What is Kulintang
A row of eight bronze gongs, each no wider than a dinner plate, can carry a full melody over three other instruments without a single written note. That is the kulintang, lead instrument of a gong tradition that reaches back roughly seven centuries in Mindanao. Communities there struck these gongs at weddings and healing rites before Islam or Christianity arrived.
This guide covers what the kulintang is, its gongs and tuning, and why do women traditionally play the kulintang in Maguindanao and Maranao communities.
At a Glance
| Aspect | Details |
|---|---|
| What it is | A row of small bronze or brass gongs played as the lead melodic instrument |
| Home region | Mindanao and the Sulu Archipelago |
| Documented age | At least the 13th century |
| Gong count | 5 to 11, tuned to a pentatonic scale |
| Full ensemble | Five instruments: kulintang, agung, gandingan, babandil, dabakan |
| Traditional players | Women, among the Maguindanao and Maranao, until roughly the 1950s |
| Main groups | Maguindanao, Maranao, Tausug, also Yakan and Sama |
| Played at | Weddings, healing rites, harvests and festivals |
What Kulintang Actually Is
Kulintang is a set of small bronze or brass gongs laid flat in a row on a wooden frame, each struck on its raised center, called the boss, with a pair of soft wooden beaters. The word names both the instrument and the wider style of music built around it, so “kulintang music” and “the kulintang” often mean the same thing in casual use.
A few quick facts on the instrument:
- Gong count: usually 5 to 11, depending on the ethnic group
- Tuning: pentatonic, a five-note scale
- Materials: cast bronze or brass
- Home region: Mindanao and the Sulu Archipelago
- Documented age: at least the 13th century
- Played with: two soft wooden beaters, no mallets or sticks
Key point
A player sits or kneels facing the row and strikes across it the way a pianist crosses a keyboard, pulling out a running melody rather than single, isolated notes.
Ask “what is kulintang” to a musician from Cotabato and a musician from Lanao and you will get two related but distinct answers, because each ethnic group builds, tunes, and names its gongs a little differently. That variation is part of what makes the tradition rich rather than a single fixed instrument.
Where Kulintang Comes From
Sources do not fully agree on when gong culture first reached the southern Philippines. The National Commission for Culture and the Arts traces bossed gong ensembles in Mindanao to trade contact that may go back as far as the third century, part of a wider gong culture shared with Kalimantan, Sulawesi and Sumatra (National Commission for Culture and the Arts).
Most ethnomusicologists date the kulintang’s documented form to around the 13th century, brought in through trade routes linking Borneo, Sulu and Mindanao. Either way, the instrument is older than the religions now associated with the region. Islam reached Mindanao in the 14th century, arriving through traders and missionaries from Malaysia and Indonesia, by which point communities in the area were already using kulintang gongs in animist ritual and healing ceremony.
Note
The religious beliefs behind early kulintang use had nothing to do with Islam. Gongs were struck to call spirits, mark a cure, or accompany rites tied to the natural world, and that older layer survived underneath the Islamic practice that followed.
Traders moving textiles, gongs and spices between Borneo, Sulu and Cotabato likely carried the instrument’s ancestors with them, embedding kulintang in the region’s economy of exchange long before any organized religion took hold there.
The Gong Set and Tuning
Each gong in a kulintang set starts as a disc of cast bronze or brass, hammered and shaved until its boss rings true. A finished set is graduated from the largest, lowest gong to the smallest, highest one, tuned so the row plays a clean pentatonic scale.
Getting that tuning right by ear, without electronic tools, is a specialized craft passed down within families of gong makers, and an old, well-tuned set is treated as a family heirloom worth more than its weight in metal.
The number of gongs varies by group. Maguindanao sets typically run 8, Maranao sets often 8, and Tausug kulintangan sets can stretch to 9 or 11, so the “kulintang instrument” a visitor sees in one province may look noticeably longer than one from the next province over.
Tip
A rushed cast rings flat, so skilled founders test each gong by ear dozens of times before calling a set finished.
Casting a gong starts with a mold, filled with molten bronze and cooled slowly before the maker hammers and shaves the boss until the pitch settles true. That patience is why an old, correctly tuned set gets treated as a family heirloom rather than a replaceable object.
The Kulintang Ensemble: Five Instruments, Five Roles
The kulintang almost never plays alone. It leads a kulintang ensemble of five instruments, each with a distinct job:
| Instrument | What It Is | Role in the Ensemble |
|---|---|---|
| Kulintang | Row of small bronze gongs | Plays the lead melody |
| Agung | Two large, deep hanging gongs | Anchors the rhythm |
| Gandingan | Four large hanging gongs, called “talking gongs” | Bends tone to mimic speech |
| Babandil | A single small gong | Keeps strict time, like a metronome |
| Dabakan | Goblet-shaped drum with a goatskin head | Adds a sharp percussive pulse |
Five musicians usually fill these five roles, and each kulintang ensemble instrument locks into the others through repeating, interlocking patterns. Remove any one piece and the sound thins out noticeably, which is why kulintang is best understood as a group tradition, not a solo one.
