SOUNDS OF CIREBON IN A STRANGE LAND

Hearing The First Smile 

Gunungan  courtesy of John Casey

                                    

More than 40 years ago a group of Indonesian characters quit their homeland for ever. They didn’t travel lightly. On their 7,600 kilometer journey south they carried something rare and precious – the indigenous culture of Cirebon.

Why did they flee?  Perhaps they were escaping a society little interested in their presence, threatening even. Had they stayed in the north coast port, soulless brutes might have attacked during a wave of religious intolerance.

For not all wanted to maintain the celebrities’ ancient and impressive lineage, claiming supporters were idolatrous and should be purged. The tomb of Sunan Gunungjati, one of the 15^th century Walisongo (nine saints), is in the West Java city and reportedly threatened by extremists following the Saudi Arabian Wahhabi sect.

The travellers’ back story is threadbare. Before moving they probably lived in the 16th century Keraton Kasepuhan (Sultan’s palace),

Maybe they were asylum seekers sent by their guardians to a haven where the locals had a reputation for tolerance, though knowing little about the newcomers’ culture.  Would they be accepted or pushed aside and ignored?

Today we happily report that all fears proved groundless. According to their custodian Jennifer Shennan (left)  the Indonesians settled well and are often seen in public where they charm and mystify.

Her late husband Dr Allan Thomas was the rescuer.  He paid several sacks of rice to secure their freedom, packing them in stout timber boxes for their long flight.

When the lids were lifted the migrants, guarded by the plump sage Semar, emerged to the delight of the welcoming onlookers.  And so The First Smile Gamelan and accompanying puppets began their new life in New Zealand.

The ten-piece collection of instruments includes a rare gambang kayu a wooden xylophone using teak slats.  Most ensembles have only brass metallophones. 

“They won’t be going back,” said Shennan, a dance teacher and musician in Wellington. “We thought about it after Allan died in 2010. 

“But as the Indonesian Ambassador Jose Tavares says, the collection has been here so long it’s now a New Zealand gamelan.

“Before being offered to Allan they hadn’t been played for 50 years – perhaps longer because of religious prohibitions on wayang kulit performances. The instruments are certainly antique – maybe 400 years.

“Others have warned that if the gongs went back the brass might be cut up and melted down.”

That won’t happen in NZ where the instruments and puppets live in The Long Hall on a splendid clifftop overlooking Wellington harbor. Till recently they were used regularly for concerts but need repairs.  These will be funded by the Indonesian Embassy.

Ethnomusicologist Thomas encountered the gamelan in the 1970s while studying in Java.  At the time he wrote:

‘Gamelan music is a curious mixture of the obvious and the intricate.  It is a simple sound effect and rich sophisticated literature at the same time. The exhilaration of gamelan for a Westerner is in the simple fact of it being alive – not castrated for a concert’.

Shennan said her late husband often spoke of music going beyond business and politics, helping people from different cultures get to know and understand each other better through feeling.

“When we perform in NZ audiences are magnetized,” she said. “Even people who know nothing about Indonesia don’t just look and leave.  They get drawn in by the magic, and because they can wander around and see both sides of the screen.

“There’s nothing precious about the tradition.  I’ve never heard anyone say outsiders shouldn’t be involved.  On the contrary, Indonesians want to share.”

Picture courtesy John Casey

The collection of 140 puppets includes some weird figures, like the utterly vile Ketepeng Reges (left) , evil spirits which try to break the concentration of meditators, and Badjul Sengara, a giant with the face of a crocodile.

Then there’s Dewi Rekatawati, who looks like something between a mermaid and a grub.  She’s a wife of Bima, one of the five Pandava brothers who fought their cousins the Kauravas in the ancient Mahabharata classic.

Her son Gatotkaca has magical powers to fly.  His headdress loops forward and is attached to the cap, a signature mark of the Cirebon puppets.  Marking pauses in the theater are the showstopping gunungan the mountain-shaped symbols also known as the Tree of Life.

Earlier this year Dhalang (puppet master) Joko Susilo of Otago University curated an exhibition of the puppets in a near Wellington regional gallery called Shadow Play to showcase Indonesian art and music.

He said the wayang purwa (original puppets) were created to stage the Hindu epics Ramayana and Mahabharata, along with old Javanese tales and satires, and celebrations of local events like weddings and anniversaries.

In its new world the gamelan doesn’t always perform traditional works.  Thomas and his friend, the late Jack Body from the NZ School of Music, were also composers, Visual artist Gerard Crewdson, (below) who plays the kenong (a high-pitch cradled gong), has written Cantor’s Infinity.

This is based on the calculations of 19^th century German academic Georg Cantor who developed set theory in mathematical logic. Less complex is the farewell song Now is the Hour which has been adapted for the gamelan.

The players are multitalented and include Tai Cha teachers, a computer programmer and librarians. 

Because of its age and fragility The First Smile is usually heard in the Long Hall.   Most outside performances are now conducted on a more modern set donated by the late Ibu Tien Soeharto, wife of Indonesia’s second president.

It’s called Gamelan Padhang Moncar.  It’s led by artistic director Budi S Putra and its players include some musicians from The First Smile.

“Padhang is brightness or daylight in Javanese, while Moncar means growing or developing vigorously,” said manager Dr Megan Collins. “We are the first gamelan in the world to see the new day. (The International Date Line running down the 180 degree longitude passes alongside NZ).

“It can also be interpreted as harmony and growth reflecting the aspirations of the group, so we’re planning to play in Java and Bali next year”

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First published in The Jakarta Post 25 May 2016)

JACK! INSPIRING OTHERS TO CROSS CULTURES

A symphony of Indonesian love 

Not all festschrifts travel well.  Sometimes the contributors veer away from the subject, driving in another direction in search of their own interests.

Though not with this beautiful book where even the format and design pays tribute to a remarkable musician, photographer, entrepreneur, teacher, song-catcher and above all lover of Indonesia, its people and music.

Jack! celebrates the life of the New Zealand composer Jack Body, ‘his endless musical curiosity’ and ‘love of life’s complexities’.

