan is still commonly played in formal occasions and in many traditional Indonesian ceremonies. For most Indonesians, gamelan is an integral part of Indonesian culture.
TERMINOLOGY
The word gamelan comes from the low Javanese word gamel, which may refer to a type of mallet used to strike instruments or the act of striking with a mallet. The term karawitan refers to the playing of gamelan instruments, and comes from the word rawit, meaning 'intricate' or 'finely worked'. The word derives from the Javanese word of Sanskrit origin, rawit, which refers to the sense of smoothness and elegance idealized in Javanese music. Another word from this root, pangrawit, means a person with such sense, and is used as an honorific when discussing esteemed gamelan musicians. The high Javanese word for gamelan is gangsa, formed either from the words tembaga and rejasa referring to the materials used in bronze gamelan construction (copper and tin), or tiga and sedasa referring to their proportions (three and ten).
HISTORY
The gamelan predates the Hindu-Buddhist culture that dominated Indonesia in its earliest records and instead represents a native art form. The instruments developed into their current form during the Majapahit Empire. In contrast to the heavy Indian influence in other art forms, the only obvious Indian influence in gamelan music is in the Javanese style of singing, and in the themes of the Wayang kulit (shadow puppet plays).
In Javanese mythology, the gamelan was created by Sang Hyang Guru in Saka era 167 (c. AD 230), the god who ruled as king of all Java from a palace on the Maendra mountain in Medang Kamulan (now Mount Lawu). He needed a signal to summon the gods and thus invented the gong. For more complex messages, he invented two other gongs, thus forming the original gamelan set.
The earliest image of a musical ensemble is found on the 8th century Borobudur temple, Central Java. Musical instruments such as the bamboo flute, bells, drums in various sizes, lute, and bowed and plucked string instruments were identified in this image. However it lacks metallophones and xylophones. Nevertheless, the image of this musical ensemble is suggested to be the ancient form of the gamelan.
In the palaces of Java are the oldest known ensembles, the Munggang and Kodokngorek gamelans, apparently from the 12th century. These formed the basis of a "loud style". A different, "soft style" developed out of the kemanak tradition and is related to the traditions of singing Javanese poetry, in a manner which is often believed to be similar to performance of modern bedhaya dance. In the 17th century, these loud and soft styles mixed, and to a large extent the variety of modern gamelan styles of Bali, Java, and Sunda resulted from different ways of mixing these elements. Thus, despite the seeming diversity of styles, many of the same theoretical concepts, instruments, and techniques are shared between the styles.
INSTRUMENTS
A gamelan is primarily constituted from metallophones while other instruments such as flute (suling) and zither (celempung) are discretionary. Hand played drums called kendhang however is essential despite not being a metallophone as it control the tempo and rhythm of pieces as well as the transitions from one section to another.
VARIETIES
They are distinguished by their collection of instruments and use of voice, tunings, repertoire, style, and cultural context. In general, no two gamelan ensembles are the same, and those that arose in prestigious courts are often considered to have their own style. Certain styles may also be shared by nearby ensembles, leading to a regional style.
The varieties are generally grouped geographically, with the principal division between the styles favored by the Balinese, Javanese, and Sundanese peoples. The Madurese also had their own style of gamelan, although it is no longer in use, and the last orchestra is kept at the Sumenep palace. Sundanese gamelan is often associated with Gamelan Degung, a Sundanese musical ensemble that utilises a subset of modified gamelan instruments with a particular mode of pelog scale. Balinese gamelan is often associated with the virtuosity and rapid changes of tempo and dynamics of Gamelan gong kebyar, its best-known style. Other popular Balinese styles include Gamelan and kecak, also known as the "monkey chant." Javanese gamelan was largely dominated by the courts of the 19th century central Javanese rulers, each with its own style, but overall is known for a slower, more meditative style than that of Bali. Although Javanese gamelan can be made from steel, the better instruments are made of cast brass. The two kinds of instruments are tuned in different ways.
Outside of the main core on Java and Bali, gamelans have spread through migration and cultural interest, new styles sometimes resulting as well. Malay gamelans are designed in ways that are similar to the Javanese gamelan except they lack most of the elaborating instruments and are tuned in a near-equidistant slendro, often using a western B♭ or C as a tuning basis. Javanese emigrants to Suriname play gamelan in a style close to that found in Central Javanese villages. Gamelan is also related to the Filipino kulintang ensemble. There is also a wide variety of gamelan in the West, including both traditional and experimental ensembles.
In oral Javanese culture distinctions are made between complete or incomplete, archaic and modern, and large standard and small village gamelan. The various archaic ensembles are distinguished by their unique combinations of instruments and possession of obsolete instruments such as the bell-tree (byong) in the 3-toned gamelan kodhok ngorek. Regionally variable village gamelan are often distinguished from standard gamelan (which have the rebab as the main melodic instrument) by their inclusion of a double-reed wind (selompret, slompret, or sompret) in addition to variable drum and gong components, with some also including the shaken bamboo angklung or other instruments not usually associated with gamelan.
CULTURAL CONTEXT
In Indonesia, gamelan often accompanies dance, wayang puppet performances, or rituals and ceremonies. Typically players in the gamelan will be familiar with dance moves and poetry, while dancers are able to play in the ensemble. In wayang, the dalang (puppeteer) must have a thorough knowledge of gamelan, as he gives the cues for the music. Gamelan can be performed by itself – in "klenengan" style, or for radio broadcasts – but concerts in the Western style are not traditional.
Gamelan's role in rituals is so important that there is a Javanese saying, "It is not official until the gong is hung". Some performances are associated with royalty, such as visits by the sultan of Yogyakarta. Certain gamelans are associated with specific rituals, such as the Gamelan Sekaten, which is used in celebration of Mawlid an-Nabi (Muhammad's birthday). In Bali, almost all religious rituals include gamelan performance. Gamelan is also used in the ceremonies of the Catholic church in Indonesia. Certain pieces are designated for starting and ending performances or ceremonies. When an "ending" piece (such as "Udan Mas") is begun, the audience will know that the event is nearly finished and will begin to leave. Certain pieces are also believed to possess magic powers, and can be used to ward off evil spirits.
Gamelan is frequently played on the radio. For example, the Pura Pakualaman gamelan performs live on the radio every Minggu Pon (a day in the 35-day cycle of the Javanese calendar). In major towns, the Radio Republik Indonesia employs professional musicians and actors, and broadcast programs of a wide variety of gamelan music and drama.
In the court tradition of central Java, gamelan is often played in the pendopo, an open pavilion with a cavernous, double-pitched roof, no side walls, and a hard marble or tile floor. The instruments are placed on a platform to one side, which allows the sound to reverberate in the roof space and enhances the acoustics.
In Bali, the Gamelan instruments are all kept together in a balé, a large open space with a roof over the top of it and several open sides. Gambelan (the Balinese term) are owned by a banjar, nobility or temples and kept in their respective compounds.
In case of banjar ownership the instruments are all kept there together because people believe that all the instruments belong to the community as a whole and that no one person has ownership over an instrument. Not only is this where the instruments are stored, but this is also the practice space for the sekaha (Gamelan orchestra group). The open walls allow for the music to flow out into the community where the rest of the people may enjoy it. Balinese gamelan cannot be heard inside closed rooms, because it easily crosses the threshold of pain. This does not apply to small ensembles like a gamelan gendér.
The sekaha is led by a single instructor whose job it is in the community to lead this group and to come up with new pieces. When they are working on a new piece, the instructor will lead the group in practice and help the group form the new music as they are practicing. When the instructor creates a new song, he leaves enough open for interpretation that the group can improvise, so the group will write the music as they practice it.
There are many styles in Balinese gamelan. Kebyar is one of the most recent ones. Some Balinese Gamelan groups constantly change their music by taking older pieces they know and mixing them together, as well as trying new variations on their music. Their music constantly changes because they believe that music should grow and change; the only exception to this is with their most sacred songs which they do not change. A single new piece of music can take several months before it is completed.
Men and women usually perform in separate groups, with the exception in Java of the pesindhen, the female singer who performs with male groups.
In the twenty-five countries outside of Indonesia that have gamelan, music is often performed in a concert context or as part of ceremonies of expat communities. It may also incorporate dance or wayang.
TUNING
The tuning and construction of a gamelan orchestra is a complex process. Javanese gamelans use two tuning systems: sléndro and pélog. There are other tuning systems such as degung (exclusive to Sunda, or West Java), and madenda (also known as diatonis, similar to a European natural minor scale). In central Javanese gamelan, sléndro is a system with five notes to the octave, fairly evenly spaced, while pélog has seven notes to the octave, with uneven intervals, usually played in five note subsets of the seven-tone collection. This results in sound quite different from music played in a western tuning system. Many gamelan orchestras will include instruments in each tuning, but each individual instrument will only be able to play notes in one. The precise tuning used differs from ensemble to ensemble, and give each ensemble its own particular flavour. The intervals between notes in a scale are very close to identical for different instruments within each gamelan, but the intervals vary from one gamelan to the next.
Colin McPhee remarked, "Deviations in what is considered the same scale are so large that one might with reason state that there are as many scales as there are gamelans." However, this view is contested by some teachers of gamelan, and there have been efforts to combine multiple ensembles and tuning structures into one gamelan to ease transportation at festival time. One such ensemble is gamelan Manikasanti, which can play the repertoire of many different ensembles.
Balinese gamelan instruments are commonly played in pairs which are tuned slightly apart to produce interference beats, ideally at a consistent speed for all pairs of notes in all registers. This concept is referred to as "ombak," translating to "wave," communicating the idea of cyclical undulation. One instrument, tuned slightly higher, is thought of as the "inhale," and the other, slightly lower, is called the "exhale." When the inhale and the exhale are combined, beating is produced, meant to represent the beating of the heart, or the symbol of being alive. 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. The scale roughly approximates that of the phrygian mode of the Western major scale (E-E on the white keys of the piano), with the notes EFGBC corresponding to the note positions 12356 in the slendro scale used by most gamelan.
As well as the non-western octave and the use of beats, Javanese gamelan uses a combination of tempo and density known as Irama, relating how many beats on the saron panerus instrument there are to notes in the core melody or balungan; density is considered primary.
NOTATION
Gamelan music is traditionally not notated and began as an oral tradition. In the 19th century, however, the kraton (palaces) of Yogyakarta and Surakarta developed distinct notations for transcribing the repertoire. These were not used to read the music, which was memorized, but to preserve pieces in the court records. The Yogyanese notation is a checkerboard notation, which uses six or seven vertical lines to represent notes of higher pitch in the balungan (melodic framework), and horizontal lines which represent the series of beats, read downward with time. The fourth vertical line and every fourth horizontal line (completing a gatra) are darkened for legibility. Symbols on the left indicate the colotomic or metric structure of gongs and so forth, while specific drum features are notated in symbols to the right. The Solonese notation reads horizontally, like Western notation, but does not use barlines. Instead, note values and rests are squiggled between the notes.
Today this notation is relatively rare, and has been replaced by kepatihan notation, which is a cipher system. Kepatihan notation developed around 1900 at the kepatihan Palace in Surakarta, which had become a high-school conservatory. The pitches are numbered (see the articles on the scales slendro and pélog for an explanation of how), and are read across with dots below or above the numbers indicating the register, and lines above notes showing time values; In vocal notation, there are also brackets under groups of notes to indicate melisma. Like the palace notation, however, Kepatihan records mostly the balungan part and its metric phrases as marked by a variety of gongs. The other parts are created in real time, and depend on the knowledge each musician has of his instrument, and his awareness of what others are playing; this "realization" is sometimes called "garap." Some teachers have also devised certain notations, generally using kepatihan principles, for the cengkok (melodic patterns) of the elaborating instruments. Some ethnomusicologists, trained in European music, may make transcriptions onto a Western staff. This entails particular challenges of tuning and time, sometimes resulting in unusual clefs.
INFLUENCE ON WESTERN MUSIC
The gamelan has been appreciated by several western composers of classical music, most famously Claude Debussy who heard a Javanese gamelan in the premiere of Louis-Albert Bourgault-Ducoudray's Rapsodie Cambodgienne at the Paris Exposition of 1889 (World's Fair). The work had been written seven years earlier in 1882, but received its premiere only in 1889. The gamelan Debussy heard in it was in the slendro scale and was played by Central Javanese musicians. Despite his enthusiasm, direct citations of gamelan scales, melodies, rhythms, or ensemble textures have not been located in any of Debussy's own compositions. However, the equal-tempered whole tone scale appears in his music of this time and afterward, and a Javanese gamelan-like heterophonic texture is emulated on occasion, particularly in "Pagodes", from Estampes (solo piano, 1903), in which the great gong's cyclic punctuation is symbolized by a prominent perfect fifth.
The composer Erik Satie, an influential contemporary of Debussy, also heard the Javanese gamelan play at the Paris Exposition of 1889. The repetitively hypnotic effects of the gamelan were incorporated into Satie's exotic Gnossienne set for piano.
Direct homages to gamelan music are to be found in works for western instruments by John Cage, particularly his prepared piano pieces, Colin McPhee, Lou Harrison, Béla Bartók, Francis Poulenc, Olivier Messiaen, Pierre Boulez, Bronislaw Kaper and Benjamin Britten. In more recent times, American composers such as Henry Brant, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Dennis Murphy, Loren Nerell, Michael Tenzer, Evan Ziporyn, Daniel James Wolf and Jody Diamond as well as Australian composers such as Peter Sculthorpe, Andrew Schultz and Ross Edwards have written several works with parts for gamelan instruments or full gamelan ensembles. I Nyoman Windha is among contemporary Indonesian composers that have written compositions using western instruments along with Gamelan. Hungarian composer György Ligeti wrote a piano étude called Galamb Borong influenced by gamelan. Avant-garde composer Harry Partch, one of America's most idiosyncratic composers, was also influenced by Gamelan, both in his microtonal compositions and the instruments he built for their performance
American folk guitarist John Fahey included elements of gamelan in many of his late-1960s sound collages, and again in his 1997 collaboration with Cul de Sac, The Epiphany of Glenn Jones. Influenced by gamelan, Robert Fripp used rhythmically interlocking guitars in his duets with Adrian Belew in the 1981–1984 trilogy of albums (Discipline, Beat, Three of a Perfect Pair) by rock band King Crimson and with The League of Crafty Guitarists. The gamelan has also been used by British multi-instrumentalist Mike Oldfield at least three times, "Woodhenge" (1979), "The Wind Chimes (Part II)" (1987) and "Nightshade" (2005).
