My Resume

Title of Paper

Cross-cultural.

The stimulus of interacting with someone or something, ‘the other’, another composer, other music tradition, other found material, another (less familiar) medium.

By Jack BodyEx.1 Lebur Saketi 1995

Let me introduce I Wayan Gde Yudane, born Denpasar Bali, 1964.

Y is well known is Bali as the most outstanding young composer of new compositions for gong kebyar. Over the decade 1991-2000 he won the first prize for the best kreasi baru (new composition) every year, with the exception of 1998 when he did not compete. Interestingly, the composer does not value this achievement very highly. Being rather cynical of the judging process of these annual competitions in Bali, he credits his success to his being able to create pieces that he knows will attract attention, rather than music that grows out of a personal creative urge. He cites the controversy that surrounded the success of his Lebur Saketi of 1995, saying that it had more to do with the fact that he had won the prize for the fifth year running, than with the actual composition itself. As a relatively unknown outsider, his early success was easily dismissed as ‘a flash in the pan’. But by the time he had won for the fifth time, he was finally acknowledged by the establishment as being a significant creative presence in the Balinese musical scene.

I came to know Yudane in 2002, when he came to live in NZ with his NZ wife. I was able to invite him to be an artist in residence in our SoM at VUW for the first three months of his stay. After a return to Bali for 6 months, Y and his wife and child returned to live in NZ in late-2003. During the time that I have known Y I have learned to appreciate his extraordinary talents, and have looked for opportunities to work with him on several occasions. And it is these projects that he has undertaken in NZ that I want to discuss. Although they have been generally small in scale, I believe these projects have been important in giving both Yudane and myself a new creative stimulus, and encouraging us to explore new types of creative collaboration.

Yudane of course has always been involved in musical collaboration. The creation of new works for Balinese gamelan is itself a collaborative process in which the composer works co-operatively with gamelan musicians in the development and structuring of the musical material. In preparation for the annual competition the composer leads the rehearsals, which take place every night, for a period of three or more months, as part of a long and intensive creative process. The new composition in its final form is the outcome of a collective endeavor, and as such is unlikely to be able to be performed by any group other than the one that first played it.

When the Australian jazz musician Paul Grabowsky came to Bali in 1999 looking for someone to work with him on the music for the production The Theft of Sita, he chose Yudane as the ideal collaborator. Yudane had already had prior experience working with Western musicians in France and Germany. He had an intuitive openness and curiosity, a need to explore new sounds, and a capacity to adapt easily to unfamiliar situations and respond to musical traditions different from his own. The fact that Grabowsky knew very little about gamelan Y saw as an advantage. After initial discussions Yudane created gamelan music that he thought appropriate. Grabowsky then composed his music in response to Yudane’s. They then worked together to edit and structure the music into an integrated whole in a way that supported the theatrical requirements of the production. According to Y this was a very satisfying collaboration, in which each party made an equal contribution. The innovative production combining live actors, puppetry, jazz and Balinese gamelan travelled widely internationally, receiving high critical acclaim.

To illustrate his openness to new experiences, new media and new sounds here is another of Yudane’s works.

Ex.2 Croaking (1997)

This was created on Yudane’s own computer using sampling, and simple techniques of sound manipulation. A pioneer of computer composition in Bali, Yudane developed his own aesthetic through his own experimentation. As unsophisticated as the material and techniques are, this piece is striking and original. The integration of frog sounds with the patterns of gamelan kotekan and disco music is clever. The intrusion of the ringing cell-phone is dramatic. Within this piece we can hear tradition meeting innovation, art meeting nature meeting technology. The piece is short and entertaining, but has the power to provoke us into thinking about the dilemmas of contemporary life in Indonesia, particularly the life of the artist.

