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.