Transpositional histories of electronic music. Perspectives from the Global South

Description

In 2017 the renowned Belgian label Sub Rosa released the album Otto Sidharta - Indonesian Electronic Music 1979-92. The album is on the webpage categorized Early Electronic Music and is 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.

My ongoing research project Java-futurism on contemporary trends in Indonesian electronic music will be my point of departure. Here we find a remarkable interest in the pasts of Javanese/Indonesian cultures, that both includes historical - and imaginary - incidents. This aspect makes Sidharta’s position as a composer of computer music and modernist not only a puzzle from a European perspective, but also in the context of the Indonesian scene.
Abstract
The presentation explores what “Indonesia” means in a context, where most of the music on the album is produced in the Netherlands by a composer who to some degree identifies himself with Western modernism, meanwhile he also has roots in traditional Sundanese music performance. Tracing historical threads between Europe and Indonesia no obvious teleology is at stake, and the genealogies that are found, are not as recognizable as one would think they would be. So, instead of leaning towards these two methods of historiography, I introduce the term “transposition” (Bubandt & Groth, forthc.) to uncover a (his)story, that not only accounts for human relations, but also entangles technologies, cosmos and matter. The presentation will include examples of Sidharta’s computer music, and his use interactive of elements in the music with the help from MAX MSP.

Period	2022 Dec 8
Event title	Computer-Assisted Composition: Perspectives on Human-Machine Interaction
Event type	Seminar
Location	Venice, ItalyShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International