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From: alves@aludra.usc.edu (William Alves)
Newsgroups: comp.music
Subject: Re: gamelan tunings
Keywords: pelog, slendro, gamelan
Message-ID: <6598@merlin.usc.edu>
Date: 21 Nov 89 01:42:07 GMT
References: <3113@husc6.harvard.edu> <14533@well.UUCP> <3156@husc6.harvard.edu> <14592@well.UUCP> <6534@merlin.usc.edu> <3222@husc6.harvard.edu>
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Reply-To: alves@aludra.usc.edu (Bill Alves)
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In article <3222@husc6.harvard.edu> elkies@osgood.harvard.edu (Noam Elkies) writes:
>In article <6534@merlin.usc.edu> alves@aludra.usc.edu (Bill Alves) writes:
>>[...,] Bukofzer (who sought to prove that slendro was
>>originally a subset of pelog and therefore younger),
>
>The reasoning escapes me here; even if at one time slendro was
>a subset of pelog, why couldn't that just as easily mean that pelog
>is a younger extension of slendro (as the Western chromatic scale
>is of the diatonic one)?
>
Beats me. I tried to find the reference, but our library doesn't have it. 
For anyone who's interested, Bukofzer's paper is called "The Evolution of
the Javanese Tone-systems" and it's in "Papers Read at the International
Congress of Musicology" ed. by Reese, Chase, and Mendel (NY: AMS, 1944).
As I said, I was quoting Vetter's article which said that Bukofzer's thesis
was that "the pelog system is the older of the two Javanese tuning concepts, 
and that the slendro was derived by selecting five tones from the complete 
pelog scale." Perhaps I shouldn't have paraphrased it in such a way to 
imply causality (as I haven't read Bukofzer and was relying on Vetter).

Bill Alves
USC School of Music / Center for Scholarly Technology