British ensemble teaches us about music

By Y. Bintang Prakarsa

JAKARTA (JP): An interesting incident happened when the British ensemble, Piano Circus, a group of six pianists playing contemporary music, rehearsed Steve Reich's Six Pianos in a workshop involving students and teachers from the Jakarta Arts Institute (IKJ) during their tour from Sept. 24 to Sept. 26.

As they trained the six participants to play their part and coordinate rhythms with other players, my ethnomusicologist colleague, who was present with me at the occasion, quickly recognized the piece's interlocking rhythm. The British were just repackaging what Balinese musicians have practiced every day and giving it back to us Indonesians, she said.

She was more than right. In fact, she summed up the history of Western involvement in Indonesian arts from the last century. It is well known that colonialism significantly enriched the West not only economically, but also artistically.

Legend has it that Debussy's orchestral piece Nuages was inspired by his experience with a Javanese gamelan brought by the Dutch to the Paris Exposition in 1889. But it was not long before that Western artists were no longer satisfied to watch the subjugated people from a distance.

In Bali, European and North American artists, like Colin McPhee, who was the first one to compose music using Balinese interlocking patterns, came and lived with the people, learned their arts and made use of the knowledge about them for their own advantage.

The same artistic appropriation of Indonesian musical elements continues now in the political postcolonial world. Lately, there has been a marked sophistication in the search for the more substantial.

Here, substantial means not relying on sound effects, like impressions of the gamelan sound affected by the use of pentatonic scales, but, more subtly, on the technical and structural features of Indonesian music. This is possible with the emergence of a new generation of Western performers who are trained in Javanese and Balinese music, and who are then able to analytically understand the inner working of the music and apply it to their own.

To illustrate this, let us turn to Steve Reich, whose Six Pianos was well exposed during the Piano Circus's workshop and collaborative performances with Sujiwo Tejo and his group Eksotika Karmawibhangga Indonesia.

Reich is a minimalist, and minimalists reject the conventional avant-garde music which values complexity, innovation and variation by a deliberate use of simple and repetitive material, even though the last item is found abundantly in non-Western music.

In Six Pianos, the minimalist style can be observed very easily. Each of its six parts is assigned for one pianist who plays simple chords in eighth notes and eighth notes only! Furthermore, it is constructed on a natural D major scale, meaning there is no raised or lowered note or change of key.

Six Pianos's interlocking parts and displaced rhythm show Reich's debt to Balinese music which he studied in the early seventies. But it is useless to look for any Balinese melody since Reich uses a compositional and playing technique as the starting point and not as the impression of sound.

Originally, the interlocking pattern is called kotekan, which is produced by two players striking the gamelan in alternation. When played at great speed, the technique becomes very challenging because it requires great precision to achieve a clean execution.

Now what Reich does with the technique is quite simple. Against an unrelenting kotekan pattern on the first three parts, which he changes only twice during the entire composition, the other three parts play, together or separately, the same motifs several beats late, thereby creating a rhythmic counterpoint or canon.

Indonesian music will continue to fascinate and inspire Western musicians, and it will be recycled and incorporated into their music and resold here as new products.

What would traditional Indonesian composers and performers say to this century old challenge? Apparently most Indonesian artists with a traditional base can not offer any significant answer because their knowledge on Western music is superficial, if not erroneous. This is evident in Sujiwo Tejo's unfocused response to Reich's music. While the members of Piano Circus might express their satisfaction with this temporary partnership out of sheer exoticism, I was concerned with the lack of conception in Sujiwo's response.

The idea of the collaboration was like giving a commentary or improvisation on Reich's piece while it was being played. Judging from the performance, I don't think Sujiwo studied Reich's score carefully enough to prepare his responses.

Lacking any conceptual and structural guidance, the collaboration turned out to be just another show of peaceful coexistence, not unlike the simultaneous "multi-cultural" performances of electronic keyboards and gamelan on Indonesian TV. If he knew that Reich's music was just about how to manipulate a kotekan, then he could be more resourceful instead of repeating the same materials in the same sequence over and over.

Traditional Indonesian musicians who want to take on the challenge of Western music seriously must learn something about Western music, especially its instrumental techniques and its musical forms and formal procedures.

With the appearance of original compositions that use deeper structures of Western music (how about mixing a loud and soft style of Javanese gamelan music using a sonata form?), Indonesian music will no longer be viewed as storehouses for the one-sided enrichment of Western music, but also as music that exploits the resources of the world, including the classical Western one.

The writer teaches Western music history at the Jakarta Theological Seminary.