Maguindanao, Maranao and Tausug Traditions
The word itself changes by group: Maguindanao and Maranao speakers say kulintang or kolintang, while Tausug, Yakan and Sama speakers of the Sulu Archipelago say kulintangan. Beyond spelling, each tradition has its own repertoire, gong count and playing style.
The Maguindanao Kulintang
Centered on Cotabato and the Rio Grande de Mindanao, the Maguindanao style is the most widely documented and often treated as the reference form. It splits into two named repertoires: kamamatuan, an older, slower style, and kangungudan, a faster, more percussive style that grew once men joined the tradition and added interlocking drum and gong rhythms to melodies that were once played unadorned.
The Maranao Kolintang
Around Lake Lanao, the Maranao are known for elaborately carved gong stands and for a rare wooden version of the instrument, the kolintang a kayo, which uses wooden bars instead of metal gongs. Maranao ensembles typically skip the gandingan and instead split the agung part between two musicians playing interlocking rhythms.
The Tausug Kulintangan
In Sulu, the Tausug call their set kulintangan and pair it with a set of two large gongs called duwahan and two drums called gandang. Tausug players have three named compositions, kuriri, sinug and lubak-lubak, and the sinug piece is built around a fast, back-and-forth exchange of phrases between the kulintangan and the agungs, almost a musical duel. Kulintang traditions of a similar style also reach the Yakan of Basilan, whose weaving is as recognizable as their music.
Why Do Women Traditionally Play the Kulintang?
Why do women traditionally play the kulintang across Maguindanao and Maranao communities? Because the melodic instrument called for slow, controlled, graceful movement, a quality both groups linked directly to feminine refinement. Until roughly the 1950s, men played only the supporting agung and the dabakan, leaving the lead kulintang almost entirely to women.
The pattern shows up inside the repertoire itself. Maranao ethnomusicologist Usopay Cadar documented a piece called Kasulampid, whose name means “to criss-cross.” Cadar read the piece as a small drama: a female kulintang player being courted by male musicians on the supporting instruments, competing for her attention through their playing.
Performance came with its own etiquette too. Women players followed set rules for how they sat and carried themselves at the gongs, since a woman’s poise while playing doubled as a public display of grace and marriageability.
That etiquette eased over the 20th century. Men began learning the kulintang itself, not just the supporting gongs, and their arrival helped produce the faster kangungudan style described above. Today master musicians of any gender lead performances, and the reversal has gone furthest in the diaspora: in North American cities, kulintang is now most often taught and performed by men, the opposite of its home tradition.
The shift says less about the music than about who has access to teach it where, and it connects to a much larger pattern of women’s roles in Filipino ritual and healing across the archipelago’s indigenous traditions.
The Repertoire and Rhythmic Modes
Kulintang music runs on modes rather than fixed scores. A mode sets the rhythmic pattern and mood, and the lead player improvises within it, so the same piece never sounds identical twice.
That balance of strict framework and open improvisation is what separates a beginner from a master: anyone can strike the gongs in order, but only a trained ear can bend the melody without losing the mode underneath it. This is also where kamamatuan and kangungudan diverge most clearly, one built for restraint, the other for speed and interlock.
When and Why Kulintang Is Played
Kulintang shows up wherever Maguindanao, Maranao, Tausug and Yakan communities gather. It marks these occasions:
- Weddings and the welcoming of guests
- Harvests and town celebrations
- Circumcision celebrations among the Tausug, marking a boy’s passage toward adulthood
- Healing rites, historically played to call on spirits or mark a recovery, a use that predates its role at parties and festivals
- Dance performances paired with the ensemble
The gongs frequently accompany dance; kulintang dance performances often pair the ensemble with pieces like singkil, one of the better-known traditional Filipino dances from Mindanao, where dancers step between clashing bamboo poles or crossed sticks in time with the gongs.
Kulintang Beyond Mindanao: Diaspora and Revival
Two musicians did more than most to carry kulintang off the islands. Maranao scholar Usopay Cadar earned his doctorate in ethnomusicology at the University of Washington and later co-directed documentary films on Maranao music. Maguindanao master Danongan Kalanduyan arrived at the same university in 1976 as an artist-in-residence on a Rockefeller Foundation grant, later moving to California to direct Kalilang Kulintang Arts and, from 1989, the Filipino Kulintang Center of San Francisco.
