That's What Friends Are For

Friends, real friends, apparently are not only there when we need them. My friends are also my source of inspiration. Many short pieces of mine are dedicated to my dearest friends, and mostly they are written very quickly in a burst of inspiration. Those pieces count as those which are the closest to my heart, besides the numerous pieces i wrote for my daughter Alicia Pirena. As I always say, music (at least mine) is a record, or a still photograph of things, events and people that have happened and crossed our path in real life. ............................................................................................................................................... I am excited by the project which my pianist friend Henoch Kristianto is doing now. As I wrote in my previous entry, he is recording my Rapsodia Nusantara pieces. For now he is working on 6 of them : nos. 2,3,4,5,6 and 10. All 6 of them would take 40 minutes of the CD approximately. When Henoch needed several "lighter" pieces to fill up this CD, i immediately thought of these pieces from the series of Alicia's Piano Books. I myself put them in "cycles" or groups. "5 Friends" are those which are using my friend's names or initials as the motif to be developed in the piece, while the character of each piece was determined by something that I saw, felt or wanted to evoke from that particular person. The Germanic system of naming the notes starts from A to G (yeah, we've got only 7 notes, so it couldn't go further). I then had to continue further with the alphabet as the notes go higher (although i sometimes used the note B for the letter H, as the Germans call it as such).And then some exceptions, such as D for the letter R for Re, E for the letter M for Mi, and E-flat for the letter S pronounced as Es, the German note for E-flat. ............................................................................................................................................... Another continuing cycle will be "Love Songs". I have written about some of the pieces in my earlier entry of this year, check this out : http://andystarblogger.blogspot.com/2013/05/is-music-really-food-of-love.html ............................................................................................................................................... My "Lullabies" are, in fact, the most truthful representation of what is sounding in my brain. What is sounding there, in fact, is the twinkling music box. Most of my music is a transformation of that music box. In fact, THE WHOLE WORLD for me is a music box. Obviously, the last few weeks have been an intense correspondence between Henoch and me. I'd like to paste here some lines from my emails to him concerning notes about some pieces, hopefully it would be useful for you who would like to play them too : ............................................................................................................................................... And about the rest of the pieces for the CD, you made a good point there! I think then the crucial ones are the 5 musical names, the lullabies, and at least 3 love songs (Unexpected Turns, Differences Unite & the Little Variations which was written for the film Romeo & Juliet). They also have varied technical difficulties, so pianists from all levels would enjoy it (the lullabies are quite easy). Those ones in Alicia's book are the ones written for piano, the rest of "dedicatorial" pieces are for different instruments. So there you have them, quite complete. If there is more time, the sunset pieces would be nice, but let's concentrate on the musical names, lullabies & the love songs first. ............................................................................................................................................... I then have to tell you some interpretative & corrections on those pieces : For Adam G : the beginning section is meant to sound like 2 music boxes : one (the LH) is very very distant, and the other (RH) very close to your ear. So pls make the RH quite "marcato" (In fact I wanna say "percussive", like a vibraphone or so), not lyrical. Bar 4, still use the una corda so it gives the effect of unclearness, and please just take it off when the tune suddenly appears in bar 5. As much pedal as poss, just change when it gets quite disturbing, or when the chord changes. And it should sound like a machine (although yeah, of course a kinda phrasing is inevitable, especially for someone as musical as you). The effect is kinda like a lullaby, but more hypnotizing. Bar 23, the LH is cut off by mistake in the published score, all those are in fact chords with an interval of 5th, so from the 1st chord they are : B-F# , G-D, A-E, F#-C#, B-F# . This piece sounds strange, yeah, but it's one of my favorite piece hehehe .. yup, I AM that strange .... ............................................................................................................................................... A Little Light Music on the name EDITH : I would like to have a clearer difference of tempo between the introduction (like a slow waltz) and the Allegretto con tenerezza. ............................................................................................................................................... Lullaby for Jessy : one note missing at bar 32 : RH plays an octave D (the lower line of bar 31 should end in D in bar 32). ............................................................................................................................................... Two corrections on "Differences Unite" : the point of the piece is that everytime LH plays 2, RH plays 3. So, in bar 9, 2nd beat, LH should just be 2, not a triplet. And bar 14, also 2nd beat, the LH should also be playing only 2 chords. ............................................................................................................................................... And it goes without saying that all the lullabies have the purpose, literally, to make people sleep. They are not meant to be played in a concert, but recording them is a perfect vehicle to listen to them. So if you doubt about the tempo, then remember one thing : the slower one is always the better. ............................................................................................................................................... I should one day write a piece on H-E-N-O-C-H , but for now you are the dedicatee of my longest and most complex piece for piano anyway hehehe ... ............................................................................................................................................... And as I wrote in my last entry, that last sentence wasn't just a wishful thought ..

