Suwardi revives dead 'gentha' gamelan sounds
By Riyadi Suparno
JAKARTA (JP): After more than a century of silence, the beautiful and haunting sounds of the officially extinct Javanese gentha (bell) gamelan traditional orchestra reverberated through the Gedung Kesenian Jakarta (Jakarta Playhouse) on Wednesday evening.
To Javanese ears, however, the sound of gentha gamelan performed by A.L. Suwardi for the Third Art Summit Indonesia 2001 was quite similar to the regular Javanese gamelan except that it was played in a more dynamic way with each instrument rhythmically played in quick succession.
Played by 13 male gamelan players, with three female singers, the sounds of gentha percussion were comparable to a combination of Javanese and Balinese gamelan with contemporary touches.
In one way or another, Suwardi, who is known among his friends only as A.L., managed to resurrect the forgotten instruments in a beautiful way.
The audience, nevertheless, were warned that the gentha they heard at the theater was not the same as the 19th century gentha instruments kept in the Surakarta palace, Central Java.
Suwardi, a lecturer at the Indonesian Arts College in Surakarta, recreated the gentha especially for this year's Art Summit based on accounts of his friends at the palace.
"It would be difficult to play gentha instruments in the palace as they are considered sacred. I made these gentha instruments and composed Suara Gentha (Sounds of the Bells) based on tales about gentha in the palace. Therefore, this must be totally different," he said.
Another problem is that no one knows how to play the palace's gentha instruments and, moreover, several instruments have gone missing. Only several musicians were able play the palace's gentha gamelan, including the late Martopangrawit and Mloyowidodo.
It took Suwardi and his assistants three months to make the instruments themselves, at a cost of around Rp 10 million (US$1,150), mostly financed from his own pocket, before they then spent another three months practicing Suara Gentha.
He named the instruments -- kelenthung, kelonthong, kelonthang, kelinthing and gong -- based on their sounds.
He hoped that his sacrifice would pay off and that his gentha instruments would survive the challenging test of time and modern culture.
"I want to see more people perform gentha gamelan more frequently," Suwardi said.
In addition to reviving the bygone gentha gamelan, Suwardi also presented his more "traditional" composition of Tumbuk, which means bumping into each other in the Javanese language.
Tumbuk is played in a slendro rhythm (tune with five nearly equal intervals) and tengahan rhythm (a series of two different slendro), mostly using basic gamelan instruments of gender, rebab and siter.
As a contemporary Javanese music composer, Suwardi inserted two contemporary instruments for Tumbuk; one is a broken piano, literally broken, and the other is called a Jalenthir, whose cricket-like sound only destroyed the beauty of the whole composition.
The Tumbuk composition, as a whole, was beautiful, with three women and three men singing the Tumbuk verses.
In the universe, the sun, the earth and the moon undergo their respective processes, leading to each having their own unique cycle. When they are aligned with each other, or tumbuk, it causes an eclipse.
In the Javanese calendar, there are days, pasaran (five-day Javanese week), wuku (Javanese horoscope), months and years which each have a different number of days. When the day, pasaran, wuku and month meet, it is called tumbuk. This event holds a special meaning for the Javanese people, so when someone's birth occurs at the same time it is generally celebrated.
But for Suwardi, tumbuk means something different. His definition emerged when he was faced with two difficult tasks: one was to participate in Art Summit and the other was to go to Australia to pursue his doctorate studies. Therefore, Tumbuk, according to Suwardi, best described his feeling of "disarray".
The audience also has the freedom to interpret Tumbuk in their own way.