This is not a dream.
It’s not the spinnaker of a sailboat
nor the skin of a mammoth onion.
It’s Aga Ujma on the sasando –
a gorgeous 32-string, butterfly-winged Indonesian zither.
Perhaps my sobriquet for the instrument shall be: the onion harp.
*
Edit: I take it back. The sasando is a dream! From the wikipedia:
According to local tradition, the origin of the sasando is linked to the folktale of the Rote people about Sangguana. The story goes that there once was a boy named Sangguana who lived on Rote Island. One day, as he tended to savannah, he felt tired and fell asleep under a palmyra tree. Sangguana dreamt that he played beautiful music with a unique instrument whose sound and the melody was so enchanting. When he woke up, surprisingly, Sangguana could still remember the tones he played in the dream. Wanting to hear it one more time, he tried to fall asleep again. Again he dreamt of the same song and the same instrument. Sangguana was enjoying his dream, but eventually he had to wake up. Not wanting to lose the beautiful sounds from his dream, Sangguana tried to recreate the sounds and quickly created a musical instrument from palmyra leaves with the strings in the middle, based on his memory from the dream, which became the basis of the sasando.
Incredible!
Here Aga Ujma also plays:
Siter – a plucked string instrument related to gamelan
Gender barung – the Javanese xylophone
