Page 3 - Fantasy Book 2

These piano pieces are based on children songs (with the addition of 2 folksongs, not necessarily for
children, from the Maluku islands), but are by no means playable by beginners. They are done for concert
purposes, although they are indeed easier than, let's say, Rapsodia Nusantara. I had enormous pleasure
doing them everywhere and every time I had some spare time. Most of them are in variations form, so I
wrote each variations without knowing the overall structure beforehand, and only order them when I
thought I had enough material.
The three major components of variation are melody, rhythm, and meter. Variation is an important key to
teach a child so that they understand the there are many di erent ways to approach music and life. This
is a wonderful method of aural education for children because of the dramatic, sad, funny, calm and
many other characters in the variations of the theme. These are all important parts of a piece for a child
to recognize.

Another thing is about fugues, canons and other polyphonic writings, which I wrote during long journeys
or waitings in airport lounges and just incorporate them in the piece on a later date. I hope (young)
pianists would have as much fun playing them, and the audience listening to them, as much as I had
writing them.

Twitter & IG @anandasukarlan
July 2020

Foreword from Julie Putra, cover illustrator

Among Ananda’s music compositions, the transformations of Indonesian children’s songs are

my favourites. It was a nice surprise when Ananda asked me to illustrate this book because It gave me
an opportunity to visualize the feeling that I always get listening to his children’s songs, a mature but
childlike feeling. It brings you to your childhood memories while standing in the reality that we all
adults with so many problems to face (oops). Anyway, my only expertise is watercolor (yes, I’m still

using the manual way to draw), so there were some challenging things I had to face. First, to make the
depth of layers, between the foreground, the elements and the objects, like Ananda’s polyphony in his
works, it sounds/looks like there are so many things to see/hear, yet you can listen to it comfortably,
not as a chaos. Second, to bring such balance, using watercolor is much harder than gouache, I can’t

make any mistakes on my strokes, because once I do a mistake I will have to draw all over again, and..
yeah I had to redraw 3 times this time. It was a nice process and brainstorming though!

Finally, I hope my artwork could give a little idea how colorful, fun, yet challenging Ananda's music is.

And here is a little game for you, there are three main objects (songs) that I brought up to the visual,
of course the cicak (house lizard) and burung kutilang (nightingale) are so obvious, but can you guess
what’s the other one?

IG & twitter @julie.putra