Murdering Mahler

So, today, Friday, is a day without a Mahler rehearsal, but I am so physically and emotionally drained that the day is a blur.  And I fall asleep at around 8 pm.  Now, three hours later, I've woken up from another wild dream.

So in this dream, I'm a photographer and I've been assigned to take pictures of a very impressive wine glass collection in a huge contemporary-style house.  The collection is all in one room, a huge dining room (although the dining table, later on, feels kind of like a morgue table).  First, I order all the lights in the house shut off so that I can control the lighting in the dining room better.  The wineglasses are in lovely glass shelves and it's my intention to take some of the standing lamps in the room and direct them so they can pick up the richness of the wineglasses' colors and textures.

But no matter which lamps I set, the room is too dark.  There must be something wrong with the lamps.  None of the lamps is bright enough.  I call for help, for more light bulbs.  All sorts of people are coming into the room now. piling boxes of light bulbs on the table.  The dining table that is ... or is it the morgue table?

None of the bulbs is any good.  Someone says ... Look, a German bulb!  It's a small thing with a black socket and a different kind of screw that won't fit into a standard lamp.  I pick it up and Curt Ayers III, a Southern gentleman who is a member of the Orpheus Choir of Bangkok, says, "Oh, ah think ah'll take that if y'all don't mind." 

Holding the bulb in my hand I have a flashback ... I murdered someone in this very room ... a bald German gentleman.   I am tormented by guilt.  Then the dead person rears up.  His bald head bears a scar from having been stitched back together ... post autopsy, perhaps.  I start screaming, "I've murdered Mahler!"

Only as I wake up do I realize that this bald fat elderly corpse couldn't possibly be Mahler.  It's Bruckner.

***

Is Bruckner's ghost telling me I better do his Ninth symphony as well?  This call for more and more light ... is it a remembrance of Goethe's last words — "Mehr licht!" ?? 

Obviously anxiety has something to do with this dream, but is there something else?  I didn't notice any Giacometti sculptures skulking about....

Time considered as a helix of maxed-out credit cards

So, for the last few days, everyone in my house hasn't known what day it is, and it all came to horrid collision of timelines and timeframes this morning.

I'm just running off to Singapore this morning for only 24 hours, the idea being to catch the opening of "Boheme" with Nancy and to be able to have another chat with Covent Garden resident director Andrew Sinclair who has offered to do a production of Jenufa in Thailand in 2011.  While I'm there, I was going to take Jay to see the NUS music school as well as perhaps pop in to see a bunch of flayed corpses at the Body Worlds Exhibition.

So I get to the airport at the time it says on the E-ticket and I ask the counter why the plane is leaving an hour earlier now.

She says, "You missed your flight!  It was yesterday." It seems that wrong-day-itis has afflicted the entire family.

Time for a split second decision.  Should I buy a new one way ticket?  If it was just me I would have turned around and gone home.  The hotel in Singapore is already paid for but it's deeply discounted, I got it mostly on award points.  It's not like I've never seen "La Boheme" before ... I just conducted it last month and I'm doing it again in August!

But there's also this other kid travelling with me and Jay, someone from Jay's school.  His dad bought his plane ticket.  I can't really send him to Singapore alone!  So here I am, an hour late for check-in, having to decide whether to stay or go.  If I spend the extra $400 on a ticket, will my credit card become suddenly maxed out so I have to hitchhike to the opera in Singapore?  I decide to get the money from the ATM and call someone to quickly deposit more money in this account so that by the time I get to Singapore in two hours I'll have enough money for lunch.

I realize that today I'm like the protagonists of "La Boheme", rushing through life without knowing how I'll pay the next bill.  Maybe, having achieved all these supposedly big-time distinctions, it's time to settle down to a nice boring teaching job in a quiet rural conservatory.

Never!

Ravens, Flying, Past, Future, Pools, Destiny

So I had a dream so extraordinary I must share it with you in its entirety.  In fact, I remember it all vividly hours later, suggesting that it is a visitation from the collective unconscious.

