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