My impressions and suggestions, from the last Ananda Sukarlan Award

Now that the Ananda Sukarlan Award Competition is over, and also the elections in our country is too (this is the first time I voted! Not really because I especially admire my candidate, but because the other candidate had promised to banish all democracy in my country if he'd won, by saying that the people wouldn't have to take the hassle of voting anymore. He will rule until the end of his life!. That, plus his very bad track record of kidnappings and killings during the Soeharto era. So, of course I voted the other candidate.) I would write about my impressions from the competition. .............................................................................................................................................. The issue that disturbed me the most is that so many young pianists (read: children) play pieces that were waaaay too difficult for them. Perhaps their teacher or parents thought that it would impress the jury and that we'd give higher marks. WRONG!! We give marks according to how that pianist play. If (s)he plays an easy(er) piece well, then (s)he would receive higher marks than if (s)he'd play a more difficult piece but clearly showing that it is too difficult. I feel sorry for any students when their teacher give them challenging material to "stretch" them. A good example is my Rapsodia Nusantara pieces. Those Rapsies are just too difficult for them who just studied piano for 3 or 4 years! They are definitely not meant for them. Even I sometimes regret writing some bits in those Rapsies, since I gotta study days 'n days to play them smoothly! .............................................................................................................................................. I can't claim that I am a teacher since I have no real students, but personally, I would not assign a piece that the child can't play. Or at least, I don't assign a piece that I expect they won't be able to do well. While there are certain developmental stages, there are always children that are exceptions. But giving a piece which is still (waaay) too difficult also disturbs the natural learning process of a student. .............................................................................................................................................. Another issue was that many participants complained "... but I did it well in the classroom! Why did I mess up?" Well, playing in front of people is sooooo different than playing alone or just for your teacher in the class. So, students should have given the chance to try out his program in front of a small audience. And if possible, no, no, it's always possible and even not difficult nowadays, to record (in audio or better even video). Watch and listen the recording together with your teacher, not only to the interpretation, but also to see if there are any distracting mannerisms or facial expressions. Listening and watching yourself from the outside is a completely different experience than what you perceive from the inside. Follow along with the music like you did with the professional recording and critique yourself. In the stress of the performance, we play what we have programmed ourselves to play, not what we “hoped” would turn out right. And perhaps you'd notice that the first try out, things would turn out rather messy. So, the more try outs you do, the better. No one is ever perfect, but you want the odds to be in your favor. Being able to play through cleanly nine out of ten times is much better odds. .............................................................................................................................................. Performance anxiety is quite a popular issue too. Well, I can't help you with this. It happens to just about everybody, but there are things you can do to help. But if I, suffering from Asperger's Syndrome can overcome it, then I know that YOU can achieve it too. Here are some hints 'n ideas. First, know yourself. If you are naturally shy, more work will be needed in this area. Things that have helped me are: know the piece well enough that I can play it even while I am in a state when I can't focus, or not having had a good night sleep, or other adverse situation. Observe, correct and redirect your negative automatic thoughts, don’t worry, regulate your breathing, use relaxation techniques while waiting to play. It helps to teach students to non-judgmentally notice their random, unproductive thoughts, and learn to gently, but quickly, refocus back on the music. Again, I wanna say to you : stage fright is very, very normal, and even great performers have it. Being unfocused is very normal too. But how to go back to focus is a skill that we all have to, and can learn. .............................................................................................................................................. Certainly there are more issues that I can't remember for now (perhaps I will write another entry about this), but to end this, I would like to advice you to build up calm mental confidence towards the end. In the last few weeks before the performance, switch over from correction to praise mode. Not that you should be less critical, but you should also see the good sides of your playing. Aaaand ... time is running out! Don’t try to make any major adjustments in the last 10 days - two weeks. Focus on expression. Teachers, start pointing out all the things the student is doing right. Remind them of all the careful preparation and hard work they have done, and how ready they are. Bolster a strong sense of internal trust that what they have worked on will be there when they need it. Tell them you believe they are ready and will do well. They need encouragement and support this time, not anymore harsh criticisms! .............................................................................................................................................. OK then, good luck in preparing your next competition, folks! For now, I leave you with the winners of the youngest category of the competition. 2 winners got the First Prize of the Little Elementary category, and coincidentally both are from the same city: Surabaya. They are Hamond Rahardjo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntbAnc2lfvk , and Olivia TS: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emDucHXcLtA . Now THEY didn't play pieces which are too hard for them. And listen how they could feel the music inside them. Enjoy !

