Beat, beat of a song, song, go buzzing in my head, head

In the summer of 2023 I chanced upon a podcast episode on Indonesian gamelan music from "Mazette ! Quelle musique !" (all in French), a weekly show on France Musique. I have been mesmerised ever since by these exotic sounds and have been listening to the podcast of that show several times since. It is still on my phone to listen to when I feel like floating on a soft carpet of chiming harmonies.

The episode tried to answer the esoteric question: "Can gamelan music be dissolved?" It wove a meandering path criss-crossing between traditional Indonesian gamelan music - with its orchestra of gongs, xylophones, drums, voices, solo string and flute - and Western classical music from medieval times to the present. It was fascinating to discover the similarities one can hear between music composed on two different sides of the world at very different periods. The witty show producer Jean-Yves Larrouturou also implied that traditional gamelan music was slowly disappearing from the modern Indonesian cultural scene.

With one week of leave to spend in mid-August and an objective of leaving Beijing's muggy heat, I took a flight to Java. I had a very loose plan of staying on the cool heights of the volcano chain, which runs through the center of the island, while also keeping my ears open to chance encounters with local gamelan music and examine whether gamelan music can still be dissolved into modern Javanese daily life.

When I asked the very helpful Rumah Lereng Bandung hotel staff if there were any traditional gamelan music shows running in Bandung, the answer was no. So I went to see the Angklung musical show in Bandung instead, featuring an orchestra of adorable children, each one playing an individual note of the scale on a portable bamboo chime. Luckily, the introduction to the children's show was a 15-minute preview of the art of Indonesian puppets accompanied by a gamelan orchestra. So I did get to hear a live rendition of gamelan music and observe how the different orchestra players watched each other for the cue to all go into repeated tempo-changing percussive beats, layered their playing to create harmony, or staggered their playing with one another to play a fluid melody between several instruments.  

The Sundanese (West Java) version of gamelan music involves a small ensemble of gongs and a solo flute playing an airy melody. I did hear it twice in public spaces during my trip. At the lobby and restaurant of the modern Hotel Santika in Tasikmalaya, instead of the usual soft repetitive pop music one usually hears in international hotel chains nowadays, the sound system was playing the traditional Sundanese gamelan degung with its airy magic flute. It was a perfect background to sample the impressive breakfast buffet showcasing all the delicious variety of a Sundanese street market.

Sundanese gamelan was also being broadcast on the sound system when I visited the outdoor hot springs of Ciater, North of Bandung. So I could hear the fluid melody of this gamelan music while soaking in the hot thermal pools. A fitting background music dissolving its sounds from the air into the mineral-rich water.

While travelling on the high plateau of Central Java, I let my taxi driver choose our music. To my delight, some tracks of local Javanese dangdut pop music have clear reminiscences of traditional gamelan music. The orchestras accompanying artists like Happy Asmara and Denny Caknan feature at least 2 guitars, 3 keyboards, a modern drum set, a traditional Indonesian drum set and a solo saxophone or electric guitar. These instruments choose their electronic settings to layer different tones of sounds, the solo instruments will weave an intricate melody with the singer's simpler tune, all instruments will sometimes break the tempo with a series of repeated beats introducing the bridge or the return of the main tune. All these musical processes are hallmarks of traditional gamelan music! 

Thus, from this very short trip on Java, I have gathered some insights of how traditional gamelan music can not only be dissolved into Javanese modern life, but how it can also sometimes fuse into modern Javanese pop music. I will now let qualified musicologists study the dissolution potential of gamelan music.

In the end, the very helpful staff at the Villa Sumbing Indah in Magelan assured me I could listen to a live gamelan orchestra at the Borobodur temple complex. However, the building was mesmerising enough by itself to capture all my attention for the one-hour fixed duration of my guided tour without the need for any background music.

King Kong Five
Mano Negra

E la mensa prepariamo con ricchezza e nobiltà

Five years after singing Mariage of Figaro with Opéra des Landes in 2018, the timing of my summer holiday this year allowed me to take part once more in the choruses of the Opéra des Landes for another of Mozart's Italian operas on a libretto by Lorenzo da Ponte: Cosi fan tutte. 

