Exchange of Realities

I begin with the music. I flashed on the idea a few weeks ago, when leftbower first mentioned dwarven aesthetics in a comment here: dwarven gamelan music. I’d originally suggested it just as an exercise in “Nobody’s done this before”, because I felt that the primary dwarven art form would be auditory in nature, but once I’d posted it it lodged in my mind—what would it be doing there? What could I do with it?

For those of you not familiar with the form, gamelan is a variety of music found in Indonesia. It is polyphonic—no single instrument has the melody, but all of them work together to create it—and highly percussive; its instruments are large, heavy, and generally boast hitting surfaces of bronze, whether those surfaces are keys, kettles, domes, or racks of gongs. (For more information, try here.)

I’ve been playing for four years, so when I started thinking about dwarves and music, it was the first idea to come. If you think about it, it does fit. The instruments strike me as something that could come out of a dwarven forge just as easily as weapons could; they might have a bit more trouble with the frames, but those could be stone or imported wood. The idea of polyphony fits with the concept of a lawful dwarven society—everyone has a role, and they play it, and while some instruments are technically more important, none of them stand out.

So I start asking myself questions. Where do they play this? A standard gamelan is played outside, or at least in a very large room. Here might be a bit more difficult, but I’m sure there are large caverns in the underground cities that would be perfect. And what if someone’s figured out how to shape the cave walls and place the instruments so that the echoes can be utilized to improve the piece further? I’m starting to like this plan, so I decide that yes, they definitely do that. How do they mark the spots? Different textures in the ground—this ties into a real-world gamelan tradition I’m going to discuss later.

Next question, then, is what to do about the instruments. I’ve always been fascinated by the respect paid to the instruments in real-world gamelan; even in my class far away, we observed traditions and rules like “Do not step over the instruments; doing such is as rude as stepping over a sleeping person.” And our dwarves are rather rooted in tradition, so why not use this? The rules apply. No shoes in the concert area. No stepping over the instruments. Then I go a step farther: each instrument has a name, and a history, carefully recorded and passed down through the family.

That’s when I hit a problem. In standard gamelan, the instruments are made in sets, since they’re very difficult to tune once created. But I’m liking the idea of each family having an instrument or two of their own, partly for storage purposes, partly for history purposes. That’s when I realize that that was why the music was created and popularized; spreading out the instruments in the gamelan, but still keeping the requirement that musicians be able to play almost any of them, would cause circulation and communication—and hopefully friendship—between the families. Creating a set of instruments would be a momentous occasion involving artisans from any and all families involved, and any occasion that involved a concert would be grand and important, as it would require musicians from every major family.

But what sorts of occasions would prompt concerts? This was a particularly hard question for me; I wanted to do something entirely new. It was actually my boyfriend who suggested the answer to this one, tying back to yesterday’s references to dwarven weaponry and to where they get fuel for their forges: a ceremony to apologize to the hammers that the dwarves normally use for leaving them behind when their owners take up their axes to go on their four-times-yearly trek to the surface for firewood. Animist dwarves—unexpected, but interesting. I decide I’m going to develop the implications of this further, but now’s not the time.

Who are the musicians? This part I’m still figuring out. They would need to be both male and female, to cover both of the major vocal parts (the low chorus, and the higher, free-meter solo portion). I’m not sure whether to gender this one or not. All I know is that the names and histories of the instruments are important, almost vital. I’m rather tempted to make it a women’s secret, just to offset the fact that most people have expectations for dwarven men, but they don’t seem to think about the women so often. Naming the instruments, and the tools, and the weapons, and just about everything, seems to be vital to this particular dwarven society variant, and somebody’s got to do it, so why not an order of naming-priestesses?

So. What do you think? Done anything like this? More importantly, does anyone want to see the ceremony?