The Beauty of Pelog, or ‘wrong’, but nice

While at Wesleyan I had the privilege of meeting the wonderful kotoist Ryuko Mizutani, for whom I composed a slightly odd piece for bass koto – reconceived of as a sort of hammered dulcimer (using Ryuko’s beautiful calligraphy brushes as ‘hammers’) – along with a recorded poem. This was perhaps the first time I had seriously attempted to compose something for an instrument from a tradition I’d not been immersed in. Though I had had an interest in Japanese culture since my teen years, there were many surprises about how this played out in practice. In my naivete, I think I imagined an insular classical tradition, which might require me to learn a new notation system. Instead I was told that most kotoists are very comfortable with Western notation, and shown examples from the extensive repertoire of such works written by both Japanese and non-Japanese composers. I quickly realised that the koto world was already very comfortable with an international and pluralist outlook, and apparently rather more worldly than I was! Similarly, rather than hirajoshi or another of the traditional tunings, I was told I could have any tuning I liked. In the end I chose a kind of just intonation, an early example of my exploration of this idea.

This flexibility proved very useful a few years later when Ryuko invited me to write a piece for koto and a Javanese gamelan group based in Tokyo, Gamelan Lambangsari. I found this an unimaginable challenge, but also really wonderful in the way that it brought together things that we had loved and shared. (Ryuko was also a member of the Wesleyan gamelan.) But the challenges were many: Tuning (most gamelan instruments have fixed pitches, but the tunings themselves are not precisely codified and vary somewhat from set to set), notation (gamelan was classically an oral tradition and ensembles use the Kepatihan cipher notation, if they use notation at all; thus it cannot be assumed that players would understand Western notation), and ensemble coordination (gamelans normally follow the drummer for the most part, as the conductor of Harjito’s orchestra and gamelan piece discovered in the first rehearsals). I needed a solution that worked both musically, and practically.

In the end, after collaborative discussions with Ryuko and one of Lambangsari’s leaders – I am a huge believer in composition as a collaboration between all involved – we arrived at a strange hybrid which combined elements of many of the things we collectively brought to it. The tuning was a mix of the Javanese pelog tuning with some notes from slendro. This was not uncommon in contemporary pieces, and normally gamelan sets are actually dual sets, one in each tuning. Lambangsari’s set was tuned in the common ‘tumbuk 6’ arrangement, in which the sets have pitch 6 in common. (In fact Lambangsari’s ‘sixes’ were not precisely matched, something which the koto part exploited.) I carefully designed the piece to be playable on a dual set, with each player able to reach the notes on the adjacent sister instrument, but to my amazement the players – with great enthusiasm and speed – went to the trouble of restringing the bars on some of the keyed percussion instruments, combining the notes of both scales, as they felt it would make it easier to play well, even if this meant adjusting to a new layout!

The notation adapted Kepatihan in a shared Western score-like layout, with separate staves and systems, using elements of proportional notation where appropriate alongside Western dynamics. Ensemble coordination was mostly worked out in rehearsal, but the score-like approach (with some old school cut and paste to reduce page turns in ‘parts’) worked well.

In contrast to my earlier experience of working with Ryuko, the experience of this piece put me face first into unexpected elements of Japanese culture when I travelled to Tokyo to attend the rehearsals and premiere. Yes, as I had previously learned there was an open, cosmopolitan and internationalist culture around contemporary music for koto. But I found myself dropped into Ryuko’s circle, all young women, a number of whom lived with their teacher who was a kind of matriarch for the group. The composer Carl Stone, who has lived for many years in Tokyo, later explained to me something of what he had observed of this world. Mostly female with a relatively small number of teachers, it exhibited a perhaps insular intensity. The sense of community I experienced was fierce and inspiring! All the students flew into the work needed to realise the event, with no job too small or menial to be taken on. They, along with the gamelan musicians, literally stopped everything to make Ryuko’s concert. I’m sure she had would have done the same for any of theirs.

