Amir Pasaribu

Amir Hamzah Pasaribu (21 May 1915 – 10 February 2010) was an Indonesian composer, pianist, cellist, cultural critic and music pedagogue. He was one of the first Indonesians to study classical music abroad and was very active in music composition, education and performance during the first two decades of Indonesian independence, and he founded the Indonesian Musician's Union . During the New Order period he left Indonesia for Suriname where he worked as a music teacher and orchestral musician, returning to Indonesia in 1996.

Biography Early life and education Pasaribu was born in the village of Siborong-borong, North Sumatra, Dutch East Indies on 21 May 1915. He was born into an upper class Batak family; his father, Mangaradja Salomon Pasaribu, was a government official (assistant ). It was during his time in those schools that he was exposed more broadly to Western Classical music from his Dutch teachers and took violin and piano lessons. ) He also received music instruction from a number of musicians during this period, studying piano under Willy van Swers, cello and piano with Joan Giessens in Bandung, and cello with Nicolai Varvolomeyev in Batavia; at this time there were many expatriate European musicians living in Java.

He was also fascinated by languages and later claimed to have learned Russian, Tagalog, Spanish, Japanese, and other languages from working musicians during that era. In 1936 he had saved enough and left for Tokyo, enrolling in the Musashino Academia Musicae, where he studied piano and cello for three years; he seems to have been the first Indonesian classical musician to study abroad. At that time non-European classical musicians were quite rare. From 1949 onwards he also played cello in a new fully Indonesian orchestra headed by Varvolomeyev, the . In September 1950 he founded the League of Composers , an organization that would protect copyrighted compositions, but relaunched it in December 1950 as the Indonesian Musician's Union , which at its start had around 80 members. Having lost his ability compose and perform at a national level, he turned to education and curriculum development and worked extensively for the Ministry of Education. He had been advocating since the 1940s for more support for the fine arts and the development of a more rigorous musical education system as it existed in European countries. In August 1953 he became chair of a new organization in Jakarta, the (Indonesian Music Society) which aimed at supporting that development. In early 1954 he was also member of a committee which aimed to develop Jakarta as a center of culture; other members included the novelist Pramoedya Ananta Toer, the painter Henk Ngantung, and the poet Asrul Sani.

In 1954 he traveled to Beijing as a Ministry representative to study Chinese music and opera and to do research for the opening of a fine arts institute. Upon his return to Indonesia in the same year, he became director of a Ministry of Education music school (, SMINDO) in Yogyakarta. He also regularly contributed to other literary magazines in the 1950s, including Zénith and . He continued to travel abroad to do research and build connections for the fine arts institutions. ) (Old songs for solo piano) (Balai Pustaka 1952 ) (Singing in canon) (Balai Pustaka, Ministry of Education, 1953 ) (The story of music and musicians) (Gunung Agung, 1953 ) (Love to sing) (Indira, 1955 ) , (Music and surrounding areas) (Ministry of Education, 1955 ) (Balai Pustaka, 1958) (Towards appreciation of music) (NV Noordhof-Kolff, 1950s ) (Analysis of Indonesian music) (PT Pantja Simpati, 1986 )