On the debut EP of Sonic Youth the track 'She's not Alone' has a gamelan timbre. Experimental pop groups The Residents, 23 Skidoo (whose 1984 album was even titled Urban Gamelan), Mouse on Mars, His Name Is Alive, Xiu Xiu, Macha, Saudade, The Raincoats and the Sun City Girls have used gamelan percussion. Avant-garde performance band Melted Men uses Balinese gamelan instruments as well as gamelan-influenced costumes and dance in their shows. The Moodswinger built by Yuri Landman gives gamelan–like clock and bell sounds, because of its 3rd bridge construction. Indonesian-Dutch composer Sinta Wullur has integrated Western music and gamelan for opera.
INFLUENCE ON CONTEMPORARY MUSIC
In contemporary Indonesian music scene, some groups fuse contemporary westernized jazz fusion music with the legacy of traditional ethnic music traditions of their people. In the case of Krakatau and SambaSunda, the bands from West Java, the traditional Sundanese kacapi suling and gamelan degung Sunda orchestra is performed alongside drum set, keyboard and guitars. Other bands such as Bossanova Java were fused Javanese music with bossa nova, while the Kulkul band fuse jazz with Balinese gamelan.
The Indonesian singer Anggun, often incorporated Indonesian traditional tunes of gamelan and tembang style of singing in her works. Typical gamelan tunes can be trace in several songs in her album Snow on the Sahara such as "Snow on the Sahara", "A Rose in the Wind", and also in her collaboration works with Deep Forest on "Deep Blue Sea" on their 2002 album, Music Detected. Philippines born Indonesian singer Maribeth Pascua also featuring gamelan tunes in her songs Denpasar Moon and Borobudur.
Beyond Indonesia, gamelan has also had an influence on Japanese popular music, specifically the synthpop band Yellow Magic Orchestra. Their 1981 record Technodelic, one of the first albums to heavily rely on samples and loops, made use of gamelan elements and samples. Yellow Magic Orchestra member Ryuichi Sakamoto also used gamelan elements for his soundtrack to the 1983 British-Japanese film Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, which won him the 1983 BAFTA Award for Best Film Music.
Later, many Americans were first introduced to the sounds of gamelan by the popular 1988 Japanese anime film Akira. Gamelan elements are used in this film to punctuate several exciting fight scenes, as well as to symbolize the emerging psychic powers of the tragic hero, Tetsuo. The gamelan in the film's score was performed by the members of the Japanese musical collective Geinoh Yamashirogumi, using their semar pegulingan and jegog ensembles. Gamelan and kecak are also used in the soundtrack to the video games Secret of Mana and Sonic Unleashed. The two opening credits of 1998 Japanese Anime Neo Ranga use Balinese music (Kecak and Gamelan gong kebyar). Each "waking up" of Ranga in the anime uses the Gong Kebyar theme. The musical soundtrack for the Sci Fi Channel series Battlestar Galactica features extensive use of the gamelan, particularly in the 3rd season, as do Alexandre Desplat's scores for Girl With A Pearl Earring and The Golden Compass. James Newton Howard, who composed Disney's 2001 feature film Atlantis: The Lost Empire, chose Gamelan for the musical theme of the Altanteans.
Loops of gamelan music appear in electronic music. An early example is the Texas band Drain's album Offspeed and In There, which contains two tracks where trip-hop beats are matched with gamelan loops from Java and Bali and recent popular examples include the Sofa Surfers' piece Gamelan, or EXEC_PURGER/.#AURICA extracting, a song sung by Haruka Shimotsuki as part of the Ar tonelico: Melody of Elemia soundtracks.
Gamelan influences can also be heard in the 2006 hip hop song, Tokyo Drift (Fast & Furious), by Teriyaki Boyz.
In the Regular Show episode "150-Piece Kit", a gamelan is mentioned to be part of the eponymous kit.
GAMELAN OUTSIDE INDONESIA
Gamelan is also found outside of Indonesia. There are forms of gamelan that have developed outside Indonesia, such as American gamelan in the United States and Malay Gamelan in Malaysia. Gamelan has also become quite widespread along the South East of Sri Lanka, particularly with the Tamil community, and in Colombo, at the Indonesian Embassy.
WIKIPEDIA
Gamelan is traditional ensemble music of Java and Bali in Indonesia, made up predominantly of percussive instruments. The most common instruments are metallophones played by mallets as well as a set of hand played drums called kendhang which register the beat. Other instruments include xylophones, bamboo flutes, bowed instrument called rebab, and even vocalists called sindhen.
Although the popularity of gamelan has declined since the introduction of pop music, gamelan is still commonly played in formal occasions and in many traditional Indonesian ceremonies. For most Indonesians, gamelan is an integral part of Indonesian culture.
TERMINOLOGY
The word gamelan comes from the low Javanese word gamel, which may refer to a type of mallet used to strike instruments or the act of striking with a mallet. The term karawitan refers to the playing of gamelan instruments, and comes from the word rawit, meaning 'intricate' or 'finely worked'. The word derives from the Javanese word of Sanskrit origin, rawit, which refers to the sense of smoothness and elegance idealized in Javanese music. Another word from this root, pangrawit, means a person with such sense, and is used as an honorific when discussing esteemed gamelan musicians. The high Javanese word for gamelan is gangsa, formed either from the words tembaga and rejasa referring to the materials used in bronze gamelan construction (copper and tin), or tiga and sedasa referring to their proportions (three and ten).
HISTORY
The gamelan predates the Hindu-Buddhist culture that dominated Indonesia in its earliest records and instead represents a native art form. The instruments developed into their current form during the Majapahit Empire. In contrast to the heavy Indian influence in other art forms, the only obvious Indian influence in gamelan music is in the Javanese style of singing, and in the themes of the Wayang kulit (shadow puppet plays).
In Javanese mythology, the gamelan was created by Sang Hyang Guru in Saka era 167 (c. AD 230), the god who ruled as king of all Java from a palace on the Maendra mountain in Medang Kamulan (now Mount Lawu). He needed a signal to summon the gods and thus invented the gong. For more complex messages, he invented two other gongs, thus forming the original gamelan set.
The earliest image of a musical ensemble is found on the 8th century Borobudur temple, Central Java. Musical instruments such as the bamboo flute, bells, drums in various sizes, lute, and bowed and plucked string instruments were identified in this image. However it lacks metallophones and xylophones. Nevertheless, the image of this musical ensemble is suggested to be the ancient form of the gamelan.
In the palaces of Java are the oldest known ensembles, the Munggang and Kodokngorek gamelans, apparently from the 12th century. These formed the basis of a "loud style". A different, "soft style" developed out of the kemanak tradition and is related to the traditions of singing Javanese poetry, in a manner which is often believed to be similar to performance of modern bedhaya dance. In the 17th century, these loud and soft styles mixed, and to a large extent the variety of modern gamelan styles of Bali, Java, and Sunda resulted from different ways of mixing these elements. Thus, despite the seeming diversity of styles, many of the same theoretical concepts, instruments, and techniques are shared between the styles.
INSTRUMENTS
A gamelan is primarily constituted from metallophones while other instruments such as flute (suling) and zither (celempung) are discretionary. Hand played drums called kendhang however is essential despite not being a metallophone as it control the tempo and rhythm of pieces as well as the transitions from one section to another.
VARIETIES
They are distinguished by their collection of instruments and use of voice, tunings, repertoire, style, and cultural context. In general, no two gamelan ensembles are the same, and those that arose in prestigious courts are often considered to have their own style. Certain styles may also be shared by nearby ensembles, leading to a regional style.
The varieties are generally grouped geographically, with the principal division between the styles favored by the Balinese, Javanese, and Sundanese peoples. The Madurese also had their own style of gamelan, although it is no longer in use, and the last orchestra is kept at the Sumenep palace. Sundanese gamelan is often associated with Gamelan Degung, a Sundanese musical ensemble that utilises a subset of modified gamelan instruments with a particular mode of pelog scale. Balinese gamelan is often associated with the virtuosity and rapid changes of tempo and dynamics of Gamelan gong kebyar, its best-known style. Other popular Balinese styles include Gamelan and kecak, also known as the "monkey chant." Javanese gamelan was largely dominated by the courts of the 19th century central Javanese rulers, each with its own style, but overall is known for a slower, more meditative style than that of Bali. Although Javanese gamelan can be made from steel, the better instruments are made of cast brass. The two kinds of instruments are tuned in different ways.
Outside of the main core on Java and Bali, gamelans have spread through migration and cultural interest, new styles sometimes resulting as well. Malay gamelans are designed in ways that are similar to the Javanese gamelan except they lack most of the elaborating instruments and are tuned in a near-equidistant slendro, often using a western B♭ or C as a tuning basis. Javanese emigrants to Suriname play gamelan in a style close to that found in Central Javanese villages. Gamelan is also related to the Filipino kulintang ensemble. There is also a wide variety of gamelan in the West, including both traditional and experimental ensembles.
In oral Javanese culture distinctions are made between complete or incomplete, archaic and modern, and large standard and small village gamelan. The various archaic ensembles are distinguished by their unique combinations of instruments and possession of obsolete instruments such as the bell-tree (byong) in the 3-toned gamelan kodhok ngorek. Regionally variable village gamelan are often distinguished from standard gamelan (which have the rebab as the main melodic instrument) by their inclusion of a double-reed wind (selompret, slompret, or sompret) in addition to variable drum and gong components, with some also including the shaken bamboo angklung or other instruments not usually associated with gamelan.
CULTURAL CONTEXT
In Indonesia, gamelan often accompanies dance, wayang puppet performances, or rituals and ceremonies. Typically players in the gamelan will be familiar with dance moves and poetry, while dancers are able to play in the ensemble. In wayang, the dalang (puppeteer) must have a thorough knowledge of gamelan, as he gives the cues for the music. Gamelan can be performed by itself – in "klenengan" style, or for radio broadcasts – but concerts in the Western style are not traditional.
Gamelan's role in rituals is so important that there is a Javanese saying, "It is not official until the gong is hung". Some performances are associated with royalty, such as visits by the sultan of Yogyakarta. Certain gamelans are associated with specific rituals, such as the Gamelan Sekaten, which is used in celebration of Mawlid an-Nabi (Muhammad's birthday). In Bali, almost all religious rituals include gamelan performance. Gamelan is also used in the ceremonies of the Catholic church in Indonesia. Certain pieces are designated for starting and ending performances or ceremonies. When an "ending" piece (such as "Udan Mas") is begun, the audience will know that the event is nearly finished and will begin to leave. Certain pieces are also believed to possess magic powers, and can be used to ward off evil spirits.
Gamelan is frequently played on the radio. For example, the Pura Pakualaman gamelan performs live on the radio every Minggu Pon (a day in the 35-day cycle of the Javanese calendar). In major towns, the Radio Republik Indonesia employs professional musicians and actors, and broadcast programs of a wide variety of gamelan music and drama.
In the court tradition of central Java, gamelan is often played in the pendopo, an open pavilion with a cavernous, double-pitched roof, no side walls, and a hard marble or tile floor. The instruments are placed on a platform to one side, which allows the sound to reverberate in the roof space and enhances the acoustics.
In Bali, the Gamelan instruments are all kept together in a balé, a large open space with a roof over the top of it and several open sides. Gambelan (the Balinese term) are owned by a banjar, nobility or temples and kept in their respective compounds.
In case of banjar ownership the instruments are all kept there together because people believe that all the instruments belong to the community as a whole and that no one person has ownership over an instrument. Not only is this where the instruments are stored, but this is also the practice space for the sekaha (Gamelan orchestra group). The open walls allow for the music to flow out into the community where the rest of the people may enjoy it. Balinese gamelan cannot be heard inside closed rooms, because it easily crosses the threshold of pain. This does not apply to small ensembles like a gamelan gendér.
The sekaha is led by a single instructor whose job it is in the community to lead this group and to come up with new pieces. When they are working on a new piece, the instructor will lead the group in practice and help the group form the new music as they are practicing. When the instructor creates a new song, he leaves enough open for interpretation that the group can improvise, so the group will write the music as they practice it.
There are many styles in Balinese gamelan. Kebyar is one of the most recent ones. Some Balinese Gamelan groups constantly change their music by taking older pieces they know and mixing them together, as well as trying new variations on their music. Their music constantly changes because they believe that music should grow and change; the only exception to this is with their most sacred songs which they do not change. A single new piece of music can take several months before it is completed.
Men and women usually perform in separate groups, with the exception in Java of the pesindhen, the female singer who performs with male groups.
In the twenty-five countries outside of Indonesia that have gamelan, music is often performed in a concert context or as part of ceremonies of expat communities. It may also incorporate dance or wayang.
TUNING
The tuning and construction of a gamelan orchestra is a complex process. Javanese gamelans use two tuning systems: sléndro and pélog. There are other tuning systems such as degung (exclusive to Sunda, or West Java), and madenda (also known as diatonis, similar to a European natural minor scale). In central Javanese gamelan, sléndro is a system with five notes to the octave, fairly evenly spaced, while pélog has seven notes to the octave, with uneven intervals, usually played in five note subsets of the seven-tone collection. This results in sound quite different from music played in a western tuning system. Many gamelan orchestras will include instruments in each tuning, but each individual instrument will only be able to play notes in one. The precise tuning used differs from ensemble to ensemble, and give each ensemble its own particular flavour. The intervals between notes in a scale are very close to identical for different instruments within each gamelan, but the intervals vary from one gamelan to the next.
