The Composer, Herself: Contemporary Snapshots of the Creative Process 3031239210, 9783031239212

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The Composer, Herself Contemporary Snapshots of the Creative Process Edited by Linda Kouvaras Natalie Williams · Maria Grenfell

The Composer, Herself

Linda Kouvaras  •  Natalie Williams Maria Grenfell Editors

The Composer, Herself Contemporary Snapshots of the Creative Process

Editors Linda Kouvaras Melbourne Conservatorium of Music University of Melbourne Southbank, VIC, Australia

Natalie Williams Wagner College, Staten Island, NY, United States of America

Maria Grenfell Conservatorium of Music University of Tasmania Hobart, TAS, Australia

ISBN 978-3-031-23921-2    ISBN 978-3-031-23922-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23922-9 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover pattern: Oxygen / Getty Images This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

This book is dedicated to the twenty-seven authors, whose mainline medium: music is, for a slice of time, here expressed in words. For this, we thank them. We would also wish to note the sad passing, during the time of the publication process, of one of our authors, Susan Frykberg (1954–2023).

Keywords

Women composers • Feminist musicology • Composition mentoring • Practice-led research • Music collaborations • Gender in creativity

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Acknowledgements

The editors would like to extend our sincere appreciation to all contributing authors to our collection. They have generously joined us on a stimulating journey of insights and explorations into their musical lives and compositional practices, and we are excited to share these stories of their passages and pathways through the industry and within their craft. While writing and working at the front line of contemporary composition, their chapters provide invaluable, first-person accounts of a dynamic field. We are grateful for the enriching experience of working with them all. We also thank the supporting researchers, agents and staff who assisted in the preparation of our manuscript: Thomas Le Brocq, Rafael DeStella, Peter Mark, Nat Grant, Hannah Rodger, Leslie Karr, and Jennifer Kelly. We thank the generous support of Professor Richard Kurth, Director of the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music at the University of Melbourne, for assistance towards publication preparation. Thank you, also, to Lauriane Piette and all the wonderful, hard-working staff at Palgrave Macmillan who have prepared our manuscript, supported by the staff at Springer Nature. We thank the Australian National University for their support of the 2017 international research conference, Women in the Creative Arts (director: Associate Professor Natalie Williams; programming committee: Williams, Professor Linda Kouvaras, Associate Professor Maria Grenfell, Dr. Katy Abbott, Professor Samantha Bennett, Dr. Lucy Neave, Dr. Martyn Jolly, and Dr. Kit Devine), which catalysed the publication of this essay collection and also A Century of Women in Composition: Music Against ix

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the Odds (Cham: Palgrave, 2022). The support of both the Gender Institute and the College of Arts & Social Sciences at the Australian National University, enabled the conference. The editors also thank Professor Will Christie, Head, Humanities Research Centre at the Australian National University’s Research School of Humanities & the Arts, and Dr. Kate Bisshop-Witting, formerly the School Manager of the School of Music. The co-editors are each deeply grateful and blessed to have worked together since 2017, as a dynamic editorial team. With the support of our families, and the company of our erstwhile felines (at every end) – not to mention the facilitation of Zoom!, we overcame pandemic lockdowns, international travel restrictions, and impossible time zone differences, to work through countless months of editing, revisions, correspondence and typesetting that brought the book to life. Our collaborations have been magical, and the memories made during our journey together will last for a lifetime. Linda Kouvaras Natalie Williams Maria Grenfell

Contents

1 Introduction:  The “Post(?)-Feminist” Moment in Contemporary Classical Music  1 Linda Kouvaras Part I Activist Musical Projects and Cross-­Cultural Collaborations  37 2 Borrowing  From the Bard 39 Melody Eötvös 3 Letters to Clara: A Contemporary Composer’s Homage to a Woman Pioneer 57 Natalie Williams 4 Holding,  Handling, Moulding and Setting the Inner Thoughts of another, in Hidden Thoughts I: Do I Matter? 77 Katy Abbott 5 Walking  the Line: Emancipating the Complex Female Voice in Recent Operas by Missy Mazzoli 91 Missy Mazzoli

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6 Composing  with, Composition by: A Set of Compositional Practices101 Catherine Milliken 7 Harmonia Mundi: Creating a New Work of Music Theatre to Speak to the Current World Chaos111 Judith Clingan AM and Jessica Dixon 8 Blocking  Out Noise: Metamorphosis and Identity in the Recent Chamber Music of Vivian Fung125 Vivian Fung 9 A  cross Te tai o Rehua: Writing for the taonga pūoro of Aotearoa135 Dame Gillian Karawe Whitehead DNZM 10 An  Overview of my Compositional Practice and Collaborations in China145 Rachel C. Walker 11 Luck,  Grief, Hospitality: Re-Routing Power Relationships in Music155 Liza Lim AM 12 In  Search of the Artistic Moment: Interdisciplinary Collaboration and “The Space Between” from an Australian Female Composer’s Perspective171 Yantra de Vilder Part II Philosophical and Phenomenological Dimensions of Musical Time 185 13 Finding  Time, Finding Space: An Autoethnography of Compositional Praxis187 Christine McCombe

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14 A  Compositional Life in Time: The Recent Operas of Elena Kats-Chernin201 Elena Kats-Chernin AO 15 Einstein’s Dream: At the Threshold Between Science and Art213 Cindy McTee 16 The  Pendulum Process: Point of Balance229 Mary Finsterer 17 Casting  Musical Spells: Time, Passion, and Inevitability in the Music of Shulamit Ran243 Shulamit Ran 18 Low  Frequency as Concept in The Music of Cat Hope257 Cat Hope 19 A Drone Opera Recast: Threat, Allure, Promise273 Judith Dodsworth and Susan Frykberg Part III Musical Awakenings: Reflecting Back, Projecting Forward 281 20 Composing  the Rolls-Royce: A Composer’s Adventures in Orchestral Composition283 Maria Grenfell 21 Finding  a Reason: A Composer’s Pathway Forged Through Social Justice Advocacy297 Kathleen McGuire 22 “When  It Comes to Music Notation, I’m a Type Triple-A Composer!”311 Augusta Read Thomas

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Contents

23 How  My Music Is Made: “Tantôt Libre, Tantôt Recherché”325 Nicola LeFanu 24 Carnivals  of Voice, Musical Playgrounds: Music from Text in Works of Andrée Greenwell345 Andrée Greenwell 25 The Mirror: A Novel in Reflections—Excerpts363 Lera Auerbach 26 Sometimes  Dreams Do Come True: Thea Musgrave’s Exploration of Dramatic-Abstract Forms in her Instrumental Music373 Thea Musgrave CBE 27 My  Awakening as Composer—No Adjective389 Judith Lang Zaimont 28 Epilogue407 Susan McClary Index411

Notes on Contributors

Katy Abbott  is a composer and academic whose work centres around the concept of “connection.” Her music explores our passions, fears and motivations using contemporary musical flavours in traditional musical settings. She is a Senior Lecturer at the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music, the University of Melbourne. http://www.katyabbott.com/. Lera Auerbach  is a poet, writer, visual artist, composer, conductor, and concert pianist. Born in Russia, she now lives in the United States, Germany, and Austria. She holds degrees from The Juilliard School and the Hanover University of Music, Drama, and Media. Her numerous works for opera, ballet, and orchestra have been performed throughout the world. She has published four volumes of poetry in and prose. Lera Auerbach was elected as a Young Global Leader and serves as a cultural leader at the World Economic Forum. Judith Clingan AM  has spent most of her seventy-eight years singing, directing choirs and composing, most often for choirs, both shorter a capella pieces and larger works accompanied by orchestra or instrumental ensemble. She studied at the Canberra School of Music (voice, bassoon, composition) in Australia and the Kodály Institute in Hungary. http:// judithclingan.net.au/ Yantra de Vilder  is a creative artist, composer and performer, specialising in film, art installations, dance and theatre. Yantra has a doctorate in creative arts, her research focusing on “The Search for The Artistic

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Moment,” and is a founding member of the Australian Guild of Screen Composers Gender Equity Committee. https://www.yantra.com.au/ Jessica Dixon  works with young people and adults on performing and visual arts projects in schools and in the wider community, nationally and internationally. She is focused on creating safe, creative, dynamic environments for students, believing the arts can provide tools for healing and deeper understanding of self and world. Judith  Dodsworth  is a soprano, educator and multidisciplinary artist. She has performed widely in Australia and overseas in opera, chamber music and concert, and is considered one of Australia’s leading exponents of new vocal repertoire, performing numerous premieres. She maintains a diverse portfolio and a particular interest in collaborative art. http:// www.weaverartistmanagement.com.au/singers/sopranos/judith­dodsworth/ Melody  Eötvös is an Australian-American composer who holds a Doctorate of Music from Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, USA, and a Master of Music (2008) from the Royal Academy of Music, London, UK. She is currently a Lecturer in Composition, Aural Studies, and Orchestration at the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music. http:// melodyeotvos.com/ Mary Finsterer  Described by critics as one of Australia’s most innovative composers, the music of Mary Finsterer spans more than three decades. Throughout that time her award-winning music has traversed a range of approaches, bringing together current innovations with medieval style, from the concert platform through to music for the screen. https://www. maryfinsterer.com/ Susan Frykberg  was a composer and sound artist and a citizen of New Zealand and Canada. She had one son. She was a founding member of the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology (WFAE) and the Canadian Electroacoustic Community (CEC). www.susanfrykberg.com Vivian Fung  JUNO Award-winning composer Vivian Fung has a unique talent for combining idiosyncratic textures and styles into large-scale works, reflecting her multicultural background. NPR calls her “one of today’s most eclectic composers.” Born in Edmonton, Canada, Fung received her doctorate from The Juilliard School. She currently lives in California. Learn more at www.vivianfung.ca

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Andrée  Greenwell  is a Sydney-based composer, vocalist and performance maker with a catalogue of over one hundred scores for performing and screen arts. As artistic director of Green Room Music, Andrée creates independent new music theatre and multidisciplinary works, achieved in partnerships with Australia’s leading performing arts organisations and presenters. https://www.andreegreenwell.com/ Maria  Grenfell,  Associate Professor, School of Creative Arts and Media, University of Tasmania, recently stepped down as Head of the Conservatorium of Music, where she has been a lecturer for twenty-five years. She is one of Australia’s most widely performed women composers and is regularly sought-after as a mentor for emerging composers. Grenfell’s work is influenced by poetic, literary and visual sources and by non-Western music and literature. Winner of the Tasmanian State Award for Ten Suns Ablaze in 2013, and Spirals in 2018 at the Australian Art Music Awards, her orchestral music has been commissioned, performed or recorded by all the major symphony orchestras in Australia; her chamber music is played around the world. Grenfell’s works are broadcast regularly in Australia and New Zealand, released on ABC Classics, Kiwi-Pacific, and Trust CDs, and available from the Australian Music Centre, SouNZ New Zealand Music Centre, Reed Music, and TSO House. Maria Grenfell has been a mentor for the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra’s Australian Composers’ School, which she founded in 2006. She was also a mentor for the Sydney Conservatorium inaugural “Composing Women” program from 2016-17. In 2013 Grenfell was Visiting Professor of Composition at Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches, Texas, and in 2019 she was Kerr Composer in Residence at the Oberlin Conservatory in Oberlin, Ohio. Her most recent scholarly publication is A Century of Composition by Women: Music Against the Odds, edited by Linda Kouvaras, Grenfell and Natalie Williams. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Cat Hope  is an artist scholar whose research interests include animated notation, gender and music, Australian music, digital archiving as well as music composition and performance as artistic research. She is currently Professor of Music at the Sir Zelman Cowen School of Music and Performance at Monash University in Melbourne. https://www. cathope.com/ Elena Kats-Chernin AO  Her music featured at the opening ceremonies of the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games and the 2003 Rugby World Cup. Her

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awards include Sounds Australia, Helpmann, Limelight and Sydney Theatre Awards as well as the Sidney Myer Performing Arts Award 2013. Her music has been performed by all major orchestras in Australia, as well as internationally, and she has composed eight operas. https://www.australianmusiccentre.com.au/artist/kats-­chernin-­elena Linda  Kouvaras,  musicologist, composer, pianist, and educator, is a professor at the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music, University of Melbourne, where she has been a lecturer/researcher for over twenty-five years. She recently completed two terms as the Conservatorium’s Associate Director of Research/Research Training. As one of Australia’s most longstanding scholars on postmodernism in art-music and feminist musicology, Kouvaras receives numerous invitations to speak, to write, to teach, to adjudicate, to serve on international and local editorial board memberships, to provide scholarly refereeing; she is commissioned to compose, record and invited to perform, with frequent high-profile radio broadcasts in Australia and internationally. A fully represented artist at the Australian Music Centre and with the Australasian Performing Rights Association, Kouvaras appears on over twenty recordings, including one solo disc of original piano works. Her monograph, Loading the Silence: Australian Sound Art in the Post-­Digital Age (Ashgate, 2013; Routledge 2016), won the 2014 IASPM-ANZ Rebecca Coyle Publication prize. Her most recent scholarly publication is A Century of Composition by Women: Music Against the Odds, edited by Kouvaras, Maria Grenfell and Natalie Williams. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Nicola  LeFanu  has composed around one hundred works for various mediums, including eight operas. Her music is published by Edition Peters and by Novello and has been widely played, broadcast and recorded. She is married to the composer David Lumsdaine; her mother was the composer Elizabeth Maconchy. https://www.nicolalefanu.com/ Liza Lim AM  is an Australian composer whose music focuses on collaborative and transcultural practices. Ideas of beauty, ecological connection, and ritual transformation are on-going concerns in her compositional work. Widely commissioned by some of the world’s pre-eminent orchestras and ensembles, Lim is Sculthorpe Chair of Australian Music at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. https://lizalimcomposer.com/ Missy Mazzoli  is a Grammy-nominated composer living and working in Brooklyn, New  York. Her music has been performed by the New  York

  NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS 

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Philharmonic, the BBC Symphony, Opera Philadelphia, Los Angeles Opera, Scottish Opera, and many others. In 2018 she became the first woman to be commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera. https://missymazzoli.com/ Susan  McClary  (Fynette H.  Kulas Professor of Music, Case Western Reserve University; Distinguished Professor Emerita, UCLA) specializes in the cultural criticism of music. Best known for her book Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality, McClary received a MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Fellowship in 1995. Her work has been translated into at least twenty languages. Christine  McCombe is an established Composer, Music Educator, Writer and Creative Arts Therapist. Her compositions have been performed, recorded and broadcast by leading musicians in Australia and internationally. Recent commissions include new works for the Australian Chamber Choir and Rubiks Collective (Melbourne). https://christinemccombe.com/ Kathleen  McGuire  is a composer, conductor and educator who advocates for positive transformation via the arts. Her compositions are published by Wirripang (Australia) and Shawnee Press (United States). She lectures in music education and professional teaching practice at the Australian Catholic University’s Melbourne campus, Victoria, Australia. https://www.kathleen-­mcguire.com/ Cindy McTee  enjoyed a thirty-year teaching career alongside her activities as a composer—three years at Pacific Lutheran University and twentyseven years at the University of North Texas where she retired as Regents Professor Emerita in 2011. Her works are performed regularly by leading ensembles throughout the world. https://www.cindymctee.com/ Catherine  Milliken  A founding member of the Ensemble Modern, Germany, Australian composer, performer and creative director, Cathy Milliken lives and works in Berlin. Commissions include works for orchestras, opera, radio, film by major international festivals and institutions. She also led the Berliner Philharmoniker Education Department and is known for her international multi-­disciplinary participatory music events. www. cathymilliken.com Thea Musgrave CBE  The works of Scottish-American composer Thea Musgrave CBE are performed in major concert halls, festivals, and radio

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stations on both sides of the Atlantic. The recipient of many notable awards including two Guggenheim Fellowships, the Ivors Classical Music Award 2018, and The Queen’s Medal for Music, she was awarded a CBE on the 2002 Queen’s New Year’s Honour List Shulamit Ran  Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for her Symphony, Shulamit Ran has received many major honors and performances by renowned ensembles of her music, which comprises a diverse catalogue of orchestral music including concerti, opera, solo and chamber, vocal and choral works. She is a Distinguished Service Professor Emerita at the University of Chicago. https://music.uchicago.edu/people/shulamit-­ran Augusta Read Thomas  A Pulitzer Prize finalist and composer featured on a Grammy winning CD by Chanticleer, Augusta Read Thomas’ impressive body of works “embodies unbridled passion and fierce poetry” (American Academy of Arts and Letters). She is a University Professor of Composition in Music and the College at The University of Chicago. https://www.augustareadthomas.com/ Rachel  C.  Walker  writes poetic, timbre-sensitive works drawing from her ongoing immersion in and research on Chinese folk music, musical time, and language. Her music has been heard across the US, China, Germany, Austria, Sweden, Portugal, Canada, Colombia, and Australia. She has held residencies at the Banff Centre for the Arts and Creativity and the Britten-Pears Foundation, and is a 2022 fellow at the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, Germany. https://rachelcwalker.com/ Dame  Gillian  Karawe  Whitehead DNZM Born in Aotearoa/New Zealand, composer Gillian Karawe Whitehead (Ngai Terangi) lived for 15 years in Europe and a further 15 in Sydney before returning to live and compose full-time in New Zealand. Her output spans orchestral, chamber, operatic and solo genres, sometimes involving improvisation, and often focused on te ao Ma ̄ori (the Māori world). https://www.gillianwhitehead.co.nz/ Natalie  Williams,  a composer and academic, is the Division Chair of Visual and Performing Arts at Wagner College, New York. Academic teaching positions include the Australian National University and the University of Georgia (USA). Her published research focuses on posttonal music, music theory pedagogy and the work of women in the creative arts. Her music has been commissioned and performed across

  Notes on Contributors 

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Australia, Europe and the United States. Natalie’s first symphony premiered to critical acclaim in August of 2014; a multimedia symphony premiered by the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra. Winner of the 2020 Sue Willgoss Chamber Music Composition Prize at the University of Sydney, the 2018 Albert H. Maggs Award from the University of Melbourne, and the Judith Lang-Zaimont prize from the International Alliance of Women in Music (2016), she was the inaugural composer commissioned by Musica Viva’s Hildegard Project in 2015, a commissioning program championing the music of women. In 2017 she directed an international research conference, Women in the Creative Arts, at the Australian National University, School of Music. Commercial recordings of her music include releases on ABC Classics (2021), Albany Records, New York (2014), and Wirripang Records (2011). Williams holds a doctoral degree in Music Composition (2012) from Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music and a Graduate Certificate of Management (2018), completed at the Australian National University. She is a Fellowship Member of the Higher Education Academy (UK) and a full writer member of the Australasian Performing Rights Association. Her most recent scholarly publication is A  Century of Composition by Women: Music Against the Odds, edited by Linda Kouvaras, Maria Grenfell and Williams. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Judith Lang Zaimont’s  music is internationally acclaimed for its immediacy, dynamism, creative forms and emotion, and is performed worldwide. Her style is distinguished by its spirit of rhapsody featuring sudden shifts in texture, instrumental coloring and atmosphere. Her 136 works include many prize-winning pieces covering every genre: six symphonies, chamber opera, music for wind ensemble, for chorus and solo voice, and works for a wide variety of chamber music.

List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Fig. 2.2 Fig. 2.3 Fig. 2.4 Fig. 2.5 Fig. 2.6 Fig. 3.1 Fig. 3.2 Fig. 3.3 Fig. 3.4 Fig. 3.5 Fig. 3.6

“The Earl of Essex Galliard” (John Dowland, 1605): example of Hemiola rhythmic grouping (bars 5–7) 41 “The Earl of Essex Galliard” (John Dowland, 1605): harmonic reduction (bars 1–8) 42 “Ruler of the Hive” first Movement (Melody Eötvös, 2018): example of sixteenth-century harmonic and rhythmic application (bars 15–20) 42 “Ruler of the Hive” second movement (Melody Eötvös, 2018): composing out process from the solo violin’s duo line (bars 20–26) 43 “Ruler of the Hive” second movement (Melody Eötvös, 2018): Example of straight into full-score composing (bars 58–60) 44 “Ruler of the Hive,” fifth movement (Melody Eötvös, 2018): Additional harp part added during performance week (revised bars 38–87) 46 Robert Schumann—Three Romances for Piano, Op. 28 (no. 2). (Source: Robert Schumann, Drei Romanzen, 1880) 59 Williams—Letters to Clara, mvt.4 (quotation from Schumann’s Op. 28, no. 2) 60 Clara Schumann—Variations on a Theme of Robert Schumann, Op. 20 (theme) 63 Clara Schumann—Piano Trio, Op. 17 (movement 1), opening melody63 Clara Schumann—Piano Trio, Op. 17 (movement 1), G minor thematic material 64 Clara Schumann—Romance Varié, Op. 3 (theme) 65

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List of Figures

Fig. 3.7 Fig. 3.8 Fig. 3.9 Fig. 3.10 Fig. 3.11 Fig. 3.12 Fig. 3.13 Fig. 3.14 Fig. 3.15 Fig. 3.16 Fig. 3.17 Fig. 3.18 Fig. 3.19 Fig. 3.20 Fig. 3.21 Fig. 3.22 Fig. 4.1 Fig. 4.2 Fig. 4.3 Fig. 4.4 Fig. 4.5 Fig. 4.6 Fig. 6.1

Robert Schumann—Impromptus über ein Thema von Clara Weick, Op. 5 (theme) 65 Robert Schumann—Piano Sonata in F# Minor, Op. 11 (mvt. 1) bars 1–5 66 Robert Schumann—Piano Sonata in F# Minor, Op. 11 (mvt. 1) bars 53–59 66 Clara Schumann—Les Ballet des Revenants, Op. 5, no. 4, “Scene Fantastique”66 Williams—Letters to Clara (mvt. 2) combination of themes by Robert and Clara Schumann 67 Johannes Brahms—Variations on a Theme of R. Schumann, Op. 9 (Var. 10) bars 30–34 68 Johannes Brahms—Piano Trio, Op. 101 (mvt. 3) bars 1–6 68 Williams—Letters to Clara (mvt. 4), quotation of Brahms Op. 101, Piano Trio 69 Johannes Brahms—Vier Ernste Gesänge, Op. 121 (no. 3) “O Tod” (bars 1–2) 69 Williams—Letters to Clara (mvt. 4), bars 81–85 70 Johannes Brahms—Violin Sonata, Op. 78 (mvt. 3) bars 12–14 71 Williams—Letters to Clara (mvt. 4) bars 1–3 71 Johannes Brahms—“Regenlied” from Lieder und Gesänge, Op. 59 (bars 1–9) 72 Williams—Letters to Clara (mvt. 4) bars 21–23, Regenlied quotation73 Johannes Brahms—Vier Ernste Gesänge, Op. 121 (no. 2) “Ich wandte mich” (bars 1–4) 73 Williams—Letters to Clara (mvt. 4) bars 24–28 74 Hidden Thoughts 1: Do I Matter?, Katy Abbott, movement 8, bars 63–73 81 Hidden Thoughts 1: Do I Matter?, Katy Abbott, movement 8, bars 53–60  84 Hidden Thoughts 1: Do I Matter?, Katy Abbott, movement 9, bars 50–57 85 Hidden Thoughts 1: Do I Matter?, Katy Abbott, movement 2, ‘Teabag’ for solo cello 85 Hidden Thoughts 1: Do I Matter?, Katy Abbott, movement 13, Crazy Dreams A Silver Thread, bars 1–3 86 Hidden Thoughts 1: Do I Matter?, Katy Abbott, movement 16: Do I Matter? (reprise) bars 1–5 87 The wind group begins the HappiOki, installed around the garden at the Hojuji Temple of Kamaishi, Japan 106

  List of Figures 

Fig. 7.1 Fig. 7.2 Fig. 7.3 Fig. 7.4 Fig. 7.5 Fig. 7.6 Fig. 11.1 Fig. 11.2 Fig. 12.1 Fig. 12.2 Fig. 15.1 Fig. 15.2 Fig. 15.3 Fig. 15.4 Fig. 15.5 Fig. 16.1 Fig. 16.2 Fig. 16.3 Fig. 16.4 Fig. 16.5 Fig. 16.6 Fig. 16.7 Fig. 16.8 Fig. 16.9 Fig. 18.1 Fig. 18.2

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A Hero’s Journey, infographic adapted from Joseph Campbell (2014) by Clingan and Dixon 113 Judith Clingan, Harmonia Mundi, first E Dorian melody 114 Judith Clingan, Harmonia Mundi, second E Dorian melody 114 Judith Clingan, Harmonia Mundi—main theme 121 Judith Clingan, O Gaia (three part round)—secondary theme, from Harmonia Mundi121 Yu Hsiu Huang (Taiwan) as Gaia’s Messenger and Morgan Smith (Australia) as Sophia (photographer: Jessica Dixon) 124 Relative numbers of male and female composers’ works performed at the Darmstadt Summer Course in composition (1946–2014)157 Numbers of women as participants (composers and performers) at the Darmstadt School, during fifty years, 1963–2014, compared with total participants 157 In Search of the Artistic Moment, Charcoal Drawing by Yantra de Vilder, 2012 173 Swarm, Collage by Yantra de Vilder, 2013 176 “Timescape” from Cindy McTee’s Einstein’s Dreams for six instruments (1996) 215 Excerpt from Cindy McTee’s Einstein’s Dream (2005) 223 Excerpt from Cindy McTee’s Einstein’s Dream (2005) 224 Triad pattern and octatonic scale examples featured in Cindy McTee’s Einstein’s Dream (2005) 225 Twelve-tone row based on the B-A-C-H motive, as utilised by Cindy McTee in Einstein’s Dream (2005) 226 Ruisselant, by Mary Finsterer—bars 22-24 232 Ruisselant, by Mary Finsterer—Pitch Grid A 233 Ruisselant, by Mary Finsterer—bars 106-108 234 Ruisselant, by Mary Finsterer—bars 115-117 235 Ruisselant, by Mary Finsterer—bars 133-135 236 Silva, by Mary Finsterer—bars 1-6 238 Silva, by Mary Finsterer—bars 7-12 238 Silva, by Mary Finsterer—Bars 55-58 239 Silva, by Mary Finsterer—Bars 59-62 240 An screenshot score excerpt from the score of Kaps Freed (2017) by Cat Hope showing the piano part (solid, horizontal coloured lines) and the electronics (opaque coloured lines) 261 An excerpt of the score from Sub Decorative Sequences (2019) by Cat Hope, showing the pink subtone parts, and the coloured, instrumental parts 262

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List of Figures

Fig. 18.3

Fig. 18.4 Fig. 20.1 Fig. 20.2 Fig. 20.3 Fig. 20.4 Fig. 20.5 Fig. 20.6 Fig. 23.1 Fig. 23.2 Fig. 23.3 Fig. 23.4 Fig. 23.5 Fig. 23.6 Fig. 23.7 Fig. 23.8 Fig. 23.9 Fig. 23.10 Fig. 24.1 Fig. 24.2 Fig. 24.3 Fig. 26.1 Fig. 26.2 Fig. 26.3 Fig. 26.4 Fig. 26.5 Fig. 26.6

