Today I am in love. Madly, absolutely, passionately in love. I am in love with the poems of Sapardi Djoko Damono which I , embarrasingly have to say, just discovered. Well, not even discovered. It was Chendra who introduced me to his poems, sending me some thru the messenger. I then googled him, and apparently his surname is oftenly misspelled : Dharmono, Darmono, Darono, whatever.
Oh, I am so ashamed, being an Indonesian and never have heard about him. His name only rang a bell because he wrote the closing essay for the book Complete Poems by another favorite Indonesian writer of mine, Goenawan Mohamad. Today I had a deja vú, like the first time I heard a Sibelius symphony or read a Whitman poem, you know that feeling ? His poems trigger a kind of blue, melancholic feeling perhaps comparable to Vaughan Williams' most intimate music. But there is a certain majestic feeling in the way he expresses love. So luscious and broad ; perhaps it's Vaughan Williams mixed with Roy Harris or Aaron Copland .... anyway, very contemporary and yet so elegantly ... baroque ? Anyway, since I met Chendra I felt much more Indonesian, since he introduced me to some really beautiful things of Indonesia which I wasn't aware of before ...
Ah, yesterday was the birthday of Geoffrey King, a good friend and considered as my "composition teacher" although we never really had a proper lesson ; but our conversations are so valuable in moulding my musical mentality, or at least in finding my identity (if I have found it, which I doubt) which is VERY different from his . I revised an old piece from 2001 for violin and piano the day before, and gave it to him as a present. It's called The Sleepers, based on -- what else -- the 8th part of a Whitman poem of the same name which starts "The sleepers are very beautiful as they lie unclothed ..." . The piece is just under 4 minutes, and now will rest in its final version. But perhaps I will add some more pieces for violin & piano and make a suite out of it in the future ...
