FOR a country of 240 million people, Indonesia’s Western music scene is surprisingly low key. There are only two well-established symphony orchestras, well-designed auditoriums are rare, and few Western-trained musicians can find enough work to make a decent living.
Like generations of musicians before me, I have always wanted to have perfect pitch. Wouldn't it be just wonderful to be able to tune a band precisely without having to use a piano or some other instrument as a reference point?
"Works of music without titles," thundered an editorial in the official organ of Chinese Communist Party in January 1974, "do not reflect the class spirit". The article went on to specifically condemn the Piano Sonata No. 17 by "the German capitalist musician, Beethoven" and the Symphony in B minor by the "Romantic Austrian capitalist musician, Schubert".
Ask a composer how he goes about writing music, and you are unlikely to get a satisfactory response. One reason for this, I suppose, is that there is rarely a simple answer. There are numerous approaches, and few composers pause to consider their own methods vary carefully.
Could concert B flat be the key to the universe? In September 2003, astronomers using NASA's Chandra X-Ray Observatory, an orbiting telescope, found what they characterised as sound waves emanating from a supermassive black hole. The “sound” that they discovered - really the waves passing through gas near the black hole - translated to the note B flat, 57 octaves below middle C.