We’ve been working on new recordings of Javanese experimental music adapted for electric keroncong, incorporating sounds of surf-rock, avant-noise, and metal to accompany Peni’s wild, beautiful singing!
Compositions by Peni Candra Rini, Danis Sugiyanto, I Wayan Sadra, and Zoel Mistortoify.
It’s being mixed and mastered by John Dieterich of Deerhoof, who’s cranking up the amps and the experimentalism for a sound unlike anything we’ve heard. We’re still working out when and how it will be released, but catch a preview at one of our upcoming shows!
Rini joined Kronos for Maduswara, singing and playing the rebab…. Rini’s tradition is Javanese music, and Maduswara was an involving evocation of this. Rini’s writing for the quartet kept the traditional rhythms while opening up the textures so that every vocal inflection, bent note, and move from a pentatonic to a Western major scale—and back—had an extra expressive edge.
Photo by Peter McElhinney for Style Weekly
Peni and Kronos recently joined in a panel discussion at the University of Richmond regarding her composition and their process of adapting it. Andy asked her to sing a passage from it, and the effect was wondrous: the members of Kronos, no strangers to awe-inspiring talent, all spoke of being deeply moved by the power of her voice in close proximity, and began to think aloud about how that sensation might change their performance technique, to represent not just the “flotando” (floating, flute-like) timbre but also the deep resonance.
Update: the truly great news following this premiere is that Kronos has commissioned 4 additional compositions from Peni!
The Kronos Quartet: Five Decades (David Harrington: violin, John Sherba: violin, Hank Dutt: viola, Paul Wiancko: cello) with special guest Indonesian composer Peni Candra Rini perform a selection from five decades of material in the Barbican Hall on Thursday 19 Oct. 2023 Photo by Mark Allan/BBC
Peni Candra Rini, PhD (b. 1983) is a renowned Javanese singer, composer, and faculty member at the Indonesian Institute of the Arts. In Spring 2023 Peni taught as a Visiting Fulbright Artist-Scholar at the University of Richmond. When visiting and touring the US, she completes residencies as guest-director of Rumput and Gamelan Raga Kusuma, and joins us in performances and recordings.
Raised in an artistic family in a small fishing village in East Java, Peni first began studying voice at the age of 5 under her father, a village shadow master. She later moved to the Central Javanese city of Solo to study at the Indonesian National Conservatory of the Arts, where she completed her doctorate and was hired as faculty in 2020. She is a master of several traditional forms and is regarded as one of Indonesia’s most daring young composers, one of only a handful of female composers in the majority-Muslim nation.
The Kronos String Quartet commissioned and is currently performing her latest chamber work, Maduswara, which they premiered this year at Carnegie Hall. She is a former recipient of grants from the Asian Cultural Council, a two-time grantee of the US State Department’s One Beat Program and in 2022 was named an Aga Khan Foundation laureate of the arts. She was a principal performer on our first major production and tour, Shadow Ballads, in 2016, along with past guest artistic director Danis Sugiyanto, Gamelan Raga Kusuma co-founder Gusti Sudarta, and folk duo Anna and Elizabeth.
US premiere of Akar at The Roundhouse, Richmond VA, September 2 2018.
Last September was the US premiere of Akar, our intercultural retelling of Jack & the Beanstalk, here in Richmond Virginia, following our tour of Java.