***
The dream is set in the future, in a vast crumbling mansion in which I live alone, in a large attic room.  The house is mostly dark, sculpted wood.  One day, there comes a visitor from the past (that is, a time traveller.)  I spend all day preparing a special room for him, but when he arrives I am so exhausted I am already asleep.

I come downstairs and he has been sleeping, he says, on a bench.  No, no, I must show you to your room.  I take him there.  It's a room that must once have been a covered entryway or hallway.  The French doors/windows have dark wooden shutters that do not reach all the way so that a bright sunlight comes in.  I apologize that I didn't put new mosquito netting in.  He might have been bitten.  My guest doesn't mind.

I open a drawer.  It contains jade knives (like from the ancient Chinese burial sites) but they're clearly fake because there is some Chinese inscription in old characters but also something written in English on each one.  They are pale green jade.


Other draws contain knives too.  And other cutlery.  I say ""The linen must have been kept here."  (Odd thing to say because there is no linen.)  I realize that this is no bedroom; it is an anteroom to the huge dining room full of antiques and a dim chandelier.  Then I say to the visitor: "You might think this is my house from 'Jasmine Nights' - the big mansion - but it's not.  This one is the ruined house."  It's a reference to the ruined house of dreams in my novel, Jasmine Nights.  He wants to know where the big house is and I saw it's outside.

We leave the house through the opposite side from the visitor's guest room.  We're in a vast green lawn.  The house must be that way, I say, because Sukhumvit is up here.  I point to the main road and see that it is completely walled off.  You cannot see the street.  We are cut off from the world.

The main house is not where I think it is.  Instead, there is a dark forest.  "If Sukhumvit is to the north," I say, then the house must be that way, beyond the forest."

The visitor cries out in fear.  We see that the way to Sukhumvit is guided by huge rocs ... giant, black, man-eating birds.  Each one stands guard, grim-faced.  They look like crows, but in the dream we call them rocs.  They may be ravens, but they are flightless.  Their red eyes glare.  There are also human guards.  Or perhaps robots.

There is no way to get out to the real world except through the forest.  So we set out to reach the main house, or perhaps the world itself.   But inside, the forest isn't made of wood at all, it is a concrete jungle.

First we pass a courtroom where someone is sitting in judgment.  The jury and court are like zombies.  They are just going through the motions.  It is a simulacrum of justice.  The visitor and I sneak past them and soon find ourselves in a labyrinthine mess of little cobblestoned streets.  There is no sky.  There has been no sky all the time; all this is inside something.

I reach a piazza lined with rococo columns, yellowing.  There is a stone pool or trough and in it, boys are swimming, naked, each one with a brightly colored toy.  The toys are the first brightly colored things in the dream.  They look like antique machines from an era of plastic.  They are all shouting, "These toys are for us to drown ourselves with!"  and they're gleefully submerging themselves.

"No, no," I tell them.  Quickly I take one of their toys.  "You've got it wrong.  These are ancient toys from a distant time.  They were not made for children to drown with."

I show the toy, hold it up.  It's a cone-shaped fluorescent green thing with little corkscrews dangling from it.  "These toys are not for drowning, but for flying."  And instantly, it takes to the air, fluttering in the first breeze to blow through these claustrophobic streets.  The boys cheer.  "You've forgotten so much," I tell them.  "Once, when we had a sky, a toy like this could fly oh, so, so high."

I turn to the stranger from the past, because now I suddenly know who he is.  And I am about to tell him so when I wake up.









 ***
I woke up from this dream six or seven hours ago, and jotted it down.  But until a few minutes ago, when I told the whole dream to Jay, I didn't realize that I was going to say to the stranger, "You're me."

And just now, I realized that although the plastic toys could touch the sky, the ravens were flightless.  Does this mean I shouldn't be afraid of death but I should trust invention?

