I Made Arnawa - I Made Arnawa - Gamelan Stravinsky (2015) [Hi-Res]

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. It is doubly unfortunate that this image of hierarchy has encouraged a sense of Schumpeterian individualism and self-containedness. I don’t mean to paint a picture of Indonesian modernist composition as a kind of Picasso-manqué—they as brilliant as any of their Western counterparts—but that both Western and Indonesian modernists have been lulled into a sense of aesthetic self-referentiality as if their works would be as great in the complete absence of reference, community and history. 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.

Tracklist:
01. I Made Arnawa - Ebony (10:39)
02. I Made Arnawa - Ebony (Fragment from Preparatory Work) (01:23)
03. I Made Arnawa - Danse Russe (02:36)
04. I Made Arnawa - Andante (02:54)
05. I Made Arnawa - Polka (02:16)
06. I Made Arnawa - Dumbarton (02:19)
07. I Made Arnawa - Improvisation on a Theme from Petrushka (07:11)
08. I Made Arnawa - Ligeti Continuum (04:56)
09. I Made Arnawa - Ligeti Selbstportrait Mit Reich Und Riley (08:18)