Gutama Soegijo surprises in latest show

Gutama Soegijo surprises in latest show

Bintang Prakarsa, Contributor, Jakarta, ritornello@hotmail.com

Meeting Paul Gutama Soegijo always brings surprises. Last
Thursday, Oct. 30, at Bentara Budaya, Jakarta, he gave a solo
gamelan (traditional, ethnic Javanese music) performance at the
opening of a sculpture exhibition Jejak Perjalanan (Traces of a
journey) by his older brother, Gregorius Sidharta Soegijo, on the
occasion of the latter's 70th birthday.

Even if a bit disturbed by the noisy audience who made him cut
short his performance way sooner than the promised,
he was upbeat, generous with smiles and enjoyed meeting people
while finishing his soto after the performance.

No bother. His latest composition, Gefuehlsstau "a pile of
feelings" (2002) for solo percussionist, dedicated as a birthday
present to his brother, comprises self-contained segments to be
played randomly and improvised at the spur of the moment. It
means that there would never be similar performances in terms of
timing, order or actual sound.

This small composition is, nevertheless, very special. When it
comes to note-taking and notation, Gutama is as scrupulous as any
Western (ethno)musicologists or composers. One of his core
beliefs is that innovation comes from detailed and systematic
study of playing technique and composition, made available by
field notes and notation.

He insists on the use of all these to transform traditional
Javanese musical forms and performances. Without writing, he
argues, no detailed analysis is possible. And without analysis,
conceptualization, and systematization, learning would be a slow
process and innovation never fundamentally possible. If one is
unable to identify the starting point, one would never be able to
measure real distance from it, and would end up going through the
same path over and over again.

While many Westerners would cringe at this in the name of
scholarly detachment and cultural non-involvement, Gutama's
argument is validated by history. In the last hundred years or so
changes in Javanese and Balinese gamelan music often (if not
always) had something to do with the incorporation of Western
ideas, instruments, techniques, etc. into existing patterns. In
the late 19th century, for instance, the Yogyakarta court
began to notate its music, and decades later it began to use
snare drums and brass in gamelan ensembles.

Now what Gutama does is more profound than that, because he
claims to transform traditional structures anew. He began, for
instance, by exploring the virtuosic possibility of the
instruments, because he believes that virtuosity is one of the
key elements of innovation. For ages there has been no
breakthrough in playing technique.

In Javanese gamelan, sarons (bigger metallophones), were
always played slowly, while genders (smaller ones) played
moderately fast with limited patterns. Learning Javanese gamelan
for the first time in the late seventies, Gutama devised a study
method akin to Western exercises for instruments, enabling him
and his ensemble, Banjar Gruppe, to facilitate speedy learning
and develop a high degree of virtuosity unthinkable - and never
practicable - in traditional Javanese milieus.

His early work Genderan (1979) for two genders shows the
possibility of creating a new form and logic and expanding the
traditional "tonality," timbre, dynamics and interlocking
techniques. Even when listened to casually, this piece exudes
that unmistakably gamelan atmosphere which is absent in many
Western gamelan reproductions -- irreverently produced.

This is what he later calls neue Urspruenglichkeitmusik, "new
source music" (his translation; I prefer contemporary indigenous
music). This term is used in tandem with the German term neue
Musik, which is often translated to "contemporary music," hence
my translation.

Contemporary music is the result of analytical innovation of
the Western musical tradition, and contemporary indigenous music
is also rooted in tradition but renewed in the same way.

What is so surprising then? When I saw him three summers ago
at his home in Berlin, he was more forbidding. At home in his
study, with neat, painstakingly written scores lying on his desk,
he spoke about his hardship in conceptualizing the new source
music.

He spoke about his decision not to compose in Western
contemporary style anymore and to concentrate instead in learning
to compose in this new way, the ease of which he only felt very
recently. He spoke of the race against time (he was then 66) and
on the project of recording and documenting his compositions
which he had barely begun (and still continue).

What is surprising is that he did not show an alarmist
attitude anymore. He is apparently more and more confident with
his composition style, dubbing his earlier attempts as "bad" and
saying that his masterpiece is still yet to come. In Gefuehlsstau
more room for improvisation indicates his willingness to relax
the written regime and plunge into the thicket of his imagination
- the concept might come from Cage's chance music, but the whole
feeling is intimately native Indonesian: improvisation and
spontaneity (but with concept! - he hastily added).

The Soegijo brothers are artists of international standing in
their own areas. They immersed themselves thoroughly in the
grammar of Western arts - visual arts in Holland for Sidharta,
music in Holland and Germany for Gutama. Geographical and
cultural distance notwithstanding (the former in Yogyakarta after
retiring from teaching at the Institut Teknologi Bandung, while
the latter live since 1964 in Berlin), they discussed for years
about their burning urge to reclaim and transform their own,
particularly Javanese, artistic roots. The result of this cross-
fertilization was a radical reorientation of esthetics from
Modernism (Sidharta) or even the abandonment of Western style
composition (Gutama). This duo's exhibition/performance was not
the first one (they also performed at the CSIS building in 1996),
and likely will not be the last.