A screen shot of anexcerpt from the score for The Post Truth Pleasure Garden (2018) by Cat Hope, showing the sampling point of an instrument (6.) and the subsequent electronic part 264 A screenshot excerpt from the score for The Lowest Drawer showing the grey scale instrumental parts amongst the coloured lines representing sampled instruments as sine tones 266 Maria Grenfell, Roar! (2003), bars 8–16, clarinets and bassoons289 Maria Grenfell, Roar! (2003), bars 54–62, strings and harp 290 Maria Grenfell, Roar! (2003), bars 153–56, percussion (xylophone, tom-toms, lion’s roar, whip) 291 Maria Grenfell, Rock Hopping (2012), bars 1–12 292 Maria Grenfell, Flinders and Trim (2019), bars 55–59 294 Maria Grenfell, Flinders and Trim (2019), bars 258–70 295 Nicola LeFanu, But Stars Remaining (1970) 327 Nicola LeFanu, But Stars Remaining (1970) 327 Nicola LeFanu, But Stars Remaining (1970) 328 Nicola LeFanu The Same Day Dawns (1974) 330 Nicola LeFanu The Same Day Dawns (1974) 330 Nicola LeFanu The Same Day Dawns (1974) 331 Nicola LeFanu, sketch for Columbia Falls (1975) 332 Nicola LeFanu, The Old Woman of Beare (1981) 335 Nicola LeFanu, The Story of Mary O’Neill (1986), early sketch 338 Nicola LeFanu Light Passing (2005) 341 Andrée Greenwell, “Moonlight #2” bars 33–41 349 Logic Pro X premix session, Andrée Greenwell, “Fire” 356 Vocal and piano parts, opening, Andrée Greenwell, “Mosaic” 358 Thea Musgrave, Concerto for Orchestra (1967) Clarinet solo and concertante group 377 Thea Musgrave, Clarinet Concerto (1968) clarinet solo, Quasi Improvisando, leading subset groups of the orchestra 378 Thea Musgrave, Memento Vitae, chord cluster (strings and horns), F/C sharp elements 380 Thea Musgrave, Memento Vitae, “Ecossaise” scoring for wind parts 381 Thea Musgrave, Horn Concerto (1971) spatial interactions between solo and tutti horns 382 Thea Musgrave, Horn Concerto (1971) quarter tone writing in solo horn part 383

  List of Figures 

Fig. 26.7 Fig. 26.8 Fig. 26.9 Fig. 26.10 Fig. 27.1 Fig. 27.2

Fig. 27.3 Fig. 27.4

Fig. 27.5

Fig. 27.6

Fig. 27.7

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Thea Musgrave, Viola Concerto (1973), “Andante: Espressivo Molto” viola soloist cantabile line, accompanied by an undulating horn figure 384 Thea Musgrave, Viola Concerto (1973), tutti violas, impassioned soloistic lines 385 Thea Musgrave, Viola Concerto (1973), viola soloist leading the tutti violas as a section recapitulation 386 Thea Musgrave, Trumpet Concerto (2019), trumpet soloist plays traditional Scottish tune, “The Bonnie Earl of Moray” 388 Judith Lang Zaimont, American City—a Portrait of New York392 Judith Lang Zaimont, Wizards—Three Magic Masters (excerpt). (Copyright © 2005 by Subito Music Publishing (ASCAP). All Rights Reserved. International Copyright Secured. Used by permission) 399 Judith Lang Zaimont, When Angels Speak (excerpt 1) 400 Judith Lang Zaimont, When Angels Speak (excerpt 2). (Copyright © 2005 by Subito Music Publishing (ASCAP). All Rights Reserved. International Copyright Secured. Used by permission) 401 Judith Lang Zaimont, Jupiter’s Moons (excerpt). (Copyright © 2005 by Subito Music Publishing (ASCAP). All Rights Reserved. International Copyright Secured. Used by permission)402 Judith Lang Zaimont, Astral … a mirror life on the astral plane … (excerpt, solo violin version). (Copyright © 2009 by Jeanné, Inc. (ASCAP). All Rights Reserved. International Copyright Secured. Used by permission) 403 Judith Lang Zaimont, Wind Quintet No. 2, Homeland, Mvt II “Echo (Intermezzo)”. (Copyright © 2003 by Jeanné, Inc. (ASCAP). All Rights Reserved. International Copyright Secured. Used by permission) 404

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: The “Post(?)-Feminist” Moment in Contemporary Classical Music Linda Kouvaras

The Composer, Herself: Contemporary Snapshots of the Creative Process—Overview I think I’ve never been a female because I’ve felt so uncomfortable about being one that I must always have been a Male! Ha! And everything that I’ve ever wanted to do would have been easier done if I had been a boy….       —Peggy Glanville-Hicks (Australian composer 1912–1990)1

The Composer, Herself: Contemporary Snapshots of the Creative Process is a collection of twenty-six essays authored by living composers of Western

1  Peggy Glanville Hicks in Interview with John Tristram, dir., P.G-H: A Musical Odyssey (Sydney: Juniper Films & ABC, 1991).

L. Kouvaras (*) Melbourne Conservatorium of Music, University of Melbourne, Southbank, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 L. Kouvaras et al. (eds.), The Composer, Herself, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23922-9_1

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“art” music from across the globe:2 this is a document of primary sources, presenting Cis-identifying women’s reflections on the creation of their music.3 Coterminous to the recent worldwide upsurge in feminist focus, the distinctive feature of the book is the “snapshots” of creative processes and conceptualizing on the part of women who write music, writing in the present day. The demographic makeup of our authors spans highly active mid-careerists to seasoned, major figures—with birth dates encompassing 1928 to 1994– from a range of nationalities in the contemporary music field. All composers profiled live and work in Anglophone nations (United Kingdom, United States of America, Canada, Australia and New Zealand), with concomitant diversity within the boundaries of that group: North American; Greek-Australian; Australian-American; New Zealander-­ Australian; Canadian-Cambodian; Māori; English; Chinese-Australian; Scottish-Australian; Soviet-Russian-born American; Russian-Australian; American-Australian and Israeli-American. The book’s rationale steps into the juncture point at which Fourth-Wave feminism finds itself, as the third decade of the twenty-first century is now, writing at the end of 2021, well underway: as binary conceptions of gender are (rightly) being dissolved, with (much-needed) critiques of the attendant gender-based historical generalisations of composers, and as recognition is (finally, and belatedly) afforded to the work and circumstances of First Nations peoples, we are interested in exploring what, actually, is being composed by women, and what their own thoughts are on their work. While compositional content is illuminated through the composers’ words themselves, another marker of the book’s uniqueness is practitioner forays, in the great majority of the chapters, into feminist interventions through creative operations. Indeed, the needs which the book serves are acutely felt—as my opening wry quote, above, from “PG-H” (Peggy Glanville-Hicks, Australian expatriate composer, 1912–1990), uttered toward the end of her life, attests: despite all of the recent societal gains, and the sector schemes and strategies to encourage, enable and stage the work of 2  We acknowledge the problematic aspect of assuming that, by the use of the term “composer,” one infers “of Western art music.” 3  An obvious further group of composers deserving of the spotlight is people whose gender is non-binary.

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women who compose music (some of these initiatives are discussed in the chapters to follow),4 their works are still yet to receive commensurate exposure with that of their male counterparts. In its multi-­ pronged, direct response to this exigency, the book’s scope serves a tripartite function: first, it highlights stellar composers on the international stage who are women; secondly, it reveals myriad issues around feminism in the chapters where such concern is foregrounded; and finally, it gives the composers’ own insights on the nuts and bolts of their compositional processes. We thus present a contemporary moment in time—a “snapshot”—across the generations and within developments in contemporary composition. The Composer, Herself: Contemporary Snapshots of the Creative Process comprises both first-person, solo-authored accounts, as well as a small number of interviews, four of the five (Vivian Fung, Missy Mazzoli, Elena Kats-Chernin AO, and Shulamit Ran) of which are conducted by co-­editor Natalie Williams, lending a coherence to those discussions. Conductor Jennifer Kelly’s 2010 interview with Augusta Read Thomas5 is also included, as an homage to a sibling publication within the activist space of celebrating composers who are women. Our chapters encompass close score-reading analysis by composers of their pieces. Socio-cultural issues, addressed in several of the musical works, comprise their very subject matter, while others home in on more “abstract” musical forays. Finally, this book provides a unique wealth of auto-ethnographic accounts from the composers themselves, a resource for musical artists and musicologists alike, and lasting well into the future. This array of methodologies is faithful to the preference on the part of each author to present their work and reflects the wealth of “ways in” to their creative processes and personal 4  Also see, for example, Part II in Linda Kouvaras, Maria Grenfell and Natalie Williams, eds, A Century of Composition by Women: Music Against the Odds (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022). 5  Jennifer Kelly and Augusta Read Thomas, “Augusta Read Thomas,” In Her Own Words: Conversations with Composers in the United States, by Jennifer Kelly, 265–280 (University of Illinois Press, 2013). Our book is, similarly, a collection by women composers on their own work. Prior compendia on women composers would include such titles as The Pandora Guide to Women Composers: Britain and the United States 1629–Present, by Sophie Fuller (London: Pandora, 1994); and Les Compositrices en France a XIXe Siècle by Florence Launay (Paris: Fayard, 2006).

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reflections. The thematicization of the overall structure illuminates a non-­ imposed, organically “faithful” way of grouping the chapters within the broad commonalities they do share. In The Composer, Herself: Contemporary Snapshots, the authors bring to life a musical kaleidoscope of twenty-first-century composing practices. This book is a “primary-source documents” collection. Authors’ words have received minimal editorial intervention; their voices are authentically their own. A broad range of musical genres feature within—from orchestral compositions, to chamber, screen music, theatre work, and narrated work. Musical languages are canvassed—from post-tonal, to modal, to experimental, to specialised notation systems, and cross-cultural interactions with instruments and form. The book’s scope traverses three parts. Part I: Activist Musical Projects and Cross-Cultural Collaborations offers a number of solutions embedded in the creative process to the challenging—to say the least—landscape for women’s composition. Essays zeroing in on formalist concepts, process and aesthetics form the basis of Part II: Philosophical and Phenomenological Dimensions of Musical Time. In Part III: Musical Awakenings: Reflecting Back, Projecting Forward, the authors trace their journeys throughout their professional life. In the majority of chapters in these two latter sections, any politico-culturally-based positioning emerges by inference rather than explicitness—but its understated presence is at times palpable in light of the foregoing chapters, and some authors track an ongoing activist “bent” over a lifetime in composition. The intention for this collection is therefore not to follow a categorical or all-encompassing narrative through-line. The volume’s strength is the highly individual nature of the contributions, which are inwards-looking and written independently—while yet engaging with the political sphere on personal and social level, and are not necessarily written towards an enveloping broader theoretical or conceptual framework, other than the emergent larger-scale themes such as gender and feminism, cross-cultural influences, and abstract contemporary musical languages.

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Part I: Activist Musical Projects and Cross-Cultural Collaborations The state of the industry supporting the presentation of New Music written by women in the present day is parlous.6 Still. In Part I, Natalie Williams and Liza Lim7 directly address the theme of incommensurate professional exposure on the part of women who compose. These authors provide hard numbers here, reporting on the shameful statistics of the representation of women composers in global concert programming; these accounts are written in the context of the composers’ own disruptive approaches to addressing the situation through their compositional practice. In part, the very fact of under-representation of women’s music justifies the need for a text—some two decades into the twenty-first century!—focusing solely on the work of women composers. The other justification for such a text is the illumination of the actual musical compositions, across a broad range of genres—from orchestral compositions, to chamber, screen music, theatre work, immersive installations, and narrated musical pieces by these composers, by the creators themselves. While the headings of the three sections of the book are distinct, and while the various emphases within each part are clearly apparent, a fascinating characteristic of the twenty-six chapters beyond this one is the recurrence of certain strands, the development of issues raised, unprompted, 6  Some recent titles on this issue include Kouvaras, Grenfell, and Williams, eds, A Century of Composition; Siobhan McAndrew and Martin Everett, “Symbolic versus Commercial Success among British Female Composers,” in Social Networks and Music Worlds, ed. Nick Crossley, Siobhan McAndrew and Paul Widdop (New York: Routledge, 2014), 61–88; Laurel Parsons and Brenda Ravenscroft, eds, Analytical Essays on Music by Women Composers: Secular & Sacred Music to 1900 (London: Oxford University Press, 2018); and Michael K.  Slayton, ed., Women of Influence in Contemporary Music: Nine American Composers (Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2010); Roxane Prevost and Kimberly Francis, “Teaching Silence in the Twenty-First Century: Where are the Missing Women Composers?” in The Oxford Handbook of Music Censorship, ed. Patricia Hall (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018): 637–60. Also see Susanna Eastburn, “We Need More Women Composers—and It’s Not About Tokenism, It’s About Talent,” The Guardian, March 6, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/music/2017/mar/06/sound-and-music-susanna-eastburn-we-need-more-­ women-composers-talent-not-tokenism, and Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore, “Beyond the ‘Dead White Dudes’: How to Solve the Gender Problem in Australian Classical Music,” The Guardian, August 20, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/music/2019/aug/20/ beyond-the-dead-white-dudes-how-to-solve-the-gender-problem-in-australian-­ classical-­music. 7  Chapters 3 and 11, respectively, present volume.

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between the essays. Each is voiced through an individual “take,” of course; but for the book as a whole, the eclecticism of the “snapshots” forms much more than a seemingly random collection. “Reluctant” / “Emergent” / “Concerted” Feminism Seminal feminist projects in musicology of 1970s Second-Wave feminism are, in many respects, still ongoing—despite the establishment of Thirdand Fourth-Wave Feminism—not to mention the so-called (highly questionable) dawning of the current “post”-feminist era.8 While, as noted above, feminist-related stances arise throughout the book, sometimes overtly, sometimes indirectly, and sometimes not at all, there is certainly one fairly firmly agreed-upon facet of post-feminism that the book encapsulates, articulated strongly in Part III—namely, the attitude of women composers towards being referred to as a “woman composer”—and I return to this discussion at the end of this chapter. Chapters 2, 3, 4, and 5 explicitly address feminism (broadly conceived) in classical music, ranging from sixteenth-century Shakespearean times (Melody Eötvös); to the Romantic era, through the prism of Clara Wieck-­ Schumann (Natalie Williams); landing on current-day, real-world issues experienced by women in society at large (Katy Abbott); and exploring opera plots setting stories of women in enormously difficult predicaments (Missy Mazzoli). Concerns of a global nature animate mother-daughter collaborators (composer Judith Clingan AM, and daughter, Jessica Dixon, a performing arts educator and visual artist). Consciousness-raising regarding the women’s particular situation, societally, professionally and on the domestic front, has been an ongoing “project” in various iterations and understandings for centuries,9 and has 8   See, for example, Elaine J.  Hall and Marnie Salupo Rodriguez, “The Myth of Postfeminism,” Gender and Society 17, no. 6 (2003): 878–902. 9  N.a., “Feminism,” Inside History, https://www.history.com/topics/womens-history/ feminism-womens-history (accessed 28 April 2021). For the prime trail-blazers in feminist musicology see especially Susan McClary, Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002). First edition appeared 1991; Marcia Citron, Gender and the Musical Canon, 3rd ed. (Champaign: University of Illinois Press 2000); Renee Cox Lorraine, “Recovering Jouissance: An Introduction to Feminist Musical Aesthetics,” in Women and Music: A History, edited by Karin Pendle, 2nd ed., 3–18 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001); Ruth M.  Solie, ed., Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).

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undergone various transformations in focus, awareness, nuance and profile.10 Prevailing commentary will frequently describe the present moment alternatively as “post-feminist” or as constituting “Fourth-Wave feminism.” Post-millennial feminism is often conceived of, at best “reluctant,” and at worst, “redundant.”11 And what of post-feminism’s application to contemporary classical music? As the aforementioned Chaps. 2, 3, 4, and 5 here go on to demonstrate, “redundancy” with regard to figuring feminism in music is, well, redundant in itself. And many of our authors have carried this awareness with them over the course of their creative trajectories. It is illuminating, however, to interrogate the “reluctant” feminism that is revealed in several chapters in our collection. In “Borrowing from the Bard,”12 Australian-American composer Eötvös’ “journey” setting Shakespeare in her work for narrator and orchestra, Ruler of the Hive (2018), transpires through an awakening sense of feminism, deciding only to use monologues by women, despite having hitherto “shied away” from incorporating gender explicitly in her work. She notes Shakespeare’s highlighting of the power inequality between women and men, and his according female characters a voice— but she also points to current feminist scholarship, scathing in its critiques of Shakespeare’s treatment of his female characters. The experience of writing her orchestral piece has led Eötvös to a more acute awareness of, and higher appreciation of, the complexities not only of the Bard’s female characters but also of the same kinds of predicaments facing women today. The characters are enduring female archetypes— Otello’s “trapped wife” Emilia; the fiercely independent Beatrice, sacrificing love for family kinship; women flying in the face of gender strictures such as Much Ado About Nothing’s All’s Well That Ends Well’s unabashedly “dirty-talking” Helena, and Rosalind of As You Like It and Measure for Measure’s Isabella defiantly remaining true to their own integrity regarding sexual status, Rosalind’s problematising of gender stereotypes as well, through her cross-dressing. Eötvös’ giving “voice”—via her own— to these five Shakespearean leading characters in an orchestral setting, “reflects the complicated array of attitudes and implications their literary 10  Nicola Rivers, Postfeminism(s) and the Arrival of the Fourth Wave (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017); Martha Rampton, “Four Waves of Feminism,” Pacific Magazine, Fall (2008), https://www.pacificu.edu/magazine/four-waves-feminism (accessed 22 December 2020). 11  Hall and Salupo Rodriguez, “The Myth of Postfeminism.” 12  Chapter 2, present volume.

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existence collectively embodies.”13 Critically, this chapter shares how a young female composer negotiates her self-described identification with “the feminine.” The rich possibilities that emanate when advocating for the metaphorical “female voice” are pursued in the following four chapters. The meta-­ stance of an historical “voice” heard anew through a contemporary one is, as in Eötvös’ chapter above,14 also put forward by Australian composer Natalie Williams, who presents in “Letters to Clara: A Contemporary Composer’s Homage to a Woman Pioneer,”15 four aspects of Clara Schumann’s life and work as a creative musician, quoting the historical composer’s own music—as well as that of Robert Schumann and Johannes Brahms—in her music. In her 2018 chamber work, Letters to Clara: Four Reflections on the Life of Clara Schumann, a four-movement suite for chamber septet: Flute, Clarinet, String Quartet and Piano, Williams juxtaposes the historical with the present, exploring her own compositional homage to a key historical female figure in classical music, Clara Wieck-Schumann. Williams’ subject matter underlines the impetus for the present publication—The Composer, Herself—in its exploration of what has developed for women composers over the subsequent 150-plus years, and it reminds us of the situation for pre-twentieth century women, barred from public life (such as publishing their music) by the conventions of the time.16 Williams situates the multi-layered exposition of her composition within theories of intertextuality, and writes, “The use of letter in the title refers to the importance of letters in Clara’s own life that, in the twenty-first century, we choose music as a medium to deliver a message about her influence on the music of our own time.”17 Australian composer Katy Abbott’s “Holding, Handling, Moulding and Setting the Inner Thoughts of Another in Hidden Thoughts I: Do I Matter? (2017)”18 “gives voice” to contemporary lay-women in this work. Abbott sets texts drawn from anonymous online responses, elicited via Facebook and other social media, on the part of over two hundred women  Chapter 2, present volume.  Chapter 2, present volume. 15  Chapter 3, present volume. 16  See, for example, Citron, Gender and the Musical Canon; Nancy B.  Reich, Clara Schumann: The Artist and the Woman (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001). 17  Chapter 3, present volume. 18  Chapter 4, present volume. 13 14

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who randomly contributed “to a confidential, anonymous survey about their private thoughts.”19 With candour, Abbott shares the odyssey she herself undertook on the writing of this vocal ensemble and chamber ensemble work, making a musical confidante for the vehicle of the acutely personal, very much “women’s stories,” shared by the responders. Abbott is at pains to take account of the ethical decision-making process in both her selection and treatment of the submitted texts. While this composer does not explicitly reference “feminism” as a concept or as a concern in the writing of this work, she alights on the “woman-­ only” aspects of the piece in the texts, and in the problematic task of setting women’s thoughts to men’s voices in the ensemble makeup of the work. Abbott arrives at a standpoint drawn from the anonymous submissions and from the process of composing the piece that is surely the ideal— an acute sensitivity to the need for mutual respect and care, based on a common humanity shared in “hidden thoughts” regarding, in particular, courage and vulnerability, that can be extrapolated across genders. In American composer Missy Mazzoli’s interview with Natalie Williams, “Walking the Line: Emancipating the Complex Female Voice in Recent Operas,”20 her operatic subjects, both real-world and fictional, centre such emancipatory figures as real-life Swiss explorer Isabelle Eberhardt who travelled through Africa in 1897 dressed as a man. The composer, among whose “life goals” are “to create music which expresses an inner world, to create space for women and minorities to express themselves and their voices,”21 focuses here on the tales of women seeking control of their immediate milieu, often in a domestic context, in contradistinction to the wider society in which they live. Significantly—and appallingly, Mazzoli’s recent commission is one of only two, ever, for women composers who have been commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera (New York) since the company came into being 137 years ago. In another dimension of the “activist” space, Mazzoli also speaks of the importance of mentorship programs for young women composers, citing her Luna Lab project, set up in 2016 at the Kaufman Music Centre in New York.

 Chapter 5, present volume.  Chapter 5, present volume. 21  Chapter 5, present volume. 19 20

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Cross-Cultural Composition; Intersectional Feminism One of the most distinguishing factors of Fourth-Wave Feminism is the broadening of its remit to include advocating for—and engagement with—women of colour, and to take enlightened, informed account of ethnicity and race.22 Intersectional feminism goes far beyond the colonialist encounters and appropriations of ethnic culture in this way, and several the authors in this volume make such involvement an integral aspect of their musical works. Chapters 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, and 12 address further contemporary politico-cultural milieus, with foci on cross-cultural music traditions (by Catherine Milliken, Judith Clingan AM/Jessica Dixon, Vivian Fung, Rachel C. Walker, and Yantra de Vilder) and Intersectional feminism (by Walker, Clingan/Dixon, Fung, Gillian Karawe Whitehead, and Lim).23 Collaborative processes—key to much contemporary composition—in very different guises also feature as part of the intrinsic processes for this wide-ranging creative work.24 The significance of these discussions on such border-crossings illuminates the complexities of creative engagements or encounters. Australian ex-patriate composer Catherine Milliken’s “Composing with, Composition by—A Set of Compositional Practices,”25 explores her over-arching mission of shared authorship and the action of collaborative composing, which she terms “collective-compositional projects,” working on various enterprises across the world, with professionals and amateurs alike. One of these projects took place in the Hojuji Temple of Kamaishi, Japan, in 2011, and involved the composer working with community groups to produce a series of curated performances, as well as musical interventions and improvisations held at night on the edge of the sea in areas affected by the 2011 Great East Japan earthquake and tsunami. The fragile living conditions and emotional fallout post-tsunami resulted in an 22  Maria Carbin and Sara Edenheim, “The Intersectional Turn in Feminist Theory: A Dream of a Common Language?” European Journal of Women’s Studies, 20(3) (2013): 233–48; Stéphanie Genz and Benjamin A. Brabon, Postfeminism: Cultural Texts and Theories (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018). 23  See, for example, Ron Eyerman, Giuseppe Sciortino (eds), The Cultural Trauma of Decolonization: Colonial Returnees in the National Imagination (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020); Jeffrey C.  Alexander et  al., Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). 24   Also see Kouvaras, Grenfell, and Williams, eds, A Century: Part III: Creating; Collaborating: Composer and Performer Reflections. 25  Chapter 6, present volume.

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ever-present precariousness of the dynamics of the creative unfolding. Milliken and her collaborators enabled the application of “HappiOki,” a non-professional or informal presentation, featuring audience participation and “messages of encouragement and empathy using movement, voices and light.”26 The notion of shared authorship and the action of composing together involving amateurs and audience members, including children, is at its core a democratic project, constituting an act of activism in its own right. Another children-based project, with a theme that was “universal in scope, dealing with issues equally relevant to Australian and Asian people,”27 served to ground the impetus for Australian composer Judith Clingan AM and her performing arts educator and visual artist daughter Jessica Dixon in their “Harmonia Mundi (2017): Creating a New Work of Music Theatre to Speak to the Current World Chaos,”28 devised at the invitation of a Hokkaido Steiner Gakuenizumino School in the Abuta District of Hokkaido, Japan. The commission was to create “a new work of music theatre which could be rehearsed in two weeks in July 2017 and then be performed in Japan and Korea. The performers were to be 100 mostly secondary students, with some adults, from Australia, Japan, Korea, Taiwan and China.”29 Clingan and Dixon, as for the respective approaches of Eötvös in Chap. 2 and Mazzoli in Chap. 5, decided that the protagonist “must be female, as 99% of the traditional stories we had researched featured a male protagonist.”30 The “archetypal hero’s journey/self-­ transformation” narrative for their Sophia, “a seeker after wisdom,” and what I see as a proto-Greta Thunberg figure, acts as a metaphor for artistic activism of the part of women in the modern era, where one person’s struggle to attain integrity and awareness will lead to a similar struggle in another, until a critical mass is reached, at which point change can occur. And the change desired is no less than a new world, a world in which people really try to understand each other, and work towards a universal harmony with all creatures and with the very earth itself.31

 Chapter 6, present volume.  Chapter 7, present volume. 28  Chapter 7, present volume. 29  Chapter 7, present volume. 30  Chapter 7, present volume. 31  Chapter 7, present volume. 26 27

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Sophia and her fellow-travellers follow a “universal,” easily playable musical thread, played by the actors on three ethnic instruments: a clay ocarina, a bamboo flute and a simple bowed stringed instrument. In her interview with Williams, “Blocking Out Noise: Metamorphosis and Identity in the Recent Chamber Music of Vivian Fung,”32 Canadian-­ born, American-based composer of Cambodian heritage, Fung details her odyssey of visiting Cambodia in 2018 to learn more about her family history and to explore intersections between the multi-cultural musics of her own heritage and the Western classical tradition. Discovering her family history leads Fung to a unique sense of musical and cultural identity. The primary distinctive and new sound for her of her family’s country—namely, its cicadas—imprinted itself upon her on returning to the United States, with Fung transmuting the insects’ metamorphosing sounds into her compositional materials. Her deep desire for the piece was to re-enliven our perception to noises we usually block out—which serves as an allegory for reconciling the trauma her family lived through before emigrating from their country of origin, and her own emotional response to this historical uncovering. The importance of music in this cultural reckoning for Fung is highly significant, and no less so, is also her creative grappling with music. She speaks openly about her Cambodian roots and the impact of racial diversity on her creative life.33 She also outlines her work in guiding emerging composers in their own, similar journeys, as does Mazzoli.34 “Across Te Tai o Rehua: Writing for the taonga pūoro of Aotearoa”35 is authored by Māori composer Dame Gillian Karawe Whitehead and presents, in her words, a “feminist triumph” of a distinct kind—namely, that of First Nations composer. Born and raised in Aotearoa/New Zealand, Whitehead details the course of her professional life, which started in the United Kingdom, before relocating to Sydney to teach at the Conservatorium at the University of Sydney. As a First Nations composer, Whitehead’s story is vital to hear, in this era of Fourth Wave Feminism and its embracing of Intersectionality. Whitehead recounts her part in the 1970s revival of some traditional Māori instruments—the taonga pu ̄oro— from pre-European times. She describes the taonga pūoro, describing their  Chapter 8, present volume.  Australian author Alice Pung’s autobiography also comes to mind here. Unpolished Gem (Melbourne: Black Inc., 2006). 34  Chapter 5, present volume. 35  Chapter 9, present volume. 32 33

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traditional use and attributes, the problems of combining Māori and Western tunings, and improvisation versus notated music. Lim’s chapter speaks of the need for being alive to the imbalance in power relations when working with Indigenous people and cultural artefacts.36 Whitehead addresses these complexities from her perspective as a First Nations composer, herself. “An Overview of My Compositional Practice and Collaborations into China,”37 by American composer Rachel C. Walker, delivers an account of the process by which an American composer achieves her aim in researching contemporary and traditional Chinese music—“not to imitate or produce Chinoiserie, but rather to reconsider through deep musical investigation what engagement with modern China can be while taking into account the technical and acoustic possibilities of Chinese instruments.”38 Walker investigates through close collaboration with musicians in China. She also details the obstacles and challenges—and the rich, personal and musical rewards—in such intercultural exchanges. The chapter underlines the importance of understanding how the non-­ monolithic cultural environment within China, and the evolving role of traditions, dictate contemporary music-making. Rather than concentrating on theoretical questions of composition, ethnomusicology, and even anthropology, her musical contribution delves into performance practice and the approach she has taken in order to establish a way forward for composing new works for Chinese instruments. Walker’s case study is her own 2015 extended work for solo pipa, For Summer Rain. She raises issues of performance practice via notational and temporal means, as well as through the collaborative process itself. The chapter adds to perspectives on the new directions at play in contemporary Chinese music. In her “Luck, Grief, Hospitality: Re-Routing Power Relationships in Music,”39 Chinese-Australian composer Liza Lim’s political antenna is concertedly articulated with regard to constructions of power in music. Here, the composer looks through the lens of intersecting concerns of gender, race and ethnicity, analysing the systemic structures that underpin how “luck” or privilege shapes gender representation in contemporary music. Data from the Gender Relations in New Music study (Darmstadt,  Chapter 11, present volume.  Chapter 10, present volume. 38  Chapter 10, present volume. 39  Chapter 11, present volume. 36 37

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2016) led by composer Ashley Fure with follow-up at the same festival in 2018, in the wake of the worldwide impact of the #MeToo movement, underpin the discussion. The chapter sheds light on power relationships through Lim’s generous examination of “a politics of grief as art in Australian Indigenous women’s business,” noting how the “ethics of hospitality” has been a pattern over Lim’s composing life, offering the chance for “the re-routing of power,” which would lead to firmer footing for women’s presence in the music industry. Another vivid account, after the chapters by Clingan/Dixon, Fung and Walker,40 of Eastern influence on a Western composer is presented in the following chapter. The Japanese concept of Ma, in “In Search of the Artistic Moment: Interdisciplinary Collaboration and ‘The Space Between’ from an Australian Female Screen Composer’s Perspective,”41 is where Australian composer Yantra de Vilder explicates her application of “the space between that defines the moment, happening or event,” which came about through creative collaborators as well as immersive visits to gardens in Japan, Australia and France. This concept allows her to uncover meaningful systems between people, sound and vision, and to examine the ways that these elements impact and influence rehearsal and performance. In 2015 de Vilder created Haiku, a site-specific, multi-art form immersive installation designed as an honouring gesture to the fragility of our life, and our environment. Another mother-daughter working relationship occurs here, too, with the composer, the daughter, here, her mother Faith Reid, author of the Haiku poems de Vilder set: a site-specific, multi-art form immersive installation “designed as an honouring gesture to the fragility of our life, and our environment.”42 A gentle activism, but advocating for ecological protection and awareness, nonetheless.

