A new volume of Rapsodia Nusantara, but ....

I haven't had even a 15-minute break since I arrived in Indonesia! Immediately after I landed, we rehearsed my Chamber Symphony no.1 "In memoriam Ainun Habibie", commissioned by the Habibie-Ainun Foundation (see my entries of last month and before). It's been premiered with myself conducting my 10 wonderful musician friends at the residence of Mr. Habibie, Indonesia's third president and we also have recorded it using Mr. President's impressively exquisite library as the studio. Yeah, we were interrupted for about 40 minutes by the sound of the torrential rain, but apart from that, the recording went so well. So, we'll see what we'll do with that recording! Now that the dedicatee of my Rapsodia Nusantara no. 11, the marvellous (and stunningly beautiful too) Argentinian pianist, Natalia Gonzalez Figueroa is going to give its world premiere in Buenos Aires on the 23rd this month, the score of that work has to be published for that date. The issue is, that my manager usually publish my Rapsies in a volume of 5 numbers, therefore there exist already 2 volumes now: no. 1-5 and 6-10. For the moment I've finished composing up till Rapsy 12+1, but I haven't written Rapsy 14 and 15, mostly due to the fact that nobody / institutions have commissioned them. And no time to do it either ... I gotta finish this opera soon! Well, two-thirds of Rapsy 14 is taken from my Chamber Symphony (some parts are adapted into piano plus the original cadenzas for the piano in the 3rd movement), and I could have done it in a few days and without any sponsors (just like my early Rapsodias!), but that still leaves me with Rapsy 15. .............................................................................................................................................. So, Chendra my manager proposed me a solution (he almost always has a solution for everything practical ... not musical ones, but mostly for administrative and executive purposes). He proposed to publish my Variations on Ismail Marzuki's "Rayuan Pulau Kelapa" and on "Silent Night" together with Rapsy 11 in one book. In this case, they are similar : both written based on existing songs / materials, just like Rapsodia Nusantara. I thought it's a fantastic idea, so I add similar pieces, yet to be premiered : Fantasy & Fugue on B.A.C.H (I will blog about this soon, near the premiere) and Fantasy & Passacaglia on "Adeste Fideles". And voila, the book will consist of 5 pieces, just like the volumes I and II of Rapsodia Nusantara! .............................................................................................................................................. The "Adeste Fideles" Fantasy was written during the days when I was "dry" during my first few weeks of writing my opera, CLARA. Clara had a difficult start, since I tried to change the structure of the story into a flashback. Even with the structure carefully planned, I was still feeling insecure even until I already wrote down the first few (even many!) notes. The theme doesn't help either. It's so painful, not the usual "mental" pain as in unrequited love, but a physical one, since it's about rape and death. Everything is so violent, and I have so much fear for violence. I tried to make this opera as a therapeutic method for me to deal with things that I fear so much in me. So, I wrote a variation of the passacaglia every time I dried up or was incapable of writing .... which proved that those days were a lot! "Adeste Fideles" turned into one of the longest pieces for piano that I've written (it lasts around 12-13 minutes). .............................................................................................................................................. The original "Silent Night" is perhaps the only musical work that is remembered from the German composer Franz Xaver Gruber (1787-1863). On the Christmas Eve of 1818, Joseph Mohr, an assistant pastor at St Nicholas, showed Gruber a six-stanza poem he had written in 1816. They were both working in that church at Obendorf, near Salzburg. He asked Gruber to set the poem to music. The church organ had broken down so Gruber produced a melody with guitar arrangement for the poem. The two men sang "Stille Nacht" for the first time at Christmas Mass in St Nicholas Church while Mohr played guitar and the choir repeated the last two lines of each verse. In later years, Gruber composed additional arrangements of the carol for organ and for organ with orchestra, as well as scores of other carols and masses, many of which are still in print and sung today in Austrian churches. .............................................................................................................................................. There are no royalties involved in these two songs, and I have liked the tunes since I remembered, so writing paraphrases on those tunes proved to be really fun. I just hope that they are fun to play as well!