This dream holds the clue, creatively, to what comes next in my life.  What's past is prologue, indeed, but also the rediscovery of flight, the confrontation with the Deathbird (there was a raven on the cover of my LP of Bernstein's Mahler 9, which I had as a child.) ... going through the forest of judgment, "forging" the sword of destiny (double meaning there because the jade knives were forgeries....)  I'll have to analyse it all the way to when I sleep again, and maybe revisit its world....

Right at the Curve?

 David Giler sent me an article from the SPECTATOR, and it says that the three most significant events that define the last century in classical music are the following:

1. Mahler become a universal icon
2.The discovery of Janacek's operas in the non-Czech-speaking world
3. The rise of regional opera companies.

This is a truly extraordinary list of things, but if it is true, it puts Bangkok Opera at the top of the curve.

1. We're pioneering the first complete Mahler Cycle in Thailand.
2. We have discussed with a prominent director from Covent Garden a new production of "Jenufa" forThailand in 2011.
3. What do is practically the Platonic Ideal of the words" "rising", "regional" and, maybe, even opera company!

Makes you think, doesn't it?

Libera Me!

After just over two years of agony it is finally done.  So now I can talk about my Requiem Pro Matre Cantuum (for the mother of songs) at last.  Apart from the emotional strain of trying to create a worthy monument to one of the most important benefactors of classical music in this part of the world, there has also been an intellectual burden because in this composition I have tried to solve my personal conundrum, caused by my being caught between two worlds, two widely disparate ways of looking at the universe.

As some of you may know, I have been agonizing over the knotty question of the fusion between Thai and Western music for at least 35 years.  I've solved the problem in many different ways: in the 1970s by evolving a kind of textural polyphony, allowing the worlds to coexist without really blending, just sort of bleeding and cross-fading into one another.

In the 1980s, during my long escape into novel-writing, I formed a different view of where I should be as a composer.  It was a more Asian view because I longer believed in music as a linear progression from past through present to future.  I felt that the entirety of our musical past was physically present and there was no real need to feel connected only to the immediate past.  To be honest, this liberation came from writing music for low-budget films.  There was a freedom to experiment that I hadn't felt since being in Thailand in the late 1970s.

In the early 2000s, after returning to Thailand, I had reinvented myself as a neo-romantic.  Interestingly, many composers in Thailand, especially the academic ones who had not really actually had careers in the "real world" and who had essentially been cut off from many of the developments in the west, thought I had sold out, not realizing that the return to tonality was actually "more modern" than the post-serialism of the 70s.  But one of the things this enabled me to do was integrate melodic ideas from Thai traditional music more fully.  But eventually this wasn't enough and there was a need to use the underlying philosophies of Thai music as well.

There is a fundamental problem when we come to do this because western music is bound up in the western perception of time.  In western music, causality is therefore of the essence.  Music is about things that germinate into other things.  Ideas like development, recapitulation,  variation exist because time in western music linear.

In many kinds of Asian music, however, time is not perceived in the same way at all.  In the traditional "thao", as basic to Thai music as "sonata form" is to the classical period, the most developed, expanded variation is presented first, and then the music gradually collapses to its most rudimentary form.  In general, even in less extended formal structures, we must forget western notions that music proceeds by addition towards a climax and that each thing we hear has been built on that which went before.  We are into a more non-linear mode of temporal perception.  And the greatest performances of Thai classical music can generate a feeling of time standing absolutely still.

In my Requiem I wanted to explore all the different musical languages I've learned during my life including those I have long since abandoned, and try to find their commonality.  Thus there are movements founded completely on traditional Thai folk motifs, movements that pair serial technique with Monteverdi-like choral recitative, and movements that draw on the colors of science fiction and fantasy film music.  But the challenge was to draw these elements together into some kind of unity.