Part II: Philosophical and Phenomenological Dimensions of Musical Time Music is, of course, a time-based artform. De Vilder’s chapter demonstrates the concept of time, informed by the Japanese Ma, that is distinct from the usual teleological Western perception. This section of the book (Chaps. 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, and 19) gives the platform to composers  Chapters 7, 8, and 10, respectively.  Chapter 12, present volume. 42  Chapter 12, present volume. 40 41

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who, in their chapters, are looking inwards, to the very stuff of musical writing, with the philosophical and phenomenological dimensions of time, and its relationship to the structuring of musical works, of especial import to several composers’ contributions (from Christine McCombe, Elena Kats-Chernin AO, Cindy McTee, Mary Finsterer, and Shulamit Ran). The physics of musical sound, along with the role of technology in all its formats, finds focus in composers whose oeuvre actually comprises these constituents (McTee, Cat Hope, and Susan Frykberg/Judith Dodsworth). In “Finding Time, Finding Space: An Autoethnography of Compositional Praxis,”43 Australian composer Christine McCombe’s chapter segues smoothly from Part I to Part II. She situates her discussion within feminist thinking, enabling an inquiry into a wide range of themes, ranging from the deeply personal (motherhood, grief, self-esteem, time constraints) to the conceptual and aesthetic (phenomenology, contemporary art), shaping the framework for her practice. The chapter includes specific examples of her recent works, Ebb Tide (2016) for contralto, cello, clarinet and percussion, on grief and motherhood; reflections on her own “patterns of behaviour” in Finding What’s There (2017) for clarinet, violin and piano; and trying to “piece together the disparate and random strands” of her lived experience, to be realised in Journeywork (in-progress 2018–), for piano, violin, clarinet and cello. McCombe details compositional process as a starting point for reflexivity, connecting out to broader cultural and societal tropes and presaging the inwardly-drawn composer-voice chapters to follow. The consideration of “time” here ranges from the experience of constraints on McCombe’s actual available time to compose—a particular challenge for women artists in general over the aeons—to temporality in composition; the phenomenology of musical time; the chronological/historical time in which we find ourselves composing; the passing of time itself; and the ripening of a compositional voice and the forming of a creative perspective, thus ushering in the discussions to follow on compositional praxis. In “A Compositional Life in Time: the recent Operas of Elena Kats-­ Chernin AO,”44 time, in its many dimensions, plays a controlling role in musical life, none more so than in the output of this Uzbekistan-born, Australian composer. Kats-Chernin spoke in her interview with Williams about two operas that premiered in 2019, Whiteley commissioned by  Chapter 13, present volume.  Chapter 14, present volume.

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Opera Australia, and Jim Knopf und Lukas der Lokomotivführer, a children’s opera written for the Komische Oper Berlin. Kats-Chernin’s unique relationship with musical time traverses small note-to-note decisions, to the larger exigencies of a project timeline and the experiential benefit of decades spent within the field. Williams puts it wonderfully: “Kats-­ Chernin’s affiliation with time is both intimate and reciprocal.”45 Temporal musings are also the subject of American composer Cindy McTee’s “Einstein’s Dream: At the Threshold between Science and Art,”46 catalysed by stimuli ranging from Chagall’s 1930s painting Time is a River Without Banks; to Jonathan D. Kramer’s The Time of Music: New Meanings, New Temporalities, New Listening Strategies;47 to the philosophical work of Susanne Langer; Edgard Varèse’s music; through to American physicist Alan Lightman’s collection of short stories, Einstein’s Dreams (2005), based on the historical figure of Albert Einstein. This disparate array of thoughts about the temporal dimension informed the composer’s chamber work Einstein’s Dream (2005) (the title borrowed from the Lightman book), for computer music on CD, percussion, and string orchestra—the year 2005 marking the one-hundredth anniversary of Albert Einstein’s “miraculous year” in which he published his famous papers on relativity and other scientific discoveries. At this time, McTee underwent a radical rethinking on temporal organization in her music. She gives an analytical account to elucidate how this scientific revelation plays out in the work, also describing the creative turn she herself took in the late 1900s— embracing acousmatic sound and composing computer pieces along with those for acoustic instruments, eventually combining both media in works such as Einstein’s Dream. Mary Finsterer’s “The Pendulum Process: Point of Balance”48 quarries the Australian composer’s own “geology” as a composer. This chapter investigates the coalescing of twentieth-century innovations with aesthetic influences stemming from Early Music practice. Finsterer casts light on a pre-compositional process that brings together historical, metaphoric and poetic references with an art music convention spanning more than a millennium. She explains her process of setting up a structure for an aesthetic  Chapter 14, present volume.  Chapter 15, present volume. 47  Jonathan D.  Kramer, The Time of Music: New Meanings, New Temporalities, New Listening Strategies (London: Collier Macmillan, 1988). 48  Chapter 16, present volume. 45 46

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from which she is able to move, in a methodical way, beyond style and fashion. Within that structure she mounts a hierarchy of musical levels and attributes. From the larger formal framework to micro–units characterised by gestural language through pitch and intervallic formations, rhythmic devices, articulation and orchestration, each of these structural levels informs the other, interconnected in a vertical harmonic framework that then extends horizontally, in a linear direction. This compositional process plays out much like a force, a pendulum moving from one reference point to another, seeking polarities that determine pathways within the map. Examples of this contradistinction of materials and compositional strategies are illustrated in the chapter, drawing from a variety of chamber, orchestral and operatic works. In contradistinction to the majority of the other chapters, Finsterer’s is an endosemantic mining of her practice. “Casting Musical Spells: Time, Passion, and Inevitability in the Music of Shulamit Ran”49 is revealed in this chapter comprising an interview with Williams, with a focus on the Chicago-based, Israeli-American Ran’s chamber works, particularly the string quartets. Discussion is based around structure, form, and compositional design, particularly Ran’s affinity for her listeners and their musical journey. Ran speaks about her work in programming music for Contempo (in the early 2000s), the new music ensemble at the University of Chicago, and her support of women composers at a time when their work was marginally recognized. The conversation ranges widely, exploring Ran’s chamber music, her reflections on the contemporary efforts of women composers and, most significantly, her relationship with musical time. “Low Frequency as Concept in the Music of Cat Hope”50 outlines this Australian composer-performer’s ongoing fascination with low frequency sound, how she became engaged with it, and the way it is deployed in almost every work she creates. This engagement with low frequency sound can be divided into four general approaches: conceptual, literal, structural and timbral. Her composition practice is facilitated by an engagement with animated notation: a dynamic form of digital, coloured graphic notation that is presented to performers on networked iPads. Informed by Hope’s ongoing practice as a bass flute and electric bass performer, also discussed is how this notational approach facilitates an interest in communicating glissandi, drones, notation of non-“musical” sounds, aleatoric  Chapter 17, present volume.  Chapter 18, present volume.

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elements, instruments and fixed media components in addition to the focus on low sound. Facilitating a strongly collaborative practice (echoing that of several above-mentioned composers) that promotes co-authorship with other composers and creative artists, the chapter explores how the low sound concept is engaged in myriad art forms, and how it operates in various ensembles that Hope has formed: pop band Gata Negra, Abe Sada, a multi bass guitar project; The Australian Bass Orchestra, an ensemble for any instruments playing below middle C; the Low Tone Orchestra— making music out of sine tones below 240 Hz; a solo bass noise practice and the Australian new music ensemble she directs, Decibel, which explores the combination of electronic and acoustic instruments. Matters beyond the appetency of “the concept of low” (as Hope puts it) are not the concern of this composer, here. New Zealand-based American-Australian composer Susan Frykberg and Australian soprano Judith Dodsworth’s “A Drone Opera Recast: Threat, Allure, Promise”51 details the reworking of the composition by Matthew Sleeth, into an ambitious multimedia project. A battalion of actual flying drones, a pair of large metal cages in which the audience were enclosed for safety, spectacular lighting and laser effects, an electronic soundscape and an evocative score by composer Frykberg for three unaccompanied, amplified operatic voices, all combined to explore possible human responses to the promise, allure and threat of technology. A Drone Opera was a large-scale undertaking, heavily reliant on the use (and almost fetishization) of technology, creating an immersive, highly-charged and pertinent commentary on its current and future role in art and life. A recasting of the work as a smaller, easier to tour performance is explicated in this chapter. The re-thinking is not only musical and performative but also conceptual, the audience now an active participant—in a technical ploy similar to Abbott in Hidden Thoughts I52—serving to provide the text. The recasting of A Drone Opera takes issue with the promise, allure and threat of technology via three states—seduction, surveillance and menace. These will be incorporated into improvised sections of the score. Thus, A Drone Opera, now called A Drone Opera Recast, will reflect the creators’ critique of current relationships between society and technology in general.

 Chapter 19, present volume.  Chapter 4, present volume.

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A feminist subtext informs Frykberg and Dodsworth’s approach to technology through the three retellings—now with contemporary tools— of the Adam and Eve story, Pandora’s box and the Chinese story of Qui Jin. The creators seek “to offer, hopefully, a womanist [sic] perspective” which, the authors assert, will deal most effectively with the “problem” of technology and people: “interactively, with many people involved, and through a feminist, or at least womanist lens.”53 Such re-imaginings of mythical stories are akin to the agendas of Eötvös54 and Mazzoli.55

Part III: Musical Awakenings—Reflecting Back, Projecting Forward The theme of “how it all began” in an early-age enchantment with writing music, is elaborated in the final eight essays, Chaps. 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, and 27 (by Maria Grenfell, Kathleen McGuire, Augusta Read Thomas, Nicola LeFanu, Andrée Greenwell, Lera Auerbach, Thea Musgrave CBE, and Judith Lang Zaimont). These authors ventilate a set of particularly female formative experiences—several again coloured by feminist concerns as part of their “awakenings.” This final section of the volume alights upon the vexed “woman composer” label, the composers vehemently stating their stance. Mentoring; Advice to Emerging Composers Much work in the current landscape on how women rise in corporations and in the arts professions, talks of the importance of mentoring programs, and even the less formal “organic” mentor relationship between a young and a seasoned participant in the field.56 This topic has already surfaced in chapters above—in chapters by Mazzoli57 and by Eötvös, where it was another woman—the project’s narrator, Pamela Rabe—who “affirmed” the composer’s feminist positioning.58 Abbott’s Hidden  Chapter 19, present volume.  Chapter 2, present volume. 55  Chapter 5, present volume. 56  Daniel Kreiss, Recoding the Boys’ Club: The Experiences and Future of Women in Political Technology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020). 57  Chapter 5, present volume. 58  Chapter 2, present volume. 53 54

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Thoughts I pursues the topic of female support for other women.59 Fung makes a point of nurturing younger composers in their exploration of their ethnic heritage,60 and Ran speaks of her support, given over half a century, of young women in their compositional career.61 Maria Grenfell, Malaysian-born, New Zealander-raised, is one of only a few Australian women composers who receive frequent orchestral commissions and whose catalogue of orchestral music is performed repeatedly. She describes her journey to this exalted position in “Composing the Rolls-Royce: A Composer’s Adventures in Orchestral Composition.”62 Grenfell is candid about the “tripwires” she encountered as a young music student, transitioning from Performance to Composition—from early non-successes in instrumental playing, to intimidation from fellow students whose skills lay in areas distinct from her own, with the affirmation of her prowess gradually accruing over time, throughout her overseas study. Grenfell highlights the importance—and the personal reward—of mentoring for up-and-coming women composers.63 Also detailed, with generous and compelling frankness, is Grenfell’s writing process for three orchestral works. She structures the prose around specific and varied contexts, which she labels “functional” or “free choice.” A “functional” example includes a commission, Rock Hopping (2012), from the Hush Foundation (Australia), a moving initiative that asks composers to write calming music for hospitalised cancer patients, their families, and medical staff at Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne, upon undertaking confronting and humbling in-situ visits to the hospital in its work with the ill children. A “free choice” work, Flinders and Trim (2019), firstly responds to Captain Matthew Flinders (1774–1818), the British explorer, and his co-journeying cat Trim, in an homage to human-­ animal companionship. This work also incorporates a reference to the 2019 massacre in Christchurch, New Zealand, the composer’s former

 Chapter 4, present volume.  Chapter 8, present volume. 61  Chapter 17, present volume. 62  Chapter 20, present volume. 63  Also see Maria Grenfell, “Mentoring Women Composers,” in Kouvaras, Grenfell and Williams (eds), A Century of Composition by Women. 59 60

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home town, where forty-nine Muslims were gunned down while at prayer at a mosque,64 which took place during the course of the composition. A further narrative of early-career-struggle is articulated in Australian composer Kathleen McGuire’s “Finding a Reason: A Composer’s Pathway Forged through Social Justice Advocacy,”65 where the lack of women role model composers meant that when young, McGuire did not conceive of herself as possibly aspiring to be a composer. Her experience is further nuanced by identifying as lesbian, with the perception of the imbalances in status and acceptance for people of non-heteronormative sexuality. A burgeoning sense of social justice paved the way for McGuire, after a very successful career in conducting, to “find herself” within the field of composition, leading to writing works highlighting the situation for homeless people and, recalling the chapter by Abbott,66 for women victims of family violence. Augusta Read Thomas, in “‘When It Comes to Music Notation, I’m a Type Triple-A Composer!’”67 in interview with Jennifer Kelly,68 also underlines the importance of mentoring. A formative experience was that of a woman composer coming to her school to teach her when Thomas was very young. Like Grenfell and McGuire, in a magnanimous act to younger readers, Thomas proffers advice on the nuts-and-bolts of composition mastery as well as how to negotiate the professional scene successfully. “‘Unambiguous’ Feminist Deconstructivist Triumph[s]” “How My Music is Made: ‘Tantôt Libre, Tantôt Recherché’”69 by British composer Nicola LeFanu delves idiosyncratically into the musical language of her composing, from a perspective drawn over half a century. She also highlights one of her eight operas, Blood Wedding (1992), an “‘unambiguous’ feminist deconstructivist triumph”—through microtonality and 64  Eleanor Ange Roy and Lisa Martin, “49 Shot Dead in Attack on Two Christchurch Mosques,” The Guardian, March 15, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/ mar/15/christchurch-shooting-new-zealand-suspect-white-supremacist-symbols-weapons. 65  Chapter 21, present volume. 66  Chapter 4, present volume. 67  Chapter 22, present volume. 68   Jennifer Kelly, “Augusta Read Thomas,” In Her Own Words: Conversations with Composers in the United States (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013): 265–80. https:// ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/unimelb/detail.action?docID=3414280 . 69  Chapter 23, present volume.

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the “secur[ing] of the harmonic rhythm through the longest-term voice-­ leading I had yet attempted, expressed across two hours in a Fibonacci-­ derived set of proportions.”70 It is significant that LeFanu chooses such terms as “unambiguous” and “triumph”—the latter term also a choice of Whitehead71—when applied to the feminist underpinning of this work, raising, and countering, the squeamishness that can yet be felt on the part of audience, creator, the sector at large—when concentrating on issues to do with the feminine.72 In “Carnivals of Voice, Musical Playgrounds: Music from Text in Works of Andrée Greenwell,”73 this Australian composer discusses three works that present her three-decades-long exploration of the concept of “giving voice” to real and imagined characters in both literal and metaphoric ways, asserted through a performative collection of “voice portraits” in her song cycle The Backdoor Songs (1988) for soprano chamber ensemble and tape; music theatre work Dreaming Transportation: Voice Portraits of the First Women of White Settlement at Port Jackson (2003) and the radio broadcast, podcast and concept album Listen to Me (2018). These expositions trace a journey from the centrality of formalist concerns in the early work, The Backdoor Songs (1988), broadening to include the socio-political awareness highlighted in the two later examples. Dreaming Transportation puts forward the under-chronicled history of European women of Australia’s colonisation in actual and imagined experiences, using Jordie Albiston’s assembled found real-world texts—shipping logs, letters, paintings and newspaper articles, along with intimate accounts of the various social strata of women at the time: convict, free settler, and aristocratic. Such an account stands in contradistinction to those traditional, “official” narratives of the (male) authorities in charge of the colonialist Invasion of Australia. The scourge of gendered violence, a substantial component of McGuire’s chapter,74 is addressed in Greenwell’s podcast/concept album Listen to Me (2018), which includes anonymous contributions along with commissioned original texts from six Australian writers writing from very  Chapter 23, present volume.  Chapter 9, present volume. 72  Regarding my reflections on one of my own compositions relating to this subject, After Before: Provenance Fantasia (2017) for Violin, Clarinet and Piano, see Maurice Windleburn, “Products of Our Own Histories: An Interview with Linda Kouvaras,” Context 43 (2018): 69–76. 73  Chapter 24, present volume. 74  Chapter 21, present volume. 70 71

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specific perspectives: Yankunytjatjara woman Ali Cobby Eckermann and Lebanese-Palestinian Australian queer storyteller Candy Royalle, Alison Croggon, Donna Abela, Eunice Andrada, and Anja Walwicz. Greenwell reflects in a way similarly to Abbott’s Hidden Thoughts I,75 upon her evolving approaches to voice, pleasure, invention, meaning, and the significance of the writer, through her formulation of project-specific artistic methodologies. Many composers over the centuries have found a near-equal affinity with creating art from words along with creating music: the text in Soviet-­ Russian-­born American Lera Auerbach’s “The Mirror (1994): A Novel in Reflections (excerpts)”76 presents as a musical literary work in itself. The text alights upon catalysing moments in her artistic formation, using a musical form—the Ritornello—as the structure for the novella. Like Eötvös,77 Mazzoli,78 Frykberg and Dodsworth,79 above, Auerbach deconstructs mythic archetypes—and female stereotypes—through which to trace her odyssey. These include the god Pan and his flute, the Minotaur, Child, Madman, Gambler, Robber, Adventurer, Wise Hermit, Skeptic, Artist, Muse, Apollo (Rational Force) and Dionysus (Elemental Force), Savage (Mowgli), Nymphette, Homeless Wanderer (The Wandering Jew), Martyr Hero (“for whatever you like: faith, fatherland, ideas”), Clown, Whore and Nun, Don Quixote, Maniac Murderer and Joseph, sold into Egypt. The author notes the role of teachers and the dark attraction of malevolent gods that can occur for the author/composer, and the effects of all these forces on her artistic psyche. Literariness also features in Scottish composer Thea Musgrave’s CBE “Sometimes Dreams do Come True: Thea Musgrave’s Exploration of Dramatic-Abstract Forms in her Instrumental Music.”80 Here, the poetic content derives from a consciousness-shattering dream Musgrave had in the 1960s which went on to inform the unfolding of her large-scale works. Significantly, the protagonist in the dream was a “rebellious instrumental player’s influence over an ensemble”—a metaphor for a maverick composer at that stage of history: a “maverick,” simply for the fact of wanting to be a composer and being a woman.  Chapter 4, present volume.  Chapter 25, present volume. 77  Chapter 2, present volume. 78  Chapter 5, present volume. 79  Chapter 19, present volume. 80  Chapter 26, present volume. 75 76

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The watershed moment of Second-Wave feminism in the 1970s is brought to life as, recalling McGuire, above,81 American composer Judith Lang Zaimont in “My Awakening as Composer: No Adjective”82 recounts her excitement at the societal realization and growing acknowledgement that women did write music and had been doing so for centuries. She also articulates her anger in reaction to the cultural amnesia and ignorance of these artists: “lost to scholarship over time—thoroughly absent from current books, recordings, and other key resources for the study of music. As time passed, I became increasingly incensed at such sustained dismissal,” and this enragement spurred Zaimont to recovery-musicological projects on the part of “lost” women composers.83 In this essay—the final in the collection, on the journey from childhood to established, composing career, Zaimont details the advice she received, post- her Masters degree in 1968, having approached a male professor for a letter of recommendation towards further study in composition. He had a policy of not endorsing for further study “any female student until she was five years out of school and still writing,” as “his years of teaching at a women’s college resulted in almost all his students deserting composing for domesticity once they were out of school.”84 She was also informed, by another male professor, that she “was a woman in a man’s world.”85 We learn of Zaimont’s own unequivocal—to say the least—stance on these men’s “take” on the decision to become a composer when one is not-a-man. How “Post-” is the Current Era, Regarding the Need for Feminism in New Music? The Composer, Herself: Contemporary Snapshots of the Creative Process centres people writing music in the present day—who are women—at its core. In the editorial brief to contributors, there was no stipulation for a feminist approach in what authors submitted: it was their own choice regarding subject matter, conceptual underpinning, detail and stance. Of the

 Chapter 21, present volume.  Chapter 27, present volume. 83  Chapter 27, present volume. 84  Chapter 27, present volume. 85  Chapter 27, present volume. 81 82

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twenty-six chapters beyond this introductory essay, only four86 do not explicitly refer to gender. How redundant, or anachronistic, then, is feminist conscious-raising for contemporary composers who are women?87 It is significant that so many authors did choose to address topics to do with the fact of being a person who is female and who writes music, and indeed that so many of the musical works written before—or as—this book came about had acutely female-focused subject matter, within the wide-ranging scope of this essay collection. Much has changed, much progress has occurred and is still unfolding, for women who write music, since the poignant quote of PG-H that opened this chapter, expressed at the end of her life, and since the professorial, gender-based discouragement levelled at Zaimont in the late 1960s; and yet some advice is afforded to Grenfell in the 1990s, that, if she “wanted to make it in this industry,” she “needed to compose like a man.” But what of that contentious term—“the woman composer” as a defined category, label, qualifier, as a term of identification? For many, “woman composer” is an egregious term, which many writers now shun. Judith Lang Zaimont’s chapter title “My Awakening as Composer: No Adjective”88 clearly reveals her stance on this issue. Jennifer Kelly asks a telling question of Augusta Read Thomas, “Was there a point when you realized that you were a woman in this compositional career?”89 To gain a perspective on this question, one merely need contemplate asking a man the same query: “Was there a point when you realized that you were a man in this compositional career?” Thomas responds to Kelly, summing up the feelings of the majority of composers who are women: “Sometimes people refer to me as a woman composer. I remember The New York Times wrote a very long time ago about me as ‘the young woman composer.’ They used ‘woman’ but I don’t have the word female or woman on my website, resumé, nor biography. I’m a composer. Yes.”90 86  Those by McTee, Finsterer, de Vilder and Hope. For an essay by Hope that does address gender and contemporary composition, see Cat Hope, “Working Towards Gender Equality and Empowerment in Australian Music Culture,” in Kouvaras, Grenfell, and Williams, eds, A Century. 87  I have discussed this issue from different perspectives in Linda Kouvaras, “Composing Women’s (Very) Long 100-year Fight: Evolutions, Illuminations, Solutions,” in Kouvaras, Grenfell, and Williams, eds, A Century. 88  Chapter 27, present volume. 89  Chapter 22, present volume. 90  Chapter 22, present volume.