Official Program Note for Chamber Symphony "In memoriam Ainun Habibie"

This program note is taken from my previous entries in this blog, but with lots of additional informations, and also edited in a more "formal" language. This will be the one to be published in the program books and the CD. .............................................................................................................................................. Program note on Chamber Symphony no. 1 "In memoriam Ainun Habibie" .............................................................................................................................................. My first Chamber Symphony is commissioned by the Ainun-Habibie Foundation, and explicitly requested by Indonesia's third President Prof. Dr. B.J. Habibie himself to be dedicated to the memory of his late wife, Dr. Hasri Ainun Besari. It would be like a monument, but a musical one, not only about her, but also about their eternal love. So basically, it's a symphonic work to immortalize their love, or let's say a highly elaborated, magnified and extensive love song. .............................................................................................................................................. When I met Mr. Habibie accompanied by one of his sons, Ilham, to talk about this, he gave me the memoirs he himself wrote after Mrs. Ainun's passing away, and also the DVD of the film "Habibie - Ainun" which was made by the filmmaker Faozan Rizal. I thought that I would just enjoy the book and the film as an activity apart from my composing, but it turned out that the book (more than the film) played a big role in the music I would later make. Reading about their love life is like reading Romeo and Juliet, but instead of lasting only 5 nights, Ainun - Habibie's last for a lifetime... and beyond. It's just incredible to learn that with them, love stayed intensely beyond physical boundaries, until even after the death of Ainun. .............................................................................................................................................. The work's length is ca. 20 minutes, and is divided into 3 separate movements, for 10 musicians. Why 10? It's because it will be performed in The Habibie's library for its world premiere, on August 11th which is the birth date of Mme. Ainun. When he asked me to do that, I immediately went to the place of its premiere, and so it's tailor-made for the occasion. The instrumentation will be for flute, oboe (doubling english horn), clarinet, piano, percussion, harp, string quartet. Since it has a very reduced instrumentation, all parts are quite virtuosic, so it requires highly trained musicians and needs (for the time being, at least) a conductor, which will be me for the world premiere. When you learn about the instrumentation, you might realize that the loudness of each instruments might be inherently unbalanced with each other, so indeed I am very careful in that. Another request from Mr. Habibie for my chamber symphony was that it would have a Javanese element. I then decided to take the tune from the Javanese folksong, Lir-Ilir, as one of its melodic motifs. The piano part has become so elaborated, especially in the 3rd movement thanks to the inspiration through the rhythmic excitement of Anthony Hartono, winner of the Ananda Sukarlan Award 2014 that a big chunk of it will land into a new Rapsodia Nusantara. So one can say that the Rapsodia (until now I haven't put a number for it) grows from Chamber Symphony, or vice versa. .............................................................................................................................................. The first movement, "Time Dilation", is based on the theory of Einstein : that moving clocks are measured to tick more slowly than an observer's "stationary" clock. Also the theory of simultaneity, that two events, simultaneous for one observer, may not be simultaneous for another observer if the observers are in relative motion. For the opening, I divide the chamber orchestra of 10 people into 5 different groups, playing simultaneously but each playing their own speed. My composing method is in fact inspired, apart from by Einstein's theory, by Sapardi Djoko Damono's line of poem "Yang Fana adalah Waktu" : "memungut detik demi detik, merangkainya seperti bunga, sampai pada suatu hari, kita lupa untuk apa." (plucking seconds, one by one, arranging them like flowers, until one day we forget what for.) But those are not the seconds from just one life, they are seconds from pararel universes. And in the end, those seconds blend together and I hope the listener would forget why were they arranged, juxtaposed and harmonized. .............................................................................................................................................. The second movement is purely a love song. I tried to write it exactly like someone falling in love : I just FALL. I didn't plan the structure, I just let the melody inside me elaborate and develop itself. As I live among the hills and it's a habit for me to take long walks during sunset, I just went out of my house carrying a music paper, and the melody developed by itself during those long walks while I wrote it down. It was scary to do a piece of music like this without any previous plans, but I think it worked out well. I want this to be a contrast to the first movement which is very structured and planned up to the minute details, which reflects Mr. Habibie's immaculate precision as a scientist. I still cannot believe, even until now that the music is finished, that such a scientific person can have such strong romantic emotions at the same time, which I think is contradictive. I could see it in his eyes, when he talked about his late wife when he asked me to write this music. Just with that look in his eyes, I realized that he is a real and genuine human being, not just a president like the other politicians. .............................................................................................................................................. The third movement is the "main course" of this work. It uses the name H.A.B.I.B.I.E (H is the note B in German, and B itself is a B-flat) and A.I.N.U.N translated into musical notes (a method already done and developed by composers since Bach, through Schumann up to Shostakovich, Britten and Bernstein) as the main motif. And all the musical themes of the previous movements, including the concept of time delation are exploited and juxtaposed in this movement, bringing it into a virtuosic ending. Of course with this kind of musical anagrams --or musical sudoku, as I always think fits better with this-- , the composer (nor anybody else) could predict if the turnout would be good. One just experiment until a certain point before we decide to continue, or abandon it. Luckily, HABIBIE and AINUN fits perfectly well with each other, either horizontally (melodic) or vertically (harmonic). .............................................................................................................................................. The point of this piece, in the end, is that everything is relative. Time is not linear and it doesn't pass with the speed and direction according to our perception. Life is like music : it could be very serious if you take it as such, but it can just be a fun game of permutating letters and notes. It can be planned meticulously, or you just let things happen, and both could turn out happily. One thing is real, and it is here to stay: LOVE. And it surpasses the boundaries that we set ourselves, even the physical one. That is perhaps the essence of the poem by Sapardi Djoko Damono : Yang Fana adalah Waktu, Kita Abadi (Time is Transient, We are Eternal) .