Busy ... doing what?

It's been a busy month so far! Am trying to recapitulate what has happened since the Ananda Sukarlan Junior Award. ............................................................................................................................................... Immediately after the competition finished I at last managed to work with Willy Haryadi, my sound engineer, in editing & mixing my orchestral work ERSTWHILE. It was the first recording of my orchestra, the Ananda Sukarlan Orchestra, and I must say it doesn't sound bad. The orchestra consists of young but very enthusiastic and technically accomplished musicians. The recording is still now in a studio for its mastering process. ................................................................................................................................................ We also did an audition, through youtube, for violinists who I'd like to be the soloist for the premiere of my Violin Concerto. The winner is a very talented 17-year-old Amadeus Giovani Biga ; he played my solo violin piece Relationships which is a set of variations, done for a violin with scordatura on the G-string. Check his playing here, and I am sure you'd be as impressed as I was. I guess, with his age, he has experienced some kind of complicated relationships that inspired him to understand this piece :) . https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QlfNte4TC8 . He will perform my Violin Concerto with myself conducting on October 28th this year, and I am working hard in finishing it. ................................................................................................................................................ Wait, wait ... working hard in finishing it? Yes, but I am sort of stuck. Instead, I have been writing some "occasional" pieces, hoping that some of those pieces would trigger me to come back to the violin concerto. Apart from finishing & revising all my chamber works for strings to be published next week (it's in printing process at the moment), I wrote very quickly several pieces for piano. That's how funny life is: I am always inspired to write pieces which are NOT obligatory (read: commissioned, or paid). Money apparently doesn't inspire me, the lack of it does! Two of those short piano pieces are based on initials, one is "Randy Ryan" of which you can read in my previous entry, and the other is called, funny enough, Not a fugue, No, but they still complete each other. The title is a response to the emails that pianist Henoch Kristianto and me interchanged. He is busy recording 6 of my Rapsodia Nusantaras at the moment (I will tell you which ones they are when the CD is about to be published, hopefully in September or before), and he is recording my shorter piano pieces (all from Alicia's Piano Books) to fill up the CD too. I told him that I should one day write a piece on H-E-N-O-C-H , but for now he is the dedicatee of my longest and most complex piece for piano (Rapsodia Nusantara no. 4). He answered "Tune on my name? Well, better make it a fugue if you ever want to do it someday. I am having a lot of fun with some you've made." I wanna take a break from writing fugues that bore the listeners to death, and since we are doing groupings of some pieces which can be grouped together in Alicia's Piano Books, I had the idea of writing him a piece that can fit in all those groupings. Therefore, this piece can be included in the cycle "Friends", "Sunsets" ot "Love Songs". It can even be a lullaby, considering the repetitive figures made by his wife Yenny's name. Yeah, the piece is built on 2 motifs, on Henoch's and Yenny's initials. There is a photograph at Henoch's facebook, where he and Yenny were sitting in a beach (I think it was somewhere in Australia) and the colours of the sky and the sea (which are amazingly quite similar, a kind of greyish blue) triggered a sound of a chord which appears persistently throughout the piece, which is built on the interval of 4ths and their inversions and transformations. I remember feeling that colour too in England during the summertime, which made me feel like having a deja vu when I wrote the piece. ................................................................................................................................................ Back to the Ananda Sukarlan Orchestra, the Indonesia Opera Society commissioned me to write a short piece for piano & orchestra based on themes from Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries and Tannhauser. I decided to call it Wagner's Restless Nights and it is going to be premiered in his annual Opera Gala, sponsored by CIMB Niaga Bank, in September this year, by the fabulous French pianist Frédéric D'Oria- Nicolas, and I will conduct it with my orchestra. So, in fact I am working on 2 works at this moment: the Violin Concerto and this kind of short piano concerto. Wagner's Restless Nights is going very well, I just love doing fantasies and throwing somebody else's themes into a whirlwind, as I have been doing with my Rapsodia Nusantaras which has numbered 11 for now. It's the Violin Concerto which is stuck. But hey, I am a Gemini, and we Geminis like to have everything in pairs. And sometimes those pairs don't resemble each other at all, one is nice and tamed, while the other can be a problematic rebel!

