V[1]
TO go to Europe! Till my last breath that shall always be my ideal. If I could only make myself small enough to slip into an envelope then I would go with this letter to you, Stella, and to my dearest best brother, and near—Hush, not another word! It is not my fault, Stella, if now and then I write nonsense. The gamelan[2] in the pendopo[3] could speak to you better than I. Now it is playing a lovely air. It is like no other song—no melody, each note is so soft, so tender, so vaguely thrilling, so changing—but ah! how compelling, how bitterly beautiful: that is no tinkling of glass, of copper, of wood; it is the voices of men's souls that speak to me; now they are complaining, now sighing, and now merrily laughing. And my soul soars with
- ↑ To Mejuffrouw Zeehandelaar.
- ↑ The native Javanese orchestra. The composition of this varies according to its uses. There is one gamelan for religious celebrations, another for feasts of rejoicing and another for the theatre. "The native Javanese orchestra in which percussion instruments play the predominant role. A gamelan salendes and a gamelan pelog are distinguished: in the former the instruments are adapted to an octave of five tones, in the latter to an octave of seven tones. The gamelan varies in composition but consists typically of the vebab, a viol of Persian-Palie origin, which carries the melody and is played by the leader of the orchestra; the soeling, a bamboo flute; kendang and ketipoeng, large and small drums; the tjelem poeng, a zither; the bonang, a set of horizontal gongs supported over a sound box; the four sorons (instruments consisting in the gamelan salendro of six toned metal staves, of seven in the gamelan pelog); they accompany the melody and give it out more plainly than the bonang (sometimes taking the melody unaccompanied); the gambang kajoe, or xylophone and a variety of large and small hanging gongs."—H. H. Bartlett.
- ↑ Audience hall and principal room of a Regent's palaec. Usually octagonal in shape and open to the out of doors.
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