Wagner, not Robert but much more complicated

Since I am a huge fan of Natalie Wood, you might think that I would write about Robert Wagner, her famous husband who is thought to be involved in the drowning of this incredibly beautiful actress. I was totally, madly in love with Natalie Wood in my teenage years, watching her in WestSide Story. I didn't care whether someone else dubbed her voice for her singing, I was just blindly in love. She was the symbol of perfection, every inch of her. I was in fact quite a fan of Robert Wagner too during his peak of fame, when you couldn't turn on the TV without seeing him in either It Takes a Thief, The Switch or Hart to Hart. But I was, obviously, pretty upset when things turned ugly with his involvement in the death of the fallen angel. ............................................................................................................................................... No, no, it's Richard I wanna talk about. This year (2013) is the 200th anniversary of the birth of this great composer. Great, sure, but also a megalomaniac anti-Semitic, extreme right-wing personality (how could one become a great artist and extremely right-winged at the same time?). Richard W. wrote an anonymous essay, Das Judentum in der Musik, arguing that Jews were ineligible to practise art. He later had the tract reissued under his own name. He abused Jews routinely, according to the diaries of his second wife, Cosima (who was the daughter of Franz Liszt), and based the devious characters of Mime and Beckmesser, in part at least, on caricatures of his least favourite Jews. ............................................................................................................................................... Richard died when his son, Siegfried was only 13. Siegfried Wagner (who was therefore the grandson of Liszt, the most macho of all composers in history who'd slept with hundreds, if not thousands of women) was gay or at least bisexual. He became the lover of the English composer Clement Harris for the rest of their lives. He later married a woman, and continued the Wagner tradition of defending the extreme right wing in Germany. Siegfried invited Hitler to Bayreuth in October 1923 and, after the following month's failed Munich putsch, supplied him in jail with home comforts and, it is said, with the paper on which he wrote Mein Kampf. Bayreuth during the Third Reich became a national shrine. All these, in spite of his declaration : "Art reaches us through the heart, and God gave hearts to all human beings." Following in his father’s footsteps, Siegfried Wagner was also a composer, but his operas, although popular during his lifetime, never entered the standard repertoire. In 1896 Siegfried began conducting at the Bayreuth Festival and from 1906-1930 was the festival’s sole artistic director. In Siegfried’s controversial 1930 staging of his father’s opera Tannhäuser, he boldly embellished several scenes with shirtless male teenagers. ............................................................................................................................................... Writing my Wagner's Restless Nights, commissioned by the Indonesia Opera Society to be premiered next September by the French pianist Frederic D'Oria-Nicolas and the Ananda Sukarlan Orchestra forced me to study his way of composing the motifs of Tannhauser and Ride of the Valkyries. The last time I did it with his music was during my student days in the conservatory in Den Haag, where I became passionately obsessed with his music for Tristan und Isolde. In this new piece of mine I did a rather complex polyphony of marrying both themes from the Ride and Tannhauser prelude. I realized then how he was so ahead of his time especially in his orchestrating methods, combining instruments which no man has done before, such as that heavenly Tannhauser prelude. I always thought that many of Wagner's music is "over-orchestrated", but studying these two works certainly changed my idea about his music. That's the manifestation of Walt Whitman's sayings: Simplicity is the glory of expression. It is simple, but Wagner used harmonies not used before. Ideas can only be developed fully when it is simple. It is the development which can be sophisticated. Sophisticated and simple can be at the same time. Anyway, writing this piece also made me to rethink Wagner's music since I totally made a new orchestration, which include a prominent piano part. The piano has never been Wagner's beloved instrument, so I have to be careful to make a kinda mutation from Wagner's musical seed, not to make a grotesque Frankenstein-ish monster out of it. Things can go terribly wrong!