Chamber Symphony, continued in Spain

(continued from the previous entry). ... Another request from Mr. Habibie for my chamber symphony was that it would have a Javanese element. I then decided to take the tune from the Javanese folksong, Lir-Ilir. The piano part has become so elaborated thanks to the inspiration through the rhythmic excitement of Anthony Hartono 2 weeks ago at Ananda Sukarlan Award (Jeeezz, it's already almost 2 weeks!) that a big chunk of it will land into a new Rapsodia Nusantara, I think no. 14. So yeah, you can say that Rapsy 14 grows from Chamber Symphony, or vice versa. .............................................................................................................................................. I came back to Spain a few days after the ASA was done. It's a great feeling, I have 2 weeks completely free at home, just to compose. I gotta finish this Chamber Symphony soon, I gave myself the deadline of July the 11th, exactly one month before the premiere so that the musicians could learn their (difficult) soloistic parts, especially Anthony. I know I won't make it, but hey it's always good to be strict with oneself. After the 11th, I've promised myself not to drink any drop of wine until I finish the Chamber Symphony. That would certainly speed up my work ! And then I gotta work on my opera, about a Chinese young girl being raped during the end of Suharto dictatorship era. I started that opera already, but then it was abandoned due to the Chamber Symphony which will be premiered earlier (11th of August). .............................................................................................................................................. On the plane back to Spain, I thought of doing something for the piece, but its structure is too complex, so I decided I would just wanna have some fun. Long time ago I promised a young winner of ASA Junior Piano Competition, Ayunia Indri Saputro, to write her a short piano piece. So I tinkered around her name, AYUNIA to make a motif which appears in the middle section, and it gave me a happy tune. So, this became the first piece written for Alicia's 5th piano book. The piece has a Mozartian lightness, and some polyphonic part when her name appears as such. I couldn't find a title for it (I am not in the mood to find fancy titles nowadays!) so it simply became A.Y.U.N.I.A written on the plane . As is almost a habit of mine with short pieces, I totally forgot about it until this morning I found it on my computer. I tried it on the piano, and it sounded nice, so I immediately sent it to her through her piano teacher, Rosalinawati Iman. And then, I write this blog. I'll make this short then, am in the mood to finish my work. It's raining outside, but it's quite a warm summer day. An ideal day to stay at home 'n compose :) .

