GAMELAN STRAVINSKY
NOTES by Andrew Clay McGraw In an island awash in proficient composers, I Madé Arnawa stands out. Talented and well regarded as a composer in traditional and neo-traditional (kreasi baru) modes, he is equally attracted to and capable in the most experimental contexts. Modernism has had the unfortunate effect of encouraging a sense of compositional hierarchy amongst some Indonesian composers in which traditional composition is placed at the bottom—if it is viewed as composition at all—and creation in the “Western,” modernist or experimental style is vaunted to the pinnacle of expression, a pedestal onto which must graduate by transcending the lower forms. It is doubly unfortunate that this image of hierarchy has encouraged a sense of Schumpeterian individualism and self-containedness. I don’t mean to paint a picture of Indonesian modernist composition as a kind of Picasso-manqué—they as brilliant as any of their Western counterparts—but that both Western and Indonesian modernists have been lulled into a sense of aesthetic self-referentiality as if their works would be as great in the complete absence of reference, community and history. Arnawa evinces no sense of hierarchy between styles, even though his intense experimentalism outstripped those of his colleagues at the National Institute of the Arts, eventually making his continued presence there untenable. But neither is his practice possible to neatly isolate from the creativity of his village of Tunjuk, Tabanan and the exceptional musicians of Gamelan Taruna Mekar. Since his undergraduate compositions, the vast majority of his output has been inspired by, composed for and performed by his fellow villagers. Tracks: 1) Ebony. Arnawa replaces Stravinsky’s large ensemble of woodwinds of the Ebony Concerto with a smaller set of Balinese suling bamboo fipple flutes. The very “fluid” and improvisational Balinese approach to intonation on the suling curiously approaches Stravinsky’s highly determined, chromatic passages. The use of the traditional terompet double-reed shawm seems to parody Stravinsky’s muted trumpets adds a humorous flare while the incorporation of the Western drum is the one point of orchestral overlap between both ensembles. Arnawa evokes dense and dark textures out of non-chromatic instruments and musicians trained in an oral tradition and accustomed to playing only in pentatonic modes. Stravinsky’s cubist tango is transformed into a scene evoking the honking horns of Balinese cross-town traffic. Arnawa transforms Stravinsky’s contrasting woodwind textures through the striking juxtaposition of bronze and bamboo. The innovative imitations of extended jazz harmonies in Stravinsky’s composition become inspirations for experiments in counterpoint within Arnawa’s work.
NOTE di Federico Capitoni “In principio era il ritmo”. È una parafrasi biblica condivisa da tanti musicisti e certamente sostenuta da Stravinskij che fece del ritmo – forse più che dell’armonia – il parametro fondativo della sua musica. Balletti a parte, tutte le composizioni di Stravinskij hanno una componente ritmica particolarmente accentuata come se il ritmo fosse appunto allo stesso tempo origine e fine della musica. È proprio così, e al di là delle speculazioni filosofiche che si possono fare sul ritmo come essenza della musica, si vede in questo album come la pulsazione esacerbata e la variazione ritmica inventiva si sposino egregiamente con la tradizione dell’orchestra di Gamelan che parrebbe poggiare molto più debolmente sui parametri melodici e armonici ma in maniera ineluttabile su quelli di ritmo e timbro. E infatti i sei pezzi stravinskiani qui suonati dall’ensemble balinese di I Made Arnawa sono stati studiati dai musicisti sulle registrazioni delle versioni per pianoforte (ove esistessero tali trascrizioni, ovviamente). Questo per due motivi: il primo è perché il pianoforte, rispetto all’orchestra, offriva meno connotazioni timbriche, il che ha reso possibile ad Arnawa di concertare il tutto più liberamente; il secondo motivo è che il pianoforte è uno strumento a percussione, quindi già artefice di una prima traduzione, dagli strumenti ad arco o a fiato, in un linguaggio più strettamente percussivo che verrà “finalizzato” attraverso la strumentazione di campane, tamburi e metallofoni in genere tipici del Gamelan. Il resto lo fa la fantasia di Arnawa, che deve fare i conti con un sistema di intonazione lontano da quello temperato dei dodici suoni utilizzato da Stravinskij. Il risultato è dunque una differenza non soltanto timbrica, ma di carattere. Si prenda Ebony, la versione gamelan di Ebony Concerto (1945): dallo spirito jazz-swing - molto americano e con momenti da café chantant - dell’originale, si passa a un pezzo quasi futurista ove i suling (flauti balinesi) e il pereret (una sorta di tromba in legno dal suono nasale e penetrante) dialogano in modo apparentemente goffo, grottesco. È invece il risultato della mutuazione da un tipo di orchestra all’altra, segno importante di come gli strumenti facciano la musica più dell’inchiostro sulla carta. Evidentissima questa trasformazione a più livelli indipendenti è nella Danse Russe (da Petruchka) e in Dumbarton (il primo tempo