A demisemiquaver note post-Ananda Sukarlan Junior Award

An advice for those who want to organize a piano competition : don't organize a small one. It is as exhausting as a big one. This year's Ananda Sukarlan Junior Award (ASA Junior) is not even half the scale of our bi-annual Ananda Sukarlan Award (always held in even-numbered years, starting from 2008) in terms of number of participants, prizes, repertory, duration and number of jury members (usually there are 5 sitting as judges, and now we were 3, but qualitywise it wasn't inferior at all. I humbly asked my highly admired pianist friends Henoch Kristianto and la sempre dolce Nathania Karina to be with me judging and I deeply appreciate their excellence in evaluating the participants). But I felt exhausted anyway, though satisfied. The ASA Junior was made possible thanks to the collaboration of Yamaha, to which I was appointed its Brand Ambassador. The winners are all from Surabaya, and the surprising fact is that they all come from the same institution AND teacher, that is Rosalinawati Iman (brava!). I must honestly say that Rosalinawati is for me a newcomer, I just heard about her last year, when some of her students won in another piano competition.Her students show both mastery of techniques and high musicianship and understanding. Ayunia Indri Saputro won the Junior Category, while the Elementary & Little Elementary was won by the brothers Hagen and Hamond Rahardjo. And then the Piano Duet category (which didn't attract that many attention apparently) was won from 2 young pianists from Medan, Carina Surya & Josephine Tjuatja. ............................................................................................................................................... A special note I'd like to dedicate to Michael Anthony, an 11-y.o. blind and autist child who reached the 9th rank among the finalists. He touched the audience's hearts, especially when he played my birthday piece I wrote for my daughter Alicia when she was 11. He proved that if you really love something, you can get it. There's no excuse. I wish that "something" could be changed into "someone". :( ............................................................................................................................................... Now we focus on the 2014 Ananda Sukarlan Award, the tough one. So tough that many have compared it with "The Hunger Games", therefore I'd wish our future participants "May the odds be ever in your favor!". A tough repertory too for the Senior category : they are asked to choose between my 8th and 10th Rapsodia Nusantara to be played in the final round; virtuosically speaking, they would just be the same! And it is indeed, unfortunately, like that sad ABBA song, The winner takes it all, the loser has to fall. In fact, we never want it to be like that, but a piano (and therefore any other instrument) competition is a reflection, or a taste, of a real life competition, where the winner indeed takes it all. The losers do NOT have to fall, as we could see in our previous competitions, but it was the winners that have proven their musical values in this tough world of piano music. Inge Buniardi (2008 winner) just toured Russia and gave her debut at the Carnegie Hall while now pursuing her Doctorate at the University of Kansas, Edith Widayani (2010) is going around giving concerts too (she'll go to Bogota Piano Festival sometime next month) while receiving scholarship for her Master's at the prestigious Eastman School of Music at this moment, and our youngest winner (2012) Randy Ryan was just accepted at the Juilliard School of Music. Not a bad future at all for Indonesia's classical music! ............................................................................................................................................. Last Saturday night I was partying with Edith, Randy and Stephanie Onggowinoto (both Randy & Stephanie in fact shared the 3rd prize at ASA 2008, 4 years before Randy won the 1st prize, at last, in 2012) and their lovely families at Mr. Budi Sabini's residence. We missed Inge Buniardi as she's having a holiday in Europe now. It was a really nice party, with great food and wine too, and it's been such a long time that I enjoyed a purely musical party like that. The last one I remembered was during my student days! We talked only about music, played piano in turns, and Edith & Randy even played each a half of Schumann's Carnaval. This is also the first time in years that I enjoyed playing the piano in a party. Anyway, I just realized that I have written short pieces, for both Inge and Edith's (who played hers in the party) birthday presents, not only as 1st prize winners (it wasn't written anywhere that the 1st prizewinner will have to suffer a piece from me!) but as great musicians and great friends they've turned out to be in the post-ASA period. So, I owed one to Randy and I promised him to write one. I wouldn't wait for his birthday, which is coincidentally almost the same as mine: his is June 9, and mine is June 10. I got already a vague concept of the piece during the party, a piece using his name, with a basso ostinato borrowing from Michael Jackson's Thriller, which is my all time favorite song (Randy's name generated a rhythmically funky piece which reminded me of that really catchy Thriller basso ostinato). On my way home I read the lyrics of Thriller, you know, about "the beast that is about to strike and no one's gonna save you", and that gave me the idea of writing not a Prelude & Fugue but the other way around. In fact, the Fugue would serve as a Prelude to the beast that is about to strike. I was happy that that piece was written down (I think the happiness was also due to the mix of the Australian wine I had in the party plus the Scotch whisky I took in my appt. before composing). I tweeted at 1.23 a.m when I finished the Fugue, and at 2.18 I finished the postlude, and sent Randy, Edith & Steph directly, since I put their names in the score too, as a remembrance of that really cool party ... and a hope that we'd repeat it again soon. We work hard, but we party hard too!

