Java-Futurism

In December 2022 the project was presented at the symposium Computer Aided Composition organised by Laura Zattra and Giacomo Albert at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini in Venice, Italy. The presentation traced the early work with electronic music Indonesian composer Otto Sidharta, both in Indonesia and in the Netherlands during the 1980s.

In the context of our project, Sidharta’s early position as a composer of computer music and modernist is not only a puzzle from a European perspective but also from the perspective of the Indonesian contemporary experimental music scene. 

The presentation can be viewed on YouTube from 2:24:53.

The presentation takes its point of departure in the release of the album by Otto Sidharta “Indonesian Electronic Music 1979-92” (Sub Rosa, 2017), its categorization as Early Electronic Music and as part of a series focusing on so-called pioneers within the genre. What is remarkable is that Sidharta’s album is the only one with the notion of nationality in the title. The presentation discusses what “Indonesian” means in a context where most of the music on Sidharta’s album is produced in the Netherlands and Sidharta himself identifies with Western modernism, even though he also has roots in traditional Sundanese music performance. We argue that no clear teleological history can describe what is at stake in these historical threads between Europe and Indonesia.

In the conclusion of the paper we respond to the symposium’s invitation and intention to shed light on the the history of early “Computer Assisted Composition” in the following way:

“In a broader perspective the story of Otto Sidharta is an attempt to bring post-colonial studies to the fields of EAM and computer music studies. Sidharta’s career and life are in every way shaped by colonialism – from his childhood in the Dutch colonial house with the noisy radio transmitter to the lack of access to advanced technologies in Europe and Indonesia  – and should be treated as such: as a colonial history. Such an approach to history opens towards a methodological awareness of the archive, understood, in the words of Ann Stoler, ‘not as sites of knowledge retrieval, but of knowledge production, as monuments of states as well as sites of state ethnography’ (Stoler 2002, 87). The archive should be approached with ‘ethnographic sensibility, rather than an extractive gesture’ (ibid. 109).

Otto Sidharta is, what anthropologists call a “colonial subject”, as he has been shaped as a composer under highly Western aesthetic and political influence and power structures. Even though we are speaking of a post-colonial time – Indonesia officially declared itself independent from the Dutch in 1945 – we continue to see the dependence and attachments that Sidharta still has to the Netherlands. This does not mean that there were no resistance in him: He would, as an example, not speak Dutch while being there (even though he could). Another more implicit example is, that he insists on using technology to explore the sounds of Indonesia in ways that makes sense to him and the context and traditions he grew up with.

The historical narration of Sidharta did not bring forth archival extracts and documents of evidence computer assisted composition. Does this then mean that Sidharta did not do computer assisted composition ? Well, maybe – and for good reasons – he did not do computer assisted composition in the strict sense defined within the context of IRCAM. However, we did learn, through oral history, that he worked with computers in the era of early computer music, and we learned that he found the computer useful and stimulating to his method of “intuitive composition” and in bringing interaction to the musical situation. This in fact is, we argue, computer assisted composition, because it is of relevance and because it brings nuances to the era of early computer music studies. As a result, it should not be left out.

Sidharta’s story is an example of a character in music history who all too easily falls into the oblivion or who is misrepresented. Take the notion of “pioneer”, as he is being described in the booklet to the album. In a former colony a pioneer cannot be the same as in the West. Sidharta is a pioneer in the sense that he was one of the first to do electronic music in Indonesia. But is he also a pioneer to the young Indonesian electronic music composers of today? To some yes, but to others no. The two artists introduced in the beginning of the talk say no, because Sidharta’s engagement with Dutch and Indonesian art and university institutions is negotiated, and even neglected by many Indonesian musicians today.

As presented, the unstable politics and technologies of Indonesia complicates a linear historical narrative. History consists of fragmented situations that only makes sense if the specific context is given. The lines of causal developments of music are multiple and broken, and the concepts that travel between North and South are constantly transposed into something new: Western Art Music, technology, modernism and pioneers are concepts that do not easily travel without transposing into something new. The same is at stake, we would argue, when it comes to computer assisted composition.”