In Bali no temple festival or ceremony is complete without entertainment for the gods, attending guests and local people. Temple anniversaries are occasions for all night dramatic and dance performances, with different type’s entertainment on each consecutive night, sometimes lasting until morning.
The basic accompaniment to any such performance is provided by the local gamelan orchestra, a group of brass instruments, metal phones, tuned gongs, cymbals and hand drums, the village generally owns the instruments, as they are extremely expensive and they are stored at the village Banjar meeting hall and taken great pride in.
No Balinese music has been written down or recorded until recent years. It has been passed down from generation to generation purely by memory. Each particular dance and dramatic performance has its own special combination of instruments to suit, melodious bamboo flutes, reedy two-stringed rebab violins and twanging Jew's harp like gengong are all used to provide their own special effects.
