Today I finished, at last, correcting every detail of Ars Amatoria, including its orchestration. In fact I want a string orchestra for it, but for practical reasons, I will only use an electric organ for its premiere at the Jakarta New Year Concert, plus flute & english horn . And piano. Some parts from my previous ballet for Chendra, "You Had me at Hello", will be incorporated as the interludes here. The premiere will take place at Graha Bhakti Budaya, Jakarta, on January the 1st at 4 p.m
As in Ovid's book and in Sapardi Djoko Damono's poems, there are many secret messages in my music . They are contained in the notes & intervals. This will be my "Enigma" Variations ! I am not going to share those secrets to anybody ; I am just content of putting them in the piece and get them out of my system. Perhaps in the future I will even forget some of their existence and meanings.
Work on Ars Amatoria has been so many times interrupted. The version for voices and piano was in fact finished already last spring, and only for the last month I did the orchestration, as well as composing the new song for the ending, "Yang Paling Menakjubkan" (The most incredible thing) . Perhaps it has nothing to do with love, but it contains my secret messages as well (and I believe SDD has also put his ones in his poems).
In the period after coming back from Jakarta I have also finished a piano piece, Rapsodia Nusantara, and am starting a cycle of songs --again about love-- for soprano, baritone & piano. The working title is "Love and variations", and this time I am using different poems of different languages by SDD, Laksmi Pamuntjak, Walt Whitman and others, of which I will talk in my next entry .
