This is a sidebar from the article American Gamelan's Pioneering Flower Still in Full Bloom. The excerpt below is from a book by Bill Alves.
“Since the 1930s, when Western anthropologists, artists, and ethnomusicologists first explored its lush volcanic hillsides, the island of Bali has been justly famous in the West for its unique culture and embarrassment of riches in the arts. Today, these hills echo with the sounds of motorcycles and tour buses, but arts and rituals are as much a part of daily life for the Balinese as they were in previous centuries. In Balinese communities, virtually everyone is an artist — a rice farmer may also be a poet, a housewife a dancer, a taxi driver a sculptor, or a construction worker a gamelan player. Professional musicians exist, of course, but are mainly associated with the modern music conservatories. Art is a natural part of community life for nearly everyone.
“The Balinese gamelan ... plays a thrilling, dynamic music apt to create a flood of sensory impressions. All the gamelan parts interconnect, not through controlled individual elaborations, as in Java, but through memorization of set parts, sometimes composed communally, so that each of the parts cooperates precisely with the others. One of the most famous and characteristic techniques of the Balinese gamelan is the creation of a melody through the combination of two or more extremely fast and rhythmically intricate interlocking parts. ... As in other aspects of Balinese life, the split-second timing of such techniques requires absolute cooperation. Another remarkable facet of Balinese performance, especially in the style called kebyar, is the ability of the entire orchestra to stop and start on a dime and to play seemingly nonmetrical, rhapsodic sections as if they were a single instrument. There is no esoteric secret behind such ability — just hours and hours of rehearsal. Another distinctive characteristic of the Balinese gamelan is the fact that the instruments are deliberately detuned from one another, producing a jarring effect that the Balinese cultivate. The detuning is not haphazard but precisely calibrated to give a constant “wah-wah” effect, a kind of sparkle to the sound that one can hear especially as the sound decays.”
— From Music of the Peoples of the World by Bill Alves (Thompson-Schirmer), © 2008, used by permission.