The content of this release is a selection of compositions and reinventions by the outstanding balinese master I Made Arnawa. These tracks, which have been remastered from previous releases, are taken from the following albums:
- ‘Gamelan Taruna Mekar Tunjuk’, Yantra 2015
- ‘Returning Minimalism’, Vital Records 2011
- ‘Gamelan Stravinsky’, Yantra 2015
- ‘Gamelan Debussy’, Yantra 2018
Pak Arnawa’s artistic output is extensive but scarcely recorded. In the present release we present a subjective selection intended to show the remarkable genius not only in his natural musical language but also in unbeaten paths of aesthetic transformation.
Excellent and detailed liner notes by authoritative writers accompany each of the four albums listed above. Here we include some excerpts of those notes, which would really deserve in depth reading.
John Noise Manis
I Made Arnawa (second from left) and members of Sekaa Taruna Mekar
Special note –
In the present release, Track 1 has two composition – ‘Perbawa’ and ‘Kebolandung’ – combined in uninterrupted sequence, with approval by the Composer.
From Notes written by Dieter Mack
I Madé Arnawa (*1960) from Tunjuk/Tabanan is one of the most prolific contemporary composers in Bali. After studying at ISI Denpasar, he quickly became a staff member and one of the leading teachers. In 2000 he was one of the first composition students at the new Master program (S 2) at ISI Surakarta. Here he came also in contact with various contemporary Western music principles. In composing after this period, he had a convincing ability of transforming these principles and techniques into his own artistic realm, thus enriching the scope of contemporary Balinese music. No wonder that he was (and still is) very often invited to Europe and America for various artistic purposes. Some of these stays abroad had been realized with his own group sekaha “Taruna Mekar”, the village gamelan club of Tunjuk. Although almost no one in that orchestra is a professional musician (most players are farmers), the ensemble has achieved an amazing artistic standard which is also due to the very good social atmosphere created by their leader.
“Perbawa” (2005) is one of his most complex compositions that hardly refers to any Balinese model. This work had become the signature piece for the famous and widely acclaimed concert of the “Taruna Mekar” group led by Arnawa during the “Contemporary Gamelan Festival” in October 2005 at the “House of World Cultures” in Berlin during the festival “Spaces and Shadows”. According to Arnawa, he was inspired by this writer’s concerto “Vuh” (2000) for solo percussion and brass, woodwind & percussion orchestra. The piece operates with a lot of changes in instrumentation, overlapping of scale-pitches and a continuous change of gong cycles, leading to a cumulative section with a fascinating poly-metric structure that reminds us even of aspects of the music of Conlon Nancarrow (which Arnawa knew as well). Formally there is no exact reference to any current Balinese model, and even the general principle of cyclic structures in Balinese music has mostly been left behind.
I Madé Arnawa always had a certain fondness for the so-called ‘kreasi lelambatan’. And “Kebo lan Dung” (2013) is a good example of his unique way of arranging and transforming such traditional forms. The unique feature here is a 10-beat gong cycle sounding very natural instead of being “constructed”. This ongoing repeated gong cycle is varied in many different ways by Arnawa’s unique arrangements. Kebo means water buffalo in Balinese language and lan is a connecting word. As the water buffalo is a symbol of strength (often referred to in the Dewa Yadnya ceremony), Arnawa wants to stress the strength of the dung pitch in this piece. Here Arnawa, so-to-speak, combines nature with a peculiar pitch in music.
From Notes written by Wayne Vitale
Terry Riley’s 1964 composition “In C” – the inspiration and basis for “In Deng” (2011) – was a musical landmark by any reckoning. It was one of the founding works of the movement later dubbed Minimalism, a new way of working with musical materials that eventually penetrated much of Western art music, either directly or indirectly, becoming one of the potent of all American stylistic currents of the twentieth century. It helped initiate a stunning reaction to the modernist music of the day, especially the hyper-complex scores of composers such as Elliott Carter and Karlheinz Stockhausen. But “In C” was also a near-magical act of distillation of ideas of the times, somehow bringing onto a single page of score, with its simple set of instructions, influences from outside the Eurocentric art music tradition. Jazz improvisation, rock, musical theater, tape music, and musical traditions from Africa and Asia were all part of its DNA.