A musical "Taj Mahal", or how to immortalize love

Remember my last entry about me being stuck in my big work, and that my piano piece "In the Nick(s) of Time" saved me? Well, I'm gonna talk about it now. What I am writing now is a Chamber Symphony, for 10 instruments. It's commissioned by Prof. Dr. B.J. Habibie, Indonesia's third president and now retired from politics but still very active in the field of technology (he is a brilliant engineer and THE person who made Indonesia's first airplane back in the last century). .............................................................................................................................................. Why a chamber symphony ? Well the commission is a kind of "musical monument" to commemorate Mr. Habibie's late wife who died recently, Mme. Ainun Habibie. The love between them has been legendary, it's been written by Mr. Habibie himself, and even made into a film. So, this is like a commission from Shah Jehan to build Taj Mahal to immortalize his wife. This time, the Taj Mahal is not a building, but a musical one. The title for now is "Chamber Symphony, in memory of Mrs. Ainun Habibie". Mr. Habibie himself explicitly asked me that this should not only be a monument to cherish her memory, but also to cherish the love between them. Therefore, I use my usual method of using names as the main motif of the work : H.A.B.I.B.I.E and A.I.N.U.N . .............................................................................................................................................. Why 10 instruments? It's because it will be performed in The Habibie's library for its world premiere, on August 11th which is the birth date of Mme. Ainun. When he asked me to do that, I immediately went to the place of its premiere, and so it's tailor-made for the occasion. The instrumentation will be for flute, oboe (doubling english horn), clarinet, piano, percussion, harp, string quartet. Since it has a very reduced instrumentation, all parts are quite virtuosic, so it requires highly trained musicians and needs (for the time being, at least) a conductor, which will be me for the world premiere. When you learn about the instrumentation, you might realize that the loudness of each instruments might be inherently unbalanced with each other, so indeed I am very careful in that. The challenge is how to make an illusion of a grand work played by a small group. However, the performance of the winner of Ananda Sukarlan Award Piano competition last week, Anthony Hartono, inspired me a lot, and I will give more prominence to the piano part. Apparently I wasn't the only one who was so impressed with his performance, but the whole audience too. After the announcement of the winner last week, I immediately asked him if he would be available to do that, and luckily he would be. Another thing that inspires me is that Anthony is at the moment very much in love with his girlfriend, so one could feel it in the air during the competition. Together they make such a beautiful couple, that touched me deeply too. .............................................................................................................................................. I did listen to several chamber symphonies before I determine the structure and instrumentation of the work. Mostly the major ones in musical history : Arnold Schoenberg's 2 Chamber Symphonies, and that masterpiece of masterpieces of chamber music: Aaron Copland's "Appalachian Spring" that never fails to amaze me, how the 25 minutes pass by as if it were much shorter. However, I realized that I can't listen to music anymore like a "normal" person listens to music. I am sure people are touched by beautiful melodies and harmonies, but I am touched by the intervals, the permutation of notes and how sections contrast each other. Musical anagrams work hyperactively in my head. I wonder if my Asperger Syndrome has something to do with it. Anyway, I am so immersed writing it, and it's a nice challenge for me to write intricate polyphonies for such a reduced instrumentation, so it's not improbable that there will be a Chamber Symphony no. 2. :)