Sonic Dissonance

By Robyn Yuwell

Yudane is seven years old when he is given his first Balinese traditional drum. Growing up in the interweaving, rich world of Balinese magic, music, mischief, and violence, he carves a unique path across the landscape of new music composition in both Bali and New Zealand. Travelling widely, his virtuosic and perennially controversial compositions cross genre and media, including gamelan ensembles, orchestral music, choirs, electro-acoustic music, scores for dance, theatre, film, and installation. He is the recipient of many honours for his compositions.

• Language: English
• Publisher: KAS Publishing
• Release date: Aug 19, 2021
• ISBN: 9780473578282

Book preview

Introduction

Kei te pō te tīmatatanga o te waiatatanga mai a te atua, ko tea o, ko tea o mārama, ko tea o tūroa

It was in the night where the gods sang the world of light into the world of music.

Maori proverb

The ancient music across the diverse cluster of islands of Indonesia is wide and varied. The most widely known music in Indonesia is gamelan.

A small number of Balinese composers integrate Western and Balinese musical forms, instrumentation, and aesthetics.

A note on pronunciation:

Balinese and Indonesian terms are generally italicised and referred to in the glossary. Balinese and Indonesian words are pronounced with the same vowel sounds as Māori or German words.

Balinese pronunciation generally stresses the final syllable in two and many three syllable words and the penultimate syllable in longer ones. The final h, as in gambuh, is sounded. The r, as in kebyar, is rolled. The c, as in cempaka, is pronounced as ch.

Part One

1: Tumpek Wayang

My grandfather lived between the seen and unseen worlds. In Bali, it’s true that the unseen world lives alongside – and is just as important as – the seen world. Our calendar of 210 days in one Balinese year is made up of cycles that, like the artists and communities across the island, interlink, interweave, celebrate and are given special meaning.

Iwas born on the day of Tumpek Wayang on a Saturday, the luckiest day of the week. Tumpek Wayang is one of the special days in the Balinese calendar and happens every 210 days, or six months, and always falls on a Saturday.

It’s the most mystical of all Balinese ceremonies and celebrates magic and all of the many sacred performing arts, such as the traditional wayang kulit puppet theatre; the masked topeng dances; and performances of the much-loved barong – a huge mythical lion-like creature, made up of two dancers, that spins, flips and pounces across the stage and clatters its teeth at the audience.

But Balinese people believe that anyone born on Tumpek Wayang has a wrathful character. They are seen as strong but scary because they are born on the same holy day as the insatiable ogre Batara Kala. Batara Kala was born on Tumpek Wayang from an improper union between Shiva and his wife, Parvati, and is seen as a dangerous demon.

People create a surface meaning of Tumpek Wayang and believe that this day is scary and threatening. In their imagination it is like the towering ogoh-ogoh demons that are built every year, by each community hall (called a banjar), out of bamboo and papier mâché to be paraded through the streets on the eve of the Balinese New Year.

They are symbols of all negative energy in the area, and as they are paraded through the streets, they are spun counter-clockwise at every crossroad to confuse and bewilder evil spirits and drive them away from our area so that they no longer harm human beings. The parades are accompanied by beating drums and gamelan music through the night until the ogoh-ogoh are laid at the graveyard and burnt, before the dawning of New Year’s Day, when all is still and silent.

Part of the parade is judging the best ogoh-ogoh. The judges would choose one banjar as the most creative, and it has always been highly competitive. 

These are all symbols and metaphors that many Balinese people don’t really understand, much less people who are not from Bali. In Bali there is a lot of confusion and a lot of information which is passed on by word of mouth, and only some people have the knowledge of the deeper meaning of each weekly and annual cycle and each ceremony and ritual.

People are not sure of the correct meaning of Tumpek Wayang and are quick to judge you negatively if you are born on that day. So they say I’m not good. It’s not a harsh judgement. It’s just a passing judgement. Maybe because of the general knowledge and experience of the way that people who are born on this day are treated, the judgement of being bad can become a self-fulfilling prophesy. They become bad because they’re always told they are bad.