That is the reason that the composition of the last movement dragged on for almost eight months.  Of course, this movement need not have been written at all; but when I was speaking to Brother Martin about using the monumental ABAC church for this concert, and he said to me, "Don't forget the Libera Me."  This section is often left out of Requiems.  But then, the Libera Me - In Paradisum section of the requiem mass provides a wonderful progression from horror to sublimity, and it soon became clear that this massive movement could be used to bring all the disparate elements and forces of the requiem together.  The melodic element of in paradisum came to me months ago, as a simple Siamese folkloric theme that would not be out of place in an Isaan village.   I had already, in the Pie Jesu movement, used the idea that a short Thai motif that never modulated and simply repeated itself recursively without modulation could be a viable movement, and in the Sanctus I had explored the idea that I could freeze-frame a G major chord and (using western rather than Asian melodic ideas) pull it into an Asian timelessness. 

What I needed was to integrate this into the whole.  In other words, to write a music that was both in time and out of it at the same time.  My solution was a childishly simple one, but one that I was in fact stuck on for many months.  It was to create a string of timeless "bits" in which the string itself was a temporal construct but the bits were not.  I found a way to have my cake and eat it too, in other words.

Whether it works or not will have to be decided by others....

But what is clear to me is that in the libera me I have managed to cathartically free myself from much of my own musical baggage ... from the post-serialism of my youth to the constraints of linear time. 

I don't know whether this provides an entertaining glimpse into the compositional process or whether it's just a bunch of self-justifying B.S.   We will have to find out over time.

Or not-time.

Why Thai Kids Don't Know Things

I had a very disturbing conversation with Trisdee a few days ago about quantum mechanics and spacetime.  Okay, these are not exactly subjects that impact our daily lives, but the conversation led to areas that definitely DO have such an impact.

It started when I asked Trisdee what the Thai for "spacetime" was, because I was trying to formulate a way of saying something in Thai about relating the musical structure of one of my compositions to relativity.  As some of you may know, we are planning a "science through music" camp for young people and I particularly want to discuss the relationship between music and relativity.

Trisdee couldn't tell me offhand so he searched around on Thai Wikipedia and came up with the word "kala awakash".  This is Sanskrit-based neologism.  "Kala" means time, and "Awakash" means space.  But wait a minute, I said to myself.  It means "space" all right, as in "outer space", because the roots of that word mean "without air" and therefore a "vacuum" and therefore the space that lies beyond our atmosphere.   There is absolutely nothing in the word that has anything to do with the meaning of the word "space" as used in "spacetime" ... i.e. space as in the three dimensions of space, space as in Euclidean geometry.

How weird, I said.  Whenever Thai kids learn about spacetime in physics, they automatically carry in their heads an image has has been engendered by mistranslation.  Whoever created the term looked up "space" in a Thai-English dictionary and didn't bother to penetrate any deeper into the semantics of it.

I started to wonder how many other Alice-in-Wonderland images young Thai students carry in their minds, so I asked Trisdee to look up "field theory."  You guessed it.  The world for "field" used in the Thai terminology is a word that evokes an elegantly manicured lawn. 

There is a big issue at stake here.  The very first people to create physics textbooks in Thai, or any other textbooks that require wholesale creation of new terminologies, were either (a) not physicists and therefore not sensitive to the specialized usages of those words in English or (b) not good at English, and therefore content to believe the first Thai translation of each word out of context or (c) not good at English OR physics or (d) just mechanically slapping a one-for-one equivalency without being interested in English, physics, education, or anything except getting paid by the page.

However, because the Thai educational system emphasizes rote learning and extreme, nay idolatrous, worship of and obedience to one's teachers, no kid would ever raise his hand and ask, "Why does gravity come in lawns?"

I am not talking about the pernicious revisionism that permeates Thai school texts anyway (I once tried asking a dozen Thai kids who had won the second world war -- all of them thought Thailand had).  Shoring up one's national identity may require that history textbooks be written like a superhero comic, and no country is immune from that ... elementary history books in the U.S. are particularly nauseating in their cartoonification of the past ... I am prepared to admit that nations do mythologize their history and to some extent this is inevitable.