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While Yantra de Vilder refers to herself in her chapter title as a “female” composer,91 her work’s aesthetic does not pursue an overtly gendered line of enquiry, other than making reference to important contributions made by her mother to her work. Does this perhaps constitute an ideal approach?—to note the “categories” but then move on? As Zaimont saliently observes, “Ultimately, in the 1990s, I began to be uncomfortable with any qualifier.”92 Shulamit Ran shuns the appellation “woman composer,” considering it a “ghetto-ing” device, and expressing the “fervent hope that ours is the last generation for which a composer’s gender is of concern.”93 Further complexities, introduced by Zaimont above,94 can inflect one’s sense of identity. Liza Lim comments that it was being Chinese and Australian that had felt to her as “downsides to developing an international career in music,”95 as opposed to the fact that she was a woman; and Christine McCombe (of Scottish descent) feels similarly regarding her Australian-ness and experiencing the cultural cringe regarding Australian composers as being almost by definition, “second-rate.”96 However, from the standpoint of the past few years, it has dawned upon Lim that she has been “the sole representative of my gender or in a significant minority in almost all public, career, creative, and academic spaces in the arts for more than thirty years,” able “to count on one hand the number of times that my work has been programmed in a concert with all women composers;” and that “four of those concerts were given in the last year.”97 As for the actual label, “woman composer,” Lim saliently observes: This is a social label for something that is different for each composing woman: different as felt from the inside, from the zoomed-in view. That’s the inside where you have a name… where you don’t represent a whole

 Chapter 12, present volume.  Chapter 27, present volume. Zaimont extends the “qualifier” to encompass other “qualifier” adjectives applicable to her own situation: “Living; American; Jewish.” Also see Aisling Kenny, “Integration or Isolation? Considering Implications of the Designation ‘Woman Composer,’” British Postgraduate Musicology 10, Special Section (2009): 1–11. 93  Chapter 17, present volume. 94  Chapter 27, present volume. 95  Chapter 11, present volume. 96  Chapter 13, present volume. 97  Chapter 11, present volume. 91 92

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gender but inhabit your own subjectivity… where you’re an independent spirit with very particular ways of being, knowing, and creating in music.98

McCombe, too, offers nuanced considerations of the concept of “woman composer” that have arisen for her during her formative years and beyond.99 Like Lim, she has often been “the only female composer in the concert program, or the only female composer on a panel,”100 and in her university work teaching in composition, the perennial gender imbalance in the student cohort seems entrenched. The outcome of “being a woman in a male dominated field, where, by their sheer weight of numbers, male voices have been heard at the expense of female voices in the same space” has been certain “crises of confidence” and underestimation of her own aptitude.101 She comments: “Claiming the Space to be a female composer in what is still a male-dominated field and to be transparent about what that means as a woman in the twenty-first century is an affirmation that what I have to say (musically and otherwise) is worth hearing.”102 What gave this composer the assurance that “there were in fact many excellent composers who happened to be women”103 was the burgeoning of 1990s feminist musicology, attesting to the importance of projects such as the present volume, for contemporary generations of young aspiring female composers and those to come. In many respects, some of the key contemporary points of tension around gender are a continuation—or a development—of the issues that emerged on the back of Second-Wave feminism and its quarrels with postmodernism.104 First among these is the post-structuralist decentring of the subject, which took hold just as women authors were receiving

 Chapter 11, present volume.  Chapter 13, present volume. 100  Chapter 13, present volume. 101  Chapter 13, present volume. 102  Chapter 13, present volume. 103  Chapter 13, present volume. 104  Rita Felski, Doing Time: Feminist Theory and Postmodern Culture (NYU Press, 2000); Ann Brooks, Postfeminisms: Feminism, Cultural Theory and Cultural Forms (London: Routledge, 1997); Marysia Zalewski, Feminism after Postmodernism?: Theorising Through Practice (London: Routledge, 2000). 98 99

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recognition.105 There is also the perennial danger of “tokenism” as a consequence of that recognition, as Zaimont also notes here, and lastly, the growing awareness of the dangers of “speaking for” a whole subset, made up of different subjectivities with divergent lived experiences.106 As noted above, the broader themes of musical trends and movements of The Composer, Herself were chosen, undirected, by the composers: this affords an acutely authentic and contemporary macro perspective on the big-picture concerns that composers want to raise.107 Arguably, in an earlier time (pre-Fourth Wave Feminism), when composers were not so generally exercised through renewed feminist consciousness-raising, we could have been furnished with a whole book of formalist exploration (along the lines of some of the chapters in Part II)—or, at the very least, gender discussion conspicuous by its absence. This is emphatically not to diminish the value of such discourse. But in the light of the current torchlight directed towards the impact of gender on the professional and personal lives of women, not to mention its imbrications with issues of race and ethnicity as articulated through Fourth Wave Feminism, this “freeze-­ frame” of twenty-six composers is a beacon of its time. It is one of the earliest records of multiple lived experiences for contemporary composition of classical setting in the current iteration of feminist development. To reiterate: this is not, of course, to detract from, nor to disregard, those chapters where the fact of the author’s gender is not at issue, where gender does not constitute the core factor. In turn, the gender-rich chapters also 105  Barbara Creed, “From Here to Modernity: Feminism and Postmodernism,” Screen 28, no. 2 (1987): 47–67; Christine Morley and Selma Macfarlane, “The Nexus Between Feminism and Postmodernism: Still a Central Concern for Critical Social Work,” The British Journal of Social Work, 42, no. 4 (2012): 687–705. But also see Craig Owens, “The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism,” The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Port Townsend, Washington: Bay Press, 1983); Linda J. Nicholson, ed., Feminism/Postmodernism (New York: Routledge, 1990). 106  See, for example, Marcia J. Citron, “Women and the Western Art Canon: Where Are We Now?” Note, Second Series 64, No. 2 (Dec., 2007): 209–215. A number of female composers speak to this issue in Jennifer Kelly, In Her Own Words: Conversations with Composers in the United States (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013). 107  One might surmise that, because the authors were informed that they would be contributing to a book authored by women composers on their own work, “It’s a book about women composers, of COURSE they are going to write about gender.” But this entirely begs the question of the need for such a book: the gender issue is so entrenched it is hardly surprising that it is the focal point for the great majority here. That they did so, shows both the concerns of the field and the exigency for this focus.

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elucidate compositional process qua process. While the gender with which one identifies will be a constant (even if that identification might shift, for those of fluid gender identity), one is not the sum total of that gender; neither is gender the comprehensive determinant of a person—their makeup, their life journey, their creativity. Furthermore, Janet Wolf’s seminal text, The Social Production of Art, reminds us that just as the sociological positioning of the artwork is ineluctable, so is the irreducibility of the artform,108 with the corollary that the elemental materials of artforms do exist outside politics (otherwise, why be a painter—why not a novelist? Why write this piece for piano instead of guitar?—et cetera). A book such as this cannot hope to encompass the different impact on each individual’s lived experience, with regard to her political, social, historical context. But this does not set out to be such a study. Our collection privileges contemporary women composers’ words, creative processes, life experiences where the individual sought to discuss them, and authorship. We present an impressive cast of established and prominent composers, from mid- to late-career, while interworking current and pressing considerations within feminist scholarship, as well as the composers’ own accounts and inner compositional workings, thus ensuring the primacy of each authorial voice. This book gives the raisons d’être for why these composers write their music; it elucidates issues in what they write about; and it excavates the processes by which they realise their musical visions. The Composer, Herself substantiates the need for political advocacy, to contribute to the “snapshots” of the direct work currently underway in the industry that is bringing about change and deconstruction of the Western art music canon. A book such as this inspires impact. Advocacy is gaining real traction in the field:109 but The Composer, Herself reveals voices from the front line of the industry, in contemporary women’s composition. Hearing their voices, understanding their motivations and compositional circumstances, learning about their struggles and triumphs, understanding their musical languages; all these stories bring the compositional “scene” to life. Thrusting these composers into the foreground will further contribute to re-canonising the repertoire. Upon reading these source documents, musicologists can subsequently embrace the challenge of situating the

 Janet Wolf, The Social Production of Art (London: Macmillan, 1981).  A whole section on such activity appears in Kouvaras, Grenfell, and Williams, eds, A Century. 108 109

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methodologies and delving into motivations, just as they have with the Strunkian110 type of primary texts authored by composers who are male. This publication delivers composer motivations, catalysts, and real-­ world concerns expressed in art, articulated here by leading practitioners; some include score analysis, some prefer to apportion their dialogue to the former. Stylistically, our chapters range from interviews; to the reproduction of a keynote address;111 to relatively traditional music analyses; to personal career story narratives. Our editorial approach has ensured the primacy of each authorial voice. A distinctive contribution of our collection comes from its framing as artistic research (or practice-as-research). While there has been a recent proliferation of resources in the field of artistic research internationally, very few publications explore intersections with gender, and indeed wider social issues, in the way this book does, in the exegetical reflections on the part of composers on their own work.112 This collection showcases chapters from a wide-ranging standpoint and approach, incorporating score-­ reading analysis, practice-as-research methodologies, socio-cultural examinations, and evocative and engaging autoethnographic accounts from the composers themselves. Such a plethora of rich, culturally diverse and globally relevant writing, from our collection of influential and eminent compositional voices, is a publication that responds in vivid,  Oliver Strunk, Source Readings in Music History (New York: Norton, 1965).  Lim, Chap. 11, present volume. 112  Composer-scholars Roger Smith and Hazel Dean note in their 2009 publication Practice-led Research, Research-led Practice in the Creative Arts that the field is far further established and documented in artistic practices other than contemporary (scored) music composition—and pianist-musicologist Mine Dogantan-Dack has also asserted this about music generally as recently as 2015. Roger Smith and Hazel Dean, Practice-led Research, Research-led Practice in the Creative Arts (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), 7–8; 10; 14. Mine Dogantan-Dack, Artistic Practice as Research in Music (Farnham, Surrey; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015), 1. In 2004, a conference was held by The National Association for Music in Higher Education, NAMHE, at Oxford Brookes University entitled “Practice-as-Research: Towards Consensus.” Dogantan-Dack reports that no major publications emanated from this event. Dogantan-Dack, Artistic Practice, 2. Since then, there have been special issue journals such as the 2007 issue of the Dutch Journal of Music Theory, devoted to “Practice-Based Research in Music” (here, from a North European perspective). Since that time, the number of conferences and international seminars focusing on artistic practice as research music has steadily increased. Dogantan-Dack, Artistic Practice, 2. But the 2007 Dutch publication contains more on music performance as research, and on collaborations between composers and commissioning performers, than on music composition itself. 110 111

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first-­order accounts, to—and articulates—feminism’s new phase in the wider culture and the musical field, and very much fits within the broad purview of practice-as-research. “Practice-as-advocacy” also presents, articulating so many of our authors’ extra-musical work that lies outside their compositions: their personal mentoring of other women; their industry advocacy through setting up formal programs for women’s works to be heard; and their behind-the-scenes dogged determination in bringing their music to the performance stage. Self-analysis is enabled in The Composer, Herself, to afford women composers agency in their own reception. “Practice-as-research” needs opportunities for such work to be disseminated: only if such books are published will the deep structural imbalance in libraries, on bookshelves, and in curricula be addressed. That much of the volume has been put together during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic is not only impressive113—many people have not, understandably, been managing to produce much114—but also speaks to the sense of urgency for such a book as this, a “cross-section” or “contemporary slice of time” (contemporary meaning now), encapsulating a panoply of the musical creativity produced by living women. XX Marks the Spot[light—for Now!]: “The Composer, Herself” In concert settings that include women’s musical works, generally speaking, one of two situations will arise: programming will involve one female composer in amongst works by males, as Lim and McCombe attest in their respective chapters,115 or the program will consist only of compositions by women. The latter was important in feminism’s Second Wave era, to enable consciousness-raising of the fact that women composed music and to showcase their work. But in the current day, one-woman-only or all-­ women-­only programs can entrench tokenism or ghettoising. If two or more female composers’ works are included in a program with that of two

113  Indeed, it provides the subject matter for Fung’s Corona Morphs (2020), Chap. 8, present volume, and Mazzoli makes reference to its effect on the planned première of one of her works in Norway for March, 2021 (Chap. 5, present volume). 114  Patrick Doyle, “It’s okay to have had an Unproductive Year in Quarantine,” The Daily Aztec (March 17, 2021), https://thedailyaztec.com/104831/opinion/its-okay-tohave-had-an-unproductive-year-in-quarantine/. 115  Chapters 13 and 11, respectively, present volume.

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or males, it will invariably be a concert of New Music.116 Ideally, the mix of all genders would be so commonplace in concert programs consisting of “traditional classical” and/or New Music, that when a concert happens to consist of any gender configuration, decision-making is not based along anatomical lines. For equality and diversity to become a reality in our concert halls, it is important that we move beyond tokenism for political correctness and aim for comprehensive and genuine inclusivity to permeate through the layers— that means the artists we see on stage, the repertoire presented in concerts and in our educational syllabuses, the personnel leading organisations and the audiences we are trying to reach.117

The goal of this collection is that the voices of women composers are amplified, their creativity celebrated. There is a deeply felt need to take women composers seriously, and to address their music with the same rigor and attention men who write music have received from the academy. As is evidenced through the unbridled accounts of the authors within this collection, from the front line of their professional practice, they, themselves, both feel and purport the need to take women composers far more seriously than history has done, thus far, and the industry at large does, currently, even with all the advances that have been achieved. The phrase, “The Composer, Herself,” was explicitly chosen in the title for this book as a counter to the still-present conceptualising of “the composer” as prima facie “he,” as well as underlining the uniform, express wish on the part of women who write music to be considered as “composer,” not as a “special case, subset: woman-composer.”118 The hope is for books such as this is to become, in time, unnecessary in impetus: rather than responding to the yet-present need for composers who are women to 116  This, of course, raises another multi-factored barrier to break: the “New Music” ghetto broadly conceived. Philip Ehrensaft, “Why New Music Dwells in a Ghetto,” La Scena Musical 8, no. 2 (Oct 2012), http://www.scena.org/lsm/sm18-2/sm18-2_musiculture_ en.html. 117  Gabriella de Lacio et al., “Equality and Diversity in Concert Halls, 2020–2021: 100 Orchestras Worldwide,” Donne Foundation, July (2021), https://donne-uk.org/wp-­ content/uploads/2021/03/Equality-Diversity-in-Concert-Halls_2020_2021.pdf. 118  Linda Kouvaras, “Introduction: Composing Women’s (Very) Long 100-year Fight: Evolutions, Illuminations, Solutions,” in Linda Kouvaras, Maria Grenfell and Natalie Williams, eds, A Century of Composition by Women: Music Against the Odds (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022).

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be given some sorely lacking oxygen in the limelight, gender would be a point of possible interest, say, in a particular setting, as opposed to yet another call-to-arms to take up the battle against inequities between the genders (particularly the binary conception thereof).119 The Composer, Herself: Contemporary Snapshots of the Creative Process makes a “companion” to the volume in-progress my co-editors, Natalie Williams and Maria Grenfell, and I have also put together, A Century of Composition by Women: Music Against the Odds,120 which “sets the scene” for what might be perceived as the lived outcome of the historical struggle women have fought over the last century (and beyond) in gaining recognition and acceptance into the profession of composition. The Composer, Herself presents the rich sampling of current, professional composing women, in their own words, writing on their music, building on previous related publications, adding an up-to-the minute, contemporary perspective, privileging the unfettered voices and creative processes of the composers themselves, and providing an extensive sample of composers and compositional works to rival any previous publication in the academic field.

References Alexander, Jeffrey C. et  al. Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. Brooks, Ann. Postfeminisms: Feminism, Cultural Theory and Cultural Forms. London: Routledge, 1997. Carbin, Maria and Sara Edenheim. “The Intersectional Turn in Feminist Theory: A Dream of a Common Language?” European Journal of Women’s Studies, 20(3) (2013): 233–48. Citron, Marcia J. Gender and the Musical Canon. 3rd ed. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2000. Citron, Marcia J.“Women and the Western Art Canon: Where Are We Now?” Note, Second Series 64, no. 2 (Dec, 2007): 209–215. Clement, Catherine. Opera, or, the Undoing of Women. Translated by Betsy Wing; foreword by Susan McClary. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988. 119  In 100 orchestras surveyed from twenty-seven countries (in Europe; the Middle East; North America; South America; Oceania; and Asia), for example, only 11.45% of the scheduled concerts worldwide included compositions by women, while 88.55% included solely compositions written by men; only 1.11% of the pieces were composed by Black and Asian women and only 2.43% by Black and Asian men. De Lacio et al., “Equality and Diversity in Concert Halls.” 120  Kouvaras, Grenfell and Williams, eds, A Century of Composition by Women.

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Creed, Barbara. “From Here to Modernity: Feminism and Postmodernism.” Screen 28, no. 2 (1987): 47–67. De Lacio, Gabriella, et al. “Equality and Diversity in Concert Halls, 2020–2021: 100 Orchestras Worldwide.” Donne Foundation, July 2021. https://donne­u k.org/wp-­c ontent/uploads/2021/03/Equality-­D iversity-­i n-­C oncert-­ Halls_2020_2021.pdf. Dogantan-Dack, Mine. Artistic Practice as Research in Music. Farnham, Surrey; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015. Doyle, Patrick. “It’s okay to have had an Unproductive Year in Quarantine.” The Daily Aztec, 17 March 2021. https://thedailyaztec.com/104831/opinion/ its-­okay-­to-­have-­had-­an-­unproductive-­year-­in-­quarantine/. Eastburn, Susanna. “We Need More Women Composers—and It’s Not About Tokenism, It’s About Talent.” The Guardian, March 6, 2017. https://www. theguardian.com/music/2017/mar/06/sound-­and-­music-­susanna-­eastburn-­we­need-­more-­women-­composers-­talent-­not-­tokenism. Ehrensaft, Philip. “Why New Music Dwells in a Ghetto.” La Scena Musical 8, no. 2 (October 2012). http://www.scena.org/lsm/sm18-­2/sm18-­2_musiculture_ en.html. Eyerman, Ron, and Giuseppe Sciortino. Eds. The Cultural Trauma of Decolonization: Colonial Returnees in the National Imagination. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. Felski, Rita. Doing Time: Feminist Theory and Postmodern Culture. NYU Press, 2000. Fuller, Sophie. The Pandora Guide to Women Composers: Britain and the United States 1629–present. London: Pandora, 1994. Genz, Stéphanie, and Benjamin A.  Brabon. Postfeminism: Cultural Texts and Theories. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018. Glanville-Hicks, Peggy. In Interview with John Tristram, dir. P.G-H: A Musical Odyssey. Sydney: Juniper Films & ABC, 1991. Grenfell, Maria. “Mentoring Women Composers.” In Linda Kouvaras, Maria Grenfell and Natalie Williams, eds, A Century of Composition by Women: Music Against the Odds. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022. Hall, Elaine J., and Marnie Salupo Rodriguez. “The Myth of Postfeminism.” Gender and Society 17, no. 6, 2003: 878–902. Hope, Cat. “Working Towards Gender Equality and Empowerment in Australian Music.” In A Century of Composition by Women: Music Against the Odds, edited by Linda Kouvaras, Maria Grenfell and Natalie Williams. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022. Kelly, Jennifer. Ed. In Her Own Words: Conversations with Composers in the United States. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013.

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Kenny, Aisling. “Integration or Isolation? Considering Implications of the Designation ‘Woman Composer.’” British Postgraduate Musicology, 10, Special Section (2009): 1–11. Kouvaras, Linda. “Composing Women’s (Very) Long 100-year Fight: Evolutions, Illuminations, Solutions.” In A Century of Composition by Women: Music Against the Odds, edited by Linda Kouvaras, Maria Grenfell and Natalie Williams. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022. Kouvaras, Linda, Maria Grenfell and Natalie Williams. Eds. A Century of Composition by Women: Music Against the Odds. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022. Kramer, Jonathan D. The Time of Music: New Meanings, New Temporalities, New Listening Strategies. London: Collier Macmillan, 1988. Kreiss, Daniel. Recoding the Boys’ Club: The Experiences and Future of Women in Political Technology. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. Launay, Florence. Les Compositrices en France a XIXe Siècle. Paris: Fayard, 2006. Lorraine, Renee Cox. “Recovering Jouissance: An Introduction to Feminist Musical Aesthetics.” In Women and Music: A History, edited by Karin Pendle, 2nd ed., 3–18. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001. McAndrew, Siobhan and Martin Everett. “Symbolic Versus Commercial Success Among British Female Composers.” In Social Networks and Music Worlds, ed. Nick Crossley, Siobhan McAndrew and Paul Widdop, 61–88. New  York: Routledge, 2014. McClary, Susan. Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002. Morley, Christine and Selma Macfarlane. “The Nexus between Feminism and Postmodernism: Still a Central Concern for Critical Social Work.” The British Journal of Social Work, 42, no. 4 (2012): 687–705. N.a. “Feminism.” Inside History. https://www.history.com/topics/womens-­ history/feminism-­womens-­history. Accessed 28 April 2021. Nicholson, Linda J. Ed. Feminism/Postmodernism. New York: Routledge, 1990. Owens, Craig. “The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism.” The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. Ed. Hal Foster. Port Townsend, Washington: Bay Press, 1983. Parsons, Laurel and Brenda Ravenscroft. Eds. Analytical Essays on Music by Women Composers: Secular & Sacred Music to 1900. London: Oxford University Press, 2018. Prevost, Roxane and Kimberly Francis. 2018. “Teaching Silence in the Twenty-­ First Century: Where are the Missing Women Composers?” In The Oxford Handbook of Music Censorship, ed. Patricia Hall. New York: Oxford University Press: 637–660. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199733163. 013.26. Pung, Alice. Unpolished Gem. Melbourne: Black Inc., 2006.

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Rampton, Martha. “Four Waves of Feminism.” Pacific Magazine. Fall (2008). https://www.pacificu.edu/magazine/four-­waves-­feminism. Accessed 22 December 2020. Reich, Nancy B. Clara Schumann: The Artist and the Woman. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001. Rivers, Nicola. Postfeminism(s) and the Arrival of the Fourth Wave. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Roy, Eleanor Ange, and Lisa Martin. “49 Shot Dead in Attack on Two Christchurch Mosques.” The Guardian, March 15, 2019. https://www.theguardian.com/ world/2019/mar/15/christchurch-­shooting-­new-­zealand-­suspect-­white­supremacist-­symbols-­weapons. Sebag-Montefiore, Clarissa. “Beyond the ‘Dead White Dudes’: How to Solve the Gender Problem in Australian Classical Music.” The Guardian, 20 August 2019. https://www.theguardian.com/music/2019/aug/20/beyond-­the­dead-­white-­dudes-­how-­to-­solve-­the-­gender-­problem-­in-­australian-­classical-­ music. Slayton, Michael K.  Ed. Women of Influence in Contemporary Music: Nine American Composers. Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2010. Smith, Roger and Hazel Dean. Practice-led Research, Research-led Practice in the Creative Arts. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009. Solie, Ruth M. ed. Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Thomas, Augusta Read. Interview with Jennifer Kelly. “Augusta Read Thomas.” In Her Own Words: Conversations with Composers in the United States. Ed. Jennifer Kelly. University of Illinois Press, 2013: 265–280. Windleburn, Maurice. “Products of Our Own Histories: An Interview with Linda Kouvaras.” Context 43 (2018): 69–76. Wolf, Janet. The Social Production of Art. London: Macmillan, 1981. Zalewski, Marysia. Feminism after Postmodernism?: Theorising Through Practice. London: Routledge, 2000.

PART I

Activist Musical Projects and Cross-­Cultural Collaborations

CHAPTER 2

Borrowing From the Bard Melody Eötvös

Introduction Ruler of the Hive, for narrator and orchestra, was written for the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra’s (TSO) seventieth anniversary year in 2018. They programmed their concerts for the year to thematically encompass as many Shakespearean works as possible (around twenty-three works in total). For my part I decided my piece would use exclusively female Shakespearean monologues. I understood straight away that by isolating these women, in their moments in the spotlight, and thrusting them into focus, I was making a statement about gender imbalance. This made me a little uncomfortable, having always shied away from feminist questions. However, it was another woman artist who affirmed the direction I was taking: when we met up to discuss the project, narrator Pamela Rabe’s illuminating but thoughtful suggestions guided me back to a place where I felt safe confronting the feminist stage I had built for myself, convinced that Shakespeare himself wanted these issues of equality brought into focus.

M. Eötvös (*) University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 L. Kouvaras et al. (eds.), The Composer, Herself, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23922-9_2

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The overall concept, then, was to bring together five of Shakespeare’s leading ladies in an orchestral setting and to give them a voice (via my voice) which reflects the complicated array of attitudes and implications their literary existence collectively embodies.

Circumstances Leading to the Commission of the Piece In 2015 I was contacted by Simon Rogers, Director of Artistic Planning at the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra, to see if I was interested in writing a new work for their 2016 season. I was on their radar from two previous TSO composer schools I had participated in (2008, and 2009), as well as from the connection I had made with Chief Conductor and Artistic Director Marko Letonja during 2009 for the 3MBS Community Radio’s Betty Amsden Award for composition. As a result of the success of my orchestral work, The Saqqara Bird (2016), I was commissioned again in 2018 for a much larger and challenging work. The Saqqara Bird is a seven-minute, self-contained, single-movement work that has all the characteristic trademarks of a tone poem. Ruler of the Hive, on the other hand, totals twenty-eight minutes in duration, and also calls for a narrator who recites Shakespearean texts. From the outset it was declared that this narrator would be a famous Australian female actor, so I knew she was going to need a substantial amount of text to perform. To solve the duration challenge I divided the work into movements. And those movements ended up being dictated by the number of appropriate Shakespearean female monologues I could find across the literature. Another crucial turning point for this commission was the nature of the concert programming. The Saqqara Bird had been designed as a shorter work, for a concert opening or filler, as well as not needing a harp or piano. Ruler of the Hive, by contrast, was originally intended to be the balancing act in a double-bill concert with the Fauré Requiem. For its second performance it would have been the companion piece to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony (October 2019).

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The Composition Process The composition process for Ruler of the Hive began at the piano. I wanted the piece to sound like it connected to the time and place from which the words originated, so I did some research. The music that I studied was mostly John Dowland (1563–1626), whose timeline closely parallels that of Shakespeare (1564–1616). These pieces helped orientate me to a more simple and open harmonic canvas than I am accustomed to in my writing, as well as give me some strong inspiration for rhythmic formulae, in particular the use of hemiola, as seen in Fig. 2.1. The harmonic pastiche, as shown in Fig. 2.2, also underpinned the opening section of Ruler of the Hive. Figure  2.3 demonstrates the application of sixteenth-century-­ inspired rhythm and harmony. That was the extent of my sketching for this piece—the rest of the music came about as a result of either composing out, or from writing straight into the full orchestral score. The second movement is an example

Fig. 2.1  “The Earl of Essex Galliard” (John Dowland, 1605): example of Hemiola rhythmic grouping (bars 5–7)

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Fig. 2.2  “The Earl of Essex Galliard” (John Dowland, 1605): harmonic reduction (bars 1–8)

Fig. 2.3  “Ruler of the Hive” first Movement (Melody Eötvös, 2018): example of sixteenth-century harmonic and rhythmic application (bars 15–20)

of composing out. The violin duo line was first composed in full, and the entire opening and closing sections were spun out from there (Fig. 2.4). An example of the second composition technique (writing straight into full score) can be found in the middle section of the second movement (Fig. 2.5). The timeline for writing this work changed over the course of the creative period. I began by writing nine minutes of music, mostly from the first and second movements, which the TSO read through in March 2018. This workshop didn’t involve any reading of the Shakespearean text excerpts. In retrospect this was one of the more crucial issues in balance and timing for the whole piece, so it would have been extremely beneficial to have heard and tested this during this earlier phase of the composition process. Normally I would say the composition process ended there with my submission of score and parts to the TSO by the prescribed June deadline. Due to balance issues with the narration, there were many alterations,

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Fig. 2.4  “Ruler of the Hive” second movement (Melody Eötvös, 2018): composing out process from the solo violin’s duo line (bars 20–26)

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Fig. 2.5  “Ruler of the Hive” second movement (Melody Eötvös, 2018): Example of straight into full-score composing (bars 58–60)

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including an extra forty-nine bars that were added to the piece a day before the performance. It was enormously risky, but I knew there was a chance I had underestimated the amount of space that was needed to truly let the narration inhabit its own realm.