He died earlier this year shortly after the book was completed and he’d been named a NZ Arts Icon, the nation’s highest arts award and the first composer to be recognized.   

Although the writers knew Body was ill and that the cancer he thought he’d defeated was galloping back, Jack! is seldom maudlin or clogged by irrelevant minutia.

Its one hundred contributors record a life well lived and where the subject was still thinking of compositions to come ‘about what the earth taught me, what the plants said, what the birds said.’  

In it Body talks in interviews about ‘discovering a new sensuality’ in Indonesia where he taught at the Akademi Musik Indonesia. He also found the love of his life, Yono Soekarno.  They lived together till Body died.

‘We met in the Yogyakarta Post Office on Boxing Day in 1976 …[Body had been recording street musicians in the city].  He is beautiful even though he is no longer the dazzling youth I first met.  Oh my God, was I the envy of all, male and female to have such a beautiful and desirable companion!

‘And the miracle of it all is that he loved unlovable me!  I like to point out to the young that love is something that is learned, something that grows with time.  Yono taught me how to love.’

One of the many photos shows Body and Soekarno together shortly after they became a unit, two handsome young men smiling and joyful, as are almost all the pictures. For Body had an orchestra of friends drawn by his cheerful humility and unqualified commitment to music – and the gamelan in particular.

Among his friends were the three women who edited this book – Gillian Whitehead, Scilla Askew and Jennifer Shennan who writes about Body’s ‘inclusive personality and joie de vivre …a low tolerance for boredom, cliché and comfort zones’.

John Stanley [Jack] Body was born in 1944 in Te Aroha, a dairy town in NZ’s North Island.  His father had a small farm and also worked as an earthmoving contractor. 

Though his Dad ‘never really understood my interest in music … [he] certainly didn’t stand in my way’. Body’s parents must have been farsighted because in those days rural NZ was a masculine place where boys played rugby in the mud, swilled beer and prided themselves on their toughness. 

Despite this young Jack was taught the piano and sent to board at the prestigious King’s College in Auckland where his artistic talents were nurtured.

In his final year he garnered a group of friends for a performance of Haydn’s [or maybe Leopold Mozart’s] Toy Symphony. This work with its disputed authorship includes birdsong and a cornucopia of sounds from toy trumpets, whistles and other instruments. 

It was a sign of things to come; apart from his organisational skills and ability to attract support for projects he developed an ear for the natural and human-made noises of the world, particularly in Indonesia, and incorporated them in his compositions.

At Auckland University he graduated in music and then completed a master’s degree studying composition and teaching.

He went to Europe on a NZ grant to study at Cologne and Utrecht.  On his slow way home overland he diverted through Indonesia and his life’s direction was set.

‘The experience of living in Indonesia and of being in a different culture, having to learn the language, hearing the sounds around me, not only the musics but the environment … that gave me a very rich resource.

‘Indonesia was a total environment; it was the weather, the food, the friendships.  I would say also the sensuality.’

In the NZ capital of Wellington where Body eventually became a professor at the School of Music on the campus of Victoria University, there was a gamelan. 

It had been donated in 1973 through the President’s wife Tien Soeharto after formal relationships were established between the two nations.  Instead of gathering dust in a storeroom, where such government gifts are often abandoned, under Body’s leadership the gongs, drums and metallophones have become a key component of Wellington’s music, training hundreds of students and exciting many to study in Indonesia.

It remains one of the better-known ensembles in the city, regularly playing in locations as diverse at Parliament House, churches and concert halls. In a music environment dominated by European traditions, the gamelan offers a splendid alternative and a prelude to exploring the nation’s nearest Asian neighbor.

The NZ players will tour Java next year. Since 1996 Embassy employee and local resident Budi Putra has been the gamelan’s musical director bonding the orchestra with its roots.

The gamelan is not the only enduring legacy of Body’s involvement with Asia.  He also became enchanted by the music of Cambodia and China where he collaborated with the Forbidden City Chamber Orchestra,

When funds could not be found to bring composers and musicians from Indonesia and other Asian countries to NZ, Brady used his own funds, as he did with the Asia Pacific Festivals.

There are several Indonesian contributors to Jack! thankful that their horizons have been expanded through one man’s credo:  Music is the universal language that moves through political, geographical and ethnic obstacles as though these barriers don’t exist.

This book is a primer on how individuals can make a difference in cross-cultural relationships.

Jack! edited by Jennifer Shennan, Gillian Whitehead and Scilla Askew

Published by Steele Roberts, 2015    256 pages

(First published in The Jakarta Post 4 April 2016)

THE KIWI WHO LOVED GAMELAN

A legacy of love and music                                             

Gamelan musician and composer Jack Body, 70, a major and enthusiastic promoter of Indonesian arts, died last Sunday (10 May) in his homeland New Zealand.

His great interest was in using music to cross cultures and create international friendships.

He had long suffered from lung cancer, which till recently was in remission.  He continued to compose.  Poems of Love and War incorporating Javanese themes was judged the best classical album in the 2014 NZ Music Awards.

Shortly before he passed away he was presented with a festschrift of more than 100 contributions simply titled Jack.  He is survived by his long-time partner, linguist Yono Soekarno, originally from Bandar Lampung in Sumatra.

Jack Body first encountered Indonesian culture in the early 1970s when exploring the world as a young musician of great promise.

He had already graduated with a masters degree from Auckland University and with a prestigious arts fellowship went to study in Cologne and at the Institute of Sonology at Utrecht.

Then he took the long way home wandering through Europe and Southeast Asia with his mind and microphone open. The last stop was Indonesia.

“I was an innocent abroad and I knew next to nothing about the country,” he told The Jakarta Post seven years ago. At the time he’d just returned from two visits to Yogyakarta to record the palace guards playing at the kraton.

 “I'd already been to India and was intrigued by the music I'd heard in the streets and villages.

“But Indonesia was quite different. By comparison I found India to be harsh. In Indonesia I started recording the sounds I heard the way other people take photographs of their travels.