That's What Friends Are For

Friends, real friends, apparently are not only there when we need them. My friends are also my source of inspiration. Many short pieces of mine are dedicated to my dearest friends, and mostly they are written very quickly in a burst of inspiration. Those pieces count as those which are the closest to my heart, besides the numerous pieces i wrote for my daughter Alicia Pirena. As I always say, music (at least mine) is a record, or a still photograph of things, events and people that have happened and crossed our path in real life. ............................................................................................................................................... I am excited by the project which my pianist friend Henoch Kristianto is doing now. As I wrote in my previous entry, he is recording my Rapsodia Nusantara pieces. For now he is working on 6 of them : nos. 2,3,4,5,6 and 10. All 6 of them would take 40 minutes of the CD approximately. When Henoch needed several "lighter" pieces to fill up this CD, i immediately thought of these pieces from the series of Alicia's Piano Books. I myself put them in "cycles" or groups. "5 Friends" are those which are using my friend's names or initials as the motif to be developed in the piece, while the character of each piece was determined by something that I saw, felt or wanted to evoke from that particular person. The Germanic system of naming the notes starts from A to G (yeah, we've got only 7 notes, so it couldn't go further). I then had to continue further with the alphabet as the notes go higher (although i sometimes used the note B for the letter H, as the Germans call it as such).And then some exceptions, such as D for the letter R for Re, E for the letter M for Mi, and E-flat for the letter S pronounced as Es, the German note for E-flat. ............................................................................................................................................... Another continuing cycle will be "Love Songs". I have written about some of the pieces in my earlier entry of this year, check this out : http://andystarblogger.blogspot.com/2013/05/is-music-really-food-of-love.html ............................................................................................................................................... My "Lullabies" are, in fact, the most truthful representation of what is sounding in my brain. What is sounding there, in fact, is the twinkling music box. Most of my music is a transformation of that music box. In fact, THE WHOLE WORLD for me is a music box. Obviously, the last few weeks have been an intense correspondence between Henoch and me. I'd like to paste here some lines from my emails to him concerning notes about some pieces, hopefully it would be useful for you who would like to play them too : ............................................................................................................................................... And about the rest of the pieces for the CD, you made a good point there! I think then the crucial ones are the 5 musical names, the lullabies, and at least 3 love songs (Unexpected Turns, Differences Unite & the Little Variations which was written for the film Romeo & Juliet). They also have varied technical difficulties, so pianists from all levels would enjoy it (the lullabies are quite easy). Those ones in Alicia's book are the ones written for piano, the rest of "dedicatorial" pieces are for different instruments. So there you have them, quite complete. If there is more time, the sunset pieces would be nice, but let's concentrate on the musical names, lullabies & the love songs first. ............................................................................................................................................... I then have to tell you some interpretative & corrections on those pieces : For Adam G : the beginning section is meant to sound like 2 music boxes : one (the LH) is very very distant, and the other (RH) very close to your ear. So pls make the RH quite "marcato" (In fact I wanna say "percussive", like a vibraphone or so), not lyrical. Bar 4, still use the una corda so it gives the effect of unclearness, and please just take it off when the tune suddenly appears in bar 5. As much pedal as poss, just change when it gets quite disturbing, or when the chord changes. And it should sound like a machine (although yeah, of course a kinda phrasing is inevitable, especially for someone as musical as you). The effect is kinda like a lullaby, but more hypnotizing. Bar 23, the LH is cut off by mistake in the published score, all those are in fact chords with an interval of 5th, so from the 1st chord they are : B-F# , G-D, A-E, F#-C#, B-F# . This piece sounds strange, yeah, but it's one of my favorite piece hehehe .. yup, I AM that strange .... ............................................................................................................................................... A Little Light Music on the name EDITH : I would like to have a clearer difference of tempo between the introduction (like a slow waltz) and the Allegretto con tenerezza. ............................................................................................................................................... Lullaby for Jessy : one note missing at bar 32 : RH plays an octave D (the lower line of bar 31 should end in D in bar 32). ............................................................................................................................................... Two corrections on "Differences Unite" : the point of the piece is that everytime LH plays 2, RH plays 3. So, in bar 9, 2nd beat, LH should just be 2, not a triplet. And bar 14, also 2nd beat, the LH should also be playing only 2 chords. ............................................................................................................................................... And it goes without saying that all the lullabies have the purpose, literally, to make people sleep. They are not meant to be played in a concert, but recording them is a perfect vehicle to listen to them. So if you doubt about the tempo, then remember one thing : the slower one is always the better. ............................................................................................................................................... I should one day write a piece on H-E-N-O-C-H , but for now you are the dedicatee of my longest and most complex piece for piano anyway hehehe ... ............................................................................................................................................... And as I wrote in my last entry, that last sentence wasn't just a wishful thought ..