Colin McPhee remarked, "Deviations in what is considered the same scale are so large that one might with reason state that there are as many scales as there are gamelans." However, this view is contested by some teachers of gamelan, and there have been efforts to combine multiple ensembles and tuning structures into one gamelan to ease transportation at festival time. One such ensemble is gamelan Manikasanti, which can play the repertoire of many different ensembles.
Balinese gamelan instruments are commonly played in pairs which are tuned slightly apart to produce interference beats, ideally at a consistent speed for all pairs of notes in all registers. This concept is referred to as "ombak," translating to "wave," communicating the idea of cyclical undulation. One instrument, tuned slightly higher, is thought of as the "inhale," and the other, slightly lower, is called the "exhale." When the inhale and the exhale are combined, beating is produced, meant to represent the beating of the heart, or the symbol of being alive. 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. The scale roughly approximates that of the phrygian mode of the Western major scale (E-E on the white keys of the piano), with the notes EFGBC corresponding to the note positions 12356 in the slendro scale used by most gamelan.
As well as the non-western octave and the use of beats, Javanese gamelan uses a combination of tempo and density known as Irama, relating how many beats on the saron panerus instrument there are to notes in the core melody or balungan; density is considered primary.
NOTATION
Gamelan music is traditionally not notated and began as an oral tradition. In the 19th century, however, the kraton (palaces) of Yogyakarta and Surakarta developed distinct notations for transcribing the repertoire. These were not used to read the music, which was memorized, but to preserve pieces in the court records. The Yogyanese notation is a checkerboard notation, which uses six or seven vertical lines to represent notes of higher pitch in the balungan (melodic framework), and horizontal lines which represent the series of beats, read downward with time. The fourth vertical line and every fourth horizontal line (completing a gatra) are darkened for legibility. Symbols on the left indicate the colotomic or metric structure of gongs and so forth, while specific drum features are notated in symbols to the right. The Solonese notation reads horizontally, like Western notation, but does not use barlines. Instead, note values and rests are squiggled between the notes.
Today this notation is relatively rare, and has been replaced by kepatihan notation, which is a cipher system. Kepatihan notation developed around 1900 at the kepatihan Palace in Surakarta, which had become a high-school conservatory. The pitches are numbered (see the articles on the scales slendro and pélog for an explanation of how), and are read across with dots below or above the numbers indicating the register, and lines above notes showing time values; In vocal notation, there are also brackets under groups of notes to indicate melisma. Like the palace notation, however, Kepatihan records mostly the balungan part and its metric phrases as marked by a variety of gongs. The other parts are created in real time, and depend on the knowledge each musician has of his instrument, and his awareness of what others are playing; this "realization" is sometimes called "garap." Some teachers have also devised certain notations, generally using kepatihan principles, for the cengkok (melodic patterns) of the elaborating instruments. Some ethnomusicologists, trained in European music, may make transcriptions onto a Western staff. This entails particular challenges of tuning and time, sometimes resulting in unusual clefs.
INFLUENCE ON WESTERN MUSIC
The gamelan has been appreciated by several western composers of classical music, most famously Claude Debussy who heard a Javanese gamelan in the premiere of Louis-Albert Bourgault-Ducoudray's Rapsodie Cambodgienne at the Paris Exposition of 1889 (World's Fair). The work had been written seven years earlier in 1882, but received its premiere only in 1889. The gamelan Debussy heard in it was in the slendro scale and was played by Central Javanese musicians. Despite his enthusiasm, direct citations of gamelan scales, melodies, rhythms, or ensemble textures have not been located in any of Debussy's own compositions. However, the equal-tempered whole tone scale appears in his music of this time and afterward, and a Javanese gamelan-like heterophonic texture is emulated on occasion, particularly in "Pagodes", from Estampes (solo piano, 1903), in which the great gong's cyclic punctuation is symbolized by a prominent perfect fifth.
The composer Erik Satie, an influential contemporary of Debussy, also heard the Javanese gamelan play at the Paris Exposition of 1889. The repetitively hypnotic effects of the gamelan were incorporated into Satie's exotic Gnossienne set for piano.
Direct homages to gamelan music are to be found in works for western instruments by John Cage, particularly his prepared piano pieces, Colin McPhee, Lou Harrison, Béla Bartók, Francis Poulenc, Olivier Messiaen, Pierre Boulez, Bronislaw Kaper and Benjamin Britten. In more recent times, American composers such as Henry Brant, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Dennis Murphy, Loren Nerell, Michael Tenzer, Evan Ziporyn, Daniel James Wolf and Jody Diamond as well as Australian composers such as Peter Sculthorpe, Andrew Schultz and Ross Edwards have written several works with parts for gamelan instruments or full gamelan ensembles. I Nyoman Windha is among contemporary Indonesian composers that have written compositions using western instruments along with Gamelan. Hungarian composer György Ligeti wrote a piano étude called Galamb Borong influenced by gamelan. Avant-garde composer Harry Partch, one of America's most idiosyncratic composers, was also influenced by Gamelan, both in his microtonal compositions and the instruments he built for their performance
American folk guitarist John Fahey included elements of gamelan in many of his late-1960s sound collages, and again in his 1997 collaboration with Cul de Sac, The Epiphany of Glenn Jones. Influenced by gamelan, Robert Fripp used rhythmically interlocking guitars in his duets with Adrian Belew in the 1981–1984 trilogy of albums (Discipline, Beat, Three of a Perfect Pair) by rock band King Crimson and with The League of Crafty Guitarists. The gamelan has also been used by British multi-instrumentalist Mike Oldfield at least three times, "Woodhenge" (1979), "The Wind Chimes (Part II)" (1987) and "Nightshade" (2005).
On the debut EP of Sonic Youth the track 'She's not Alone' has a gamelan timbre. Experimental pop groups The Residents, 23 Skidoo (whose 1984 album was even titled Urban Gamelan), Mouse on Mars, His Name Is Alive, Xiu Xiu, Macha, Saudade, The Raincoats and the Sun City Girls have used gamelan percussion. Avant-garde performance band Melted Men uses Balinese gamelan instruments as well as gamelan-influenced costumes and dance in their shows. The Moodswinger built by Yuri Landman gives gamelan–like clock and bell sounds, because of its 3rd bridge construction. Indonesian-Dutch composer Sinta Wullur has integrated Western music and gamelan for opera.
INFLUENCE ON CONTEMPORARY MUSIC
In contemporary Indonesian music scene, some groups fuse contemporary westernized jazz fusion music with the legacy of traditional ethnic music traditions of their people. In the case of Krakatau and SambaSunda, the bands from West Java, the traditional Sundanese kacapi suling and gamelan degung Sunda orchestra is performed alongside drum set, keyboard and guitars. Other bands such as Bossanova Java were fused Javanese music with bossa nova, while the Kulkul band fuse jazz with Balinese gamelan.
The Indonesian singer Anggun, often incorporated Indonesian traditional tunes of gamelan and tembang style of singing in her works. Typical gamelan tunes can be trace in several songs in her album Snow on the Sahara such as "Snow on the Sahara", "A Rose in the Wind", and also in her collaboration works with Deep Forest on "Deep Blue Sea" on their 2002 album, Music Detected. Philippines born Indonesian singer Maribeth Pascua also featuring gamelan tunes in her songs Denpasar Moon and Borobudur.
Beyond Indonesia, gamelan has also had an influence on Japanese popular music, specifically the synthpop band Yellow Magic Orchestra. Their 1981 record Technodelic, one of the first albums to heavily rely on samples and loops, made use of gamelan elements and samples. Yellow Magic Orchestra member Ryuichi Sakamoto also used gamelan elements for his soundtrack to the 1983 British-Japanese film Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, which won him the 1983 BAFTA Award for Best Film Music.
Later, many Americans were first introduced to the sounds of gamelan by the popular 1988 Japanese anime film Akira. Gamelan elements are used in this film to punctuate several exciting fight scenes, as well as to symbolize the emerging psychic powers of the tragic hero, Tetsuo. The gamelan in the film's score was performed by the members of the Japanese musical collective Geinoh Yamashirogumi, using their semar pegulingan and jegog ensembles. Gamelan and kecak are also used in the soundtrack to the video games Secret of Mana and Sonic Unleashed. The two opening credits of 1998 Japanese Anime Neo Ranga use Balinese music (Kecak and Gamelan gong kebyar). Each "waking up" of Ranga in the anime uses the Gong Kebyar theme. The musical soundtrack for the Sci Fi Channel series Battlestar Galactica features extensive use of the gamelan, particularly in the 3rd season, as do Alexandre Desplat's scores for Girl With A Pearl Earring and The Golden Compass. James Newton Howard, who composed Disney's 2001 feature film Atlantis: The Lost Empire, chose Gamelan for the musical theme of the Altanteans.
Loops of gamelan music appear in electronic music. An early example is the Texas band Drain's album Offspeed and In There, which contains two tracks where trip-hop beats are matched with gamelan loops from Java and Bali and recent popular examples include the Sofa Surfers' piece Gamelan, or EXEC_PURGER/.#AURICA extracting, a song sung by Haruka Shimotsuki as part of the Ar tonelico: Melody of Elemia soundtracks.
Gamelan influences can also be heard in the 2006 hip hop song, Tokyo Drift (Fast & Furious), by Teriyaki Boyz.
In the Regular Show episode "150-Piece Kit", a gamelan is mentioned to be part of the eponymous kit.
GAMELAN OUTSIDE INDONESIA
Gamelan is also found outside of Indonesia. There are forms of gamelan that have developed outside Indonesia, such as American gamelan in the United States and Malay Gamelan in Malaysia. Gamelan has also become quite widespread along the South East of Sri Lanka, particularly with the Tamil community, and in Colombo, at the Indonesian Embassy.
WIKIPEDIA
Woodhenge, Amesbury, Wiltshire. After 5000 years the posts have gone, they are marked by short concrete posts.
Gamelan is traditional ensemble music of Java and Bali in Indonesia, made up predominantly of percussive instruments. The most common instruments are metallophones played by mallets as well as a set of hand played drums called kendhang which register the beat. Other instruments include xylophones, bamboo flutes, bowed instrument called rebab, and even vocalists called sindhen.
Although the popularity of gamelan has declined since the introduction of pop music, gamelan is still commonly played in formal occasions and in many traditional Indonesian ceremonies. For most Indonesians, gamelan is an integral part of Indonesian culture.
TERMINOLOGY
The word gamelan comes from the low Javanese word gamel, which may refer to a type of mallet used to strike instruments or the act of striking with a mallet. The term karawitan refers to the playing of gamelan instruments, and comes from the word rawit, meaning 'intricate' or 'finely worked'. The word derives from the Javanese word of Sanskrit origin, rawit, which refers to the sense of smoothness and elegance idealized in Javanese music. Another word from this root, pangrawit, means a person with such sense, and is used as an honorific when discussing esteemed gamelan musicians. The high Javanese word for gamelan is gangsa, formed either from the words tembaga and rejasa referring to the materials used in bronze gamelan construction (copper and tin), or tiga and sedasa referring to their proportions (three and ten).
HISTORY
The gamelan predates the Hindu-Buddhist culture that dominated Indonesia in its earliest records and instead represents a native art form. The instruments developed into their current form during the Majapahit Empire. In contrast to the heavy Indian influence in other art forms, the only obvious Indian influence in gamelan music is in the Javanese style of singing, and in the themes of the Wayang kulit (shadow puppet plays).
In Javanese mythology, the gamelan was created by Sang Hyang Guru in Saka era 167 (c. AD 230), the god who ruled as king of all Java from a palace on the Maendra mountain in Medang Kamulan (now Mount Lawu). He needed a signal to summon the gods and thus invented the gong. For more complex messages, he invented two other gongs, thus forming the original gamelan set.
The earliest image of a musical ensemble is found on the 8th century Borobudur temple, Central Java. Musical instruments such as the bamboo flute, bells, drums in various sizes, lute, and bowed and plucked string instruments were identified in this image. However it lacks metallophones and xylophones. Nevertheless, the image of this musical ensemble is suggested to be the ancient form of the gamelan.
In the palaces of Java are the oldest known ensembles, the Munggang and Kodokngorek gamelans, apparently from the 12th century. These formed the basis of a "loud style". A different, "soft style" developed out of the kemanak tradition and is related to the traditions of singing Javanese poetry, in a manner which is often believed to be similar to performance of modern bedhaya dance. In the 17th century, these loud and soft styles mixed, and to a large extent the variety of modern gamelan styles of Bali, Java, and Sunda resulted from different ways of mixing these elements. Thus, despite the seeming diversity of styles, many of the same theoretical concepts, instruments, and techniques are shared between the styles.
INSTRUMENTS
A gamelan is primarily constituted from metallophones while other instruments such as flute (suling) and zither (celempung) are discretionary. Hand played drums called kendhang however is essential despite not being a metallophone as it control the tempo and rhythm of pieces as well as the transitions from one section to another.
VARIETIES
They are distinguished by their collection of instruments and use of voice, tunings, repertoire, style, and cultural context. In general, no two gamelan ensembles are the same, and those that arose in prestigious courts are often considered to have their own style. Certain styles may also be shared by nearby ensembles, leading to a regional style.
The varieties are generally grouped geographically, with the principal division between the styles favored by the Balinese, Javanese, and Sundanese peoples. The Madurese also had their own style of gamelan, although it is no longer in use, and the last orchestra is kept at the Sumenep palace. Sundanese gamelan is often associated with Gamelan Degung, a Sundanese musical ensemble that utilises a subset of modified gamelan instruments with a particular mode of pelog scale. Balinese gamelan is often associated with the virtuosity and rapid changes of tempo and dynamics of Gamelan gong kebyar, its best-known style. Other popular Balinese styles include Gamelan and kecak, also known as the "monkey chant." Javanese gamelan was largely dominated by the courts of the 19th century central Javanese rulers, each with its own style, but overall is known for a slower, more meditative style than that of Bali. Although Javanese gamelan can be made from steel, the better instruments are made of cast brass. The two kinds of instruments are tuned in different ways.