When Yudane first arrived in NZ I asked him to compose a new piece for our Javanese gamelan at Victoria University. This project might not have appealed to other Balinese musicians, who probably feel no empathy or fondness for either the sounds or the traditions of Javanese gamelan. And certainly the playing skills of our NZ musicians are a far cry from those of Balinese gamelan musicians! But Yudane was attracted by the challenge of working in this unfamiliar context, with unfamiliar materials. He made several notated scores that we tried out, before he found something that worked for our group. And the piece he created is indeed extraordinary.

Ex. 3 Carik-caruk (2002)

I personally make comparisons with the music of Morton Feldman in the way that Yudane’s soft and very slowly evolving melody unfolds in this piece called Carik-Caruk. According to the composer, his concept was one of elasticity, the stretching of time and tempo and sonority. Responding to the lack of ombak (vibrato) in Javanese gamelan he wanted to create a meditative space where the notes of the melody connect in the mind of the listener. Sections are marked as various points by a soft beat on the bedug. At my suggestion we added ‘floating tones’, singing bowls and wine-glasses, that create an aural ‘halo’. Working collaboratively with William, one of our gamelan musicians who is also a violinist and composer, Yudane added another element, improvised nervous squeaks and tremoli, suggestive of insects in the night. I had the feeling that these subversive sounds are intended to prevent the piece becoming too portentous or ‘precious’. Thus, out of this interaction with our gamelan musicians of meagre ability, an unfamiliar gamelan, and two other composers (William Harsono and myself) Yudane has created this unique sounding composition. When we played Carik-Caruk at the Yogya Gamelan Festival in 2002, some of the audience remarked on the work’s affinity with the sekaten gamelan traditions of Central Java, music which Yudane had never heard!

While living in Wellington in 2002 Yudane was commissioned by Radio NZ to create a radiophonic work. He chose the theme of crossroads in Bali, the magical place of cardinal intersection, the place in a Balinese village or town where so many things of importance take place. For this work, Yudane drew on his own memories and those of others through recorded interviews. He used recordings of his own music and also environmental field recordings he made. He worked intensively with an experienced producer from Radio NZ, Matthew Leonard, and created a wonderfully evocative radio work, part documentary, part fantasy, which, I believe could only have been make by someone who was used to stepping outside his own culture, someone who had the capacity to view objectively where he had come from.

Ex. 4 Crossroads of Denpasar Radiophonic composition for NZ Radio (2002)

I have a reputation for organising things, and people. This generally gives me a lot of pleasure, since I can have a good idea, but don’t have to expend the time and energy in carrying it out – I motivate other people to do that! The concept of combining gamelan and organ has been tried before, but in my mind I like the fact that the organ can sustain sounds indefinitely, whereas gamelan sounds begin to fade as soon as the notes have been struck. I proposed the idea as a collaborative composition between Yudane and a young NZ composer, Emma Carle, and we premiered their joint composition in 2003. I thought my title clever and witty – gam.org – but it was later pointed out to me that in Indonesia the acronym GAM has another, more disturbing, meaning other than ‘gamelan’!

The process for the development of this piece was interesting. Yudane deliberately chose the slendro set of gamelan, knowing that it was less compatible with western equal tempered tuning than pelog, and therefore more of a challenge. He composed some simple gamelan motives using limited notes. These he played to Emma who improvised on the organ to see what seemed to fit. She returned the following week with sections of music that were variants for organ of what Yudane had played on the gamelan. Yudane persuaded her a more productive approach would be to create something that was complementary, rather than imitative. After a series of meetings where the musical material was modified, rearranged, and structured into a piece, we were able to perform gam.org in concert, with considerable success. It is a truly collaborative composition for organ and Javanese gamelan.

Ex. 5 gam.org

What impresses me about this piece is that the two composers, using two contrasted tuning systems that we would normally consider incompatible – a slendro gamelan and an equal-tempered pipe organ – have been able to create the impression of a ‘complementary modality’ that embraces both intonation systems. They have achieved something extraordinary in this piece, a work that is neither long nor complex, but which always sounds fresh and effective in live performance.