Gamelan Lambangsari was equally surprising in some ways. Though I have never considered myself more than an adequate rebab player at my very best, and was always highly dependent on my teacher to even approach that, I was of course aware that one of the wonderfully inclusive things about Javanese gamelan is the way in which it allows participants of wildly varying expertise and experience to play together. Rebab however, is an ‘advanced’ instrument, and it is not uncommon to find community groups where nobody can play it. As such I felt I should offer to play the part myself, though I tried to make it clear that I was no virtuoso, and I’d be very happy if there was someone better. They responded that of course they would be delighted that I do it. It was only later when I heard one of them testing the tuning of the instrument that I realised just how outmatched I was, and that my clumsy diplomacy had achieved the opposite of my desired outcome! This for me began a long pattern of reflection on differing cultural approaches to politeness and deference, and the many ways in which I could fail to communicate well because of them!

Upon discussion with Ryuko we settled on the title 漂う– Tadayou, or ‘floating’ – for the work. It both reflected the relationship between the solo koto part and the gamelan, sort of floating above it (at times almost like the suling or pesindhèn in gamelan), and seemed to suggest the way we now often float between cultures, near – like viewing from above – but not exactly always within. While musically much of the piece is quite free, it draws in a blurred way upon the piece Golek Lambangsari, in part as a nod to the wonderful Japanese group that played in its premiere.

Ryuko’s kindness, care and discipline in all her work struck me deeply, and I was intensely struck when she tragically died a few years later of cancer. This was shortly before a visit I made returning to Wesleyan, and I was moved by how profoundly she had affected so many people there, as we met and reflected quietly on the loss. Some years later I realised slightly to my surprise that my piece Ember, which I was writing at the time, was really a dedication to her. It has nothing to do with koto, or gamelan tunings, but reflected perhaps the quiet fierceness of her way of being which remains an inspiration for me. Interactions, intercultural or otherwise, need not be only about surface aspects after all!

All this fed my growing fascination with the idea of tuning – I remember Barlow holding forth at length on the idea of ‘E-ness’ and realising that notes themselves are culturally mediated and ontologically problematic entities! – and an attachment to hierarchical (i.e. modal) approaches to pitch organisation. Not all my explorations of this have had a cross-cultural angle, but a number have.

While living in Toronto, I was asked to compose a piece for the wonderful and long running Arraymusic ensemble. I turned again to Japan, and this time the ancient court music Gagaku. The resulting piece, Netori, is loosely inspired by the gen
re of tuning pieces of the same name. These serve as an introduction, setting the atmosphere and tuning the instruments. Fixating on this relatively small part of the repertoire I was not unaware, even then, of the possible comparisons with the infamous performance of Indian classical musicians at Woodstock, where the audience applauded after the tuning. But how those pieces sang to me! How wonderful to write a piece to find the tuning…

Later, in Birmingham I would return to pelog, which remained a fascination for me in its defiance of adequate approximation in equal temperament. A friend at Wesleyan had told me that for one of the modes of pelog, he’d heard one of the notes named as ‘wrong but nice’. I loved that, and while I’ve never been able to find another source for that taxonomy, I did enjoy the wonderful heterogeneity of one of the naming schemes I did find: bem, gulu, dhadha, papat, lima, nem, barang. Translated from Javanese, these are head, neck, chest, four, five, six, thing, which became the name of a piece I wrote for the wonderful Fidelio Trio. It used a sort of adapted pelog scale, which the two string players must conform to. The piano part approximates this in equal temperament, creating beating effects like those in Balinese music, whilst avoiding note 4, which at a good 54 cents off the closest pitch is indeed ‘wrong but nice’ against it. Although the most overtly gamelan-y piece I’d written in terms of textures, it was not intended as a pastiche, but rather a hybrid. I wanted to compose something that somehow brought together so many different strands of my own musical life: western instrumentation, electroacoustic sound, gamelan derived ways of thinking [6] , modality, tuning. All of these seemed to me to be ‘me’, at least in some sense. An arrogant notion perhaps, with all the potential for contradictions and false claims, but I felt the need to try to untie that musical knot in a piece, nevertheless.