Busy ... doing what?

It's been a busy month so far! Am trying to recapitulate what has happened since the Ananda Sukarlan Junior Award. ............................................................................................................................................... Immediately after the competition finished I at last managed to work with Willy Haryadi, my sound engineer, in editing & mixing my orchestral work ERSTWHILE. It was the first recording of my orchestra, the Ananda Sukarlan Orchestra, and I must say it doesn't sound bad. The orchestra consists of young but very enthusiastic and technically accomplished musicians. The recording is still now in a studio for its mastering process. ................................................................................................................................................ We also did an audition, through youtube, for violinists who I'd like to be the soloist for the premiere of my Violin Concerto. The winner is a very talented 17-year-old Amadeus Giovani Biga ; he played my solo violin piece Relationships which is a set of variations, done for a violin with scordatura on the G-string. Check his playing here, and I am sure you'd be as impressed as I was. I guess, with his age, he has experienced some kind of complicated relationships that inspired him to understand this piece :) . https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QlfNte4TC8 . He will perform my Violin Concerto with myself conducting on October 28th this year, and I am working hard in finishing it. ................................................................................................................................................ Wait, wait ... working hard in finishing it? Yes, but I am sort of stuck. Instead, I have been writing some "occasional" pieces, hoping that some of those pieces would trigger me to come back to the violin concerto. Apart from finishing & revising all my chamber works for strings to be published next week (it's in printing process at the moment), I wrote very quickly several pieces for piano. That's how funny life is: I am always inspired to write pieces which are NOT obligatory (read: commissioned, or paid). Money apparently doesn't inspire me, the lack of it does! Two of those short piano pieces are based on initials, one is "Randy Ryan" of which you can read in my previous entry, and the other is called, funny enough, Not a fugue, No, but they still complete each other. The title is a response to the emails that pianist Henoch Kristianto and me interchanged. He is busy recording 6 of my Rapsodia Nusantaras at the moment (I will tell you which ones they are when the CD is about to be published, hopefully in September or before), and he is recording my shorter piano pieces (all from Alicia's Piano Books) to fill up the CD too. I told him that I should one day write a piece on H-E-N-O-C-H , but for now he is the dedicatee of my longest and most complex piece for piano (Rapsodia Nusantara no. 4). He answered "Tune on my name? Well, better make it a fugue if you ever want to do it someday. I am having a lot of fun with some you've made." I wanna take a break from writing fugues that bore the listeners to death, and since we are doing groupings of some pieces which can be grouped together in Alicia's Piano Books, I had the idea of writing him a piece that can fit in all those groupings. Therefore, this piece can be included in the cycle "Friends", "Sunsets" ot "Love Songs". It can even be a lullaby, considering the repetitive figures made by his wife Yenny's name. Yeah, the piece is built on 2 motifs, on Henoch's and Yenny's initials. There is a photograph at Henoch's facebook, where he and Yenny were sitting in a beach (I think it was somewhere in Australia) and the colours of the sky and the sea (which are amazingly quite similar, a kind of greyish blue) triggered a sound of a chord which appears persistently throughout the piece, which is built on the interval of 4ths and their inversions and transformations. I remember feeling that colour too in England during the summertime, which made me feel like having a deja vu when I wrote the piece. ................................................................................................................................................ Back to the Ananda Sukarlan Orchestra, the Indonesia Opera Society commissioned me to write a short piece for piano & orchestra based on themes from Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries and Tannhauser. I decided to call it Wagner's Restless Nights and it is going to be premiered in his annual Opera Gala, sponsored by CIMB Niaga Bank, in September this year, by the fabulous French pianist Frédéric D'Oria- Nicolas, and I will conduct it with my orchestra. So, in fact I am working on 2 works at this moment: the Violin Concerto and this kind of short piano concerto. Wagner's Restless Nights is going very well, I just love doing fantasies and throwing somebody else's themes into a whirlwind, as I have been doing with my Rapsodia Nusantaras which has numbered 11 for now. It's the Violin Concerto which is stuck. But hey, I am a Gemini, and we Geminis like to have everything in pairs. And sometimes those pairs don't resemble each other at all, one is nice and tamed, while the other can be a problematic rebel!

