warbling elephant music — chris miller

Blog: Indonesia 2005

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#3. Saturday, 18 June 2005

Much less in the way of straight travelogue for this entry. The only real traveloguey thing to report is my "represing" in Bandung last Sunday (the reference is to how the word "refreshing" was rendered by a friend of mine in Bandung who took a bunch of us up into the hills north of town). Took the afternoon off to visit Ciater hot spring. Had a quick dip, and it was nice (it was sufficiently high up that the air was cool enough to enjoy warm water), despite the throngs of people. Kind of a mistake, in retrospect, to choose a destination like that on a Sunday. And getting there and back was somewhat more repressing than refreshing. Just missed my train back to Jakarta (about a 3 hour trip, very scenic in parts) from not allowing enough time to get through Bandung traffic, which now rivals Jakarta traffic, thanks in part to the new (and expensive) toll road between the two cities.

The rehearsal in Bandung was well-worth the trip. The group are students at an teacher training university. They all have solid foundational experience in traditional Sundanese music and play very well, but have also acquired the skill of reading complex notation. Two of the pieces they did, by Mas Slamet and by one of the members, they played from score--they had short music stands set up among the instruments. Other pieces were apparently also learned from notation, but then memorized. Most of the pieces involved the composer conducting, often as much for expressiveness and details of timing than for rhythmic coordination. I had seen conducting like that in 1995 in Bandung, but this was at a whole different level. Quite impressive. One of the pieces joined gamelan quite effectively with processed samples of gamelan instruments--I believe the software used was Reason (which as Emily can tell you used to be commonly used by electronica producers, but is now looked down upon as being too much like paint-by-numbers, or something like that).

Back in Jakarta, on Tuesday I went to a rehearsal of the group Krakatau, a group which started out doing jazz/pop, but in the early nineties turned to exploring fusion with traditional Sundanese music. (Only two members from the original group are active with the current incarnation). They tune their keyboards and iron bonang (which is easily tunable) to a 10-tone scale which allows them to play slendro, pelog, sorog, and other Sundanese scales.

I found out about their rehearsal when I went to meet Endo Suanda (who did his MA at Wesleyan and his PhD at U. of Washington). Pa Endo showed me a PowerPoint presentation on the work he is doing with an organization developing curricular material for arts appreciation at the primary and secondary school level. Pretty impressive stuff, some of it would actually be great for a 1st year undergrad survey course if it were in English. Would be great to try and get him to give a colloquium next time he's in the US--though now that his two sons, Atta and Umay, have both graduated from Wesleyan, he's less likely to pass through. Working with Pa Endo is a Nyak Ina Raseuki, who usually goes by Ubiet. She was a member of the New Jakarta Ensemble and has worked on other projects with Tony Prabowo, did her MA and is currently ABD at U of Wisconsin-Madison in ethno. Very good singer, apparently does all manner of work: teaches ethno at the Jakarta Arts Institute, sings Tony's music in its vaguely Schoenbergian style, was hired to help with vocal coaching for Indonesian Idol (yes, it's true, there's an American Idol knock-off in Indonesia--even the logo has the same typeface), and is doing something with Krakatau.

Ubiet didn't actually sing at the rehearsal. Actually, not too much happened at the rehearsal. They mostly played along with a couple of pieces from a recently recorded CD (of "house" music, as they semi-jokingly put it--some tracks did actually use sequenced drum samples, though mostly the music is comprised of acoustic drums, and some other instruments), over and over, trying to remind themselves how they went. Not terribly interesting to listen to (I must admit I found the material somewhat banal), but interesting to observe as a rehearsal method.

On Wednesday, I finally got around to contacting Srikarji Sriman, a dancer who did his MA at Smith who now teaches at IKJ. He told me about a dance performance on the 19th, and invited me to come watch rehearsals. I've been to a few now, and actually am at one now as I'm writing. As of the last time I came it was supposed to start at 1, but when I arrived at 1:30 they were only a few of the design people working on the set. Now it's 5:30 and they're just getting started. Actually, the down time was to my advantage, as it allowed me to take some video footage of some of the instruments used by a group led by Epi Martison (another former New Jakarta Ensemble member) that is accompanying choreography by Wiwiek Sipala. Three of the musicians are from Minang (West Sumatra), three from Makasar (Bugis, Sulawesi). In addition to Bugis and Minang instruments, they used kecapi (Sundanese zither), bowing it rather than plucking; didgeridoo; various bells and flat gongs, a miniature dan trang (Vietnamese bamboo xylophone); an ektar (which I was told was from Malaka--I vaguely know it as an Indian instrument--it's a single string instrument with small membrane as a resonator, with a neck of split bamboo that one squeezes to change the pitch); two originally designed instruments, by one of the Bugis musicians, modeled after the ektar--one looks more like an erhu, but he was playing it upside down, plucking with one hand and opening and closing the resonator with his other to get a "wah" effect--he said he was after the sound of a jaw harp; and one other original design, a tin can with a metal neck to which a spring is attached. I've seen a very similar instrument used by Yasudah, a musician from Solo (actually from the neighborhood within the outer walls of the kraton, the main palace) who studied Western experimental music in Jakarta with Mas Slamet and now lives in Solo (and mostly does stuff which is more like some of Laurie Anderson's music, somewhere in between pop and new music).

Yet another former New Jakarta Ensemble is providing music for another one of the dance pieces, by a choreographer from East Kalimantan. He has also designed a number of new instruments--string instruments which can either be plucked or bowed--which are used along with two fiddles, a gambus (Indonesian version of the ud), and sape, a traditional instrument from Kalimantan.

Sukarji himself is using canned music--an Australian musician that I haven't heard of, and, I'm sorry to say, Enya. Yes, a flagrant display of my aesthetic bias, I know. I'll put it aside when I survey people as to whether they think Enya is kontemporer or something else.

They are now in between pieces (have been for the last hour or so). It's a fairly typical, perhaps slightly more ramai (lively),

Yesterday I made a fairly lengthy trek to a mostly industrial area in north Jakarta, near the main port, Tanjung Priok, to a rehearsal for an event commemorating the 40th anniversary of Kompas, the leading Indonesian newspaper. The rehearsal, in a very large TV studio, involved Javanese gamelan (a group from STSI Solo led by Supanggah), keyboards (Dwiki Darmawan, from Krakatau), Ubiet, Inisisri (a rock drummer from Jogja) and a group of musicians from Banyuwangi playing rebana (frame drum), a group playing gondang sembilan (nine extremely large drums from Mandailang, North Sumatra). Not sure if it would be considered kontemporer--and in this case I will make some effort to try to get different peoples perspectives--but certainly many of the people involved are active with music that is considered kontemporer. The bit I heard was for the finale, and involved a big play-along--the gamelan was playing a simple two line lancaran. It was very interesting observing the rehearsal of the ending, which was approximately, but not exactly, a suwuk gropak--the "flying off the edge of a cliff" style ending in Javanese gamelan where it gets faster and faster right up until the end. Except that the feel of suwuk gropak usually involves a fairly gradual creeping up of tempo, then a final dramatic push over the last eight beats. In this case, it just kept on getting faster and faster, and they settled (not through discussion) on ending on the weaker gong. This prompted some of the STSI players to suggest it was "salah gumun"--wrong, but nice. It was an interesting example of the trickiness of combining different musics. I wonder if any of the other genres felt as aesthetically compromised as the Javanese, and which aesthetic in the end will prevail.