Tazul Tajuddin’s Opera Serikandi Nusantara: The Diminution of Functional Tonality and Its Symbolic Role from an Esthesis Perspective

Music has become one of the essential communication forms used to evoke symbolic associations of the related extra-musicals, precisely to symbolise a series of events in a story by means of music composition. In the Malaysian context, there is a contemporary opera adaptation of short stories about the legendary Malaysian princesses entitled Opera Serikandi Nusantara, composed by Tazul Tajuddin. The music of this opera reveals a stylistic feature different from that of the existing local folktale-based musicals. It conjures up a sense of departure from the conventions of functional tonality in which the musical ideas are organised through the contemporary musical language and imaginative use of instrumental timbre and extended techniques. A vital aspect of Tajuddin’s compositional techniques that encompasses the whole work is an emphasis on integrating materials derived from the cultures of traditional Malay music and postmodern compositional practices into its music to allow for great subtlety of symbolic connection with the text. To emphasise novelty as the salient characteristic of the composition, Tajuddin developed highly personal idioms that depended more on tonal ambiguity and folk inspirations than conventional harmony, abandoning the old notions of cadences and harmonic progressions that suggest the need for discords to be resolved. Moving away from or diminishing the traditional system of harmony led him to new ways of organising a multitude of ideas, structural parameters and expressive elements in this opera. Consequently, this kind of treatment expands the possibility of conveying a more abstract level of emotional expression and dramatic effects throughout the opera.