“I followed my ears. I recorded birds, animals, street sounds, music. I was fascinated by the fantastic richness of the culture. I liked the way people took things easily. They couldn't be bothered to get hot and bothered.

“What attracted me most? The sensuality.”

He taught at the Akademi Musik Indonesia [now Institut Seni Indonesia – Indonesian Arts Institute] in Yogyakarta for two years. Back home he joined the NZ School of Music in Wellington where he became an associate professor.

His compositions covered all genres, from chamber music through to themes for television soap operas.

Two years ago he accompanied the School’s gamelan orchestra for a tour of Bali and Java. They performed to a full house at the Yogya Gamelan Festival where the locals were stunned to discover Kiwis were so professional in traditional Indonesian music.

A few days before the composer passed away he was awarded the Arts Foundation of NZ Icon Award Whakamana Hiranga, limited to a living circle of just 20 artists.

At the presentation in a Wellington hospice the Foundation said Jack was a prolific world-class composer with a global reach. 

The citation continued: ‘The impact of his artistic life on NZ is profound. Jack has given so much to audiences, local and international composers, musicians and students. The Arts Foundation is honoured that Jack has accepted the Award and proud to have him as the first composer to be named an Icon, and the first Laureate to also receive an Icon Award.’

Professor Body’s works have been performed in the United States, Holland and many other countries. He was also a widely exhibited photographer. His specialty has been cross-cultural compositions and experimental electro- acoustics.

In 2000, to celebrate 25 years of gamelan in NZ, he co-organised BEAT, an International Gamelan Festival with over 100 overseas participants. He was also artistic director of the Asia-Pacific Festivals and Conferences in 1984, 1992 and 2007.

In all his pursuits he set out to embed the music of Asia, and Indonesia in particular, in multicultural NZ. His success is measured by a vast collection of awards, including a NZ Order of Merit.

To help promote Indonesian culture he collected a Javanese gamelan for his university and named it Padhang Moncar.  Tien Soeharto, the late wife of the late Indonesian president Soeharto is believed to have donated the instruments. The School also has a Balinese gamelan, Taniwha Jaya.

In his compositions Professor Body integrated other musical cultures as in Campur Sari for Javanese musician and string quartet, and Polish Dances, for clarinet and Javanese gamelan.

He organized residencies in Wellington for Indonesian artists including, Agus Supriawan and Dody Ekagustdiman [both from West Java], Rafiloza bin Rafii from Minangkabau and Wayan Yudane from Bali.

Wayan said his friend was at the center of the music community because of his lifelong support for young composers and immigrants “like me”.

“He had a way of collaborating that was quite different from other composers, especially western composers.

“Jack would never isolate himself as a composer but was really open to finding something new, finding a friend and putting it all together in a way that everything and everyone was given equal value.  He had a great warmth and heart for Indonesia.”

Budi Putra who directs the Javanese gamelan is also on the local staff of the Indonesian Embassy. He said:

“Although Jack was a great artist he never boasted of his achievements. He taught, he motivated, he worked tirelessly.  He inspired.

“He was always just ‘Jack’.  He dealt with everyone in the same way and was always polite. Despite his illness he continued to think about the continuity of gamelan music in NZ, right to the last seconds of his life.

“We will continue to develop the gamelan as he wished and play at his funeral.”

Composer Michael Asmara said he was inspired to set up the Contemporary Music Festival in Yogyakarta after being introduced to a NZ composers’ workshop by Professor Body.

“I felt Jack was just like the Javanese,” he said. “Yoga was his second home. The way he spoke and acted was very halus [refined and sensitive], and sometimes going round and round. He looked so excited when he played.  His patterns and forms, rhythms and tempo were inspired by Indonesia, but he also introduced other ideas.

“His music will never die.”

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(First published in  The Jakarta Post 12 May 2015)

JAVA'S GEN Y HAS A SOUND

Seeking the sounds of Yogya   

                    

If the graffiti and eaves-to-gutter posters aren’t enough to convince that the Y in Yogyakarta stands for Youth, then the music will. The Central Javanese city, long known as the heart of Java’s high culture, has become the hub of the Archipelago’s contemporary music scene with an unique festival.  Duncan Graham reports.

Malioboro is Yogya’s must-stroll street for cheap.  Trashy souvenirs, knock-off artefacts, the lacquer barely dry on the cracking wood, and smudged batik dominate the pop-up stalls.

There’s excellence to be found, but the visitor has to hunt. Though not for the music. On weekend nights when it’s shoulder-to-shoulder foot traffic and hardly enough space for the horse drawn buggies to sway, the relief is entertainment.

Bus terminals, town squares and other public spaces across the Republic are plagued by talent-free wannabes fingering two-string packing case guitars.  But Malioboro shoppers get to hear quality, from sitar players who could grace a concert hall to angklung bands finding new ways to thrash bamboo and produce crackling dance beats.

Musicians are fickle folk more interested in tempo than timetables so don’t expect a show a night – and remember they’re free, though donations don’t get rebuffed.

Malioboro is bookended with a small gamelan group near the railway station, while the angklung artists are usually found further down near the old Dutch fort of Vredeburg.

Last month (November) the Yogya Contemporary Music Festival was staged with performers and composers from 15 countries. The YCMF was established in 2003 by composer Michael Asmara who studied in Japan.

“Yogya is the place to be for any aspiring young musician,” said Budhi Ngurah, a music school lecturer and former concert cellist at the archipelago’s most prestigious cultural college, the Institut Seni Indonesia (ISI – Indonesian Arts Institute).

“We have more than 600 active students and they’ve come from everywhere.”

In a shady stairwell on the campus with just enough breeze to dry sweat, about a dozen young people tuned their strings and ventilated their flutes.  The mix was discordant, but the energy real.

 “We teach Western music but ethnomusicology and other forms are becoming popular,” said percussion teacher Ayub Prasetiyo who spent nine years studying at ISI.  He played in symphony orchestras before becoming an academic.

 “New classes are opening to meet the demand.”

