This article first appeared in The Edge Financial Daily, on November 16, 2015.

THERE are many ways of exploring the psyche of a battered and fatigued nation like Malaysia today, but very few are musical and lyrical.

Composer Datin Saidah Rastam’s book, Rosalie And Other Love Songs, has been an eye-opening revelation of a country that contemporary Malaysians romanticise about “for the good old days”.

“I’m sure shit happened in those times too,” was Saidah’s crisp reply to The Malaysian Insider’s question as to whether Malaysians were being too overly romantic and nostalgic in wanting Malaya of old, and whether in so doing, were being silly.

 Rosalie and Other Love Songs is elegantly written, and yet raw in its honesty.

It was published in September 2014 as part of a preservation project on Malayan music, recordings, manuscripts and oral history.

The book is not on sale yet, but Saidah has been speaking about it and her work at various events, and the reception to the book has been heartening.

Saidah is not an unfamiliar name to cultural and heritage activists in the country. She is a composer who has written music for theatre, film dance and TV, for gamelan, martial artists, choral groups, Chinese opera singers, orchestras and electronica.

She was the music director for the launch of the Petronas Twin Towers. A show she developed last year, Malam Terang Bulan, for narrators, singers and orchestra will be restaged at the Dewan Filharmonik Petronas from Friday to Sunday.

She is currently working on a documentary on the early years of the Sultan Idris Training College and the Malay College Kuala Kangsar — institutions which produced young men with radically different ideals.

Saidah was trained as a barrister and was in practice for seven years.

In an email interview — her answers given in the midst of producing Malam Terang Bulan this coming weekend — Saidah speaks on Rosalie and her thoughts on Malaysia.

The Malaysian Insider: How would you describe yourself now? An anthropologist of music? A historian? A musician with a deep love of Malaysiana?

Saidah: My card says “Composer”, but in the last three years I’ve focused on others’ music instead. As with many people, a main impulse now is the need to “do” something about troubles in this country.

But how? Where? I felt impotent. Then my social activist-actress friend Jo Kukathas told me, as an artist, your job is to create. That made sense. Not necessarily create music. But create. Make. I’ve been making. So maybe I’m a maker.

How has writing this book changed you, or not?

The more I dug into the records and materials, the more I saw the extent of our cultural custodians’ neglect towards the country’s heritage. It’s hideous.

During the research, I fell into a depression and didn’t realise it. That’s now replaced by a sense of urgency, a need to tell people about it. “Look in your cupboards, speak to veterans you know. It’s late but still in time to salvage something.”

When you compare working on this book, to your other musical projects, what was different/challenging about it?

Interviewing many musicians, I felt proud yet deeply sad. They had worked with such dedication yet in the end, their recordings were thrown away, their manuscripts destroyed. It gave me a sense of a bigger national tragedy, which of course is not there when I work on music for music’s sake.

You come from an established family steeped in public life. Do you think this has influenced your work?

It’s possible that family values are passed down through generations. But which values, out of many?

My grandfathers inhabited rather different ends of the spectrum. My father’s father, Abdul Hadi Hasan, was in the first batch of graduates from the Sultan Idris Training College, along with Harun Aminurashid. He wrote the first history textbooks by a Malay (they had previously been written by Englishmen), Sejarah Alam Melayu, which were used in schools in Malaya and Singapore until the ‘50s.

According to historians such as [Tan Sri] Khoo Kay Kim and [Datin Paduka Dr] Ramlah Adam, he inculcated in his students a sense of perjuangan, based on a great Nusantara legacy, as different from the exploits of Kings of England, which was what the British were teaching in the Malay College Kuala Kangsar.

His students included Ibrahim Yaacob and Hassan Manan, future founders of the radical Kesatuan Melayu Muda and proponents of “Melayu Raya”. His son Hasnul Hadi was a political detainee under the Internal Security Act.

My father Rastam Hadi (who went instead to MCKK) was the first managing director of Petronas, but later left Petronas because, he and his contemporaries told me, he couldn’t agree to the allegedly unusual requests by the then prime minister.

My mother’s father, Mohd Eusoff Mohd Yusuff, was the 14th Datuk Panglima Kinta of Perak, his father was the 10th. (He was with Sultan Idris in London in 1902, that fateful visit when the Perak anthem is said to have been created.)

