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“The
lack of a common cause and the self-interest of many have drained us of much of
our energy. A bogus national identity and its commercialization have obscured
the true breadth of our culture.”
So
said the late Peter Sculthorpe in describing the background to his Earth Cry of
1986.
There
is a huge scope of what one could talk about tonight. We’re presented with a
programme perhaps largely unfamiliar to most of us – works by a Dane, an
Armenian, an Australian and a New Zealander. Bizarrely if we know any of these
pieces it’s more likely to be the Dane or the Armenian than the Australian or
the New Zealander.
They
are quite a diverse bunch of pieces. But I think what draws them together is a
desire to reveal that true breadth of culture
that Sculthorpe refers to, and a desire to extend and transform our experience
of the concert hall in the Western Art Music Tradition. Whether through
transcription, as in the case of Jack Body, or by combining indigenous music
and contemporary classical music, as Sculthorpe has done in Earth Cry, these
composers are exposing us to new types of musical encounters. Where else have
you seen a didjeridu dialogue with an orchestra?
More
than just composers though, these men were various combinations of transcribers,
arrangers, musicologists, facilitators of cultural exchange. And they were no
longer “The Composer” in scare quotes. By celebrating world musics they
challenged the idea that the composer is the sole author, the authority, to be
worshipped and interpreted painstakingly, as if each composition were a last
will and testament, to be observed to the letter. These composers are not sole
authors but collaborators, participants in a dialogue with tradition and
innovation. The composer here has an interpretive role as much as a generative
one.
This
concert is titled inspired by exotica. Flicking through an APO brochure or
scrolling down the website one might be intrigued or even a tad confused about
what Exotica signifies here. Wikipedia tells me: Exotica is
a musical genre, named after the 1957 Martin Denny album of the same title, popular during the 1950s to mid-1960s, typically with suburban Americans
who came of age during World War II. The musical
colloquialism exotica means
tropical ersatz, the non-native,
pseudo experience of insular Oceania, Southeast Asia, Hawaii, Amazonia, the Andes and tribal Africa. Denny
described the musical style as "a combination of the South Pacific and the
Orient...what a lot of people imagined the islands to be like...it's pure
fantasy though." While
the South Seas forms
the core region, exotica reflects the "musical impressions" of every
place from standard travel destinations to the mythical "shangri-las"
dreamt of by armchair safari-ers.
Thanks
Wikipedia. Rather than impressionistic exoticism - fantastical collages of
oriental effects - the works on tonight’s concert are very much tied to the
qualities and traditions of particular places: Australia, Indonesia, Greece,
India, Armenia. The only exception is Carl Nielsen’s Aladdin Suite, whose
language is a more generalised orientalism, with titles of movements such as
“Chinese Dance”, “Hindu Dance” and “Negro Dance.” The other three works though,
by my reckoning, seem concerned with getting us close to the thing itself,
facilitating a cultural exchange and education.
Tonight
I’m going to focus my attention largely on the composers we might know least
well, that is, the late Jack Body and the late Peter Sculthorpe. I think with
some insight into Body’s practice and his relationship to the music of other
cultures we can begin to see all the music on the programme differently. Rather
than neatly summarising each musical work and what it sounds like, it’s my
intention to talk around these pieces, draw some links and perhaps raise some
more general points of discussion.
Body
and Sculthorpe, both recently deceased, are respective icons of their home
countries, at least within their chosen field of composition and perhaps within
the wider arts scene too.
Jack
Body was only a couple of years ago composer in Residence with this very
orchestra, presenting a huge extravaganza of a performance in the form of his
cabaret evening Songs and Dances of Desire, based on the life of Carmen Rupe.
There he mixed Maori and Spanish folk traditions with a Chinese countertenor,
drag, stage direction from the late Warwick Broadhead and a symphony orchestra.
Such a striking collage was by no means uncommon in Jack’s music; as I see it
every piece of Jack’s set up a kind of encounter between self and other.
Jack’s
practise is a lens through which we can view this whole concert: not “Inspired
by Exotica” but inspired by an engagement with aspects of global culture, and a
desire to expand the concert hall outwards, to create connections across
traditions. Let’s begin with a little of the work of Jack’s you’ll hear
tonight, the opening of Horos Serra from Melodies for Orchestra. This is based
on a Greek fiddle tune, and was one of Jack’s first transcriptions.