ISI graduate Gatot Danar Sulistiyanto, 34, remembers the day the music came.  He was 15, but hadn’t been looking because it had been ever present in Magelang since his birth in the Central Java town.  Why search for water when you’re swimming?

“In the Javanese kampong there’s always sound,” said the director of Yogya’s Art Music Today (AMT), an organization encouraging musicians to work together, share resources and develop skills.  

“It’s the mothers’ lullabies as they nurse their babes; it’s the food sellers calling out in the street; it’s the prayers from the mosques; it’s the gamelan, the cocks crowing, the sheep bleating.  Music is everywhere.”

So the muse came to him. Someone handed him a guitar and showed how.  Hardly necessary.  The instincts were already quivering in his fingers and his soul, though there were no known musical abilities in his ancestors.

He became a fan of Iwan Fals, the balladeer famous for his protest songs during the Orde Baru (New Order) period when the authoritarian President Soeharto was forever suspicious of artists and youth - and even more wary when the two combined.

Gatot enrolled in a trade college to learn the electronic skills that his communications technician father used to feed his family.  However the school’s extra-curricular activities were more electric.  Particularly the rock band.

A brief period of bashing skins, thumping a keyboard or scraping strings seems to be a rite of passage for many acned adolescents, but this one didn’t lose interest as he morphed into a man.

He moved to Yogya because that’s where music mattered, and found a curious scene.  “There were plenty of musicians, bands and composers but everyone was doing their own thing,” he said. “There was no coordination, no information about contemporary music, no archiving.”

His eclectic talents got him into ISI where for eight years he learned to read music, play the classical guitar and move from fiddling chords to becoming a professional.

Gatot’s abilities were sharpened to the point where he was invited to New Zealand as a contemporary composer, and to Holland where he worked with chamber musicians.

Then came Yogya’s day of disaster.  On 27 May 2006 a massive shallow jolt caused immense destruction, killing close to 6,000 people and injuring six times as many.

Like the tsunami which struck Aceh in 2004 and inadvertently led to the end of a prolonged civil war, the Yogya quake impacted the music scene.

“That’s when I started pushing people to work together,” Gatot said.  “The earthquake gave us the impetus to connect.”

He started AMT at the Sangkring Art Space in Nitiprayan village on the outskirts of the city, where many artists have moved to create a semi-rural cultural scene.

According to Gatot about ten new art centers have been built in Yogya since 2006, bringing talented people together and establishing a fertile environment that nurtures creativity, where young people can experiment without being ridiculed.

“A few years ago a contemporary music concert would be lucky to attract 40 people,” Gatot said.  “Now hundreds come and the festival runs for three days.

“I’m really optimistic about the future of music in Yogya – it’s in good shape and will be growing for the next five to ten years.” 

Yogya may have become a magnet for young musicians but Gatot resisted suggestions it was unique. He then rattled off a list of major and minor towns across the nation with professional and experimental performers, tossing in names and contact numbers.

When still a student Gatot’s mother urged him to complete his technical qualifications before following his heart. Good advice; it’s his electronics tradecraft that’s financially most useful. 

As a field producer and sound engineer Gatot said he’s able to care for his opera singer wife Ika Sri Wahyumingsih and their young son by earning Rp 500,000 (US$40 a day), a sum he forecasts to rise as demand grows.

ISI academics Budhi and Ayub agree.  “We expect most of our students to get work when they graduate,” they said.  “Some are already employed.”

Music in Yogya includes the sound of money.

(First published in J Plus 7 December 2014)

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MALANG'S MUSIC PATROL

West Side Story  

                                                       

It’s every parent’s horror movie: Their kids fall in with the wrong crowd and end up on the streets, students at Campus Crime.

But in the suburb of Bandulan on Malang’s west side, dads and moms happily push their offspring out of the house, into a gang and off to the harsh city where they bash, smash and frighten sensitive folk. 

The oldies even lay on transport, a cut-down Toyota Kijang that’s little more than four naked tires and two wonky axles, a hazard on the highway and a magnet for cops.

Irresponsible? Just the opposite. Civic authorities worried about youth packs turning feral for want of work should send their welfare staff to Malang right now.  Their assignment: Check the music patrols.

The first started in Bandulan more than five years ago when T-shirt printer Aries Kusuma Brasmantha had a smack-brow idea, beautiful in its simplicity.

His neighborhood had all the usual headaches: lots of kids with little to do.  “I looked at the situation and knew something had to change,” Aries said. He’s now 24, but at the time was a serious-minded teen.

If Bandulan had been in Malvern, a suburb of Melbourne, he’d apply for a community development grant.  But this is Malang, East Java. “We had to do it ourselves,” he said, “the government wasn’t going to help.”

Like many traditional kampong, Bandulan also had the remnants of a gamelan orchestra, stuff that had been lying around forever.  Solid metallophones doubled as doorstops, drums cluttered cupboards, gongs sat silent atop wardrobes. If they hadn’t been brass they’d have rusted away last century.

Performances were rare, space limited and enthusiasm falling faster than the rupiah.  Then there was the music. Rock?  For Generation Now, gamelan is rubble. 

Reasoned the lateral-thinking Aries: “If the people won’t come to listen, let’s go to them, brighten the sound and give it wheels.”

There was a small precedent.  During the holy fasting month of Ramadhan the faithful (and the rest) are roused for their pre-dawn meal by car horns and loud speakers.

Some streets competed for the most creative wake-up call, leading to more sounds than bells and whistles.

Aries mouse-clicked his way into secular society, nibbling ideas from here and there. You Tube videos of carnivals in Spain were to his taste, with street parades of spectacular displays.

Why not build a multi-level stage on an old vehicle chassis, make it into a fantasy chariot of fiery colors, fill it with musicians – and away we go?

The kids thought this wasn’t just cool, it was chillingly revolutionary. The music patrol was born and has been so successful it’s been copied.  Now about 30 teams compete for mayoral prizes.

It works like this; a community - in Aries’ case the families who worship at the Al-Hidayah Musholla (prayer room) - club together to buy a dead van. 