For I Made Arnawa, this was something new. Here was a piece without convergence: No unifying vertical events, no punctuation, no goals, no sections, no map of intersections or landmarks for orientation. How could the players know what to do?
The composer was initially unsure of how to even approach such a project. It contrasted starkly with traditional composition and performance in Bali. Even in modern pieces, he always felt there were anticipated events to channel one’s musical energies, something to move towards in each section or phrase, no matter how unusual. For Pak Arnawa, it was the change in interaction between performers that he felt most keenly. In his regard, music in Bali is all about the kelompok or section of the ensemble, from a pair to several musicians, who must work together in perfect tandem so that they, and ultimately the entire gamelan, play together as one person—an expression of the communal ethos that underlies many activities in Bali, from rice farming to religious ceremonies. How could the players work “alone,” with no clear way of relating to others, no way of knowing if you were right or wrong, no way of hearing whether your rhythms or accents were in synch, and no musical leader to bring the players back together when they weren’t?
For Pak Arnawa, the concept of “In Deng” evolved over several days of rehearsal. His first attempt to reconcile the ideas of individual freedom and lack of vertical convergences was to let the players work in pairs: two players would operate as one individual. Each pair, as a unit, could choose when to move forward or hold back. This, he thought, would be a happy compromise: The players could depend on one another in the comfort of partnership, so central to Balinese performance practice, while allowing each pair to confront new ideas of unmoored horizontal freedom. It would also allow him to retain the technique of kotekan, or paired interlocking parts, for the gangsa and reong instruments. The complementary part to such a pattern is easily generated by any competent Balinese musician; the players readily did so in the first rehearsal. But as rehearsals progressed, the “need” for pairing and kotekan fell away as the musicians slowly overcame their nervousness about the lack of landmarks, and Arnawa dispensed with it.
Pak Arnawa saved the simplest patterns for last. In the final moments of his piece, the music eventually does achieve a kind of convergence, first on wavering neighbor tones, and finally on a single one—deng—the central tone of his piece, after which it is named. Here was the Balinese answer to Terry Riley’s nomenclature: in place of naming the piece after a restricted harmonic field (the key of C major), the Balinese composer named his work after the central tone around which all the parts were oriented. (This idea came from the previous iteration of John Noise Manis’s project with Javanese musicians, called “In Nem” after the central scale tone used in the Javanese scale.)
From Notes written by Andrew C. 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. 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.
Against this image, John Noise Manis has posed the towering persona of Stravinsky, almost the caricature of the heroic, independent compositional mind. Stravinsky himself fostered such an image, as if he single-handedly brought entire worlds of music into being. But study after study has pointed to the ways in which his oeuvre represents a distributed creativity: “borrowed” Russian folk tunes, imitated jazz patterns, and so on. This is in no way to deny his imposing genius, but only to admit, finally, that expressions belong to a much wider community than the modernist notion of the composer, or the financial tool of copyright, has allowed us to think. Anthropology and tourism have encouraged an inverse image of the Balinese—so completely communitarian that the very notion of the individual is dissolved. Arnawa’s arrangements help us to hear both the individual genius of Balinese composers and the distributed nature of Western modernist expression. In none of the “arrangements” does Arnawa attempt to literally follow the composer’s detailed score, instead using recordings as inspirations for the starting point of new expressions.
In ‘Ebony‘ (2014), 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.
In the arrangement of ‘Danse Russe‘ (2014) from Pétrouchka. it is as if the original had been dropped on the floor, shattered and Arnawa had picked up only some of the fragments, sending Stravinsky’s original phrases and metrical forms through a metrical kaleidoscope. Arnawa arranges Stravinsky’s continuous motion passages into Balinese nyog cag interlocking patterns, evoking traditional mask dance (topeng) arrangements through a highly experimental lens.