Outside of the main core on Java and Bali, gamelans have spread through migration and cultural interest, new styles sometimes resulting as well. Malay gamelans are designed in ways that are similar to the Javanese gamelan except they lack most of the elaborating instruments and are tuned in a near-equidistant slendro, often using a western B♭ or C as a tuning basis. Javanese emigrants to Suriname play gamelan in a style close to that found in Central Javanese villages. Gamelan is also related to the Filipino kulintang ensemble. There is also a wide variety of gamelan in the West, including both traditional and experimental ensembles.
In oral Javanese culture distinctions are made between complete or incomplete, archaic and modern, and large standard and small village gamelan. The various archaic ensembles are distinguished by their unique combinations of instruments and possession of obsolete instruments such as the bell-tree (byong) in the 3-toned gamelan kodhok ngorek. Regionally variable village gamelan are often distinguished from standard gamelan (which have the rebab as the main melodic instrument) by their inclusion of a double-reed wind (selompret, slompret, or sompret) in addition to variable drum and gong components, with some also including the shaken bamboo angklung or other instruments not usually associated with gamelan.
CULTURAL CONTEXT
In Indonesia, gamelan often accompanies dance, wayang puppet performances, or rituals and ceremonies. Typically players in the gamelan will be familiar with dance moves and poetry, while dancers are able to play in the ensemble. In wayang, the dalang (puppeteer) must have a thorough knowledge of gamelan, as he gives the cues for the music. Gamelan can be performed by itself – in "klenengan" style, or for radio broadcasts – but concerts in the Western style are not traditional.
Gamelan's role in rituals is so important that there is a Javanese saying, "It is not official until the gong is hung". Some performances are associated with royalty, such as visits by the sultan of Yogyakarta. Certain gamelans are associated with specific rituals, such as the Gamelan Sekaten, which is used in celebration of Mawlid an-Nabi (Muhammad's birthday). In Bali, almost all religious rituals include gamelan performance. Gamelan is also used in the ceremonies of the Catholic church in Indonesia. Certain pieces are designated for starting and ending performances or ceremonies. When an "ending" piece (such as "Udan Mas") is begun, the audience will know that the event is nearly finished and will begin to leave. Certain pieces are also believed to possess magic powers, and can be used to ward off evil spirits.
Gamelan is frequently played on the radio. For example, the Pura Pakualaman gamelan performs live on the radio every Minggu Pon (a day in the 35-day cycle of the Javanese calendar). In major towns, the Radio Republik Indonesia employs professional musicians and actors, and broadcast programs of a wide variety of gamelan music and drama.
In the court tradition of central Java, gamelan is often played in the pendopo, an open pavilion with a cavernous, double-pitched roof, no side walls, and a hard marble or tile floor. The instruments are placed on a platform to one side, which allows the sound to reverberate in the roof space and enhances the acoustics.
In Bali, the Gamelan instruments are all kept together in a balé, a large open space with a roof over the top of it and several open sides. Gambelan (the Balinese term) are owned by a banjar, nobility or temples and kept in their respective compounds.
In case of banjar ownership the instruments are all kept there together because people believe that all the instruments belong to the community as a whole and that no one person has ownership over an instrument. Not only is this where the instruments are stored, but this is also the practice space for the sekaha (Gamelan orchestra group). The open walls allow for the music to flow out into the community where the rest of the people may enjoy it. Balinese gamelan cannot be heard inside closed rooms, because it easily crosses the threshold of pain. This does not apply to small ensembles like a gamelan gendér.
The sekaha is led by a single instructor whose job it is in the community to lead this group and to come up with new pieces. When they are working on a new piece, the instructor will lead the group in practice and help the group form the new music as they are practicing. When the instructor creates a new song, he leaves enough open for interpretation that the group can improvise, so the group will write the music as they practice it.
There are many styles in Balinese gamelan. Kebyar is one of the most recent ones. Some Balinese Gamelan groups constantly change their music by taking older pieces they know and mixing them together, as well as trying new variations on their music. Their music constantly changes because they believe that music should grow and change; the only exception to this is with their most sacred songs which they do not change. A single new piece of music can take several months before it is completed.
Men and women usually perform in separate groups, with the exception in Java of the pesindhen, the female singer who performs with male groups.
In the twenty-five countries outside of Indonesia that have gamelan, music is often performed in a concert context or as part of ceremonies of expat communities. It may also incorporate dance or wayang.
TUNING
The tuning and construction of a gamelan orchestra is a complex process. Javanese gamelans use two tuning systems: sléndro and pélog. There are other tuning systems such as degung (exclusive to Sunda, or West Java), and madenda (also known as diatonis, similar to a European natural minor scale). In central Javanese gamelan, sléndro is a system with five notes to the octave, fairly evenly spaced, while pélog has seven notes to the octave, with uneven intervals, usually played in five note subsets of the seven-tone collection. This results in sound quite different from music played in a western tuning system. Many gamelan orchestras will include instruments in each tuning, but each individual instrument will only be able to play notes in one. The precise tuning used differs from ensemble to ensemble, and give each ensemble its own particular flavour. The intervals between notes in a scale are very close to identical for different instruments within each gamelan, but the intervals vary from one gamelan to the next.
Colin McPhee remarked, "Deviations in what is considered the same scale are so large that one might with reason state that there are as many scales as there are gamelans." However, this view is contested by some teachers of gamelan, and there have been efforts to combine multiple ensembles and tuning structures into one gamelan to ease transportation at festival time. One such ensemble is gamelan Manikasanti, which can play the repertoire of many different ensembles.
Balinese gamelan instruments are commonly played in pairs which are tuned slightly apart to produce interference beats, ideally at a consistent speed for all pairs of notes in all registers. This concept is referred to as "ombak," translating to "wave," communicating the idea of cyclical undulation. One instrument, tuned slightly higher, is thought of as the "inhale," and the other, slightly lower, is called the "exhale." When the inhale and the exhale are combined, beating is produced, meant to represent the beating of the heart, or the symbol of being alive. 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. The scale roughly approximates that of the phrygian mode of the Western major scale (E-E on the white keys of the piano), with the notes EFGBC corresponding to the note positions 12356 in the slendro scale used by most gamelan.
As well as the non-western octave and the use of beats, Javanese gamelan uses a combination of tempo and density known as Irama, relating how many beats on the saron panerus instrument there are to notes in the core melody or balungan; density is considered primary.
NOTATION
Gamelan music is traditionally not notated and began as an oral tradition. In the 19th century, however, the kraton (palaces) of Yogyakarta and Surakarta developed distinct notations for transcribing the repertoire. These were not used to read the music, which was memorized, but to preserve pieces in the court records. The Yogyanese notation is a checkerboard notation, which uses six or seven vertical lines to represent notes of higher pitch in the balungan (melodic framework), and horizontal lines which represent the series of beats, read downward with time. The fourth vertical line and every fourth horizontal line (completing a gatra) are darkened for legibility. Symbols on the left indicate the colotomic or metric structure of gongs and so forth, while specific drum features are notated in symbols to the right. The Solonese notation reads horizontally, like Western notation, but does not use barlines. Instead, note values and rests are squiggled between the notes.
Today this notation is relatively rare, and has been replaced by kepatihan notation, which is a cipher system. Kepatihan notation developed around 1900 at the kepatihan Palace in Surakarta, which had become a high-school conservatory. The pitches are numbered (see the articles on the scales slendro and pélog for an explanation of how), and are read across with dots below or above the numbers indicating the register, and lines above notes showing time values; In vocal notation, there are also brackets under groups of notes to indicate melisma. Like the palace notation, however, Kepatihan records mostly the balungan part and its metric phrases as marked by a variety of gongs. The other parts are created in real time, and depend on the knowledge each musician has of his instrument, and his awareness of what others are playing; this "realization" is sometimes called "garap." Some teachers have also devised certain notations, generally using kepatihan principles, for the cengkok (melodic patterns) of the elaborating instruments. Some ethnomusicologists, trained in European music, may make transcriptions onto a Western staff. This entails particular challenges of tuning and time, sometimes resulting in unusual clefs.
INFLUENCE ON WESTERN MUSIC
The gamelan has been appreciated by several western composers of classical music, most famously Claude Debussy who heard a Javanese gamelan in the premiere of Louis-Albert Bourgault-Ducoudray's Rapsodie Cambodgienne at the Paris Exposition of 1889 (World's Fair). The work had been written seven years earlier in 1882, but received its premiere only in 1889. The gamelan Debussy heard in it was in the slendro scale and was played by Central Javanese musicians. Despite his enthusiasm, direct citations of gamelan scales, melodies, rhythms, or ensemble textures have not been located in any of Debussy's own compositions. However, the equal-tempered whole tone scale appears in his music of this time and afterward, and a Javanese gamelan-like heterophonic texture is emulated on occasion, particularly in "Pagodes", from Estampes (solo piano, 1903), in which the great gong's cyclic punctuation is symbolized by a prominent perfect fifth.
The composer Erik Satie, an influential contemporary of Debussy, also heard the Javanese gamelan play at the Paris Exposition of 1889. The repetitively hypnotic effects of the gamelan were incorporated into Satie's exotic Gnossienne set for piano.
Direct homages to gamelan music are to be found in works for western instruments by John Cage, particularly his prepared piano pieces, Colin McPhee, Lou Harrison, Béla Bartók, Francis Poulenc, Olivier Messiaen, Pierre Boulez, Bronislaw Kaper and Benjamin Britten. In more recent times, American composers such as Henry Brant, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Dennis Murphy, Loren Nerell, Michael Tenzer, Evan Ziporyn, Daniel James Wolf and Jody Diamond as well as Australian composers such as Peter Sculthorpe, Andrew Schultz and Ross Edwards have written several works with parts for gamelan instruments or full gamelan ensembles. I Nyoman Windha is among contemporary Indonesian composers that have written compositions using western instruments along with Gamelan. Hungarian composer György Ligeti wrote a piano étude called Galamb Borong influenced by gamelan. Avant-garde composer Harry Partch, one of America's most idiosyncratic composers, was also influenced by Gamelan, both in his microtonal compositions and the instruments he built for their performance
American folk guitarist John Fahey included elements of gamelan in many of his late-1960s sound collages, and again in his 1997 collaboration with Cul de Sac, The Epiphany of Glenn Jones. Influenced by gamelan, Robert Fripp used rhythmically interlocking guitars in his duets with Adrian Belew in the 1981–1984 trilogy of albums (Discipline, Beat, Three of a Perfect Pair) by rock band King Crimson and with The League of Crafty Guitarists. The gamelan has also been used by British multi-instrumentalist Mike Oldfield at least three times, "Woodhenge" (1979), "The Wind Chimes (Part II)" (1987) and "Nightshade" (2005).
On the debut EP of Sonic Youth the track 'She's not Alone' has a gamelan timbre. Experimental pop groups The Residents, 23 Skidoo (whose 1984 album was even titled Urban Gamelan), Mouse on Mars, His Name Is Alive, Xiu Xiu, Macha, Saudade, The Raincoats and the Sun City Girls have used gamelan percussion. Avant-garde performance band Melted Men uses Balinese gamelan instruments as well as gamelan-influenced costumes and dance in their shows. The Moodswinger built by Yuri Landman gives gamelan–like clock and bell sounds, because of its 3rd bridge construction. Indonesian-Dutch composer Sinta Wullur has integrated Western music and gamelan for opera.
INFLUENCE ON CONTEMPORARY MUSIC
In contemporary Indonesian music scene, some groups fuse contemporary westernized jazz fusion music with the legacy of traditional ethnic music traditions of their people. In the case of Krakatau and SambaSunda, the bands from West Java, the traditional Sundanese kacapi suling and gamelan degung Sunda orchestra is performed alongside drum set, keyboard and guitars. Other bands such as Bossanova Java were fused Javanese music with bossa nova, while the Kulkul band fuse jazz with Balinese gamelan.
The Indonesian singer Anggun, often incorporated Indonesian traditional tunes of gamelan and tembang style of singing in her works. Typical gamelan tunes can be trace in several songs in her album Snow on the Sahara such as "Snow on the Sahara", "A Rose in the Wind", and also in her collaboration works with Deep Forest on "Deep Blue Sea" on their 2002 album, Music Detected. Philippines born Indonesian singer Maribeth Pascua also featuring gamelan tunes in her songs Denpasar Moon and Borobudur.
Beyond Indonesia, gamelan has also had an influence on Japanese popular music, specifically the synthpop band Yellow Magic Orchestra. Their 1981 record Technodelic, one of the first albums to heavily rely on samples and loops, made use of gamelan elements and samples. Yellow Magic Orchestra member Ryuichi Sakamoto also used gamelan elements for his soundtrack to the 1983 British-Japanese film Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, which won him the 1983 BAFTA Award for Best Film Music.
Later, many Americans were first introduced to the sounds of gamelan by the popular 1988 Japanese anime film Akira. Gamelan elements are used in this film to punctuate several exciting fight scenes, as well as to symbolize the emerging psychic powers of the tragic hero, Tetsuo. The gamelan in the film's score was performed by the members of the Japanese musical collective Geinoh Yamashirogumi, using their semar pegulingan and jegog ensembles. Gamelan and kecak are also used in the soundtrack to the video games Secret of Mana and Sonic Unleashed. The two opening credits of 1998 Japanese Anime Neo Ranga use Balinese music (Kecak and Gamelan gong kebyar). Each "waking up" of Ranga in the anime uses the Gong Kebyar theme. The musical soundtrack for the Sci Fi Channel series Battlestar Galactica features extensive use of the gamelan, particularly in the 3rd season, as do Alexandre Desplat's scores for Girl With A Pearl Earring and The Golden Compass. James Newton Howard, who composed Disney's 2001 feature film Atlantis: The Lost Empire, chose Gamelan for the musical theme of the Altanteans.
