Scoring these films – first ’40 Years’ and then the ‘Afflictions’ series – presented some real conundrums musically, namely: how to marry two sound worlds – traditional Indonesian music and western film music – that are so intrinsically different?

Director Rob Lemelson wanted the viewer to feel ‘like they never leave’ Indonesia; he had already collected plenty of ethnographic field recordings to ensure he had access to authentic traditional music. But to a western ear, Javanese and Balinese music does not have the same emotional resonance as to its native audience. This is particularly true of classical gamelan music, whose shimmering cyclical melodies and rhythms are designed to create a sense of cool, emotional detachment in order to inspire a selfless, contemplative state. For western audiences to connect with these emotionally charged stories the scores would have to also use some traditional western film vocabulary and instrumentation.

The biggest practical hurdle to overcome is that of intonation or tuning. Traditional Indonesian instruments do not generally follow a western standard tuning – indeed, each region prides itself on its tuning idiosyncrasies. So, a full gamelan orchestra may be ‘in tune’ with itself and little else! The likelihood of, say, a western ‘concert pitch’/A440 Hz grand piano being able to integrate harmoniously with a Balinese gamelan is next to zero. To compound matters, in the case of the Balinese gamelan micro-tonal differences between pairs of instruments is a desirable quality. This produces ‘beating’ between close frequencies, considered undesirable dissonance in Western music – put simply, it sounds ‘out of tune’.

Like any good international summit, the point was not to dwell on these differences but rather to find common ground and compromise. ’40 Years’ proved to be a testing ground for some of these ideas. The central theme ‘Genjer Genjer’ loaned itself well to arrangement; in the pivotal scene ‘Budi’s Homecoming’ (dic 1 #7) you’ll hear the melody in the piano/cellos with the rest of the strings adding some emotional punch. The large gongs and ‘core’ metallophones (Jegog, Calung and Penyacah) provide a rhythmic accompaniment. At the mixing stage, the higher-pitched ‘Gansa’ metallophones were clashing too much pitch-wise with the other instruments so as a compromise the same part was played on an equivalent western metallophone; the glockenspiel, played with wooden mallets to bring it closer in sound to the gamelan instruments.

One of the more unusual choices of instrumentation in ’40 Years’ was the Dobro (a kind of slide guitar more commonly used in American folk/roots music.) Guitars are actually widely used all over Indonesia, but more importantly the pentatonic minor ‘blues’ scale is analogous with a commonly used local scale. Hence, the mournful, ‘sighing’ sounds of ‘Degung & Pak Kereta’ (disc 1 #2) or ‘Unclean Environment’ (disc 1 #5) sound equally at home depicting sorrow in Bali as they would in Mississippi!