my experience
“Mountain of Self” is a composition written based on the inspiration of my experience in climbing the Merbabu mountain (one of the mountains in Central Java, Indonesia). In this work, I will not explain the meaning of the name of the mountain itself literally, but I will focus on the philosophy of life of the people along the way to this mountain.
The title “Mountain of Self” implicitly tells us about a journey to reach a destination in this life. I use the “journey” in climbing the Merbabu as an illustration of this philosophy. There are many obstacles and challenges on the way to reach the peak of this mountain. The biggest challenge is emotion and desire, two psychological sides which I need to control in this way to the top of the Merbabu as well as in real and whole life.
A situation in which one is facing his/her own emotion and desire is deeply expressed in this work. Two dominant aspects in this work are feeling and spirit. They are obviously sensed through this composition. I put some variations of rhythm, dynamics, and articulation with use pentatonic ‘Slendro and Pelog’ scale in this work to emerge the expression of emotion and desire. I refer to Indonesian traditional music which commonly gives more emphasize on these aspects. Several rhythmical and harmonization patterns are adopted from technique gamelan music (dyad) – a unique inheritance of Indonesian traditional musical instrument – tune.
