Back home in Spain, my urgent task is to go through all my works : manuscripts, Sibelius files, notebooks etc. There will be a couple of projects for this season that involves my works, two of them in Jakarta (as a composer-in-residence at Universitas Pelita Harapan, invited by my friend, its former dean of the music faculty Johannes S. Nugroho) and in Surabaya (a project still in-progress under the initiative of another friend, the hyperactive Patrisna Widuri).
Talking about hyperactivity, I haven't realized that I am one too, until now. Apparently I have written hundreds of works. My manuscripts are dated back to the 1990s, and most of my works of this period have ended in the trash bin. But going through my works is like looking back through my life. Of course, there are important pieces in my life which were written in a significant period, such as being lonely in my travellings, doubts about love, misrelationships or in a state of broken heart ... or unrequited love. In fact, I could say that ALL my works are products of unrequited love, since I am in love with practically 90% of the people I met during these years. If those were not unrequited, I would have ended up in jail by now, so thank God my heart broke all the time!
My productivity has toned down (hopefully only in quantity, not quality) for the last 3 or 4 years, since now I write directly in my laptop or computer with the Sibelius program. Before that, I used to carry music paper with me everywhere ... including to the toilet. I do carry my laptop around, but laptops take a while to turn on and at last having the access to the Sibelius program. In those minutes usually something else has come up. But I don't regret it, since many ideas and sounds in my head nowadays turned out to be a "recycle" of what I have written before. Only very few times that I got something completely new, and those periods are when I felt that my language is changing. And that's when it's both exciting and annoying at the same time. Exciting because I am like a little boy having a new game, and annoying because it's something completely new that I still couldn't figure out how it worked.
Anyway, I had a most productive flight yesterday, from Jakarta back to Spain. After dinner off Singapore, I read poems by my new favorite poet, Sitor Situmorang, and without me knowing, a poem of his "Malam Kebumen" transformed into music for a tenor voice. I dunno if the voice of my tenor friend Dani Dumadi (with whom I performed in Bali a few days earlier) has something to do with it, but I dedicated the song to him anyway, as a remembrance of our concert at the fantastic Hotel Tugu at Canggu Beach, Bali. And after breakfast 2 hours before arriving Frankfurt, I sketched another poem of his, I think this time will be for another tenor friend Ivan Yohan who I was with at the airport in Jakarta before we separated : he to Amsterdam, and me to Frankfurt. But I didn't have time to finish it yet, since the plane table has to be folded and locked ... and I had to turn off my laptop.
And in the business lounge at Frankfurt airport instead of finishing Ivan's song I had another idea of a tiny piano piece for Alicia who I would meet happily a few hours later. It was finished while I ate my cornflakes and before taking a shower to prepare myself to board.
"Welcome to Bilbao. Thank you for choosing Lufthansa as your flight company". And thanks for the musical & inspirational flight, Lufty!