Loops of gamelan music appear in electronic music. An early example is the Texas band Drain's album Offspeed and In There, which contains two tracks where trip-hop beats are matched with gamelan loops from Java and Bali and recent popular examples include the Sofa Surfers' piece Gamelan, or EXEC_PURGER/.#AURICA extracting, a song sung by Haruka Shimotsuki as part of the Ar tonelico: Melody of Elemia soundtracks.
Gamelan influences can also be heard in the 2006 hip hop song, Tokyo Drift (Fast & Furious), by Teriyaki Boyz.
In the Regular Show episode "150-Piece Kit", a gamelan is mentioned to be part of the eponymous kit.
GAMELAN OUTSIDE INDONESIA
Gamelan is also found outside of Indonesia. There are forms of gamelan that have developed outside Indonesia, such as American gamelan in the United States and Malay Gamelan in Malaysia. Gamelan has also become quite widespread along the South East of Sri Lanka, particularly with the Tamil community, and in Colombo, at the Indonesian Embassy.
WIKIPEDIA
At dawn on the winter solstice, a crowd listens to an archaeologist explain what we know about Woodhenge.
Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site, Illinois.
In 1806, President Thomas Jefferson signed legislation creating America's first federal highway. The National Road would join the bustling cities of the East to the resource-rich wilderness of the West, connecting state capitals, county seats, & smaller centers of commerce along the way.
The Road pressed west from Cumberland, Md., reaching Illinois in 1828. It crossed creeks & rivers, passed through prairie, forest & marsh, & into a fertile flood plain known as the American Bottom. Here, it led travelers through the remains of America's oldest city, a metropolis that thrived more than 500 years before Jefferson was born.
Road to Ruin
By the end of the 1800s, the National Road had spawned cities across eastern Illinois, opened the state's western counties to settlement, and plotted a path for the St. Louis, Vandalia and Terre Haute Railroad.
Westward migration and urbanization came at great cost to the mounds. Marvels of earthen engineering that had stood for centuries fell to ploughshares, or were cut and carted away as fill to support the growing network of roads and rails.
Road to Recovery
Throughout the 20th century, archaeologists and concerned citizens battled commercial and residential development to preserve and protect what remained of the Cahokia complex. In 1956, conservationists found an unexpected ally in the Federal-Aid Highway Act. The act funded archaeological surveys and artifact recovery at sites compromised by federal highway construction.
By 1960, plans for Interstates 55 and 70 were in place. The resulting salvage archaeology led to the discovery of Woodhenge, a cultural artifact that contributed to Cahokia Mounds being named a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1982.
(photo captions:)
In AD 1150, some 10,000 to 20,000 Mississippians lived at and around Cahokia Mounds, making it larger than many European cities at the time. Seven centuries after Cahokia reached its peak, the mounds were noted in National Road survey notes and travelogues.
Schmidt's Mound Park stood on the National Road east of Monks Mound. The site supported an inn, tavern, bandstand and casino. Schmidt's Mound was eventually razed for construction of a retail store.
Built in 1929, Cahokia Mounds' first museum was located north of the National Road.
At the turn of the 20th century, wagon wheels, steam locomotives and streetcars cut through the Cahokia complex, as illustrated by this map from 1906.
This illustration from an 1873 Madison County atlas shows the home of T.T. Ramey atop Monks Mound. The National Road, known locally as Collinsville Road, is in the background.
(aside:)
A Road of Dirt, Rock, And Dreams
In 1806, President Thomas Jefferson signed legislation to provide federal funding for a National Road. Surveyed from Cumberland, Md., to the Mississippi River, the National Road was a highway for pioneers eager to settle the West.
Today, as US 40, the National Road in Illinois spans 164 miles. From Indiana to East St. Louis, you can still see how the ambitions and accomplishments of early Illinois immigrants shaped our communities. You'll find their influence in our art and architecture, our industry and agriculture, and in our way of life. Enjoy your time on the Road.
First problem was finding a flat piece of wood to place on ground for camera. Then taking picture into the sun. I like the effect of flare in upper right corner and the way this camera captures the ground right up to the camera. This could be a rotting pier or the remains of an ancient culture that worshipped the sun. Or perhaps many sundials for telling time?
P-Sharan and 35mm negative scan - Kodak Ultramax 400.
Gamelan is traditional ensemble music of Java and Bali in Indonesia, made up predominantly of percussive instruments. The most common instruments are metallophones played by mallets as well as a set of hand played drums called kendhang which register the beat. Other instruments include xylophones, bamboo flutes, bowed instrument called rebab, and even vocalists called sindhen.
Although the popularity of gamelan has declined since the introduction of pop music, gamelan is still commonly played in formal occasions and in many traditional Indonesian ceremonies. For most Indonesians, gamelan is an integral part of Indonesian culture.
TERMINOLOGY
The word gamelan comes from the low Javanese word gamel, which may refer to a type of mallet used to strike instruments or the act of striking with a mallet. The term karawitan refers to the playing of gamelan instruments, and comes from the word rawit, meaning 'intricate' or 'finely worked'. The word derives from the Javanese word of Sanskrit origin, rawit, which refers to the sense of smoothness and elegance idealized in Javanese music. Another word from this root, pangrawit, means a person with such sense, and is used as an honorific when discussing esteemed gamelan musicians. The high Javanese word for gamelan is gangsa, formed either from the words tembaga and rejasa referring to the materials used in bronze gamelan construction (copper and tin), or tiga and sedasa referring to their proportions (three and ten).
HISTORY
The gamelan predates the Hindu-Buddhist culture that dominated Indonesia in its earliest records and instead represents a native art form. The instruments developed into their current form during the Majapahit Empire. In contrast to the heavy Indian influence in other art forms, the only obvious Indian influence in gamelan music is in the Javanese style of singing, and in the themes of the Wayang kulit (shadow puppet plays).
In Javanese mythology, the gamelan was created by Sang Hyang Guru in Saka era 167 (c. AD 230), the god who ruled as king of all Java from a palace on the Maendra mountain in Medang Kamulan (now Mount Lawu). He needed a signal to summon the gods and thus invented the gong. For more complex messages, he invented two other gongs, thus forming the original gamelan set.
The earliest image of a musical ensemble is found on the 8th century Borobudur temple, Central Java. Musical instruments such as the bamboo flute, bells, drums in various sizes, lute, and bowed and plucked string instruments were identified in this image. However it lacks metallophones and xylophones. Nevertheless, the image of this musical ensemble is suggested to be the ancient form of the gamelan.
In the palaces of Java are the oldest known ensembles, the Munggang and Kodokngorek gamelans, apparently from the 12th century. These formed the basis of a "loud style". A different, "soft style" developed out of the kemanak tradition and is related to the traditions of singing Javanese poetry, in a manner which is often believed to be similar to performance of modern bedhaya dance. In the 17th century, these loud and soft styles mixed, and to a large extent the variety of modern gamelan styles of Bali, Java, and Sunda resulted from different ways of mixing these elements. Thus, despite the seeming diversity of styles, many of the same theoretical concepts, instruments, and techniques are shared between the styles.
INSTRUMENTS
A gamelan is primarily constituted from metallophones while other instruments such as flute (suling) and zither (celempung) are discretionary. Hand played drums called kendhang however is essential despite not being a metallophone as it control the tempo and rhythm of pieces as well as the transitions from one section to another.
VARIETIES
They are distinguished by their collection of instruments and use of voice, tunings, repertoire, style, and cultural context. In general, no two gamelan ensembles are the same, and those that arose in prestigious courts are often considered to have their own style. Certain styles may also be shared by nearby ensembles, leading to a regional style.
The varieties are generally grouped geographically, with the principal division between the styles favored by the Balinese, Javanese, and Sundanese peoples. The Madurese also had their own style of gamelan, although it is no longer in use, and the last orchestra is kept at the Sumenep palace. Sundanese gamelan is often associated with Gamelan Degung, a Sundanese musical ensemble that utilises a subset of modified gamelan instruments with a particular mode of pelog scale. Balinese gamelan is often associated with the virtuosity and rapid changes of tempo and dynamics of Gamelan gong kebyar, its best-known style. Other popular Balinese styles include Gamelan and kecak, also known as the "monkey chant." Javanese gamelan was largely dominated by the courts of the 19th century central Javanese rulers, each with its own style, but overall is known for a slower, more meditative style than that of Bali. Although Javanese gamelan can be made from steel, the better instruments are made of cast brass. The two kinds of instruments are tuned in different ways.
Outside of the main core on Java and Bali, gamelans have spread through migration and cultural interest, new styles sometimes resulting as well. Malay gamelans are designed in ways that are similar to the Javanese gamelan except they lack most of the elaborating instruments and are tuned in a near-equidistant slendro, often using a western B♭ or C as a tuning basis. Javanese emigrants to Suriname play gamelan in a style close to that found in Central Javanese villages. Gamelan is also related to the Filipino kulintang ensemble. There is also a wide variety of gamelan in the West, including both traditional and experimental ensembles.
In oral Javanese culture distinctions are made between complete or incomplete, archaic and modern, and large standard and small village gamelan. The various archaic ensembles are distinguished by their unique combinations of instruments and possession of obsolete instruments such as the bell-tree (byong) in the 3-toned gamelan kodhok ngorek. Regionally variable village gamelan are often distinguished from standard gamelan (which have the rebab as the main melodic instrument) by their inclusion of a double-reed wind (selompret, slompret, or sompret) in addition to variable drum and gong components, with some also including the shaken bamboo angklung or other instruments not usually associated with gamelan.
CULTURAL CONTEXT
In Indonesia, gamelan often accompanies dance, wayang puppet performances, or rituals and ceremonies. Typically players in the gamelan will be familiar with dance moves and poetry, while dancers are able to play in the ensemble. In wayang, the dalang (puppeteer) must have a thorough knowledge of gamelan, as he gives the cues for the music. Gamelan can be performed by itself – in "klenengan" style, or for radio broadcasts – but concerts in the Western style are not traditional.
Gamelan's role in rituals is so important that there is a Javanese saying, "It is not official until the gong is hung". Some performances are associated with royalty, such as visits by the sultan of Yogyakarta. Certain gamelans are associated with specific rituals, such as the Gamelan Sekaten, which is used in celebration of Mawlid an-Nabi (Muhammad's birthday). In Bali, almost all religious rituals include gamelan performance. Gamelan is also used in the ceremonies of the Catholic church in Indonesia. Certain pieces are designated for starting and ending performances or ceremonies. When an "ending" piece (such as "Udan Mas") is begun, the audience will know that the event is nearly finished and will begin to leave. Certain pieces are also believed to possess magic powers, and can be used to ward off evil spirits.
Gamelan is frequently played on the radio. For example, the Pura Pakualaman gamelan performs live on the radio every Minggu Pon (a day in the 35-day cycle of the Javanese calendar). In major towns, the Radio Republik Indonesia employs professional musicians and actors, and broadcast programs of a wide variety of gamelan music and drama.
In the court tradition of central Java, gamelan is often played in the pendopo, an open pavilion with a cavernous, double-pitched roof, no side walls, and a hard marble or tile floor. The instruments are placed on a platform to one side, which allows the sound to reverberate in the roof space and enhances the acoustics.
In Bali, the Gamelan instruments are all kept together in a balé, a large open space with a roof over the top of it and several open sides. Gambelan (the Balinese term) are owned by a banjar, nobility or temples and kept in their respective compounds.
In case of banjar ownership the instruments are all kept there together because people believe that all the instruments belong to the community as a whole and that no one person has ownership over an instrument. Not only is this where the instruments are stored, but this is also the practice space for the sekaha (Gamelan orchestra group). The open walls allow for the music to flow out into the community where the rest of the people may enjoy it. Balinese gamelan cannot be heard inside closed rooms, because it easily crosses the threshold of pain. This does not apply to small ensembles like a gamelan gendér.
The sekaha is led by a single instructor whose job it is in the community to lead this group and to come up with new pieces. When they are working on a new piece, the instructor will lead the group in practice and help the group form the new music as they are practicing. When the instructor creates a new song, he leaves enough open for interpretation that the group can improvise, so the group will write the music as they practice it.
There are many styles in Balinese gamelan. Kebyar is one of the most recent ones. Some Balinese Gamelan groups constantly change their music by taking older pieces they know and mixing them together, as well as trying new variations on their music. Their music constantly changes because they believe that music should grow and change; the only exception to this is with their most sacred songs which they do not change. A single new piece of music can take several months before it is completed.
Men and women usually perform in separate groups, with the exception in Java of the pesindhen, the female singer who performs with male groups.
In the twenty-five countries outside of Indonesia that have gamelan, music is often performed in a concert context or as part of ceremonies of expat communities. It may also incorporate dance or wayang.
TUNING
The tuning and construction of a gamelan orchestra is a complex process. Javanese gamelans use two tuning systems: sléndro and pélog. There are other tuning systems such as degung (exclusive to Sunda, or West Java), and madenda (also known as diatonis, similar to a European natural minor scale). In central Javanese gamelan, sléndro is a system with five notes to the octave, fairly evenly spaced, while pélog has seven notes to the octave, with uneven intervals, usually played in five note subsets of the seven-tone collection. This results in sound quite different from music played in a western tuning system. Many gamelan orchestras will include instruments in each tuning, but each individual instrument will only be able to play notes in one. The precise tuning used differs from ensemble to ensemble, and give each ensemble its own particular flavour. The intervals between notes in a scale are very close to identical for different instruments within each gamelan, but the intervals vary from one gamelan to the next.