Just like in Figaro, the chorus only makes three short appearances on stage and one backstage. I had already sung the piece with Bangkok Opera in 2006, and the chorus was in desperate need of tenors. So I negotiated with the chorus master to let me sing the production with my joining only two rehearsals before the dress rehearsal. It worked! This is a recollection of what happened back- and off-stage.

This production had already been given in other cities and five of the six soloists had already worked with each other and the conductor. On the other hand, the lead tenor and the chorus were discovering the staging and we only had three days to learn our roles and actions on stage. On the day of the dress rehearsal, the props for the stage were still being set up by the stage technicians while the artists were rehearsing on stage.

The trickiest part for everyone was that in the small theatre of Soustons there is no orchestra pit. Therefore, the small ensemble of musicians is always put on one side of the stage and the conductor is also on the far-side. This was problematic for many of us because the stage setting in this production involved an inner central box into which all people on stage had to turn their gaze. When deep inside the box, or on its outside, it was difficult or even impossible to see the conductor. Thus, many of us had to sing by ear and sometimes get off-time, or turn our head towards the conductor but then we would be told off by the stage directors for not looking into the central box! To help out, the stage technicians installed a loudspeaker hidden behind a curtain on the opposite side of the stage from the musicians so that singers on that outer side could hear the music more clearly and in time.

At the dress rehearsal the last change of costume for the two men soloists inevitably did not work out as planned: they failed to metamorphose themselves back from Albanians to Italians in the only two minutes they had backstage. So they cheated by wearing their Western trousers and shirt under their Oriental embroidered livery and turban. They also kept their Oriental shoes on for the final scene. However, given that the whole costume colour scheme was off-white, the audience probably did not spot these details.

All in all, we all had lots of fun and the two shows were close to sold out with a total of 800 people coming to see us and enjoy the show. You can read a French musical critic's viewpoint and see photos of all of us on stage here, and see some film footage of the dress rehearsal taken by the local TV channel here.

Cosi fan tutte
Wolfgang A. Mozart, Chamber orchestra of Europe, Sir Georg Solti, Decca

On England's pleasant pastures seen

I used to take regular trips to the UK at least once a year. I enjoy its green countryside and usually cheerful folk in small cities and rural areas. Going through my previous articles in this blog, I realise my last trip to the UK was in April 2019. Covid put a stop to my international travelling for several years.

Now that it is again possible to travel easily in and out of China, I took a summer holiday to Europe and went for a nine-day, three-Nations tour of England, Wales and Scotland. I had announced my trip to all the friends whose email address I had and who were based or had a connection with the UK, giving them the choice of meeting place in either London, Monmouth (Wales), Manchester or Edinburgh when I was passing by. Unfortunately, the dates of my trip also coincided with summer holidays in the UK so many of my friends were away too. I only got to meet two of my friends and their spouse. I thus spent the rest of my time visiting new places, trekking or running along well-signed footpaths, enjoying the new British gastro-scene and shopping for new clothes and textile items.

In the past I had always driven around the UK as a car is the easiest way to reach out-of-the-way rural areas of outstanding beauty. This time I chose to take trains throughout my trip despite the threat of widespread industrial action. There was no disruption in the end. I only had a tight change of platform in Birmingham on my way to Manchester because of the late arrival of my first train from Gloucester. For once, all the photos in the article are selfies in different places along my tour.

I started off with a night and half-day in London where it was as busy as ever although I tried to stay away from the major tourist attractions. By 2pm it was really starting to get unpleasantly busy with tourists, so I took a train down to Kent. As none of my friends had expressed interest to meet me in London, I accepted the invitation of my friends Hannah and Tim to stay a few days with them in the smaller town of Otford. We enjoyed delicious food together. I went on a long and sunny five-hour walk along the North Downs Way and had to take two trains to find my way back to Otford.