In 2003 the Indonesian pianist Ananda Sukarlan visited NZ with a programme of works especially composed to commemorate the victims of the Bali bombing in 2000. He had been asking me for a long time for a contribution to his programme, but I had not found the time. But even while he was performing his programme in NZ he still pressed me, and I began to think about what kind of piece I could write. I decided that it should connect as strongly as possible with Balinese music, since it was on the people of Bali and their lives that the great impact had been. It was a wonderful opportunity for me to invite Yudane to collaborate with me on a work for piano and Balinese gangsa, as being one of the more portable of the Balinese gamelan instruments. Our plan was that it should be performaed by Ananda on piano and Yudane himself playing gangsa. We borrowed an instrument from a gamelan that had recently arrived in Wellington – the tuning was very close to Western tuning, something that had been a deliberate choice of the musician who had commissioned the set. Thus we were able to treat the two instruments on equal terms – though in performance the piano needs amplification since the gangsa is noticeably louder. As a starting point I asked Yudane to provide me with some musical material, something identifiably Balinese. He created for me a 16 beat kotekan pattern – with complementary polos and sangsih – which I notated. This became the basic material for our piece. It begins as a slightly restless meditation on the sad event of 2000, but the mood soon brightens as the Balinese material makes it appearance. As Yudane pointed out, as tragic as the events of September 2000 were, the Balinese mentality refuses to dwell on the past, preferring to look to a more optimistic future. Hence the title ‘Paradise Regained’.

Ex. 6 Paradise Regained

In conclusion I can say that it is for me an immense pleasure and privilege to know Yudane and have the opportunity I have had to watch him at work and to work with him myself. One of his plans over the coming months is to learn the basics of Western notation, a tool that he may find useful in the future. For me, I am looking forward to future collaborative projects that we might do together, where I can break out of the conventional role of a Western composer, composing individualistically and in isolation, and find new stimulus and richer creative processes in collaborating with musicians from other cultural backgrounds, such as Yudane.


