Courtesy of Hiromi Kano

Singing Javanese gendhing is no easy matter. Indeed, as 41-year-old singer Hiromi Kano says, “It’s very difficult, demanding great intensity and a long time to learn.”

Originally from Chiba in Japan and now living in Surakarta, Kano has spent many intense years learning how to sing Javanese songs to claim the title of pesinden, a female singer accompanying the gamelan.

Before testing her vocal cords in this way, she worked hard to master karawitan, or Javanese music.

“There’s a contrasting difference in tones,” the Tokyo College of Music graduate, who originally specialized in classical piano, comments. “Pentatonic gamelan music is very different from diatonic Western music.”

Despite her thousands of performances since 1996 with at least 126 dalang (shadow puppet players), Kano modestly says she does not yet have an easy command of the Javanese vocal art, saying “I keep on learning so as to be truly worthy of being called a pesinden.”

As a young musician, she was first charmed by the Javanese orchestra in the early 1980s when she heard Balinese gamelan music played by a radio station in Japan. Fascinated, she tried to find out more about it, but all she could find in Tokyo was the Javanese gamelan, whose “rhythm was different from Bali’s faster tempo”.

Her curiosity led her to keep watching Javanese gamelan performances by Japanese musicians but it wasn’t quite enough. “I wasn’t quite satisfied and remained curious, until one day I heard the news of an Indonesian wayang festival in Jakarta,” she says.

In 1988, Kano took the opportunity to visit Jakarta, where she spent days engrossed in a series of shadow puppet plays and classical dance operas.

“What I witnessed was so different from the performances in Japan,” she says. “The rhythm and pattern of Javanese orchestration were so exceptional that I was very eager to study this musical art.”

Later, Hiromi secured a scholarship from the Indonesian government to study karawitan at the then Indonesian Arts College (now the Indonesian Arts Institute) in Surakarta. In 1996 she began her study through a Dharma Siswa (student devotion) program.

Although she became competent in all the gamelan instruments, Kano claims she is most adept at the rebab (a viola-like instrument) and gender (a xylophone-like instrument with broader bars), which are among the most difficult to master.

“Playing the rebab and gender is like creating our own tones. Neither of them has any specific notes so we have to be sensitive in producing sounds. And they are really needed to generate an atmosphere, especially as an accompaniment to wayang shows.”

While improving her skill with the instruments, Kano began taking private lessons in her other interest: Javanese singing. Among her teachers were such maestros of Javanese tembang or sung poetry as the late Ki Sutarman, Nyi Supadmi, a noted pesinden, once a protégé of the late Ki Nartosabdho, a celebrated puppeteer, and Surakarta’s Indonesian Arts College singing teacher, the late Mrs Sudarti.

She also received vocal guidance from Nyi Suparni, a Surakarta court servant and employee at the Surakarta station of the national radio broadcaster RRI. Kano later joined intensive training and regular shows with a karawitan group of the Surakarta court.

During her five years of studying classical music and singing, Kano claims she avoided television and radio. “TV and radio broadcasts are dominated by diatonic music, so I avoided any association with them. I simply didn’t want to be disturbed by diatonic tones,” says Kano, who instead listened to gendhing recordings.

All of it required hard work, as none of it came easy. As a Japanese, whose native language has no “l” or “n” sounds, it was not easy for her to change her “tongue pattern”. She had to learn, for instance, to pronounce the orchestra ga-me-lan instead of ga-me-rang. But “five years turned out to be too short to change something I’d been born with,” she says.

So during her college years, she accepted offers by her fellow students from the karawitan and pedalangan (puppetry) departments to take part in performances in remote villages in Central and East Java.

In this way, Kano says, she was able to learn more through vocal practice, while her friends could also benefit from her ability as a Japanese woman to draw attention to the shows.

“It was mutually beneficial and my knowledge of Indonesia increased,” she says. “Apart from Bandung and part of the Sunda area, I’ve toured various regions in Indonesia.”

The touring took place particularly toward the end of her college days. “At the time, almost every night I took part in an event. In a month, I had only five nights to rest.”

Now Kano is well-versed in Javanese tembang, covering such classical styles of gendhing as Sinom, Pangkur, Asmarandana, and macapatan (sung verses without gamelan) as well as popular styles such as Kutut Manggung (meaning “turtledoves coo”, a style synonymous with Ki Nartosabdho) and Caping Gunung (or “mountain sunhat”, by Gesang).

“I’m still learning two difficult ones, Pangkur and Dhandhanggula Semarangan [a Semarang style by Ki Nartosabdho], with their high octaves,” she says.

Kano has also appeared as a pesinden accompanying several distinguished puppet players including Ki Purbo Asmoro in Surakarta and Ki Manteb Sudharsono in Karanganyar. She even joined Ki Manteb’s theater troupe in the early 2000s, which whom she toured different cities in Indonesia as well as other countries.

She also has unforgettable memories of performing with Ki Manteb Sudharsono in her homeland. “I performed twice as a pesinden in Japan with Pak Manteb, once for 15 minutes and once for an hour. They were surprised and proud at the same time to see a Japanese woman capable of nyindhen [singing classical Javanese songs].”

After marrying Wiyono, a fellow student from the pedalangan department, in 2002, Kano was determined to become a professional pesinden. “If I return to Japan, we’ll have to start everything all over again,” she says. “My husband has a puppetry background so it’s hard for him to find the right job. Here he’s free to work while I can throw myself into my work.”

Although she is on stage four to five times a month, Kano is convinced she can make a living from her present profession. “I don’t want to get any special treatment in honorarium payments because all puppeteers know the reasonable and proper fees for their pesinden.”

Surakarta is home to two other pesinden from Japan: Miki, who is married to a famous kendang/traditional drum player and Yumiko, now the wife of a local karawitan teacher.

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