They strip out the engine and bodywork, then build an elaborate framework for the players and their instruments, creating a benign juggernaut. Because space is limited and the construction less than sturdy, the lightweaight kids are the performers.

The youngest is six, mister tambourine man Galih Fitro (pictured left).. 

Like sailors on a 16^th century Man o’War frigate, they perch in the rigging while their dads push and steer the monster, its tiger figurehead snarling away the traffic.

Dancing in front are the girls, singing and swaying to the beat behind. Flashing lights, flags, swooping cardboard eagles, bunting and banners, Javanese designs swirling in color, drapes, calligraphy – and sound.

If noise could be weighed, the music patrols would pulverize the pavement. In competitions it’s not just the flamboyance of the display, it’s also about decibels. The kids whack the gongs and drums with such vigor and style the show becomes a spectacle to be appreciated even when wearing earplugs. They’re X Factor plus.

Having no funds for instruments the kampong did what it does best – improvise. Discarded 200 liter steel and plastic containers have been salvaged and the tops sliced, car inner tube rubber stretched across the gap. Sew on a skirt and you’ve drummed up a drum. Add water to change the pitch. Unbeatable!

The total crew of cooks, costume stitchers, water carriers, traffic marshals, maintenance men, musical advisers, choreographers, moms with tissues, grans with snacks and dads with gaffer tape comes to 120. Whatever your talent, you’re wanted.

It all sounds creatively chaotic but the show has now got so big that discipline, rehearsals and forward planning are necessary.

Malang’s music patrols fit into the tradition of medieval Europe’s long-gone strolling minstrels and Trinidad’s steelpan drum bands, entertainment nurtured in poverty, need and a determination to enjoy life.  The beat goes on.

The Al-Hidayah Crew (AHC) snared trophies and public attention. Sponsors (not the cigarette companies that infiltrate most youth music) helped with uniforms. Would the crew play at festivals and commercial events?  They would.

Businessman Wahyu Pambudi wanted something bright and different for the opening of his convenience store – so for Rp 1 million (US $88) plus meals and drinks he got the AHC to drum up business (minus their chariot) and smother the traffic noise, which they did with splendid ease.

“I wanted this group because since I heard them at a percussion festival,” he said. “They’re school kids but they play with such enthusiasm. They make you feel good and proud.”

Despite its Islamic credentials the AHC’s repertoire is far from solemn.  “It’s supposed to be religious,” said Aries. “But we get a bit bored with this, so compose our own, and include pop.”  

Half the income goes to buying more gear and paying for dancing instructors; the rest goes to the kids as pocket money, said AHC treasurer Widya Astuti.

That makes it worth being on the streets.

(First published in The Jakarta Post 8 October 2013)

  

KIWI HITS RIGHT GAMELAN NOTES

A striking musician                                                                     

Public servants in the Ministry of National Education must have had links with tourism promoters when they supported musician Rupert Snook for a prestigious Indonesian government award.

For the 22-year old exuberant New Zealander has a simple philosophy:  “When you think something is really amazing then you want to tell everyone else about it.”

In his ‘amazing’ basket is Indonesian culture and music.  Although he’s yet to mallet a metallophone in the Republic, he’s already vacuumed up more about the country and mastered more of the language than many long-term visitors.  If all goes well he’s set to become an enthusiastic booster for the Archipelago.

“I fell in love with Indonesia as a teenager when I encountered the gamelan in Wellington,” he said.  “The music is so alive, so outrageously innovative.  It was like encountering an alien, though in a really good way.

“So I set out to learn more by reading and talking to Indonesians who’ve been helping me with Bahasa Indonesia.  Later I’ll study Balinese.”

Last year he was named by the Indonesian Embassy as the best gamelan student in NZ.  This year he graduated from Victoria University of Wellington with a degree in music.  In July 2012 he’ll head to Bali.

As NZ’s only recipient of a 2012 Darmasiswa Scholarship he’ll study gamelan music at Denpasar’s Institut Seni Indonesia (ISI – Indonesian Arts Institute) for a year. The scholarship provides tuition fees and living expenses.

The Darmasiswa is ‘to promote and increase the interest in the language and culture of Indonesia among the youth of other countries. It has also been designed to provide stronger cultural links and understanding among participating countries.’

Commented Rupert: “This is extraordinary; I’ve never heard of a government offering scholarships to foreigners so they can study the culture. I’ve had a privileged life in NZ and so fortunate to be going to Indonesia.

“I don’t really know what to expect but I like being thrown in at the deep end. As the Indonesian government has accepted me I hope it shouldn’t be too hard.

“This is something I’ve wanted to do for a long time. The more I know of the music the more I learn of the culture.  Through music we can bridge differences.”

Rupert started learning music when he was seven and living in the South Island city of Christchurch.  He studied classical violin and piano but suffered from asthma so spent long periods in hospital.

Others might have found this experience depressing, but Rupert enjoyed his stays.  He was so impressed by the professionals he encountered that he decided to become a doctor, following the example of an older brother and sister.

Then the family moved to Wellington where the teenager found his school grades for science were average while he was scoring 100 per cent for music.

Rupert attended Victoria University’s Young Musicians’ Program.  Here he encountered ethnomusicologist and composer Jack Body, an academic at the NZ School of Music and manager of the Gamelan Padhang Moncar.

 (The Javanese term means ‘growing brightness’ and refers to the Wellington gamelan being the first in the world to greet a new dawn every day.  NZ lies just west of the International Date Line.)

Professor Body, who lectured at the Akademi Musik Indonesia in Yogya, is another musician infected by enthusiasm for Indonesia. He insisted that although Rupert was enrolled for composition he had to include units in performance.

“Rupert is the kind of curious, intelligent young musician who will undoubtedly maximise all the opportunities he is offered,” he said.

“Today's cultures are largely dominated by the West. It’s very important that we in the West make the effort to understand the cultures and values that are different from our own.  Studying gamelan provides a perfect entry into the Indonesian world.”

