The most powerful inspirer (continuing my previous article)

I always say, no matter how powerful someone, a piece of art or an event can inspire you to create an artistic product, the biggest inspirer of all time (and it never fails) is THE DEADLINE. Since Erstwhile is an intense essay about love, I have put the Valentine's Day this year for my own deadline to finish the voice parts. Well I missed 2 days, but since it's my own deadline, it wasn't as inspiring as deadlines which are imposed by external forces :) .......................................................................................................................................... Therefore all the soloists, even the choir, have received their parts through email by now. The orchestration, especially the orchestral sections without singers involved, is not finished ; I guess it will be finished just when I have to send the parts to the orchestral musicians next month, as I have this sick obsession of revising and re-re-re-revising my music before the musicians get the score. Oh, I didn't tell you the names of the soloists involved, right? Well, you would know their names since they are all the winners of the National Voice Competition "Tembang Puitik Ananda Sukarlan" (TPAS) 2011, but mostly not the ones who sang in my previous chamber comedy operas MENDADAK KAYA and LAKI-LAKI SEJATI. So, they are : Ivan Jonathan (as Rafael), Evelyn Merrelita (as Madame Vaillant) -- both are characters living in the 21st century, in fact they met aboard the Singapore Airlines. The ones from the 13th and 14th century are Albertus James Sofyan (as Picaro), Christine Tambunan (as Soléne) and Anggana Bunawan (who only sing 2 arias but playing the role of 2 characters, as Gajah Mada -- a historical character from the Majapahit era in Indonesia -- and as a priest at the Notre Dame Church). All characters of the story, except Gajah Mada, are purely fictional, and any resemblances with real life characters or happenings (such as a broken heart of 7 centuries!) are purely coincidental. As I wrote you before, Erstwhile is a work in progress, so at the moment it will just be recorded and performed in a "concertante" way, although I do ask the singers to do some very small gestures (such as shaking hands when they first met, and other things that connect each other at the duets). Will they wear concert costumes or theatrical ones in the premiere? I still dunno. .......................................................................................................................................... Ah, talking about the National Voice Competition, in case you are a vocalist, you might be interested in joining the next one, in September this year in Surabaya. The city is coincidentally very close to one of the locations where Erstwhile took place, but that's not the reason. It is simply because the initiator, founder and executor of the competition happens to be Amadeus Performing Arts, a company based in Surabaya. You can tweet them to @KompetisiTPAS for more info, and do be quick since I heard that the end of this month February is the last day to register for the "early birds" (this term couldn't be more appropriate for you singers who sing like nightingales!). Anyway, I am so proud and happy to know and work with the previous winners, they are amazingly and surprisingly brilliant, but am still curious in discovering new & unknown great new vocal talents. They are another source of inspiration for me, just like deadlines. And I love those inspiring vocalists. In fact, I love all people and everything else that inspires me, except deadlines. Unfortunately we have to know the difference between love and inspiration ; you don't have to love the people (or things) that inspires you. That, my friends, is what you call life.

