Bengawan Solo

Gesang Martohartono was 23 and had no musical training when he wrote Bengawan Solo in Surakarta in 1940. He worked the tune out by singing it, adjusting it for a few weeks until he was satisfied, then wrote it down in numbered sol-fa notation. Although he was Javanese, the nationalist mood of the time led him to write the words in the literary Malay that was being proposed as the national language, Bahasa Indonesia, set in the local kroncong style. The lyrics simply follow the Solo River, Java's longest, through dry and rainy seasons, from the mountains around Solo to the sea, used by merchants and their boats. Gesang first sang it at weddings and local gatherings, and it spread when two radio stations began playing it. During the Japanese occupation from 1942 it was broadcast widely, and the occupying soldiers loved it. The singer Ichirō Fujiyama, taken prisoner in East Java at the end of the war, carried it home to Japan, where Toshi Matsuda's 1947 recording became a best-seller. After independence, Sukarno promoted it as a national song. It became the first song by an Indonesian in the Indonesian language to win wide popularity at home and abroad, recorded in Mandarin, English, Thai, Dutch and many other languages. It became so familiar in Japan that many thought it was Japanese, until a court ruled in 1990 that Gesang had written it. In 1991, grateful Japanese veterans paid for his statue in a Surakarta park. A young man's song about his river ended up flowing across Asia.