JP/Munarsih Sahana

The living room of keroncong maestro Gesang Martohartono is a kind of gallery exhibiting the profound impact of his legendary composition “Bengawan Solo” (Solo River).

Hanging on the light brown walls of the room in his house in Surakarta, Central Java, are numerous pictures of the musician with prominent figures, including President Susilo Bambang Yudho-yono, and dozens of certificates and awards for his achievements in keroncong music.

Some of the certificates, written in Japanese characters, were presented by Japanese institutions in appreciation of “Bengawan Solo”.

The song has been popular throughout Indonesia, Japan and other Asian countries since he first recorded it. It became popular in Java after it was aired in the 1940s on SRV, a local radio station owned by the Mangkunegaran palace. The Japanese forced occupying Java during World War II also appreciated it. Later, when state radio RRI of the Surakarta regional station was established in 1950, Gesang had a keroncong program.

The song went on to break records. In 2003, the Indonesian Records Museum (MURI) presented him with a certificate for his long career in the recording industry; in 2004, he received another for “Bengawan Solo”, the song that has had the most versions recorded by other artists.

Now, a month shy of his 92nd birthday, Gesang moves around his living room slowly.

“My life is at only about 30 percent, that’s why I declared myself retired in 1997,” he says in a
deep voice.

He rarely ventures far from his house, except for monthly medical checkups that reveal he has no illness. In the mornings, he walks back and forth in his yard for exercise, and naps until lunchtime. He naps again in the evening, after passing the time watching TV or chatting with his niece’s children. He has no children of his own, and his wife has passed away.

But despite his frailty, he lights up with enthusiasm at talk of his songs – and especially “Bengawan Solo”, whose lyrics took him almost six months to complete in 1940.

“[The song] is about the truth of the river that it runs out of water in the dry season but always overflows in the rainy season,” he says.

“And it was because I was observing the real state of the river that it took me such a long time to finish even the lyrics.”

Gesang says all his songs — he wrote 25 in 70 years — are “realistic” in that they are based on his observations of people and nature. His most popular songs were his earliest: “Bengawan Solo” in 1940, followed by “Sapu Tangan” (Handkerchief) in 1941, “Tirtonadi” in 1942 and “Jembatan Merah” (Red Bridge) in 1943.

Gesang is the first to acknowledge he was never a speedy songwriter, noting that a current pop song composer can turn out 100 songs in a single year. The reason, he says, is his lack of an education — he cannot read musical notation. He even cannot say for sure if he began with the lyrics or the melody; he just created his songs, never dreaming they’d be so popular. Back in the 1940s, the thought that his name was known on the radio made him very happy, he adds.

It was his passion for his hometown of Surakarta — also known as Solo — with its famous river that runs through Central and East Java, that inspired him to compose the song.

“At that time, the river was beautiful, surrounded by shady areas where people could spend their leisure time,” Gesang says. “But now it has become heavily polluted because of the buildings around it. Unfortunately, it is not as beautiful as it used to be.”

The current Solo river does not inspire him to write; he is, he says, “too old”.

He is not too old, though, to rail at the polluted state of the river.

“Because the Japanese who visit here always want to see the beauty of the river and meet me,” he says. “They must be disappointed finding the river now.”

Once he even visited the office of the mayor of Surakarta, in response to a complaint about the river by a Cabinet minister, to discuss how the river had become so polluted.

Others of his songs deal with the struggle for Indonesian independence, such as “Caping Gunung” (Mountain Cap), about the guerilla war. Gesang recalls the lyrics without difficulty, explaining that the young people in the song were sent by their parents to rural areas and they pretended to be villagers by wearing the caping or village-style cap.

“The young people were afraid to live in the unsafe city and so they stayed with their relatives in rural areas and joined the guerilla war,” Gesang says.

He still follows current affairs through the news on TV, though he claims he is “not intellectual enough” to understand politics. Yet he expressed his concern about the extent of poverty across the country.

This means, he adds, “we haven’t achieved social justice as was hoped by the founding fathers of this nation.”

The musician becomes happier again when he talks about keroncong, and the fact that this kind of music is still widely preserved today. He was delighted to recount how he had recently attended the founding ceremony for a new association of keroncong lovers.

What makes him even happier is that keroncong is supported by people who are better educated than he.

“I am happy to know people with academic degrees in medicine and engineering are playing keroncong,” he says.

As a young musician, he says, he and his colleagues did not have much education; he found it difficult to find people to sing his songs, and so he sang his songs himself.

Popular

PDI-P will likely be part of opposition: Ganjar

Indonesia one step from Olympics after beating South Korea

Bahlil leads task force to boost sugar, bioethanol production in Papua