God Only Knows What I'd Be Without You

Do you believe in coincidence or destiny? That question aroused when I was writing that section in my opera CLARA, exactly when Clara is driving her BMW before she was attacked by the rapists. It was designed to be 3'30" maximum to create the equilibrium with the sections coming before and after. What I knew was that the music should be calm, but tense. You know, like a thriller or horror movie, when things look all right, but something really bad's gonna happen. Since until then I had no slightest idea of what the music should be like (in terms of notes and harmonies), I left it until the last moment. And so, I have finished all the arias, recitatives, everything, and was left with this 3'30" section. And still it was .... blank. Could something be worse than this situation for a composer ... and time is running out? Apparently it could be. .............................................................................................................................................. It was 3 a.m. (Central European Time) and I had my chat with my new friend Ryan Tandya in Jakarta, an excellent photographer whose works I admire a lot. But we mostly talk about other stuff .... like music, as apparently we have some musical tastes in common. I just finished orchestrating the existing materials of the opera for the day but still stuck on that mentioned scene. And Ryan showed me that BBC Music has released a remake of Beach Boys' "God Only Knows", which I haven't heard for ... oh I dunno ... 30 years maybe or more. It used to be my favorite song, my mom had a vinyl of it, and I remember I loved it since it's so weird, and full of polyphony, which is unusual for a pop song (yeah yeah, I love polyphony since the day I remembered! And not only Bach, but also Brian Wilson - The Beach Boys). Apart from the polyphonic element, the song has a sophisticated harmonic complexity. It modulates in a unique way from A major, D major and E major and extensively uses inverted chords. The tonic chord (E major) usually only appears with the major 3rd or the 5th in the bass. The entire verse progression sounds restless and ambiguous, until the line "God only knows what I'd be without you" when the chord progression finally reaches a clear goal (A—E/G#—F#m7—E). It is as if the idea of 'key' has itself been challenged and subverted. Shortly speaking, a work of genius by Brian Wilson. .............................................................................................................................................. I slept afterwards with that song banging in my head like 50 times repeated during our chat (it was at least a 2-hour one), and naturally I woke up the next morn .. I mean noon with that song in my head. And the song was there to stay, for the rest of the day. If you are a fellow composer, then you know this problem too well : an existing piece of music sounding in your head blocks your own music from coming out. But hey, I gotta do something. If something's hanging in your head, you can't take it away by thinking that it should go away, in fact it would cling stronger if you do it that way. It just gotta go away naturally ... but how long? And .. if life gives you lemons ... make lemonade, right? So, since the song itself is full of polyphony, why not put more voices to the song? And then I also realized the fact that I (and perhaps even the writer of the story, Seno Gumira Ajidarma) have forgotten this: in a critical situation such a mass riot, when you are driving a car, what do you do? You listen to the radio to hear the news, right? And radios don't just put news, but also music. And what texts could be more appropriate after Clara's father anxiously called his daughter to stay away from the city? If you should ever leave me / Though life would still go on believe me / The world could show nothing to me / So what good would living do me .............................................................................................................................................. Isn't that what we call the conspiracy of the universe? So I decided to put the old recording of that song, and make the singers (Clara and her father) sing polyphonically. Which is in fact, composing new melodies with Brian Wilson's tune as the cantus firmus (that's the cool -- or nerdy -- term for a melody used as the basis for a polyphonic composition). And guess the duration of the song .... yup, it's 3 minutes. With some modification using loops and cut & pastings, it's the perfect duration. And it gives time for the orchestral musicians to rest while the singers are singing with the recording. Nothing could fit perfectly. Well, well, Ryan. I wanted to kill you that day for showing me that bloody videoclip. But now, it feels like .... God Only Knows What I'd Be Without You, Ryan. Thanks!

Composers' block, 2nd part (an introspection)

