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) .