A mathematical mistake in Romeo & Juliet?

Well well, only after the 100th time reading Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet I start to do my mathematics. Here we go : .............................................................................................................................................. The tragic story of Romeo and Juliet took place from Sunday to Thursday. Romeo and Juliet met each other at the party on Sunday night. They married Monday morning. Around noon time Romeo kills Tybalt. Tuesday, Juliet goes to the friar to ask for help. Tuesday evening, Juliet drinks the potion. Wednesday is the day of the discovery of Juliet's fake death, and in the evening, Romeo commits suicide when he believes his wife to be gone. Thursday, Romeo and Juliet dies. .............................................................................................................................................. But think about this: if Juliet takes the potion on Tuesday night, and the potion lasts 42 hours, she will not wake up until Thursday afternoon (in the play that's when Romeo and Juliet's funeral takes place). Therefore, in Act 5, when Friar Laurence says that Juliet will wake up in 3 hours, it is still Wednesday night. You see? It doesn't add up!! .............................................................................................................................................. Can someone, a fellow nerd or a fellow love-sick patient clear this up for me?

Foreword to Alicia's 4th Piano Book

Yup, it's now being printed! We plan to release it in about 2 weeks time. This is what I wrote for the introduction. .............................................................................................................................................. Although practically all of the pieces in this book are not for my daughter anymore (to play on the piano), she still plays an important role as my muse and inspirer. You see, Alicia is now 15, and we can talk about things of the adults : friendships, relationships ... and romance. Yup, as a 15-year-young lady, she already has her shares of the beauty and pain of love and passion. It's only nowadays, during our loooong and intense conversations through the night, that I find the real beauty and meaning of life. That beauty that can't be exchanged with all the success, money or anything else in this world. 5 years ago I wouldn't believe that I could learn so much about life from my very young Alicia. And yet she belongs to a generation that tweets, being immersed in their smartphones during a big chunk of the day and have short attention spans. Even the pop music written today are much simpler then those written during my generation to adapt to the limited musical brain of today's generation. No more poignant recitatives of Whitney Houston or Queen. No more breathtaking harmonies of The Beatles. And of course, goodbye to those incredible riffs n rhythmic inventions of Michael Jackson. Alicia, like her friends, listens to the pop music of today. And yet, she has so many inside her to inspire and teach me. .............................................................................................................................................. Therefore, pieces like "Call me but love .." (this is the longest, and perhaps most complex piece in this book) was born from our conversations, analyzing the balcony scene of Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet, when we delved into the theme of passion and the whole divine madness. The title came from the lines of Romeo, responding to Juliet's : .............................................................................................................................................. O Romeo, Romeo! Wherefore art thou, Romeo? Deny thy father and refuse thy name; Or, if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love, And I'll no longer be a Capulet. .............................................................................................................................................. And Romeo answered : Call me but love, and I'll be new baptis'd; Henceforth I never will be Romeo. .............................................................................................................................................. Many of the pieces here are also written for friends either for a special event in their lives, or just because I wanna write them, because I believe that everyone that came to my life is there for a reason. And my music is the manifesto of that reason, since it is thanks to those dedicatees that I could give birth to the music. Therefore, Alicia's 4th piano book is more like a collection of my short piano pieces, a musical diary of my day-to-day life, sometimes with no educational purposes in mind. Unlike my longer pieces, the pieces in this book are more intuitively written, therefore I don't really think about their technical difficulties. It is thanks to pianist Henoch Kristianto who has recorded most of my piano music (including many of them in this book, and all of my heavily virtuosic Rapsodia Nusantara, yes, all of them!) and his team at the Clavier Music Academy that these pieces are now graded according to their pianistic levels of difficulty. He even found pedagogic values and educative purposes in those pieces! I will leave you now with his words while he worked on them. And thank you again to all of you who have made the music in the previous Alicia's Piano Books part of your musical life. Hope you all still enjoy studying these modest pieces, either for educational or teaching purposes, repertoire for your concerts, or just for plain fun playing them at home during rainy days :) . .............................................................................................................................................. Ananda Sukarlan, April 2014. .............................................................................................................................................. Introduction by Henoch Kristianto .............................................................................................................................................. Those who were fortunate enough to hear Ananda Sukarlan's piano music in live performance would agree that his music is very close to the ears of his Indonesian listeners or those who are Indonesian at heart. It cannot be disputed that his compositions comprise the greatest variety, from the deepest pathos to most sparkling humor. As a prolific performing pianist and composer of variations, rhapsodies and other small-scale works for piano, Sukarlan claimed that he always felt more at home when composing his vocal works. Perhaps due to this personal preference, you may find many of the pieces in this Alicia book very "cantabile" in the sense that they are very much singable. This feature of course is an excellent tool for the musical development of any young pianists. Intended primarily for the cultivated amateur, these works are abound in attractive melodic ideas and brilliant instrumental writing. Indeed, their study will lead to higher realms of imagination and it shall prepare for all that can be found in piano literature. ~Henoch Kristianto

