Last week was our first visit to 8bb’s second home, University of Richmond (VA), for the 2007/08 school year.
Alongside the usual round of lessons, coachings and meetings galore, we also had a significant load of repertoire to plow through as an ensemble, most importantly our upcoming Mirrors project. Ms Muskal, our august composer, was in town to give us a whippin’:
As well as this, we had two rehearsals for a fascinating collaboration with UR professor and gamelan-expert Andy McGraw, and fabulous Indonesian composer, dancer and musician, Gusti Putu Sudarta. Gusti works in the theater department at the Indonesian Institute of the Arts in Denpasar, Bali, but is visiting professor for this semester at Richmond, at the invitation of Andy McGraw.
The results of this collaboration is Wayang Jataka to be performed at University of Richmond’s 3P Festival of Electro-Acoustic Music in October. The focus of
this year’s festival is on pieces that incorporate or respond to music from
around the world.
According to the Modlin Center website:
Balinese shadow master and Richmond Visiting Artist Gusti Putu Sudarta collaborates with Richmond faculty member Andrew McGraw, eighth blackbird and Kinetic Imaging artists from VCU, New York City and Rome to create an experimental performance combining traditional Indonesian shadow puppets and computer imagery, accompanied by a mixture of Western chamber and gamelan music. The play, Wayang Jataka, will be a setting of a traditional Jataka tale–the stories of the many incarnations of the Buddha–in which the buddha is reborn as a golden peacock.
Andy McGraw has arranged a suite of instrumental and vocal pieces to support some pretty dramatic-looking, electronically produced shadow puppet imagery. There are songs of war, love, death and hunting (lots of hunting), and 8bb members get to beat drums, crash gongs and hit gamelan instruments.
There is a brief synopsis, courtesy of Andy McGraw:
‘Kayonan.’ Tree of Life/Creation of Universe
‘Mantram.’ two monks meet, sing a mantra
‘Pemungkah.’ Birth of Boddhisattva as a golden peacock
‘Angkatan.’ the young peacock ranges the himalayas
‘Mimpi.’ Queen of Dandaka sees peacock in a dream
‘Angkatan.’ Hunters attempt to catch the peacock for the queen and fail
‘Mesem.’ Queen Dies.
‘Sanghyang.’ the king creates a plate instructing his progeny to hunt the peacock.
‘Kereptan.’ 7 generations hunt the peacock
‘Perang.’ War
Warriors/hunters transform into dragons and demons
War
Boddhistatva transforms the demons into trees/flowers. Lead warrior decides to use a peahen to capture the Boddhisattva
‘Rebong/Onde-Onde.’ Love/Flirting scene
‘Angkatan.’ The boddhisattva is caught and brought to court.
‘Angkatan.’ The boddhisattva reveals himself to king, expounds on dharma.
‘Tabuh Gari.’ finale.
The one, the only, Gusti Putu Sudara:
A quizzical Duv, a baffled Aussie, and a laid-back Gusti:
No idea what the story is here. I suffered some frustration with the drum part I was sight-reading at the first rehearsal, and as a result Andy arrived the following rehearsal armed with a completely revised, “simplified”, drum part for me. This was not exactly a ringing endorsement:
The video attached to this blog entry (which may not be able to be downloaded to your pod - I will correct this for future podcasts) includes rehearsal extracts from two musical sections of the project. One of these features the distinctive timbre of Gusti’s amazing, description-defying voice, while the other is driven by a hectic, very Reich-like pulse. (Reich is a composer who quite obviously, and quite audibly, learned much of what he knows from Balinese gamelan.)
You can see more photos from the week’s fun at our flickr site here.
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