A journey into primordial music

Ary Hermawan ,  The Jakarta Post ,  Jakarta   |  Sat, 08/30/2008 6:32 PM  |  Lifestyle

Planet Earth is the origin of life. It is where life begins with all its splendor; the wide oceans, the flowing rivers, the high mountains and the deep forests.

This is a known fact, of course. But did you know that the Earth also sings? Have you ever heard it singing?

For artist Haryo Wisanggeni, Earth (or clay to be more precise), is also the genesis of music. When God created Adam from clay, Wisanggeni says, primeval music was made.

"Clay had sung long before the tunes were invented," he told reporters following his latest performance.

Since the beginning, Wisanggeni added, the earth never ceased to sing; sometimes in the form of wrathful, jolting earthquakes, and, once it settled, it sung the harmony of life in the form of fertile land.

In Tanah Bernyanyi (The Singing Clay), Wisanggeni's collaborative art performance with musicians Naniel Swami, Wukir Suryadi, Yongki LPT, Anang WE and dancer Ratih Widyasari, Wisanggeni and his fellow artists make clay literally sing, telling the story of our Earth, which continues to suffer from exploitation by human beings.

While nearly all modern instruments are made of wood, plastic, metal or the combination of all three, Wisanggeni, with a penchant for the primeval form of music, returns to the earliest musical element he talks about: Clay.

He said the idea came to him while working together with Widyarasi, a dancer who also indulges in pottery. The pottery pieces she made were not specially designed like musical instruments but Wisanggeni -- who was in the process of making gamelan batu (a rock-made gamelan) from Gua Tabuhan (Percussion Cave) in Pacitan, West Java, at the time -- liked the way her clay pieces produced pure, pre-tonal sounds.

"The sounds produced by these potteries are natural sounds. We play them in such a way that we are able to make from them a beautiful, easy-listening musical composition. This is perhaps a sample of ancient music," said Naniel Swami, the music director who executed Wisanggeni's idea.

The collaborative piece, which was part of the JakArt 2008 Festival, was held at Taman Ismail Marzuki's Teater Kecil Hall on Wednesday evening, captivating a small audience of mostly journalists who sat randomly among the hall's vast number of empty seats.

There was a mystical ambience when Wukir Suryadi, Yongki LPT and Anang WE began scratching and thumping their pottery pieces, which were arranged beautifully on stage. Naniel led the group with his bamboo flute.

Quite unlike regular percussion music, the acoustic and unrelenting sounds of the scratched potteries -- which resembled a flowing river or a rolling stone -- seemed to bring the audience to a state of harmony at one with nature

The atmosphere became more eerily gripping when one of the musicians performed a incomprehensible shamanic mantra, as if he were in a trance.

"In ancient and traditional societies, music was often used in mantras," Wisanggeni said after the performance.

Wearing traditional Javanese attire, Wisanggeni appeared on the right side of the stage. He was there to spontaneously respond to the song of the earth produced by the pottery musicians by translating it into a spontaneous painting on a stretched white sheet.

His movements were both erratic and choreographic when he painted, producing a vibrant expressionistic art piece.

In the middle of the show, Widyasari appeared on the stage to perform dance movements -- wearing a batik robe that was wide enough for Wisanggeni to paint on. The entranced dancer moved to the clay music while the painter decorated the robe as he interpreted both the sounds of the potteries and the dancer's gentle movements.

The artistic collaboration managed to combine the aesthetical and mystical elements of an ancient society into a contemporary art scene, taking the small audience on a journey to the primordial forms of art. But that was not its primary aim.

According to the performing artists, Tanah Bernyanyi was a reflection of how the Earth has deteriorated and become more hostile to human beings by giving them disasters such as tsunamis, earthquakes and landslides.

"The masks in Widyasari's batik symbolize the hypocrisy of leaders," Wisanggeni said.

The performance was perhaps a call to respect Mother Nature, from which life originates, by using clay -- earth -- as a musical force.

Wisanggeni said he plans to use pottery pieces made from the Lapindo mudflow mud for his next art project. It would indeed be interesting to see if the unstoppable black mud, which has displaced thousands of people, is able to produce a pleasant tune.

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