A demisemiquaver note post-Ananda Sukarlan Junior Award

An advice for those who want to organize a piano competition : don't organize a small one. It is as exhausting as a big one. This year's Ananda Sukarlan Junior Award (ASA Junior) is not even half the scale of our bi-annual Ananda Sukarlan Award (always held in even-numbered years, starting from 2008) in terms of number of participants, prizes, repertory, duration and number of jury members (usually there are 5 sitting as judges, and now we were 3, but qualitywise it wasn't inferior at all. I humbly asked my highly admired pianist friends Henoch Kristianto and la sempre dolce Nathania Karina to be with me judging and I deeply appreciate their excellence in evaluating the participants). But I felt exhausted anyway, though satisfied. The ASA Junior was made possible thanks to the collaboration of Yamaha, to which I was appointed its Brand Ambassador. The winners are all from Surabaya, and the surprising fact is that they all come from the same institution AND teacher, that is Rosalinawati Iman (brava!). I must honestly say that Rosalinawati is for me a newcomer, I just heard about her last year, when some of her students won in another piano competition.Her students show both mastery of techniques and high musicianship and understanding. Ayunia Indri Saputro won the Junior Category, while the Elementary & Little Elementary was won by the brothers Hagen and Hamond Rahardjo. And then the Piano Duet category (which didn't attract that many attention apparently) was won from 2 young pianists from Medan, Carina Surya & Josephine Tjuatja. ............................................................................................................................................... A special note I'd like to dedicate to Michael Anthony, an 11-y.o. blind and autist child who reached the 9th rank among the finalists. He touched the audience's hearts, especially when he played my birthday piece I wrote for my daughter Alicia when she was 11. He proved that if you really love something, you can get it. There's no excuse. I wish that "something" could be changed into "someone". :( ............................................................................................................................................... Now we focus on the 2014 Ananda Sukarlan Award, the tough one. So tough that many have compared it with "The Hunger Games", therefore I'd wish our future participants "May the odds be ever in your favor!". A tough repertory too for the Senior category : they are asked to choose between my 8th and 10th Rapsodia Nusantara to be played in the final round; virtuosically speaking, they would just be the same! And it is indeed, unfortunately, like that sad ABBA song, The winner takes it all, the loser has to fall. In fact, we never want it to be like that, but a piano (and therefore any other instrument) competition is a reflection, or a taste, of a real life competition, where the winner indeed takes it all. The losers do NOT have to fall, as we could see in our previous competitions, but it was the winners that have proven their musical values in this tough world of piano music. Inge Buniardi (2008 winner) just toured Russia and gave her debut at the Carnegie Hall while now pursuing her Doctorate at the University of Kansas, Edith Widayani (2010) is going around giving concerts too (she'll go to Bogota Piano Festival sometime next month) while receiving scholarship for her Master's at the prestigious Eastman School of Music at this moment, and our youngest winner (2012) Randy Ryan was just accepted at the Juilliard School of Music. Not a bad future at all for Indonesia's classical music! ............................................................................................................................................. Last Saturday night I was partying with Edith, Randy and Stephanie Onggowinoto (both Randy & Stephanie in fact shared the 3rd prize at ASA 2008, 4 years before Randy won the 1st prize, at last, in 2012) and their lovely families at Mr. Budi Sabini's residence. We missed Inge Buniardi as she's having a holiday in Europe now. It was a really nice party, with great food and wine too, and it's been such a long time that I enjoyed a purely musical party like that. The last one I remembered was during my student days! We talked only about music, played piano in turns, and Edith & Randy even played each a half of Schumann's Carnaval. This is also the first time in years that I enjoyed playing the piano in a party. Anyway, I just realized that I have written short pieces, for both Inge and Edith's (who played hers in the party) birthday presents, not only as 1st prize winners (it wasn't written anywhere that the 1st prizewinner will have to suffer a piece from me!) but as great musicians and great friends they've