A Day of Hands-On Learning

Jan Miyake, randai and talempong kreasi workshops, 15.01.14

On Wednesday, January 15th, we attended two workshops at Institut Seni Indonesia in Padang Panjang. The first was on talempong kreasi, a diatonic collection of gongs. There were three sets of gongs--one for mainly melody, a second for hamonization, chords, or melody, and a third for a lower register. There was also space for one person to play a 'flute' (don't picture a Western flute, rather, picture a set of unexpectedly shaped recorders that make a wide range of timbres), a medium sized drum, a hand drum, and an electric bass. Yes, electric bass. Evidently this institution teaches, among many other things, a form of talempong that is blended---it mixes varoius styles. So, the gongs and flutes played traditional melodies while the drums and bass used Latin rhythms, including a classic bossa nova rhythm.

The tune we learned consisted of four short phrases, unified in pitch material and often sharing similar melodic snippets. There were two groups learning on the higher-octave talempong sets. Two small groups of us worked on these instruments. One group learned how to emellish the melody while a different group learned how to play chords to the melody. The harmonic struture was F, F, C, d, C, F, C, G, with two chords per phrase. After about 30 minutes, we got to play as an ensemble a few times through the tune.

The second workshop was on randai. Here we met one of our very best teachers during the trip. Pak An (Jeni's Indonesian father) was incredibly clear despite choosing to speak little. There are many vocal cues for the movement in this genre, and he rehearsed us until we responded quickly (and correctly) to his cues. We were a little less successful when he strung sequences of moves together, but overall I thought we did a nice job learning some basic moves. Unlike our seudati experience, randai is performed in a circle, so one of the challenges was mimicking the instructor correctly -- sometimes you had to flip the image in your head before doing it! One of my favorite moves was the simplest-- a step and then raising a leg high enough to stretch your pants like the surface of the drum. You hit your pants on the off beat (or weak beat) and then repeat with the other foot. This was fun, even though several of us have sore glutes today....

 

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