If you have so much pain in your heart and soul and you want to heal it, you normally go to a psychologist, psychiatrist or even hypnotherapist. Well now I can tell you another way to vomit it out. Write an opera about the traumatic effect of being raped, AND do it very near the deadline. In that case, you don't have a reason to postpone it until tomorrow or the next day. You just gotta deal with it and vomit it on paper (or in our case nowadays, on those bloody Sibelius staves on the computer). This is what I have done for the last 3 weeks. 22 days, writing my ca. 40-minute CLARA, complete with its orchestration. If you do your maths, that means 2 minutes of music every day, and they are not 2 minutes of simple flute solo music of just 1 line. It's a whole orchestration, PLUS the vocal line, PLUS thinking to match the words to the music PLUS doing the polyphony for the dialogues. Until September I only did 2 arias for Clara's father, and they were not even complete, and neither were they orchestrated. They were even written "under pressure", since there was a concert for a "teaser" for CLARA organized by the Four Seasons Hotel and the National Commission for Violence to Women at the end of September. The whole opera is about 2 things: 1. extreme sufferings and pain, both physical and mental ones, and 2. about evil on earth, the decadence of humanity, how extreme we can inflict pain and sufferings to our own brothers and sisters. .............................................................................................................................................. How could I manage to compose so much in so little time? I dunno. I worked like I've never did before, that's for sure. I slept a maximum of 5 hours a day for the last 3 weeks. And of course I don't write this just to finish it in time, otherwise it makes no point of writing this. "To achieve great things, two things are needed; a plan, and not quite enough time.", said Leonard Bernstein, the great composer, pianist, conductor and my idol. This is the strangest period of my life, I think. Just before this opera, I wrote my Chamber Symphony, "In memoriam Ainun Habibie" and I was in such a happy and loving mood. Love is always my favorite theme, and the look on Mr. Habibie's (Indonesia's 3rd president and the commissioner of the piece) eyes every time he talked about his late wife was enough to inspire anyone. It was also rapidly composed (Í spent the whole June doing it), but it was much easier. Then, a period of about 2 months of almost nothing put down on paper. I was conscious that CLARA should be finished during that uninspired period of crisis, but somehow I couldn't put any note on paper. I knew and always know HOW to compose, but I just couldn't do it. You might think I am a loser, a whiner, a wimp, well perhaps I am. But there is something in composing which is inexplicable. If I CAN do it, why don't I? I dunno the answer, except that what I gotta write is too painful and too true. A composer's block is not about that we cannot compose, but about something else. Feeling stuck sucks, especially for us creative types. Which logically explains why when we are stuck we resist it. We often start to get "tight". Closed off. Frustrated. We suffer. .............................................................................................................................................. Why is that? .............................................................................................................................................. We suffer because we cannot accept this period of non-performance. Our idea of what our lives should look like takes over what our life does look like. We are not looking at reality clearly and not aligned with the whole truth. It makes the entire "not doing" situation even worse because not only are you now uninspired but you are resentful at life for being uninspired. That's a heck of a lot of suckiness! And yes, I did go to a friend who now specializes in hypnosis, and those sessions really helped. It's like finding a key to a locked door. But perhaps, the thing that helped the most is to be brave enough to touch the pain inside me, and let it go out. Hypnotherapy doesn't do that, but what it does is to make you strong and bold enough to do it. So, perhaps being stuck is not that bad. I now even believe that being stuck is a blessing. It forces us to slow down. To try new things. To question our direction. Being uninspired requires us to stop pushing life and start receiving, if we allow it. Just because life is not unfolding the way you want it to unfold does not mean it's not unfolding the way it's supposed to. .............................................................................................................................................. And what lesson can we learn from CLARA ? That the world, that means WE, don't need money and more money for security. What we need is LOVE. Clara (a fictional character, but based on many real individuals) is depicted as a rich girl whose daddy is a successful businessman. In fact, BECAUSE she is rich (and of Chinese descendant), those wild men who are systematically organized by the stronger power suppose that she deserves to be raped and tortured. Those men, the rapists, are even deeply religious people, and that's where the problem is. They are religious, but they forgot that there is God, and God only means love. .............................................................................................................................................. I can't thank enough my dearest friends for all the late night hang outs, the internet chats. No, they are not the sponsors, but I just wanna say that even with billions of funding from sponsors, without these good friends who helped me in times of darkness, CLARA wouldn't have existed. In this case, friendship means much more than money. So thanks to Erza S.T. the ultimate Grand Duchess of the opera (and drama!), to Risti Brophy and T. Marlene Danusutedjo for all the late night talks accompanying the alcohol, to my close friends with golden voices but also shared their time and support Evelyn Merrelita, Nikodemus Lukas, Mariska Setiawan, to my friend and hypnotherapist Willy Haryadi, and my best friend doubling manager doubling choreographer doubling director of the opera Chendra Panatan. One thing I should warn the public here is that CLARA is not a nice and beautiful opera, but it is a brutally honest one. It's even darker and more painful than all those Puccini death-ending operas, coz this is not about death, but about the exact opposite: the highly questionable purpose of life. I never raped anyone, and I have never been raped either. But I have pain in me, and I put it all in this work. I just hope that there is no more pain inside me left after this, so my next musical works would be all sweet, nice and exquisite (wouldn't it be nice?). .............................................................................................................................................. This blog entry was written late at night (in fact it's almost sunrise) after a visit of my friend, the prominent Global & Greatness Coach Michael Thallium (www.michaelthallium.com ), to my house earlier. Through the years he's made lots of documentaries about me, and in one section of the documentary he shot yesterday I talked about composers' block spontaneously (in all documentaries I didn't use any scripts). After he went home, I started to re-think about it, and so I put here all the thoughts I didn't talk about in the video he made. The link to the video is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYXX6Oo_P-U