Mahler and the Pharaohs: Death and Immortality

He Hath Made Everything Beautiful in its time -- Ecclesiastes 3 : 11 .......................................................................................................................................... Indeed. Even if it takes days, months, years .. and now I see it can happen even in centuries! That is the essence of the book that inspired me so much to write the music I am doing now, as I mentioned briefly in several entries in this blog before. In fact, the inspiration is so powerful that I would let my work now as a "work in progress" for the rest of my life. For the time being, I just concentrate for its premiere and recording which will be just short excerpts of the whole book. .......................................................................................................................................... The book, and therefore my music, bears the title Erstwhile, A Communion of Time. The book is clear, what is not clear is my music. Is it a lyrical symphony, such as Gustav Mahler's "Das Lied von der Erde"? Is it an opera? Is it a cantata? I might say, in the long run, it is an opera, but for now, let's call it a symphony. I mentioned Mahler's work since Erstwhile will also have that dubious hybrid of half song-cycle half symphony, and in fact in my case it is also an opera. And it deals with the same issues of Mahler's work: pain, loss, love, life, parting and salvation. But Erstwhile was written by Rio Haminoto, a 21st century writer who happens, like me, to be a Trekkie (Star Trek fan, if you still don't know that word) and so the story spans for 7 centuries, which doesn't differ much from Mahler's last few painful years of his life if you believe that time is just the 4th dimension of space. .......................................................................................................................................... But there is another conclusion I took from the book. You see, the whole human life and psychology is focused on two things: the fear of death as our primal terror, and the longing for immortality, a yearning to live forever. I have touched this issue briefly in my only work for piano and orchestra up till now, a 5-minute overture called Fons Juventatis, or The Fountain of Youth. I didn't write it just for fun. It was a happy piece, of course, depicting the spirit of eternal youth (besides the fact that it was written as a birthday present for my friend Erza S.T., the founder of Indonesia Opera Society), but it was also the thing I, and I'm sure we all, painfully yearn. From this yearning for forever, this hurtful sense of passing time, springs most of humanity's greatest achievements, in art, music, literature and architecture. Paradoxically, it is the very awareness that life is fleeting on the wings of time that directs human activity towards the creation of artistic products that possess the durability their creators lack, images in carved stones and marbles and later in paintings and photographs, words in literature, beauty woven in sounds, ideas captured in books and films. Most of civilization is a by-product of the quest of immortality. Mahler's 9 great symphonies and Shakespeare's dramas serve exactly the same purpose as the Pharaoh's pyramides of 5000 years ago. .......................................................................................................................................... But on the other hand, have you seen the film "Highlander" and its fantastic soundtrack by Queen, "Who wants to live forever"? The reason we fear death, as much as we yearn for immortality, is love. We fear the loss of our loved ones, there is no use being immortal if we couldn't share it with our loved ones. As the Vulcans always say, "Live long, and prosper". Just a long life is not enough. And that's the essence of "Erstwhile". Our soul, but not our body, is immortal ... just to find our loved ones. .......................................................................................................................................... Every note of Erstwhile embodies that concept, with motifs that appear "in different clothes" during the whole piece. Time is not the only issue in Erstwhile, places are also important, and so is the music that cultivated the culture of those places. Thanks to the internet, for the last two weeks I've learned and researched history more than the 3 years I learned about it in my highschool. I've therefore discovered that historical documentation of my country is pretty poor, especially the musical ones. So I had to invent many musical ideas based on my incomplete researches and pretend that they are "authentic" so to say. And yes, the composition has started, which means writing those millions of notes. .......................................................................................................................................... John Fowles, the writer of "The French Lieutenant's Woman" interestingly commented that after he'd got half way through the text, the characters started "telling him what to do", as if they wrote their own lines. Well, that's what happening with me now. As usual in big pieces, such as in my two cantatas Ars Amatoria and Libertas I planned carefully the structure before writing the first note, but then the notes themselves determined their structure. And I think I am old (and wise) enough to let them "go their own way" as we say. A good leader is not one who keeps on telling his staff what to do. His staff should know what they are doing. The composer's staff are those notes, they have a life of their own, and I just put them together. They will guide me to boldly go where I have never gone before.

My daughter's growing up, but I am not

This is the foreword to my new "Alicia's 3rd Piano Book", due to be published the end of this month January. The book contains more than 30 short pieces of mine of diverse technical difficulties. ============================================================================================================================================== Apparently my daughter Alicia Pirena isn't the only inspirer of my works in this book. In fact, she has now stopped playing the piano, and happily pursuing her other interests. Many pieces in this book serve as sketches of larger works I wrote during this period, mostly for the film "Hari Ini Pasti Menang" (Today We Shall Win) and "Air Mata Terakhir Bunda" (Mother's Last Drop of Tears), both of very different stories and atmospheres. There are also pieces written as a gift to my dear friends, such as the birthday present to Edith Widayani the brilliant young pianist, the wedding gift to my childhood friend who is now a prominent writer Laksmi Pamuntjak, a commemoration to the Lifetime Achievement Award given by the Indonesian Classical Music Foundation to the 84-year-young piano pedagogue Mrs. Latifah Kodijat etc. All of them are inspired by the dedicatees, sometimes with a starting point as simple as using their name / initials as the motif. .......................................................................................................................................... One curious thing is my obsession, until now at my age, with the so-called "music box" effect. I did make my mom crazy with me repeatingly winding up the many music boxes that we had back when I was small. My favorite one was my mom's jewelry box that sounded the love theme from the film "Godfather" (which became my favorite film of my life later!) every time one opened it. My favorite activity was waking up at 5 a.m. on an alarm clock which sounded like a music box and listening to it for half an hour, half asleep winding it up numerous times, until I had to get out of bed at 5.30. Being half asleep brought that sound into territories in my brain that usually aren't readily open if I am awake. The sonic memories remain there until now, more than the other music that I have heard when I was small. And that, I think, explains the many music-box-effect in my music. Just in my pieces for this book, I could mention its existence in pieces such as We were once children, too, Mother's Love, He's Gone, ... and in Falling in Love (Alicia's 1st piano book) the whole second half of the piece is in fact imitating a music box, with its ending in need to be wound up! .............................................................................................................................................. If Alicia's 1st and 2nd Piano Book contain music only for the piano, I add a new element of joy in this book: playing with another instrument. Therefore there are pieces for piano together with a flute, an oboe (Echo's Whisper, a 4-minute piece that forms a diptych with my older piece for flute and piano based on the related mythological character, Narcissus Dying although each of them could be played separately), a double-bass (yes! It IS possible to make beautiful music with this instrument!), 3 pieces with violin and 1 piece for a trio of english horn, violin and piano (the latter 4 pieces are used in the film "Air Mata Terakhir Bunda") ............................................................................................................................................. I am grateful to the piano teachers at Marcia Music School, Surabaya, and their team leader Patrisna May Widuri for going through the pieces, determining and grading their difficulties.

