Suka to discard musical norms at art summit

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)