A literary festival which is not only literary

It's been quite an inspiring half a week! The 2nd ASEAN Literary Festival was held in Jakarta, visited by literary figures from 20 countries. I am honoured to be invited to give a half-an-hour concert for the opening, which also include some poetry reading by Indonesian prominent poet Khrisna Pabichara and a speech by Dr. Ma Thida, a writer and human rights activist from Myanmar who spent many years in prison for "endangering public peace, having contact with illegal organisations, and distributing unlawful literature." .............................................................................................................................................. The program director of this highly inspiring festival is Okky Madasari, the awardwinning writer famous for her novels about (the lack of) human rights. She designed this year's festival as a tribute to Sitor Situmorang, Indonesia's great poet who died less than 100 days ago. Since Sitor is one of my favorite poets, I have written a few songs based on his poems, but then I wrote a new one, (and a looong one by the way!) based on his masterpiece, La Ronde. It is one of the most erotic poems ever done in Indonesia literature, and written so subtly and exquisitely. It was in fact written for tenor and harp, since I felt that the harp represents more the sound that was triggered by the poem in my head, but unfortunately the young harpist partner of the tenor (Nikodemus Lukas, who sang so beautifully) had some examinations at those dates. Yeah, Jessica Sudarta the harpist is only 16, and her school makes her too busy. So I adapted the harp part for the piano and played it myself accompanying Niko. But they will record that work this year, so I am very much looking forward to it. Niko and I then perform my older songs based on poems by Sitor, and apparently many members of the audience made video recordings of them (yeah, it's so easy to do it nowadays!) and even uploaded them on youtube. This is one of them : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZBQs9YVaa0 .............................................................................................................................................. What made me happy about this is that at last the relationship between (classical) music and literature in Indonesia is now re-established. Since the death of composers such as Mochtar Embut and F.X. Sutopo (who wrote songs based on poems by W.S. Rendra etc) in the 1970s and 80s, these two artistic fields didn't meet anymore. I continued the tradition without even being aware that it was cut, since I live in Europe, where composers keep on composing based on existing poems or other literary forms since the 19th century (as you know, Franz Schubert and Robert Schumann were the pioneers in doing this). You might ask, what do we, composers, contribute to those poems that are already so highly expressive? Well, music enhances words with emotional energy that speech alone cannot convey. But obviously, there is more to it than this! We in Indonesia have a beautiful term for this art: Tembang Puitik (Poetic Song, which differentiates it from other songs whose texts are written by the songwriter himself). Therefore it strives to be the perfect combination of music and literature, based on four elements: poet, composer, singer and accompanist. The composer uses the full resources of the art form to embellish the poet's text, sometimes even realizing potential interpretations that were not explicit in the poet's words. In a well-realized Poetic Song, the composer creates a duet between the accompanist and the vocalist, so an accompanist's job is not merely "accompanying" with nice rhythms and chords. That is, the poetic song paints for us a picture of what the poet might have envisioned. The performance of an poetic song literally breathes life into this picture through a complementary, coordinated partnership among the four significant elements. .............................................................................................................................................. Now I have written around 120 songs based on Indonesian poems, and another 60 or 70 on poems of Whitman, Browning and other foreign writers. In fact, I started to write those Indonesian songs in 2006 after having written many songs in English and Spanish, and now I feel really comfortable in composing on poems of my mother tongue. And I met new literary friends in this great festival, and I discovered the works by young writers such as Adimas Immanuel and Bernard Batubara so I am looking forward to write something based on their works. I also met long-time-no-see great poets Hasan Aspahani and Joko Pinurbo. .............................................................................................................................................. My latest poetic songs are included in my CD "An Essay on Love", sung by Widhawan Aryo Praditha, Theodora Amabel Beatrice and Niko as well. If you are interested in it, please tweet me at @anandasukarlan .

The Voice Inside me (can now be found in this book)

This was published last month, but I just got the photo of the cover a few days ago by email. It's the score of 25 vocal works by me, based on Indonesian poems by Goenawan Mohamad, Chendra Panatan, Sapardi Djoko Damono, Joko Pinurbo and Ilham Malayu. You can order it through Chendra my manager (whose poems can be found in this book as well) at ycep@yahoo.com or 0818 891038 if you live in Indonesia.