New Works, New Ideas, New Friends

Today's the last day of my longest stay in Indonesia to date. It's been quite a productive stay, I must say. .................................................................................................................................. Musically speaking, I finished my music for two films. The first is Hari Ini Pasti Menang (Today We Must Win), a film about the intrigues and dark side of the world of soccer in Indonesia. I have never liked soccer in my whole life, and living the last 14 years in Spain doesn't help either. But since I read the script and learned that this film is about the "dark" world which has always attracted me, be it in sports, arts or politics, I accepted to do the music enthusiastically. The most strange element in that movie, I guess, will be the theme song which the producer also asked me to write. It was supposed to be a nationalistic pop song with a "classy(cal)" touch to be played and sung by a pop group, but when the production team heard what I wrote, they insisted that I should play the piano, together with some strings, to accompany the high rising popstar, Judika. I already told them that if I play myself, it will sound very strange, but they insisted anyway. The end result, the song "Indonesiaku" (My Indonesia) will sound like something nobody has heard before. ........................................................................................................................................... This film will inevitably provoke controversy, especially after the death of Diego Mendieta, the Paraguayian player, due to the indifference of the National Football Federation, and the rotten (dis)organization and corruption in the world of sports in Indonesia. Legendary film stars Ray Sahetapy and Mathias Muchus take major roles, together with father and son Hengky and Verdi Sulaiman, Tika Putri etc. It will be released on April 11 this year throughout Indonesia. .......................................................................................................................................... The second film is Air Mata Terakhir Bunda (Mother's Last Drop of Tears). The story is a melancholic family drama and unlike the film I mentioned before, this is not a big-budget one, but it is the location which is very special here: Sidoarjo (East Java), a place hit by the "unique" disaster, drown by mud from the inside of the earth due to the human error by the Lapindo company. Now if you google "Lapindo mud" you will get what I mean. This second film is more "me", I must say. As I have confessed to a reporter more than once, I have this strange hormone that makes me feel lonely all the time (even in the midst of a crowd), and therefore provokes a sense of melancholy. You might like to read this: http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2008/10/26/ananda-sukarlan-%E2%80%98i-write-my-best-music-when-i-feel-horribly-lonely%E2%80%99.html . In the Indonesian language a word was invented a few years ago for this feeling: GALAU. But long before the word existed, I was already born with that hormone in my body. Every time I write music, this "atmosphere" is what naturally comes out. If my music sounds happy, funny or anything else than melancholic, it is only thanks to my compositional technique of transforming the material into different characters. So, writing for the latter film didn't give me this extra "work" except for very few spots. I use my favorite instruments to evoke the melancholic feeling, such as the english horn and violas. The film is full of shining starry names of the most beautiful actors in Indonesia right now, such as Vino G. Bastian, Marsha Timothy, Happy Salma and Rizky Hanggono, and due to be released around June. .......................................................................................................................................... Many sketches of the music for those 2 films above will be included in Alicia's Third Piano Book, which will be published the end of this month January. In fact, since I play the piano for the soundtrack, many pieces appear just as they sound on the films. .......................................................................................................................................... But I am always more excited with future projects. And my next project is a kind of Mahlerian orchestral work with singers. The theme is about --what else-- broken heart, but this is the one which has been broken for 6 centuries. So, I am trying to inject and implant medieval, renaissance up to 21st century music. It is based on the still unpublished book "Erstwhile - A Communion of Time" by Rio Haminoto who happens to have studied at the same highschool with me. The story is unbelievably touching and it directly stabbed my heart. I am sure that when it gets published it would become a best-seller. The word Erstwhile itself I find so poetic: it means something like "once upon a time in the past". I am going to invite the winners of the National Vocal Competition "Tembang Puitik Ananda Sukarlan" organized by Amadeus Performing Arts 2 years ago to sing it. It will be for full orchestra, and I have planned it to be in 10 movements or big sections, some of them are connected. It's too early to talk more about this, since it will involve some multimedia too, but I'll keep you informed !

