Somtow and Bruce • The Return

In only about 6 weeks, my Thai-language book, "Phasaa mai kaengraeng - volume 1" is going to come out. It's the first volume of a autobiographical trilogy that discusses my coming to terms with being a creature of two cultures.

The first book deals with the period up to 1978, and it therefore contains a lot of material which is incredibly important in the history of music in this country, yet which is no longer remembered or taught ... or rather it has been so subsumed into the collective soul of Thai music that no one realizes that there once a time when the wheel had to be invented.

I constantly am reminded of how much is forgotten. The renewal of the creative partnership between me and Bruce Gaston is, I think, going to awaken those memories. But we also have to get rid of 32 years of accumulated conventional wisdom.

I read in the paper recently a reference to what Bruce and I contributed to music in Thailand in the 70s. The paper, in all innocence, spoke of Bruce's creation of the fusion between Thai and Western music ... and of my passion to bring opera to this country ... as two important elements of that revolution in the 1970s.

The reality is, of course, in some ways its opposite. This is why Bruce and I so often are amazed at how we have ended up as mirror images of each other.

In the 1970s, when I first met Bruce Gaston, he was completely Asian, and I was completely Western. He was a student of Boonyong Ketkhong and in some ways the premier proponent of Thai classical music. I arrived and it was Bruce Gaston, the American, who in fact opened my ears to the sound-world of Thai music, but it was I who began incorporating elements of that music into my very western music, creating the ancestral (and not terribly great) work "Views from the Golden Mountain" in 1975 for a controversial TV broadcast. I went on to start imitating Asian musical techniques on Orff instruments which I found lying around in the Goethe Institute, producing the 1976 composition GONGULA. This then cross-pollinated back to Bruce Gaston and we produced a succession of works in which the styles became ever more fused ... until we ended up with our co-composed HEXAPHONY in 1977.

On the other hand, it was Bruce who first conceived a style of opera that could be comletely done within the resources of Thai music and his opera CHUCHOK was really what set all that in motion. My involvement in opera at that time was a music director of the BOS, an expat amateur opera society.

When the alliance started to fracture in 1979 with my departure for the U.S., I was left with opera, whereas Bruce was left with fusion.... we were in a sort of role reversal.

So yes ... today, Bruce Gaston is known for the Thai-western fusion which his band, FONG NAAM, symbolizes. And I am mostly known in Thailand for opera. But the truth is, we each started what the other continued ....

It's complicated, and it's all coming in my book....

99999

Well, it seems that the first really really public display of the renewed partnership between Bruce Gaston and me will take place in an incredibly high-profile arena ... as witness the above TV spot....

Here's a version in English....

The governor....

Well, there I was at the grand opening of the BACC and here I am with my dear mama, and the governor of Bangkok, who loves to tell the story of how I deliberately flunked out of Oxford by telling the interviewers I'd rather go to Cambridge. On October 7th, however, the "real" story of this will be told when I deliver the toast to Oxford at the annual Oxford and Cambridge dinner....

Immodest Proposals

Today I happened to read, in the paper, the petition signed by 3.5 million people asking H.M. the King to pardon Thaksin Shinawatra.

I'm a bit saddened by the text of this petition because it's not only a request for a pardon but also a political tract disputing the legitimacy of the current government. While I do agree that the coup was a misguided and ultimately self-destructive reaction to Thakin's shenanigans, the current government's hold on power, tenuous though it may be, is entirely constitutional and within the normal operating limits of a democracy. Almost every democracy in the world has had coalition governments such as this where no party possessed the ability to govern alone. "Almost" a majority is not a majority.

Had the petition simply been a heartfelt outpouring from those who love the ex-PM and weren't bothered by the tax evasion, pocket-lining, Muslim-bashing, extrajudicial killing and press muzzling that occurred during that administration, I would applaud the signatories' right to present it. After all, love is blind. It may well be true that such petitions should only legally be presented if the guilty party has served a little time and shows penitence, but in my opinion, anyone can write a letter to anyone else, even a head of state.

But the text of the petition isn't such a heartfelt outpouring. It''s a provocative attack on the legitimacy of a government whose democratic credentials are at least as strong as that of the pre-coup government, perhaps more so in that the last election may not have been quite so blatantly purchased as the one ousted by the coup. Therefore I'm saddened that those who may well have loved the ex-PM may have been manipulating into signing a political manifesto. In the end, this erodes the entire purpose of having an entity beyond politics.

