The real man's been fussy

Whatever my next opera is, it's definitely gonna be an all-male cast. And I'll write lots of falsetti! Huff ... during the creative process of Laki-Laki Sejati, those soprano voics (especially the coloratura one, the "mom") is banging in my head ... and it is LOUD AND HIGH! So I definitely miss those low, male voice who do those beautifully weird falsetto sometimes.
They say the older you get the more fussy you become. Perhaps that's true. Laki-Laki Sejati at last took longer to write than I imagined. According to my plan, the music is about 24 minutes long, so I estimated between 24-30 days to compose it.

I got back home just 10 days ago, and I just emailed the whole score to the singers yesterday. During my 16-hour plane trip home I completely finished the vocal lines, and sketched the accompaniment. But it took me a whole week to clean up all the mess, revise, write down the accompaniment and the most important thing is the finishing touch. I wonder why I am getting fussier now. When I wrote "Ibu, yang anaknya diculik itu" (The Mother whose son was kidnapped) with a kinda similar formation I remembered I wasn't like this. IBU was a bit longer (around 40 minutes, almost twice longer than Laki-Laki Sejati) but I wrote it in less than two months. True, at that time (in 2009) there weren't any distractions, and now the work has been so many times interrupted. Since June when I started writing Laki-Laki Sejati I also wrote several songs, piano pieces to be included in "Alicia's Second Piano Book", orchestrating Fons Juventatis (a 5-minute overture for piano & orchestra) AND performing it, wrote my 4-hand piece for the inauguration of the Berlin-Jakarta Festival as well as finishing "A Sicilian Diary" for 3 flutes which is not a small piece, and did a few concerts (mostly of my pieces, so I didn't have to practice a lot). Those aren't big tasks, but if one adds them up, they do take some time. And I spent almost the whole summer in Jakarta, so the traffic jam didn't help either. I can compose on a plane, but not in a car during the traffic jam.

One thing which was also rather "not my nature" is the comic side of Laki-Laki Sejati. I had to invent ways to make the funny parts funny, and those spots didn't flow easily, I tell you. But I learned a lot anyway in exploring the "funny" side in me.

By the way, the wifi aboard the airplane is a nice invention, but what I need is electricity to charge my laptop battery! I had to write lots of music on paper while I was on board, and copy and elaborate them when my feet are on the ground here back home. I can survive hours without internet, but I need more than 2 hours to compose on my laptop, so please airplane makers, would you consider some holes to plug my laptop cable?

Not funny!

I'm glad I've overcome my "sick" ambition of proving to the (Indonesian) audience that I have written more music than just "Dalam Doaku", or that there are pieces of mine which I myself believe to be better than that. Dalam Doaku, for me, is just a product of lonely nights in a Belgian hotel and a kind of self-therapy for my bad mood. I write what I believe, my music is part of me and just let the audience have their own opinion. As usual when one's being honest, some people don't like what you say (I am grateful that in this case it's the other way around). In a much bigger scale it has happened in the history too: The Spanish Joaquin Rodrigo is remembered by one movement (not even the whole piece) of his "Aranjuez" Guitar Concerto, and many people know Rachmaninov through his one short piece, the Prelude in C minor.

So I have stopped trying to make my pocket opera in progress, Laki-Laki Sejati (LLS), an attempt to convert the audience of Dalam Doaku to like this instead. To start with, LLS is a duet for soprano and mezzosoprano, whose colours when combined wouldn't be as tear-jerking as a duet of male and female being in love with each other. There are indeed some "romantic" arias in LLS, especially for the young girl, but those are expressions of craving of love and dreaming of an ideal man, so the love is, shall we say, unreal.

LLS is a comedy, so I am confronted with the issue: how do you make music funny? You can be funny with words or gestures, but in music? And is "funny" an adjective which means you should laugh to? Even in comedies you have different kinds of humor: cheap humor, slapsticks, and even satires base themselves in humor, a black one that is. And then you have the British ironic humor, the Latin over-the-top exaggerating ones and I think I start to understand the Indonesian ones. And why is it that comedians usually are depressed people (the famous example is Pagliacci the weeping clown; and you know Rowan "Mr.Bean" Atkinson just came out of a long depression period, right?) ?

The key is, I think, incongruity. Things are not in their right places or their right moments, incorrect proportions, strange situations. In German, the word "komisch" reflects it perfectly: it doesn't have to be funny, it's just about something wrong, incongruent and strange while in English, "comical" is indeed funny.

So I think that's the key to make the music "funny". In my opera, you'll hear the girl blindly in love, singing 3 arias consecutively. Each aria is just normal, but put together, I hope they will sound "unproportional": too much, over the top. No operas before have asked the same singer to sing 3 arias, real ones, one after the other. Not even in Broadway musicals. And that is just one example of making incongruences in music. I am having fun in doing some research on this. I don't have a bassoon to play that "Sorcerer's Apprentice" tune nor a tuba imitating an elephant, but I am sure I can do it with just two fantastic singers and my poor old piano.

What's a real man?

OK, it's now official. Scarily official. I have started writing my next opera, this time a real mini pocket opera, and I am happy to tell about it. It will be for 2 singers (mezzo-soprano & soprano) and I (or for the future productions another pianist) will accompany it. No other instruments except some small percussions which I bring with myself. It will be produced by its commissioner, Bimasena, in October this year.

This opera is based on a very short story by Putu Wijaya, a renowned Indonesian writer who has written more than 1000 short stories. The title, which will also be for my opera, is Laki-laki Sejati (A real man), and the story is a dialogue between a mother (a (high) soprano who's wisdom is solidly based on her knowledge of men!) and her daughter in her late teens (sung by a mezzosoprano or high alto who --unfortunately-- can be (much) older than that, since it does happen, and often, in real life) who is desperate on having a boyfriend. The story starts with her asking her mom, "Mom, what is in fact a real man?" and ends with a catchy conclusion of what, or where, or how, a real man is indeed.

I spent most of the time during my flight from Bilbao to Jakarta last weekend in making the plans from Putu Wijaya's script. I am now waiting for his approval of my cuts and small editions, which will make the duration of the opera about 24 minutes. In fact I have been looking for a script with 3 characters involved, one of them a male, since I am writing this to be premiered by the winners of the Ananda Sukarlan Vocal Competition (Tembang Puitik AS) last April: coloratura soprano Evelyn Merrelita, mezzosoprano Indah Pristanti and the tenor Adi Nugroho, the latter had performed with me 2 months ago in Magelang and will again do so in Makassar, hopefully in October. After I browsed Putu Wijaya's many short stories (for a long time I've been thinking to do something with his works) I found this kind of tragi-comedy, brilliantly written by this Balinese writer, and decided to do this for now. Adi Nugroho will have to wait, but I am sure I'll get hold of a nice script for an opera for him to be involved.

It will be too soon to say more about Laki-laki Sejati, since I barely written the notes (I did start a chaconne for an introduction to an aria for the mezzosoprano on the plane), but I really would like to discover "the other side of me" with this opera, not me who people call "romantic". I refuse to be called a romantic. I prefer to be like Winnie the Pooh, a bear of very simple brain who doesn't like difficult words (nor music).