Colin McPhee remarked, "Deviations in what is considered the same scale are so large that one might with reason state that there are as many scales as there are gamelans." However, this view is contested by some teachers of gamelan, and there have been efforts to combine multiple ensembles and tuning structures into one gamelan to ease transportation at festival time. One such ensemble is gamelan Manikasanti, which can play the repertoire of many different ensembles.
Balinese gamelan instruments are commonly played in pairs which are tuned slightly apart to produce interference beats, ideally at a consistent speed for all pairs of notes in all registers. This concept is referred to as "ombak," translating to "wave," communicating the idea of cyclical undulation. One instrument, tuned slightly higher, is thought of as the "inhale," and the other, slightly lower, is called the "exhale." When the inhale and the exhale are combined, beating is produced, meant to represent the beating of the heart, or the symbol of being alive. 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. The scale roughly approximates that of the phrygian mode of the Western major scale (E-E on the white keys of the piano), with the notes EFGBC corresponding to the note positions 12356 in the slendro scale used by most gamelan.
As well as the non-western octave and the use of beats, Javanese gamelan uses a combination of tempo and density known as Irama, relating how many beats on the saron panerus instrument there are to notes in the core melody or balungan; density is considered primary.
NOTATION
Gamelan music is traditionally not notated and began as an oral tradition. In the 19th century, however, the kraton (palaces) of Yogyakarta and Surakarta developed distinct notations for transcribing the repertoire. These were not used to read the music, which was memorized, but to preserve pieces in the court records. The Yogyanese notation is a checkerboard notation, which uses six or seven vertical lines to represent notes of higher pitch in the balungan (melodic framework), and horizontal lines which represent the series of beats, read downward with time. The fourth vertical line and every fourth horizontal line (completing a gatra) are darkened for legibility. Symbols on the left indicate the colotomic or metric structure of gongs and so forth, while specific drum features are notated in symbols to the right. The Solonese notation reads horizontally, like Western notation, but does not use barlines. Instead, note values and rests are squiggled between the notes.
Today this notation is relatively rare, and has been replaced by kepatihan notation, which is a cipher system. Kepatihan notation developed around 1900 at the kepatihan Palace in Surakarta, which had become a high-school conservatory. The pitches are numbered (see the articles on the scales slendro and pélog for an explanation of how), and are read across with dots below or above the numbers indicating the register, and lines above notes showing time values; In vocal notation, there are also brackets under groups of notes to indicate melisma. Like the palace notation, however, Kepatihan records mostly the balungan part and its metric phrases as marked by a variety of gongs. The other parts are created in real time, and depend on the knowledge each musician has of his instrument, and his awareness of what others are playing; this "realization" is sometimes called "garap." Some teachers have also devised certain notations, generally using kepatihan principles, for the cengkok (melodic patterns) of the elaborating instruments. Some ethnomusicologists, trained in European music, may make transcriptions onto a Western staff. This entails particular challenges of tuning and time, sometimes resulting in unusual clefs.
INFLUENCE ON WESTERN MUSIC
The gamelan has been appreciated by several western composers of classical music, most famously Claude Debussy who heard a Javanese gamelan in the premiere of Louis-Albert Bourgault-Ducoudray's Rapsodie Cambodgienne at the Paris Exposition of 1889 (World's Fair). The work had been written seven years earlier in 1882, but received its premiere only in 1889. The gamelan Debussy heard in it was in the slendro scale and was played by Central Javanese musicians. Despite his enthusiasm, direct citations of gamelan scales, melodies, rhythms, or ensemble textures have not been located in any of Debussy's own compositions. However, the equal-tempered whole tone scale appears in his music of this time and afterward, and a Javanese gamelan-like heterophonic texture is emulated on occasion, particularly in "Pagodes", from Estampes (solo piano, 1903), in which the great gong's cyclic punctuation is symbolized by a prominent perfect fifth.
The composer Erik Satie, an influential contemporary of Debussy, also heard the Javanese gamelan play at the Paris Exposition of 1889. The repetitively hypnotic effects of the gamelan were incorporated into Satie's exotic Gnossienne set for piano.
Direct homages to gamelan music are to be found in works for western instruments by John Cage, particularly his prepared piano pieces, Colin McPhee, Lou Harrison, Béla Bartók, Francis Poulenc, Olivier Messiaen, Pierre Boulez, Bronislaw Kaper and Benjamin Britten. In more recent times, American composers such as Henry Brant, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Dennis Murphy, Loren Nerell, Michael Tenzer, Evan Ziporyn, Daniel James Wolf and Jody Diamond as well as Australian composers such as Peter Sculthorpe, Andrew Schultz and Ross Edwards have written several works with parts for gamelan instruments or full gamelan ensembles. I Nyoman Windha is among contemporary Indonesian composers that have written compositions using western instruments along with Gamelan. Hungarian composer György Ligeti wrote a piano étude called Galamb Borong influenced by gamelan. Avant-garde composer Harry Partch, one of America's most idiosyncratic composers, was also influenced by Gamelan, both in his microtonal compositions and the instruments he built for their performance
American folk guitarist John Fahey included elements of gamelan in many of his late-1960s sound collages, and again in his 1997 collaboration with Cul de Sac, The Epiphany of Glenn Jones. Influenced by gamelan, Robert Fripp used rhythmically interlocking guitars in his duets with Adrian Belew in the 1981–1984 trilogy of albums (Discipline, Beat, Three of a Perfect Pair) by rock band King Crimson and with The League of Crafty Guitarists. The gamelan has also been used by British multi-instrumentalist Mike Oldfield at least three times, "Woodhenge" (1979), "The Wind Chimes (Part II)" (1987) and "Nightshade" (2005).
On the debut EP of Sonic Youth the track 'She's not Alone' has a gamelan timbre. Experimental pop groups The Residents, 23 Skidoo (whose 1984 album was even titled Urban Gamelan), Mouse on Mars, His Name Is Alive, Xiu Xiu, Macha, Saudade, The Raincoats and the Sun City Girls have used gamelan percussion. Avant-garde performance band Melted Men uses Balinese gamelan instruments as well as gamelan-influenced costumes and dance in their shows. The Moodswinger built by Yuri Landman gives gamelan–like clock and bell sounds, because of its 3rd bridge construction. Indonesian-Dutch composer Sinta Wullur has integrated Western music and gamelan for opera.
INFLUENCE ON CONTEMPORARY MUSIC
In contemporary Indonesian music scene, some groups fuse contemporary westernized jazz fusion music with the legacy of traditional ethnic music traditions of their people. In the case of Krakatau and SambaSunda, the bands from West Java, the traditional Sundanese kacapi suling and gamelan degung Sunda orchestra is performed alongside drum set, keyboard and guitars. Other bands such as Bossanova Java were fused Javanese music with bossa nova, while the Kulkul band fuse jazz with Balinese gamelan.
The Indonesian singer Anggun, often incorporated Indonesian traditional tunes of gamelan and tembang style of singing in her works. Typical gamelan tunes can be trace in several songs in her album Snow on the Sahara such as "Snow on the Sahara", "A Rose in the Wind", and also in her collaboration works with Deep Forest on "Deep Blue Sea" on their 2002 album, Music Detected. Philippines born Indonesian singer Maribeth Pascua also featuring gamelan tunes in her songs Denpasar Moon and Borobudur.
Beyond Indonesia, gamelan has also had an influence on Japanese popular music, specifically the synthpop band Yellow Magic Orchestra. Their 1981 record Technodelic, one of the first albums to heavily rely on samples and loops, made use of gamelan elements and samples. Yellow Magic Orchestra member Ryuichi Sakamoto also used gamelan elements for his soundtrack to the 1983 British-Japanese film Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, which won him the 1983 BAFTA Award for Best Film Music.
Later, many Americans were first introduced to the sounds of gamelan by the popular 1988 Japanese anime film Akira. Gamelan elements are used in this film to punctuate several exciting fight scenes, as well as to symbolize the emerging psychic powers of the tragic hero, Tetsuo. The gamelan in the film's score was performed by the members of the Japanese musical collective Geinoh Yamashirogumi, using their semar pegulingan and jegog ensembles. Gamelan and kecak are also used in the soundtrack to the video games Secret of Mana and Sonic Unleashed. The two opening credits of 1998 Japanese Anime Neo Ranga use Balinese music (Kecak and Gamelan gong kebyar). Each "waking up" of Ranga in the anime uses the Gong Kebyar theme. The musical soundtrack for the Sci Fi Channel series Battlestar Galactica features extensive use of the gamelan, particularly in the 3rd season, as do Alexandre Desplat's scores for Girl With A Pearl Earring and The Golden Compass. James Newton Howard, who composed Disney's 2001 feature film Atlantis: The Lost Empire, chose Gamelan for the musical theme of the Altanteans.
Loops of gamelan music appear in electronic music. An early example is the Texas band Drain's album Offspeed and In There, which contains two tracks where trip-hop beats are matched with gamelan loops from Java and Bali and recent popular examples include the Sofa Surfers' piece Gamelan, or EXEC_PURGER/.#AURICA extracting, a song sung by Haruka Shimotsuki as part of the Ar tonelico: Melody of Elemia soundtracks.
Gamelan influences can also be heard in the 2006 hip hop song, Tokyo Drift (Fast & Furious), by Teriyaki Boyz.
In the Regular Show episode "150-Piece Kit", a gamelan is mentioned to be part of the eponymous kit.
GAMELAN OUTSIDE INDONESIA
Gamelan is also found outside of Indonesia. There are forms of gamelan that have developed outside Indonesia, such as American gamelan in the United States and Malay Gamelan in Malaysia. Gamelan has also become quite widespread along the South East of Sri Lanka, particularly with the Tamil community, and in Colombo, at the Indonesian Embassy.
WIKIPEDIA
. . . accompanying a wayang golek
__________________________________
Gamelan is traditional ensemble music of Java and Bali in Indonesia, made up predominantly of percussive instruments. The most common instruments are metallophones played by mallets as well as a set of hand played drums called kendhang which register the beat. Other instruments include xylophones, bamboo flutes, bowed instrument called rebab, and even vocalists called sindhen.
Although the popularity of gamelan has declined since the introduction of pop music, gamelan is still commonly played in formal occasions and in many traditional Indonesian ceremonies. For most Indonesians, gamelan is an integral part of Indonesian culture.
TERMINOLOGY
The word gamelan comes from the low Javanese word gamel, which may refer to a type of mallet used to strike instruments or the act of striking with a mallet. The term karawitan refers to the playing of gamelan instruments, and comes from the word rawit, meaning 'intricate' or 'finely worked'. The word derives from the Javanese word of Sanskrit origin, rawit, which refers to the sense of smoothness and elegance idealized in Javanese music. Another word from this root, pangrawit, means a person with such sense, and is used as an honorific when discussing esteemed gamelan musicians. The high Javanese word for gamelan is gangsa, formed either from the words tembaga and rejasa referring to the materials used in bronze gamelan construction (copper and tin), or tiga and sedasa referring to their proportions (three and ten).
HISTORY
The gamelan predates the Hindu-Buddhist culture that dominated Indonesia in its earliest records and instead represents a native art form. The instruments developed into their current form during the Majapahit Empire. In contrast to the heavy Indian influence in other art forms, the only obvious Indian influence in gamelan music is in the Javanese style of singing, and in the themes of the Wayang kulit (shadow puppet plays).
In Javanese mythology, the gamelan was created by Sang Hyang Guru in Saka era 167 (c. AD 230), the god who ruled as king of all Java from a palace on the Maendra mountain in Medang Kamulan (now Mount Lawu). He needed a signal to summon the gods and thus invented the gong. For more complex messages, he invented two other gongs, thus forming the original gamelan set.
The earliest image of a musical ensemble is found on the 8th century Borobudur temple, Central Java. Musical instruments such as the bamboo flute, bells, drums in various sizes, lute, and bowed and plucked string instruments were identified in this image. However it lacks metallophones and xylophones. Nevertheless, the image of this musical ensemble is suggested to be the ancient form of the gamelan.
In the palaces of Java are the oldest known ensembles, the Munggang and Kodokngorek gamelans, apparently from the 12th century. These formed the basis of a "loud style". A different, "soft style" developed out of the kemanak tradition and is related to the traditions of singing Javanese poetry, in a manner which is often believed to be similar to performance of modern bedhaya dance. In the 17th century, these loud and soft styles mixed, and to a large extent the variety of modern gamelan styles of Bali, Java, and Sunda resulted from different ways of mixing these elements. Thus, despite the seeming diversity of styles, many of the same theoretical concepts, instruments, and techniques are shared between the styles.
INSTRUMENTS
A gamelan is primarily constituted from metallophones while other instruments such as flute (suling) and zither (celempung) are discretionary. Hand played drums called kendhang however is essential despite not being a metallophone as it control the tempo and rhythm of pieces as well as the transitions from one section to another.
VARIETIES
They are distinguished by their collection of instruments and use of voice, tunings, repertoire, style, and cultural context. In general, no two gamelan ensembles are the same, and those that arose in prestigious courts are often considered to have their own style. Certain styles may also be shared by nearby ensembles, leading to a regional style.
The varieties are generally grouped geographically, with the principal division between the styles favored by the Balinese, Javanese, and Sundanese peoples. The Madurese also had their own style of gamelan, although it is no longer in use, and the last orchestra is kept at the Sumenep palace. Sundanese gamelan is often associated with Gamelan Degung, a Sundanese musical ensemble that utilises a subset of modified gamelan instruments with a particular mode of pelog scale. Balinese gamelan is often associated with the virtuosity and rapid changes of tempo and dynamics of Gamelan gong kebyar, its best-known style. Other popular Balinese styles include Gamelan and kecak, also known as the "monkey chant." Javanese gamelan was largely dominated by the courts of the 19th century central Javanese rulers, each with its own style, but overall is known for a slower, more meditative style than that of Bali. Although Javanese gamelan can be made from steel, the better instruments are made of cast brass. The two kinds of instruments are tuned in different ways.
