Dark thoughts

A couple of days ago I went through an experience which has left me thinking rather dark thoughts; kind of 'who am I, what am I doing here, and what is music anyway?' thoughts. The occasion was a rehearsal hosted by Kitsie Emerson for a performance here on the 18th of July. Kitsie's name has long been familiar to me from the gamelan mailing list, as an American living in Solo who organises the Pujangga Laras klenengan, a monthly series of gamelan concerts. For the concert on the 18th, she told us she wanted to attempt something which had 'never been done before'; a concert of classical Javanese music performed by an all-western group of musicians. 'Western groups have come here before, but they have always performed new pieces, "komposisi"' she said. Mags and I looked at each other, feeling very slightly disparaged, and thinking the same thing, I think; one of the things our group in Scotland does best is new music for gamelan.

At any rate, we agreed to take part. The other musicians involved seemed to be mainly American acquaintances of Kitsie's, including a couple of people from the New York group Kusuma Laras who we had already met here. A whole other set of misgivings revolved around our general lack of skill and experience in this music; most of the other western musicians seem to have already spent a significant amount of time either studying in Java or with Javanese musicians back home, something neither of us has done.

The evening started like something out of a spy movie, with an eight o'clock rendezvous somewhere near the entrance of the ISI campus, the gamelan college here in Solo. Text messages flew back and forth; who were we meeting, where were we going, were we in the right place? A woman who might have been Japanese or Korean turned up on the back of a motorbike, she and I managed a brief conversation together in Indonesian, she sped off again apparently knowing where she was going.

In due course Kitsie appeared and led our taxi off into the night. We pulled up ten minutes later, somewhere in the Jebres district I think, and were led into a room about the size of a basketball court on the top floor of a house. It was rather bare and stark, with glaring lighting and a ceiling made of what looked like asbestos panels.

Filling about half the room was a rather battered but servicable looking gamelan, and about fifteen Javanese men sitting around, variously at the instruments or not, chatting, smoking and joking amongst themselves, with one or two other westerners in place also. 'Now', said Kitsie brightly, 'Is there anyone here who hasn't learned Indonesian yet?' Mags and I looked sheepish, as did Anthony from the New York group. My standing joke in an Indonesian conversation these days is 'Saya bisa berbicara bahasa Indonesia, tapi tidak bisa menggerti'; 'I can speak Indonesian, but I can't understand it'. Kitsie duly made introductions in two languages.

Then, there was another language in the room, Javanese. Most of the westerners in this circle have done the Dharmasiswa programme, which is a funded opportunity for musicians to come to Java for a year. And, it would be safe to assume that all of these people can get by in Indonesian, which is after all reputed to be one of the easiest languages in the world to learn. On the other hand, Javanese is really tough. It exists in three different simultaneous variants, as I understand it, with different words being used for the same thing depending on the social standing and circumstances of the conversation. The pronunciation is a little more complicated than Indonesian, and there is no such thing as a 'Teach Yourself Javanese' book you can buy on Amazon!

I'll come back to this point about the language. So, Mags and I were ushered to a saron and demung respectively, and given some music. For people who haven't played gamelan, I should explain that in theory what we were given here should have been an easy task. In front of you is an instrument with seven keys, with (to simplify things a bit) the numbers 1-7 written on them from left to right. You are given an A4 sheet of paper with a big list of maybe a couple of hundred numbers written on it, and all you have to do is hit the corresponding number on your instrument at the right time.

Sounds like the kind of task anybody would be able to manage, without even any gamelan experience, huh? Not a bit of it. The music stops and starts unpredicatably, then jumps to another part of the page, then slows down so much that you lose track of where you are, then suddenly speeds up again and other numbers are inserted which aren't written on the page.

I'm writing this in a naive way; of course, as someone who has played gamelan music in some shape or form for over ten years, one might have hoped that some of that experience would be useful. But no; I was frequently completely lost, with no idea how to find my place or get back in again. A bit dispiriting.

