Suling-Suling

Suling-Suling for 10 Bamboo Flutes (Javanese), 10 Bamboo Zither-Buzzers, 10 Flat Gongs (Gangsa) 30mins. Ten flutes, ten flat gongs, and ten bamboo buzzers are layers of colors independent of each other in time progression, but related to each other by their differences of tonal materials... blown bamboo sounds, metallic sounds and a quick decay of buzzing sounds.

the irregularity and regularity of rhythmic beats comes out as drone as everlasting repetitions of events, a looseness of time, another concept,”rhythm”

*program notes from Jean Macduff Vauz Composer-in-Residence, The Mills College Music Department and the Center for Contemporary Music, 22 October 2000

Ten Indonesia flutes with different tunings are treated as a unit spectrum with pitches becoming accessories rather than principal entities to the total picture consisting of two other sound colors – bamboo buzzers with short decays and flat gongs with long and short decays.

*program notes, CCP 2 March1985, CCP

In Suling, three ranges of instrumental colors are portrayed by ten flutes, ten bamboo percussion and ten Chinese gongs moving independently of each other. The exact pitches of the flutes do not fit the inexact pitches of the two groups of percussion. For the moment, we have to wait for change of perception in order to have the use of instruments that understand an aesthetic of the ambivalent and the flexible, the opposite of the precise and the rigid. In other compositions, Maceda works on a theory of music involving vast numbers and the use of levels, drones, and border-line between color and sound.

*program notes from ISCM-ACL World Music Days Festival, 26 October 1988.