Outside of the main core on Java and Bali, gamelans have spread through migration and cultural interest, new styles sometimes resulting as well. Malay gamelans are designed in ways that are similar to the Javanese gamelan except they lack most of the elaborating instruments and are tuned in a near-equidistant slendro, often using a western B♭ or C as a tuning basis. Javanese emigrants to Suriname play gamelan in a style close to that found in Central Javanese villages. Gamelan is also related to the Filipino kulintang ensemble. There is also a wide variety of gamelan in the West, including both traditional and experimental ensembles.
In oral Javanese culture distinctions are made between complete or incomplete, archaic and modern, and large standard and small village gamelan. The various archaic ensembles are distinguished by their unique combinations of instruments and possession of obsolete instruments such as the bell-tree (byong) in the 3-toned gamelan kodhok ngorek. Regionally variable village gamelan are often distinguished from standard gamelan (which have the rebab as the main melodic instrument) by their inclusion of a double-reed wind (selompret, slompret, or sompret) in addition to variable drum and gong components, with some also including the shaken bamboo angklung or other instruments not usually associated with gamelan.
CULTURAL CONTEXT
In Indonesia, gamelan often accompanies dance, wayang puppet performances, or rituals and ceremonies. Typically players in the gamelan will be familiar with dance moves and poetry, while dancers are able to play in the ensemble. In wayang, the dalang (puppeteer) must have a thorough knowledge of gamelan, as he gives the cues for the music. Gamelan can be performed by itself – in "klenengan" style, or for radio broadcasts – but concerts in the Western style are not traditional.
Gamelan's role in rituals is so important that there is a Javanese saying, "It is not official until the gong is hung". Some performances are associated with royalty, such as visits by the sultan of Yogyakarta. Certain gamelans are associated with specific rituals, such as the Gamelan Sekaten, which is used in celebration of Mawlid an-Nabi (Muhammad's birthday). In Bali, almost all religious rituals include gamelan performance. Gamelan is also used in the ceremonies of the Catholic church in Indonesia. Certain pieces are designated for starting and ending performances or ceremonies. When an "ending" piece (such as "Udan Mas") is begun, the audience will know that the event is nearly finished and will begin to leave. Certain pieces are also believed to possess magic powers, and can be used to ward off evil spirits.
Gamelan is frequently played on the radio. For example, the Pura Pakualaman gamelan performs live on the radio every Minggu Pon (a day in the 35-day cycle of the Javanese calendar). In major towns, the Radio Republik Indonesia employs professional musicians and actors, and broadcast programs of a wide variety of gamelan music and drama.
In the court tradition of central Java, gamelan is often played in the pendopo, an open pavilion with a cavernous, double-pitched roof, no side walls, and a hard marble or tile floor. The instruments are placed on a platform to one side, which allows the sound to reverberate in the roof space and enhances the acoustics.
In Bali, the Gamelan instruments are all kept together in a balé, a large open space with a roof over the top of it and several open sides. Gambelan (the Balinese term) are owned by a banjar, nobility or temples and kept in their respective compounds.
In case of banjar ownership the instruments are all kept there together because people believe that all the instruments belong to the community as a whole and that no one person has ownership over an instrument. Not only is this where the instruments are stored, but this is also the practice space for the sekaha (Gamelan orchestra group). The open walls allow for the music to flow out into the community where the rest of the people may enjoy it. Balinese gamelan cannot be heard inside closed rooms, because it easily crosses the threshold of pain. This does not apply to small ensembles like a gamelan gendér.
The sekaha is led by a single instructor whose job it is in the community to lead this group and to come up with new pieces. When they are working on a new piece, the instructor will lead the group in practice and help the group form the new music as they are practicing. When the instructor creates a new song, he leaves enough open for interpretation that the group can improvise, so the group will write the music as they practice it.
There are many styles in Balinese gamelan. Kebyar is one of the most recent ones. Some Balinese Gamelan groups constantly change their music by taking older pieces they know and mixing them together, as well as trying new variations on their music. Their music constantly changes because they believe that music should grow and change; the only exception to this is with their most sacred songs which they do not change. A single new piece of music can take several months before it is completed.
Men and women usually perform in separate groups, with the exception in Java of the pesindhen, the female singer who performs with male groups.
In the twenty-five countries outside of Indonesia that have gamelan, music is often performed in a concert context or as part of ceremonies of expat communities. It may also incorporate dance or wayang.
TUNING
The tuning and construction of a gamelan orchestra is a complex process. Javanese gamelans use two tuning systems: sléndro and pélog. There are other tuning systems such as degung (exclusive to Sunda, or West Java), and madenda (also known as diatonis, similar to a European natural minor scale). In central Javanese gamelan, sléndro is a system with five notes to the octave, fairly evenly spaced, while pélog has seven notes to the octave, with uneven intervals, usually played in five note subsets of the seven-tone collection. This results in sound quite different from music played in a western tuning system. Many gamelan orchestras will include instruments in each tuning, but each individual instrument will only be able to play notes in one. The precise tuning used differs from ensemble to ensemble, and give each ensemble its own particular flavour. The intervals between notes in a scale are very close to identical for different instruments within each gamelan, but the intervals vary from one gamelan to the next.
Colin McPhee remarked, "Deviations in what is considered the same scale are so large that one might with reason state that there are as many scales as there are gamelans." However, this view is contested by some teachers of gamelan, and there have been efforts to combine multiple ensembles and tuning structures into one gamelan to ease transportation at festival time. One such ensemble is gamelan Manikasanti, which can play the repertoire of many different ensembles.
Balinese gamelan instruments are commonly played in pairs which are tuned slightly apart to produce interference beats, ideally at a consistent speed for all pairs of notes in all registers. This concept is referred to as "ombak," translating to "wave," communicating the idea of cyclical undulation. One instrument, tuned slightly higher, is thought of as the "inhale," and the other, slightly lower, is called the "exhale." When the inhale and the exhale are combined, beating is produced, meant to represent the beating of the heart, or the symbol of being alive. 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. The scale roughly approximates that of the phrygian mode of the Western major scale (E-E on the white keys of the piano), with the notes EFGBC corresponding to the note positions 12356 in the slendro scale used by most gamelan.
As well as the non-western octave and the use of beats, Javanese gamelan uses a combination of tempo and density known as Irama, relating how many beats on the saron panerus instrument there are to notes in the core melody or balungan; density is considered primary.
NOTATION
Gamelan music is traditionally not notated and began as an oral tradition. In the 19th century, however, the kraton (palaces) of Yogyakarta and Surakarta developed distinct notations for transcribing the repertoire. These were not used to read the music, which was memorized, but to preserve pieces in the court records. The Yogyanese notation is a checkerboard notation, which uses six or seven vertical lines to represent notes of higher pitch in the balungan (melodic framework), and horizontal lines which represent the series of beats, read downward with time. The fourth vertical line and every fourth horizontal line (completing a gatra) are darkened for legibility. Symbols on the left indicate the colotomic or metric structure of gongs and so forth, while specific drum features are notated in symbols to the right. The Solonese notation reads horizontally, like Western notation, but does not use barlines. Instead, note values and rests are squiggled between the notes.
Today this notation is relatively rare, and has been replaced by kepatihan notation, which is a cipher system. Kepatihan notation developed around 1900 at the kepatihan Palace in Surakarta, which had become a high-school conservatory. The pitches are numbered (see the articles on the scales slendro and pélog for an explanation of how), and are read across with dots below or above the numbers indicating the register, and lines above notes showing time values; In vocal notation, there are also brackets under groups of notes to indicate melisma. Like the palace notation, however, Kepatihan records mostly the balungan part and its metric phrases as marked by a variety of gongs. The other parts are created in real time, and depend on the knowledge each musician has of his instrument, and his awareness of what others are playing; this "realization" is sometimes called "garap." Some teachers have also devised certain notations, generally using kepatihan principles, for the cengkok (melodic patterns) of the elaborating instruments. Some ethnomusicologists, trained in European music, may make transcriptions onto a Western staff. This entails particular challenges of tuning and time, sometimes resulting in unusual clefs.
INFLUENCE ON WESTERN MUSIC
The gamelan has been appreciated by several western composers of classical music, most famously Claude Debussy who heard a Javanese gamelan in the premiere of Louis-Albert Bourgault-Ducoudray's Rapsodie Cambodgienne at the Paris Exposition of 1889 (World's Fair). The work had been written seven years earlier in 1882, but received its premiere only in 1889. The gamelan Debussy heard in it was in the slendro scale and was played by Central Javanese musicians. Despite his enthusiasm, direct citations of gamelan scales, melodies, rhythms, or ensemble textures have not been located in any of Debussy's own compositions. However, the equal-tempered whole tone scale appears in his music of this time and afterward, and a Javanese gamelan-like heterophonic texture is emulated on occasion, particularly in "Pagodes", from Estampes (solo piano, 1903), in which the great gong's cyclic punctuation is symbolized by a prominent perfect fifth.
The composer Erik Satie, an influential contemporary of Debussy, also heard the Javanese gamelan play at the Paris Exposition of 1889. The repetitively hypnotic effects of the gamelan were incorporated into Satie's exotic Gnossienne set for piano.
Direct homages to gamelan music are to be found in works for western instruments by John Cage, particularly his prepared piano pieces, Colin McPhee, Lou Harrison, Béla Bartók, Francis Poulenc, Olivier Messiaen, Pierre Boulez, Bronislaw Kaper and Benjamin Britten. In more recent times, American composers such as Henry Brant, Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Dennis Murphy, Loren Nerell, Michael Tenzer, Evan Ziporyn, Daniel James Wolf and Jody Diamond as well as Australian composers such as Peter Sculthorpe, Andrew Schultz and Ross Edwards have written several works with parts for gamelan instruments or full gamelan ensembles. I Nyoman Windha is among contemporary Indonesian composers that have written compositions using western instruments along with Gamelan. Hungarian composer György Ligeti wrote a piano étude called Galamb Borong influenced by gamelan. Avant-garde composer Harry Partch, one of America's most idiosyncratic composers, was also influenced by Gamelan, both in his microtonal compositions and the instruments he built for their performance
American folk guitarist John Fahey included elements of gamelan in many of his late-1960s sound collages, and again in his 1997 collaboration with Cul de Sac, The Epiphany of Glenn Jones. Influenced by gamelan, Robert Fripp used rhythmically interlocking guitars in his duets with Adrian Belew in the 1981–1984 trilogy of albums (Discipline, Beat, Three of a Perfect Pair) by rock band King Crimson and with The League of Crafty Guitarists. The gamelan has also been used by British multi-instrumentalist Mike Oldfield at least three times, "Woodhenge" (1979), "The Wind Chimes (Part II)" (1987) and "Nightshade" (2005).
On the debut EP of Sonic Youth the track 'She's not Alone' has a gamelan timbre. Experimental pop groups The Residents, 23 Skidoo (whose 1984 album was even titled Urban Gamelan), Mouse on Mars, His Name Is Alive, Xiu Xiu, Macha, Saudade, The Raincoats and the Sun City Girls have used gamelan percussion. Avant-garde performance band Melted Men uses Balinese gamelan instruments as well as gamelan-influenced costumes and dance in their shows. The Moodswinger built by Yuri Landman gives gamelan–like clock and bell sounds, because of its 3rd bridge construction. Indonesian-Dutch composer Sinta Wullur has integrated Western music and gamelan for opera.
INFLUENCE ON CONTEMPORARY MUSIC
In contemporary Indonesian music scene, some groups fuse contemporary westernized jazz fusion music with the legacy of traditional ethnic music traditions of their people. In the case of Krakatau and SambaSunda, the bands from West Java, the traditional Sundanese kacapi suling and gamelan degung Sunda orchestra is performed alongside drum set, keyboard and guitars. Other bands such as Bossanova Java were fused Javanese music with bossa nova, while the Kulkul band fuse jazz with Balinese gamelan.
The Indonesian singer Anggun, often incorporated Indonesian traditional tunes of gamelan and tembang style of singing in her works. Typical gamelan tunes can be trace in several songs in her album Snow on the Sahara such as "Snow on the Sahara", "A Rose in the Wind", and also in her collaboration works with Deep Forest on "Deep Blue Sea" on their 2002 album, Music Detected. Philippines born Indonesian singer Maribeth Pascua also featuring gamelan tunes in her songs Denpasar Moon and Borobudur.
Beyond Indonesia, gamelan has also had an influence on Japanese popular music, specifically the synthpop band Yellow Magic Orchestra. Their 1981 record Technodelic, one of the first albums to heavily rely on samples and loops, made use of gamelan elements and samples. Yellow Magic Orchestra member Ryuichi Sakamoto also used gamelan elements for his soundtrack to the 1983 British-Japanese film Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, which won him the 1983 BAFTA Award for Best Film Music.
Later, many Americans were first introduced to the sounds of gamelan by the popular 1988 Japanese anime film Akira. Gamelan elements are used in this film to punctuate several exciting fight scenes, as well as to symbolize the emerging psychic powers of the tragic hero, Tetsuo. The gamelan in the film's score was performed by the members of the Japanese musical collective Geinoh Yamashirogumi, using their semar pegulingan and jegog ensembles. Gamelan and kecak are also used in the soundtrack to the video games Secret of Mana and Sonic Unleashed. The two opening credits of 1998 Japanese Anime Neo Ranga use Balinese music (Kecak and Gamelan gong kebyar). Each "waking up" of Ranga in the anime uses the Gong Kebyar theme. The musical soundtrack for the Sci Fi Channel series Battlestar Galactica features extensive use of the gamelan, particularly in the 3rd season, as do Alexandre Desplat's scores for Girl With A Pearl Earring and The Golden Compass. James Newton Howard, who composed Disney's 2001 feature film Atlantis: The Lost Empire, chose Gamelan for the musical theme of the Altanteans.
