STORIES WITH PA': Diary Notes with the Last Master of Javanese Classical Music of the Golden Age

The author, Alex Dea, is a composer, performer, performance artist, and ethnographer who started composition with the “Bad Boys” of avant-garde minimalism La Monte Young, Terry Riley, and Robert Ashley, and ended with Javanese master music and dance teachers. His work in Central Java documenting the last remaining masters produced over 1,000 hours of audio and video. He is an uber inside-outsider. He had permission to video the reconstruction of the sacred Bedhaya Semang in the Yogyakarta Palace, and in the Surakarta Palace, he is the only non-Javanese singer (bestowed title KRT Candradiningrat, a fairly high rank somewhat like a earl or baron). He creates and produces new works with Asia’s Didik Nini Thowok, Ramli Ibrahim, the late Ben Suharto, and others. Dea intertwines old classical and new avant-garde imagined histories with futures from the lush flower-bed of harmonic overtones. This book, in diary form, draws a portrait of renowned Javanese master gamelan musician Pak Cokro, an accomplished and influential musical mind, on the level of Beethoven, Bach, or Mozart. The author’s living with and interviewing—for fifteen years—such a master is an unprecedented longitudinal ethnography. (NOTE: Pak Cokro’s titles, among others, are KRT Wasitodiningrat, KRT Wasitodipuro, and KPH Notoprojo. Over the years of his service to the Paku Alaman palace, he received honors and promotions from the reigning head of the royal family.) Pak Cokro, who lived until past 100, speaks broadly about subjects ranging from composing, to playing, history, knowledge, and mystical matters. Themes and threads include: tuning, gamelan’s origin, poetry, secrets of music, esoteric knowledge, dreams, meditation, Ratu Kidul (Queen of the South Sea), sexual energy, being in the USA, and growing up at Paku Alaman palace. Not a narrative book, Pak Cokro’s thoughts roam but return to many threads giving peeks at how a genius thinks. It is a springboard for future researchers, curious readers and seekers, and certainly, for aficionados of gamelan arts. Opening a door to understanding, here then is a wellspring to dig in and taste the ephemeral gift of Pak Cokro. Some Excerpts: Sept. 27, 1999 Taman Siswa… he believes that the energy he uses to know about the spirit and spiritual world is the same energy he uses in playing music. Because of perasaan (feeling), musicians are able to find variation, meaning, and content in music. Oct. 24, 2000 Taman Siswa I must listen and regard what Pak Cokro is saying about mystical things—no matter how far-fetched sounding… It is all coming from the same source. Jan 25, 2001 Taman SiswaHe said his left and right hand play independently: sometimes the left hand and sometimes the right go off on its own… One must play independently. All this came out of his dream of meeting with Panggah. July 29, 2003 Taman SiswaHe used to say that the exact detail of the balungan (basic melody) was not important…The whole thing comes together when there is “understanding” which includes intuition and feeling. June 30, 2007 Taman SiswaTonight, he emphatically said that he must … tell them things, what he calls the “soal-soal” [important matters]. Just like the way the Tuesday night rehearsals is a medium for him to pass on musical knowledge by a kind of aura and osmosis transmission—just being there with him and playing for him, the players have figured out how to garap [improvise] the important pieces. … he doesn’t mean to sit people down and actually teach them the details … (although he most certainly would demonstrate ... the way he plays “air gendèr” singing out the cèngkoks to me for pathetan slendro sanga ngelik or pathetan nem). He means that by telling them the things he’s been telling me, they will figure out the rest on their own. Read more