turned out to be in the post-ASA period. So, I owed one to Randy and I promised him to write one. I wouldn't wait for his birthday, which is coincidentally almost the same as mine: his is June 9, and mine is June 10. I got already a vague concept of the piece during the party, a piece using his name, with a basso ostinato borrowing from Michael Jackson's Thriller, which is my all time favorite song (Randy's name generated a rhythmically funky piece which reminded me of that really catchy Thriller basso ostinato). On my way home I read the lyrics of Thriller, you know, about "the beast that is about to strike and no one's gonna save you", and that gave me the idea of writing not a Prelude & Fugue but the other way around. In fact, the Fugue would serve as a Prelude to the beast that is about to strike. I was happy that that piece was written down (I think the happiness was also due to the mix of the Australian wine I had in the party plus the Scotch whisky I took in my appt. before composing). I tweeted at 1.23 a.m when I finished the Fugue, and at 2.18 I finished the postlude, and sent Randy, Edith & Steph directly, since I put their names in the score too, as a remembrance of that really cool party ... and a hope that we'd repeat it again soon. We work hard, but we party hard too!

My music for string instruments

Just a few weeks after my music score of Rapsodia Nusantara 6-10 was published, my music for string instruments will have their turn to be published. In this book there will be some "old" and quite popular pieces of mine, such as my short String Quartet "Lontano" which was commissioned by the great violinist Midori Goto, my pieces for violin & piano Sweet Sorrow and The Sleepers, my Tango (I forgot the exact title, but it's a tango anyway) for cello and piano etc. Apart from all the pieces included in this book, you can also find my music for violin & piano in Alicia's 3rd Piano Book, where my piece Sadness Becomes Her and some music written for films can be found. But new pieces were included too, and I wrote some program notes for them, and here they are. ............................................................................................................................................. Both Sweet Sorrow and The Sleepers are commissioned by Fundacion Musica Abierta in Spain, which deals with disabled (young) musicians. Both pieces for violin & piano are written for a pianist with only 2 functional fingers in his/her right hand. Both pieces are also inspired by excerpts of phrases by my favorite writers, Shakespeare & Whitman. Sweet Sorrow is recited by Juliet to Romeo when parting: "Good night, good night! Parting is such sweet sorrow, That I shall say good night till it be morrow.", while The Sleepers is inspired by the long poem bearing the same title by Walt Whitman. I quoted some phrases on the score: "The sleepers are very beautiful as they lie unclothed, They flow hand in hand over the whole earth from east to west as they lie unclothed .... They pass the invigoration of the night and the chemistry of the night and awake." ............................................................................................................................................. My "mini trio", A Farm Picture was written just in a few minutes in an explosive burst of inspiration. The very short but powerful poem of Whitman (yes, him again) immediately triggered that sound in my head, a placid, rustic texture of flute, viola and piano, but a few months later I went back to the score to revise it and found out that the wind & string instruments can change place in this piece, hence it can be played by a violin, clarinet & piano. I just had the combination of a wind and a string instrument in this music. The poem just consists of 3 lines : Through the ample open door of the peaceful country barn / A sun-lit pasture field, with cattle and horses feeding / And haze, and vista, and the far horizon, fading away. ............................................................................................................................................. I always think that my song, Jemari Menari ("Dancing Fingers") is too short, and I always wanted to expand it. Well, it's based on a very short poem by Nanang Suryadi, and I want it to become a vocal piece, not someone singing accompanying a virtuosic pianist! So I decided to make a kind of "fantasy" on it, and since I like the register of a viola, I started to do a kind of toccata-fantasy based on it. The whole melody appears in the middle of the piece, but I already give hints of its naughty rhythms from the beginning. I wrote this piece in the nice business lounge of Frankfurt airport where I had to wait 4 hours for the connecting flight earlier this year, accompanied by my favorite drink : orange juice with a few drops (well, more than drops, and more than few) of Campari. The music certainly has that taste, a kind of bittersweet excitement. The original poem, which I used for the original piece for middle voice and piano, is as such : menarilah / jemari menari / melukis udara kosong / dengan jemari / menarilah jemari / mengukir hari / menatah mimpi