Pain is Inevitable, Suffering is Optional

There have been quite a few pros and contras about the "teaser" or "preview" on my next opera, CLARA when we performed parts of it last month at the Four Seasons Hotel, Jakarta. Whatever the reaction, it didn't leave people indifferent. The role of Clara's father was sung by the same tenor who will sing it in the premiere next December, Nikodemus Lukas, but the role of CLARA was sung not by Isyana Sarasvati, but by Evelyn Merrelita, who is a bit older than Isyana. Her role at this "teaser" concert wasn't big anyway, and it was done without much acting, and no real costumes and decors, so it was allright. Allright? No, she sang brilliantly, as usual, and so did Niko. We performed 2 arias of Clara's Father : Jangan Pulang (Don't Come Home) and Pesan Papa Terakhir (Dad's last message). The text (by Seno Gumira Ajidarma) is direct, stabbing, and clear. Poetic, but honest and true. In fact, CLARA will be premiered as the closing of the International 16 days against Gender violence, also coinciding with the International Human Rights Day which will also include the Indonesian premiere of that controversial documentary by the Oscar-nominated (for his previous documentary on exactly the theme of violence during the Suharto era) director, Joshua Oppenheimer : The Look of Silence. This film has already been premiered during the Venice Film Festival a few weeks ago. Anyway, about the "contra"s for my opera : some people (especially who went through what happened during the period of the fall of Suharto in May 1998) expressed that my opera will be too painful to them. Not only politically, but also psychologically. Those scars are about to heal, why should we open them up again? .............................................................................................................................................. Do we move on in this life by forgetting the pain of the past? My best friend, the one I always turn to in times of sorrow, always tells me this phrase : Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional. That simple? If it's that simple, why is it so hard? .............................................................................................................................................. I am working hard, very hard in finishing this opera. It's been a difficult period, last August and September. I practically composed next to zero during that period. Now time is running out, apart from the fact that my biggest inspirer is always that thing called "deadline", I suddenly have all the things that could inspire and motivate me to compose : the performance of Evelyn Merrelita and Nikodemus Lukas really boosted something inside me (although Evelyn will not sing in my opera in December. I will, certainly, write another opera involving her, after my comic opera "Laki-laki Sejati" where she took the main role 2 years ago), and also the book "Disangkal" ("Denied") which the National Commission On Violence Against Women gave me as a gift. It is a manifestation of "Homo Homini Lupus", a proof of how low humans could act and inflict sufferings to each other. It is a powerful book, and I now know that I am indeed destined to write these operas to understand more about what happened in the past in my beloved country. You see, in May 98 I was still in my appartment in Den Haag. I didn't have internet back then and since it's never a habit for me to watch the news on TV, I realized what happened only a few days later. I then called my mom in Jakarta, who said that I shouldn't worry since that huge mass riot was systematically and massively organized against people of Chinese descendant. Not only we are Javanese, but also my dad was in the military so my family was just very, very safe. And only a year later when I went to Indonesia I found out that things indeed were much worse than I thought. Hundreds of Chinese weren't just killed; they were tortured, and the women were raped in ways unimaginable. There is a history of anti-Chinese sentiment in Indonesia, but even taking that into consideration, the violence of May 98 was unusually extreme and virulent, attributed to the encouragement of the army and the Suharto regime. .............................................................................................................................................. Friends, we are afraid of ourselves, of our own reality; our feelings most of all. Pain is a feeling. Your feelings are a part of you. Your own reality. If you feel ashamed of them, and hide them, you’re letting society destroy your reality. You should stand up for your right to feel your pain. This is not opening old scars, friends. This is about resisting to forget. To heal, we must forgive, but we cannot forget. This entry I wrote is not about being strong, it's about overcoming our weakness. Whether you were held or beaten, cared for or neglected, happy or sad, or TORTURED AND RAPED, take a moment to remind yourself that we are not defined by what has been done or done to us, but by what we choose to do with the time we have left. Fear should be faced head-on and if we're going to fight it, we should do it in a forum that allows the opportunity to help anyone who can relate to it find the courage to move past the past or reach out to get help to escape a painful present. It is painful, yes it is, but we should turn pain into wisdom, and make sure we do not inflict that pain to others in the future. I believe painful emotions have a self-healing and self-correcting component. When we take advantage of it, we flourish. When we don't, we suffer. So, we choose. That simple? If it's that simple, why is it so hard?