I moved across the country from Kent to Wales for a few days with my former food marketing Professor David Hughes and his wife Susan. The weather started deteriorating but we still enjoyed delicious local meats and the vegetables Susan produced herself in her allotment. I got very cosy with their old cat Spartacus. I got baffled trying to read signs in Welsh.

From Wales, I made a stopover in Manchester, where I had never been before. The architecture of the city is very surprising: there is no consistent heighbourhood housing style. Each individual house has a style spanning from the 15th to the 21st century, whatever the style of its neighbouring houses. This creates a disconcerting kaleidoscope of a city. I took a long walk along a canal heading North of town; with all the locks they had to pass, I was walking faster than the long boats. 

I was thrilled to take a Trans-Pennine Express service North from Manchester to Edinburgh. We passed through beautiful countryside. The Scottish weather was unwelcoming for tourists: showers and sunny spells throughout my day in Edinburgh. I shopped my way along the Royal Mile for woolen textiles and souvenirs. I went to listen to evensong at Saint Mary's Cathedral. The choristers were sadly on summer holiday too; the music was artfully sung by a visiting choir from Texas. I got to taste Scottish tapas. It seems to be the latest food trend in fashionable urban centres: sharing several small portions of food set on the table for all. Rather than ordering a main dish each, the diners order several small dishes to share. 

I thoroughly enjoyed this trip back in the UK and hope to go back more regularly, choosing a base point to enjoy more of the local scene and greenery.

Jerusalem
Hubert Parry, Royal Choral Society

Summer days drifting away to those summer nights

My last week of June has been very busy getting all my work done before my summer vacation. I've also been very busy outside of work.

For the dragon boat festival long week-end, I travelled to Lanzhou for a few days of hiking along the Yellow River with Beijing Hikers. My highlight from this trip was the many colours and forms that the river took depending on the topography it flowed through. Despite its name, the Yellow River turned to blue in a lake created by a dam along its course. I was accompanied on this trip by the smiling handicapped mascot of the 2024 Paris Olympic games, a phryge. It looks like a red smurf hat and is a symbol of liberty. We shot lots of photos together as part of a promotional campaign to introduce the values of next year's Paris Olympic games to the Chinese netizens through a series of short stories on the Chinese Twitter-like Weibo platform of the mascots visiting various emblematic Chinese sites.

On Thursday 29 June I gave a solo recital of French Romantic melodies together with pianist Cheng Tong. After a trial recital last year which only attracted 8 people because of covid-phobia, this time I sang a full-length programme of 12 pieces in front of 44 people. For the first time, I realised the difficulty of singing live, solo and for a long time: one needs to deal with voice quality but also interact with the audience, say a few words of introduction before singing, keep going although the pianist and I realise to our horror we are no longer in synch... It was an exhausting learning experience. The audience nonetheless seemed to enjoy the show. I was fortunate to have lots of singing friends come to listen to me: I already have a group of fans in Beijing.

Finally, just before leaving China for France, I travelled to Taiyuan in Shanxi province to take part in the wedding ceremony of my French cousin Henri who had met and got married to a Chinese lady in France. This was the Chinese side of the wedding and I was the only representative from the French side. The ceremony was very colourful and well choreographed to maximise photo opportunities. The music was loud; the lights multicoloured and very bright; but the banquet was a delicious assortment of local Chinese delicacies.

It has been a tiring week, made all the more exhausting by the scorching temperatures reaching 40°C during the day over the last month. I am now glad to have left the heat of Northern China for the more temperate European weather for my three weeks of summer vacation. 

Summer nights
John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John, original soundtrack from the motion picture Grease, 

Recital photos: Autumn and Katia Wistoff

We'll find such lovely things to share again

It has been three years since covid had prevented me from seeing friends in France freely, especially those with children. End 2020 I thought best not to visit friends so as not to spread the virus. End 2021 I chose not to see anybody indoors and unmasked for fear of catching the virus and not being able to go back to China. Now that I have been fully vaccinated, and having caught covid just before leaving for my holiday one month ago, I felt free this year to go on a big tour of France to visit my friends who were available to see me!