Performance Week Process and Confronting the Venue Space There were so many unpredictable factors in this project for me, namely the narration-to-orchestra balance (as this was my first work for orchestra with narrator) the sheer size-duration of the commission, and how to properly set and treat the text. Composing this work in movements guarded me from some of the dangers of a single movement work of that size. Concerning the narration-to-orchestra balance I plunged myself blindly down the rabbit hole of assuming the amplification of the voice would take care of any conflicts in volume with the orchestra. While writing, I had attempted to multitrack a MIDI recording of the composition with a voice recording Pamela had sent me earlier, and for the most part this was incredibly helpful. However, I now think it misguided my ears in terms of balance and disguised the fact that the monologues still needed to be conversational, in particular when asking oneself a question or posing a thought to the audience, and required a kind of organic space around them to allow their full meaning to come across. At the first rehearsal on 1 August 2018, it was immediately apparent that several parts of the music were simply too loud or cluttered for Pamela (narrator) to be clearly heard. Overall, everything needed to be a lot quieter. By the end of the second rehearsal, we had a debriefing session to work with the idea of adding an additional passage in the fifth movement to open up some more space for Pamela’s text. We ended up with the following: rehearsal figs. G through to L would be replaced with a harp solo and strings. Pamela’s cue at G would be the same, but completely unaccompanied to begin with. A few lines into her text, at “my way is to conjure you,” the harp would begin with a new solo passage underscoring the text, then a few lines later, at “if I were a woman,” the strings would join in with a light textured triplet figure. The original score resumed at fig. G, minus the brass entry (Fig. 2.6).

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Fig. 2.6  “Ruler of the Hive,” fifth movement (Melody Eötvös, 2018): Additional harp part added during performance week (revised bars 38–87)

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Choice of the Five Texts All of the monologues were found online by using Shakespearean keyword-­ search websites that allowed me to find certain passages, genders, and character-types.1 A few days before the performance, we also added a short section of text which comes immediately before Isabella’s existing excerpt (taken from Measure for Measure) in movement four: “oh, it is excellent to have a giant’s strength, but it is tyrannous to use it like a giant.”2 Here is a brief summary of all five characters followed by a general comment about the music: EMILIA (“Othello,” Act 4, Scene 3, line 85). Trapped in a marriage to possibly one of Shakespeare’s most hated villains. She seems like a loyal, eager-to-please wife, desperate for affection from a terrible husband. Eventually she boils over, her bitterness spills out in this monologue, and she redeems a little of the damage she did by giving up her life to clear the name of a lost friend. The music might seem light-hearted at first but the middle section containing the dialogue has an edge of sarcasm and impatience that means to bring Emilia’s emotions to the surface a little more. BEATRICE (“Much Ado About Nothing,” Act 4, Scene 1, line 1940). Transforms from a more humour and wit-inducing character, into a righteously angry woman. She quite seriously asks her love Benedict to kill Claudio in defence of her cousin (Hero) and would rather be loyal to her kin than be with her love. Beatrice is a brilliant woman in love, but has difficulty confronting the fact. The music in this movement focuses on both her desire for Claudio’s death as well as her “lovesick” condition that she tries to hide and ignore. HELENA (“All’s Well That Ends Well,” Act 1, Scene 1, line 121). While Helena might seem like a social climbing, sleazy tramp, she is actually a Shakespearean character that most directly challenges the period’s attitudes about gender and sexuality. Not only that, she’s not afraid to talk back to the boys (most other women characters avoid talking about sex to the men). In the face of all her male confrontations, Helena stays 1  Such as https://www.shakespeare-monologues.org/women/ and https://www.playshakespeare.com/monologues/monologues-female, and then cross-checked with more standard collections like http://shakespeare.mit.edu/, and https://www.folger.edu/ shakespeares-works. 2  William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure (Melbourne, Penguin: 2015).

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calm and cool. Fittingly, the music in this movement is the ­comparatively calm “centre” of the whole piece. A little walking bass and some harmonies derived from the violin duo solo from the second movement are all designed to give a more relaxed, unfazed vibe. ISABELLA (“Measure for Measure,” Act 2, Scene 2, line 137). She is a virgin and is given the choice of saving her brother’s life and giving up her virginity, or watch her brother die and be chaste. She chooses to stay a virgin but ends up being proposed to at the end of the play by a Duke. This movement is dramatic and heavy in a way that is not heard in the other four movements. There is always a line (melodic, moving, weaving) searching throughout the music, perhaps in a similar way to how Isabella’s desire to stay pure in a “corrupt” world of sin and fornication, guides her decisions. ROSALIND (The Epilogue, from “As You Like It,” Act 5, Scene 4, line 2596). She is the protagonist of this play and disguises herself in order to accomplish her goals. The section of this movement in the music where the dialogue is heard, is noticeably different from the surrounding musical themes. This serves as a parallel for the disguise as well as clears out the more dramatic texture of the music to allow for the dialogue to become the focus. As a female composer in the twenty-first century, it made sense to deliver a feminist theme: while not stated at all in my relationship and activities with the TSO, I do know that whenever I am programmed for something large scale like this, I become a statistic to someone, somewhere; for example, the programming surveys done, world-wide, for all of the major orchestral organisations, and the ratios of their seasonal programs across categories such as new music to music by female composers, or to music by dead-white composers. So, by the fact that I walked into this commission feeling somewhat scrutinised as a categorical presence, it seemed like the right time to approach the theme of gender imbalance in the piece itself.

Confronting the Feminist Stage as a Female Composer in the Twenty-First Century As someone who identifies with the feminine and many of the issues that still perpetuate the gender imbalance today, working with these texts was an unexpected confrontation and realisation, comparatively, of how some problems are still a major issue, despite the 400-year gap. It is also a

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battle trying to determine Shakespeare’s own stance on these issues. The fact that he highlighted the inequality of women to men, and used this as a dramatic play-card in his work, means he was acutely aware of these attitudes and was able to give his female characters a voice and opinions. Alternative perspectives are seething in regard to Shakespeare’s treatment of his female characters: So bad is the Bard’s treatment of women, it could earn him a whole #MeToo hashtag on Twitter…How can the physical and psychological abuse endured by Katherine at the hands of her suitor Petrucio in The Taming of the Shrew be played for laughs, as originally intended? What might have produced belly laughs in Elizabethan England should have modern women running to their nearest refuges as fast as they can shout “coercive control.”3

These kinds of opinions are all the more impactful when they utilise modern feminist responses and call-to-action tactics, such as the #MeToo movement which truly kicked off in 2017 when its viral internet spread began, to illustrate the level of mistreatment that the women of Shakespeare’s time suffered, while creatively linking them to many social issues still current today. Female composers have just as depressing a history. While we are making up some ground, the struggle that composers such as Hildegard von Bingen and Clara Schumann4 went through are motivation enough to aim for a culture where there is no distinction between, or discrimination against, male and female composers or artists of any kind.5 Also relevant to these perspectives on Shakespeare-as-a-villain is that there is a noted difference between a female performing as herself and a female performance constructed through the eyes of a man. This is certainly something which stretches beyond Shakespeare and into other artistic practices such as opera and music composition. To be fair, if we were to reverse the creators as being women who construct male characters, a similar situation is just as likely to occur by fact that first person 3  Danuta Kean, “Margot Robbie is Rethinking Shakespeare’s Women. It’s About Time,” The Guardian, 27 March 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/ mar/27/margot-robbie-shakespeare-women-characters-tv-series. 4  See Chapter Three, present volume, for Natalie Williams’ exposition on her Letters to Clara (2018). 5  Amy Beth Kirsten, “The Woman Composer is Dead,” New Music Box USA, 19 March 2012, https://nmbx.newmusicusa.org/the-woman-composer-is-dead/.

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perspectives are inherently from the self. Many male roles in Shakespeare, including famous ones like Hamlet and Julius Caesar, are now being played by women. However, the bulk of the remaining problem is that the male perspective here is more often than not in favour of supporting outdated stereotypes which downgrade the quality and respect of women’s opinions. Even though we now acknowledge that women and men are intellectual equals, and this is a politically established fact, our society and culture are still fighting with attitudes and habits that are so deeply embedded that more work must be done before we truly break free of our current patriarchal predicament. Compositionally this inquiry then begs us to ask what makes music sound feminine and masculine, and whether that resulting sound changes to us, as listeners, depending on the gender of the composer. Sergeant and Himonides at the UCL Institute of Education, University College, London, have recently completed a study which explores extensively the nature of gender in music composition. They pose the following three hypotheses: 1. The sex or gender of its composer is identifiable from the musical content of a composition; 2. perception of gendering of music is related to the sex of the listener; 3. musical sounds, or the organization of sounds within a composition, infer sex, or gender characteristics.6 The results were mostly as expected. The first hypothesis studied proved that the majority of listeners (an equal test group of male and female) were not able to tell the sex of the composer accurately from examples of their work, discounting the listeners who recognised the examples. For the second theory most listeners attributed the majority of the works to being composed by a male; an openly biased assumption that carried over into the density of instrumental music; the larger the instrumental force, the more attributions there were to male composers. The third hypothesis was verified by the data:

6  Desmond C. Sergeant and Evangelos Himonides, “Gender and Music Composition: A Study of Music, and the Gendering of Meaning,” Frontiers in Psychology 7, no.411 (31 March 2016).

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The third hypothesis is therefore accepted, but with the important caveat that the gendered perception understood by listeners was not derived from elements inherent in the data of the music’s content, but from the presence of gender stereotyping contributed to the perceptual event by the listener… composer-sex attributions and the compositional scale and tonal density of musical texture of the works from which the extracts were taken reveals that a view that works of major proportions (symphonies, concerti, choral works) are composed by men, but women are either incapable of attempting largescale works, or only of sustaining musical invention only briefly, writing only “graceful little songs about spring and the birdies”7 is still inherent and, held even among experienced musicians of both sexes.

This study is both interesting and frightening. I was initially shocked that female listeners were just as biased as males in their attributions. However, after thinking over it, it makes perfect sense. The ability to create, control, and manipulate musical properties, gestures, tonal densities and instrumental timbres in a piece of music are all learned skills. The study and learning of such musical skills throughout history has always occurred in groups and schools of people, linked together in a very traceable genealogy of names and “isms”. We can also trace the development of complexity in music (“complexity” here meaning all developments in musical language and composition technique) as corresponding to technological, social, scientific, political, and philosophical ruptures/discoveries. Both genders have been exposed to these events and changes over time and so have developed the same learned understandings and interpretations of cultural generalities and assumed truisms. The point is that even if over this period of time females have been mostly neglected and continually denied the same platforms and basic human rights as males, we have all still developed the same social cues and understandings, regardless. And for his time, Shakespeare was one of the few creatives who betrayed a very real sense of comprehending the true human condition, whether embodying the male or female perspective in his works.

7  Moore, cited in Judith Tick, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Composers?” International Music 79 (1975): 22.

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Shakespeare and the Hivemind Dr. Neema Parvini says, of Shakespeare’s characters, that they “are not merely archetypes or products of generic convention, they are complex simulations of thinking and feeling in action.”8 Shakespeare’s characters are generated from his unique understanding and perception of how we as humans locate ourselves cognitively and socially within the world: His characters are not modified by the customs of particular places, unpractised by the rest of the world; by the peculiarities of studies or professions, which can operate but upon small numbers; or by the accidents of transient fashions or temporary opinions: they are the genuine progeny of common humanity, such as the world will always supply, and observation will always find.9

As each individual human being situates themselves in society, they do so in a way that often comes back to relying on innate emotions and intuition over reason. Parvini goes on to state that he believes that “this aspect of human thinking is broadly speaking transhistorical; that is a universal.” This is where we can introduce the hivemind concept as a way to track the function and operation of such “universal” behaviours. As revealed in both the Parvini and Johnson quotes above, these Shakespearean characters exemplify the multifaceted nature of humanity. Some of these faces could include being playful, epicurean, scientific, legislative, clandestine, and, of course, the gossiper.10 The development of these complex human aspects, over time, requires a sociological connection and a common ground on which they can exist, operate, flex, break, and renew themselves. Merriam-Webster online defines “Hivemind” as “the collective thoughts, ideas, and opinions of a group of people regarded as functioning together as a single mind.”11 To produce a more general and concentrated description we can distil this down to: A collection of minds somehow 8  Neema Parvini, “What did Shakespeare Understand about the Human Mind?” This View of Life, 23 April 2016, https://thisviewoflife.com/what-did-shakespeare-understand-aboutthe-human-mind/. 9  Samuel Johnson, “Preface to Shakespeare,” edited by Jack Lynch, accessed 12 December 2021, http://jacklynch.net/Texts/prefabr.html. 10  Bob Holmes and Kate Douglas, “Human Nature: Being Playful,” NewScientist 2861 (21 April 2012), https://www.newscientist.com/issue/2861/. 11  Merriam-Webster Dictionary, “Hivemind,” accessed 12 December 2021, https://www. merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hive%20mind.

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linked or unified. This definition can now bridge us to the sixteenth century and into the cumulative, ever-working minds of Shakespeare’s characters; referring to the possibility that they undergo evolution and rebirth every time a play is produced and staged. This gives the characters a spectral life of their own. A modern term like “hivemind” is destined for evolution and subtle changes to its exact meaning, based on the social expectations and technology (which are always in flux) of the time, which means it can be applied post factum to any period within our history. Similarly to how we describe the technology of “writing” as putting ink to paper, we now also identify the carving of cuneiform into clay, as well as typesetting on a computer, as earlier and later forms of the craft. Beyond the facets of humanity described above, as observed by Kean, the presence and awareness of gender imbalance in Shakespeare hangs like a cloud over the literature. While this is an unfortunate and prevailing artefact in our social development as humans, it is interesting to note that there have been successful instances (proportional to the timeline and technological advancement) of a more balanced male-to-female equality in past societies; the most ancient and obvious which comes to mind is Ancient Egypt. Women of this time were eligible to rule as well as share the same basic human rights as men. In the time between the existence of women such as Sobekneferu and Hatshepsut, the first known female Pharaohs of Egypt (Hatshepsut ruled from 1806–1802 BCE, three hundred years before Sobekneferu), and the women of the sixteenth century, there would have been a great number of females who knew they had the capacity to rule, change the world, and live lives as full as their male counterparts, and fortunately for us enjoying our freedom and rights in the twenty-first century we owe it all to the women who prevailed before us. When deciding on the title “Ruler of the Hive,” my aim was to create a concept that would properly illustrate the collective lives of these five characters. During the course of reading through each play I began to gain an impression many others have also developed: that these women are the clandestine rulers and true heroines of these plays. Their subjects then are, of course, the Hive, and the Hive is humanity in all of its commonality and socially conditioned behaviours. Within Shakespeare’s plays these women are usually described as strong female characters, and their struggles reach out to the audience. They can die, be crushed, or destroyed in some manner and still come out victorious, even from oblivion. Today, these works of Shakespeare’s continue to inform us who we are, and these women’s voices will always strike a chord along the lines of

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imbalance in political leadership, the gender pay-gap, and many other such remaining issues, no matter whether one is angry at the Bard for his backward sixteenth-century male-perspective, or loves him as a literary genius and champion of humanity. As a female composer in the world of today, I had to work hard to personally connect with this text, and doing so was essential to producing an honest and more deeply engaging piece of music. The level of research I undertook to reach the point of understanding that I personally needed was unprecedented, but the result has me questioning my position in all of this a lot more now, as well as challenging myself to contribute more to the promotion and support of under-represented figures in composition and in artistic disciplines that extend beyond music.

References Dowland, John and Phillippe Meunier. The Earl of Essex Galliard. Leipzig: Breitkopf, 1974. Eötvös, Melody. Ruler of the Hive. Sydney: Australian Music Centre, 2018. Holmes, Bob & Kate Douglas. “Human Nature: Being Playful.” NewScientist 2861 (21 April 2012). https://www.newscientist.com/issue/2861/. Johnson, Samuel. “Preface to Shakespeare.” Edited by Jack Lynch, accessed 12 December 2021. http://jacklynch.net/Texts/prefabr.html. Kean, Danuta. “Margot Robbie is Rethinking Shakespeare’s Women. It’s About Time.” The Guardian, 27 March 2018. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/mar/27/margot-­r obbie-­shakespeare-­women-­characters-­ tv-­series. Kirsten, Amy Beth. “The ‘Woman Composer’ is Dead.” New Music Box USA, 19 March 2012. https://nmbx.newmusicusa.org/the-­woman-­composer-­is-­dead/. Merriam-Webster Dictionary. “Hivemind.” Accessed 12 December 2021. https:// www.merriam-­webster.com/dictionary/hive%20mind. Parvini, Neema. “What did Shakespeare Understand about the Human Mind?” This View of Life. 23 April 2016. https://thisviewoflife.com/what-­did-­shakespeare­understand-­about-­the-­human-­mind/. Sergeant, Desmond C. and Evangelos Himonides. “Gender and Music Composition: A Study of Music, and the Gendering of Meaning.” Frontiers in Psychology 7, no.411 (31 March 2016). Shakespeare, William. “Othello (Act IV, Scene 3, Line 85).” The Tech, Michigan Institute of Technology. Edited by Jeremy Hylton. Accessed 12 December, 2021a. http://shakespeare.mit.edu/othello/othello.4.3.html.

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———. “Much Ado About Nothing (Act IV, Scene 1, Line 1940).” The Tech, Michigan Institute of Technology. Edited by Jeremy Hylton. Accessed 12 December, 2021b. http://shakespeare.mit.edu/much_ado/much_ado. 4.1.html. ———. “All’s Well That Ends Well (Act I, Scene 1, Line 121).” The Tech, Michigan Institute of Technology. Edited by Jeremy Hylton. Accessed 12 December, 2021c. http://shakespeare.mit.edu/allswell/allswell.1.1.html. ———. “Measure for Measure (Act II, Scene 2, Line 137).” The Tech, Michigan Institute of Technology. Edited by Jeremy Hylton. Accessed 12 December, 2021d. http://shakespeare.mit.edu/measure/measure.2.2.html. ———. “As You Like It (Act V, Scene 2, Line 2596).” The Tech, Michigan Institute of Technology. Edited by Jeremy Hylton. Accessed 12 December, 2021e. http:// shakespeare.mit.edu/measure/measure.2.2.html. Tick, Judith. “Why Have There Been No Great Women Composers?” International Music 79 (1975): 22.

CHAPTER 3

Letters to Clara: A Contemporary Composer’s Homage to a Woman Pioneer Natalie Williams

Letters to Clara (2018) Since the death of Clara Schumann in 1896, little has changed for women composers writing contemporary classical music. Industry steps towards gender equity have begun, but only in relatively recent times; overall, change has come slowly and in insufficient amounts. The representative field of the past 124 years would have seemed familiar to Clara herself, wherein the reception of women composers and their work has remained largely unaltered. Professional impediments facing contemporary women composers eerily echo the domestic concerns that Clara faced: the subordination to her husband’s compositional career, personal conflicts between professional life and motherhood, and balancing the demands of a touring lifestyle against those of a household.1 Such constraints are common in the 1  Nancy B.  Reich, Clara Schumann: the Artist and the Woman. New  York: Cornell University Press (1985): 11.

N. Williams (*) Wagner College, Staten Island, NY, United States of America © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 L. Kouvaras et al. (eds.), The Composer, Herself, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23922-9_3

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working lives of contemporary women composers, a fact which this 2018 chamber work gently explores. In the twenty-first century, the music of women composers has grown in recognition, supported by an industry more attuned to social diversity. A recent swell of social discourse has revealed the disparity in representation of women and other minorities in contemporary art music.2 An ensemble redressing this balance is The Australia Ensemble, resident at the University of New South Wales (Sydney), which committed to gender parity in its commissioning program in 2014.3 Artistic Director Paul Stanhope’s mission: to “re-evaluate existing repertoire and its contributors,”4 led to new commissions for women composers, featuring new works by women in every subsequent concert season. In 2018 I was privileged to write a new piece for performance in The Australia Ensemble’s annual series, Letters to Clara: Four Reflections on the Life of Clara Schumann (2018). The piece was commissioned as an homage to Clara Schumann, in celebration of her life and influence as a prominent woman composer and performer. This chapter examines the creative process behind the intertextual piece, linking the struggles of a nineteenth-­century creative artist to the concerns of those today. Letters to Clara: Four Reflections on the Life of Clara Schumann (2018) is a four-movement suite for chamber septet: Flute, Clarinet, String Quartet and Piano, that presents aspects of Clara’s life and work as a creative musician.5 The movements depict her love of music, her love for Robert Schumann and Brahms, and her deep emotional engagement with the music of her life. To do this, the suite uses direct quotations from the music of Clara, Robert, and Brahms, chosen because of their latent interconnections. The parameters of the commission were that the piece function purposely as an homage work, both responding to Clara’s music and serving as a companion piece to her Piano Trio Op. 17, also on the program. The use of  Berklee, Institute for Creative Entrepreneurship, “Women in the U.S. Music Industry,” Berklee College of Music (2019): 2. 3  Alex Siegers, “#IWD2020: An Exciting and More Diverse Future,” Sydney: University of New South Wales, 2020. 4  Siegers, “#IWD.” 5  Letters to Clara was commissioned for the 12 May 2018 concert by The Australia Ensemble held at the Sir John Clancy Auditorium at the University of New South Wales. The work is dedicated to Professor Claude Baker (Indiana University), a lifelong enthusiast of Robert Schumann’s music, and a master of quotation and homage. 2

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letter in the title refers to the importance of letters in Clara’s own life that, in the twenty-first century, we choose music as a medium to deliver a message about her influence on the music of our own time.

Approaching Intertextuality The compositional goal I had for the newly commissioned work was to compose a communiqué piece to Clara, commenting on the music of her time from the standpoint of ours. Unlike a directly spoken conversation with Clara herself, the method of communication here is music alone. Using musical material as a communicative device inherently changes the aesthetic context that listeners build around the work—the quotations from historical scores are intended to be heard as referential, not as renditions of the pieces in their own right. Transplanting these original works into a contemporary piece strips them of their original context, function, and aesthetic association; the inclusion of an excerpt from Robert Schumann’s Three Romances for Piano, Op. 28 (no. 2), in movement four of the new suite, functions as an echo of the music that Clara actually heard as she lay dying, divorced from the originally intended performance context of the Romance as a salon piece. (See Figs. 3.1 and 3.2) Within Letters to Clara, excerpts from Clara’s own music are used trans historically, re-clothing works from the past in a contemporary context and forcing the older pieces to behave as signifiers. The quoted works then carry extra layers of musical meaning and (in many cases) expose their preexisting musical interconnectivity originally intended by the Schumanns

Fig. 3.1  Robert Schumann—Three Romances for Piano, Op. 28 (no. 2). (Source: Robert Schumann, Drei Romanzen, 1880)

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Fig. 3.2  Williams—Letters to Clara, mvt.4 (quotation from Schumann’s Op. 28, no. 2)

and their friend Brahms.6 These conscious references to other artworks and their use as vehicles for aesthetic meaning, reveals the delicate approach of an homage work—a new piece which lifts historical music from its original context to use as the bearer of a new musical message. Quoting historical works in this way raises questions of interpretation. Michael L. Klein addresses this perceptual problem: A distinction needs to be made between influence and intertextuality, where the former implies intent or a historical placement of the work in its time or origin, and the latter implies a more general notion of crossing texts that may involve historical reversal… the frontiers of music are never clear-cut: beyond its framing silence, beyond its inner form, it is caught up in a web of references to other music: its unity is variable and relative. Musical texts speak among themselves.7  Reich, “Schumann” (1985): 100.  Michael L. Klein, Intertextuality in Western Art Music, Bloomington: Indiana University Press (2005): 4. 6 7

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The inclusion of music by Clara and Robert Schumann and Brahms renders the function of their works as referential, subordinate to a larger aesthetic context of the contemporary piece. These musical voices from the past are newly presented as memories, musical wisps and shadows, woven into a larger compositional web and inherently altering their meaning. The historical pieces therefore function as messages to, and about, a former time, and do not stand alone as distinct musical works. Robert Hatten argues for intertextuality as a concept that “will balance the competing demands of interrelatedness and individuality of musical works.”8 But the Letters to Clara suite demands more from its listeners—it asks for a re-contextual interpretation, to view the nineteenth-century works as “letters” in themselves, used to carry messages back to an imagined Clara, if she were present to hear the piece today. Greater demands upon the listener are thereby both imposed and assumed: “The concept of intertextuality applies equally to author and reader (composer and listener). Creation and interpretation are both constrained and enriched by the universe of discourse established by earlier texts.”9 At the work’s première, the concert program featured four pieces comprising two intertextual pairings: Natalie Williams Letters to Clara (2018) György Kurtág Hommage à (Robert) Schumann Op. 15d (1990)

Clara Schumann Piano Trio in G Minor, Op. 17 (1846) Robert Schumann Piano Quintet Op. 44 in E flat Major (1842)

Both contemporary works function as homages to their historical companions, quoting musical content and referencing topical themes from the Schumann pieces. The 1990 Kurtág homage takes inspiration from Schumann’s Fantasy pieces, Op. 73, and Op. 12, while also using Kurtág’s own previous works, including his Játékok series for piano.10 Direct musical quotations are buried deeply, indistinct from Kurtág’s own musical voice which is heard as the forefront material.11 In contrast, Letters to 8  Robert Hatten, “The Place of Intertextuality in Music Studies.” The American Journal of Semiotics 3, no. 4 (1985): 69. 9  Hatten, “Intertextuality,” 69. 10  Friedemann Sallis, “The Genealogy of György Kurtág’s “Hommage à R.  Sch”, op. 15d,” Studia Musicologica 43, no. 3–4 (2002): 313. 11  Kurtág’s piece also references fictional characters in Schumann’s life, Eusebius in movement two, and Florestan in movement three. Guillaume De Machaut is mentioned in the final movement’s title; Machaut’s musical influence here is suggested through isorhythmic techniques used in the piano part.

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Clara hides nothing about its overt use of her own musical voice. The suite freely quotes exact material from Clara’s compositions, the intertextuality made apparent at a surface level. Even uninformed listeners would recognize Clara’s nineteenth-century voice, clearly juxtaposed against more contemporary techniques. This approach treats Clara’s work as an historical object, reinterpreted and recontextualised for a modern audience. The quotations chosen for the suite’s four movements form a small chronological essay on the major aspects of her musical life as performer, composer, wife, and mother. Piano Queen depicts her love for music, Whispered Breath, her love for Schumann, Frei Aber Einsam, her love for Brahms, and Regenlied, her death and eternal memory.

Piano Queen: The Love of Music (Movement 1) What indeed is finer than to clothe one’s feelings in music? Clara Schumann (1837)12

The first movement, Piano Queen, highlights Clara’s career as a prominent performer and champion of new music. She was considered amongst the foremost pianists of her day and was hailed by critics as Europe’s “Queen of the piano.”13 She maintained an international concertizing career while raising a family and supporting her husband’s composing. Clara was devoted to performance and saw herself primarily as a champion of new music. Clara wrote to Brahms, “I feel I have a mission to reproduce beautiful works… the practice of my art is definitely an important part of my being; it is the very air I breathe.”14 The balance between her personal and professional life was sometimes a challenge. Eugenie Schumann wrote in her memoirs, “…we knew that in our mother, woman and artist were indissolubly one, so that we could not say this belongs to one part of her and that to another. We would sometimes wonder whether our mother would miss us or music most if one of the two were taken from her, and we could never decide.”15 12  Carol Neuls-Bates, ed. Women in Music: An Anthology of Source Readings from the Middle Ages to the Present, (New York: Harper & Row, 1982): 120. 13  Nancy Reich, “Schumann [née Wieck], Clara,” Oxford Music Online, 20 January 2001, https://doi.org/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.25152. 14  Nancy B.  Reich, Clara Schumann: the Artist and the Woman. New  York: Cornell University Press (1985): 265. 15  Reich, “Schumann” (1985): 175.