				*YUDANE* *Composer*



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		Title of Paper Cross-cultural. The stimulus of interacting with someone or something, ‘the other’, another composer, other music tradition, other found material, another (less familiar) medium. By Jack BodyEx.1 Lebur Saketi 1995 Let me introduce I Wayan Gde Yudane, born Denpasar Bali, 1964. Y is well known is Bali as the most outstanding young composer of new compositions for gong kebyar. Over the decade 1991-2000 he won the first prize for the best kreasi baru (new composition) every year, with the exception of 1998 when he did not compete. Interestingly, the composer does not value this achievement very highly. Being rather cynical of the judging process of these annual competitions in Bali, he credits his success to his being able to create pieces that he knows will attract attention, rather than music that grows out of a personal creative urge. He cites the controversy that surrounded the success of his Lebur Saketi of 1995, saying that it had more to do with the fact that he had won the prize for the fifth year running, than with the actual composition itself. As a relatively unknown outsider, his early success was easily dismissed as ‘a flash in the pan’. But by the time he had won for the fifth time, he was finally acknowledged by the establishment as being a significant creative presence in the Balinese musical scene. I came to know Yudane in 2002, when he came to live in NZ with his NZ wife. I was able to invite him to be an artist in residence in our SoM at VUW for the first three months of his stay. After a return to Bali for 6 months, Y and his wife and child returned to live in NZ in late-2003. During the time that I have known Y I have learned to appreciate his extraordinary talents, and have looked for opportunities to work with him on several occasions. And it is these projects that he has undertaken in NZ that I want to discuss. Although they have been generally small in scale, I believe these projects have been important in giving both Yudane and myself a new creative stimulus, and encouraging us to explore new types of creative collaboration. Yudane of course has always been involved in musical collaboration. The creation of new works for Balinese gamelan is itself a collaborative process in which the composer works co-operatively with gamelan musicians in the development and structuring of the musical material. In preparation for the annual competition the composer leads the rehearsals, which take place every night, for a period of three or more months, as part of a long and intensive creative process. The new composition in its final form is the outcome of a collective endeavor, and as such is unlikely to be able to be performed by any group other than the one that first played it. When the Australian jazz musician Paul Grabowsky came to Bali in 1999 looking for someone to work with him on the music for the production The Theft of Sita, he chose Yudane as the ideal collaborator. Yudane had already had prior experience working with Western musicians in France and Germany. He had an intuitive openness and curiosity, a need to explore new sounds, and a capacity to adapt easily to unfamiliar situations and respond to musical traditions different from his own. The fact that Grabowsky knew very little about gamelan Y saw as an advantage. After initial discussions Yudane created gamelan music that he thought appropriate. Grabowsky then composed his music in response to Yudane’s. They then worked together to edit and structure the music into an integrated whole in a way that supported the theatrical requirements of the production. According to Y this was a very satisfying collaboration, in which each party made an equal contribution. The innovative production combining live actors, puppetry, jazz and Balinese gamelan travelled widely internationally, receiving high critical acclaim. To illustrate his openness to new experiences, new media and new sounds here is another of Yudane’s works. Ex.2 Croaking (1997) This was created on Yudane’s own computer using sampling, and simple techniques of sound manipulation. A pioneer of computer composition in Bali, Yudane developed his own aesthetic through his own experimentation. As unsophisticated as the material and techniques are, this piece is striking and original. The integration of frog sounds with the patterns of gamelan kotekan and disco music is clever. The intrusion of the ringing cell-phone is dramatic. Within this piece we can hear tradition meeting innovation, art meeting nature meeting technology. The piece is short and entertaining, but has the power to provoke us into thinking about the dilemmas of contemporary life in Indonesia, particularly the life of the artist. When Yudane first arrived in NZ I asked him to compose a new piece for our Javanese gamelan at Victoria University. This project might not have appealed to other Balinese musicians, who probably feel no empathy or fondness for either the sounds or the traditions of Javanese gamelan. And certainly the playing skills of our NZ musicians are a far cry from those of Balinese gamelan musicians! But Yudane was attracted by the challenge of working in this unfamiliar context, with unfamiliar materials. He made several notated scores that we tried out, before he found something that worked for our group. And the piece he created is indeed extraordinary. Ex. 3 Carik-caruk (2002) I personally make comparisons with the music of Morton Feldman in the way that Yudane’s soft and very slowly evolving melody unfolds in this piece called Carik-Caruk. According to the composer, his concept was one of elasticity, the stretching of time and tempo and sonority. Responding to the lack of ombak (vibrato) in Javanese gamelan he wanted to create a meditative space where the notes of the melody connect in the mind of the listener. Sections are marked as various points by a soft beat on the bedug. At my suggestion we added ‘floating tones’, singing bowls and wine-glasses, that create an aural ‘halo’. Working collaboratively with William, one of our gamelan musicians who is also