Rapsodia Nusantara 6-10, after a lapse of 3 years

Now that the Indonesian pianist that I admire a lot, Henoch Kristianto is preparing his recording of my complete (yes, complete!) Rapsodia Nusantara's, I will have to publish the score. He is until now (that I know of) the only Indonesian pianist who managed to play all the 24 Chopin Etudes (and those aren't the only Chopin pieces he has played), and he played them with such a high musicianship, not only getting all those difficult notes correct! As with my Rapsodias, or Rapsies as I call them dearly, Henoch didn't play them as I imagined how they should sound. He plays them BETTER than I imagined them. He managed to paint new colours, squeeze different nuances from different pianistic textures and see them from different points of view which I myself haven't seen before. I plan to write at least 33 Rapsies, each dealing with folktunes from 1 province of Indonesia, but I have broken my own rule. There are already 2 Rapsies based on music from Maluku (no. 3 based on "Rasa Sayange" and "Sarinande" and no.4, based on "Buka Pintu". I don't know how many Henoch will record for this first CD, but anyway he will add some short pieces of mine in this CD too. .............................................................................................................................................. The scores of Rapsy 6-10 will be published at the beginning of July, hopefully. Here are the program notes for them. By the way, Henoch has made a meticulous analysis (which revealed many things that made me, the composer, surprised too!) of Rapsy 1-5 in his blog. Check it out if you want to know : http://henochkristianto.blogspot.com ............................................................................................................................................. Rapsodia Nusantara no. 6 is perhaps the most "French" in terms of its "impressionistic" sound from the keyboard. Durationwise it is the shortest of all my Rapsodias (it's not just the real duration, it's how it FEELS) and one can even call it a "Mini Rapsodia", since it's in form of an etude and lasts approximately (hopefully less than) 4 minutes. Basically it's a continuous transformation, or "growth" from the character of the beginning (hazy, soft, "feminine") to the end (percussive, dry, loud, "masculine"). One can even think of a "growth" of a nice, harmless sweet baby up to a 14-year-old "bad boy". It is based on a song from Aceh, Bungong Jeumpa. The song itself is very simple, just containing intervals of major 2nd and minor 2nd. There are no bigger intervals than that, which makes it unique. OK you can say that Tschaikovsky used the descending major scale as his main motif for The Nutcracker, but what a development did he do in that piece! No, no, Bungong Jeumpa has only 2 intervals, no more. I don't know another piece of music which is as economic as Bungong Jeumpa, apart from those Gregorian chants of course. And as I always say to my students, the more limited your material, the bigger possibilities there are to develop it, and therefore the freer you can be in developing it. Well, a melody with only a whole tone and semitone intervals obviously cannot provide you with an elaborate motif, that's why I decided that in this Rapsodia I'll have to exploit the other musical elements apart from melody. Rhythmically, Bungong Jeumpa doesn't provide much either. So that's the reason why I wanna experiment with textures here, just like those impressionist painters. One sees the score and there apparently are as many notes as dots in a painting of Georges Seurat. The pianist should be aware that those notes should form a "bigger picture", so he/she should aware of the listener in hearing the "melodic figures" among those millions of notes. Henoch gave the world premiere of this Rapsy in Medan (yup, just a few hundred kms away from Aceh) on June 8th this year. ............................................................................................................................................. The 7th Rapsodia uses the technique employed more in visual arts than music (Stravinsky, I believe, was the first composer who applied this technique in music). It is the "pastiche" but all broken into little pieces which was done by the cubist painters. In a Rhapsody, a pastiche is of course a perfect method to be applied, since the composer works on existing materials anyway. But what I refer to is the pastiche paintings of Picasso which was drawn from Goya, or