But we're not talking about history.  This is physics, i.e. hard science.  We're not even talking about the whimsical minds of physicists who have given quarks colors, strangeness, charm, and beauty.  We're talking about inappropriate translations of root concepts.

A day later I was talking to a German gentleman, Dr. Amrehn, who teaches at a Thai university.  He told me the problem is even more pervasive because when it comes to specialist vocabularies, each expert has created his own, and they spend as much time fighting over which word to use as over the subject in question.

Is it possible that there could be some kind of commission to completely rethink what is being taught here ... to find the best way to translate key ideas if needed ... to create textbooks that actually make objective sense?

Otherwise we're just going have another generation of rote-learning zombies, with all the external accoutrements of a technologically advanced society, but it'll only be skin deep.

Passing through the Window

Sometimes dreams can be quite cosmic ... seeing God and that sort of thing ... I know when I have dreams like that they are NOT acid flashbacks, because I didn't do acid in the 60s.  Or did I?  I don't remember the 60s, so I must have lived through them.

Thais believe that seeing dead people in a dream is very lucky which is why there are always lottery vendors at funerals.  But what if you see yourself dead?

In last night's dream I was a fugitive being hunted through the wilds of Alaska, I think it was during the gold rush.  I'm crawling through the snow wearing a lot of furs and one of those Russian looking hats.  Anyway I'm caught by someone, a posse I imagine.  I'm thrown into a cage on the back of train and we begin a long and epic journey through snowy, desolate terrain.  I distinctly remember being unshaven.

At some frontier outpost I manage to escape and find myself in a two-story building.  But they come after me.  There is a bloody shootout, me versus what looks like Seventh Cavalry uniforms.  It's very bloody.  My last enemy has his legs blown off and I crouch over him, but he turns himself over on one arm and shoots me between the eyes with the other.

And here's the thing, I feel myself get colder and colder and the world getting dark and it's not scary like I thought it would be.  When I look out of the window I see a woman escaping on  a white horse.  I realize that she was with me the whole time.  She is the one I have been protecting on the train journey, only I didn't see her before.

As I wake up, I continue to die, so the two sensations cross-dissolve very slowly.   So my waking moments are as dreamlike as my dream was real.

... As a committed Jungian I would point out that the woman on the white horse is clearly a representation of the anima and that the dream is clearly not about death but about survival ... transformation ... it's in fact a highly positive dream about how things are going to change this year.

I said anima, not enema!  Jeeze!

Two Years and Counting....

Tomorrow it will be the second anniversary of HRH Princess Galyani's death, and as of now, I am still composing the Requiem, which is supposed to have been completed a long time ago, and performed already, and so on. As with any labor of love, it just does not seem to turn out neatly. I have composed virtually the entire piece and it could perhaps easily be performed as is, without the final movement. After all, most requiems don't even include the "libera me" and "in paradisum" sections ... and this is what I have stalled over for months, composing an average of a minute's music a month for the last six months.

The reason I am writing them at all is that, two years ago, when I was starting the piece, I sat with Brother Martin at ABAC and he said to me, "Somtow, you must not forget to set the libera me section of the requiem mass." I realized that I had a unique opportunity to create the first setting of a major piece of Latin liturgy by a Thai composer. Maybe that's a rather retro thing to want to do, half a century after Vatican II, but I've always had a powerful streak of retro: why else am I trying to revive the sonnet, put on concerts of Dufay, and set long bits of Latin to music?

Those who have followed the saga of my Requiem pro matre musicae perhaps know it's been a painful process. One movement from the piece, by far the smallest, has had a bit of a life as an excerpt. having been played at one or two memorial concerts for the princess, but this work. created specially for the space at the huge ABAC cathedral in Bangna which is a sort of scale model of St Peter's Basilica in Rome, has just kept getting bigger and bigger, so that parts of it now require something like 200 - 300 performers, including seven soloists, off-stage brass band, two boys' choirs, a large mixed chorus, and an orchestra with an organ. Although most of it actually feels like chamber music.