Loops of gamelan music appear in electronic music. An early example is the Texas band Drain's album Offspeed and In There, which contains two tracks where trip-hop beats are matched with gamelan loops from Java and Bali and recent popular examples include the Sofa Surfers' piece Gamelan, or EXEC_PURGER/.#AURICA extracting, a song sung by Haruka Shimotsuki as part of the Ar tonelico: Melody of Elemia soundtracks.
Gamelan influences can also be heard in the 2006 hip hop song, Tokyo Drift (Fast & Furious), by Teriyaki Boyz.
In the Regular Show episode "150-Piece Kit", a gamelan is mentioned to be part of the eponymous kit.
GAMELAN OUTSIDE INDONESIA
Gamelan is also found outside of Indonesia. There are forms of gamelan that have developed outside Indonesia, such as American gamelan in the United States and Malay Gamelan in Malaysia. Gamelan has also become quite widespread along the South East of Sri Lanka, particularly with the Tamil community, and in Colombo, at the Indonesian Embassy.
WIKIPEDIA
DESCRIPTION
Dead trees reaching for the stars and the far end of the milky way (as good as it gets, due the the severe light pollution in Netherlands & Belgium).
I wonder...is there life out there?
Enjoy this view of the Dutch-Belgian night sky!
La Spiaggia della Lecciona è una delle poche spiagge italiane che ancora preserva il suo stato naturale,arricchita da legni levigati dalla sabbia e sbiancati dai cristalli di sale ...
The Beach of Lecciona is one of the few Italian beaches that still preserves its natural state , covered with smoothed wood from the sand and bleached by salt crystals...
One of Ki and Dodgie's most favourite places, and also marginally less muddy than our local walks. Lovely to see Dodgie running around with his frisbee and not looking for Ki to tell him what to do so much.
Dodgie decided it would be fun to go and hide in Woodhenge!
By the North Jetty at the mouth of the mighty Columbia River. North Head State Park, Washington.
It is hard to imagine the fury of the tempest that carried this massive section of tree trunk this far inland. It is probably cedar since there so little deterioration.
Pictures of some of the gardens in the grounds of the Castle.
Detail: Zimbabwean statue/sculpture in the Rose Garden.
Come and enjoy Herstmonceux Castle Gardens & Grounds, set within 300 acres of carefully managed woodland with themed formal gardens to the rear, the 15th century moated castle embodies the history of medieval England and the romance of renaissance Europe.
Starting at the front of the castle, visitors have the perfect opportunity to take some photographs before walking around to Chestnut Tree Walk and heading towards Chestnuts Tea Room and the Visitors Centre where you can refresh yourself, learn a little about the history of the castle and relax before taking a gentle stroll around our formal gardens.
As you head through the themed gardens you will work your way towards the woodland trails where you can enjoy a peaceful stroll and take in the carefully managed flora and fauna of the estate. Discoveries such as Woodhenge, 300 year old Chestnut Trees, the Folly and Secret Garden as well as our Lake and Moat Walk all add to the escapism of everyday life.
www.herstmonceux-castle.com/explore-gardens-grounds/
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HERSTMONCEUX CASTLE AND PLACE
Heritage Category: Park and Garden
Grade: II*
List Entry Number: 1000231
National Grid Reference: TQ 64645 10713
Details
A C15 castle, surrounded by a medieval park with significant surviving landscape and archaeological features, additional C18 landscape and built features and with new and restored elements from the C20.
HISTORIC DEVELOPMENT
The origin of the park at Herstmonceux is unrecorded but it seems likely that it was in existence by the C12. The estate, including the park, passed to the Fiennes family in 1330 and in 1441 Sir Roger Fiennes applied for a licence to build the present castle and to enlarge the park. In 1449 the estate passed to Sir Roger's son who later became Lord Dacre. The Dacre family sold the estate to George Naylor in 1708 and in 1775 the Hare-Naylor family abandoned the Castle and moved into Herstmonceux Place, in the north-west corner of the park. The Castle was virtually dismantled and became a picturesque ruin in the park. The estate was sold to Thomas Reed Kemp in 1807 and purchased from him in 1819 for John Gillon. He sold it in 1846 to H B Curteis of nearby Windmill Hill Place from whom it passed by succession to Herbert Curteis. The Castle and surrounding park were sold off in 1911, with Herstmonceux Place and Windmill Hill Place becoming separate entities again. Herstmonceux Place was purchased by the James family and retained a significant area of the park. The Castle was partly restored by the new owner, Colonel Claude Lowther. He died in 1929 and in 1932 the Castle estate, plus Herstmonceux Place, was purchased by Sir Paul Latham. He completed the restoration of the Castle and, with his architect, Walter Hines Godfrey (1881-1961), restored and developed the gardens.
Latham sold the Castle and its park to the Royal Greenwich Observatory in 1946 which erected a series of buildings to house the telescopes. Sir Paul Latham died in 1952 and in 1958 the remainder of the park was sold for agricultural use. Herstmonceux Place was sold and divided into apartments in 1960. In 1989 the Castle and its park were sold to a development company. The International Study Centre of Queen's University (Canada) subsequently purchased the estate and are the present owners. The Equatorial Telescope Group complex is run as a Science Centre.
DESCRIPTION
LOCATION, AREA, BOUNDARIES, LANDFORM, SETTING Herstmonceux Castle and park and Herstmonceux Place which together comprise the 148ha of the registered site lie just to the south of the A271 Hailsham to Battle road. The site is screened on its west side by a woodland belt along Church Road which runs south from the A271, past the west front of Herstmonceux Place to All Saints' church, which sits just outside the south-west corner of the park. To the west of Church Road and south-west of the park's southern boundary, hedged pasture merges into the flat, open landscape water systems of the Pevensey Levels. The east side of the site is bounded by Wartling Road and partly screened by Wartling Wood on its far side. Wartling village lies about 1km away across bordering farmland to the south-east. The northern boundary merges into farmland with small woods.
While the present east and west road boundaries of the park appear to be of early C15 origin and have remained unchanged since, the medieval park extended further to the south and also to the north and north-west, reaching the villages of Windmill Hill and of Gardener Street on the present A271. The estate had been reduced in size to about 160ha by the time a survey was made in 1570 (BM). The Castle is sited at the south end of a stream valley emerging from the very edge of the Weald onto the Pevensey Levels. The parkland rises to the north and east to sheltering wooded crests. To the north-west a high ridge separates the Castle from the site of Herstmonceux Place.
ENTRANCES AND APPROACHES The present main entrance to the Castle and the park is from Wartling Road in the south-east corner, a drive running c 700m westwards before turning north to the Castle's west-facing entrance front. There is a second entrance in the south-west corner on Church Lane beside West Lodge, built by Godfrey in 1933, the drive from here, known by its post-war name of Flamsteed Road, probably serving as the Castle's principal entrance in the C15 and connecting it with All Saints' church. Both entrances and drives are recorded on the 1570 survey, together with a third gate, Cowper's Gate, on the north boundary north-west of Comphurst Wood. In the C15 the west and east gates were linked by a medieval road which survives (1990s) as a well-defined track lying to the south of the present main entrance drive, which follows a C20 alignment.
PRINCIPAL BUILDING Herstmonceux Castle (listed grade I) stands in the centre of the shallow valley, its principal front facing south. It is square in plan, constructed in the newly fashionable red brick, and is surrounded by two water-filled arms of a moat. It was built from 1441 and replaced the former manor house. Service buildings probably lay to the west on the site of the present C20, cottage-style lodges, one of which serves as a visitor centre and tea room. The present main entrance is on the west. The Castle was largely dismantled in 1777, leaving only its gatehouse and exterior walls intact, and was restored, although to a new interior lay-out, between 1911 and 1932, work from 1929 being carried out by the architect Walter Hines. The central, enclosed courtyard is laid to lawn and an axial flagged path lined by Irish yews, this design being part of Col Lowther's work between 1911 and 1929.
Herstmonceux Place stands on the north-west boundary of the park and commands extensive views over it to the south and east. It has an entrance front of c 1720. Samuel Wyatt enlarged and added two new elevations to the house for the Hare-Naylor family when they moved here in 1775.
East of the Castle, on higher ground, stands the six-domed, former Equatorial Group Telescope building, erected in 1958 by the Royal Greenwich Observatory. It forms a prominent landmark for a considerable distance to the south and west.
GARDENS AND PLEASURE GROUNDS The area of formal gardens immediately around the Castle include the moat to the south and east and the extended walled garden to the north.
The present moat arms around the south and east sides of the Castle are part of what was presumably a complete square in the C15. An extension northwards from the eastern arm, into the stream valley to form a broad mere, may also be a C15 feature. The mere, which appears to have been restored by Latham, is now managed as a reed bed with the feeder stream running through two channels of open water southwards into the moat. The moat is recorded as already drained by the survey of 1570 and laid out with gardens by the late C18 (CL 1918). The moat was cleared and re-flooded in 1933 by Sir Paul Latham, the present southern arm having been extended to approximately double its original c 20m width by Col Lowther.
The rectangular walled garden (listed grade II) stretches some 200m from the north face of the Castle, over rising ground. A strong formal axis is maintained northwards through the three main compartments. The first, closest to the Castle, contains a central flagged path, laid in 1995 to replace the previous grass surface, which is flanked each side by five free-standing sections of clipped yew hedge. There are rectangular lawns to either side with a flagged perimeter path and herbaceous borders along the east and west walls. A central set of steps leads up to the second, 50m long compartment, at the mid-point of which the path encompasses a circular rose bed, replacing a former pool. There are lawns to east and west. The north wall enclosing this garden is pierced by a central loggia which gives access to the third compartment which is divided by yew hedges into three smaller enclosures. The central one, beyond the loggia, contains a former lily pool or swimming pool which is now laid out to a box parterre. To the west is the tennis court and to the east, a rose garden. The walled garden appears to have been laid out soon after the Castle was built, but was extended before the C17. In the C18 it was in use as a kitchen garden and orchard and was redesigned by Col Lowther with a central axis flanked by roses and with herbaceous borders along the east and west walls. The present (1990s) formal treatment and the addition of the northernmost compartment and loggia were the work of Walter Hines Godfrey in 1933-5.
North-east of the Castle, the extended moat arm is fed by the stream which runs southwards down the valley feeding a tiered chain of pools and dams en route. The stream is culverted through the valley or 'Temple Field', which is now managed as a meadow. The ponds, which have been (1990s) partially cleared from the silted condition they were in in the early C20, were most likely formed by clay digging for the Castle's bricks and may also have numbered among the four stew ponds referred to in the survey of 1570.
The Temple Field is enclosed by woodland and the folly in the style of a little C18 house at its north-east end was built by Sir Paul Latham to serve as an eyecatcher from his rooms in the Castle. South of the Castle are open, level lawns which replace the arena constructed by Col Lowther. Further south, the present pasture landscape is part of a medieval system of water meadows and reed-bed irrigation for which the earthworks survive. There are extensive views over the Levels.
From the south-west corner of the moat, fragmented, linear groups of sweet chestnut trees follow a course northwards for a distance of 820m to the dam below the pond in Comphurst Wood. The trees line the route of the medieval, northern approach to the Castle but are most likely to have been planted by Sir Thomas Lennard in the C17 (Rodwell 1989). Trees are being restored to sections of the route in 1997.
The present gardens of Herstmonceux Place are laid to lawn with surrounding belts of ornamental shrubbery and trees to the north and south. The terrace on the south-east front was added by the James family in the early C20 and commands extensive views over the park to north, east and south.
PARK The present parkland extends over rising ground to the north-west, north and north-east of the Castle. The open areas are entirely under arable cultivation and virtually none of the scatter of clumps on the north-western slopes shown on the 1st edition OS map surveyed 1873(5 survive in the 1990s. The northern slopes have no parkland trees at all, and only a few individuals are shown on the OS 1st edition. The early C15 manor house was surrounded by a deer park, the survey of 1570 describing the park as bounded by a park pale, laid one third to lawns with 'great timber trees' and stocked with fallow deer. John Norden's map of 1595 shows the oval paled enclosure of the park with a central lake and south-flowing stream. There are few records of the park in the C18 and C19 and by the time of the Tithe survey in 1839, considerable areas of land had already been disparked and laid out to fields.
The park contains a number of woodlands, the largest areas lying to the north-west and north and north-east of Temple Field. Plantation Wood (to the north-east) contains mature C19 rhododendron shrubberies, winding walks and a cascade and is probably of C18 origin although partly replanted and extended west and south in the C20 by the RGO for commercial forestry purposes. The mixed woodland to the north and north-west is also of mid C20 origin, the north-western block on the ridge between Herstmonceux Castle and Place replacing the probably C18 Egg Plantation.
REFERENCES
Country Life, 43 (2 March 1918), pp 214-21; (9 March 1918), pp 242-8; (16 March 1918), pp 270-3; 65 (18 May 1929), pp 702-9; 78 (30 November 1935), pp 566-72; (7 December 1935), pp 606-12; (14 December 1935), pp 630-5 I Nairn and N Pevsner, The Buildings of England: Sussex (1965), pp 534-7 W Rodwell, Herstmonceux Castle, an Archaeological Assessment of the Park (1989) Garden History 17, no 2 (1989), pp 177-8
Maps Survey, 1570 (British Museum Add Mss 5679, fo.266) John Norden, Map of Sussex, 1595 W Gardner and T Gream, A Topographical Map of the County of Sussex..., 1" to 1 mile, surveyed 1795 Tithe map for Herstmonceux parish, 1839 (East Sussex Record Office)
OS Old Series, 1" to 1 mile, 1813 OS 6" to 1 mile: 1st edition surveyed 1875 2nd edition published 1899 3rd edition published 1910 OS 25" to 1 mile: 1st edition surveyed 1875 2nd edition published 1909
Description written: July 1998 Register Inspector: VCH Edited: March 2000
historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/100023...