My tour of France was principally centred on the sea, friends and food. I left my parents' country house in Southwest France on 3 January for Bayonne, still on the Atlantic coast and close to the Spanish border. I finally took the time to visit the historical centre of Bayonne which I had not managed to stroll through during the three years that I was stationed in that region from 2017 to 2020. I did go back to the beach in Anglet where I would sometimes go for a lunchtime swim break when visiting my colleagues who were posted there. I also went back to the local restaurant serving delicious and simple local food for a bargain, targeting the armies of builders, painters and carpenters who are constantly erecting new houses on this highly sought-out coastal area.

I rented a car in Bayonne and drove all the way to Nice on the other side of France by the Italian border. There was unfortunately no snow for skiing in the mountains this early winter so I spent all my time seeing friends and former colleagues. My first stop was in Pau from 4 to 7 January. I had seen most of my friends and former colleagues already last winter or when I had left town two years ago. I enjoyed deliciously crafted food at L'esberit and Maynats restaurants. The foody scene in Pau is becoming increasingly elaborate and it is more and more difficult to find an empty table in a good restaurant by chance. Bookings are highly recommended even for the simplest bistro. I managed to be there to see the new year's concert of the Pau orchestra and choir, which I was part of when I used to live there: a great show with lots of jokes between pieces and the usual festive Blue Danube, polkas and other classical hits. This being the 20th anniversary of the new year's concert in Pau, the producer had interwoven the Happy birthday theme into several of the orchestral pieces as a clever leitmotiv emerging from the music all along the concert.

I drove along the Pyrenees mountains to the Mediterranean Sea for my next stop in Agde where I was hosted by Brittany S. with whom I had sung in small ensembles when we both lived in Bangkok in 2009. However, we had met again since then and our latest reunion was in Nairobi eight years ago when Brittany and her husband Bruno C. were driving through Eastern Africa with all their possessions and themselves tightly fitting inside a van. Their small house just by the beach had a marvelous view on the sea and they prepared delicious vegetarian food during my stay there, sharing viewpoints about life with their volubile son Phoenix.

I continued hopping along the Mediterranean to visit my current Beijing colleague Julien B. who was also on holiday at his parents' house in the oyster-producing village of Bouzigues, close to Sète. Unfortunately, there was an administrative order preventing all the seashells to be consumed because of a temporary food safety problem. However, they had prepared and frozen lots of stuffed mussels, a local specialty, before Christmas and I got treated to a delicious home-cooked meal of Mediterranean seafood in Languedoc style.

From Bouzigues, I drove on to Montpellier where I stayed with my postgraduate school batchmate Vianney H. I had last seen him in the Summer of 2020 when I had come to Montpellier for a job interview. I also took the opportunity to meet some of my former colleagues from Cirad, some of whom were on the opposite side of the job interview table last time I had seen them, or with whom I had worked in Vietnam when I was based at ILRI in Nairobi eight years ago. This was an opportunity to share insights on covid management in France, Vietnam, Western Africa and China. To take a break from the feasting of the past two weeks, I had very simple fare of butternut soup and pasta with grated cheese at home with Vianney, who was ridden with flu and had no appetite himself.

I then moved on to Marseille where I met up with Thibault V. whom I had last seen in 2017 just as he had come back to Paris from Cameroun and I was moving out of Paris for Pau. He took me to the Miramar to sample an enormous serving of traditional bouillabaisse fish soup. I had more local seafood with deep-fried squid rings and baitfish, along with lots of olive-based veggie dips the next day in a small provençal restaurant on the old port of Marseille after visiting the exhibition dedicated to Mediterranean food cultural heritage at the new Mucem museum of Mediterranean civilisations.

My last Mediterranean destination was Nice from 12 to 14 January where I jogged along the famous Promenade des anglais, went to visit the sites where Henri Matisse had painted colourful art, went to the opera house for a staged show of Schubert Lieder, and ate more seafood in Mediterranean style. Overall, my trip along the Mediterranean allowed me to taste many facets of the Mediterranean diet. However, having eaten in rather large quantities, it would be difficult to still call it a diet in these circumstances.

