|
 Bringing
the Ramayana epic, and indeed the entire tradition of performance
that it has spawned in South East Asian performance traditions,
to the Western instrumental medium has always been a challenge.
Sinta Wullur is a pioneering composer from Indonesia who has
explored various avenues of Indonesian tradition and Western
composition in her home base of the Netherlands, and it seems
she has found a winning formula in her lastest gamelan opera.
Off The Edge April features an interview with
Indonesian-Dutch composer Sinta Wullur, who talks about her
latest opera Sita's Liberation, and the challenges of bringing
gamelan music to a western medium. This present article is meant
as a complement to that Off The Edge interview, offering some
additional background to Wullur's fascinating European career,
and some further insights into the creation of her first opera
that did not make it into the magazine feature.
Wullur was born in 1958 in Bandung, Indonesia.
She emigrated to Holland in 1968 and has pursued her composition
studies and career there ever since. After receiving her piano
degree at the Sweelinck Conservatory where she studied with
Willem Brons, she started her activities as a composer and gamelan
musician.
In 1984, at the same conservatory, she studied
composition with Ton de Leeuw. She continued her studies at
the Royal Conservatory of The Hague with the composers Theo
Loevendie and Louis Andriessen in 1988. At both conservatories
she also worked in the electronic music studio with Gilius van
Bergeijk and Jan Boerman. She received her degree in composition
in 1991.
Interested in non-Western music and determined
to integrate this music in her own works, she participated in
international workshops and conferences on traditional non-western
music and modern composition techniques whenever she got the
opportunity. A couple of months in a year she studied gamelan
and singing with several teachers in Bali and Java.
Wullur's love for her home country's traditions led to the
founding of several gamelan groups in Holland like the the Balinese
gamelan orchestras Tirta and Irama and the contemporary
gamelan group Multifoon. In 1995 she ordered a set of
chromatically tuned gamelan instruments that has since become
the trademark of Multifoon, which performs a wide range of modern
compositios from avant garde to jazz.
Integration of the east and the west forms an important issue
in her work, which can be discerned in her compositions for
western music ensembles as well as in her works for gamelan
ensembles with or without western instruments. In the compositions
Between Dreams and Fairy Tales and Khayal, performed
on western instruments, structures and ideas from gamelan and
Indian music are used.
Wullur has also written numerous contemporary works for gamelan.
The compositions Ganatara and Kaleidoscope were
written for the Gamelan group Gending, which devotes
itself to modern music. For the Percussion Ensemble Den Haag
and Astrid Seriese, she composed the song cycle 10
Bulls for gamelan instruments in combination with western
percussion and song.
The contemporary sounds of her Gamelan works are the result
of a modern use of compositional structures and the addition
of other instruments and other pitches. For example, in the
choral compositions Scenes from the Ramayana and Sita
Lost, the Balinese 'kecak' style of singing is combined
with a polyphonic choir. In the tape composition Mendung
Indonesian sound samples, from crickets to street vendors, are
used as building block.
 These
various approaches culminate in her most ambitious work to date,
the gamelan opera Sita's Liberation. The work employs three
singers, a narrator, dancers, wayang kulit accompanied by the
Multifoon ensemble augmented with string quartet, bass clarinet
and a full chorus. In the staging of Sita, Wullur uses a large
backdrop screen onto which the shadow play, operated by several
dalangs, relate parts of the story of Sita's capture by Ravana.
Dancers fill in the rest of the story, and both intertwine to
form a beautiful narrative that is refreshing and colourful.
Contemporary opera staging employs traditional Indonesian elements
seamlessly to provide a beautifully crafted finish, and the
music, a gorgeous blend of contemporary and gamelan, distinctively
operatic yet uniquely Indonesian, binds the entire performance
together into a satisfying whole.
The 50-minute long opera is cast in 9 continuous scenes revolving
around the main characters of of the popular story. In the final
test of fire the dalangs make emerge from the shadows to cast
flames directly at Sita as the music builds from the ominous
destruction of fire to the glorious liberation of the untainted
Sita.
The work begain in 2001 when Wullur started to work on the
beginnngs of the opera then called Ramayana through Flashbacks
to the libretto by the Canadian poet Paul Goodman. The first
twenty minutes were completed in 2001 and performed on the gamelan
combined with bassclartinet, a small choir and tablas.