A leader starts with being able to lead himself ....

Yup, it's confirmed: twitter makes us blog less. It's been 2 months for me without blogging, and even this entry is not new either. I just came back from the launching of the book "Letters of Leaders" at the JW Marriott Hotel, Jakarta where I was honoured to be selected as 1 of the 95 "personalities who have contributed in the making Indonesia as it is now", produced by the Tempo Institute in collaboration with General Electric and Garuda Indonesia (that's our airline company). Each of us was asked to write a letter to "the future leaders" in our respective fields. I am flattered that many people I admire are also included in that book, a.o. political leaders Sri Mulyani, the new governor of Jakarta Joko Widodo, writers and intellectuals Anies Baswedan, Goenawan Mohamad, Sapardi Djoko Damono, Ayu Utami, athletes Richard Sam Bera, Yayuk Basuki, film makers Mira Lesmana & Riri Reza, fellow musicians Addie M.S. and Glenn Fredly. All letters are in Indonesian, of course, so if you want to read mine, please copy it to our dear friend Google Translate :) . So, here is my letter. ============================================================================================================================================== Dari Ananda untuk ananda-ananda tercinta, para pemimpin masa depan negara RI, ........................................................................................................................................ Terima kasih telah meminjamkan negara ini kepada kami, generasi di atas anda. Dalam waktu singkat kami akan kembalikan negara ini ke kalian, pemilik sahnya. Walaupun cuma pinjaman, saya merasa sangat bahagia dapat memilikinya sesaat, mencintainya sampai mati dan selalu bangga menjadi warganegaranya, apapun reputasinya di dunia internasional saat ini. Negara kita memiliki sumber daya seni dan budaya yang terkaya di dunia, dan kami generasi sebelum anda belum bisa menggunakannya sepantasnya, bahkan masih banyak yang berpikir bahwa segala yang "Barat" itu lebih keren dan berkualitas, jadi tugas anda lah untuk menggunakannya demi kemakmuran dan kedamaian seluruh rakyat. Jangan mengulang kesalahan kami, sadarlah dan wujudkanlah dengan berkata "Saya orang Indonesia" di negara manapun orang akan menghormati anda. ........................................................................................................................................... Tapi bagaimana caranya "Menjadi Indonesia"? Saya sendiri tidak tahu. Yang jelas, dalam seni, saya telah selalu berusaha menunjukkan identitas Indonesia dalam musik sastra (istilah yang saya ingin tawarkan untuk menggantikan "musik klasik"), dan saya berharap usaha tersebut dapat diteruskan oleh para pemimpin kita berikutnya, bukan hanya dalam musik tapi di bidang seni lainnya. Sejak saya menginjakkan kaki di negeri orang pada usia 18 th, saya tahu bahwa saya hanya bisa berhasil sebagai saya sendiri dan sebagai orang Indonesia, bukan sebagai seorang komponis peniru musik Bach atau Wagner. Sebagai pianis, sudah (terlalu) banyak juga pianis yang sangat kuat memainkan musik Chopin dan Tschaikovsky; Eropah dan dunia tidak terlalu membutuhkan seorang anak Jakarta yang mencoba memahami musik yang bukan tradisinya, dan mencoba memainkannya lebih baik dari para kolega Eropah saya. Musik mereka memang saya serap, tapi tidak saya reproduksi