Sounds in the Shadows

- Steve Everett

In 1969, Indonesian President Suharto imprisoned Javanese author and political dissident, Pramoedya Ananta Toer for over ten years, although never officially charging him with any crime. An estimated 250,000 individuals were either imprisoned or simply disappeared after Suharto’s 1965 coup d’état that overthrew Indonesia’s founding president, Sukarno. Toer, along with other literary and intellectual figures with left-wing inclinations, was put in isolation in a penal colony on Buru Island where he was allowed contact with other prisoners for only one hour each week. Remarkably, Toer composed four novels and several smaller works during this time without the use of pen or paper. In the final years of his imprisonment, he was able to write them down as the result of a sympathetic guard who smuggled in an old typewriter and gave the manuscripts to a Catholic church in Buru.

During the 1960s and 70s, Toer became an international symbol for resistance to totalitarian repression. French philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre attempted to send him a typewriter at one point. Salman Rushdie mentioned that he remembers attending protest rallies in London in the 1970s demanding Toer’s release. Ultimately, it was the human rights initiatives of the Jimmy Carter administration that helped pressure Suharto to release these political prisoners in 1979. Toer was then placed under house arrest in Jakarta and all of his writings were officially banned in Indonesia – still never charged with any crime. The Suharto regime fell in 1998 and Toer was able to travel abroad in 1999. He died on April 30, 2006.

In 1996, I had been reading Toer’s four novels, the Buru Quartet, prior to a research trip to Java and Bali to study gamelan music, dance, and puppetry as preparation for my starting a Javanese gamelan ensemble at Emory. Carrying Toer’s books with me to Java was not prudent since being caught with them could result in an arrest. As a composer, I found Toer’s Nobel Prize nominated novels and his historical narrative style quite intriguing and thought they were an ideal text for a music drama setting. A Dutch art historian I had met in Java offered to arrange a possible meeting with Toer to discuss his novels. Of course this had to be kept quite secret since Indonesians (including my gamelan teachers) were encouraged to report any anti-government activity. For several mornings at 6:00 am, I walked for 30 minutes to the nearest pay phone attempting to contact a publisher in Jakarta who could assist in arranging the meeting, all the while keeping my activities secret. I was told to never use Toer’s name over the phone since government wire-tapping was quite common.

Two weeks later, I flew to Jakarta and was driven to Toer’s house. There I discovered a resolute and still defiant critic of the Suharto regime. He was quite pleased that I was interested in using his writings for a music composition, but suggested that I consider an unpublished play he wrote while at Buru that was structured as a Javanese shadow play and contained a gamelan ensemble and dancer as central characters. The play is Ki Ageng Mangir. It is a retelling of a famous Central Javanese event of 1590 during the early days of the Islamic Mataram kingdom set at the royal court of Yogyakarta. I had a sense that this sixteenth-century narrative had similarities to contemporary political situations and that principal characters seemed analogous to personalities in the current Suharto government. After translating the work from Indonesian to English with the help of Emory Provost Billy Frye’s daughter Alice, I met with Toer again in 1997 to discuss my observations. When asked if these characters and setting in the play were actually historical references to contemporary Java, Toer smiled, nodded his head and said, “you understand my work…of course all of Javanese history is cyclical, just like gamelan music.” Several scholars, including anthropologist Clifford Geertz, have also suggested that aspects of Javanese social structure can be observed in the forms contained in shadow plays and gamelan music.

I continued research on the Mangir story and the early Mataram kingdom in 1997 at the Royal Tropical Institute and Film Museum in Amsterdam, which contain extensive archives on Indonesian history. While a research fellow at the Rockefeller Study Center in Bellagio, Italy and at the Liguria Foundation in Bogliasco, Italy in 1998 and 1999, I composed a two-hour music drama entitled KAM (Ki Ageng Mangir). The work was modeled on Javanese shadow puppet plays and includes a Javanese puppeteer who narrates and sings the text, Western and Javanese musical instruments, and interactive computer-controlled video and audio.

In designing this composition, ancient sekaten gamelan instruments in Surakarta, Java were recorded and digitally analyzed in 1998 during a research trip sponsored by the Asian Cultural Council. These sacred Islamic instruments were used in the courts during the early Mataram kingdom. The spectral quality of the instruments served as models for the harmonies used in the music drama. Original shadow puppets were designed in Central Java for this production as well.

KAM has been performed at Emory on two occasions, including in 2001 at the Year of Reconciliation Symposium. In 2005, it was also featured at the 50th International Conference of the Society of Ethnomusicology. Selections from KAM have been performed in ten countries, including Ladrang Kampung for flute, gamelan, and interactive electronics, which has recently been recorded on CD by Gamelan Asmårådånå in Singapore and will next be performed at Georgia Institute of Technology on November 12, 2007 by resident chamber ensemble, Sonic Generator.

One goal in writing KAM was to capture Toer’s technique of chronological transference by adapting traditional and modern compositional approaches. Creating culturally hybrid works can be a challenging endeavor for composers and one that I did not undertake lightly. There are numerous aesthetic, social, religious, and technical differences to be negotiated to produce a work that respectfully represents the values of different cultures. To examine the issues and problems of musical hybridity, I developed and taught a graduate seminar at Emory and Princeton entitled, “Hybrid Vigor in Music.”

Originally, my primary fascination in composing was with the design of innovative new sounds and the creative potential offered with new technologies. Composition projects such as KAM have strengthened my awareness of the creative process as essentially a humanistic endeavor, often requiring additional cultural, political, and individual sensibilities. Meetings with Toer encouraged me to seriously consider if artists and intellectuals in general have a social responsibility. Toer once said, "It is impossible to separate politics from literature or any other part of human life, because everyone is touched by political power.” This is true for music as well as for literature, I suspect.