At that time—and you have to understand what that time
meant, because it mattered, it mattered the way the first cold morning of
October matters, the way it wakes something up in you—Sumarti was still a high
school student in Semarang. She was seventeen years old, seventeen and already
dangerous in the way that certain people are dangerous, not because of anything
cruel in them, but because of what they carry inside. She had a voice. Not just
a voice, the way everyone who can string a few notes together has a
voice, but the voice, the kind that made people stop whatever they were
doing and look up from their plates or their newspapers or their private small
unhappinesses, listening with their whole bodies like dogs that have caught
some sweet and inexplicable scent on the wind.
She was the star singer at her school, and she had won
competitions—the Pekan Olahraga dan Kesenian Lanjutan Atas, and others like it—but
awards are just pieces of paper and cheap trophies that collect dust on
shelves. What she had couldn’t be measured in those terms. It lived in the
space between her open mouth and your ears, in that quarter-second of
electricity before the sound waves actually reached you and rearranged
something inside you that you hadn’t even known was misaligned.
But.
There is always a but, isn’t there? In every story worth
telling, there’s a but that arrives like a stone wall across the road.
Her father, Tugeno Puspowidjojo—a serious man, a man of his
era, and his era had very specific opinions about what serious men permitted
and what they did not—disapproved. Not cruelly, maybe. Maybe even with the best
of intentions, which, as any honest person will tell you, pave a very
particular road. Singers. In those days, the word carried with it an
invisible asterisk, and the fine print attached to that asterisk was nothing
you’d want your daughter to carry into the world. Entertainers. Women
who sang for strangers, who made themselves available to be looked at and
listened to by God-knows-who. It wasn’t something Tugeno Puspowidjojo could
countenance for the youngest of his children. It simply wasn’t done. It wasn’t right.
He didn’t know, of course, that the voice inside her wasn’t
something that could be simply not-done. You might as well tell a river it can’t
flow downhill.
Her friend Yayuk knew. Girls who grow up alongside someone
with a gift like that—they always know. Yayuk was the one who told her about
the Bintang Radio talent search, the one coming to Semarang like a bright
promise on the horizon. And Yayuk was the one who said, with the particular
cunning that belongs to teenage girls who understand the terrain of adult
disapproval: Enter. Just don’t tell him. And don’t use your name.
They settled on Titiek Puspa. Part of her everyday
nickname. Part of her father’s surname, worn like a disguise that was also,
somehow, an act of love. She would become someone else in order to become fully
herself. The irony of that—the gorgeous, sad irony—is the kind of thing that a
whole life can turn on.
“The 1954 Semarang Bintang Radio Contest was held,” she
would recall decades later, the memory still bright and a little terrifying,
the way your first real high dive stays with you. “From the afternoon onward, I
prepared myself with much better mental readiness than when I had competed in
PORKSLA.”
She didn’t win. Let’s be clear about that. The girl who
would become a legend—one of Indonesia’s legendary divas, the books
would later say, in that slightly breathless way that biographies have of
announcing the obvious—she didn’t take first place. She came in second.
But here is where the story bends and becomes something else
entirely, the way great stories always do: the MC announced on stage that the
second-place winner would be sent to Jakarta, because her score was high
enough. She heard this and something in her chest cracked open—not broke, but opened,
the way a seed cracks open in the dark wet earth before it begins its long,
astonishing climb toward the light.
She was going to Jakarta.
---
The story of Titiek Puspa—her story, her voice, her name
that was both a mask and a revelation—was only one thread in a much larger
tapestry. For more than three decades, the Bintang Radio talent search had been
producing singers the way certain fields, given the right soil and season,
produce extraordinary harvests. Songs that outlive their singers. Voices that
outlive their times.
You have to understand what radio meant to people then, in
the years after independence, when the country was still new and raw and
figuring out what it wanted to be. Television was a rumor. A promise for later.
But radio was now—it was the voice in the corner of the room, the
invisible guest at every meal, and people opened up to it the way they open up
to darkness and music and the particular warmth of a trusted stranger’s voice.
Amateur stations were sprouting everywhere, proliferating the way good ideas do
when an idea’s time has come. Music was their lifeblood. People were humming.
People were singing in offices and in the street and in their showers, filling
up the ordinary minutes of ordinary days with the songs they’d heard on the
airwaves, and the songs became the texture of the era, the sonic wallpaper of a
nation discovering itself.
This was the atmosphere—electric, hungry, alive—into which
Radio Republik Indonesia dropped the first Bintang Radio competition, on the
eleventh of September, 1951. National Radio Day. The sixth anniversary. A
birthday present to the airwaves from the state that owned them.
The rules were simple. Almost brutally so. You came with
your voice and your technique and whatever God had given you in the way of an
instrument, and then they judged you on those things and nothing else. No
gimmicks. No drama. No audiences calling in to rescue their favorites from
elimination. No weeping in rehearsal rooms while cameras captured your
authentic vulnerability for the six o’clock broadcast. You sang. They listened.
The best voice won.