a violinist and composer, Yudane added another element, improvised nervous squeaks and tremoli, suggestive of insects in the night. I had the feeling that these subversive sounds are intended to prevent the piece becoming too portentous or ‘precious’. Thus, out of this interaction with our gamelan musicians of meagre ability, an unfamiliar gamelan, and two other composers (William Harsono and myself) Yudane has created this unique sounding composition. When we played Carik-Caruk at the Yogya Gamelan Festival in 2002, some of the audience remarked on the work’s affinity with the sekaten gamelan traditions of Central Java, music which Yudane had never heard! While living in Wellington in 2002 Yudane was commissioned by Radio NZ to create a radiophonic work. He chose the theme of crossroads in Bali, the magical place of cardinal intersection, the place in a Balinese village or town where so many things of importance take place. For this work, Yudane drew on his own memories and those of others through recorded interviews. He used recordings of his own music and also environmental field recordings he made. He worked intensively with an experienced producer from Radio NZ, Matthew Leonard, and created a wonderfully evocative radio work, part documentary, part fantasy, which, I believe could only have been make by someone who was used to stepping outside his own culture, someone who had the capacity to view objectively where he had come from. Ex. 4 Crossroads of Denpasar Radiophonic composition for NZ Radio (2002) I have a reputation for organising things, and people. This generally gives me a lot of pleasure, since I can have a good idea, but don’t have to expend the time and energy in carrying it out – I motivate other people to do that! The concept of combining gamelan and organ has been tried before, but in my mind I like the fact that the organ can sustain sounds indefinitely, whereas gamelan sounds begin to fade as soon as the notes have been struck. I proposed the idea as a collaborative composition between Yudane and a young NZ composer, Emma Carle, and we premiered their joint composition in 2003. I thought my title clever and witty – gam.org – but it was later pointed out to me that in Indonesia the acronym GAM has another, more disturbing, meaning other than ‘gamelan’! The process for the development of this piece was interesting. Yudane deliberately chose the slendro set of gamelan, knowing that it was less compatible with western equal tempered tuning than pelog, and therefore more of a challenge. He composed some simple gamelan motives using limited notes. These he played to Emma who improvised on the organ to see what seemed to fit. She returned the following week with sections of music that were variants for organ of what Yudane had played on the gamelan. Yudane persuaded her a more productive approach would be to create something that was complementary, rather than imitative. After a series of meetings where the musical material was modified, rearranged, and structured into a piece, we were able to perform gam.org in concert, with considerable success. It is a truly collaborative composition for organ and Javanese gamelan. Ex. 5 gam.org What impresses me about this piece is that the two composers, using two contrasted tuning systems that we would normally consider incompatible – a slendro gamelan and an equal-tempered pipe organ – have been able to create the impression of a ‘complementary modality’ that embraces both intonation systems. They have achieved something extraordinary in this piece, a work that is neither long nor complex, but which always sounds fresh and effective in live performance. In 2003 the Indonesian pianist Ananda Sukarlan visited NZ with a programme of works especially composed to commemorate the victims of the Bali bombing in 2000. He had been asking me for a long time for a contribution to his programme, but I had not found the time. But even while he was performing his programme in NZ he still pressed me, and I began to think about what kind of piece I could write. I decided that it should connect as strongly as possible with Balinese music, since it was on the people of Bali and their lives that the great impact had been. It was a wonderful opportunity for me to invite Yudane to collaborate with me on a work for piano and Balinese gangsa, as being one of the more portable of the Balinese gamelan instruments. Our plan was that it should be performaed by Ananda on piano and Yudane himself playing gangsa. We borrowed an instrument from a gamelan that had recently arrived in Wellington – the tuning was very close to Western tuning, something that had been a deliberate choice of the musician who had commissioned the set. Thus we were able to treat the two instruments on equal terms – though in performance the piano needs amplification since the gangsa is noticeably louder. As a starting point I asked Yudane to provide me with some musical material, something identifiably Balinese. He created for me a 16 beat kotekan pattern – with complementary polos and sangsih – which I notated. This became the basic material for our piece. It begins as a slightly restless meditation on the sad event of 2000, but the mood soon brightens as the Balinese material makes it appearance. As Yudane pointed out, as tragic as the events of September 2000 were, the Balinese mentality refuses to dwell on the past, preferring to look to a more optimistic future. Hence the title ‘Paradise Regained’. Ex. 6 Paradise Regained In conclusion I can say that it is for me an immense pleasure and privilege to know Yudane and have the opportunity I have had to watch him at work and to work with him myself. One of his plans over the coming months is to learn the basics of Western notation, a tool that he may find useful in the future. For me, I am looking forward to future collaborative projects that we might do together, where I can break out of the conventional role of a Western composer, composing individualistically and in isolation, and find new stimulus and richer creative processes in collaborating with musicians from other cultural backgrounds, such as Yudane.