Is Music Really The Food of Love?

There are several pieces in the 3 Alicia's Piano Books that deals with love. But how do we express love in music (apart from the composer's obvious intention -- sometimes failed -- to make it sound beautiful)? For me, love is about uniting the differences of 2 persons. Remember this, young pianists who will experience (or just entered into?) your first love: you don't ask your partner to be the same as you. You should love your partner because who (s)he is. And that means that (s)he is different from you, and let him/her be that way. You are a lover, not a boss who tells people how they should act and should be. That's the power of love : it’s the unity of 2 people IN SPITE OF their differences. .......................................................................................................................................... But enough of love talk, let's analyze my music in a formal way. Keeping that concept above in mind, it is not difficult to write "love music" for piano: just make the right and left hand do different things! And that's what I did, mostly in rhythm. But of course, this is for the pieces with educational purposes. I'm making it rather simplistic, and if you listen to my other "love oriented" music, they are much more complicated than that! Until now I have managed writing those (easy) love music bi-rhythmically. I would love to do one bi-tonally, it would be really wild! Falling in Love (Alicia's 1st piano book) started from my wish to explain to my daughter the difference between a 6/8 and a 3/4 bar. So I wrote a piece where the left hand is in a 6/8 bar, and the right is in 3/4. The result is a flowing melodious piece, not a rhythmical one, since the melody is supported by an accompaniment which is different from its rhythm. No love involved initially, besides my love to my daughter. But then it turned out to be pretty romantic, so I gave it its title, and since I was commissioned to write for the film "Romeo & Juliet" at that time, the piece found its way to be one of the background music of one scene. .......................................................................................................................................... Since Alicia doesn't play the piano anymore, Alicia's 3rd Piano Book became more varied. I put many pieces that don't have any relations to Alicia and/or dealing with piano techniques into this book. One of them is indeed called Differences Unite, written for my dear friends Nathania Karina & Christian Oscar. It was written just because I chatted through Yahoo Messenger to Nathania, and suddenly felt like writing it (noooo, no fixed date for the wedding yet, at least that’s what they say hehehe). In this piece, the polyrhythm of 3 and 2 is changed in every beat, therefore it becomes a not-so-easy piece. The melody also appears not only in 1 hand but in both, so in most part of the piece it is clear which hand is more important. In the beginning, the melody in right hand even comes in exactly inverted from the first time it appears in left hand, kinda saying that two statements could be diametrically opposed but they both can be true (if you remember John Keats saying that “Truth is beauty”, ... and if you consider my melody beautiful). Only in the end both hands play equally important melodies (it also symbolizes that in a relationship, both parties are equal, if both are in love). .......................................................................................................................................... Unexpected Turns is a wedding gift for my dear childhood friend Laksmi Pamuntjak who has now become a prominent writer (and a stunningly beautiful lady, as if she turned into a butterfly from the caterpillar who I used to know!) who was marrying her second husband. Her most recent novel "AMBA" is enjoying immense success, and I feel guilty that for the 1 month I've been here in Indonesia I haven't managed to get hold of it. But I will, and the book will perhaps will accompany me during the flight back to Spain later this month. The title of my music refers to her life experiences too, and its differences lie in the sections which go to unexpected turns, although all of them are built on the same motif. .......................................................................................................................................... Mother's Love is different. It uses the motifs that I employ in my music for the film "Air Mata Terakhir Bunda" (Mother's Last Drop of Tears), to be released at the end of this year. After I finished writing its soundtrack, one day I felt like tinkering on one of its motif to make a rather virtuosic short piece. Anyway, a mother's love surpasses all differences; it's just the greatest love of all. .......................................................................................................................................... Talking about my music, of course we can’t avoid talking about motifs, since that element is the most crucial thing in my creative process. My music without motifs is like the world without atoms. I mentioned several times in my lectures that I have a “love” motif, but I am not sure if I have written about it in this blog. Anyway, it consists of an interval of a perfect fifth, plus a minor second (with its derivatives such as a major seventh or minor ninth and so on). That symbolizes my idea that love can make you understand perfection through happiness, but it can create the most dissonant chord too. Have your heart been wounded deeper than by the knife of love? Anyway, if you want to hear how this motif is so exploited, you can listen to my song Dalam Doaku and Ketika Kau Entah Dimana where it appears naked in the very first 3 notes of the singer. It then appears in a more elaborated figure in “Echo’s Whisper” for oboe and piano, and in many many places in my recent orchestral work ERSTWHILE: A communion of time (which is about love being postponed for 7 centuries. That motif can’t help but being very much elaborated, naturally!)