My music for string instruments

Just a few weeks after my music score of Rapsodia Nusantara 6-10 was published, my music for string instruments will have their turn to be published. In this book there will be some "old" and quite popular pieces of mine, such as my short String Quartet "Lontano" which was commissioned by the great violinist Midori Goto, my pieces for violin & piano Sweet Sorrow and The Sleepers, my Tango (I forgot the exact title, but it's a tango anyway) for cello and piano etc. Apart from all the pieces included in this book, you can also find my music for violin & piano in Alicia's 3rd Piano Book, where my piece Sadness Becomes Her and some music written for films can be found. But new pieces were included too, and I wrote some program notes for them, and here they are. ............................................................................................................................................. Both Sweet Sorrow and The Sleepers are commissioned by Fundacion Musica Abierta in Spain, which deals with disabled (young) musicians. Both pieces for violin & piano are written for a pianist with only 2 functional fingers in his/her right hand. Both pieces are also inspired by excerpts of phrases by my favorite writers, Shakespeare & Whitman. Sweet Sorrow is recited by Juliet to Romeo when parting: "Good night, good night! Parting is such sweet sorrow, That I shall say good night till it be morrow.", while The Sleepers is inspired by the long poem bearing the same title by Walt Whitman. I quoted some phrases on the score: "The sleepers are very beautiful as they lie unclothed, They flow hand in hand over the whole earth from east to west as they lie unclothed .... They pass the invigoration of the night and the chemistry of the night and awake." ............................................................................................................................................. My "mini trio", A Farm Picture was written just in a few minutes in an explosive burst of inspiration. The very short but powerful poem of Whitman (yes, him again) immediately triggered that sound in my head, a placid, rustic texture of flute, viola and piano, but a few months later I went back to the score to revise it and found out that the wind & string instruments can change place in this piece, hence it can be played by a violin, clarinet & piano. I just had the combination of a wind and a string instrument in this music. The poem just consists of 3 lines : Through the ample open door of the peaceful country barn / A sun-lit pasture field, with cattle and horses feeding / And haze, and vista, and the far horizon, fading away. ............................................................................................................................................. I always think that my song, Jemari Menari ("Dancing Fingers") is too short, and I always wanted to expand it. Well, it's based on a very short poem by Nanang Suryadi, and I want it to become a vocal piece, not someone singing accompanying a virtuosic pianist! So I decided to make a kind of "fantasy" on it, and since I like the register of a viola, I started to do a kind of toccata-fantasy based on it. The whole melody appears in the middle of the piece, but I already give hints of its naughty rhythms from the beginning. I wrote this piece in the nice business lounge of Frankfurt airport where I had to wait 4 hours for the connecting flight earlier this year, accompanied by my favorite drink : orange juice with a few drops (well, more than drops, and more than few) of Campari. The music certainly has that taste, a kind of bittersweet excitement. The original poem, which I used for the original piece for middle voice and piano, is as such : menarilah / jemari menari / melukis udara kosong / dengan jemari / menarilah jemari / mengukir hari / menatah mimpi