mentah-mentah. Hanya 1 kekuatan lebih yang saya miliki: ke-Indonesiaan saya. Musik yang merupakan ekspresi dan komunikasi universal yang melampaui kata-kata, harus bisa memperkuat identitas kita. Karena sudah melampaui kata-kata, musik tidak bisa berbohong ; itulah bentuk ekspresi yang paling jujur dan dalam. Saya memiliki harta yang sangat berharga: pengalaman hidup, budaya dan tradisi bangsa saya selama 17 tahun pertama di Indonesia yang berasimilasi dengan musik sastra Eropah yang saya geluti sesudahnya. Apa itu berarti saya lebih baik daripada mereka? Tidak, dan saya tidak berusaha untuk lebih baik dari siapa pun. Saya hanya selalu berusaha untuk lebih baik dari apa yang saya pikir saya sendiri bisa capai. Menjadi saya adalah menjadi yang lebih baik dari saya. Dan akirnya menjadi Indonesia juga demikian. ........................................................................................................................................... Kalau Austria bisa membuat kota kelahiran Mozart yang sangat kecil, Salzburg, menjadi obyek wisata dunia, kenapa kita tidak? Kalau Jerman bisa mengangkat Simfoni ke-9-nya Beethoven menjadi lambang persaudaraan dan perdamaian sedunia, kenapa kita tidak? Dan kalau Italia bisa menjadikan "Mona Lisa"-nya Leonardo da Vinci menjadi lambang keindahan enigmatik sedunia, kenapa kita tidak? Bukan tanggungjawab Mozart, Beethoven dan da Vinci bahwa ketiga contoh itu bisa terjadi. Mereka, seperti seniman-seniman lainnya, hanya "mengerjakan tugasnya". Tapi, "to have great poets, there must be great audiences too", kata penyair Amerika Walt Whitman. Amerika telah menjadi great audience untuk Whitman, kini giliran para seniman besar Indonesia yang telah menghasilkan banyak mahakarya untuk memiliki a great audience. Ini hanya bisa dimulai di negaranya sendiri, karena negara yang besar adalah negara yang bisa menjadi a great audience untuk mencintai dan bangga atas para senimannya. ....................................................................................................................................... Hanya satu pesan saya kepada anda, pemimpin masa depan negeri ini. Pimpinlah dengan kerendahan hati, karena kepemimpinan adalah amanat dan kepercayaan rakyat terhadap anda. Sekecil apapun yang kita dapatkan, baik sejak lahir maupun yang kita dapatkan dari jerih payah adalah dari Tuhan melalui umatNya, dan semua itu tidak ada yang kekal. Mungkin saya tidak lagi perlu memohon supaya anda tidak korupsi, karena semua yang bisa dikorupsi akan habis oleh generasi saya ini, tapi tetaplah ingat bahwa kita semua sudah diberi jatahnya oleh Tuhan, dan jatah itu sangat cukup untuk dibagi. Sebagai contoh, kontribusi Yayasan Musik Sastra Indonesia yang saya ikut dirikan memang masih kecil, tapi kebahagiaan anak-anak kurang mampu setelah berhasil memainkan instrumen itu adalah suatu hal yang tidak ternilai dalam menaikkan harga dirinya dan membuat mereka menjadi manusia yang lebih baik, bukan saja dalam musik, tapi dalam moral. Kalau anak-anak itu, calon-calon pemimpin itu di kemudian hari membalas budi kami dengan cara meneruskannya, membagi dan memberi ke mereka yang kurang mampu juga, saya yakin itu akan menjadi Indonesia yang semakin baik. Menjadi Indonesia yang kita impikan. Menjadi Indonesia. ........................................................................................... Salam artistik, @anandasukarlan

