'Kreasi Baru': A mixture of two musics
By Gus Kairupan
JAKARTA (JP): The combination of gamelan with a symphony orchestra is not a new one. The first time I heard such a mixture was towards the end of the 1950s when a visiting American conductor, Wheeler Becket, composed and conducted a piece for symphony orchestra and gamelan. "Experimental" is probably the only way to describe that piece which, as far as I know, has not to been performed again since that time. All I can remember of it is that it was pleasant enough, with the gamelan ensemble providing the bit of excitement (different colors, different pitches, etc.) one might expect from a dash of exotica in the midst of ordinariness.
The same applies to Kreasi Baru (New Creation), a work by American composer Robert Macht, which featured in the program of Nusantara Chamber Orchestra's (NCO's) concert on Tuesday. In Becket's work, however, gamelan and orchestra played together for quite long stretches at a time, whereas Macht keeps the two well separated. There were very short instances in Kreasi Baru when the twain met and it was then that I almost began to see some validity in Kipling's dictum about East and West, at least in musical terms. Those short instances, just before crossing from gamelan to orchestra, sounded awful, perhaps because of the different tonal dynamics between do-re-mi and pelog/slendro. Perhaps Becket's work (though I remember little of it) was the more effective in that his perception and sensitiveness towards gamelan tones and how to shape western tonal systems in order to fuse them successfully with the former, was more acute than Macht's.
At any rate, Becket's composition has never been heard again, at least not in Indonesia, and there's no guarantee that Macht's New Creation will become an established number among works for orchestra in this country. But maybe such is the fate of all compositions that endeavor to mix two different musical traditions and systems. I found Kreasi Baru rather disappointing. Having studied gamelan, one would have expected Robert Macht to have achieved a razor sharp sensitiveness to how gamelan sounds can best be fused with western orchestral sounds. Maybe, indeed, he has and (discovering that it is terribly difficult if not impossible) that was why he kept the different musical traditions apart, using only a short interlude of flute and harp (shades of kecapi-suling) to lead from Javanese into western percussion, followed later by the rest of the orchestra. The NCO was conducted by American composer/pianist/conductor Louis Stewart, who has visited Indonesia before as pianist, playing with the orchestra.
Other works in the program were Vaughan-Williams' Prelude To Farewell, Borodin's overture to Prince Igor and Beethoven's Seventh Symphony. An ambitious program, but then, the NCO has never been afraid of over-reaching itself. There were several moments when the orchestra sounded quite agreeable, which indicates that its members have surpassed their level of four years ago. Technique, though very important, is probably the least of the orchestra's problems. I've already gone over this countless times in these pages; even so, at the risk of boring The Jakarta Post's readers, I'll repeat what I've said before regarding the NCO's grasp of music and what that entails.
When you see the name Vaughan-Williams, your first thought may be something like this (provided you're familiar with Vaughan- Williams): Ah! Here's one of Britain's (or Wales') composers whose works are shot through with mysticism. And if the composition has something to do with farewells, you'd expect mystical elements to be even more prominent. Likewise with whatever characteristics and colors mark Russian music. The elements you would have expected in Tuesday's rendition were largely missing, although (as I said before) there were moments in which the orchestra sounded quite good. On the whole, its members were reading but not articulating, not styling. As a result, whatever there was in coloring did not differ from one piece to the next, and this definitely won't do.
Another aspect which I have mentioned before is the turnover of members. At the concert on Tuesday I again noticed the absence of some members and the presence of quite a number of new faces. I will have to be more careful about keeping programs in order to see exactly what the turnover is like. But if this coming and going is to be a permanent feature of the NCO, there won't be much progress in all its efforts.