Today I chatted (to be precise : gossipped) with Ruth, from the Jakarta Conservatory of Music, telling me that it's the 35th anniversary of tante Anneke and her husband. Tante Anneke is our sweet (well, most of the time) managing director, but also doing all the other jobs at the administration office, all the scheduling ..... in short, everything but teaching ! So, congratulations, tante & oom Eddy .
As a gift, I want to write a love song, so I browsed again the poems of Sapardi Djoko Damono, with whose poems I am having a big crush on these days (please check my entry a few days ago). Found 2 short poems which I would like to set into one continuous piece of music for mezzosoprano & piano, "to tante Ann & oom Eddy for their 35 years of happiness". Of course I haven't got permission from the great poet, but I just hope that I could get his email and ask him ( cross my fingers that he will give his permission, especially in uniting those 2 poems !) . Anyway, I set a target of writing 35 bars of music to be scanned and sent by email to the happy couple, and I managed to write 37. Am not going to tell you now which poems they are ... for superstitional reasons . The piece has to be finished first . I wrote this post right after I sent the email to them with those 37 bars.
By the way, I have also finished setting Chendra's poem "Saksi" two days ago, but in such a different character ! The piano part is very, VERY virtuosic. There is a prelude which last for perhaps 30 seconds, which is quite scary when I look at the finished page. Completely black full of running notes ! Well, it's inspired by the storm, so, what else can I do ? The piece wrote itself !
Tomorrow Rohan de Saram will arrive and will stay at my place (with his Guarneri cello which costs .....half a million euros !!! (that was the estimation of his cello in the year 2000 ... so, it has gone up since then ..). Make sure you turn on the alarm and lock the doors at night, Andy ...) before we travel together to Madrid on Sunday. So, 4 days of rehearsals. No musing and toying with other people's poems. By the way, we are premiering a work (another Love Song ! Everybody's talking about love these days ... or is it because we already are practically in the age of Aquarius ??) by Jesus Rueda and a 3-movement work by Geoffrey King.