My grandfather Mohd Eusoff served in 56 public organisations, and had run-ins with the politicians of the day.

Public life is one thing, but I think what these men had in common was the need to act according to their principles, even at the cost of being unpopular. I may have inherited a bit of that.

During pupillage in London, I was almost arrested at the Old Bailey for going to the defence of a prisoner being abused by the guards, and the same trouble happened here in the KL High Court, when as a chambering student I witnessed a senior registrar bullying a court clerk.

Age has made me wiser, but even in making art, for me it should serve some bigger purpose. If we were back in the days of Asas 50, with disputes between “seni demi seni” and “seni demi masyarakat”, it wouldn’t take me long to decide.

I find this book to be a combination of history, anthropology and sociology — it is about a song, and yet it is about a nation that is now embattled by many woes. How do you see this book?

It’s essentially about music created against the background of our nation-building years.

It’s not an academic book. I have no training in historians’ research methodologies. The book is unsophisticated, it merely serves to gather and present some results of research I did within a music preservation project.

And then it just scratches the surface, and contains loose ends which need much more time to pursue. (Where, for instance, are the 514 competition entries which were received by Radio Malaya/the Department of Information during the national anthem competition in 1956-57?).

But if, with flaws and all, it manages to prompt anyone to hunt in their storerooms for those half-remembered LPs or open reels, or if it provokes curiosity about Malaysia’s music heritage and sparks new projects, it will have been worth my two years.

Would you say this book is a personal love letter from you, as  a Malaysian who loves this country?

No. Patriotism and nationalism make me squeamish, as they did Samuel Johnson and Albert Einstein. The story is at once smaller than, and bigger than, a country. It’s about ordinary people who made extraordinary music which crossed centuries and continents.

As a lover of books, I am hoping that this book will reach the Malaysian public. What frustrates me is that perhaps the Malaysian public may not appreciate this work.  Do you think only a select group of bibliophiles would find Rosalie a joy, or are we underestimating Malaysians?

The book is not yet available for sale to the public. I hope that it will be by November, at the Malam Terang Bulan concerts.

From the few who have read it, the feedback has been fantastic. I’m told that in Singapore, photocopies of this book are floating around, and the book is already being cited in academic work.

We tend to stick with people who think like us, so though the feedback has been great I don’t know if the book will have a widespread appeal.

But it doesn’t have to. It just needs to tickle the imaginations of a few, who go on to create initiatives of their own.

Two such projects, inspired by this book’s research, are a new album of Alfonso Soliano’s music by Rachel Guerzo, Alfonso 25, and a BFM Radio podcast by Ezra Zaid and Uma Ampikaipakan, Tanah Tumpahnya Darahku: the search for our national anthem.

Three film companies have approached me about doing a film on the search for our anthem, and of course there are my talks on patriotic music.

The response to these has been overwhelming. Full houses; at two talks, people had to be turned away. Malaysians care a lot for their country, and they have no difficulty separating this from their feelings about their politicians.

And it’s amusing that it’s the scoffers — those who say “Patriotic music? What’s to be patriotic about?” — who get moist-eyed during singalongs.

Do you think we can go back to that era of keroncong et al, or is this part of a musical evolution? What do you think of contemporary Malay(sian) pop music now?

The internet has kicked us into the big wide pulsing world of amazing global influences, and Malaysian musicians are responding with brio. I like what’s happening in this country’s pop music now. Keroncong remixed? Keroncong dubstep? I don’t know. If I had one tiny ask, it would be for Malaysian contemporary musicians to fly the freak flag. Higher.

As for my work/project, if it has any message at all, it would be that despite our cultural custodians’ (criminal) neglect, it’s not too late to reach out and look in relatives’ record collections and transcribe veterans’ accounts. But it’s urgent, it’s now: this is truly the last generation that remembers what happened during Merdeka (e.g. Ahmad Merican, or Kassim Tamin, who played in the band which performed Negaraku for the first time).

I’m not the only one who has evidence of old records being thrown out in entire batches from the RTM archives. Questions should be asked.

Catch Malam Terang Bulan from Nov 20 to 22 (8.30pm, 5pm) at Dewan Filharmonik Petronas, Tower 2, Petronas Twin Towers, KLCC. Tickets are   RM200, RM160, RM120 and RM80, call (03) 2051 7007 to book.