But my father and mother never believed this. They knew from studying the traditional scriptures that are written on palm leaves called lontar, that this day has a deeper meaning. Tumpek Wayang is the special day when three very important cycles intersect, invoking the big spirit of art and magic, and imbuing anyone born on this day with this spirit.

You can imagine how jealous some people become when they hear this. Somebody born on this day has melik – gifts and talents in the arts, or whatever field they work in. I feel like I have something special too in my life compared with other people. A lot of people are very hybrid, but I try to find my own way. I don’t follow any trends.

But in Indonesia, to be seen as different and standing apart from the crowd, enjoying my own path and my own company is seen as strange or even dangerous. And people will find a way to let you know this makes them uncomfortable. It’s not an issue when I’m travelling outside of Indonesia.

I’m lucky I’m not one to be running around only in my neighbourhood – Kaliungu Kaja – in the heart of Denpasar. Maybe it’s part of the spirit of Tumpek Wayang that has led me out into the wider world. It’s not just because I work hard by myself. I feel like something of this spirit has given me great support. I think that it gifts me some knowledge, some magic that I have received from being born on this day.

ln fact, when you look more closely at the meaning of ‘kala’, it means ‘time’. And this is the celebration of a split-second moment between light and shadow when we transcend time and the cross-over between night and day. When life quivers for a second into the sphere of magic or the ‘unseen’ and then is gifted back to the seen world we live in now.

In ancient Balinese scripts it is said that the god Shiva comes down to earth and devours a child born on Tumpek Wayang. And so, every child born on this day, will have at least one mebayuh, a purification ceremony with special, sacred wayang puppets called Sapuh Leger.

Because I was born on this day, I had these special ceremonies to protect me and cleanse any bad spirits from me so that I could become a good boy. But I have to admit that it might not have worked as well as my extended family hoped.

I had three of these ceremonies. I asked my dad why he gave me three instead of just one, and he shrugged and simply said it was because he likes Wayang Kulit, and since his friend is one of the best puppeteers on the island, it was all free of charge!

As the ceremonies came closer, I would run higher and higher fevers until the ceremonies for Tumpek Wayang began and the puppetry twisted in and out of the sunlight, and just as suddenly as it started, my fever would break, and I would be well again.

2: A Community of Music

Sang sākşāt mêtu yan hana wwang amutêr tutur pinahayu.

Authenticity will arise for those who are able to cultivate consciousness

Arjuna Wiwaha.X.1

Islipped out from another world, same spirit onto the kitchen floor, on September 5 th , 1964. I was recognised as the eldest son of the eldest son as my father tied my umbilical cord.

It was dawn, just as the birds and howler monkeys in the nearby bird market behind the palace were starting their cacophony of a morning chorus. The roosters competed for who could crow the loudest. In our own back yard, the chickens and geese spluttered to life with intermittent squawking. A cloud of tiny kelelawar bats flew back to the trees at dawn, and finches flicked through the garden singing.

In the back of the garden there were still a lot of huge sacred banyan trees, coconut trees, and a huge mango tree that bent down with the weight of the heavy fruit. You could hear the squirrels jumping through the mango tree. Motorbikes were kicking into gear as families rode out to buy nasi kuning or nasi goreng for their breakfast from the tiny street stalls or the markets. Their mechanical drone would weave in and out of the full song of the wildlife that still lived in the city.

Every evening, the crickets would start up. Dogs barked excitedly as their owners rushed into the compound at full speed on their motorbikes. You could hear the huge percussive gamelan orchestras striking up their rehearsals in every neighbourhood or community hall around us.

The orchestras of metallophones, bronze gongs and two-headed drums were played in perfect synchrony by ensembles of about 25 people. We could sit on the veranda in the evening and hear completely different ensembles playing separate pieces that reverberated and shimmered in the air across the city, breathing in and out of each other and surrounding us.

Almost every community hall – called a bale banjar – had their own gamelan ensemble. We could hear the gamelan from our own Kaliungu Kaja banjar, and from the neighbouring Sadmerta banjar. In later years, we could even hear the gamelan rehearsals from as far away as the Taensiat banjar. All the many banjar in the area were very active, and we could clearly hear their rehearsals, mixed and joined with the music coming out of our own banjar.