PLAY
DISC 1 Track 1 Melodies for Orchestra
mvmt 1
A
few weeks ago at the NZTrio’s concert at Q Loft, featuring their latest
commission by Chris Cree Brown, I met a friend of Jack’s. Actually there were
dozens of friends of Jack’s at the concert; Jack knew everyone. But I mention one
in particular, a friend, student and advocate of Jack’s, Shen Nalin, who is
currently a professor at a major Chinese university. He mentioned as a sort of
off-hand comment that his university had just purchased 60 new Steinway Grands.
But
perhaps more interestingly Shen Nalin is organising a Jack Body Conference in
December with performers from all over Asia, including our own NZTrio and New
Zealand String Quartet. Such is the significance of Jack in that part of the
world that the entire conference is dedicated to his music.
John
Psathas describes Jack’s influence on Asian composers in an interview with the
man himself: “The extent of this cross-fertilization was
brought home to me recently when you and I were having dinner with Tan Dun.
Toasts were being raised to the various ‘fathers’ and grandfathers’ of Chinese
and New Zealand composition. It was an amazing moment to witness this table of
world-famous composers and performers from Asia raise their glasses and toast
Jack Body as the uncle of Chinese music.”
Whenever
one travels abroad as a New Zealand composer, the first and usually the only name other composers mention is
Jack Body. In Asia particularly he has a kind of legendary status. Through his
transcriptive works and tireless energy for organising outlandish musical
projects, Jack brought all sorts of people together and encouraged composers to
celebrate their musical heritage and voice in individual ways. Here’s Jack
again: “I have found that some contemporary Asian composers have expressed
enthusiasm for my transcriptions as suggesting different perspectives on how
they might relate to their own traditions. The arranging and orchestrating of
folksongs is a feature of musical nationalism in many countries, particularly
China, and composers are often frustrated by the clichéed conventions imposed
on them by audience expectations or by the bureaucracy, and are looking for
alternative approaches.”
We’ve
heard the word Transcription a few times now – so perhaps it’s worth explaining
what exactly we mean by that term. Composer and lecturer Dugal McKinnon
describes it in an article on Jack’s practice as “the basic tool of
ethnomusicologists and involves the “translation” of a field-recording of a
performance into a notated form.” Jack himself described it rather more
fancifully, in typical fashion: “Transcribing
is like putting on a mask, taking on a disguise, and has now become an
important part of my compositional practice. Transcription to me is a kind of
travelling, exploring other musics and sensibilities. Modernism, which has its
roots in the Renaissance, places great value on individual originality, and
this is what our training as composers instils in us. And yet what does ‘being
original’ mean? When I listen to a lot of the music of today I hear distinct
influences, even in the most ‘original’ and ‘avant-garde’ scores. Today’s music
of fashion, be it Lachenmann, Scelsi, Adès, whoever, becomes tomorrow’s
stylistic cliché.”
Jack’s
music foregrounds the fact that aspects of it are borrowed, reframed. His award
winning CD Pulse includes two discs, one of Jack’s transcription-based
compositions or arrangements, and the second of the original recorded source
material from which he transcribed them. Thus he makes completely transparent
that one comes from the other, but that the one can never be the other.
Here
is the second movement of Melodies for Orchestra, as it will appear tonight.
The recording is a performance by the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, conducted
by Kenneth Young.
PLAY
(Pulse) Melodies for Orchestra mvmt 2 DISC
1 Track 2
This
was a transcription from a solo saluang, a type of flute from West Sumatra. The
music is largely monophonic even in this version but I think the orchestral
textures are used cleverly to capture some of the colouristic complexity of the
original recording, which we will hear now. The flute solo is preceded by a
short spoken introduction.
PLAY
(Pulse) Singgalang DISC 2 Track 2
Despite
the care and skill of the orchestration, there are some aspects of the music
that can’t be captured. Rather than being a hindrance, Jack saw this as a
positive aspect of his transcriptive method. In an interview with Michael
Norris, he said “the transcription process, […] exposes the limitations and
cultural bias of Western notation and performance practice, and the
ethnocentricity of our modes of listening. I’ve found it very instructive
working with students over many years, comparing their different notational
interpretations of the same music.”
