Composer Sinta bridging East and West in music

Her shiny black hair in a tight, short bob reminiscent of 1920s' actress Louise Brooks, musician Sinta Wullur gesticulates in an Amsterdam cafe opposite the Tropenmuseum (Asian Civilizations Museum).

Outside, great gusts of cold wind and gray skies remind us that we are in Europe, far from Bandung where Sinta was born in November 1958.

Scheduled to perform at an international women's musical performance in Soeterijn, the museum's amphitheater, Sinta barely had time to sit down for an interview, let alone grab a sandwich. The dynamic 45 year old leads an active life; even when she comes home to husband Jan Rokus van Roosendael, a composer and gamelan player, the beat goes on.

Although Sinta was born in the capital of Sundanese music, at home she grew up with Western classics played by her mother, a noted piano teacher trained in the Netherlands. Her father was a renowned Sino-Indonesian psychologist, who moved with his family to Europe in 1968.

"I was accepted at Sweelinck Conservatory (in Amsterdam) at the age of 17 and embarked on piano studies," Sinta said in her clear voice. "But later on I realized that playing the piano is a lonely profession, not like playing in an orchestra where there is an exchange between fellow performers and one can even get to play different instruments!"

Sinta had already begun to study composition at the conservatory after graduating as an accomplished piano player and was actively writing music for film and theater productions. In 1984, she studied composition with Ton de Leeuw at the same conservatory.

She continued her studies at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague with the composers Theo Loevendie and Louis Andriessen in 1988. Both teachers were drawn to non-Western music and helped Sinta rediscover her roots.

"These composition teachers were deeply influenced by Eastern philosophy and musical tonalities," she explained. "I felt that I was not ignoring my own heritage while taking advantage of the best on offer in Europe."

Sinta "rediscovered" Indonesia while on holiday, notably the wide range of gamelan music in the archipelago. Between 1983- 1988, she returned to Bali in several summers and learned to become part of a whole ensemble while mastering a range of instruments, and then later in Java. In Amsterdam she joined the gamelan group led by Elsje Plantema.

In Ubud and Denpasar, she enjoyed gender wayang and accompanying wayang kulit (shadow puppet plays). Sinta even accompanied famous Balinese dalang (puppetmaster) Wayan Wiji from Sukawati gamelan group on his trip to Amsterdam. She also perfected her knowledge of Sundanese singing and flute playing, and later classical Javanese singing.

Sinta felt more rounded and fulfilled musically. In Bali she founded the Balinese gamelan orchestras Tirta and Irama. Since 1992, she has been a pesinden (singer) of the Javanese ensemble Widosari in the Netherlands.

Playing in Western and Eastern ensembles are two totally different experiences, but what if one wishes to combine the two?

"Trying to compose music for both kinds of instruments annoyed me because the basic sounds clashed, so I began to think about another type of gamelan orchestra based on the Western scale," Sinta said. "I tried to envisage changing the traditional pentatonic scale to a 12-tone chromatic scale."

The frustrated composer had heard of a solution to such a problem in Denmark, where the percussionist Ivan Hansen had constructed a chromatic gamelan in Balinese style. In 1990 Sinta decided to give it a try after playing on Hansen's instruments.

Sinta ordered a set of gamelan instruments in Western tuning from craftsman Pak Suhirdjan in Yogyakarta, but only after sending him a set of 12 tuning forks normally used by piano tuners to be sure that the gamelan would sound right. The new gamelan was inaugurated on the occasion of the performance of Lingkaran, composed by Sinta in 1995 for seven percussionists. The gamelan instruments were placed on supports high enough for Western musicians to play without having to sit cross-legged.

Sinta composed more new works for the concert series "Gongs & Strings", one for chromatic gamelan only and one for chromatic gamelan and cello solo. Ensemble Multifoon was born in 1998 and played with the Odyssey String Quartet to produce the first CD featuring Sinta's Mata Angin, Detlefsen's Malam dan Hari and Van Zijp's Mel Benniget.

From then on, there was no stopping Sinta's creativity. She began composing an opera based on the Ramayana, using a system of musical flashbacks exploring the kidnapping of Sita. The first 40-minute version, The Golden Deer, premiered last November at the small concert hall De Rode Hoed in Amsterdam. The sparse budget made for greater creativity in costumes and verses translated into English by a Canadian poet.

Understandably, audiences in the Netherlands are impatiently awaiting the complete 90-minute version of Sinta's Ramayana Opera. Sinta is already dreaming of bringing the opera to Indonesia. Meanwhile, another joint musical project has just been realized with the opening of Het Gamelanhuis in Amsterdam in mid- January.

-- Kunang Helmi-Picard