Imbal Imbalan by Bill Alves

Imbal-Imbalan is a composition by Bill Alves for Javanese gamelan instruments. The instruments do not play in traditional Javanese forms or idioms, though the piece is inspired in part by the different interlocking patterns, known as imbal, common to some aesthetic traditions of Indonesia. This work uses a version of the Javanese pelog tuning system, so that most of the pitches are not exactly the ones that you might expect from this notation, and they are represented by the closest equivalent in Western staff notation. The gamelan instruments used in this recording represent a non-traditional version of pelog that uses principles known as “just intonation,” where the frequencies are related by relatively simple ratios. This recording was made in 2007 by the HMC American Gamelan ensemble with Bill Alves, Daniel Garcia, Greg Jackson, Mark Nelson, Julie Simon, Mutiara Sondjaja, Benjamin Smith, Sayuri Soejima, and Darryl Yong. It is recorded on the album Imbal-Imbalan on Spectral Harmonies, available on BandCamp. More information is available at www.billalves.com.