Some of the songs in this book (about 80 pages or so !) can be listened to at http://www.youtube.com/ ; search under my name Ananda Sukarlan. All songs are with piano accompaniment (except two solo vocal pieces), and are for soprano, tenor and baritone solo and duets . It includes the song-cycles "Senyap Dalam Derai" (soprano & piano), "Gemuruhnya Malam" (baritone and piano), Canda Empat Penjuru (baritone & piano) as well as individual songs such as "my Aids song" Dalam Sakit for tenor & piano. All those beautiful poems are printed in the first few pages, and there are some program notes by me as well (mostly taken from this blog).

Lots of blogging today, eh ? Ok, ok ... back to writing my opera ...

More on Jokpiniana and its influences

ITB (the commissioner of my last choir piece, see my entry below) has asked me for more details of the work I just made for them. All I can say is that certainly it couldn't have existed without my fascination for cubism, which once in a while "appeared" in my works. What I did was, perhaps, translating the visual creative process of Picasso to music, therefore changing the concept "space" into "time". Living in Spain, I can't help admiring Picasso every day !

In "Jokpiniana", the way I use the motifs is by experimenting with its distortion, just what Picasso did with, e.g., Demoiselles d'Avignon, representing apparently solid objects as radically fragmented. This innovative approach broke down the components of the musical elements (originated from the poetic elements of Joko Pinurbo) into a number of individual facets, presenting several different aspects of one object (it could be a melody, or harmonic progression, or rhythmic pattern) from a variety of angles, simultaneously. I also juxtapose different, most of the time contrasting, moods (again, originating from several poems of contrasting moods) back to back with each other. What I want to repeat again and again, especially to those reporters and critics who always misunderstand my way of creative thinking, is that I am not just reading the poems word by word and make a melody out of it. I concentrate on the mood of the poem as a whole. Once I get the music, the words (or phrases) become (a little bit) less important. Nevertheless, I never use a phonetic element outside the poem : for example, the words "dang" and "dut" do exist IN the poem itself ! I just take it out and establish it as an independent element, treating it purely as sound and not as a word that has a meaning. I always consider a great poet as a great painter : they know how to choose the exact words for the "paint" as a material to create their picture. So, don't get me wrong : individual words are of primary importance for me in the beginning of the creative process, but they become secondary in the RESULT of the musical work. A great painting is not made with only primary colours, right ? Its greatness lies in how the painter mixes the colours, and how the result could express what he would like to communicate with the observer.

As I mentioned in the subtitle, Jokpiniana is an etude. The "real" manifestation of this technique I use in the opera I am writing now. Its duration is 70 minutes (plus break between the two acts), and I must say that this is an exciting experiment (whether it works or not, it's not really exciting ; it's terrifying for me ! That's why I keep on taking breaks from its composition, due to self-doubts, and write other short works). Its results have worked before in my pieces, so I hope it works again now !

Jokpiniana I : A reflection on dangdut

Work on my opera is going quite well. Haven't made up my mind about the dialogues & recitatives, but I have done some arias and choreographical music. I decided a few days ago to take a break from it and compose my short (4-minute) choral piece commissioned by the ITB (Bandung Institute of Technology, one of the oldest and most prestigious universities in Indonesia) Choir for their tour to Italy.

The piece will be for SSAATTBB choir.For about one year I have been fascinated by the (very) short poems of Joko Pinurbo "Jokpin". You can find them (if you understand Indonesian) in http://celanasenja.blogspot.com/ . I have been toying the idea of putting several poems into one short piece, and writing for the choir has provided me the opportunity to do so. So, Jokpiniana will be a series of choir pieces, or shall we say "choir etudes", and this one for ITB will be the first of I-dunno-how-many-will-there-be etudes for choir. In this piece I concentrate especially on his fantastic poem "Dangdut" which provides me the ostinato, but I will treat it antiphonally. Dangdut is a very popular rhythm that is very close to the heart of most of Indonesians. One always say that it belongs to the low-class people, but hey, all the diplomats at the Indonesian embassies around the world always organize dangdut parties. They even have dangdut artists TO BE FLOWN FROM INDONESIA for their "cultural" events. I must say that they are more representative of Indonesian culture than, let's say, me or my colleagues of "classical music" who are pretentious enough of searching things such as "What is Indonesian classical music ? What is Indonesian opera?" and other useless soul-searching questions. Dangdut IS our identity !