From Notes written by Jonathan Adams
In 2000, while still on the faculty at ASTI Denpasar, Arnawa was given permission to pursue a Master’s degree (S2) at Institut Seni Indonesia Surakarta (ISI Surakarta). The program had just launched and he was part of the first class. There, Arnawa met the influential figures Pak Suka Hardjana, Slamet Abdul Syukur, and Dieter Mack, with whom he studied composition and developed lasting and rewarding relationships. At ISI Surakarta Arnawa began to free himself from traditional Balinese forms. To this day he credits the experience in Surakarta with being the one that first allowed him to “see Bali from the outside.” His final exam consisted of five works (Komposisi 1-5) mixing instruments from gong kebyar, bebonangan, angklung, and other gamelan. The entire production, called Wak Bajra (wak = sound; bajra = strong), was inspired by recent demonstrations that had contributed to Suharto’s fall in 1998.
In 2003 Arnawa returned to ASTI Denpasar, which by then had been renamed STSI Denpasar (Sekolah Tinggi Seni Indonesia), and was pressured to lead the karawitan (music) department. He was reluctant to accept the promotion but 35 of the 38 faculty members had selected him in a vote. Finding himself in a position of moderate influence, he decided to share concepts and experiences he had gained at ISI Surakarta with the hope that it would open student’s minds. One year later, in 2004, the entire graduating class created works classified kontemporer, despite the fact that he had not pushed any of them to do so, and this concerned some faculty.
Throughout his tenure at STSI Denpasar Arnawa was frequently involved in international projects and performances. In 2005 his group, Sekaa Gong Teruna Merkar, travelled to Berlin for the Festival Gamelan Kontemporer Indonesia and premiered Arnawa’s new work for gong kebyar Perbawa. The following year, in 2006, Arnawa held a six week residency at the Codarts Conservatorium in Rotterdam before travelling to the USA for a residency with Gamelan Sekar Jaya in California. And three years later, in 2009, he returned to California for a second residency. Shortly after returning from this trip he decided to resign from Institut Seni Indonesia Denpasar (formerly STSI). A recent wave of politics at the institution had become an unwanted dimension of his post and he decided to focus on his passion for music elsewhere. His frequent trips abroad, however, continued.
In 2010 Arnawa and his group were invited back to Europe for the Festival Salzburg Binnale in Austria. Arnawa brought two compositions: Mayatupatus (ma= 5, ya = 9, tu = 7, pa = 4, tus = 8; total = 33), which had been premiered at the 2008 Pesta Kesenian Bali, and Perbawa. The following year, in 2011, friend and composer Wayne Vitale invited Arnawa and his group to participate in the event Bali: Art, Ritual, Performance, which took place at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, California. The group performed Arnawa’s new lelembatan (tabuh empat) Catur Rebah. Later that same year Arnawa participated in the Art Summit in Jakarta, performing two new works, Sinom and Tenten, which combined his selonding and Pendro ensembles.
In 2011 Arnawa also began a series of collaborations with John Noise Manis, the first of which was an interpretation of Terry Riley’s In C, appropriately renamed In Deng and released on the album Returning Minimalism – Teruna Mekar and Cudamani (Vital Records 2011). The Returning Minimalism series includes two other releases: Returning Minimalism – In Nem (Gamelan of Central Java) and Returning Minimalism – Gamelan Semara Ratih of Bali, both reissued on Yantra (2014 and 2018 respectively).
In 2014, Noise Manis and Arnawa teamed up again for reworks of Igor Stravinsky (Gamelan Stravinsky), later released on Yantra (digital) in 2015. And in 2016 Noise Manis reached out to Arnawa about the Debussy project, which was completed in September of the following year.
JNM initiated Gamelan Debussy by producing preliminary arrangements of 12 pieces using the pitches of I Made Arnawa’s selonding and pendro gamelan, as well as Sekaa Gong Teruna Mekar’s gong kebyar. These were rendered as audio files from MIDI arrangements. The virtual instruments were tuned to match ‘Center Weighted Tunings’ (CWT) of the respective gamelan used in each arrangement. CWT were established using a series of calculations that included averaging note-pairs, determining CWA for each note-pair across multiple octaves (CWA are not always consistent across octaves), and averaging deviations from the CWA while weighing central octaves more heavily. A chart Gong Kebyar Tuning (not reproduced here) reveals the complications involved in achieving a CWA of a gamelan that would be consistent across octaves. Starting in the lowest register, each octave gets progressively sharper as we move up the pitch gamut, such that the highest octave begins nearly a full half-step sharper than the lowest.