del concerto Dumbarton Oaks) ove il riadattamento è fedelissimo in termini metrici e ritmici ma gli strumenti utilizzati (jublag e gangsa, simili ai nostri xilofoni), avendo una scala diversa da quella del pianoforte, restituiscono una dimensione armonico-melodica deformata: la figura è la stessa, l’immagine è diversa. La complessità che ne scaturisce ci traghetta nel secondo capitolo dell'album dedicato a Ligeti con due pezzi di matrice minimalista ma dalla scrittura dettagliata e articolata: Continuum (1968), composto per clavicembalo, e Autoritratto con Reich e Riley (e Chopin sullo sfondo), scritto per due pianoforti, costituiscono un banco di prova esecutivo difficile e un esito sonoro che si raggiunge per accumulazione di strumentazione, utilizzando ben sette gangsa suonati, sotto la guida di Arnawa, da un gruppo di giovanissimi musicisti (alcuni appena adolescenti). Entrambi i brani di Ligeti sono riflessioni sull’infinito, non però prodotte con l’espediente della lunga durata ad libitum, bensì con la divisione dell’enunciato musicale in parti infinitamente piccole, attraverso l’accostamento strettissimo delle note suonate in velocità, tanto da dare l’illusione della continuità: il paradosso di Zenone in musica. Nei suoi lavori, I Made Arnawa lascia intendere di aver ascoltato molta musica.
NOTES by Federico Capitoni "In the beginning was the rhythm." This biblical paraphrase can be approved by many musicians and was certainly true for Stravinsky, who made the rhythm – more than harmony – the founding principle of his music. Ballets aside, all compositions by Stravinsky have a strong rhythmic quality, as if rhythm were simultaneously the origin and the end of music, which is absolutely true. Beyond any philosophical speculation on rhythm as the essence of music, this album shows a perfect combination of heightened pulsation and creative rhythmic variations with the tradition of the Gamelan orchestra, which appears to be based more on rhythm and timbre than on melodic and harmonic sequences. In order to play the six Stravinsky pieces included on this record, Arnawa’s Balinese ensemble studied the recordings of the piano versions (when such transcriptions existed, of course). That was for two reasons: firstly, the piano has less tone-color connotations than the orchestra, which allowed Arnawa to create his pieces more freely; secondly, the piano is a percussion instrument capable of translating the sound of string or wind instruments into a more strictly percussive language, which is then enriched with the metallophones and drums which are typical of the Gamelan music. The rest is left to Arnawa’s creative elaboration of a tuning system that stands far from the twelve-toned equal-tempered scale used by Stravinsky. Ultimately then the differences between output and model are not only a matter of timbre, but of musical character. In Ebony – the gamelan version of the “Ebony Concerto” (1945) – the American jazz-swing spirit of the original, with its café-chantant flavor, turns into an almost futuristic piece where the sulings (Balinese flutes) and the pereret (a type of wooden trumpet with a nasal, penetrating sound) are intertwined in a seemingly clumsy, grotesque way. This is the result of moving from one type of orchestra to another – an important sign of the fact that music is “written” more by instruments than by ink on paper. This transformation taking place at different levels is particularly evident in Danse Russe (from “Petrushka”) and Dumbarton (the first movement of the “Dumbarton Oaks” concerto), where the re-creation is true to the original in terms of metrics and rhythm, but it resorts to instruments (jublag and gangsa) that play on a different scale, thus producing a distorted harmonic-melodic dimension – the figure is the same, but the image is different. In the meditative Andante (a time-stretched version of one of the “Five Easy Pieces” for piano-duet) and in the Polka (from more “Easy Pieces”) there is also Simone Mor’s guitar, which makes it possible to compare two overlapping harmonic systems. The Improvisation on the Petrushka theme appears as a summary of the entire album, with the participation of almost all instruments – percussion, wind and plucked strings – which are now perfectly intertwined as an ensemble. The complexity emerging from this piece brings us to the other part of the album, dedicated to Ligeti, with two minimalist pieces characterized by a meticulous and articulated writing – Continuum (1968), composed for harpsichord, and Self-portrait with Reich and Riley (and Chopin in the Background), written for two pianos. In these musically challenging pieces, the sound results from an “accumulation” of instruments, with seven gangsa played by a group of very young musicians – some are teenagers! – under the guidance of Arnawa. Both pieces are “reflections on infinity” created by Ligeti, not through an ad-libitum prolonged sound, but through the division of the musical phrase into infinitesimal parts played at high speed so as to give the illusion of continuity: Zeno's paradox translated into music. Arnawa’s pieces are the works of an artist who has surely listened to much music.
YANTRA PRODUCTIONS |