September's just gone

September has passed, and it's been a super-busy month, although it seems like I was enjoying life. The month opened with my concert with the Nusantara Symphony Orchestra in Jakarta, and joining my friend, the conductor Addie MS we performed Yazeed Djamin's masterpiece, "Variation on the song Sepasang Mata Bola" as well as the short "Warsaw Concerto" by Richard Addinsell. The theme Sepasang Mata Bola is from an old song by the late popular songwriter Ismail Marzuki, written during the war years. Yazeed managed to elaborate that song into a 23-minute sort of piano concerto, which is not easy, considering that the tune itself is so complete in itself. I was even told that Ismail Marzuki couldn't read n write notes, so obviously he didn't think of melodic motifs and all those "intellectual" ways of writing music. In fact, that's the thing that he did best: writing beautiful lyrics and long, winding tunes. For him it was as simple as opening the tap. I wish I could do that, without all those musical knowledge I acquired from my education that only served to raise the level of procrastination and anxiety of doing (artistic) things. Beethoven could write a whole symphony by playing around with a motif as silly as 3 short notes and 1 long note, but try to give him a very long & memorable tune like Ismail Marzuki's, see if he could elaborate it for a symphony without any problems. Remember, young composers: the simpler and shorter the motif, the easier and bigger possibilities it has to elaborate. __________________________________________________________________ Where am I? Oh yes, superbusy September. After that performance I went back home directly to Spain the day after, since I had to write the music for the film "Hari Ini Pasti Menang" ("Today we shall win") by the director Andibachtiar Yusuf. Mostly the music is for orchestra, and I received help from my friends at Institut Musik Indonesia to do it with the computer program Reason 5. It sounds 90% like a real orchestra, and to make it even more real, I am using a few real, human musicians too to mix it with the sounds produced by the software. Writing for orchestra of course takes at least 5-10 times the time to write than for, say, piano solo, so around 20 minutes of orchestral music of this film was done during last month. The rest are for some solo and chamber music, and I am also playing some piano parts (and solo) in the soundtrack. Thanks to Nia and Sammy from IMI for helping with all those computer gadgets. At the moment I am sending Sammy my music through computer, and he converts it to sounds and sends it back to me. ______________________________________________________________________ And during the second half of September I also started practising that gigantic, mammoth, overblown piece, Turangalila Symphony of Olivier Messiaen. It is a work for piano, ondes martenot and (very) big orchestra that lasts for 1,5 hours, in 10 movements. The piano part itself is 140 pages. I don't know whether this, or Ferruccio Busoni's Piano Concerto is the longest in the repertory of piano and orchestra. I have performed Turangalila several times, not every year, and I always remember the most important thing to do before going on stage : go to the toilet. You'd be stuck on stage for 1,5 hours. I have also done something even heavier : performing "20 visions on the child Jesus" by the same composer. Yeah, that's 20 movements and it's for ... piano solo !! I've done it several times too, but that was until around 7 or 8 years ago. So, no rests at all, no orchestra playing while you rest your poor fingers during that 1,5 hours. Messiaen was a kind of 20th century Bach, who wrote everything "dedicated to the glory of God" and that we, the poor musicians playing his music should do anything to reach that superhuman level of virtuosity to be nearer to God, I guess. Anyway, I still have less than 2 weeks, since the concert is scheduled for the 15th of October in the beautiful Royal Opera House just in the garden of the Royal Palace (imagine having an opera house with a capacity of 2000+ in your garden!), and repeated on the 17th at the National Auditorium . ______________________________________________________________________ OK then, enough blogging and back to practice ...