In November 2003 the next forty minutes were performed for
the complete strength of the orchestra. The chromatic gamelan
consisted of gongs and kempuls, 3 octaves bonang, 2 extended
sarons (2 and a half octaves) and 2 gendèrs. Added to
that were percussion instruments including marimba, congas,
bass drum, a string quartet and bass clarinet. Solo singers
sang the parts of Sita, Rama, their twin sons, Kekayi, Dasaratha
and a narrator. The choir had a lead role in the opera as narrators
and commentators as the story moved along.
In 2007 the final version of Sita's liberation was performed
with mis en scène. Here the solo singers were a soprano
for the role of Sita and a tenor as the narrator, together with
the choir. Wullur adds that because of the narrations from the
tenor and choir, the form of the opera was comparable to an
oratorium like Bach's Mattheus Passion.
 Says
Wullur, "The opera was received very well. It was performed
at the International Gamelan Festival in Amsterdam. It was nearly
sold out (the theatre sat 420 people).
Everybody likes the music and the different comments on the
mis en scene were in general positive."
"The combination of wayang kulit, dance, opera singing
on the stage and the combination of gamelan, string quartet,
choir in the music was new and exciting for the public and musicians.
They have never experienced this before. The western singers
from the choir are amateurs coming from very good choirs in
the Netherlands. They all were very pleased to participate in
this production doing the rhythmical stuff like the kecak and
other percussive sounds together with the gamelan."
"So were the members of the string quartet, they are
professional and it was the first time that they played together
with a gamelan orchestra that blended surprisingly well with
each other. The mezzo soprano Barbara Tetenberg enjoyed singing
the music, and was thrilled to communicate with the dancers
and the shadow puppets on the big screen."
"The opera director has always wanted to work with shadow
puppets. He was very pleased to get the opportunity to work
together with the dhalang Joko Susilo, who is a master in doing
experimental wayang kulit performances with a couple of puppeteers,
projected on a large screen," says Wullur of the staged
performance.
About the compositional approach to the opera, Wullur says,
"Just as in the wayang kulit accompaniment, here there
are themes especially composed to accompany the characters and
events. And there is also a theme that appears when there is
a transition from one scene to another scene. Like in opera,
there are arias and recitatives. My approach is to make lyrical
melodies accompanied by music that resembles gamelan music and
Bach. There are cyclic forms in the music marked by gongs and
several rhythmical melodic patterns in a heterophonic structure
played on the different instruments at the same time."
Sita's Liberation was premiered on 14 June 2007 at the Internationale
Gamelan Festival Amsterdam. You can now listen to it on Malaysian
Art Radio. The four tracks cover the 9 scenes in the opera
as follows:
Track 1:
0:00 Sc1 Now banned for 14 years
4:21 Sc2 Look! A dream has broken from the dark! A deer...
13:09 Sc 3 A gentle hermit
Track 2:
16:22 Sc4 The magic circle breaks
20:53 Sc 5 Time moves so slowly
24:23 Sc 6 Ceaselessly Rama and Laksamana search for Sita
Track 3:
32:34 Sc 7 Rama's ring greets me
34:50 Sc 8 Wayang - the sun opens the sudden sky and there stands
Rama
Track 4:
39:35 Sc9 The battle is won and Sita is free, but doubts remain...
Sita endures the test of fire
Ensemble Multifoon
The Multifoon Foundation was founded in 1993 by
Jan Rokus van Roosendael and Sinta Wullur with the aim to stimulate
the interaction between non-western music and contem-porary
music. To achieve this they started with acquiring a set of
chromatically tuned Javanese gamelan instruments (built by Pak
Suhirdjan in Yogyakarta). With these new gamelan instruments,
gamelan players and composers are no longer restricted to the
five tones of the pentatonic scale from the gamelan, they can
use freely the notes of the five lines from their staff-notation.
The ensemble's instruments consists of:
2 extended saron with a range of 2 and a half octaves: c"
- f'''
1 gendèr panerus:
1 gendèr barung:
1 slenthem: c - c'
1 peking: c"' - c""
1 bonang panembung: c# - b
1 bonang barung divided in 2 rancakan: c' until c" + c#"
until c"'
1 bonang panerus divided in 2 rancakan: c" until c"'
+ c'''' until c""
1 set of kempuls: c - c'
1 set of kenongs: c' - b'
Related Links:
25 Mar 2008
|