like the Damoiselles d'Avignon or Guernica. In this Rapsodia I took two songs from the island of Papua, Yamko Rambe Yamko and Apuse, picked all the small motifs and present them as such. So the listener won't here the complete melodies until much later in the piece. With this technique, the spaces between the materials are carefully measured, so the pianist has to be rhythmically very precise, even (or I should say especially) in silences. Both silences and sounds are equally important, since they should be proportionally correct. Of course there are sections (especially dealing with the song Apuse, which by nature is lyrical) which are more free that the pianist could apply more rubato. Certainly this is the most strict -- proportionally, structurally and rhythmically speaking -- of my Rapsodias to date, which perhaps would make it the least "flashy", yet it is not the least difficult technically and intellectually. ............................................................................................................................................. If no. 6 is "French", then the 8th Rapsodia is perhaps "Austrian" or "Germanic". When I wrote it, Beethoven's second movement of Appassionata did stay on my mind. But its influence doesn't go further than the 2nd variation, and afterwards this Rapsodia takes a life of its own. This is based on O Inani Keke, a folksong from North Sulawesi. It is perhaps the easiest of my Rapsodias, not only technically and interpretatively, but in terms of my compositional process. I didn't recall any difficulty in writing it: I wrote a set of variations everytime I had free time from other big pieces, and one fine day I collected those variations and put them together, wrote the last variation and ... there you have it! ............................................................................................................................................. I have been, and still am, a huge admirer and fan of the music of Mozart, but since I became very active in composing around 8 years ago, my admiration shifted poco a poco to the music of Haydn. For me, he was more innovative and full of surprises. Since then I spent around 1 hour every day, if possible, practising many of his marvellous sonatas for keyboard. My 9th Rapsodia is perhaps my music that most reflects my studies of his music. It is based on 2 songs from South of Borneo, Ampar Ampar Pisang and Paris Barantai. Not only how I split and put the materials together is very Haydnesque, but also the character & touchee of the whole piece is more "classical" than most of my works. Therefore the pianist should bear in mind the sound of the harpsichord while playing this particular Rapsodia, even in the "lyrical" parts which is more "baroque" or "classical" than "romantic". The Australian pianist Daniel Herscovitch (whose fantastic recital I attended last year) is planned to give its world premiere on July 24th this year at the Piano Institute in Surabaya, founded by his talented and beautiful Indonesian student of his, Catherine Tanujaya. ............................................................................................................................................. I started my 10th Rapsodia in 2011 by planning its overall structure: a virtuosic introduction, some variations and ending in a passacaglia. This is perhaps the loudest of my Rapsodias until now (the last chord of the first section depicts the bomb, so one can never play it too loud!) , and it has a unique element : it is my only piece in my life that doesn't modulate AND only employs 5 notes. Those 5 notes are from the Balinese pentatonic mode, since the material for this piece is the Balinese song "Janger" which is very popular. I then abandoned it after just 2 or 3 days work in favor of other urgent pieces, and in October 2012 I came back to it again after watching the 10th anniversary of Bali bombing ceremony, which triggered me to dedicate this piece to the memory of the victims. I then realized that this horrible event is full of number 2: it occured on the 12th of October 2002, there were 2 bombs exploded and overall they killed 202 victims. I was toying on some palindromic phrases but it was too late since the structure (and many notes of it) has been established, so I concentrated in number 2, or pairs. Therefore most phrases are built on 4 bars, with the second half as the complementary of the first one. Number 2 also plays an important role in the last passacaglia movement. Again, after 2 or 3 days work I abandoned it again and only when I visited Bali a few weeks ago (where I was invited to perform for the inauguration of the Foreign Ministers Conference and then spent 3 days for holiday afterwards) that I finished it, working on it in the darkest hours of the nights when I was still suffering from jetlag.

