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Building bridges through music
In harmony: Participants of the recent Melbourne Symphony Orchestra music camp in Yogyakarta
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In harmony: Participants of the recent Melbourne Symphony Orchestra music camp in Yogyakarta.
“Musical styles and cultural differences don’t need to be barriers,” she said recently at Yogyakarta’s Sanata Dharma University as Australian and Indonesian musicians tuned their violins.
“By collaborating we can build bridges to understanding. Never underestimate the power of music.”
That’s not the tune played by conservatives driving foreign policy. They argue that power means arms; after security, trade and defense have been settled, people’s hearts and minds will follow.
But this lady is no dilettante whose views can be waved away; she carries clout in the hard places where the notes aren’t heard but counted.
Galaise is as comfortable with a score as a spreadsheet. She’s on the advisory council of the Harvard Business Review and a member of the Australian Institute of Company Directors.
Three years ago she was a winner in the Australian Financial Review and Westpac Bank’s 100 Women of Influence Awards. Not bad for a foreign flautist, or flutist as they say in North America, her onetime home.
Her day job is running Australia’s oldest professional orchestra, founded in 1906, which she reckons ranks among the world’s top 20 and “engages” with an audience of more than 5 million every year through events, broadcasts and recordings.
Label them “consumers” and you have a figure worth singing in corporate aisles. But it would not resonate if the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra (MSO) simply stayed in its Arts Centre studios in Victoria’s state capital.
Not all international trade can be measured in tons tipped into the holds of bulk carriers. The MSO has built its reputation by exporting, touring overseas since 1965.
Its players have performed in Europe, the United Kingdom, the United States, Singapore, New Zealand, China and Indonesia, focusing on Java’s artistic heartland.
The MSO’s first visit to Yogyakarta was in 2015. In that year Australia’s smallest mainland state, Victoria (population 6.5 million), coupled with Indonesia’s second-smallest province (4 million) after Jakarta. Both see themselves as their nation’s cultural custodians.
Two years ago Sri Sultan Hamengkubuwono X asked the MSO to perform at the ninth century Hindu Prambanan Temple. It was the first foreign orchestra to play at the World Heritage site.
Galaise said the Sultan wanted a permanent orchestra in the city. During the Dutch colonial era, court retainers known as musikan (harmony) were employed to play European music, but disappeared as a permanent fixture after the formation of the Republic of Indonesia in 1945.
In August 2019 the MSO ran its fourth annual Youth Music Camp in Yogyakarta for 30 young and promising players, wrapping up with a concert before more than 1,000 music lovers.
“The students are talented and determined,” said Galaise.
“We ask them to practice and they do so overnight for hours, returning next day with improvements. Australian students might take a week.”
Most performers at the Yogyakarta concert were string players, but the stage was also shared by the bonang barong two-rack 10-bronze gamelan played by Eunike Theresia Siahaan, 19, lifting the concert from its somber mood.
Cellist Longginus Alyandu, 24, and the splendidly named violinist Elgar Putrandhra, 25, who spent a month in Melbourne refining their repertoires, presented their own composition.
Galaise first heard the gamelan as a gifted 3-year old from a musical family when taken to an exhibition in Canada. Later at university she encountered a gamelan orchestra.
After graduating she played her flute in several European orchestras before returning to Canada. English is her third language after French and German.
In 2013 she moved to Australia as the chief executive officer of the Queensland Symphony Orchestra where she boosted audiences and made an operational surplus before being recruited by the MSO three years ago.
“In Indonesia we’re also teaching arts administration in cultural management workshops,” said Galaise. “Getting an orchestra on stage requires a large number of organizational abilities that we want to pass on to Indonesians.”
The audience only sees the musos stroll on stage, do their bit, bow to applause and leave. But it takes months of planning, promoting, designing and assembling for just a two-hour show. Running an aircraft carrier might be easier — at least the sailors have to obey orders.
“Another project we hope to introduce to Indonesia is the Pizzicato Effect, a community music program we run in a Melbourne school, providing free string instrumental and musicianship tuition. “
It is aligned with the principles of El Sistema; the internationally celebrated music project that originated in Venezuela claims communal music-making enhances children’s development.
Similar programs are run in the US, the UK, Canada and several European nations, though so far not Indonesia. Some educators have been critical, claiming music should be studied for music’s sake and not to create social change.
Galaise said research at the University of Melbourne showed the program enhanced academic performance and social-emotional well-being for participating children.
It sounds postmodern, but Plato said it 2,400 years ago; “Education in music is most sovereign because more than anything else rhythm and harmony find their way to the innermost soul and take strongest hold upon it.”
— Photos by Erlinawati Graham
