Suka to discard musical norms at art summit
JAKARTA (JP): Either way one sees it, to slide fingers over a Javanese gamelan and play it like a piano, or play a rebab (traditional stringed instrument) passed its slenten (small piece of wood located at the center of the rebab) section, which acts as the instrument's border, it is trespassing.
This, however, is no fitting description for Suka Hardjana's music. The 58-year-old composer/arranger from Yogyakarta conveyed, in so many words and sounds, that he was suffering from an identity crisis.
At particular "musical" sequences of Wulan, his music throws every single norm that ties traditional music to gamelan and rebab playing out the window and combines sounds of dismembered rebab.
Suka said that Wulan is the 1995 musical interpretation of director Garin Nugroho's Bulan Tertusuk Ilalang (And The Moon Dances).
It does not carry the trademark of modern music simply because Suka will not hear of it. "My music is something that comes out of me. It is no improvisation or rejuvenation of anything," Suka said about Wulan, the first of two pieces he is to play at the Art Summit Indonesia 1998 with his 30-member Ensemble Kentingan of the Indonesian Arts School in Surakarta, Central Java,
The one-month summit, participated in by eight countries and deemed the most prestigious art festival here, begun on Sept. 19 and is being held at two main art venues, the Taman Ismail Marzuki art center and Gedung Kesenian Jakarta, Central Jakarta. Suka's two night performances, Oct. 9 and Oct. 10 at Gedung Kesenian, will be the 11th group to perform at the event.
Suka studied music at Germany's Detmold University, where he learned the clarinet as the favored instrument aside from musicology. He later played orchestral clarinet in Bremen and ended up teaching at the Bremen Conservatory.
He furthered his musical studies at Bowling Green State University, Ohio. All this, he said, somehow caused a "distortion of his Javanese thoughts".
Suka hen demonstrated a few ways he creates music. At one point, he took a rebab and did several things with it. He drummed his fingers on it; played its two strings with his fingers below the slenten and worked his way up; plucked the strings; and then used the penggesek (a rebab bow similar to a violin's) to ever so lightly draw "music" out from the rebab.
"Traditional rebab players will probably kill me for this but this is me," Suka said. "My music is about deconstruction."
His second piece, Bamban, uses silence as the main theme.
Bamban, which means going back to the starting point, is Suka's way of exercising "extreme individualism", which, he said, carried factors of multiculturalism.
He demonstrated this by playing different notes -- each one separated by a few seconds of silence -- on gamelan that were musically disconnected from one another; one does not develop into, or have a hint of, the next note played. The piece will make use of 21 gongs and other traditional instruments.
He told The Jakarta Post that the individualistic quality of a piece in itself helps all people to personally communicate with it because it carries no other tag aside from his name.
"The pieces I will play are not ethnically multicultural, but individuals (pieces) that breed multiculturalism," Suka said.
People in Irian Jaya, he said, might find it difficult to learn the intricacies of Balinese gamelan playing and people in Ambon might feel the same about Sundanese gamelan playing, but that was not the case with individual pieces.
"Wulan and Bamban carry my name alone, nothing else. People can understand them as my music, not something that belongs to Javanese or Balinese gamelan playing. Or anything else for that matter." (ylt)