This is the requiem of which one movement disappeared completely in a hard drive crash and had to be reconstructed completely out of thin air, not once but twice....

The requiem is also my personal "Monteverdi Vespers" in that it's a compendium of every technique I've ever used from neo-romanticism to serialism to neo-Asianism, and it's a real attempt to reconcile all the different creative strands in my music. And that final coming together happens in the last ten minutes of the piece, which it's all been building towards and that's why it is such an angst-ridden bit of composing.

But I've suddenly turned a corner. Suddenly I see how the end is going to have to be. It must have just taken this long to figure it out. Not used to this. Now I'm composing up a storm. It might even be finished in a matter of days....

In which case, it will be the my first composition to take over two years to compose....

2009 - My Personal Vampire Junction

So, in a couple of hours it will be 2010 here in Bangkok. There's no one in the house. The housekeeper went to the big countdown at Central World, Trisdee went to see Avatar, and Jay went out with friends.

So I'm sitting all alone reflecting on the year that's gone by. For me 2009 was a watershed; one of the best and worst years of my life.

It was the year in which I finally came to my senses and realized I can't save the universe on my own dime. It's the year in which the Bangkok Opera's administrative structure, damaged beyond fixing in 2006 but sustained more or less singlehandedly by throwing my family's money at the hermorrhage, finally crashed and burned because I ran out of fingers to stick in the dike.

But also the year in which I found people who might really rebuild it the way it was always meant to have been built, the year in which we put on two of the finest productions in our history and in which our orchestra finally broke through the international credibility barrier. It was a year of astonishing bad luck followed by amazing last-minute rescues. I think I can honestly say I've aged much more than a year this year. I certainly feel it, physically and emotionally.

This is the year that Trisdee broke through to become an genuine international conductor, and Jay started composing, and Ruaychai become a concertmaster for Mahler symphonies. Basically the year that young people whose talent I discovered and nurtured have all started showing the world what they can do.

My own creative work has stalled, though; my major compositions, the Requiem and Dan no Ura my big Japanese opera remain unfinished, my big fantasy trilogy is on hold. It's really all because the details of opera admin have been weighing everything down.

So, I got to "the vampire junction that sucks your soul away," and I hope I've turned in the right direction now. Away from the soul-sucking. My new year's resolution, if anything, is to remember to be more selfish.

I want to avoid another 2009, but I'm not quite sure how to yet ...

Seaweep Soup

Gaze upon the splendour of this menu, from a small restaurant somewhere on Rama III Road. Of course, the "hot curry with mixed crap" takes the cake, but I am also pretty proud of the "seaweep" soup.

I suppose it's a reference to the high sodium chloride content of both the ocean and human tears.

Thus, by expansion, making the sea a metaphor for human suffering and frailty.

What poetry is to found in the humble typo!

My Review of "Dances with Aliens"

I wrote this review of AVATAR that appeared in THE NATION yesterday ...

"DANCES WITH ALIENS"
a personal perspective on "Avatar"
by S.P. Somtow

In 1977, Memorial Day, I sat with hundreds of salivating members of the Washington Science Fiction Association at the very first showing of STAR WARS. It was explosive. The packed theatre was alive. Every effect was greeted by applause and cheering. The world of nerdy sci-fi readers had suddenly become cool. The next decades were bittersweet as the masses began to infiltrate — some might say dilute — the purity of fandom's somewhat elitist vision of itself. But there is no doubt that STAR WARS' tropes — the Deathstar, "Use the Force", and so on — have become as entrenched in contemporary mythology as Achilles and Hector were to children of ancient times.

For almost 30 years, the science fiction community has been waiting for another such epiphany. Which AVATAR almost is. Its virtues as science fiction are considerable, its effects stunning and more than worth the price of admission. They are almost enough to drown out that little cynical inner voice that's bitching and moaning about the idiotic plot and stupefying dialogue.