Which brings me to the big personality in the room; Darsono 'gila'. I've mentioned my teacher Darsono before, but it's a common name, it seems; our teacher is Darsono 'cilik' (I think), 'young' Darsono, whereas this was 'mad' or 'crazy' Darsono. That seems to be a completely accurate translation; everyone I spoke to in English agreed that this Darsono was 'mad' or 'crazy'. Kitsie explained this a little further; what it means, it appears, is that within the Central Javanese tradition, he is one of the musicians how is prepared to go further than anyone else in... I don't know quite how to describe it, innovation? Making up new parts on the spot? Which, it seems, makes him 'crazy', but in a good way; he seemed to be very highly respected by everyone in the room.

For a lot of the rehearsal he was sitting directly in front of me, and it was immediately apparent that he is a master musician. As with my own teacher here, the top players are able to sit in the middle of a rehearsal, playing one part, singing another, whilst simultaneously being able to listen to everything else which is going on and immediately correct anyone who goes astray. It's an impressive performance, and I have the highest respect for musicians who have made such a thorough and deep study of their music.

On the other hand, he really is a big personality, and I found it a little disconcerting. Sitting there in front of me, as well as correcting my mistakes he was forever mugging at me, shouting 'rest!' when I leaped ahead, singing snatches of Beatles songs, and generally being quite loud and... perhaps deliberately kind of coarse in his manner? This is where the Javanese language thing comes in, every once in while he would crack some joke in Javanese and all the guys would laugh uproariosly; it would probable take five or ten years of living in Java and studying the language intensively to have any chance of even understanding the joke once explained. He reminded me of an ex-army guy I used to play beside in a military band, a really bright guy who in the same way took a certain delight in acting the bufoon, and particularly in gently needling at my middle class pretensions. I kind of liked him, and I kind of liked crazy Darsono as well. Kind of...

All these layers of cultural disconnection; the continual smoking, unfamiliar languages, different agendas. One of the reasons this easy-looking music was so impossible for us to get right is the degree of knowledge of the repertoire and genre which the local musicians shared. Anthony and I have on a couple of occasions discussed the analogy with jazz musicians, and I think it stands up very well. Jazz musicians build an entire universe around themselves, which again is based on an extensive knowledge of a particular repertoire and set of conventions. A jazz musician (a real one, not a dilletante like myself) could happily have walked into the bar here at the Novotel and sat in with the house band, calling 'Autumn Leaves' in the full confidence that everyone present would have listened to the same recordings, studied the same books, know more or less the same set of changes, and have more or less the same expectations as to the routine of the performance. For the musicians, individually and a group, it's an affirmation of their identity as 'jazzers', built upon anything between ten years to a lifetime of studying, memorising and thoroughly internalising an entire genre.

So with these Javanese musicians. The music is filled with vocal and instrumental cues which they just know, but which are entirely inscrutable to naive players such as myself.

Dilletante. I never really went all the way with jazz, and I don't think I'm ever going to go all the way with Javanese music. Or any kind of music, I think, except my own. One doesn't become a composer entirely by chance, I think. There is a particular kind of musician who, depending on how you look at it, is either too lazy to fully absorb an existing genre, or who, having got a certain way in, feels the need to... break away, do something different, make the music go my way. Secretly, in our own wee clique, we composers allow ourselves a certain measure of arrogance, we feel a little superior to the musicians who 'merely' reproduce a tradition; we feel that there is something we know that they don't, that there is a step of courage we have taken in putting forward something new, which guys who are just 'players' don't really understand.

Talking myself into the ground here, but... I've decided that I'm not going to allow myself to feel inadequate because I don't understand spoken Indonesian (or Javanese!), that I don't smoke, that I don't like to eat spicy ricy food all the time, and that a part of me finds this music sometimes long, slightly samey, locked in it's own genre and history. At some point I'm going to do my own thing again. With, perhaps, some even firmer convictions around my personal internal thesis that 'music is not sound'; to me, the sound of Javanese music is almost an epiphenomenon, an accidental byproduct of what is really going on, which is a set of social interactions confirming a certain group of people in a particular individual and cultural identity.