Last year, I protested, and they removed, a Wikipedia entry that said I was an anti-Thaksinite. The reality is, I'm ambivalent. The man is clearly a genius, but genius does not automatically come with goodness. Otherwise the term "evil genius" would not be such a cliché of B movies.

Still, as much as I supported the yellow team's motives until they actually blatantly said that "the poor are too stupid to vote," I supported the right of the reds to petition ... until I saw that petition not only asked for a pardon, but also that that pardon include an implicit royal sanction of one view of the political situation. What was wrong with having it just say "Please pardon you-know-who?"

Well, I'd better shut up, or I'll find myself back to having only one passport ... (and it won't be the Nicaraguan one) I think that Purukanda's rap-style commentary on the Thai political situation says it all far better than I ever could. So look for it on youtube and I'll go back to talking about opera.

Shopera till you Dropera

One of the exciting events this week was the opening of the "Bangkok ShOpera" at the Bangkok Art and Culture Center. For the next 2 months, creative people and music lovers will be able to hang out and get to know each other and we will be able to hand out information about the opera. We've already met all sorts of fascinating people and of course, all our DVDs are available at the Bangkok ShOpera as well.

Soon Bruce Gaston and I will be giving a wild John Cage concert in the lobby outside using all the different levels of the museum to hide musicians in.

Today, the boyband classical string quartet that I created welcomed a new member because Boom, who we all know and love, has been shipped off to Fargo, of all places, for a year. The kids themselves voted to invite Top, one of Byrd's pupils, as their fifth member. I guess a five person quartet is like a four book trilogy, but it is useful if one person is stuck in Fargo. Top is a very charismatic and musical boy. The celebrated Andrew Biggs dropped in on their rehearsal because he's figuring out a way to package them for TV.... we might expand the membership to 8 kids, which would mean that one quartet could be touring all over the world and doing TV gigs while a second quartet could be shoveling snow.

A Brief Update on the Coffee Cherub....

Thanks to all those who wrote expressing interest and sympathy for the case of the coffee cherub ...

Well, as most predicted, I recently heard from him again; or rather, my housekeeper did. He called here and asked if he could have a meeting with her. She went off into the wilds to meet with the boy and his mother.

Well, the CC asked the housekeeper if she thought there was a chance he could come back and work for me again, but before she could respond, the mother said that he could only be allowed to do so if she could collect three months' of his salary upfront.

My housekeeper immediately smelled a rat and told her that she believed I would say that he could certainly come back, but he would get paid in the normal course of events and if at that point he chose to give her his entire paycheck, that was really up to him, but there would be no more calls demanding that he beg me for money and take it to her in the middle of the night, whether to feed a drug habit or for any other reason.

I think that was the right answer to give though had I been there myself I would probably have succumbed to the extortion...

The coffee cherub continued to insist that he really wanted to come back to work, so we will just have to see what happens ... things that are "meant to be" have a way of happening regardless of what you say or do ... we will see.

A Mahler Clip

We have received a lot of positive attention as a result of this Mahler initiative. Great press, I'm told, is on its way.

Meanwhile, some lovely emails have come including half a dozen from members of the orchestra, thanking me for giving them the opportunity to realize their life's dream of playing Mahler's Fifth.

Here's an excerpt ... well, the whole first movement, anyway...

Thais Tie for First

Here's a picture of about 100 people I guess, all participants in the International Choir Festival in Pattaya where I was a judge a couple of days ago. You can look for Waldo, but you will probably only find me.

Mahler: Death and Resurrection

This has been a very thrilling week which began with the launching of the Siam Philharmonic's Mahler Cycle ... but as I am running off now to the "Parade of Choirs", I haven't time to post anything about it yet ... so here's the article I wrote for THE NATION about it ... it was intended as a blog post originally, so here it is.....

MAHLER IN THAILAND – THEN AND NOW by S. P. Somtow

Over thirty-five years ago, Piyabhand Sanitwongse’s living room in Soi Nana North was Thailand’s “classical music command central”. Everything happened in that room, from rehearsals of the brand new Chulalongkorn University Chorus to penetrating midnight discussions about the philosophies of post-serial music.

