Experimental guitarist Engl creates a sound of his own
Experimental guitarist Engl creates a sound of his own
By Franki Raden
JAKARTA (JP): Many of the world's best composers started their careers as instrumentalists.
Ardhi Engl, a German-Indonesian musician born in Munich 39 years ago, is one of these artists. His talents as a composer and guitarist are just as special. As a guitarist, he is a superb exponent of classical music although he is also an accomplished composer of experimental music.
Engl's two-day concert at Gedung Kesenian Jakarta last weekend confirmed he is a musician of admirable talent. He presented himself as a guitarist maestro, one of the few truly top-quality foreign guitarists to have performed here since the 1970s.
His repertoire is rich (from Milan to Bach, Sor, Torroba, Tarrega, Turino, Villa Lobos and de Falla), technique highly sophisticated, intonation steady, articulation clear and interpretation charming.
With a guitar, it is difficult to achieve a perfect combination of the above four elements. But Engl played so extraordinarily well that his fans asked him to treat them with thee encores at the end of the Aug. 8 concert.
Some even returned to hear the concert again the following night, particularly to enjoy again his own work called Suacha- Hoacha-Klanggartenszenen.
One of this work's attractions is its instrumentation. In Suacha-Hoacha-Klanggartenszenen, Engl does not use conventional Western instruments but instruments he created. They are a combination of sound sources that we find around us in everyday life, such as drops of water, aluminum jars, plastic pipes, fan spokes, badminton rackets, music boxes and guitars transformed into new musical instruments.
With amplification, this set of simple unconventional instruments made a symphony orchestra much richer in timbre than conventional Western instruments. Again, Engl proved that his 20 years of experimenting with the sounds of music have been a success.
The creation's characteristics are among the most peculiar of all the works of the 20th century. Over the past 400 years, Western musical culture has ignored the timbre element.
To perform his works, Engl was assisted by two Indonesian instrumentalists, I Wayan Sadra and Iwan Hasan. He also employed improvisations which required assistants with composing backgrounds.
The musicians were responsible for creating a musical composition audible in the whole auditorium. This required the musicians' imagination, collaboration and interaction.
What transpires is that no two performances are ever alike. In this context, I observed that the three musicians did better during their rehearsal than during the actual concert.
In rehearsal they were able to fill in musical moments with sounds that streamed together unbelievably smoothly. The sound of plastic pipes beaten and blown, a slab of steel and guitar rubbed, badminton rackets strummed, water dropped in aluminum jars, the sound of music boxes that came one after the other made a beautiful symphony.
However, in the concert, the sound dynamics did not ebb and flow, and the sounds did not stream from the stage as harmoniously. The result was that the fragmentation of Suacha- Hoacha-Klanggartenszenen was rather predictable.
The three musicians should have spent longer practicing how to produce a consistently good musical arrangement. Engl, Sadra and Iwan had only one week to rehearse. In the future, Engl should allow more time to collaborate with local musicians to perform his wonderful works like Suacha-Hoacha-Klanggartenszenen.
Having said that, the differences between Engl, a classical musician, and local traditionalists, did produce a musical event that would have been worthy of praise if performed anywhere in the world.
The writer is a noted music composer.