The first big star to come out of all this was a man named
Sam Saimun, from Bandung, who possessed a baritone so warm you could
practically feel it on your skin like afternoon sun. He won in the keroncong
category in 1951. And then again in 1952—winning two categories that
year, keroncong and seriosa, because once wasn’t enough and apparently neither
was twice. And then again in 1955. Three wins, spread across the years, each
one a kind of proof. The newspaper Berita Harian, on a July morning in
1963, tried to explain what Sam Saimun had and how he’d used it: the warmth of
his voice, they said, full of deep feeling, combined with his masterful
phrasing. The beauty of the old songs and old lyrics. Elements, they wrote,
that needed no further explanation.
That’s the thing about a truly great voice. It explains
itself.
Then came Bing Slamet. Cilegon-born, funny and talented and
beloved, already a fixture on RRI Jakarta by 1952, already someone who’d toured
the cities and filled the rooms. He won the entertainment category in 1955, but
the competition was almost a formality—people already knew who he was. He was
also an actor, with movie credits stretching back to Solo di Waktu Malam
and beyond. The man who popularized “Gendjer-Gendjer” turned out to contain
multitudes, which is very often what you find when you look closely at anyone
who seems, from a distance, to be just one simple and beautiful thing.
A decade later, Waldjinah. Born in 1945, already known at
twelve years old—twelve—as someone to watch, having won a singing
contest on RRI Solo while other children were still figuring out how to be
children. By the time 1965 rolled around, she was already the Queen of
Indonesian Keroncong, a title she’d earned the hard way, through years of work
and the sheer physical fact of what her voice could do. She won the Bintang
Radio keroncong category that year singing “Putri Solo” and “Keroncong
Telomojo,” and if you could have been in the room to hear it, you would have
understood without needing anyone to explain it to you.
---
The 1970s arrived the way decades always do—gradually and
then suddenly, like weather. And with the decade came television, that glowing
box that was going to change everything and did. TVRI was the only channel,
back then; they owned the airwaves the way state monopolies own things,
completely and without apology. But RRI was watching, and RRI saw the
opportunity.
In 1974, they joined forces. And Bintang Radio—the old,
austere competition that had asked only for your voice and your nerve—evolved.
It became Bintang Radio Televisi. BRTV. The contestants weren’t just heard
anymore. They were seen.
For the first time, you couldn’t close your eyes and just
listen. The camera was there, patient and unblinking, and it had opinions about
things that had nothing to do with your vocal range. Viewership surged. Of
course it did. The nation had been listening for decades; now it got to look.
Two years later, they added a youth division—BRTV Remaja,
for the talented teenagers and students, for all the seventeen-year-olds out
there with voices bigger than their lives had room for yet. The first winners
were Harvey Malaiholo—son of a sailor, grandson of a musician, carrying the
deep musical heritage of an Ambon family named Titaley somewhere in his bones—and
Rafika Duri, who took the female category and took the future along with it.
They signed with Musica Studio. Their first duet album came
out in 1977, produced by veteran composer A. Riyanto. “Bisikan Mesra.” Songs
that people still know, still hum, still feel in that unexamined part of
themselves where the best music lives.
---
Nothing lasts forever. This is not pessimism; it is simply
the oldest true thing.
After 1997, when the BRTV format wrapped up and sent its
last class of winners—Rio Febrian, Lucky Octavian—out into an industry that was
already beginning to change beneath their feet, something went out of the
competition. The format retreated, shrank back toward its radio roots. By 1998,
you could read about it in regional government publications: “Final Pemilihan
Bintang Radio Tingkat I Jawa Tengah.” Just a regional contest. Not the thing it
had been.
Private television stations had arrived, and they had
brought with them their own talent shows, their own stars, their own dramas.
SMS voting. Reality-show tears. The entire spectacular machinery of
manufactured discovery, engineered to give audiences not just voices to admire
but stories to follow, fates to feel invested in. If you didn’t like what
Bintang Radio was offering—its old, strict standards, its unyielding belief in
vocal technique and musical arrangement, its almost austere insistence on quality—you
could simply change the channel.
People did.
Tjang Abbas, a prominent RRI broadcaster, writing in RRI
55 Tahun in the year 2000, described the loss as only someone who had
watched it from the inside could. Bintang Radio, he wrote, had become something
unreachable—reaching upward but without a crown, reaching downward but without
roots. Stranded. Suspended between what it had been and what the world now
wanted.
---
But here is the other thing, the thing that matters just as
much or maybe more: the voices.
The voices are still out there. The recordings exist, the
songs persist, carried by Lokananta—the state-owned record label that had been
pressing discs in Surakarta since the 1950s and had released albums by Bing
Slamet and Sam Saimun and Waldjinah and Titiek Puspa, by Gesang and Christine
and Bob Tutupoly and A. Rafiq and so many others. All those voices, preserved
in the way that only music can be preserved—not as artifact but as experience,
available to anyone willing to listen.
The girl from Semarang who borrowed part of her father’s
name and walked onto a stage in 1954 with her heart hammering and her voice
steady. She didn’t win. She came in second. And they sent her to Jakarta
anyway, because the quality of what she had was simply too obvious to be
ignored.
Some things, it turns out, are like that. You can delay
them. You can put up walls. You can give them a different name and send them
out into the world in disguise.
But the voice will out.
It always does.
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