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This movement borrows musical material from piano works written by Clara. Her Variations on a Theme of Robert Schumann, Op. 20, uses a theme of Robert’s that is suspected to be based upon a motive from Clara’s own early compositional sketches.16 The movement also quotes themes from Clara’s best-known chamber work, her Op. 17 Piano Trio in G minor (1846). The mournful opening melody and the strident, rhythmic chordal theme in G minor are juxtaposed and quoted freely throughout. The quotations from Clara’s well-known work provide early intertextual clues to informed listeners about the homage nature of this piece. The piano part functions as a protagonist within this movement, introducing the thematic material from Clara’s Op. 17 trio and the Robert Schumann theme from her Op. 20. (See Figs. 3.3 and 3.4) Clara’s affinity for the instrument is

Fig. 3.3  Clara Schumann—Variations on a Theme of Robert Schumann, Op. 20 (theme)

Fig. 3.4  Clara Schumann—Piano Trio, Op. 17 (movement 1), opening melody 16  Nancy B. Reich, “Clara Schumann” in Women Making Music, the Western Art Tradition, 1150–1950 (Urbana: University of Chicago Press, 1986): 251.

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Fig. 3.5  Clara Schumann—Piano Trio, Op. 17 (movement 1), G minor thematic material

evident throughout her life, from her passion for new music, to her own composition, the piano was dear to her heart; Clara to Joachim, September 1854, “I always pray to God to give me the strength to successfully overcome the frightful agitations that I have lived through and that still await me. My true old friend, the piano, my help me with this!”17 (Fig. 3.5).

Whispered Breath: The Love of Schumann (Movement 2) Music is so complete and alive in me that I ought to be able to exhale it like a whispered breath. Robert Schumann (1841)18

The second movement, Whispered Breath, explores the delicate relationship between Clara and Robert. Clara enjoyed a happy marriage despite difficulties experienced in the final years of Robert’s life, with a suicide attempt and extended hospitalization. They wrote frequently to each other and kept detailed marriage diaries about their daily home life and professional engagements. Their lives were musically intertwined, seen through their early compositions which paid homage to each other; Clara’s Romance Variee Op. 3 was written for Robert in 1833 when she was fourteen years old. Robert responded with a set of Impromptus sur une Romance de Clara Wieck. Op. 5, composed that same year. As adults they both agreed that Robert’s composing should take precedence over  Reich, “Schumann” (1985), 180.  Reich, “Schumann” (1985): 185.

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Fig. 3.6  Clara Schumann—Romance Varié, Op. 3 (theme)

Fig. 3.7  Robert Schumann—Impromptus über ein Thema von Clara Weick, Op. 5 (theme)

Clara’s, sometimes to her frustration, “my piano playing is falling behind. This always happens when Robert is composing!” (Clara’s diary, 3 June 1841).19 This movement quotes the early reciprocal works by these two composers, Clara’s Op. 3 Romance Varié and Robert’s Op. 5 reply, the Impromptus on her own theme. (See Figs. 3.6 and 3.7) Also featured is the opening theme of Robert’s Piano Sonata in F# minor, Op. 11. (See Figs. 3.8 and 3.11) Schumann wrote that his sonata “was a cry from my heart to yours in which your theme appears in every possible form” (1835).20 Within the Op. 11 Sonata, Robert Schumann combines two themes, one by Clara and one by himself; this occurs in the Allegro Vivace section of the first movement.21 (See Figs. 3.9 and 3.10) In this same way, Letters to Clara’s second movement juxtaposes thematic materials written by both Clara and Robert, symbolic of their musical and emotional union. These quotations are accompanied in this homage movement by a steady crotchet pulse of  Reich, “Schumann” (1985): 120.  Reich, “Schumann” (1985): 238. 21  Schumann, Piano Sonata in F# minor Op. 11 (m.53 Allegro Vivace), quotes an oscillating diminished fifth interval by Robert, together with the second theme from Clara’s Op. 5, Les Ballet des Revenants, no. 4, “Scene Fantastique” for solo piano. 19 20

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Fig. 3.8  Robert Schumann—Piano Sonata in F# Minor, Op. 11 (mvt. 1) bars 1–5

Fig. 3.9  Robert Schumann—Piano Sonata in F# Minor, Op. 11 (mvt. 1) bars 53–59

Fig. 3.10  Clara Schumann—Les Ballet des Revenants, Op. 5, no. 4, “Scene Fantastique”

an open F# minor chord, adorned with dissonant pitches, suggesting the uneasiness of Clara’s and Robert’s home life together. (See Figs. 3.6, 3.8, and 3.11)

Frei Aber Einsam: The Love of Brahms (Movement 3) Life is a wild polyphony, but a good woman like you can often bring about a resolution of its discords. (Brahms to Clara Schumann, 1868)22  Reich, “Schumann” (1985): 140.

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Fig. 3.11  Williams—Letters to Clara (mvt. 2) combination of themes by Robert and Clara Schumann

The other great relationship of Clara’s life was her association with Johannes Brahms. Clara first met Brahms in 1853 when he visited Robert to study composition and their friendship developed into a lifelong association.23 Brahms supported Clara through Robert’s illness and death. Many suspected they would marry, but soon after Robert’s demise, Brahms chose not to pursue a marriage relationship with Clara, instead remaining her companion until her death in 1896. Many of Brahms’ works contain quotes or homages to Clara, dedicated to her and written as birthday presents and “letters” to her in musical form, including his Piano Quartet, Op. 60 and the Violin Concerto. Brahms composed a set of Variations on a Theme by Robert Schumann, Op. 9 (1854) which was dedicated to Clara. Within this piece he wove the theme from her Op. 3  Reich, “Schumann” (1985): 140.

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Fig. 3.12  Johannes Brahms—Variations on a Theme of R.  Schumann, Op. 9 (Var. 10) bars 30–34

Fig. 3.13  Johannes Brahms—Piano Trio, Op. 101 (mvt. 3) bars 1–6

Romance Variee, symbolising their relationship. The quote appears briefly at the end of Variation 10, within an inner voice. (See Figs. 3.6 and 3.12) Clara also wrote about her experiences of Brahms’ music, particularly his Piano Trio in C Major, Op. 101. After she performed the piece in 1887, she wrote in her diary, “…no other work of Johannes’ has transported me so completely.24 This Letters to Clara movement quotes passages from Brahms’ Piano Trio, Op. 101 over a constant cycle of three pitches, F.A.E., creating a textural wash at the movement’s opening. (See Figs.  3.13 and 3.14) This musical cryptogram spells Frei Aber Einsam (“free but lonely”) and was the motto of violinist Joseph Joachim that appears in many of Brahms’ works. These pitches were also used by Schumann in his movement for the F.A.E. Sonata written collaboratively for Joachim by Brahms, Schumann, and Albert Hermann Dietrich. The closing bars of this movement quote directly from Brahms’ Vier Ernste Gesänge, Op. 121, the third movement, O Tod (“O Death”). Brahms wrote Op. 121 in the few days after he heard about Clara’s death in May 1896 (Figs. 3.15 and 3.16). These songs are an outpouring of grief from a composer who had lost his most treasured friend. Brahms himself died just eleven months after Clara in April 1897.25  Reich, “Schumann” (1985): 201.  Reich, “Schumann” (1985): 208.

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Fig. 3.14  Williams—Letters to Clara (mvt. 4), quotation of Brahms Op. 101, Piano Trio

Fig. 3.15  Johannes Brahms—Vier Ernste Gesänge, Op. 121 (no. 3) “O Tod” (bars 1–2)

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Fig. 3.16  Williams—Letters to Clara (mvt. 4), bars 81–85

This movement combines melodic material that the three composers used intertextually between themselves. Atop the F.A.E pitch cycle which anchors the movement, the quotations are assembled as a small catalogue of interchangeable “messages,” distilled here as a musical exposé of the works that connected their emotional lives. This technique highlights the interwoven musical connections between these composers that were self-­intended, placed together in a reflective movement which comments on the delicate relationships between them, their losses, joys, and experiences of death.

Regenlied: Her Death and Eternal Memory (Movement 4) This last movement is what I would wish to accompany me on my journey to the other world. Clara on Brahms’ Op. 78 Violin Sonata26

 Reich, “Schumann” (1985): 201.

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Fig. 3.17  Johannes Brahms—Violin Sonata, Op. 78 (mvt. 3) bars 12–14

Fig. 3.18  Williams—Letters to Clara (mvt. 4) bars 1–3

The final movement, Regenlied (“rain song”) unites the music of Clara, Robert, and Brahms in homage to all three composers in an ode to death and eternity. Clara loved Brahms’ Op. 78 Violin Sonata, the “Regenlied” sonata, based upon a theme from the Regenlied of Brahms’ Op. 59 (no. 3) song cycle, composed in 1873. She wished this music to accompany her on the journey to heaven.27 What she actually heard in her dying moments was the second of Schumann’s Three Romances for piano, Op. 28, in F# minor. (See Fig. 3.1) In her final hours Clara asked her son Ferdinand to play this piece and also Schumann’s Intermezzo, Op. 4. This suite’s final movement opens with a soft raindrop theme taken from Brahms’ Violin Sonata, Op. 78 (See Figs.  3.17 and 3.18) and quotes the song melody from his own Regenlied, Op. 59 upon which the violin sonata is based. (See Figs. 3.19 and 3.20) The piano remains aloof from the ensemble within this movement, commenting from a distance with Robert Schumann’s F# minor Romance quoted in different keys and at a different time signature than the strings and woodwinds. The piano commentary fades in and out of the  Reich, “Schumann” (1985): 201.

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Fig. 3.19  Johannes Brahms—“Regenlied” from Lieder und Gesänge, Op. 59 (bars 1–9)

movement like a distant memory, replicating what Clara may have heard in her last moments. The association of rain with tears, mourning and remorse is suggested throughout this movement. Around the Regenlied quotes a chorale appears, drawn from the second movement of Brahms’ Vier Ernste Gesänge written as he heard of Clara’s death. (See Figs. 3.21 and 3.22) “Ich Wandte Mich” (So I Returned, from Ecclesiastes 4: 1–3) presents a softly falling G minor arpeggiated chord transformed here as a chorale, harkening to the key of Clara’s own Piano Trio, Op. 17 and connecting back to the opening key of this suite. Brahms sent the score of the four songs to Clara’s daughter Marie Schumann with the inscription, “deep inside us all there is something that speaks to us or drives us, almost unconsciously, and that may emerge at times sounding as poetry or music. You will not be able to play through these songs just now because the words would be too affecting. But I beg you to regard them as a true memorial to your beloved mother” (Brahms, 1896).28

 Reich, “Schumann” (1985): 207.

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Fig. 3.20  Williams—Letters to Clara (mvt. 4) bars 21–23, Regenlied quotation

Fig. 3.21  Johannes Brahms—Vier Ernste Gesänge, Op. 121 (no. 2) “Ich wandte mich” (bars 1–4)

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Fig. 3.22  Williams—Letters to Clara (mvt. 4) bars 24–28

The quotation techniques within this movement favor fragmentation, motivic association, and juxtaposition. The poetic intent is to replicate Clara’s final thoughts in music, overlaying the music she actually heard (Schumann, Three Romances, Op. 28, no. 2), the pieces she most revered (Brahms, Violin Sonata, Op. 78), and the music Brahms wrote in response to her passing (Brahms, Vier Ernste Gesänge, mvt. 2). (See Figs. 3.1, 3.17 and 3.21) This collage technique suggests to the listener a multi-faceted musical life, one that was rich in composition and performance and intertwined with the music of the day.

Conclusion Letters to Clara functions as a musical homage from one woman composer to another and from one historic era to a former, written using works which held meaning to Clara herself and structured as a chronological summary of her own musical life. Informed listeners will discern the

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musical dichotomy between the quotations chosen and the contemporary content which scaffolds the extractions. In this way, the voices of two composers are presented, the contemporary piece serving as a series of “letters” to the historical Clara, presenting a catalogue of works that she herself would recognise as associated. What she would not recognise now is a greater industry focus on the work of women composers, more promotion of their output, and a growing professional equality for their role as creators, performers, and leaders. In this regard, Clara’s example as a pioneering woman composer can perhaps be seen as a type of letter, to us.

References Berklee, Institute for Creative Entrepreneurship. “Women in the U.S.  Music Industry.” Berklee College of Music, March 2019. https://www.berklee.edu/ news/berklee-­n ow/berklee-­c ollege-­m usic-­a nd-­w omen-­m usic-­r elease­results-­new-­study-­women-­us-­music. Brahms, Johannes. Variationen über ein Thema von Robert Schumann, Op. 9. Berlin: Simrock, 1898. Brahms, Johannes. Trio für Violine, Violoncello und Klavier, Op. 101. Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2013. Brahms, Johannes. Vier Ernste Gesänge. Munich: Drei Masken, 1923. Brahms, Johannes. Sonata for Pianoforte and Violin, Op. 78. Hamburg: Simrock, 1897. Brahms, Johannes. Vier Lieder nach Gedichten von Klaus Groth: Regenlied-Zyklus. Munich: Henle, 1997. Hatten, Robert. “The Place of Intertextuality in Music Studies.” The American Journal of Semiotics 3, no. 4 (1985): 69–82. Klein, Michael L. Intertextuality in Western Art Music. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005. Kurtág, György. Hommage à R.  Sch. für Klarinette, Bratsche und Klavier, op. 15/d. Budapest: Editio Musica, 1996. Neuls-Bates, Carol, ed. Women in Music: An Anthology of Source Readings from the Middle Ages to the Present. New York: Harper & Row, 1982. Reich, Nancy B. “Clara Schumann” in Women Making Music, the Western Art Tradition, 1150–1950. Urbana: University of Chicago Press (1986), 249–81. Reich, Nancy B. Clara Schumann: the Artist and the Woman. New York: Cornell University Press, 1985. Reich, Nancy B. “Schumann [née Wieck], Clara.” Oxford Music Online, 20 January, 2001. https://doi.org/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.25152.

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Sallis, Friedemann. “The Genealogy of György Kurtág’s “Hommage à R. Sch”, op. 15d.” Studia Musicologica 43, no. 3–4 (2002): 311–322. Schumann, Clara. Trio in G-Moll für Klavier, Violine und Violoncello, Op. 17. Munich: Wollenweber, 1989. Schumann, Clara. Variationen über ein Thema von Robert Schumann, Op. 20. Leipzig: Breitkopf, n.d. Schumann, Robert. Drei Romanzen, Op. 28. Leipzig: Breitkopf, 1880. Schumann, Robert. Impromptus über ein Thema von Clara Wieck, Op.5. Munich: Henle, 2009. Schumann, Robert. Piano Sonata, Op.11. Leipzig: Breitkopf, 1887. Siegers, Alex. “#IWD2020: An Exciting and More Diverse Future.” Sydney: University of New South Wales. Accessed 5 March 2020. https://www.music. unsw.edu.au/iwd2020-­exciting-­and-­more-­diverse-­future Wieck, Clara. Romance Varié Pour de Piano, Op.3. Paris: Richault, 1897. Wieck, Clara. Quatre Pièces Caractéristiques, Op.5. Hofheim: Hofmeister, 1996. Williams, Natalie. Letters to Clara: Suite for Chamber Septet. Sydney: Australian Music Centre, 2019.

CHAPTER 4

Holding, Handling, Moulding and Setting the Inner Thoughts of another, in Hidden Thoughts I: Do I Matter? Katy Abbott

Hidden Thoughts Hidden Thoughts (2017) for vocal ensemble and chamber ensemble of sixty minutes is a work that journeys into that murky place—the chatter in your head, as dark as it is ridiculous. Hidden Thoughts asks you to consider what confines you. One of the key ideas in the work of Eckhart Tolle is being witness to or observing one’s thoughts which creates space to not being a slave to them. That is, the thinker of the thought is not the thought. The following is an account of setting text derived from a very unusual source—and of my own personal journey, not only compositionally but also as a person, in writing the work. The text for the work is distilled from the answers of over two hundred women, who responded to a confidential, anonymous survey about their

K. Abbott (*) University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 L. Kouvaras et al. (eds.), The Composer, Herself, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23922-9_4

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private thoughts.1 Within the hour-long work the six voices of The Song Company (Sydney), and the six musicians of Syzygy Ensemble (Melbourne, Australia), are each featured as the music shifts between full ensemble textures and numerous solo roles. The concept of Hidden is to survey potential audiences and bring their previously unspoken thoughts into a public forum—in this case—a festival or contemporary classical music setting (and recording). The first iteration (of three currently undergoing development) asks women to express their private thoughts and feelings through an anonymous survey which was submitted to me. I chose which text to include, how to set each text, how to structure each individual thought into a larger narrative that expresses joy, longing and pain and acknowledges loss. During the writing of the work, I had thought I was writing to give voice to those that didn’t have one. But upon reflection, a year after completion of Hidden Thoughts #1, I see there was another motivation. When I walk in public, I am very conscious of the people I walk past and, in particular, their story, unknown to me. I don’t know their inner worlds, the conversations they had this morning, the joy, the pain they feel. But I am aware they carry their story with them, and their thoughts affect their actions. Perhaps I am simply hoping for a better world— through glimpsing an Other’s private pain, we can then be prompted to kindness. Our internal world and life experience influences life events such as choice of partner, how we communicate, how we spend our working life. On a more meta level, these thoughts then collectively shape the way society functions—shaping how generous, fearful or otherwise we are. It is how a community quietly establishes itself. This work, in essence, is based on exploring vulnerability and connection—two states that paradoxically require personal courage to act. The concept aligns with my personal goals of writing music for the everyday person; the, non/musical, old, young, un/educated person. Hidden Thoughts 1: Do I Matter? provides a path to potentially present difficult concepts in a palatable way (through humour, music and anonymity). I wanted to compose a work that was courageous on my part, inspires bravery and integrates audience and musicians through shared experience and

1  The survey was administered via Google Sheet, then emailed to such lists as TSC, Syzygy, my own contacts, University of Melbourne classes, IAWM, and posted on social media sites.

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acknowledgment of the hidden things that shape our life, with the hope of shaping society on a larger scale.

Collecting the Text The text materialised through an online survey I devised, which used a “snowball” effect in distribution. The ensembles sent the survey to their subscribers and newsletter recipients and family, friends and colleagues sent the link to interested people and asked to send it on. Over 200 responses were collated from all over the world: There were four survey questions: . Do you have hidden thoughts and feelings? Tell me what they are. 1 2. What have you learned to be brave about? 3. What would you like to be braver about? 4. Would you like to say anything else about hidden thoughts and/ or courage? Although the people who completed the survey were assured of anonymity in their responses, participants were asked to provide some demographic information: gender, age-group range, country of residence and if they live in an urban or regional area. My aim for the content of Hidden Thoughts 1: Do I Matter? was to have a mix and a cross-representation of thoughts: humorous, confessional, flippant, deeply personal. There were a few themes that presented strongly across the more than 200 responses: grief/loss, body-image, sex, illness, relationships, feeling trapped, children, saying difficult things (such as “I love you” to dear ones), amongst others. I needed to make sure all topics were represented. So, as I read the surveys, I noted down the thoughts that stood out to me,2 representing (eloquently) the topics that many people were thinking.

2  As an experienced composer of art-song and choral works, I have now developed a strong intuitive sense of what I can achieve/add/do with text, particularly if it is not a text that might normally be found in a classical music setting. Crime Scene Investigation (2005, SSA voices, percussion and string orchestra), Words of Wisdom (2003, SSATTB voices), Bundle of Joy (2000, SATB choir), Famous (2007, SA voices and piano) and It Is Just The Heart (2006, song-cycle for soprano and string quartet), all use quirky, non-art texts that enabled a voice or character to explore in this genre.

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Examples of some of the shared reflections that are set in this work across these topics are: • “Oh my god, I have a huge hair on my chin. How did I not see that yesterday?” • “I am ever hopeful that beauty will replace ashes one day.” • “I am afraid that thirty per-cent of my cognitive life has been preoccupied with my body image and of course my body weight.” • “I hate it when people tell me I have a great attitude to life’s hardships. But the fact is, no one wants to hear the truth about how difficult every day can be and how the constancy of illness is slowly grinding me down. It’s like they are congratulating me for breathing.” Selecting which text to set from the deluge of responses I received was challenging. I really had to grapple with this. I chose texts that I thought beautifully captured the sentiment expressed and that was representative of complex ideas. “Everyone says to me it’s time to move on, are you still sad? But that’s the thing about grief and loss; if one stays with it, one is wallowing, stuck, not moving on, needing anti-depressants.” Grief should not have a timeline and setting that particular text was a very emotional experience for me. Sad! Once I had the appropriate musical material to express this text, I felt as though I could let it go because I had musically done justice to the thought. I could move on and let it “sit” there with me—the thought and I became friends. I didn’t need to wrestle with where it was going to sit in my life—which for me is part of the uncomfortable-ness of the composing process. In my experience, a piece stays with you for life, and so this thought and I can go through life together but I don’t have to hold it anymore—I have given it a place to sit in the world. This inadvertent method of absorbing, holding and placing the words in my work (and life) is something I often experience but in Do I Matter?  was particularly acute. The process was aided through the rehearsal period with The Song Company and Syzygy Ensemble; watching them experience the piece first-­ hand was another step in letting it go and handing it over. Early on in the process, I needed to determine the level of integrity to which I wanted to answer for this work. It is easy to change the meaning of the text (deliberately or inadvertently), depending on the context in which it is set. I decided to try very hard not do this. One exception is in the setting of “Can you not like yourself as I like you?” where I set the line between the three male voices in a canonic setting. Towards the end, I

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Fig. 4.1  Hidden Thoughts 1: Do I Matter?, Katy Abbott, movement 8, bars 63–73

fragmented the text and had all the three voices sing in rhythmic unison “I like you.” Fragmenting a line is a very typical technique in vocal composition, but in this instance, it does detract a little from the original expression of frustration on the part of the author. I certainly altered the focus from a question to a statement but felt the integrity of the intention remained and was perhaps amplified (Fig. 4.1).

Emotional and Musical Processes There are two aspects to handling the text: the practical and musical aspects as well as the experience of holding and moulding the text. Although discussed in these two separate ways, the experience of working with the musical and emotional elements of the text was one where they informed each other. My experience of reading through the surveys was one of joy—but I also found it confronting at times. Women were generous and very open and vulnerable with their thoughts. I had to learn how to sit with uncomfortable thoughts. To sit with them, absorb them enough to understand them so I could set them, yet not take on the emotional burden they contained. I needed to practise empathy but also to balance that with some emotional distance in order to set them with the intention set by the author of the statement. It’s easier to sit with other people’s difficulties than with your own. But I had to sit with it alone. The thoughts were given to me in confidence and I had to feel and process them in order to set them. I appreciated the depth of vulnerability in the responses. At times it was painful. Not in a dramatic way or in a way that took something from me. It only added to me. Singing somebody’s painful words is profound. Sitting with a sentence for some hours or a whole day, or carrying it around in my body with the music I’ve written for it. Sitting with five or ten words and making sure they are right. Sometimes the release for me was to cry (for the author of the thought); other times it worked to keep the angst and not release it but to transfer that emotion into the music.

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On a practical/musical note, this project went a step beyond the usual in text-setting, comprising the woman-on-the-street’s darkest, deepest, most cherished, private sentiments, not from a place of art, but a place of life. Therefore, what was the role of the twelve soloists—which include not only three female but also three male voices? I was mindful of keeping texture relevant and interesting and keeping the ears and mind of the audience engaged. For example, I am often asked in presentations on this work why I used the male voices to sing thoughts by women. In Hidden Thoughts 1: Do I Matter?, the singers act as narrators, not personifying the women themselves. And although the thoughts are from women exclusively, and some of the statements read very much as a woman-only experience, many of the thoughts themselves are a shared human experience and can be equally effectively interpreted by male or female voice. I see the narrators as being able to convey the subjective contribution of the thoughts into the composition and this adds poignancy to the text. Further, sometimes the juxtaposition of a male voice singing something distinctly female can provide a different platform for the thought to be interpreted or heard/processed by the audience. Men may well find these experiences and sentiments challenging and affecting too, but males are typically not encouraged to voice or explore such emotions. Hearing the male voice sing these statements renders them beyond gender and, in turn, inflects the way the audience perceives the meaning of the words. For example, in answer to the survey question, “What have you learned to be brave about?” the baritone sings the response, “Being a single Mum.” Elsewhere, the bass voice sings, “It’s getting to that stage that I’m afraid to admit my lack of experience. Sweet sixteen and never been kissed is kinda cute but twenty-six is a little pathetic!” The male voice in this instance amplifies the light-heartedness inherent in this also emotional angst-ridden thought. The juxtaposition adds to the poignancy of the text, and raises possible  uneven societal stereotyping across the two genders with regard to sexual experience. Many of the thoughts were given in humour or with a sense of wryness even though they were serious in nature. One woman in the thirty-threeto fifty-five-year-old demographic appends to her contribution, “just head to the bar and order a drink.” Although I didn’t include the first part of her sentence in the work, I did try and keep to her sense of wry humour having it follow other similarly emotionally heavy thoughts. This allowed me to add sophistication through musical and text that had double meaning,

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“Do I matter? Am I loved? Does he love me? What if I am left with regret? Just head to the bar and order a drink.” These thoughts remind us that our experiences are sophisticated, complex and multi-dimensional. That life is messy. And as humans we respond to life in many varied healthy, unhealthy, thought-out, rash, and multi-layered ways. “I would have a huge sense of relief if my mother were to die.” This woman was brave enough to write these words and I am convinced the audience would hear it differently—as for all text—in a musical context than if these were uttered over a catch-up coffee with a friend. How does the musical setting of these words change the audience response? It is the role of music and the arts to delve into an expression of the human condition and we all interpret the musical delivery in our own ways. It can be a powerful tool for healing and all sorts of purposes. I found it therapeutic myself. Sometimes when I’m doing hard things, I relay some of the thoughts through my head while I do the hard things and they help me: as one of the responders declared: “I am stronger, smarter, prettier than I realise.” These women gave me a gift in their words. Some were difficult to hold. Some I carried as a burden and some I didn’t. It was more than a piece of music for me; much more three-dimensional. Challenging. Holistic. Because the nuts and bolts were made up of my own skill-strengths—writing for voice, setting quirky text, working with two ensembles whom I consider “my people”—whom I know really well, how they play/sing. I was safe in all those things which allowed me to take on the risks in this project. There’s always the potential for it to be naff or not meaningful. It is a calculated risk. I draw on my strengths to take the risks.

