“Jazz borrowed from other genres of music and also has lent itself to other music genres ". - Herbie Hancock
Previously, I wrote about the arrival of jazz in Batavia in 1919. it was heard until the invasion of Japan in 1942 varied little of imported sounds of 78s plate scores and transcripts. However, what is little known Indonesia is how a Canadian performer of Javanese music "traditional" came to be influenced jazz itself.
Gauthier with wayang golek figure
Gauthier (1885-1958), a Canadian mezzo-soprano, was to be the catalyst. in a hissy fit diva, she gave up singing opera high after being replaced at the last minute by another singer in a 1910 Covent Garden (London) production of Delibes opera Lakmé . She quickly left for Java to join her fiancé Frans Knoote, a Dutchman who was running a tea plantation outside Bandung.
Within weeks of arriving, she was performing arias by Tchaikovsky and Rossini concerts in Batavia Schouwburg Weltevreden (Gedung Kesenian Jakarta), accompanied by a local pianist and band of House.
In the months that followed, Gauthier visited Java, playing all the major concert halls and sociëteiten (European social clubs). Robinson sponsorship Piano Company, a firm specializing in pianos built for the tropics, endorsed a tour in 1911 in Kuala Lumpur, Penang, Singapore, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Tianjin and Beijing; tours to Japan, Siam, and India have followed over the next two years.
Knoote then got a job with a commercial company Semarang and it was while living there that Gauthier discovered gamelan music.
"from there, I went in the other cities of the island. Often on the road, I saw groups of natives playing strange instruments, and hear them sing songs of several specific harmonies. I immediately became curious. There was a music I had never heard of! I, who had made the music of my study of life! I inquired about these strange melodies All my friends shook their heads and said it would be impossible for me to understand Aboriginal music, not the whites were, and to sing -. "
the man who provided the entry into the world of Indonesian music for the singer was the Dutch composer and pianist Paul J. Seelig (1876-1945), who had served as Gautier pianist when his local pianist has unable to attend. Raised in Bandung, he studied composition, conducting and piano in Germany. In 100, Paku Buwana X, the soesoehoenan (Sultan 1893-1939) of the Royal Court of Surakarta (Solo), Seelig named the driver of the royal band, a position he held until 108.
During this time, Seelig documented royal gamelan repertoire in Western notation. He also collected Malay songs directories of Keroncong and stambul , a form of trans-ethnic Indonesian folk theater, adapted for voice and piano in a music style influenced by Debussy. Seelig Gauthier provided with a number of these arrangements of songs and she liked enough to order some more.
With the outbreak of the Great War (1914-18) in Europe, Gauthier decided to travel to North America, arriving in New York in September 1915.
it struggled to find a niche in the New York music scene already crowded, so she wisely chose to focus on Javanese songs "exotic" and Western vocal modernist repertoire.
With the Boston-born exotic dancer Regina Woody Jones (1894-1983), who danced under the name Nila Devi, she created a 15 minute act entitled "Songmotion" in which Woody illustrated Gauthier Indonesian songs in dance. At the end of October 1915, they left New York for a tour of one year from the main theaters of American vaudeville.
However, the grueling schedule matinees and evening shows and the lack of public appreciation of art that were otherwise entertained with cyclists ride, comedians, singers, jugglers, lead to Guathier withdraw from the tour after five months.
Aeolian lobby 1st November 1923 (w. George Gershwinn)
New York was already home to many musical artists north American and European, so Gauthier focused on his Javanese songs, which she combined with her knowledge and skills in the modernist western song. She began a series of annual recitals at Aeolian Hall in Manhattan, and on 1 November 1917 its performance has attracted the attention of many leading composers. Known as a " sensitive purveyor, defendants interesting songs ", she gave performances of three songs by Maurice Ravel. His performance included the first American of Three Japanese Lyrics Claws and Stravinsky Five Poems of Ancient China and Japan . The performance was a great success, and she began to receive invitations to perform songs creations of other contemporary composers.
Gauthier went to Paris in 1920 at the request of the American Music League to organize a visit to North America by Maurice Ravel. She befriends and professional correspondence not only with him but also with Erik Satie. This led to more music to be sent to her by various composers in her first concert.
The key concert in this story was in 1923. The first half consisted of classical works of Vincenzo Bellini and Henry Purcell, and modernist works by Arnold Schoenberg, Darius Milhaud, Bartók and Paul Hindemith. The second half of his performance disrupt musical creation, however. She opened with Ragtime Band Alexander by Irving Berlin, then realized works of Jerome Kern and Walter Donaldson, and eventually finished with three works by George Gershwin, the first time his works ( I build a Stairway to Paradise Innocent Ingenue baby and Swanee ) would be performed by a classical singer in a concert.
important figures in the audience included Paul Whiteman, who then commissioned Gershwin to write a composition for his band. Rhapsody in Blue was the result, and it was created in 1924 at Aeolian Hall with the Orchestra of Paul Whitman with Gershwin at the piano, as he had been the previous year for Eva Gauthier.
Èva Gauthier has been a pioneer and perhaps the first musical singer in the world. " She did much to publicize the Americans with the indigenous culture of what was then the Dutch East Indies. Perhaps his most important contribution was to take the jazz on the concert stage and win widespread public acceptance for the most creative musical genres.
"Jazz began to break into the company last season was a pioneer Èva Gauthier." -. Independent, 3 January 1925.
Additional Information
Èva Gauthier Matthew Isaac Cohen, Java Jazz (06), available here www.jstor.org , is a very detailed and fascinating reading.
There are some 30+ Gauthier recordings on the Internet.
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