No effort has been spared to make an alien world real. If you watch this film in 3-D, you will spend a lot of time being impressed. First of all, it's tasteful, not in-your-face, and the specs can be worn over your own glasses without any discomfort. The screen looks like a window out into a genuine universe. There's nothing contrived. There doesn't have to be, because the planet Pandora has been created with lavish and loving precision. It's a world that has been realized with such conviction and totality that you buy into it completely. It the film were a Galactic Geographic documentary, it would score a perfect ten.

Another example of the depth of detail in this film's world-building is the fact that the Navi language is so much a real language that I felt like pulling out a notepad and making grammatical notes. Some of my linguistic hunches were confirmed when I researched it onine later — it's a highly inflected language with a very fluid word-order, a rather limited set of phonemes, and fascinating grammar.

James Cameron has stated that the movie contains all the science fiction he ever read as a child, and that is easy to believe. Although the parallels with "Dances with Wolves" are obvious and, I believe, deliberate, the idea of a perfect Eden about to be wrecked by an uncomprehending, technology-inclined human race is one of the most important themes in science fiction. My first encounter with it as a child was in Theodore Sturgeon's classic novelette The Skills of Xanadu and James Blish's catholic take on the trope, A Case of Conscience, in which a priest reaches the conclusion that the utopian planet must be a creation of Satan because its inhabitants have no concept of original sin. Ursula le Guin's The Word for World is Forest is also an almost exact novelistic foreshadowing of this film. All these works and hundreds more are in AVATAR. There's probably even a nod to my own very tall, blue-skinned, sexy race of Selespridar in a series I wrote that was very popular in the 1980s.

It's therefore clear that Avatar has impeccable sources (one of which is not the famous science fiction novel The Avatar by Poul Anderson). My quarrel with the film is not with its sources — there really are no original stories per se — as with the fact that the sources are only half-digested, giving us a screenplay that insults the intelligence from time to time.

So in the end — yes, it's mindblowing all right. I will probably see Avatar several times in order to appreciate the complexity and beauty of its vision. But ultimately it's not the epiphany that the first STAR WARS was. In fact, it possesses the same problems that the second STAR WARS trilogy, impressive thought it looks, has. Like those three films, it's a film that treads old ground, more grandly and more spectacularly, and in travelling the safe way toward riches has given up some of the most important elements that made STAR WARS classic. The wit, for starters. STAR WARS was funny: AVATAR takes itself far, far too seriously. The character reversals: in AVATAR the lines of good and evil are drawn right from the start and never change. I was rather hoping that the nasty CEO running the planet would suddenly turn out to be a good guy, for instance, but all storytelling subtleties are sacrificed on the altar of special effects.

Having said all these things, which must be said in the interests of a fair critique, I'm still going to go back for another helping. As Obiwan Kenobi so trenchantly tells us, "Let go your conscious self!" You'll love it.

Getting Serious About Creativity

I wrote an open letter to the Prime Minister which appeared in today's edition of The Nation. Originally, I'd written a 2,500-word piece which really got into the nitty gritty of how the future might play out, but maybe all those details are best left for a genuine strategy session, if I were ever lucky enough to be invited to one.

Dec 21, 2009

Dear Prime Minister:

It was an honour to perform excerpts from Bruce Gaston’s extraordinary A Boy and a Tiger for you yesterday. It prompts me to write you this letter in a spirit of optimism and hope.

I am writing to you on behalf of my fellow Distinguished Silpathorn Artist Bruce Gaston and myself, but I believe I speak for all creative people in this country and Thai artists in other countries.

Recently Ajarn Bruce and I and many other artists were invited by the Ministry of Culture to two very different meetings. One was an intimate meeting with the Office for Contemporary Culture. As artists, we gave our forthright opinions and we all felt that our government was listening to us. We had a real sense that our ideas would be incorporated into policy.

The other was a huge seminar attended by hundreds of people in which government officials tried to lecture us benighted artists on the meaning of creativity and our function in society. Artists were incensed and some walked out.

