Author: tompepinsky

Since not much is happening in Jakarta at the moment, I’ll post a bit more about the music festival I just finished.  We had a concert in downtown Jakarta to finish the festival on Friday night and they brought their own grand piano to the hall.  I thought this was a little bit strange, but the piano was headed back to the downtown branch of the school, so this was just a stop on the way.  Now I don’t have much experience watching pianos being moved, but I’m pretty sure the way they moved this piano was somewhat unconventional, at least by western standards.

They had five guys (just some of the regular guys on staff) turn it on its side, then they removed the legs to get it out of the building.  There was no dolly involved, just a piece of wood with wheels on the bottom. When they got to the front of the building they stood the piano back up again and put the legs back on. They accomplished this by having five guys hold it up while another one crawled underneath to reattach the legs.  They put it on the back of this microbus- imagine a little VW van that only has seating for two and has an open bed in the back.  At this point the piano was standing on its own legs which have wheels at the bottom and I immediately began to wonder how the heck they were going to secure it.  After wrapping the legs with cardboard, they jammed some metal risers the choir was going to stand on under the piano and threw two matressess on top.  A tarp and some strong twine completed the operation.  I asked one of the staff if they were going to drive all the way to Jakarta like that, and when she said yes I remarked that they’d probably just drive slowly the whole way.  She looked at me puzzled and said no, they’d drive regular.  They did indeed, and amazingly the piano arrived before we did and was ready to go for the performance.  It sounded great at first but by the middle of the concert was sounding twangy and out of tune.  Still, it sounded pretty good to me considering the wild ride it had to get there.

JMP here, I’m back in downtown Jakarta with TP.  Please excuse me as I get used to blogging again, I’m quite out of practice!  My music festival ended yesterday with many tears from the kids who were sad to leave their new friends and their "music holiday" as many of them called it.

What an interesting and rewarding experience it was.  There were about 60 kids from 7-22 years old, although most were in the 11-15 age range.  They were almost all pianists, with some who also played violin and flute and I was quite impressed at the level of playing.  It was really amazing to see these little kids get up there and play some pretty hard stuff by memory at the evening concerts.  I spent my time teaching my three students, helping them learn a few duets for the final concert, and coaching a little chamber music (cello and piano is an interesting thing to coach as a flutist- it made me glad I play a wind instrument for various reasons).  In the mornings I led general music appreciation classes for the kids which basically consisted of using recorders to play together and review some musical concepts.  That was fun except that I don’t know how to play the recorder and had to learn very quickly.  Also, I was expecting to teach the kids how to play the recorder, but they had been playing in school for a long time and were much better than I am.  This proved challenging for the first day or so, but I got it all sorted out and we mainly just had fun together.  I have to tell you though, ten kids playing screechy high notes on the recorder creates a rather hair-raising sound.  After a while I forbid them from playing the highest notes- I think they were as relieved as I was.

Pretty much every evening the kids played in concerts in our building.  The choir rehearsal room was large enough to set up enough chairs and had a mini stage so it worked well for informal concerts.  Well, they were supposed to be informal but some of the girls were like fashion plates- they kept coming up wearing yet another different party dress or fancy gown night after night.  This was all a buildup for a big concert last Wednesday when they all got to play solos and chamber music at a hall in Jakarta at the Goethe Institute.  It was a lovely hall with a good piano in it (finally- they have a really hard time with pianos here mostly because of the climate, and also perhaps because they transport them in open air mini pickup trucks but more on that later).  Then on Friday we had another big concert in another hall in Jakarta.  This was basically a greatest hits of  Wednesday’s concert plus the choir and orchestra components of the festival.  The kids all did very well and are now seasoned performers, and I think all this practice performing was one of the greatest things about the program.

Teaching at a summer camp was funny for me for a few reasons.  First off, it wasn’t that long ago that I was a student myself at camps like this.  Also, I was significantly younger than all the other teachers that came.  So put both those things together with the fact that I stayed in a room at the end of the a hall filled with kids and I was a little confused.  Basically I felt a bit like I was at camp but got to hang out with the cool adults all the time (and they were really cool people from the US and UK).  So all in all, a pretty neat thing to do.  I am so glad that I was able to come back here and contribute something meaningful to this program and I hope the kids had as much fun as I did!  I’ve got plenty more stories and thoughts, but I’ll save them for later posts and give TP a break from posting for a while.