page_title: Kulintang
section_title: Origin of the gong
hierarchical_section_title: Kulintang / Compositions / Origin of the gong
caption_attribution_description: English: This map shows one of the two migration routes that the kulintang gong is believed to have made as it went through insular Southeast Asia.
context_page_description: Kulintang is a modern term for an ancient instrumental form of music composed on a row of small, horizontally laid gongs that function melodically, accompanied by larger, suspended gongs and drums. As part of the larger gong-chime culture of Southeast Asia, kulintang music ensembles have been playing for many centuries in regions of the Eastern Indonesia, Southern Philippines, Eastern Malaysia, Brunei and Timor, Kulintang evolved from a simple native signaling tradition, and developed into its present form with the incorporation of knobbed gongs from Sundanese people in Java Island, Indonesia. Its importance stems from its association with the indigenous cultures that inhabited these islands prior to the influences of Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Christianity or the West, making Kulintang the most developed tradition of Southeast Asian archaic gong-chime ensembles.
  Technically, kulintang is the Ternate, Mollucas, Maguindanao, Lumad and Timor term for the idiophone of metal gong kettles which are laid horizontally upon a rack to create an entire kulintang set. It is played by striking the bosses of the gongs with two wooden beaters.
context_section_description: The kulintang gong itself is believed to have been one of those foreign musical elements incorporated into kulintang music, derived from the Sundanese kolenang due to its striking similarities. Along with the fact that they play important roles in their respectively ensembles, both the kulintang and kolenang show striking homogeneity in tapered rims (as opposed to pronouncedly tapered Javanese bonang and non-tapered Laotian khong vong gongs). Even the word kulintang is believed to be just an altered form of the Sundanese word kolenang.
  It was these similarities that lead theorists to conclude that the kulintang was originally imported to the Philippines during the migration of the kolenang through the Malay Archipelago. Based on the etymology, two routes have been proposed as the route for the kulintang to Mindanao: One from Sunda, through Banjermasin, Brunei and the Sulu Archipelago, a route where the word “kulintangan” is commonly used for the horizontal row of gongs; The other from Sunda, thru, Timor, Sulawesi, Moluccas and Mindanao where the word kolintang/kulintang is commonly seen.
caption: Two proposed routes for the migration of the kulintang gong to Mindanao
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