Dichotomy

No, that's not a title of a new piece. It's what I have been thinking these days, writing my new opera.

Let's face it, my (and many of other artist's) taste is not (always) the common public taste. Nobody has heard even one note of my new "pocket opera" IBU (oh, by the way, this word means "Mother"), but many questions, opinions and even protests (!) have been sent to me regarding my article about my creative process (see my previous entry). Most of you expressed concern about this surrealistic idea of mine of writing "unfinished" arias in my new opera. And now that it is 99% finished, I can see that I am truthful to my original idea about "unfinishing" arias, recitatives, even its overture and instrumental intermezzi. Basically, most of your reaction is simply "Hmmm ...Andy, I don't think it's a good idea ..."

"Unfinished" is my way of symbolizing the underlying theme of IBU : What really happened to my son ? And it also expresses this kind of strange sadness. If you have an unanswered (and very important) question in your life, I guess that's what happened. Everything keeps hanging in the air. But one thing is symbolism, another thing is being artistic. Will the public stand an opera, sung by one and only one singer (Aning Katamsi will be spectacular in her singing and acting, I can assure you, but this lasts for 35 minutes non-stop !), singing broken arias all the time ?
But hey, writing with this technique could perhaps make an "Indonesian identity". You see, Indonesian public likes to clap (which is nice, I know. Imagine a public who does NOT like to clap !), especially between movements and even before a piece is finished. I always regret them clapping right before the coda of my song, "Dalam Doaku". This coda was very difficult to write, and I think I succeeded in its timing and placement. But Indonesian public never heard it because they always clap right before the coda arrives ! So, "broken arias" might be a solution to avoid them clapping, he he ...

I have done some "dangerous" artistic experiments in my life. Some failed, some succeeded, as usually happened in any kind of experiments. I lost count on the amount of music I wrote that ended up in my dustbin. The last time I did this kind of experiment was in the film "Romeo & Juliet" by film director Andibachtiar Yusuf, already received its world premiere at the Hongkong International Film Festival a few weeks ago, and due to be premiered in Indonesia on the 25th this month. Some say it's outrageous, some say it's brilliant, but I will let time to tell the ultimate truth. Which means that in a few years time, when I am older (and hopefully wiser) I will look at it again and see whether I did a brilliant thing or I was just exercising an idiocy.

Some artist friends always told me that the public is not my business. But then I believe, with several other artists friends, that I am part of the public. Whatever the truth is, for many many years now I've been holding on to this catchy phrase of my favorite painter Piet Mondriaan : "Art has to be forgotten, beauty must be realized".