There are two gamelan sets in Wellington, one Javanese, the other Balinese, called Gamelan Taniwha Jaya - a mix of Maori and Balinese words meaning a great supernatural creature. (Pictured left)

Apart from the tutors the players are Kiwis.  Not all are students – some have been playing for pleasure for more than 30 years.

The orchestra has toured Indonesia in the past startling audiences encountering foreign musicians who have mastered the nation’s traditional instruments.

Tutor Budi Putra, who lives in NZ and is a graduate of the ISI in Solo, has been directing the Javanese gamelan since 1996. “Rupert is very smart and active,” he said.  “I’m optimistic about his future.”

Balinese composer I Wayan Gde Yudane agreed:  “His ability and comprehension is backed by his determination and hard work.”

Rupert joined the orchestra and found the collegiate environment strikingly different from what he knew as a Western musician. 

“It’s a real ensemble experience and you have to go with the flow,” he said.  “This isn’t something that can be practised alone at home – you have to be with a group and aware of others.

“There’s no conductor in the European style, though someone may lead.  It’s better not to think too much about what you’re doing – let your hands do the talking.  It’s wonderful to watch players’ hands fly over the instruments.

“There’s no tempo – yet everyone plays together using their peripheral vision to get cues.  When we hit as one there’s an explosion of sound.”

When the orchestra played at the Embassy to a mainly Indonesian audience Rupert discovered an ambience different from any other venue and great appreciation.  “It was such a pleasant experience,” he said. “Everyone was so friendly and wanted to share – and the food was also interesting.”

Like many NZ university students Rupert worked to pay for his education.  For the past five years he’s been clipping tickets on the city’s trains, teaching guitar and helping a student with special needs.

“To compose you need to be totally focussed, very single-minded, and that’s how I’m approaching the language,” he said. “I want to be stretched to the limit.

“Getting the Darmasiswa is a really big thing in my life.  You won’t recognise me in twelve months time.”

(First published in The Jakarta Post 4 June 2012)

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WAYAN GDE YUDANE

A Man for all Cultures Duncan Graham

A prophet is not without honor – except in his own country and among his own kin.

Apart from being a Biblical text it could be the epitaph for Balinese composer Wayan Gde Yudane who finds his work better appreciated outside the Archipelago.

“To be honest, I’m not very popular in Indonesia,” he said in the New Zealand capital, Wellington while shuddering with a pneumatic-drill toothache.

“That’s why I like to live here. People enjoy my music and they respect me as a composer, though I’ve also had to wash dishes in a restaurant to make ends meet. I’ll have to get my tooth fixed in Indonesia. Dentists in NZ are so expensive.

“Despite these problems I can hear my music played here. I don’t know that I can do so in my homeland. The people there just listen to pop. In Wellington I offered to teach gamelan free. No Indonesians took up the chance – only Kiwis.

“I wrote the music for the NZ Trio when it performed in Jakarta. (In 2007) They play the best chamber music in the country, but when I went to the hotel they (staff) treated me like rubbish. Indonesians can be racist towards other Indonesians.”

The lean and lank Yudane wears the uniform of the Indonesian artist – black shapeless clothes, long hair, bearded wildman looks and benign countenance. His detached demeanor is at odds with intense feelings about his craft.

Though to call him an artis is to corrupt his creativity. The word, hijacked from English and since corrupted, has lost its quality of compliment. It’s been devalued by tabloid overuse, particularly when describing sinetron mayflies.

The 46-year old musician is no temporary talent or cultural monoglot. The son of an architect who made gamelan instruments, Yudane started his career, primarily as a sound and scenic designer in theater. That was after studying at the Academy of Performing Arts in Denpasar, graduating in 1991.

At that time gamelan music was everywhere. “I was surrounded by it – my family, my neighbors, my friends,” he said. “It wasn’t something separate. I was encouraged to become a musician.”

One of his earliest jobs was in Japan, at the Kumamoto Performing Arts Festival. He designed sets for the Singapore Arts Festival, then got a scholarship to study and work in France with the Le Temps Fort theatre company.

Yudane is now well known overseas, particularly in Australasia and Europe, as a contemporary composer experimenting in fusing the gamelan with Western music and instruments.

In Australia he won The Age newspaper’s Critics Award for Creative Excellence for his work with the Adelaide Festival. He also scored strong reviews for his “dramatic and technically ferocious” work Paradise Regained dedicated to the Bali bomb victims.

For the past six months he’s been working as artist-in-residence at the NZ School of Music. It’s not the first time he’s been in the South Pacific nation. He held a similar position eight years ago at Victoria University and is married to a Kiwi teacher.

Yudane’s farewell concert, titled Musical Hunters and Collectors (“I’m both) included Temporal Paradox, which involved a violin and a viola along with the gamelan, and the self-explanatory Causality for Piano.

Apart from his own compositions there were works by Wayan Lotring and Wayan Beratha.

Lotring, who died in 1983, is considered to be the most famous gamelan composer of the 20th century. He was responsible for a revision of Balinese compositions back in the 1920s; Yudane attributes this to the influence of the Dutch who brought Western music to the Archipelago.

Beratha, who is now 86, is credited with pioneering the gong kebyar style of gamelan, with lots of sudden clashing and mood shifts.

“I don’t know how to best describe gong kebyar,” Yudane said. Suggestions included fireworks, a metaphor he rejected because the image was too ephemeral. “Maybe like turning on a light switch – that’s better.

“I studied under Beratha – he’s my hero. But he won’t listen to my music – he doesn’t like it. He says it’s too Western, that it’s gone too far and is too individualistic.

“That’s OK. I’m a contemporary composer. The gamelan doesn’t just have to play traditional Indonesian music. I write what I like, though I want it to be listened to by everyone. My interests are eclectic. (The French composer) Debussy is my favorite.

“I tell students in Indonesia: ‘You must learn the tools. You must be able to write music. It’s OK in Indonesia to memorise, but you can’t do that overseas. You don’t need to go abroad but you must listen to music from everywhere.’”