The Role of the Instruments It was important to me from the outset that the role of the ensembles be equal, in relation to each other and also the narrative of the work. I was working with twelve experienced soloists and chamber musicians. I did not want to place a vocal ensemble in an accompanying role to the instrumental ensemble (Syzygy Ensemble). So while I featured doubling between instruments and voices in the work (see examples below), I balanced this with textural independence between the musical forces. I hope by doubling the instrumental lines with voices, and imitating vocal lines, that this impresses the words of that text more deeply to an audience: repetition enforces semantic clarity of the expressed idea. One example is shown below. The text, “You are boring me. Your kid’s behavior

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is a reflection of your parenting. I wish you cared more about the world,” is sung by all voices. Their line has glissando in unison on the word “behavior,” echoed firstly by flute and then by clarinet. At this point, the melody is quite familiar to the audience as it is a reiteration of a previous melody in previous movement, but this time has a different instrumentation, so I could afford to adjust and play with it. Also, the glissandi by the flute and clarinet add a comedic quality to the narrative phrase which is intended to amplify the phrase. I am aware it is in the nature of humans to zone-out from certain ideas, sounds or sights in order to absorb other new material in our lives. If you live near a busy road for example, you tune-out the traffic noise after a time for example. Audiences can also tune out to ideas or sounds if they think they know or understand them and I find this a constant consideration in my consciousness as I compose. I am asking how can I keep the audience interested and listening and not tuning out thinking about what they will have for dinner. The melody mentioned above, is utilised in four vignettes (movements) in the work yet I used different words, moods, tempi and orchestrations to not only best set the text but also keep the audience engaged and the orchestrational textural variety adds to this also (Fig. 4.2). Another example of instrumental lines doubling and imitating vocal lines is in the movement “Brave Enough” also titled “What would you like to be braver about?” In Fig.  4.3 the flute and bass clarinets echo the

Fig. 4.2  Hidden Thoughts 1: Do I Matter?, Katy Abbott, movement 8, bars 53–60 

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Fig. 4.3  Hidden Thoughts 1: Do I Matter?, Katy Abbott, movement 9, bars 50–57

Fig. 4.4  Hidden Thoughts 1: Do I Matter?, Katy Abbott, movement 2, ‘Teabag’ for solo cello

vocalists’ line: “…and tell my Mum I love her and not to hurt her. And tell my Dad I love him—not pretending nothing happens.” The flute doubles with the baritone on “and tell my Mum I love her” and then echoes on the text “and not to hurt her.” Although the score is full of examples of doubling and highlighting, movement two shows another form of doubling (Fig. 4.4). The cello follows the pitch line of the spoken words “A teabag? Sorry. Not acceptable!” It was initially intended for the cello to play this line whilst a vocalist spoke; however, in workshop stage, when I requested the cellist have a “try” playing and speaking, it was immediately apparent it would be easier (and definitely more fun) for the cellist to both “say and play.” The instrumental sections both within movements and also instrumental movements on their own provide an escape or break from the text. This provides space away from the text to allow the audience to reflect and

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absorb what they have just heard and to prepare for what is to come. Also, I think of the instrumental sections as a palate cleanser; a little course between meals that allows the senses to refresh. I also wanted to give Syzygy Ensemble a chance to play together in tutti and reductive combinations, to balance my affording the Song Company an ensemble tutti, a capella. This worked/was intended for both a sense of fun and for structural purposes. “Crazy dreams… a silver thread” is for instrumental sextet. The music here is upbeat, gritty-yet-pretty which collates some previous musical material but interprets it in a new way. For example, the flute has some strong and memorable melodies yet they are “distorted” through use of fortissimo flutter tongue with the instruction violent. The intention of this movement came after I went to a progressive-rock-thrash-metal concert for the first time. I was impressed by the musicality which oozed from the stage which also had a clear and strong intention of violence to it (Fig. 4.5). The instrumentalists also participate in communicating the text through the music, with further instances of speaking lines (as a narrator, as per Teabag above). The occasional spoken texts repeat or pre-empt phrases which were or are to be sung, or add new text to a vocal texture. The instrumentalists are asked to sing the final movement of the work. In octave unison, the twelve musicians sing a variation of the key motive for “Do I Matter? Am I Loved?” This time the text is reversed and they sing “Am I loved? Do I Matter?” I was mindful of ending a sixty-minute work in a suitably meaningful way following quite an onslaught of emotional and musical material. Including all musicians in unison on one of the key themes of the surveys and the music drew everyone together, in a way, which is one of the deeper purposes for my project (Fig. 4.6). Another way that the intersection between vocal line and accompaniment is deliberately blurred is in the trance-like or dream-like sections I tried to create in the work. These musical sections aimed to do two things: firstly, allow the musicians a certain degree of contained improvisations over themes and given texts in order to bring something further of

Fig. 4.5  Hidden Thoughts 1: Do I Matter?, Katy Abbott, movement 13, Crazy Dreams A Silver Thread, bars 1–3

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Fig. 4.6  Hidden Thoughts  1: Do I Matter?, Katy Abbott, movement 16: Do I Matter? (reprise) bars 1–5

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themselves to the interpretation of the work, and secondly to provide space for the audience to reflect on material already presented. The texts for the improvisations are notated in boxes within the score and singers are asked to improvise using one or more texts from the box. Vocalists are also instructed to improvise over previous and current musical material from the work. The trance-like nature provides a safe musical zone where nothing too challenging is presented to the audience, which allows them to therefore focus on the words and meaning of the words at this juncture in the work. There is higher purpose intended here—the need to bring composer—performer—audience all together. Mutual trust is one way of achieving this. As composer, I trust the responders to give me their heartfelt thoughts, they trust me with them, I trust the performers, and the audience then trusts both the myself and the performers. In all the Hidden Thoughts works in the series, there is room in the score for contributions from that night’s audience. In Hidden Thoughts 1, the audience is invited to submit their own hidden thoughts (anonymously and by choice), some of which will be included in the performances. One of the trance-like sections in the work is able to hold these thoughts.3

Conclusion The questions I set in my survey are about courage, and I’ve been profoundly inspired and touched by what people have endured, what they’ve learned to be braver about and equally what they’d like to be braver about. I find stories of personal fortitude inspiring. Part of the process of writing the work meant I had to ‘hold’ these expressed musings in order to set them to music in a way that brought them justice. Holding a thought means reading, understanding, trying to empathise with it. To absorb it. The writing of this piece has changed me as a person. I think I frame myself differently. When Laila Engle (flautist, Syzygy Ensemble) commented on what it was like to experience this work in rehearsal and recording, she says: Rehearsing Hidden Thoughts was a powerful emotional experience. I was particularly struck by the vocal setting of the text that shifts effortlessly from highly charged tragic confessions to light-hearted,

3  In other iterations of the series the immediate audience’s hidden thoughts will be incorporated in different ways.

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tongue-in-cheek social commentary. The themes of the work are highly relatable and I can’t wait to see how audiences respond.4 Usually when I set text, I choose text that really resonates with me in some way; maybe it makes me laugh, speaks to some deeper meaning and something I believe the audience would want to hear. As noted above, in this work I had to hold the text—but the text sometimes also held me. Courage breeds courage and perhaps vulnerability breeds vulnerability. Perhaps I’m less judgemental than I used to be as a result of composing this work. Perhaps I’m more vulnerable and courageous for reading the thoughts people gave me. But I noticed that courage and vulnerability were the attributes I admired when I read the thoughts. Even if the thoughts were frivolous—I admired the fact that they were uttered. I think I’ve learned to be more “gently” real in my own life through this project. There’s a greater need for people to be considerate of each other. Think about the average day: as we leave home people put on their work mask, footy mask, their “I’m okay” mask. I’m conscious of the masks that people wear. What if that woman who experiences domestic violence at home doesn’t have to put on a work mask? How might that change the society in which we live? I’m conscious that everyone who walks down the street has a story and is carrying their own thoughts, trying to get through the day—holding their thoughts. The text in this work is all the more acute because it is the layperson’s thoughts, not the imaginary text of an artist. These ideas have somehow fed into this work. We don’t need to wear our hearts on our sleeves but we need to respond with kindness to—or at least an awareness of the human behind—the person we see on the street. Perhaps the role of this work is to promote an understanding of this. It could be the very person we are sitting next to now.

References Abbott, Katy. Hidden Thoughts I: Do I Matter? Sydney: Australian Music Centre, 2017. Tolle, Eckhart. The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment., San Francisco: New World Library, 2004.

4

 Laila Engle, Personal Communication, May 2020.

CHAPTER 5

Walking the Line: Emancipating the  Complex Female Voice in Recent Operas by Missy Mazzoli Missy Mazzoli

Introduction New York-based composer, Missy Mazzoli is one of the most established composers of her generation. She studied with some of America’s most influential composers, with her works performed and recorded by leading ensembles across the globe. At the age of thirty-nine she has composed three operas and is currently working on her fourth and fifth, including a Metropolitan Opera commission programmed for the 2025/2026 season. We spoke about her recent works and her passion for bringing stories of women to the operatic stage. Missy’s music is deeply connected to time and place, revealing a composer authentically concerned with the lives and

In interview with Natalie Williams, 4 June 2020 (New York / Melbourne (via Skype)) M. Mazzoli (*) Brooklyn, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 L. Kouvaras et al. (eds.), The Composer, Herself, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23922-9_5

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stories of her characters. Our discussion uncovered the multiple layers of her working approach, giving insight into a prominent and influential contemporary musical voice. Natalie Williams (NW): Missy, you are currently working on your fourth opera and are in preparation for your fifth for The Metropolitan Opera in New York. Can you speak about what this genre means to you? Missy Mazzoli (MM): My fourth opera, The Listeners (2021), is for Opera Philadelphia in a co-commission with the Norwegian National Opera. The librettist is Royce Vavrek working in conjunction with playwright Jordan Tannahill.1 The opera will be directed by Lileana Blain-­Cruz. I have always been attracted to the collaborative nature of opera; it brings an opportunity to make big statements, to respond to topics that resonate with people at this moment. It is more difficult to do this with abstract chamber works. Music is the best way I have of engaging with the world, in general, and I find that opera is the most direct vehicle for engagement. All my operas revolve around stories of women in impossible situations. Power is not always given to women from within their society; instead, women must claim power, grab for that power, often in controversial ways. My first opera, Song from the Uproar (2012)2 is about Swiss explorer Isabelle Eberhardt, who challenged late Victorian gender roles and travelled through Africa dressed as a man. In my fourth opera, The Listeners, a female character takes over a cult at the end of the piece. Themes at play here include the role of charismatic leaders and their impact upon American society, the depiction of a woman not in control of her life who is inspired to claim power, and the transformation of that female character into a position of power by the opera’s end; it’s she who is the charismatic leader, she who eventually attains the power. My operas often focus on the stories of women who find their sense of control within their immediate situations, often in a domestic context, when they don’t have social control of the wider world around them. I am interested in opera as the means to explore these social themes. This is a deeply complex issue, the idea of maintaining power with a 1  Pew Centre Arts, “The Listeners, grantees” accessed 2 June 2020, https://www.pewcenterarts.org/grant/listeners. 2  Mazzoli’s operas include Song from the Uproar: The Lives and Deaths of Isabelle Eberhardt (2012) for the Beth Morrison Projects (New York), Breaking the Waves (2016) for Opera Philadelphia, Proving Up (2018) for the Washington National Opera, Opera Omaha and Miller Theatre.

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household or a relationship context. Breaking the Waves (2016),3 is based upon the idea of a woman finding herself and claiming power within a community circle that includes church, a husband, family and God. Every part of that community is telling the woman what to do, leading to a totally impossible situation. Opera provides the huge platform and scale to engage with these complex issues. NW: Can you expand upon your choice of women in impossible situations as a theme in your work? Why is this an important topic for you? MM: Not enough explorations of complex female characters exist within the operatic literature. Female characters do of course appear within opera, some even depicted with great strength, but even strong characters can be one-dimensional. The majority of historical operas were composed by white men, therefore we are missing the essential voices of women and minorities in the literature. Many nuanced characters are missing from the operatic tradition. It’s hard to understand why these voices are missing, especially when women are often the stars of opera, the “divas!” There are so many established opera singers, women at the top of their game, like Christine Goerke and Nicole Heaston, and I am interested in writing parts especially for them. These singers can handle a wide emotional landscape and I want to use them and their voices to bring life to these complex female characters on stage. The genesis of my approach is drawn from my own experiences, my own life, and from my family. Women hold many realities in our minds at once and are often caught within life situations where they bite the hand that feeds them, through no fault of their own. A razor thin line of acceptable behavior shapes the life of many women, and we’re always falling off that line in one direction or another. That is what I aim to dramatise in my works. My operas are not true stories in themselves, but rather, highly dramatised and extreme versions of stories based upon real events. My operas explore situations that women are faced with every day – and I use complex characters, strong female singers, and my own lived experience to depict these complex lives. My third opera, Proving Up (2018) is based on a short story by Karen Russell, about the lives of American homesteaders in the nineteenth century. My fourth opera, The Listeners (2021), tells the story of a woman pulled into a cult, which eventually falls apart. In each opera, 3  Mazzoli’s Breaking the Waves is based upon a 1996 film directed by Lars Von Trier; Breaking the Waves, directed by Lars Von Trier (October Films, 1996).

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the situations are real, but the personal stories within them are fictional. When writing The Listeners I did a lot of research into actual cults in America and noticed many commonalities in the way they inevitably fall apart. In many cases there are sexual scandals, but there is always (what I call) a “Labyrinth” moment, which I take from the 1986 Jim Henson film, starring David Bowie. There’s a moment when the character of Sarah states “you have no power over me” after which everything collapses. I knew immediately that I wanted to portray that moment in The Listeners; it’s an important instance of claimed power for the main female character. NW: That scene also stands out for its analogy of “broken glass” – first Sarah smashes a crystal ball held by the Goblin King (Jareth, played by David Bowie), then she smashes the glass wall of the ballroom and escapes back into the Labyrinth. From that point on, she solves the problems of the Labyrinth. Can you speak about your fifth opera, commissioned by The Metropolitan Opera, New York? MM: Currently I’m preparing to work on my fifth opera. I am in discussions with the director and the librettist, Royce Vavrek, is about to start writing. The work will be an adaptation of George Saunders’ 2017 novel, Lincoln in the Bardo. We are in creative development for this new work, while I am composing The Listeners (fourth opera). The Listeners was due to premiere in Norway in March 2021, by the Norwegian National Opera, but was postponed due to the Covid-19 pandemic. NW: Can you expand upon your affinity for opera as your preferred vehicle for the topical aspects of your works. Why do you feel drawn to the operatic genre, in particular, to best tell these stories? MM: Opera is an inherently dramatic artform – it is a captivating genre, works can last an entire evening, up to five or six hours, and each opera immerses an audience within its own world. The necessary investigations into character and the memorisation of every role produces a very visceral, active performance. Singers must engage deeply with the operas they perform; it is the nature of the beast. I also find that people respond more readily to larger-scale works; my operas are talked about much more than my other works. People can focus on so many aspects of an opera – the story, the sets, the acting, the music – there are many ways to access the genre. The conversations about my operas are the conversations I had been dying to have about my music in general  – deep discussions about how music can help us access hard questions about our world. Music is the language through which I want to engage with the whole world, and I can do that best through the operatic medium.

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NW: Do you take inspiration from the Gesamtkunstwerke of operatic history? How do you view your work as part of a larger tradition? MM: I originally got into opera through watching music videos on television. As a child of the 1980s and 1990s, I loved watching MTV, and from MTV, I became interested in multi-media work. I came to opera through my early exposure to television, then came to know the wider stage tradition. I love being connected to the historical tradition, I identify with the word “composer,” as an open-ended term; a “music maker.” The operatic tradition has problems, the exclusion of so many voices is one of them, stereotyped characters and slanted perspectives is another. That said, I have learned so much from historical operas, works by Britten, Verdi, Puccini, Purcell – these pieces feel very “alive” and visceral, even today. Humans are all dealing with the same issues of heartbreak, sudden death of a loved one, betrayal and more  – there is a universality and a timelessness to these experiences. NW: How have your operas evolved over time? Do you see a path, themes or patterns through your body of work? MM: Every opera demands its own universe, just as every character demands their own sound world. Everything vibrates within its own certain space. My goal with each opera is to do something different than the last opera, and this is a conscious choice for me. I do feel that I’ve refined the process of connecting with my characters – I know how to “talk” to them and create a world for them within the opera. I’m getting better at this with each opera I write and as a result the characters emerge as more “defined” for the audience. NW: Do you engage philosophically with your characters? MM: In every moment of an opera a composer must ask the central questions: 1) Why is this person saying these particular words, and 2) what inspired them to sing them instead of speak them? I’m committed to asking those questions at every moment and to translating the answer into a musical world. My job is to know what the characters are thinking, even when they themselves can’t articulate these thoughts. Opera creates layers of subtext through music; no other art form does this in this particular way. Complex female characters can be singing, thinking, doing, wearing (etc.) conflicting things at the same time, and these conflicts illuminate something essentially true or vivid about this situation. In opera, the composer is in control of all these elements.

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NW: That is a large creative weight to carry. By considering these complex elements of character design, do you feel emotionally drained when writing? MM: I am alone with these characters for a very long time, which can be a lonely creative process. Operas can take three to five years to write, so I can have years where I am the only person engaged with these characters. This can be isolating, and hard! But I have created an opera “family” around me of collaborators, singers and writers; I find it psychologically easier to work now that I have created a circle of artistic support. I have used the same librettist for all my operas, Royce Vavrek, who is like family to me. Royce and I are in constant contact and have dialogues and working connections on many levels, and I think this open communication is the key to our success. NW: How is opera filling the character gaps of the missing voices you mentioned earlier, both in your works and within the field? MM: My own work focuses on portraying women caught in impossible situations. I want to bring to the operatic stage the experience of being a woman and walking the thin behavioral lines expected of us. In opera, music drives the drama and the composer plays a pivotal role in shaping the characters, so I feel it is my responsibility and my privilege to create space for underrepresented viewpoints and to portray humanity in a nuanced and diverse way. The wider opera field has made some steps in this direction. Recently the Metropolitan Opera (New York) commissioned two female composers, myself and Jeanine Tesori. These were the first actual commissions for women since the inception of the company (137 years ago). This feels bittersweet; since I was fifteen years old, I have dreamt of writing an opera for The Met, and this commission was one of the great honours of my life, but I can’t ignore their history of gender and racial inequality. That said, change can happen very fast and my approach is to both work within the system to encourage presenters of my work towards diversity, and also to create my own little utopias through programs I start myself, outside of existing institutions. We first need to truly acknowledge the dearth of women and people of colour in the field, measured by the annual statistics released by programming bodies – which are still in the single digits for percentage of works by women and people of colour commissioned and performed. In general, performing companies aren’t addressing problems at the roots. Young creative women and people of colour, in their teens, aren’t encouraged to enter the field, so we must ensure support at a much younger age.

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I would like to see companies addressing the pipeline problem and encourage young women to enter the field of composition, as well as programming existing work by women and composers of colour. NW: We have a long road to travel before reaching this kind of equality. What do you feel would help it along? MM: Women deserve models who look like them; teachers, mentors, industry leaders. That mentorship is so helpful for women who aspire to join the profession. Few opportunities exist for women composers in general, and there is still a bias away from hiring them as artistic leaders. As I mentioned, I like to work both within the system and outside the system. In 2016, with composer Ellen Reid and with the support of the Kaufman Music Centre, I established a program, Luna Composition Lab, which addresses the lack of opportunities and mentorship for young women. The program finds female-identifying, non-binary and gender nonconforming composers at a young age, from thirteen to nineteen years old, and we develop a relationship to assist their music development during these formative years. Many institutions and companies try to point to the “absence of repertoire by women” as an excuse to avoid programming their work. This is not an excuse. If you look hard enough, you can find plenty of music composed by women, from all eras. But it’s true that women have been discouraged from entering the field for many centuries, in both subtle and overt ways. While we can’t seek absolute gender equality in the historical canon, we must ask the question; what are we doing now for betterment of the field in 100 years’ time? A first step is demanding representation, to have our voices heard, to be seen on concert seasons, for institutions to include music by women in a college teaching syllabus for example. We’re not asking for revisionist history, or an instant 50/50 gender split in all programming of historic repertoire  - we want representation. While my work in Luna Composition Lab is based specifically around gender equality, I believe that mentorship and representation are obvious first steps towards diversity of all kinds. NW: We find that the artistic world (among other industries) is not yet a safe or welcoming place for women to express themselves and succeed professionally, although the situation is slowly changing. By amplifying the voices of complex female characters within your operas, do you expect political backlash for doing so? In other words, do your characters enter a similar world of hostility? MM: It’s true that I would have an easier life it I played it safer. It is possible to have an entire career in music and never rock the boat. I know

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many artists who have done that, and they have fulfilling careers. But speaking for myself, if I take three to five years to write a piece, especially on the large scale of the operatic genre, I want to use this as a platform to achieve lots of things. I want to use the stage as a place to talk about big ideas and have a strong impact. My life goals are to create music which expresses an inner world, to create space for women and minorities to express themselves and their voices, and also to have my own expressive space as a creative artist. My single-mindedness allows me to feel free and be outspoken on these issues. I receive a lot of criticism that my work makes the critics and the audience uncomfortable – that’s the point! Operas are not meant to calm an audience down; they are meant to stir things up that we don’t usually want to talk about. People don’t always know how to express their discomfort, and asking audiences to confront difficult situations (within artworks) is a tricky endeavour. I also find that many people who experience my work are not accustomed to women creating art which is violent or dark. After Breaking the Waves was premiered, I received much negative criticism. People couldn’t believe a woman would write “something like this” (a dark piece), and instead believed that women should write “a certain type” of piece. In this way I was walking a thin line of expected behavior; some critics, having before heard an opera by a woman, seemed to believe that a female composer “should” have written something that achieves the impossible. They imagined an opera that makes everyone happy and comfortable, satisfies all topical themes, is appropriate for families yet still pushes boundaries (but not too far!), is better than all operas by the composer’s male peers, that doesn’t rock the boat but still wins the Pulitzer Prize. In essence, this criticism sets female composers up to fail. NW: How do you view the responsibility of the large scale of opera? Does the weight and size of the operatic project match the impact level of your work in the field? MM: Operas are typically big and expensive productions, costing hundreds of thousands of dollars, involving hundreds of people, and years of work. While the operatic form has an inherent grandeur, my work does not always depend upon budget or stage size. My third opera, Proving Up, I wrote to be scalable. The work was about the American dream and the myths and origins behind that dream, and I wanted the piece to be transportable. One performance was done by a small opera company in Kansas, outside, on a shooting range, and many productions have been done by college students. My first opera, Song from the Uproar, has been performed

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by several small, independent companies, including Chicago Fringe Opera. I would like my works to exist everywhere they can – both onstage at The Met, and also in smaller places. I have the energy and desire to reach out to the world, to step out in the field, unafraid, and to ask tough questions about where and how opera happens. I have a responsibility to make the most of the genre and part of that responsibility lies in getting my compositional message across regardless of venue or budget. NW: What would you like to see from the operatic world in the future, in terms of newly composed works? MM: Here I’ll borrow a phrase from my good friend, conductor Steven Osgood: “we’re in a new, golden age of American opera.” There is so much vibrancy happening to help develop future operas in places like Beth Morrison Projects, Opera America, or the Composing Women Program at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, Australia, that I was privileged to visit in 2018. We need to see a greater diversity of creators – it’s that simple – women and people of colour. Institutions must let these artists come to the table with their own stories. They can’t impose unrealistic expectations, can’t set limits, and can’t dictate topics; they must let everyone bring their own unique ideas to the table. NW: Do you see any trends that we can expect in future works? MM: Young composers are very informed; they are hyper-aware of what’s going on in the field and in the world. In 2019 we had five composition students in Luna Composition Lab; one student wrote a piece titled Peace, another wrote a work about human trafficking, another about a Jewish religious service, another about trauma, and another about ostriches. I saw a huge range of ideas, and a heartfelt creativity in their work. I am very optimistic about the next generation. Creation isn’t always a comfortable endeavour – there exists often a tension or struggle in creative work. The process is difficult, and this is what I like most about the work – if it’s worth doing, it should be hard. Discomfort in the creative process is the very element that makes artistic life worthwhile.

References Kaufman Music Center. Luna Lab. Accessed 7 June, 2020. https://www.kaufmanmusiccenter.org/ftm/luna-­lab/. Madonna, Zoë. “Missy Mazzoli Is The 21st Century’s Gatecrasher of New Classical Music.” NPR Music Features, 16 November, 2018. https://www.npr.org/ 2018/11/16/668403281/missy-­mazzoli-­is-­the-­21st-­centurys-­gatecrasher-­ of-­new-­classical-­music.

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Mazzoli, Missy. Missy Mazzoli. Accessed 2 June, 2020. http://www.missymazzoli.com/. Opera Philadelphia. Missy Mazzoli. Accessed 5 June, 2020. https://www.operaphila.org/whats-­on/on-­stage-­2016-­2017/breaking-­the-­waves/composer/. Pew Center Arts. The Listeners, grantees. Accessed 6 June, 2020. https://www. pewcenterarts.org/grant/listeners. Salazar, David. “Missy Mazzoli & Jeanine Tesori Among Women Whose Operas are Coming to The Met Opera,” Opera Wire, 23 September 2018. https:// operawire.com/missy-­mazzoli-­jeanine-­tesori-­among-­women-­whose-­operas-­ are-­coming-­to-­the-­met-­opera/. Sydney Conservatorium of Music. Composing Women. Accessed 7 June, 2020. https://www.sydney.edu.au/music/industry-­and-­community/community-­ engagement/composing-­women.html. Von Trier, Lars, director. Breaking The Waves. October Films, 1996. 2 hours, 39 minutes.

CHAPTER 6

Composing with, Composition by: A Set of Compositional Practices Catherine Milliken

Introduction This chapter presents my reflections on the changing role of the composer today. The research has evolved through a personal reflection on compositional processes around my work Earth Plays  (2015) for voice and orchestra. It is the second essay in a series I have written about democratic processes and collective outcomes.1 These processes produced scenarios where different types of compositional agency emerged—ranging from more socially engaged work and shared authorship to solo compositions. It is also a sharing of general thoughts about the breadth of approaches to compositional agency carried out by composers today. Questions have 1  Catherine Milliken, “Democracy and Collective Composition,” Darmstädter Beiträge zur Neuen Musik. Band 25, edited by Michael Rebhahn & Thomas Schäfer (Mainz: Schott, 2021).

C. Milliken (*) Berlin, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 L. Kouvaras et al. (eds.), The Composer, Herself, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23922-9_6

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arisen throughout my research in this respect: how can one best share and distribute the action, the making, and the compositional process between artists, participants and audience? How can we share our expertise with others to make music together? What sort of music does this approach produce? Can we expect that more socially-driven works, where the agenda is the process and not only the performance, will still be perceived as art?

The Composer’s Role Historically, western classical composition and performance requires clear roles for audience and performers. One can argue, and indeed it has been, that listening to or reading musical works constitutes its own form of performative action on the part of the audience. Nevertheless, in traditional concert situations, the roles often remain separated: the one active, the other passive; the one placed on stage, the other seated in the concert hall. Theatre makers and visual artists are perhaps more accustomed than musicians to promoting socially conscious dialogue between spectators and performers. The Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn, for example, has consistently committed to creating work for what he terms a “non exclusive public,” by making art in public spaces.2 In an interview surrounding the 2017 opening of his “Gramsci Monument” in New York, Hirschhorn describes his role unequivocally as an artist in the light of possible antagonism or cynicism towards his projects: It is always decisive to act as artist—which means with confidence in art, in what art can do and what art must do. I must act with confidence, with the real strength and real forces of art. I am not acting as politician or as social worker. My mission is to do an artwork because this is my only competence. This excludes any cynicism, because to do a work of art in public space requires humility, total engagement and belief in the constitutive power of art.3

2  Veronica Simpson, “Thomas Hirschhorn: The Gramsci Monument, Like All Monuments, is Made for Eternity,“Studio International, 15 February 2017, https://www.studiointernational. com/index.php/thomas-hirschhorn-interview-the-gramsci-monument-is-made-for-eternity. 3  Simpson, “Thomas Hirschhorn,” 2017.

