JAKARTA (JP): Performances of contemporary music have been overflowing lately, offering a lavish treat for adventurous music lovers. Regretfully, those who usually flocked classical concerts seemed to be missing.
What happened? Is contemporary music not for classical music fans? I would argue that it is. By listening to contemporary music, you will understand classical music better. On the other hand, as informed and trained listeners, your appreciation of the past would help appreciating contemporary music, too.
All classical compositions were once contemporary music. Why did they become classics? Concepts like ""beauty"", ""universality"", and the like wouldnot suffice to explain this because acceptance into the classic status involves a complex web of social and cultural meanings.
To understand the phenomenon, one should probe in what scholars call reception history, a translation of the original German Rezeptionsgeschichte.
The problem of reception always loomed large in the history of Western music: many of today's ""classical masterpieces"" were beset by disapproval or even rejection. You might think of Bach as a saint or Beethoven a hero, but many of their first listeners held very different views. Bach's (now!) great Passions were thought as cacophonous and sacrilegious, and Beethoven's now popular Third Symphony was attacked by negative reviews forits supposed lengthiness, ponderousness and exaggerations. Should we blame those blasphemers, then?
Rootedness
On the other hand, knowledge in past traditions would enable listeners appreciate contemporary music more, even if they did not find it beautiful and entertaining (how selfish: is it composers' job to entertain?)
Serious composers are not eccentrics who strike us with weird sounds. This caricature is a gross misconception of what composers of new music do. Composition is never carried out of nothing. As evident in the compositions I am going to describe, contemporary compositions are similar in their debt to the past, to history, to tradition, musical or otherwise, both distant and near.
For those who craved oddities, contemporary music seems to be an ideal source of excitement, as shown by an incident in the concert that featured works by Achmad Fahmy Alattas, Haryo ""Yose"" Suyoto and Dody Satya Ekagustidiman (Erasmus Huis, April 12).
The scene, in Dody's Kuit Gamit, of the five performers surrounding the piano and scratching and hitting the strings or banging the keys with fistswas sensational enough to provoke big applause.
Is Dody's piece ""new""? Not so. The techniques involved are already common, after Henry Cowell introduced it in the 1920s.
Less than a week before, the American pianist Theresa Bogard featured twopieces using the same techniques during her joint concert with Trisutji Kamal Ensemble (Gedung Kesenian Jakarta, April 8), in a program of piano works by (mostly) living American composers and pieces for ensemble by Trisutji Kamal.
The lecturer at University of Wyoming performed the haunting Halting at Arafah by Trisutji Kamal which uses clusters, and the stirring Toccata for Piano by Emma Lou Diemer, which employs only one person, the pianist, to manipulate the strings barehanded.
With this in mind, perceptive listeners would respond differently to Dody's piece, such as assessing the effectiveness of the huge manpower itself on the music.
Dody's colleagues also reclaim the past in their own ways, as they use techniques associated with certain composers: Debussy (late 19th century), Bartok, Schoenberg (early 20th century), Messiaen and the Serialists (mid-20th century to the present).
Fahmi's works, as clearly evident in his intense and technically rich Monolog for solo clarinet, are declared as being based on modal system (of Messiaen) and serialism (of Stockhausen et. al.). Sa'unine, a three-movement work for string quartet by Yose, is admittedly influenced by Debussy, Bartok, Schoenberg and Messiaen.
Another example came from the concert by XVIII-21 Musique des Lumires from France (Erasmus Huis, March 22), that mixed Baroque and contemporary pieces to demonstrate their common elements (!).
Here, amid Rameau and Scarlatti, was a monophonic vocal piece by French composer Philippe Leroux, sung to a text from the fourth Book of Questions by the writer Edmond Jabs, an exiled Jew from Egypt who lived in France.
This text was inspired by the liturgical practice at the synagogue, and the intense setting for unaccompanied solo soprano -- sung by Donatienne Michel-Dansac -- invokes the echoes of Jewish cantillation, French Baroque opera recitative, Schoenbergian speech-song and rhapsodic chanting found intribal rituals.
A more extensive account of past influences was provided by the German composer Detlev Glanert in an event organized jointly by the Goethe-Institut and the Association of Indonesian Composers (Teater Utan Kayu, March 31 and April 1).
The day after a concert of his works (played by violinist Bagus Wismakarma and pianists Ary Sutedja and Iswargia Sudarno), Glanert gave a lecture on his music in the new music context of postwar Germany.
Glanert said that after a long period of complex music that more or less followed the model of the cerebral Darmstadt school, he began to return to late Romantic composers, especially Mahler, and to consider color, expressivity and clarity of texture.
The early 20th century advocates of 12-note method abhorred expressivity and replaced it with highly mathematical note deployments. The trend towardcalculated music was continued by the Darmstadt school in the 1950s and 1960s by developing serialism, an extension of the 12-note method that tries to impose minute control over every aspect of sound production.
The school became very dogmatic with its claim that ""expressivity is a fascism"" (because it does not appeal to human intellect but emotion), and to this Glanert rebelled by turning to history, and began to compose differently just a few years ago.
In these works, the music is less calculated. It becomes more transparent(but still rich in harmony), very rhythmic, with big, rich ""Romantic sound,"" warm melodic lines and many repetitions.
A few days later the composers's association changed partner with Centre Culturel Franais to host a composition workshop by European and Indonesiancomposers, performers, and music scholars (Cemara 6 Galeri Kafe, April 6-13).
Beginning with brainstorming and presentations, this workshop managed to muster the diverse, and often opposing, creative forces. The proposed ideasshowed obvious debt to various ethnic traditions in Indonesia, particularlyBalinese and Javanese.
After a painful process, a composition came out and was performed on the last evening. Using various Asian (mostly Indonesian) ethnic instruments and performing techniques, it was not traditional but traditionally based: there was, for instance, a free-rhythm melody in the manner of Javanese chant called macapat.
Listened to casually, it would make one think that it was traditional, but with motivic repetitions, it definitely was not (in fact, it came from composer Jean-Yves Bosseur, who managed to learn gamelan notation on the spot with traditional singer Muria Budiarti).
In conclusion: seen from the perspective of the past, contemporary music should no longer be so frighteningly opaque.
Next time, please do come, relax and listen. Just imagine that you were attending a premiere of a great composer's work.