Being better ... than yourself

Time and again, I must confess: I don't like music competitions. It is cruel, and in my opinion something which can be so subjective should not be competed and judged. Yeah you can run faster, you can jump higher, but what is to play the piano better? Or sing better? What is better anyway? ______________________________________________________________________ But now, you tell me something. If you (like me, ca. 25 years ago) were an unknown young (classical) musician, and your parents (or your partner) are neither millionaires nor having friends in high places, what should you do for starting your career? You would need a platform to show people your artistic abilities, right? Now, how would you do that? And another thing. Supposed that you really are confident, and really want to depend solely on your artistic abilities. How would you get audience to come to your concert, as a totally unknown musician? ____________________________________________________________________ That's why when some sponsors proposed me to do the Ananda Sukarlan Award (ASA) back 5 years ago, I accepted it with pleasure. And am equally thankful to Amadeus Performing Arts who, in 2010 followed with another proposal of a competition for voice, "Tembang Puitik Ananda Sukarlan" in their city, Surabaya, though as ASA it is of national scale. Those competitions will mean so much for the young talents of Indonesia, who are looking for their first steps of their musical career through the "normal", honest way. ___________________________________________________________________ Now, would the winners of the competition guarantee high artistic qualities? Most probably they do. But during the years, we have discovered that artistic quality alone is not enough to build a career. There is a more important aspect in building a musical career, and that is attitude. Yes, (opera) singers are famous for their strange behaviours and demands, but that era is gone now. We need professionals, an artist we can depend on, during the rehearsals, recordings and most importantly in concerts. We all understand how difficult it is to be a singer, carrying your own musical instrument in your body ; in fact, your body IS your musical instrument. It takes high responsibility, and therefore an intense feeling of insecurity all the time. But believe me, it's not only singers who have difficult attitudes. It's just in each and every performers psyche. Yes, including pianists. _______________________________________________________________________ I tell you one thing. Professional artists and performers are simply just workers, nothing else. Yup, workers. Like those who works cleaning the streets. We (in our case, our managers) sign the contracts, we do the job, and that's it. And during the process of doing our job, we are just working like nerds, yeah yeah, it's that boring and that uncool. We don't care if our clothes are cheap or expensive, we don't care about the food whether it's fine dining or junk food. In our head there is just one thing: finish the job, and finish it well. The amateurs are the opposite, they care of those things we don't care: how they look, how they are treated, what kind of priorities they are given and what people think of them. Yeah, they spend so much time, money and energy (that they don't have) to do things (that they can't) to impress people (that they don't like). In fact, they do music not to express, but to impress. Sadly, in the end, nobody's impressed. _______________________________________________________________________ I wrote this inspired by the tweets of my friend, the conductor who recently I worked with, Addie MS. Many people look up to him as someone who is cool and effortless. He tweeted on the day of our concert: "people just see the result in 2 hours, but people don't see (and don't care to see) the days and hours before it, preparing concert, the sweat, the tension. And after all those, I gotta be on stage and smile as if nothing happens". And in fact, he doesn't have to smile, he's a conductor, he doesn't face the public! But that's the extra mile, that mile with an s. _______________________________________________________________________ I always remember my dad's advice: "Son, you don't have to be better than other people. You just gotta be better than what you think you could be". Still working on it, dad.

My third book of works for voice

On preparing the 3rd volume of collections of my vocal works, I realize that for the last two years (after the 2nd volume was published) I haven't written that many songs. However, I did write a lot for the voice : I wrote my two chamber operas (Laki-Laki Sejati & Mendadak Kaya) both in 2011, and I am writing a new one at the moment, again based on a short story of Putu Wijaya. So, the 3rd volume of "Tembang Puitik Ananda Sukarlan" (Ananda Sukarlan's Vocal works) contains in fact mostly works I've written before 2010. I copied them down in Sibelius file, and of course revised some of them or even finished them. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- There are still some songs (solo & duet) from the past unpublished that couldn't be included in this book. I think if I publish them, they would easily make another book, and that's it. Those will be the complete songs of my life. And since I was so aroused to write dramatic works, my interest in writing short songs diminished. Since vocal works involve words and texts, I realized that I wasn't just interested in that highly expressive and unique "musical instrument" (which is the human voice) but also the character and drama that comes together with it. So, although I am quite sure of a 4th volume of my song collections, I am not so sure if there will be a 5th one, since I quite lose interest lately in doing them. Except if suddenly someone like Fischer-Dieskau or Peter Pears come to my life and totally inspires me. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ The poets whose poems I set to music the most in my third book are Ready Susanto (from Bandung), Hasan Aspahani (now living in Batam) and Nanang Suryadi (from East Java; I am not sure where he's from, what I know is that he's a lecturer in the Brawijaya University in Malang at the moment). There are also 2 songs based on tweets, by the Peruvian poet Jose Luis Mejia and the Indonesian M. Aan Mansyur. And then there are 2 songs for voice & guitar. There are also other foreign poets here: Longfellow, Robert Browning and of course O Captain, my Captain Walt Whitman. Both the Whitman & Browning poems are unabashedly erotic, although there are other poems by Indonesians that are quite erotic as well, though not so much as those two foreigners. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Again, I was "forced" to compile my scattered manuscripts of songs, thanks to Patrisna Widuri who will again organize the National Voice Competition next year. The rules are not yet published since she is formulating it with her artistic team, but you can already join the competition's facebook group : http://www.facebook.com/groups/361289260607185/ . They (and I) will publish news & updates regularly there. The vocalists can choose from this 3rd collection of mine for their repertoire in the competition.