After four days' of shopping and seeing other friends in Paris, I took a train to the Western-most part of France in Finistère (meaning, the end of the Earth!) in Brittany. I had more seafood and lots of the local crepes specialty while also meeting with very old friends. I met Thomas V. and his family in Brest. Thomas was a high school student with me in the Netherlands from 1988 to 1991. However, we had seen each other again afterwards, most recently when we were both Parisian in 2016. 

 

 

I then went South along the Brittany coast to Penmarc'h in French Cornwall from 19 to 22 January spent with Cyril A. Cyril and I were boarding together during graduate school in Paris. Although we were not from the same batch year, we kept close contact after graduating to different postgraduate schools. I had visited him in Montpellier and he came to visit me in Bangkok in 2009 but we had not actually seen each other in 14 years. The big surprise was that Cyril happened to live just 50 km away from his graduate school boarding mate Michel D., whom I had probably last seen in 2002, more than twenty years ago!

 

I found it very satisfying to interact freely again with old friends after three years of covid wariness about in-person meetings. I am now back in Paris with my parents but I will still be meeting with many of my Parisian friends in the coming days. This tour of France reinforced my strategy to keep regular contact by email, Whatsapp and post cards with my good friends. Although we do not see each other often, when we do meet, it seems like just yesterday and there is little catching up to do. We just need to exchange the latest news and enjoy our mutual company, until the next time comes to meet again. 

We'll gather lilacs
Ivor Novello, Julie Andrews

Tis the season to be jolly

With covid sweeping unhindered in Beijing, I caught the virus mid-December, which was rather unpleasant and tiring. More distressing: it prevented me from hosting guests for celebratory pre-Christmas dinners and the music we were supposed to sing for the third Sunday of Advent service went unsung because nearly all the singers had caught covid! 

So I was releaved to get out of morose Beijing on 17 December for a few days of duty travel to Hong Kong. It was an opportunity to meet up with my brother and sister-in-law, whom I had not seen in the flesh since June 2019! We shared many delicious dinners in the restaurants which were reopening after the Hong Kong covid spell of last spring. I even enjoyed the rather kitch Christmas spirit pervasive throughout the city: Christmas decorations and lights, carols suffusing out from all the sound systems of malls and lifts, gourmet goods and ingredients in the shops and supermarkets. All these things were sadly missing in Beijing this past month.

The weather was wonderfully sunny during my six days in Hong Kong. I went out for a hike in the new territories with my brother. I took a day off to roam around town and on the bay. The skyline is always impressive and uplifting.

 

 

 

I have now arrived back in France for Christmas with my parents and the rest of my family.

 

 

Deck the halls with boughs of holly
Nana Mouskouri, Christian Christmas songs

While thus we agree, our toast let it be

One of the activities I have taken most pleasure in during my time in Beijing has been singing with a group of men in an octet. I created the octet with seven other singers from the Deutsche Kantorei Peking: four tenors and four basses. We call ourselves "The deep side" of the Kantorei.

We have been rehearsing regularly for small projects linked to the German evangelical church, or to produce our own concerts in bars around town. We sing an eclectic repertoire of music going from Renaissance to modern arrangements of popular music; we explore the German-, French-, English-language repertoires, with some attempts at traditional songs in exotic languages such as Basque. 

Most important for me, this group is also a source of companionship and good fun. Apart from the singing, we also take the opportunity to share a meal and drinks at each rehearsal and after our concerts. 

Not only do we enjoy singing, eating and drinking together, but our audiences also enjoy our performances. We still have to work on knowing our parts better so as to lift our heads out of the scores and interact with our audience; we are told this eye contact is still missing. We will be working on it for our future gigs. We already have two producers who want us to sing again in their venue. 

Despite covid sometimes preventing all eight singers to take part in an event, those who are left still keep singing with glee!

The Anacreontick Song
J.S. Smith, The Hilliard ensemble, The singing club, Harmonia mundi