Individualism: It’s the Indonesian curse (or quality) to be seen as different, strange, or maybe even dangerous if you stand apart from the crowd, like to walk alone and feel comfortable with your own company. No problems in the West, but a worry in the East.

“This is why so many follow pop kitsch (he spits out the words, as though he’s found a cockroach in his coffee) even though Indonesians claim to like gamelan,” he said.

“I don’t follow any trends, and I never will. Sometimes I feel that I’m not part of Indonesia.”


Wellington has two sets of gamelan, Balinese and Javanese, both played by performing arts students. Only one musician is Indonesian – Budi Putra, the cultural officer at the Indonesian Embassy.

Balinese gamelan music is quite different from Javanese, strident, energetic and declamatory. It’s also more disciplined than the enigmatic and subtle Javanese style.

By the time you read this Yudane will be back in Bali composing for film and theater. Then he’ll move to Belfast, the capital of Northern Ireland, where he’s been before, and expects his work will get recognition and respect.

That doesn’t mean the man is vain or arrogant – he’s humble and polite, but hates the superficiality of pop with a loathing others reserve for snakes in the toilet - along with the public’s indifference to Indonesian music.

“My message to other composers is this: ‘Please don’t just listen to what you like. Widen your interests. Every single day new music is being made in the world. Make sure your work is interesting and exciting. Don’t go with the flow’.”

(First published in The Jakarta Post 27 October 2010)


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DARYUSTI'S DANCING DELIGHT

Raising triple threat performers

Noel Coward’s advice to Mrs Worthington to keep her daughter off the stage could have been written for Daryusti.

Like the famous English performer and composer Daryusti is multi-talented, a dancer, choreographer and academic – head of the Padangpanjang Institute of Arts in West Sumatra. He’s also the father of three girls.

“One is a chemist, another a doctor and the third is still studying,” he said. “I didn’t push them to go on the stage, though that’s what my father did to me. I know just how tough it can be.”

Daryusti’s father, a teacher and amateur drummer, urged his talented son to study the arts – which he did in Yogyakarta to get a master’s degree. Dad also sold food to help young Daryusti get a formal education along with qualifications from the university of hard knocks.

Those who think the entertainment industry as a life of non-stop glamor punctuated by air kissing get gored by reality when they seek enrolment at the Padangpanjang institute. Half the candidates don’t get beyond the doors of the stylish Minangkabau building with its multi-peak roof because they don’t make the grade.

At the moment 1,800 have gained entry to a multiplicity of courses in seven faculties covering most art forms, but they do need to watch their step. Failure to match the high standards required can rapidly lead to a dash for the exit, said Daryusti.

“We insist on students being disciplined,” he said in New Zealand while leading a cultural group called Sumatran Sounds. “None of our graduates are jobless because their quality is so high. We attract students from all parts of the Archipelago and most are women.

“That’s not surprising because Minangkabau culture is matrilineal. In West Sumatra children are close to their mothers – in Java they’re close to their fathers. Women are dominant in many areas including land and property ownership. Our fees aren’t high – Rp 600,000 (US $66) a semester for locals – and we have 22 overseas students.

“Applicants must also show creativity, talent, devotion to the arts and demonstrate a strong willingness to learn. Their flexibility and ability to improvise are also taken into consideration.”

Kiwi ethnomusicologist Dr Megan Collins who spent two years studying in Sumatra said the Institute was equal to prestigious arts institutions in Yogyakarta and Solo.

“It’s successful because it’s supported by the local communities as well as the national government,” she said. “It’s helping keep the arts in Sumatra alive.”

Some of these arts were on display during a week of workshops and performances in the NZ capital Wellington.

The visit of the 15 performers and four officials led by Daryusti was funded by the Indonesian Department of Education and the Indonesian Embassy in NZ.

Sadly the tour was not well publicised so few got the chance to see some spectacular and polished presentations that drew standing ovations from those lucky enough to attend two public performances.

These featured traditional Sumatran dancing and music, along with contemporary items featuring new instruments, and works exploring the fusion of European, Maori and Indonesian art. The artists were not afraid to adapt and alter, modify and contract to suit foreign audiences.

It’s not the first time the Institute has sent performers overseas. “We’ve been to Holland, Germany, Australia and the US,” said Daryusti. “We need to experience other cultures and draw on what we see and hear.

“We’re in Wellington because the previous ambassador Amris Hassan knew of Dr Collins’ studies in Sumatra and her role in the NZ School of Music which has a gamelan orchestra. ”

On the Wellington program that included “serious and challenging artistic material aimed at artists and university students” was a dynamic item called Tari Rundo (night watchman’s dance). This was choreographed by Daryusti and based on the neighborhood security system used in Indonesian villages.

Deftly using torches and sarong the male and female dancers moved with the elegance normally seen in traditional Western ballet, through to the energy found in boisterous Broadway musicals. The result was a robust piece that also owed much to contemporary Chinese theatre, as its creator acknowledged.

“Dance has to be created out of knowledge,” Daryusti said. “After observing, I write then deliver my ideas to the cast.

“When I’m directing dancers at first I tend to be authoritarian. If a doctor can’t cure his or her patients they can’t stay in medicine. It’s the same with the arts – do it right, get it right or quit. Dancers need to be fit and strong.

“However as the work develops I allow more ideas to come from the performers. I start as a dictator – but end as a democrat.”

More traditional works included the piring (plate) dance representing seasonal changes. The performers hold dishes in their palms only using centrifugal force to keep the crockery in place as they twirl, leap, dash and roll. It’s a dazzling piece demonstrating the performers’ dexterity – not a dance to try in the kitchen.

Randai is folk theatre that features much loud pounding of baggy pantaloons. It’s a rugged athletic work with elements similar to the Russian kalinka dancing.

Many pieces in the Sumatra Sounds repertoire require the cast to be ‘triple threats’ – the most feared and admired of stage performers able to sing, dance and act.

Daryusti is a small, dapper man with a penchant for flamboyant multi-colored ethnic jackets matched – or mismatched -with Western clothes. This makes him look nothing like the standard senior academic in bureaucratic black.