Tourette Syndrome and how much I suffered from it

Earlier this week I was taping an interview for one of the most popular talkshows on Indonesian TV, "Tea Time with Desi Anwar". Desi is one of the top reporters in this country, and meeting her in that session convinced me that she deserves her reputation. During the breaks I quickly decided that I will talk about a subject which I never talked publicly before (although everyone who looks at me knows that I suffer from it) which is the Tourette Syndrome (TS), and how I suffered from it. In all the hundreds of interviews with reporters I've done throughout my life, I haven't opened up this matter to any one of them, and they were all nice enough not to touch this matter. At Desi's program, it was me who decided to talk, not her. .............................................................................................................................................. I had TS since as early as I could remember. My mom took me to some psychologists on this matter, but they proved useless, which only much later in life I realized that this is a syndrome that still has no cure for. Needless to say, I got bullied a lot at school with this thing with me, and even now some people look at me in a strange way. TS is a "cluster" disorder: because it is made up of separate symptoms, no two Touretters are the same. It consists of physical twitches, vocal twitches, obsessive-compulsive disorder and attention deficit hyperactive disorder. You can control the obsessions and compulsions for a time, but eventually they have to find an outlet, like an itch that has to be scratched. .......................................................................................................................................... TS automatically brings different side effects in each person. The most common are depression, anxiety (nervousness), seclusion (anti-social) and hyperactivity. In my case, I remember that my mother thought that I had abnormality in my talking or hearing, because until the age of almost 3 years I still wasn't able to speak. Apparently this is quite common, because people with TS tend to be introverted character even from a very early age, so we are not interested in getting in touch with the outside world. This character is also a cause of depression, because often we think about things too deeply, often repetitive due to the muscles and nerves in the brain that works without control. .......................................................................................................................................... Learning deeper about TS, I realized that it not only give disadvantages, but also advantages. Since TS not only affects outer body movements but also inner, it affects how our brain work. Most TS sufferers are hyperactive at some times which then are compensated by strange obsessions. In my case, when music sounds in my brain, it just cannot stop. I just gotta write it down, and sometimes I became so tired (or I had been so tired from working something else) but I couldn't stop myself from writing. And I am obsessed with each and every note; those notes may not be the BEST notes, but those ARE the notes which HAVE TO be in my piece. After writing, obviously I became dead tired, exhausted beyond belief, and I need hours of rest. During that rest I still need to do things extramusical, like reading, blogging or for the last 3 years tweeting (which I admit, am quite addicted to it). Months later I could just forget totally how the piece sounds, but at the time of its writing I couldn't take my focus and attention off it. It was simply Goodbye, world. .......................................................................................................................................... Another obsession of mine is being alone and lonely. I do need so much time to be both. It is ok if I am lonely by being alone, but if I am in a crowd (and mostly when I am performing) this loneliness become unbearable. It is a strange thing that I suffer from being lonely, but I enjoy it on the other hand. It's a kind of mental sadomasochistic attitude. This is one of the reason that I cut many of my performing activities. While my brain cannot stop being creative (I'd rather to call it as such, than call it being obsessed), mentally I can't stand too much being in, or exposed to a crowd. Being a composer really helps in keeping me mentally sane. ............................................................................................................................................. If you have friends or relatives who have TS, although it still can't be cured, much can be done to help them. The most important is your understanding, that we don't want all the tics and we can't suppress it. The symptoms of TS are unstable; it may be reduced depending on the state of the patient, and therefore a calm situation without the pressure / stress overload is very helpful in this regard. During my life, I have also observed that caffeine and sugar somehow exaggerate those tics, that's why I rarely consume 2 things mentioned above. Due to excessive brain nerves work, the majority of people with TS have higher than normal intelligence and a certain creative potential that can be (far) above the average; this can be developed which can be useful for us and the society around us, but we need participation and understanding from the society too. There are so many (I do not know exactly the data) MENSA member (the club of people with IQs categorized as genius) around the world with TS. The role of teachers at schools are very important to explain to students that this disease is "normal" although it's still often considered mysterious. .......................................................................................................................................... The icon of TS sufferer in the music world is W.A. Mozart. My theory is that his father "abused" him of working the whole day and night not only to get money from his work, but also to cool him down of his numerous uncontrolled (and sometimes aggresive or even self destructive perhaps?) body movements. I might be wrong. Of course during his time the syndrome wasn't named as such, since Gilles de Tourette himself (who first diagnosed this disease) was born in 1857, while Mozart died in 1791. There is a good article on TS and also on Mozart here : http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2117611/ ............................................................................................................................................. If you suffer from TS, or know someone who suffers from it, let's have a chat and share your stories! Tweet me at @anandasukarlan , ok? And why not write your own story in a blog like this?

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!)