One evening, I was looking through Ajarn Piya’s extensive LP collection when I discovered, unopened, the Mahler symphonies. You must understand that Ajarn Piya had a huge LP collection because he simply ordered everything that came out. He was more complete than any record shop in Thailand. What am I saying? There weren’t any such shops in Thailand, really.
Being newly arrived from Cambridge, of course, I was a product of the 1960s Mahler revival. I had been living and breathing the Mahler symphonies for years, and had worn out all my own LPs; I’d just had the incredible experience of singing in Mahler’s 8th in the Albert Hall with an astonishing array of soloists which were a sort of who’s who of British opera, from Heather Harper to Raimond Heryncx, in a concert which was David Willcocks’s farewell to Cambridge. So I cried out, “Look, look, Mahler, Mahler!”

No one in the room really knew who Mahler was, but I put on the last movement of the Ninth anyway. You should have heard the silence in Piyabhand’s living room. There was only Mahler and the purr of the air conditioning. At the end, Witaya Tumornsoontorn, now a respected figure in the BSO, sighed, “How sweet, how bitter, how romantic … will we ever hear such music live in Thailand?”

Twenty years later, the Mahler revival had come and gone, I was happily living in the States, and the symphonies had become a staple of every symphony orchestra in every city in the world … but not yet Bangkok.

In the late 90s, when I returned to Bangkok to conduct the Mahajanaka Symphony, I had an audience with HRH Princess Galyani Vadhana, and I told her that standards in Thailand were high enough that we would soon be playing Mahler. Her Royal Highness was unfamiliar with Mahler, but my glowing description must have intrigued her, because shortly thereafter, the Tower Records in Central World received a visit from a mysterious messenger. Pongsatorn Surapab, the manager of the classical section, was asked to provide the complete Mahler symphonies. The messenger whispered that the command was from Her Royal Highness herself.

Pongsatorn is now the manager of the Siam Philharmonic Orchestra.

Later I was to ask the princess what her favorite one of the Mahler symphonies was. She answered “The Sixth.” And in that moment, I understood how penetrating and perspicacious her understanding of music was, because that’s a musician’s answer, not a casual listener’s. The Sixth is one of the deepest and most wide-ranging of Mahler’s symphonies, with a structure that is at the same time a fulfillment of and a criticism of the classical symphony.

I was still flying back and forth to the U.S. and my desire to be the very first to conduct a Mahler symphony in Bangkok was thwarted by the Chulalongkorn University Symphony under Chuchat Pitaksakorn, who with great bravery played No. 4, the shortest. I believe they also played No. 1 at some stage. But in 2004 I was ensconced in the Bangkok scene, and had started the Siam Philharmonic Orchestra as the resident professional orchestra for the Bangkok Opera. It was always our plan to start a real cycle with No. 5, the most “populist” of the symphonies, but No. 4 is a good way to ease yourself into Mahler; it is like reading The Hobbit in preparation for The Lord of the Rings. In 2002, I did play the Adagietto from the Fifth with the BSO, and I received a most moving email from someone in the audience who was amazed at how I had made the BSO rise to the emotional demands of the piece.

But only in 2004 were we ready to have a performance by a professional orchestra of Mahler’s Fourth. It happened in Shrewsbury Auditorium in our annual Mozart and More Mini-Festival. It was by no means perfect, but it had passion and it had the exuberance of young people discovering for the first time that what they once thought impossible was within their grasp. Although there weren’t that many people at there, the tale of this performance (to go back to Tolkien once more) “grew in the telling” and later the performance had a renewed life by being played online, via youtube, and its web audience far exceeded those who had been there in person.

The fact that people still watch this performance means that only last month, I received a moving endorsement from a Mahler conductor I admire greatly, Frederic Chaslin, who received the legacy directly from Boulez and who conducts regularly at the Vienna State Opera and the Met. He said, “I listened carefully to your recent interpretation of Mahler's Symphony, and I have to say that I am extremely impressed. Not only do you succeeed in making this young orchestra play really beautifully, but let me tell you that I didn't think that a non-Jewish conductor (and I think you are...) could understand Mahler's music so perfectly.”

It was thrilling to receive this compliment. Mahler once said that he was three times an alien: a Bohemian in Austria, an Austrian among Germans, and a Jew in the whole world. This sense of homelessness is something I too have always felt, as a creature of many worlds. It is what speaks to me most in Mahler’s music.