I was born into the world of the 20th century gamelan music of Gong Kebyar – a filigree of intricate rhythm and melody woven tightly together and played so fast that sometimes you could not even see the hands of the musicians as they beat the instruments in a cyclical rhythm with a hammer in hand, in perfect unison with each other.

When I was small, the resonating low baritone of the large gong scared me. It’s huge, copper reflective surfaces boomed out a growl from the back of the gamelan orchestra that terrified me. Even though I cried and screamed in terror, my father brought me back to the bale banjar each day to play gamelan.

But when I was around four years old, he put me on the smallest instrument called the kempluk and as soon as I was playing in the gamelan with other members of my community, I learnt to face and overcome my fear of the low growl of the gong.

3: The chaos of history

Mati Tan Tumut Pejah

Death is the estuary of the authenticity of the way of life. Death is not vanity and death is also not a waste

Cokorda Mantuk Ring Rana

Igrew up surrounded by the chaos and strife of the sixties in Bali. I was born the year after the 1963 eruption of Gunung Agung in Bali. It was one of the largest and most devastating eruptions in the whole of Indonesia.

Lava flowed like rivers from the volcano crater and then two successive explosions brought fire, molten rocks, pyroclastic flow deposits, and ash down on the villages along the side of the mountain.

Many lives were lost, and villages and crops were destroyed. Thousands of people came off the mountains to shelter in Denpasar, and the people there and across Bali looked after them until they could return home the following year. They were still sheltering in the city when I was born.

A year after I was born was an incredibly momentous time of chaos and violence in Bali. Thousands of people with connections to the communist party were slaughtered or disappeared and also many non-communists were also killed. It is said that the streets ran red with blood.

Although it was a war between the army and communists, the main political party called PNI, and civilians with a Silat background, were also recruited to take and kill people. Mostly it was the army disappearing people and nobody knows where they went.

Some of the houses of communists were burnt to the ground and they were restricted in getting work. People doing the killing didn’t know who they were killing and what the connection was and it was very confusing and unclear who was being killed and why. It was a very dangerous time.

A lot of people in my banjar belonged to the communist party. Only one communist in my banjar died because he was the real leader of the Communist Party of Indonesia. He wasn’t taken from his home. They waited until he was out of his house to take him, and we don’t know who disappeared him. My community protected everyone we could, but if they were in a high position, it was impossible to protect them.

My uncle and other relatives weren’t killed because they were hidden in the palace. Some of them already had their name on the target list called DPO (Daftar Pencarian Orang). The Indonesian Nationalist Party called PNI was tasked with providing the names and locations of communists, but the boss of PNI was also the head of Puri Satriya, the palace that was just down the street and was part of our community.

The palace sheltered everyone in our community that they could, including our uncle. They protected them from being killed and hid them behind the walls of the palace as the army moved out across the city to find them and kill them.

The army couldn’t take anyone from the palace because the leader was from the royal family and the leader of PNI. He was simply too powerful. The palace was a stronghold in the city, and a lot of communists were protected in Puri Satriya.

My dad had a background in Silat and other martial arts and had a little bit of power in the area, so he was recruited into the Tameng or civil militant group. He was given a black uniform with a brown beret and a sword. He was given a list of people to kill, but instead he took the sword to our local bale banjar, and protected our community.

People arrived and called out the names on their killing list but our community chased them off and they weren’t executed. I was born very close to that chaos, but I was still too young to remember anything.

Despite everything around us, our community was tightknit and were resilient and quick to adapt to change through all our stories of the Mahabarata that were acted out in mask dances and puppetry on the island.

Even when the Dutch invaded, they could not have imagined what they would face when they came into Denpasar. The royal family and their entourage knew they couldn’t win against the Dutch guns. Holding their own cremation ceremony, they walked in trance, wave after wave into the Dutch guns. They would rather die than be subjugated.

4: Ordinary Days

Then