Love and Variations

Just wrote the last note of "Kekasihku", a song based on Joko Pinurbo's poem, and that is the last note I wrote for "Love and Variations". This is a multi-lingual song-cycle (or perhaps a mini-cantata, if you like) based on 8 poems from 5 countries (Spain, Mexico, the USA, the UK and Indonesia) and from 3 centuries (the newest is Laksmi Pamuntjak's, written in 2001, and Joko Pinurbo's in 2003) . I've been promising to write about it for a few weeks, so here it is.

This is a piece commissioned by the American singers Kathryn Mueller (soprano), Nathan Krueger (baritone) and the Indonesian pianist Aryo Wicaksono. They all live in Arizona and are going to give the World Premiere of the whole cycle on the 25th of April this year, which will be the first of a series of performances throughout the US of this piece. Each of them sent me recordings of their previous performances which, I must say, are excellent, so I did think a lot of their characteristics while composing these songs. This is a piece I enjoyed very much in composing, since they are basically not strenuous to write (I wrote the songs one by one between breaks of concerts or composing other big works), and I was given freedom to choose whatever poems I like and suited my musical language. The first song was written already in October last year, and as I said, I finished the last song a few minutes ago. "Kekasihku" is a very light-hearted and witty song, and who else but Joko Pinurbo could capture that ironic yet profound atmosphere, inexplicable by words.

Each song can be performed separately, but if one wants to perform them as a whole, this is the order I would very much prefer :

1. Snowflakes (Henry W. Longfellow) -- ouch, the soprano starts by hitting a high note!
2. Glass Conservatory (Laksmi Pamuntjak)
3. Amor Eterno (Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, in Spanish. This is dedicated to my good friends Leticia Martin & Ruben Rodriguez for their wedding present last November)
4. Hours Continuing Long, Sore and Heavy-Hearted (Walt Whitman) -- soprano and piano, and could be sung by a tenor as well
5. Kukirimkan Padamu (Sapardi Djoko Damono, in Indonesian) -- baritone solo, but couldn't be sung by a female voice !
6. So we'll go no more a-roving (Lord Byron)
7. Kekasihku (Joko Pinurbo, in Indonesian)
8. Si tu me dices ¡Ven! (Amado Nervo, in Spanish)

Sabbatical month

Performed my last concert before my sabbatical period 2 days ago (Sat March 3) in Santander, which include the first complete performance of David del Puerto's Notebook for Children (Cuaderno para los niños) . Also that Saturday the video of our performance's of David del Puerto's "Alio Modo" was launched at YouTube, which has now, only two days later, received more than 200 visits . It looks very nice : you can check it at : http://www.youtube.com and you can search under my name or Chendra Panatan's there .

Meanwhile, I have been immensely enjoying my correspondence with my new idol, the great Sapardi Djoko Damono, who writes emails as if they were poems ; I promise you I´ll never throw any of his emails away ! Of course, now in this sabbatical period which last until May I will set many, many of his poems to music. I´ll reveal my plans in a few days.

Also I have read other poems by Nirwan Dewanto, Joko Pinurbo, Goenawan Mohamad, Debra Yatim, Eka Budianta ( I mention my favorites ) .
Bought some CDs last week : the ones I like are : a new version of Copland's Third Symphony with New Zealand SO (the one with New York Phil & Bernstein is still beyond comparison), Songs by Ferruccio Busoni, Britten plays with Colin MacPhee his "Balinese Ceremonial Music" and the suite from "Prince of the Pagodas". Only now, in the 21st century, that we can really appreciate the greatness of those 20th century composers !
Also read, and finished a very bitchy memoir of Ned Rorem (after all those bitching around I still consider him one of the greatest of modern composers as well) "Knowing when to stop". My favorite quotation from this book :
[Carlos] Chavez, whose own Sinfonia de Antigona and Sinfonia India, so stark and spare and diatonic, were close to my heart. Indeed, just as New Orleans today summons up the plays of Tennessee Williams more powerfully than it imposes its proper identity, so the music of Chavez evoked Mexico more than Mexico evoked itself. Nature imitates art, .....

Japan already has Toru Takemitsu, Australia has Peter Sculthorpe, Elgar, Britten, Vaughan Williams, Sir Michael Tippett etc have found "Britishness in music" and the music of Bernstein, Copland, Harris are so, so American. They all produced their masterpieces only in the last century. Will we find, in the near future, music that can evoke Indonesia more than Indonesia evoke itself ?