Mahler is the last great legacy of the symphonic tradition, the symphonist who really stands at the end of the unbroken line of symphonists that began with Haydn. After Mahler, there are still symphonies being written, but they look backwards; they are exercises in nostalgia.
Now that we are about to embark on a full-scale Mahler cycle, one of the things that thrills me most is that, for young Thai musicians today, playing Mahler is not a once-in-a-lifetime experience. In 2004, we thought it might be. But earlier this may, the Galyani Vadhana Orchestra played the Fourth Symphony under Japanese conductor Yazaki, using about 75% of the people who had already played the work with me in 2004. People got exposed to another viewpoint, another interpretation. If you play something once, it’s a unique … twice, and it becomes repertory. That’s what Mahler should be. In this ambiguous world, the thrice-alienated artist has become the true mirror of our collective soul.

I can't save the universe, after all....

About five weeks ago, my housekeeper introduced me to a fatherless boy who needed a job. Although we didn't really need anyone, the kid had a kind of charisma and everyone immediately liked him. So I thought, all right, he can be a houseboy, do errands, and what have you. I gave him a really cushy job. (His previous job was as a restaurant slave; long hours, sleeping in the scullery.) Here, all he had to do was make coffee in the morning, and bring me dinner as I labor on my latest opera.

He soon became well-loved by everyone at the opera, including all the opera stars who called him "the coffee cherub" because of the cheerful way he would always bring them coffee. He worked really hard and showed a little bit of musical talent as well; we were considering the idea of sending him to have lessons and also getting him out of his illiteracy. He was having the time of his life!

Then at the end of the month, he took his monthly big time off and went to see his mother. Like many peasants who work in the city, he gave her his entire paycheck. When he came back he was a bit ... strange. Two days later he told me his grandfather had died and he needed to go to the funeral. He was gone for several days. One his return, he was even ... stranger.

He had only been back for a few days when he showed up in my work room late at night and asked for some advance money. I thought nothing of it. After all, he had given his mother his entire paycheck, so he probably just needed a bit of cash. I was about to hand it to him when he said, "I have to go. My mother just called and she wants it now. I'll be back soon." His mother lives out of town.

I said, "But you just gave her your entire paycheck."

He said, "Okay, never mind."

His mother called again. He came to me and said, "My mother says I am to go to my sister's house, get money and bring it to her immediately."

My housekeeper, who originally brought him in, called the mother and said, "Why are you asking your son to bring you money in the middle of the night? Can't it wait?"

The mother said, "Okay, just tell him to bring the money at the end of the month as usual."

Then she called her son again and told him to get money out of me and bring it to her. I said to him, "I'm happy to give you extra money, but you can't just go off to another city in the middle of the night. The carfare alone is more than your mother is asking for (about ten bucks)."

He said, "I don't want to do this. I'd rather stay here."

She called him again. He comes back to my office and says, "My mother says I have to quit because you won't let me take her the money now. Goodbye. Here's the cell phone you gave me back." And he leaves the room.

The phone rings again. The housekeeper answers. The mother says to her, "What can I do? He insists on quitting."

And the coffee cherub is gone. His mother has instructed him to walk out to the main road and "someone will give you money to bring to me." She wanted the money so desperately she made him quit his job.

So I'm thinking, what in the world is so important that costs $10, and a woman is willing to make her kid give up the first chance he has ever had in his life of getting an education, being taken care of, being with people who for the first time are interested in his future, meeting dozens of people who want to teach him and help him etc etc etc .... and he has to go across a crowded megalopolis in the dead of night to give it to her?

The only thing I can think of that fits the evidence is that she must be a junkie. It took me a while to realize that because I don't really know any ... at least not socially ... I don't think. If there's another explanation that fits these facts, I'd love to know it.

Now I am very sad. It is clear to me that there is nothing I can do about this. I can't save the universe after all ... not all of it.

Taking the Auspices

It's been a time of dire omens. Before Thaïs opened, a moth the size of canary hovered over the coffee machine. There was also a dream about lions, bears, and tigers. Then there was the discovery of the ancient cat dance, reproduced below,.

According to ailurochoreographic expert Richard Henderson, Despite the co-performer's sub-continental accent, I thought I detected elements of both sub-Saharan African and (especially) Polynesian influence in different strata of the performance. Given the very early separation of the African and Polynesian populations in the eastward drift (via the sub-continent, of course), this would seem to suggest a very early origin for the dance. Further (expensive) research is clearly required. It's so nice to be taken seriously for a change.

While Waiting for a Detailed Report

The THAIS production was by all accounts a highly successful one, though the first night began so late that I've decided to give a free DVD of the second night to anyone who missed the last act....

Still very very exhausted from it, so I'll report later....