On October 11th I got the chance to attend a small concert titled Young Composers in Goethe Haus, Jakarta. The concert featured 10 best works of entries in the Festival of Contemporary Music for Young Composers Southeast Asia 2011, where each work was reconstructed to be played using both Gamelan and orchestra instruments. The collaboration between Ensemble Mozaik (from Berlin) who played the orchestra instruments and Kyai Fatahillah (from Bandung) who played the gamelan instruments was something absolutely new to me. As a matter of fact, the contemporary music itself is indeed something hard to be understood, perhaps due to its indifference since it doesn’t follow any rules established. But as the art director said himself, do not try to understand this kind of music but simply enjoy it :)
This one piece is composed by Gan Ruo Xian, he was inspired by Hinduism deities—Vishnu, Ganesha, and Shiva that incarnated as avatars. “The evolving colours of each instrument scale the sonic imagination and heights of the Hindu mythology.”
And this other one is one of my favourites of the night, a piece by Matius Shan Boone who explores “the mystical quality of truth” that will be vanished once it is revealed. I like how the musical instruments crowd put together a unique harmony.
P.S. I didn't record the whole performance since my camera has very limited memory :( and youtube really annoys me for taking FOREVER to upload a merely 50 MB video. For detailed info about the event, go to: Young Composers in Southeast Asia 2011
