This morning I got an invitation to the launching of the so-called "Bandung Orchestra". Some of the players are friends of mine, so I was eager to come though I anticipated this with a certain amount of skepticism. I had been invited to some orchestra performances in the city in the past and normally I got this excruciating pain in my stomach which resulted from not-so-well-tuned instruments, loud sound-system and a mix of silly stuffs on stage. Anyway, turned out that this one's just the same. But this was probably the stupidest thing I've ever seen in my entire life.
It was stupid in every way. First of all, it started almost 90 minutes too late. I came at 6.45 because the invitation said it will start at 7 pm, but I saw that some of the players were still outside, smoking, so assured that it's going to be late as always, I decided to grab some quick dinner. When I got back at 7.15 and went straight inside the hall, the stage curtain was still down and there wasn't any sign that the show was going to start. 7.30 and the loud-speaker still played us some Sundanese music from a recording. People slowly filled some seats, but apparently not enough since we were asked by the organising committee to move from the balcony to the VIP area. That was at 8 pm. At 8.15 the VVIP guests arrived (may God have mercy on their souls) and by 8.30 they all finished talking and gave trees. (I really mean it. The director of the orchestra gave 1,000 trees to mark the launching of his orchestra. I love trees, but I hate anything out of context. It was amazingly absurd.)
So the music started at around 8.40 and this was where the second stupid thing happened. If somebody invites me to a beauty product lauch, I would expect that people are going to sell me boxes of anti-aging cream. If it's a book launch, it would be normal if the publisher introduce me to the author and tell me that the book is simply the best one ever written in the history of mankind. So, when I came to this orchestra launch, I was expecting that orchestral music will be the center of the universe that night. But the orchestra acted as a "music provider", in a way that they simply accompany singers on stage. It was like a variety show at the telly, very much in demand right now in Indonesia. Everything is orchestrated, everybody wants to be a conductor, but the orchestra is never the main subject. It's like coming to a peanut launch where the salesman tells you how tasty it is to put peanut in your ice cream or chocolate or butter or jellybean but he never mention how good the peanut tastes by itself.
The third stupid thing which probably annoyed me the most is that how ignorant people can be about quality. I can't even begin to understand why people would bother spending so much to produce such base thing, as if we don't have enough of it here. I can't understand why somebody, and that is somebody with money, don't want to think a little bit harder and try to do something different, something good. And I can't think of what things can be achieved through such performance, except that the musicians are getting their paychecks. But to compare it with the time they spent for rehearsing and learning such idiotic pieces, I would say everything came to a zero sum. They'd probably better off practising scales unpaid!
It is all so frustrating to me and sometimes makes me wonder if this country is ever going to change. If people with money don't care about this, I can't think of how this whole situation is going to be any different in the future. And there are always people who will want to sweat for these simply because they need the money. And it's not even worth that much. How sad. In the end, idealism is always defeated by the need to put food in your mouth.
(Imported old blog, originally written on December 22, 2008)