Due to the complications posed by realizing 12-tone music on five and seven-tone instruments Noise Manis developed a number of strategies for handling pitches not accessible to the gamelan employed in each arrangement. This included using instruments from multiple ensembles to create a ‘super scale’, combining instruments from Pendro and gong kebyar specifically, and/or revising the original score so that only notes in the CWT were used. In the case of the latter, JNM dealt with each note individually, often testing several alternatives before settling on the one he believed was most ‘musical’ in the combined context: Debussy and Balinese gamelan.
After listening to the twelve preliminary arrangements produced in Italy, Arnawa was asked to select nine and undertake a second arrangement process, recreating them onto gamelan instruments. The procedure that followed was the same for all of the arrangements except those that Noise Manis had arranged using a ’super scale’ drawn from a selection of instruments from more than one ensemble, which required a different approach. Arnawa’s rehearsals consisted of repeated listenings of preliminary arrangements with the musicians and instruments at hand. The group moved through each piece phrase by phrase, working together to find the correct notes, often laughing hysterically at mistakes and successes along the way. Arnawa tackled arrangements for pieces that made use of more than one ensemble using one of two strategies. The first involved re-configuring them for a single ensemble by notating scores at home and later teaching them to a full gong kebyar. The second involved a combination of scoring in advance and working through the material together as a group.
The entire project moved forward in phases, granting the group necessary breaks for other obligations, and reducing the overall workload at any given time. Two to three pieces were prepared and then recorded before Arnawa moved onto other arrangements. This alleviated the need for musicians to maintain all of the arrangements until they were ready to be recorded in a single session at a later date.
Sekaa Taruna Mekar
I Made Arnawa
I Wayan Ardika
I Nyoman Arsana
I Made Eka Arta
I Gede Made Dwipayana
I Wayan Kertayasa
I Made Martana
I Wayan Mudiara
I Nyoman Muliadi
I Putu Artana Perbawa
I Made Dita Nava Prajanata
I Wayan Salin
I Ketut Suarta
I Nengah Sudartana
I Made Sukarta Wijaya
I Ketut Sumandra
I Nyoman Sumawi
I Nyoman Suriadi
I Wayan Sutika
I Putu Adi Sucipta
I Nyoman Widnyana
I Wayan Wijaya
I Nyoman Winata
I Nyoman Wirka
I Komang Juliartha
I Nyoman Egi Agastia
I Putu Ari Saputra
I Made Satria
Kadek Agus Pusaka Adiputra
The output of the Gamelan Debussy project:
1. Pour Invoquer Pan, Dieu du Vent d’Eté
[Six Epigraphes Antiques] Selonding, suling, gong
2. Pour Remercier la Pluie au Matin
[Six Epigraphes Antiques] Gong Kebyar
3. Voiles [Préludes Book 1] Gong Kebyar
4. Des Pas sur la Neige [Préludes Book 1]
Selonding, suling, gong
5. Général Lavine – Eccentric [Préludes Book 2] Selonding, kempli
6. Golliwogg’s Cakewalk [Children’s Corner]
Selonding, gong
7. Pour que la Nuit soit Propice [Six Epigraphes Antiques] Gong Kebyar / Pendro
8. The Snow is Dancing [Children’s Corner]
Gong Kebyar / Pendro
9. Scherzando – à mon Ami Igor Stravinsky *
[En Blanc et Noir] Gong Kebyar
* includes guest musician Zachary Hazen
Recorded by Jonathan Adams with assistance from I Putu Gede Sukaryana, Yan Priya Kumara Janrdhana, and I Putu Arya Deva Suryanegara in Pura Dalem Munduk Sangkur, Desa Tunjuk, Kabupaten Tabanan during four sessions.
YANTRA PRODUCTIONS
john.noise.manis@gmail.com