World Premiere of "IBU -- yang anaknya diculik itu" will be held at the World Theatre of BIS ( British International School )
Bintaro Jaya Sektor IX, Jl. Raya Jombang
Ciledug, Pondok Aren
Sunday, June 7, 2009 at 4 p.m

Performers will be : Aning Katamsi, soprano as IBU
Elizabeth Ashford, flute
Ananda Sukarlan, piano
BIS Children Choir dan JCOM Children Choir
conducted by Elizabeth Ashford dan Mirta Hartono

Romeo*Juliet

So I keep my promise ! Rather late .. but hey ...

Who would have guessed that my first music for the film would be for a film about football ? I was baffled when the Indonesian film director Andibachtiar Yusuf approached me earlier this year to ask me to score the music for his "Romeo*Juliet". Yes, you got it right. But instead of Montague and Capulet, it is the Jakarta against the Bandung football fanclubs. The confrontation between them goes back to many decades, and when it happens, they are notorious for being violent. People got killed during their fights. So, you can guess how the story goes ...

... which reminds me, inevitably, of WestSide Story. It IS difficult not to have that masterpiece as a reference ! But Yusuf's film is not a musical film, so my job is a bit easier. Oh, I forgot to tell you that he wanted me and only me for this job, because of his huge crush on my duet from the cantata Ars Amatoria "Dalam Doaku" (In my Prayer). Definitely that song became an important part of the film ; in fact, the film revolved around that song. Yusuf was (is, and always will be) a great fan of rock music, and he has never fancied any kind of classical (read : soft, boring) music. But I am dubiously flattered when he discovered through my music that classical music is not that bad! Something is definitely very wrong with my music, or ... ?
For the film, I used other songs ("Kasih" and "Ketika Kau Entah Dimana", which happens to be my favorite amongst my songs) of mine, recently released in the CD "Ananda Sukarlan Vocal Works" for that film as well, besides writing quite a lot of new materials purely instrumental. So you can hear the voices of Bernadeta Astari and Joseph Kristanto in that film once in a while blasting from the cinema loudspeakers. The motifs I use for the whole soundtrack are taken from the hymn of both football clubs, and I just make some variations out of them, according to the situation which it accompanies.

This version of Romeo*Juliet is very Indonesian. I mean, the unromantic oriental type of love. Passionate, but unromantic. There is even no balcony scene in the whole film! I was quite confused when I read the script, but when I received the rough cut of the film, I honestly was pretty impressed. And I was quite inspired after I watched the rough cut. I decided that I don't have to escape from my musical style ; the film is very, very Indonesian in many ways, so that my "western" musical style would just compliment it without "stealing the show" as they say. As Aaron Copland said about writing music for films : "The best film music is the one you don't notice". In other words, you can hear it, but you don't listen to it.

The film is due to be shown in cinemas 21 throughout Indonesia starting late March 2009.

Newsflash

Sorry that this entry is a quickie one. Anyway, this is just to tell you that :

1. I am in Jakarta at the moment, although I will leave to Surabaya on the 28th, to be back in Jakarta beginning of December.

2. I have been very busy composing & recording for the film soundtrack "Romeo*Juliet" directed by Andibachtiar Yusuf. I will write about this further next week (unfortunately I have a habit of a presidential candidate : I don't keep up with my promises !)

3. Facebook : now, this is a problem. Since I have reached the limit of 5000 "friends", I cannot accept anymore friends, so I am VERY sorry. As you see, this is not my decision, but our big brother's, the facebook guys. But we have created the "Ananda Sukarlan's friends" group at facebook : you can search for it, and be a member. And yes, you STILL can send me messages through facebook ! But please do not suggest more friends for me ; you can, instead, invite all your friends to join the "Ananda Sukarlan's friends" group, once you become a member. Just click this : http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=41769011619 .

4. And I would like to confirm : YES, although it is still not finished, I am writing a new choral piece for the 50th anniversary celebration of the Institut Teknologi Bandung, one of the oldest and highly prestigious universities in Indonesia, celebrated in March next year. It is based on a new sonnet by Sapardi Djoko Damono, also commissioned by that mentioned choir.