As a young man in Cotabato, Kalanduyan had already won islandwide gong competitions and toured the Far East in 1971 with the Darangan Cultural Troupe, well before any American university heard his name. Kalanduyan received the National Heritage Fellowship in 1995, the United States’ highest honor for a folk and traditional artist, for decades spent teaching kulintang to Filipino American students who had never set foot in Mindanao.
Their work seeded kulintang programs at universities across North America, and that pipeline is part of why the tradition survived a period when interest at home was fading. Today, students in Manila, Los Angeles and Seattle can all learn kulintang formally, something unavailable to any generation before the 1970s.
Kulintang Today
Kulintang is no longer confined to Mindanao’s home communities. Universities now teach it as coursework, cultural centers run workshops, and government bodies including the National Commission for Culture and the Arts support documentation and performance projects meant to keep the tradition intact rather than frozen.
Master players are recognized on skill rather than gender, and performances at weddings and festivals across the country now include students who picked up the beaters far from Lake Lanao or the Rio Grande de Mindanao.
Ask a Filipino speaker “ano ang kulintang” and the short answer holds steady no matter where they learned it: a row of gongs, a five-piece ensemble, and one of the oldest surviving forms of Filipino sining, or art.
Kulintang and the Wider Gong Family
Kulintang belongs to a much larger family of tuned gong music spread across maritime Southeast Asia. Related kulintangan ensembles play in Sabah and Brunei, and similar bossed-gong traditions turn up in Kalimantan and Sulawesi, all sharing roots in the trade networks that once carried the instrument between islands.
The best-known relative is gamelan, the orchestral gong and metallophone tradition of Java and Bali in Indonesia and of parts of Malaysia. Gamelan ensembles run large, often a dozen or more musicians playing metallophones, gongs and drums around fixed, notated compositions.
Kulintang stays lean by comparison: five musicians, five instruments, and a reliance on live improvisation rather than a written score. The two traditions never developed side by side, yet they share a common ancestor in the region’s long history of bronze casting and tuned percussion, a craft that reached across the islands centuries before national borders did.
A Living Tradition
Kulintang has outlasted the empires and religions that passed through Mindanao, carried forward first by women within Maguindanao and Maranao households and now by a wider, mixed generation of players. Its gongs still open weddings in Cotabato and now, just as often, a classroom in San Francisco or Manila.
Readers curious about the wider gong-and-ritual world this instrument belongs to can explore more of our coverage of Philippine traditions, where dance, music and ceremony from every region sit side by side.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is kulintang Islamic music?
No. Kulintang traditions predate the arrival of Islam in Mindanao. The gongs were originally used in animist rituals and healing ceremonies, and Muslim groups such as the Maguindanao and Maranao continued playing them after conversion.
What is the difference between kulintang and gamelan?
Both are tuned bronze gong traditions from island Southeast Asia. Gamelan, from Indonesia and Malaysia, uses a full orchestra of metallophones and gongs. Kulintang centers on one row of small melodic gongs backed by four supporting instruments, and it favors improvisation over fixed composition.
Why do women traditionally play the kulintang?
Among the Maguindanao and Maranao, the melodic kulintang was historically a woman’s instrument because its playing style called for controlled, graceful movement, a quality linked to feminine refinement. Men traditionally played the louder supporting gongs and drum instead.
How many gongs does a kulintang have?
Most sets have between five and eleven bronze or brass gongs, graduated in pitch and tuned to a pentatonic scale. The exact number depends on the ethnic group and region.
Ano ang kulintang?
Ang kulintang ay isang hanay ng maliliit na gong na tinutugtog gamit ang kahoy na pambalpal. Ito ay katutubong instrumento ng Mindanao, partikular ng mga Maguindanao, Maranao, at Tausug.
Works Cited
Antolin, Bob. “The Cross-Continental Appeal of Kulintang Music, from the Villages of Mindanao in the Southern Philippines to Jazz Fusion.” International Examiner, 8 Aug. 2023, iexaminer.org/the-cross-continental-appeal-of-kulintang-music-from-the-villages-of-mindanao-in-the-southern-philippines-to-jazz-fusion/.
Cadar, Usopay H. “The Role of Kolintang Music in Maranao Society.” Asian Music, vol. 27, no. 2, 1996, pp. 80-103. JSTOR, jstor.org/stable/834489.
“The Maguindanaoan Kulintang of the Southern Philippines.” Center for World Music, Sept. 2021, centerforworldmusic.org/2021/09/instrument-kulintang/.
National Commission for Culture and the Arts. “Asiatic Musical Traditions in the Philippines.” NCCA, ncca.gov.ph/about-ncca-3/subcommissions/subcommission-on-the-arts-sca/music/asiatic-musical-traditions-in-the-philippines/.
National Endowment for the Arts. “Danongan Kalanduyan.” NEA, arts.gov/honors/heritage/danongan-kalanduyan.
