Rapsodia Nusantara 6-10, after a lapse of 3 years

Now that the Indonesian pianist that I admire a lot, Henoch Kristianto is preparing his recording of my complete (yes, complete!) Rapsodia Nusantara's, I will have to publish the score. He is until now (that I know of) the only Indonesian pianist who managed to play all the 24 Chopin Etudes (and those aren't the only Chopin pieces he has played), and he played them with such a high musicianship, not only getting all those difficult notes correct! As with my Rapsodias, or Rapsies as I call them dearly, Henoch didn't play them as I imagined how they should sound. He plays them BETTER than I imagined them. He managed to paint new colours, squeeze different nuances from different pianistic textures and see them from different points of view which I myself haven't seen before. I plan to write at least 33 Rapsies, each dealing with folktunes from 1 province of Indonesia, but I have broken my own rule. There are already 2 Rapsies based on music from Maluku (no. 3 based on "Rasa Sayange" and "Sarinande" and no.4, based on "Buka Pintu". I don't know how many Henoch will record for this first CD, but anyway he will add some short pieces of mine in this CD too. .............................................................................................................................................. The scores of Rapsy 6-10 will be published at the beginning of July, hopefully. Here are the program notes for them. By the way, Henoch has made a meticulous analysis (which revealed many things that made me, the composer, surprised too!) of Rapsy 1-5 in his blog. Check it out if you want to know : http://henochkristianto.blogspot.com ............................................................................................................................................. Rapsodia Nusantara no. 6 is perhaps the most "French" in terms of its "impressionistic" sound from the keyboard. Durationwise it is the shortest of all my Rapsodias (it's not just the real duration, it's how it FEELS) and one can even call it a "Mini Rapsodia", since it's in form of an etude and lasts approximately (hopefully less than) 4 minutes. Basically it's a continuous transformation, or "growth" from the character of the beginning (hazy, soft, "feminine") to the end (percussive, dry, loud, "masculine"). One can even think of a "growth" of a nice, harmless sweet baby up to a 14-year-old "bad boy". It is based on a song from Aceh, Bungong Jeumpa. The song itself is very simple, just containing intervals of major 2nd and minor 2nd. There are no bigger intervals than that, which makes it unique. OK you can say that Tschaikovsky used the descending major scale as his main motif for The Nutcracker, but what a development did he do in that piece! No, no, Bungong Jeumpa has only 2 intervals, no more. I don't know another piece of music which is as economic as Bungong Jeumpa, apart from those Gregorian chants of course. And as I always say to my students, the more limited your material, the bigger possibilities there are to develop it, and therefore the freer you can be in developing it. Well, a melody with only a whole tone and semitone intervals obviously cannot provide you with an elaborate motif, that's why I decided that in this Rapsodia I'll have to exploit the other musical elements apart from melody. Rhythmically, Bungong Jeumpa doesn't provide much either. So that's the reason why I wanna experiment with textures here, just like those impressionist painters. One sees the score and there apparently are as many notes as dots in a painting of Georges Seurat. The pianist should be aware that those notes should form a "bigger picture", so he/she should aware of the listener in hearing the "melodic figures" among those millions of notes. Henoch gave the world premiere of this Rapsy in Medan (yup, just a few hundred kms away from Aceh) on June 8th this year. ............................................................................................................................................. The 7th Rapsodia uses the technique employed more in visual arts than music (Stravinsky, I believe, was the first composer who applied this technique in music). It is the "pastiche" but all broken into little pieces which was done by the cubist painters. In a Rhapsody, a pastiche is of course a perfect method to be applied, since the composer works on existing materials anyway. But what I refer to is the pastiche paintings of Picasso which was drawn from Goya, or like the Damoiselles d'Avignon or Guernica. In this Rapsodia I took two songs from the island of Papua, Yamko Rambe Yamko and Apuse, picked all the small motifs and present them as such. So the listener won't here the complete melodies until much later in the piece. With this technique, the spaces between the materials are carefully measured, so the pianist has to be rhythmically very precise, even (or I should say especially) in silences. Both silences and sounds are equally important, since they should be proportionally correct. Of course there are sections (especially dealing with the song Apuse, which by nature is lyrical) which are more free that the pianist could apply more rubato. Certainly this is the most strict -- proportionally, structurally and rhythmically speaking -- of my Rapsodias to date, which perhaps would make it the least "flashy", yet it is not the least difficult technically and intellectually. ............................................................................................................................................. If no. 6 is "French", then the 8th Rapsodia is perhaps "Austrian" or "Germanic". When I wrote it, Beethoven's second movement of Appassionata did stay on my mind. But its influence doesn't go further than the 2nd variation, and afterwards this Rapsodia takes a life of its own. This is based on O Inani Keke, a folksong from North Sulawesi. It is perhaps the easiest of my Rapsodias, not only technically and interpretatively, but in terms of my compositional process. I didn't recall any difficulty in writing it: I wrote a set of variations everytime I had free time from other big pieces, and one fine day I collected those variations and put them together, wrote the last variation and ... there you have it! ............................................................................................................................................. I have been, and still am, a huge admirer and fan of the music of Mozart, but since I became very active in composing around 8 years ago, my admiration shifted poco a poco to the music of Haydn. For me, he was more innovative and full of surprises. Since then I spent around 1 hour every day, if possible, practising many of his marvellous sonatas for keyboard. My 9th Rapsodia is perhaps my music that most reflects my studies of his music. It is based on 2 songs from South of Borneo, Ampar Ampar Pisang and Paris Barantai. Not only how I split and put the materials together is very Haydnesque, but also the character & touchee of the whole piece is more "classical" than most of my works. Therefore the pianist should bear in mind the sound of the harpsichord while playing this particular Rapsodia, even in the "lyrical" parts which is more "baroque" or "classical" than "romantic". The Australian pianist Daniel Herscovitch (whose fantastic recital I attended last year) is planned to give its world premiere on July 24th this year at the Piano Institute in Surabaya, founded by his talented and beautiful Indonesian student of his, Catherine Tanujaya. ............................................................................................................................................. I started my 10th Rapsodia in 2011 by planning its overall structure: a virtuosic introduction, some variations and ending in a passacaglia. This is perhaps the loudest of my Rapsodias until now (the last chord of the first section depicts the bomb, so one can never play it too loud!) , and it has a unique element : it is my only piece in my life that doesn't modulate AND only employs 5 notes. Those 5 notes are from the Balinese pentatonic mode, since the material for this piece is the Balinese song "Janger" which is very popular. I then abandoned it after just 2 or 3 days work in favor of other urgent pieces, and in October 2012 I came back to it again after watching the 10th anniversary of Bali bombing ceremony, which triggered me to dedicate this piece to the memory of the victims. I then realized that this horrible event is full of number 2: it occured on the 12th of October 2002, there were 2 bombs exploded and overall they killed 202 victims. I was toying on some palindromic phrases but it was too late since the structure (and many notes of it) has been established, so I concentrated in number 2, or pairs. Therefore most phrases are built on 4 bars, with the second half as the complementary of the first one. Number 2 also plays an important role in the last passacaglia movement. Again, after 2 or 3 days work I abandoned it again and only when I visited Bali a few weeks ago (where I was invited to perform for the inauguration of the Foreign Ministers Conference and then spent 3 days for holiday afterwards) that I finished it, working on it in the darkest hours of the nights when I was still suffering from jetlag.