At 49 he still occasionally dances, but said his time was now taken up moving between board meetings, leaving little opportunity to star on the boards. It took four months of rehearsals to perfect Tari Rundo. His last public performance was in Melbourne in 2009.

“We like to tour overseas so people can learn more about Indonesian culture and visit our country,” he said. “Sumatran culture is seldom promoted, unlike music and dance from Java and Bali.

“This creates a misconception that Indonesian culture is only found in particular areas when in fact our unique cultures are spread throughout the Archipelago. We should love Indonesian culture, it is so diverse and every region has its own special characteristics.”

(First published in The Jakarta Post 29 Sept 2010)

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JACK BODY: Kiwi master of Indonesian music

Jack Body
Interpreting Indonesia’s sensuality through the Bard © Duncan Graham 2008

Living in one of the most isolated Western countries in the world requires adjustments and rituals. For Pakeha (white Kiwis) one essential has long been the big trip abroad known colloquially as OE, or overseas experience.

This journey, mainly to explore the northern hemisphere and seek the family’s roots, is an important part of the culture of New Zealand, a country still searching for its identity.

Young musicologist Jack Body was no exception. He’d already graduated with a masters degree from Auckland University and won a prestigious arts fellowship. In the late 1960s he headed for Europe where he studied in Cologne and at the Institute of Sonology at Utrecht.

Then he took the long way home wandering through Europe and South-East Asia with his mind and microphone open. The last stop was Indonesia.

“I was an innocent abroad and I knew next to nothing about the country,” he said. “I’d already been to India and was intrigued by the music I’d heard in the streets and villages.

“But Indonesia was quite different. By comparison I found India to be harsh. In Indonesia I started recording the sounds I heard, like other people take photographs of their travels.

“I followed my ears. I recorded birds, animals, street sounds, music. I was fascinated by the fantastic richness of the culture. I liked the way that people took things easily. They couldn’t be bothered to get hot and bothered.

“What attracted me most? The sensuality.”

Back in NZ Body transcribed some of the music he’d collected, a laborious task but one he thought necessary to understand what he’d heard. He also knew he needed more of the seductive archipelago.

In 1976 he scored a guest lectureship at the Akademi Musik Indonesia in Yogyakarta where he stayed for two years. On his return home he joined the academic staff of the School of Music at Wellington’s Victoria University where he’s now an associate professor.

He’s been a featured composer in the US and Holland, a widely exhibited photographer and he also runs a music publisher called Waiteata Music Press. His speciality has been cross-cultural compositions and experimental electro-acoustics.

In these jobs he’s set out to bring the music of Asia, and Indonesia in particular, to the attention of Kiwis and he’s done this with such success that he’s won a swag of awards, including a NZ Order of Merit in the 2001 Honors List. The following year his recordings titled Pulse won the NZ Music Award for the Best New Classical CD.

And all the time he’s been promoting Indonesian culture, along the way collecting a set of Javanese gamelan instruments for his university donated by Ibu Tien Soeharto, the wife of the late Indonesian president.

This year he’s been back to Indonesia twice, recording music played by the soldiers of the kraton (palace) in Yogyakarta. He said the music was an intriguing and ancient European-derived mix of fifes, drums and other instruments performed by men in quaint uniforms whose origins could well be the topic of a PhD.

Body’s work isn’t the only way Kiwis are learning more about Indonesia. He’s organized numerous residencies in Wellington for Indonesian artists and praised the Indonesian government for offering a range of cultural scholarships for structured three-month arts programs. These are expected to be enhanced later this year when an agreement between Indonesia and NZ is signed allowing young people from both countries to get work visas.

Now 64 Body shows no sign of going stale, repetitive or monotone. If he followed the Shakespeare formula he’d be ‘the lean and slippered pantaloon’ but he moves, physically and intellectually, as nimbly as his students.

He has the quirky mannerisms of a long-time creative artist living in a parallel universe where music rules. While he has to be involved in teaching and university administration his mind seems to be somewhere else, pulling sounds and ideas together for some future fusion.

His latest production (“exhilarating, the most ambitious I’ve ever done”), staged with help from the Indonesian Embassy in NZ and the Asia-NZ Foundation, was the Seven Ages of Man, a ‘cross-cultural, multi-media music theater’ piece based on Shakespeare’s famous lines in All’s Well That Ends Well:

All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages.

Body’s idea was to mix bits of the Bard in English with music from the Javanese gamelan and a Balinese gamelan, plus an electric violin, four vocalists singing in Javanese and Balinese, and have the lot interpreted in dance and puppetry.

Translation of the Shakespeare was not without difficulties. The verse about the soldier ‘full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,’ caused problems.

“In Shakespeare’s time most of the military were mercenaries, but in Indonesia being a soldier is an elitist occupation,” said Body. “We had to make some adjustments in the language.

”Many people in the English-speaking world have been taught the Seven Ages of Man and I found Indonesians related well to the sentiments.”

The composers included the Javanese gamelan director Budi Putra (originally from Solo but now a NZ resident) and the Balinese gamelan director I Wayan Gde Yudane. Most of the gamelan players were university students and staff, including Jack Body.

In the wrong hands this could have become a real dog’s breakfast, but in fact it worked brilliantly on every level – emotional, imaginative and creative.

There were several reasons; the inclusion of the masked multi-talented Balinese dalang (puppet master) I Nyoman Sukerta as a musician, singer, dancer and actor, was a masterstroke.

So was a lighting system that included a haze machine, recreating in the Wellington timber studio the misty, musty, dusty, mysterious, spooky, smoky and almost tangible atmosphere found in villages and kampongs of Indonesia come nightfall. The only thing absent was the scent of clove cigarettes, for NZ takes its anti-smoking laws seriously.

“The reception has been great,” said the exuberant ethnomusicologist. “I love this synthesis – I’ve long wanted to use dance and now I’ve got the theater bug. We’re hoping to take the production on tour around NZ, maybe even to Indonesia. That would be terrific.”

(First published in The Jakarta Post 11 November 2008)

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