Considering
Jack’s output as a creative artist it might be worth thinking about his
transcriptions as a series of encounters: between different traditions of
music, between different notational systems and performance practices, between
a composer and an unfamiliar sound, between the instrument, the ear, the pen,
the page, the instrument and the ear.
When
you think about it, composing is one of the most indirect of creative acts: a
composer hears a sound, a combination of sounds, in their mind’s ear or in
their environment, and puts it on the page as best they can as a kind of
blueprint. They’ve spent hundreds of hours figuring out how to best represent
the sound they want to be produced in notation, and how best to achieve the
sounds in the technique of performance. They give this blueprint to a
performer, hoping for it to be realised in an expressive or interesting way.
The performer translates the notation into sound, and the listener interprets
the vibrations. It all seems so impersonal, disconnected, indirect. In a way
the score on its own, unperformed, is the ultimate useless artefact. And yet,
when the sound is produced, the sensuality and magic of it is unmistakeable.
It’s a kind of alchemy.
Here’s
Jack again, on that alchemical process of composition: “This idea that the creative act took one beyond the
rational, beyond the known, the familiar, into a fantastic, sometimes dangerous
territory, is something that has reappeared in several of my works over the
years. The electronic piece Kryptophones (1973) was inspired by listening to a shortwave radio on a beach in
Greece. Suddenly music and voices from all of Europe, Africa, the Middle East
flooded in, the air was filled with a whirlwind of sound. I realised with a
shock that I these sounds were around me constantly, but that, without the aid
of a radio receiver, I could not hear them. But what if I could? Is this not so
different from a schizophrenic condition, being able to hear voices that no-one
else can hear? How could one communicate one's experience? One would be
considered mentally ill, surely. And yet history is full of visionaries who
heard secret voices - Joan of Arc, Jesus.... What is the difference between a
prophet, a shaman, a fool, a madman?”
To me Jack’s great strength and influence was in his attunement to the
short-wave radio of culture, his ability to be himself a radio receiver, a
prophet even, for the musics of Asia and beyond.
Like Jack Body, Peter
Sculthorpe was also drawn to Asia for inspiration, and like Jack Body, Peter
Sculthorpe considered his home country a part of Asia. It’s to Australia we
turn for Sculthorpe’s Earth Cry, which presents a rather intense kind of
engagement with the static quality of the Australian landscape. It’s
monolithic, uncompromising music – the music of old rocks and ancient
traditions. Sculthorpe described his attraction to this sound world:
“Early on I found I was using long-held drones in my music and later of
course I realised that what I was doing was imitating the didjeridu. In
mirroring the flatness of the landscape I was adding a kind of didjeridu sound
to my music. For that reason when I started adding the didjeridu to my music I
found I could add it to almost everything I’ve ever written.”
Earth Cry of course features the spectacular
talents of didjeridu soloist William Barton. For want of a better word the work
is a didjeridu concerto, although for me this doesn’t capture the sheer force
of the encounter. Unlike a concerto where the soloist represents a virtuosic
extreme of classical music, accompanied by a classical band, here Barton’s extreme
virtuosity expresses a whole other individual tradition of music. The two
forces are juxtaposed and then fused in a remarkably visceral concert
experience.
I want to return for a moment to the quote I began
my talk with.
“The
lack of a common cause and the self-interest of many have drained us of much of
our energy. A bogus national identity and its commercialization have obscured
the true breadth of our culture.”
On
hearing that quotation out of context though one might extrapolate it to any contemporary capitalist nation: our own, for example. With a work like Earth
Cry Sculthorpe is attempting to draw our attention to our sense of place, our
relationship to the land. The land that our society puts great store on
dividing, selling, extracting and exploiting. Whether in fact a work of music,
a collection of sound waves interpreted by the listener, can be interpreted
politically, whether it can carry a message, is moot, but I would argue that
perhaps that’s less important than being able to simply encounter the music, to
feel the ancient vibrations of the didjeridu.
PLAY
Sculthorpe Earth Cry Track 1
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