The contrast between these two perspectives compels me to write. A renaissance of national consciousness may come to a halt while we wait for bureaucrats to reinvent the wheel.

When Ajarn Bruce and I began working together in the 1970s, Thailand was reeling from what, in the 1940s, was a traumatic cultural revolution. Thai classical music, vibrant and innovative in the early twentieth century, had been rejected in a rash policy of westernization. When traditional arts came back, the backlash caused an overreaction. Invention and creativity were replaced by rote-learning. No one challenged what was preserved, whether masterpiece or mediocrity.

In the 1970s a small group of artists flung open the doors. Bruce Gaston’s operas, like Chuchok, and my own fusion of Thai and western classical music, played out against the backdrop of the Bhirasri center, which showcased uniquely Thai contemporary visual arts. In a 1977 interview in Asia Week, I predicted that we would be the world’s next cultural hub.

By 1979, we were exhausted. We’d survived a lifetime’s worth of artistic ferment. We believed it was a noble but failed experiment. Bruce and I didn’t collaborate again for 30 years except to create, together, the songs “Thailand, the Golden Paradise” and “Amazing Thailand,” still used by the Tourism Ministry to sell Thailand to the outside world.

Thirty years later, I came home and made some startling discoveries.

First off, our revolution succeeded beyond our wildest dreams. What we did has infiltrated into every level of popular culture and become part of the definition of “Thai-ness”.

Some pundits view those two events — the slamming of the doors during the 1940s and their re-opening in the 1970s — as the last century’s two pivotal moments in Thai music. But what’s past is past, and we must look to the future.

Since those two meetings, I feel a sense of urgency. The government is committing a sizeable investment into our nation’s future. Funds are limited and we have to nurse our resources.

I propose four essential principles in putting creativity to work for this country.

First: we must stop dreaming that Thailand should become what it already is — the epicenter of creativity in the region. Everyone knows this except the Thais themselves. Please study what has already been achieved here, often against incredible odds.

For example, in my field of opera, Thailand is the acknowledged regional leader. Our productions are reviewed in the New York Times, Financial Times, and all the international opera magazines. We have achieved this on creativity alone, because, we don’t receive the 80% government subsidy that a European opera company does.

Second: Get perceptive people with a global perspective to oversee your policy. Otherwise, creativity will be overwhelmed by mediocrity. Really make excellence a priority; don’t pay lip service to it as previous regimes have done.

Third: Fund creativity and creative projects directly. Established artistic entities and artists should receive direct and substantial subsidies. If symphony orchestras, major opera companies, khon troupes, and avant-garde theatre groups get real money every year, you will see the investment repaid a thousandfold. We are not talking here about commercialism, but real culture, our national identity.

Finally, I must propose the most difficult thing for a paternalistic government to accept. But, having first learned to stop reinventing the wheel, having then set your eye on the truly excellent, and having made sure that those who are genuinely creative have the means with which to create … the final thing government must do is let go.

Please look at the BBC, a wholly government-funded institution which nevertheless has a charter stating firmly that the government cannot interfere in any creative matter. Government must trust us. We are your conscience. It is we who speak the truth, even when it is painful for the nation to hear.

Please consider carefully this simple, four-step plan for a true creative economy. If you can set up the infrastructure for it to happen, the country’s finest artists will rally for a creative flowering such has not been seen since the Ayuthaya period. I guarantee that the diaspora of Thai talent will reverse itself. Though I am one of the first Thai artists to have come home, I am confident that I will not be the last.

This moment in our cultural history is the vindication of what we dreamed of decades ago. A Siamese Renaissance, set in motion thirty-five years ago amid distrust, controversy, and apathy, is upon us. What we have prophesied has come to pass and, with the full cooperation of the government, can take us to places even we dreamers cannot yet dream of.

With my best wishes



Somtow Sucharitkul

World Fantasy Award Winner
Distinguished Silapathorn Artist