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Recently, however, we can witness a greater shifting, a greater flexibility in the roles of composers and a deeper commitment to opening our places of art-making to include the public in the creative space. Collaborations between myself, participants (who are not professional musicians) and the places and communities they live in, have also become central concerns for my work as a composer. The main thrust of this chapter will reflect on works which stemmed from the above-mentioned Earth Plays but which all manifested different forms of collaboration, with different processes of composition. I will also explore some of the challenges I encountered in the collaborations mentioned above, particularly around modes of sharing the compositional process and inevitable questions arising about the artistic value of a socially integrated artistic practice.

Where Is the Audience? In 2019, I attended a performance at the Venice Biennale German Pavilion entitled “Faust” by Anne Imhof. It was a four-hour long immersive performance for spectator and performers, featuring performers perched under the ceiling, under the glass floor, peering into space, sometimes singing and moving, sometimes evocatively and mysteriously, sometimes matter-of-factly. They were seemingly aware of their role as performers, merging surprisingly with the public to then suddenly take on their own role. The fabric of contemporary music has changed. Considering how this kind of music is normally perceived, how can we can freshly listen, receive, and participate as performers and spectators alike? Uncertainty may arise: where is the line, the traditional divide we are accustomed to? We no longer follow the unbending, trusted parameters of concertising. Entrusting the audience with the freedom, for example, to move during performances, or even simply to organise the staging and the sound outside of a direct frontal experience, presents new experiences for many listeners. Many works have, in recent years, played with the myriad possibilities of reshaping these hierarchies. Two favourites that have influenced my own thinking are “Quodlibet” by Emmanuel Nunes, 1991 (which features two ensembles playing as soloists in constant movement around the audience), and “Inside-Out” by Rebecca Saunders (2003), a choreographed installation (together with Sascha Waltz Dance Company) which shifts the traditions of spectator placement whereby we as audience members move throughout the performance spaces of the venue, choosing our own focus, and thus organising our listening.

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Thinking back to my experience at the Venice Biennale, I feel that the world of participatory visual art asks questions that musicians, and especially composers, could also be interested to address. If the line between artist/composer and that of spectator become less distinct, can one change the way contemporary music is perceived or received? In my work I’m compelled to blur the line between artist and spectator. As it becomes more flexible, breaking down the divide creates a sometimes magical ambiguity—where is the line, the divide? Is it safe or unsafe? The opening of the parameters of time, spatiality, and the changing roles of the audience and artist are all new vantage points from which to regard our creative and artistic work. How to make such works? What preparation is necessary, what research, and are such works still received as works of art?

Collaborative Creation and Participation This opening of the division between audience and artist invites the inclusion of the otherwise classically solitary profession of composition into a relational social fabric or network. The sociologist Nicolas Bourriaud refers to relational art within the visual arts as being “a set of artistic practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private space.”4 I would extend this definition to describe similar sets of musical and compositional practices. Both for the audience and artist, for the composer and listener, this more recent contemporary acquiring of vantage points of listening and agency in a relational setting, brings a new potential in experiencing music and making music together. In my long experience of making and creating with people untrained in music and in a context of social relations (and often in disadvantaged or distressed communities), I have experienced great reciprocity. It is my belief that during such processes, we are all learning from one another. This has caused me to question my own reasons for composing, and affected why I compose, and who and what for.

4  Nicolas Bourriau, Relational Aesthetics, translated by Simon Pleasance, Fronza Woods and Mathieu Copeland (Dijon: Les Presses du Réel, 2002).

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The Continuum One of the most helpful concepts for me viewing the possible paths to collaboration and therefore perhaps “joining” the various compositional routes as a composer is that of the “continuum.” On one end of the spectrum are the traditionally conceived works where the sole artistic responsibility lies with the composer. At the other end is the opening of the compositional process, to include the set of artistic practices proposed by Bourriaud, and including democratic decision making and collaborative pooling of ideas and approaches. Once it is clear where we are on the continuum, once we become aware of our collaborators and begin to enjoy the “we-ness,” it becomes easier to relinquish the control of the sole composer and to share authorship while still lending a hand in providing knowledge sets and skills if needed. The notion of shared authorship and the action of composing together can be described as  collaborative and democratic, constituting an act of activism in its own right.

Earth Plays: The Beginnings and After Life In 2014 I was offered an orchestral commission by the Musica Viva section of the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, Germany. The central theme was inspired by places I had visited, whereby I imagined human endeavour to be etched as an acoustic memory of voices past into the surrounding earth and stone; imagined messages etched over time. Although seemingly esoteric, the idea for the first movement was formed after an actual visit to the Þingvellir National Park in Iceland, the site of the first European courts of law. During my visit I felt as if the words of the callers reciting the laws of the land resounded in the layers of rock reaching for miles along the tectonic fissures which mark the surrounds. Movements II and IV were also inspired by other places I had visited: Epidauros in Greece and the Radio City Music Hall in New York. Movement III began in Japan with the project Messages for You. The impact of this truly inspirational project stayed with me reaching far into the grain of my compositional process, nurturing further works in turn.

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Messages for You and Akiko Iwasaki In 2011, in the aftermath of the Great Earthquake and Tsunami along the Eastern coast of Japan, I was invited by the organisation Future Labo and their director Kayoko Iemura, to create a participatory event for local community musical groups in the prefecture of Iwate. I arrived to find a community dealing with grief and exhaustion, yet I was able to meet with local choirs and create songs and sounds that reflected their yearning for spring, for better times. During subsequent visits over five years, I met with local school wind bands. We improvised together and used movement and voice as well as instruments to explore various possibilities of presenting messages they had composed. This was quite exciting as the wind band musicians had not improvised before together and the experience resulted in a pact to try out a new concert format together. The format was given a name, a “HappiOki” which is an informal Japanese term, perhaps taken from English to mean a somewhat informal presentation (Fig. 6.1).

Fig. 6.1  The wind group begins the HappiOki, installed around the garden at the Hojuji Temple of Kamaishi, Japan

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The performance took place in 2015 in the local Buddhist temple for friends and family. It began with the wind group outside gently weaving brass calls with the sound of the temple bell rung by Satoshi Nojima, the Hojuji Temple’s priest. The event itself was a relaxed musical and choreographed performance consisting of messages of encouragement and empathy using movement, voices and light. The audience was invited to join at some points, clapping and singing. There was the use of video and moving lights showing written messages chosen by the participants—words such as “Mirai” (future) or “Yuuki” (courage). There were also spoken messages by community leaders. One leader in particular, Akiko Iwasaki, a local hotelier, played a large role in introducing us to the various musical communities in the town as well as creating the text for the third movement of Earth Plays. Messages in general played an extremely important part in everyone’s lives at the time of the Tsunami. Messages posted on boards at the local rescue centres were often the only way for families to reunite and people left messages pinned on boards in public places wishing everyone “ganbare” (courage, do your best). Akiko Iwasaki gave daily lectures about the extent of the Tsunami in her town. She is a born storyteller and was able to convey the chilling damage of the catastrophe to her guests with a view to keeping awareness for the needs of the township and perhaps also helping generate city projects. She supported and welcomed Messages for You as an opportunity for various communities in the town to meet in a supportive, enjoyable way, sharing reflections, musical moments and their good wishes for each other. She asked me for a personal workshop to create her text for the performance. We worked on sound and movement, and through this she selected key words as well as finding a pulse which she would entrust to the audience as a pace of deliverance for her words. The words were “Umi mo, Yama mo, kata mo,” reiterating her love for the sea and mountains, “Mirai, minna ga mirai desu,” meaning to consider the future, the future for all, and “Kazuko:” for Akiko-san it meant, not living alone but with family, and finally, “Ikiru anoshi, inochi wo moraimashita,” meaning that Akiko-­ san, who was actually swept under by a Tsunami wave whilst fleeing, survived and received another chance at life. Her enthusiasm and desire to communicate these thoughts into a type of sung and spoken rhythm led me to incorporate her rhythmic responses into the composition of the third movement of Earth Plays. Akiko-san’s contributions became part of the musical language. In the section where I

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set her texts, I used sparse clear musical forces, scored for strings and percussion, and material which relied on each individual string player gently shaping their parts. For me this section was a form of remembering the nights of listening in solitude to the waves on the Japanese coastline, remembering Akiko San’s daily stories of the Tsunami, her near-death experience and the joy of life she seemed to impart to all she met. The performative experience together with the public listening and participating in Messages for You at the HappiOki presentation, inspired other works that were performed in quite different places and circumstances. At Lautstark, Austria’s Klangspuren festival in 2016, at a course on composition for young musicians, I introduced the Message Song to the children and other musical leaders. In response, we created a whole performance of the Austrian children’s own messages to the world. The children also learnt the Message Song in Japanese which we filmed and sent back to the Tsuing Choir in Kamaishi which had composed the original song performed at the HappiOki for Messages for You.

Earth Plays Movement III and Beyond to Earth Plays V Collaborating with the wind bands, the choirs and Ms. Akiko Iwasaki, among others, provided personal connections and experiences, which I could incorporate into other works. I took many photographs of lost objects whilst travelling through the Iwate Prefecture at the same time as the Messages for You project, which resulted in a graphic scored work called “Memorial” in memory of those lost during the Tsunami. This work was performed by Ensemble Modern in Tokyo and Kammerensemble Neue Musik in Berlin and Mexico as well as a receiving a performance by film and music students of the Queensland Conservatorium of Music in Brisbane with a parallel film version of the score by Carey Ryan. Perhaps the strongest image that remained for me after the Messages for You project, was the importance of place to Akiko Iwasaki and her community: the meaning of the sea, the spiritual connection to the mountains and surrounds and the earnestness with which Akiko and her community in the aftermath of the Tsunami in 2011, undertook the rebuilding of their place, their town. Meanwhile Earth Plays was gradually being finished and the premiere set for December 2015 in Munich, Germany by the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Peter Rundel. I

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decided to create an additional movement—this time in collaboration with young German school students rather than as the sole composer. This project focused on a specially chosen place—the Radome Satellite at Raisting, just outside the students’ home city. The music and texts we created together were inspired by the notion of the Satellite sending messages throughout the world so linking to the project in Japan—Messages for You. The children then performed their new work alongside various members of the Orchestra and Radio choir prefacing the World Premiere of Earth Plays in the Herkulessaal der Residenz, Munich.

Conclusion I hope that by sharing these particular experiences I can show examples of different webs of social-musical experiences, as Bourriaud calls them: “a set of artistic practices.” It was my intention to share how Earth Plays came into being and how the set of different compositional practices involved were informed and influenced by my creating with others. Rather than treating the various practices of sole or shared collaborative authorship as separate entities, I see them as a continuum, as a possible framework within which to view the ways they inform my work and make clear my desire to invest in a seamless path between the social and artistic elements of my compositional practice.

References Bourriaud, Nicolas. Relational Aesthetics. Translated by Simon Pleasance, Fronza Woods and Mathieu Copeland. Dijon: Les Presses du Réel, 2002. Milliken, Catherine. “Democracy and Collective Composition.” Darmstädter Beiträge zur NeuenMusik. Band 25. Edited by Michael Rebhahn & Thomas Schäfer. Mainz: Schott, 2021. Simpson, Veronica. “Thomas Hirschhorn: The Gramsci Monument, like All Monuments, is Made for Eternity.” Studio International, 15 February, 2017. https://www.studiointernational.com/index.php/ thomas-­hirschhorn-­interview-­the-­gramsci-­monument-­is-­made-­for-­eternity.

CHAPTER 7

Harmonia Mundi: Creating a New Work of Music Theatre to Speak to the Current World Chaos Judith Clingan AM and Jessica Dixon

Introduction I (Judith Clingan) am a composer, conductor, performer, visual artist, writer and creative arts educator; my daughter Jessica Dixon is a performing arts educator and visual artist. We have collaborated many times in Australia and overseas in creating music theatre performances through community organisations and schools. In 2016 we were invited by the Hokkaido Steiner School in Japan to create a new work of music theatre, which could be rehearsed in two weeks in late July 2017, and then be performed in both Japan and Korea. The performers were to be 100 mostly secondary students, with some adults, from Australia, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and China. For several months, in early 2017, Jess and I considered many possible themes. Both we and the Japanese teacher who had invited us to work on

J. Clingan AM (*) • J. Dixon Canberra, ACT, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 L. Kouvaras et al. (eds.), The Composer, Herself, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23922-9_7

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this project (Kunihiro Sati, at the Steiner school) felt that the theme needed to be weighty. We also felt that it was necessary that the theme be universal in scope, dealing with issues equally relevant to Australian and Asian people. We read many traditional stories from cultures around the world, but failed to find any which fitted our two criteria. Finally we decided that we needed to create our own story. The first decision we made was that the protagonist must be female, as 99% of the traditional stories we had researched featured a male protagonist. We decided to call her Sophia, a seeker after wisdom. It was not difficult to choose a weighty theme—for decades we had both been deeply alarmed by the increasing evidence that the health of our planet was being severely compromised by human activity. I had already written two works of music theatre looking at this issue: Terra Beata-Terra Infirma in 1989, and Endangered! in 2015. This time, it seemed to me that we needed to address the fact that none of the necessary changes needed can be achieved by unenlightened humans. Accordingly, Jess and I discussed the ways in which humans have traditionally sought enlightenment, and Jess suggested that the archetypal hero’s journey, as researched by Joseph Campbell, is still a good model.1 Here is our adapted version of this archetypal storyline (Fig. 7.1): Typically in stories of this genre, the protagonist is faced with a difficult issue; they meet a mentor who provides guidance and sets the protagonist on their road; companions are met to assist in the quest; oppositional characters are met and a series of difficulties are encountered, which are eventually all overcome, albeit with a certain degree of pain and self-­sacrifice; ultimately, through a process of self-transformation, the hero wins through to a desired outcome. Jess and I decided that the desired outcome would be an enlightened humanity—which can only be created one individual at a time. The hope is that one person’s struggle to attain integrity and awareness will lead to a similar struggle in another, until a critical mass is reached, at which point change can occur. And the change desired is no less than a new world, a world in which people really try to understand each other, and work towards a universal harmony with all creatures and with the very earth itself. Accordingly, we decided that the work’s title would be Harmonia Mundi. We wanted to create a consciousness-raising work which could 1  Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, second ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968).

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Fig. 7.1  A Hero’s Journey, infographic adapted from Joseph Campbell (2014) by Clingan and Dixon

awaken both performers and audiences, at this crucial point in the earth’s history, to the imperative that all humans learn to work together for the common good. At this point in the process I became obsessed with the need to represent the common good, the source of enlightenment which our hero Sophia was seeking, by a musical motive. And I wanted this motive to be the unifying musical thread throughout the work. I envisioned the theme being played not only by a traditional western orchestra, but also by a range of ethnic instruments, to be played by the various characters encountered by Sophia on her journey. I also wanted the theme to be sung, by Sophia and by choral forces. Accordingly, my first task was to discover, from among my vast personal collection of historical and ethnic instruments, several with the same set of notes. This is not as easy as it sounds. I have more than a hundred flute-type, fipple-type, single reed, double reed, bowed strings, plucked strings, hammered strings and pitched metal instruments, collected during my years of journeying around the world. I spent more than

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a month in early 2017 playing all of these instruments, searching for an identical set of pitches in at least three different types of instruments. I finally settled on a small hand-made clay ocarina, a bamboo fipple flute and a kindervieille—a simple bowed stringed instrument. All three had D4 as the lowest note, and could play at least one octave of a major scale. The ocarina was the most limited—it had precisely one octave—the D major scale. However, I did not want my theme melody to be in a major key— that would, I felt, be too simplistic. The most satisfying tone-set available to all three instruments was an E Dorian mode. That decided, I set to work creating a thematic motive with sufficient gravitas, but not too pessimistic or too limply melancholic. The raised sixth (in this case, the C#) is very useful in the otherwise minor-sounding set of notes—it creates the necessary flash of optimism. I ended up with two E Dorian melodies (Figs. 7.2 and 7.3): I chose the second melody to be the Harmonia Mundi theme. The other melody also found its way into the score, both on its own, and weaving together with the main melody.

Fig. 7.2  Judith Clingan, Harmonia Mundi, first E Dorian melody

Fig. 7.3  Judith Clingan, Harmonia Mundi, second E Dorian melody

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It was now necessary to write the libretto. We did not envisage a through-composed piece—rather, a play with strongly-linked musical sections. We discussed whether we wanted our story to be totally realistic, or totally fantastic, or a sort of magic realism. We settled on magic realism. There would be seven main characters: 1. The hero, Sophia—a girl aged sixteen to seventeen, depressed by climate change and by the overwhelming global human crises, and also anxious about her sick mother; 2. Her mentor, Gaia’s Messenger, who would give her a melody to recognize and follow (my second melody), and an ocarina on which to learn to play that melody; 3. First ally: a younger boy, Sol, who already knows the Harmonia Mundi melody; 4. Second ally: Tori, a girl shapeshifter in the form of a wounded bird—she also knows the Harmonia Mundi melody; 5. Third ally: Nik, a sailor, who plays the melody on a bamboo flute; 6. Enemy: Oscar, who tries to steal the ocarina and Tori the talking bird—the ocarina is smashed and Sophia is hurt; and, 7. The Healer: helps Sophia recover; plays the melody on a simple stringed instrument; imparts wisdom about forgiveness. The huge crisis would obviously be the smashing of the ocarina and Sophia’s wounding. Later struggles would include battling unhelpful spirits, Discords; help would come from spirits of positivity, the Harmonisers. The darkest hour would be Sophia’s rejection of everything she has been through, before finally recognising her transformation. When this project was first mooted, I had sent information to the Asian Steiner schools where I had previously worked as a music educator, as well as to several Australian Steiner schools, inviting current and previous students, teachers and parents to audition as a performer. Each aspiring performer had to send me recordings/videos of themselves: (a) singing an unaccompanied melody (b) singing an unaccompanied duet (c) speaking a poem chosen from a selection (d) miming a scenario chosen from a selection (e) playing any instrument

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Almost 100 people came forward from six countries, aged from twelve years to seventy-five years. After listening to hundreds of audition recordings, I began to make choices. I selected three of the seven main characters—Sophia, Nik and the Healer, from the Australian participants, to ensure there would be lots of time for me to help them learn to play the theme melody on the three folk instruments before our deadline; also because many of the overseas participants preferred to avoid main roles, being anxious about their command of English. No-one from among the Australian participants seemed suitable for the parts of Gaia’s Messenger or Sol, so I had to hope non-Australians would come forward. Many teenage girls were keen to be Tori, the bird-girl who needed to be both a beautiful dancer and a beautiful singer. The part of the thug Oscar, as well as his cronies, I hoped would be easy to fill once we were all together. We then discussed how we could give all the other performers meaningful participation. The best instrumentalists would form an orchestra; the best choral singers would be the Harmonisers—helpful spirits singing choruses in three parts—soprano, alto and baritone—as there were not enough older males to divide into tenors and basses. The youngest participants, aged about twelve, would be Discords—a troop of nasty little sprites, throwing obstacles in Sophia’s way. They would sing in unison. And lastly, we decided to form a group of Movers—participants who loved dance and physical theatre. Most of the time they would use their bodies to create visual effects such as the forest, the storm at sea, the mountain. They would also mime Sophia’s family, Sophia’s peers and teachers at school, people in the village and so on. They would join the other performers in singing the first and final choruses, but otherwise focus on physical theatre. After discussing the plot and characters with Jess, I began to write the script, continuing to consult with Jess and others. It was important that the protagonist, Sophia, be a well-rounded character, not a cipher. We—that is, Jess and I and Kunihiro, the Japanese teacher who had invited us to create this work—all felt very strongly that the piece should speak at a deep level to today’s young people. Jess and I discussed Sophia’s dilemma—a mixture of her feeling of impotence in the face of global crises, both environmental and human, and her personal grief caused by the illness of her mother. Together, these feelings have led to a deep depression. She distances herself from her family and from her friends and teachers at school. At the beginning of the story, we feel that Sophia’s depression is so overwhelming that

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she finds it difficult to believe in herself, or to even be pleasant and kind to others. Coming to grips with her own strengths and weaknesses are as much her “quest” as working out how humanity can save itself from the results of its own actions and inactions. By the end of April the script was finished. There were nine scenes. 1. THE BEGINNING: We meet the alienated Sophia, who goes through breakfast with her family and a day at school totally withdrawn, speaking to no-one. To orchestral music the Movers would mime members of her family, and peers and teachers at school. 2. SOPHIA ALONE: On her return home she wanders in the garden, and expresses her misery, disillusionment and despair in a solo. 3. FOLLOW THE MUSIC: A strange-looking character, Gaia’s Messenger, approaches Sophia, playing the Harmonia Mundi motive on the ocarina. S/he gives Sophia the ocarina, telling her to learn how to play the planet’s melody, and to follow it whenever she hears it. She can trust those who know this melody. If she “follows the music” she will learn how to save herself, help her ill mother, and equip herself to contribute to humankind’s saving of the planet. Sophia feels totally overwhelmed and incapable—but nevertheless, when she finds herself alone, she listens, hears the melody in the distance, and moves towards it. 4. GAIA’S ARMY: As she is setting out, a younger boy, Sol, a neighbour, appears. He is cheerful, and interested in the ocarina he sees hanging from a cord round Sophia’s neck. And he knows the tune—he hums or whistles it. Sophia is still feeling extremely out of sorts—she is curt and unfriendly towards the boy. However, Gaia’s Messenger appears to her again briefly, reminding

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her that learning to tolerate difference and to display kindness is part of her journey—and so, unwillingly, she allows Sol to travel with her. The two move into the forest, following a distant flute playing Harmonia Mundi. They come across a wounded bird—but as they kneel to examine it, the bird speaks. It turns out that she is a girl, a shape-shifter. She explains to Sophia and Sol that she often changes into a creature in order to better understand the natural world. She also knows the Harmonia Mundi motive instinctively. She asks if she can join them. Sophia binds Tori’s broken wing, and the three of them set off together, singing Gaia’s Army. 5. HARMONIA MUNDI / A STORM: It turns out that the flute was being played by Nik, a young man in a sailing boat at the edge of the bay. He invites the trio on board, offering to help Sophia learn the melody. But suddenly a violent storm breaks over them. Sophia helps Tori, who can’t swim. The boat is wrecked, and Nik’s flute is lost—but, as Nik observes in his wry solo, Glass Half-Empty?: “If my flute had been saved but a life had been lost, that would have been harder to mend.” 6. THE MARKET PLACE: Wet, worn out and hungry, washed up on an unfamiliar beach, Sophia and her companions move towards a village where market day is in full swing—musicians, maypole dancers and jugglers are entertaining the crowds. Nik goes to look for food, while the other three discuss their situation. They are overheard by three young louts, who decide to steal the magic ocarina and the talking bird. In the scuffle which ensues, the ocarina is smashed, and Sophia is hurt. 7. THE HEALER: Two of the louts vanish, but their leader, Oscar, regrets his actions, and brings a Healer to help Sophia. Sophia is taken to the Healer’s hut, and Sophia’s friends and Oscar are set to work making a fire, gathering and chopping herbs. The Healer knows the Harmonia Mundi melody—she

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plays it on a simple bowed stringed instrument. Over the next few days, as Sophia recovers, she imparts her wisdom to Sophia. She tells Sophia that part of her quest is to climb a nearby mountain and to find and gather three particular herbs which could help her mother—and others. 8. THE MOUNTAIN: Oscar becomes interested in the quest. Sophia is extremely reluctant to forgive him and to allow him to accompany them on this next stage of their journey—but the Healer helps her to see that acceptance by Sophia could be the beginning of healing for Oscar. The Healer and the off-stage Harmonisers sing to Sophia as the travellers move towards the mountain. The Healer has told Sophia that the mountain is peopled by both helpful and unhelpful spirits—the Harmonisers and the Discords. Oscar is lured into stupidity by the Discords—Sophia and her friends battle the Discords, trying to save Oscar. The Harmonisers offer help; Sophia finds to her astonishment that she can sing part of the Harmonia Mundi melody. Tori regains the use of her wings, and flies to the peak of the mountain, discovering the medicinal plants. Oscar is saved. 9. THE SCROLLS: Just as it seems that Sophia has done what she had been given to do, despair overwhelms her and she is struck by the futility of everything. Gaia’s Messenger appears and points out to her that she has actually come a long way. Scrolls depicting each scene are unravelled as they reminds her of how she has overcome each tribulation. And as the Harmonisers sing the Finale, Sophia picks up the plants Tori picked for her and walks through the audience towards home, with a new sense of purpose, determined to make a difference in the world. Besides the dialogue which moves the story along, I wrote eleven poems which I would turn into songs—five for the Harmonisers; two for the Discords, a solo for Sophia, a solo for Gaia’s Messenger, a solo for Nik, and the Finale. Once both Jess and I felt that the script represented as well as possible our initial thoughts and aspirations, it was time to write the music.

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By this time (April 2017) I knew both the vocal and instrumental skills of each participant. One of the huge advantages a composer / music educator has when working with students or graduates of Steiner / Waldorf schools is the fact that Rudolf Steiner placed great emphasis on the importance of music. Steiner schools all round the world offer daily singing for every child, leading from simple rounds to full major choral works in the senior years; instrumentally, they offer daily recorder playing in primary school, with tuition in music notation, and string playing is taught to every child in the lower primary years, with students changing if necessary to wind or other choices in upper primary, leading to opportunities for orchestral and chamber music throughout their high school years. Consequently, every participant in our Harmonia Mundi project was an adequate singer, familiar with choral music as a genre. There were enough good string players to form a small string ensemble (violins 1, violins 2, violas, celli—but no double basses); there were several flutes (one excellent), one excellent clarinet, one excellent bassoon, no brass at all, several excellent recorder players capable of playing descant, treble, tenor and bass recorders, several adequate guitar players, and several good pianists. No-one was a trained percussionist, but I felt it would be possible to include both tuned and untuned percussion parts here and there. All of these skills gave me ample scope for my composition. One of the interesting results of my having written two possible Harmonia Mundi motives early on was that I now needed to fit some of the poems I had written into those two existing melodies. With a little rewriting of the words, I managed this. (I have always found that songs can be written most easily if the words are written first. But because of my work on the Harmonia Mundi motive before the libretto was written, I had no choice.) Here are the two main motives with their words (Figs. 7.4 and 7.5): O Gaia lent itself to a round, so I decided it could appear twice—firstly, sung by the off-stage Harmoniser choir, as a full choral work with orchestra, and later, as an unaccompanied melody sung by Tori as she flies to the top of the mountain. The Harmonia Mundi motive I used several times unaccompanied: a solo cello plays it at the very beginning of the work; a solo flute and a solo violin play it at various times, as well as the three ethnic instruments for which I originally wrote it. It also appears as a flute obliggato above Gaia’s Messenger’s first solo; as the melody of Gaia’s Messenger’s second solo,

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Fig. 7.4  Judith Clingan, Harmonia Mundi—main theme

Fig. 7.5  Judith Clingan, O Gaia (three part round)—secondary theme, from Harmonia Mundi

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above the three-part choir; for full string orchestra when Sophia is going in the right direction; it is sung in unison by Nik, Sol and Tori, with a violin counter-melody, when Sophia is wounded; it is played by the first violins against the O Gaia unison first verse; it is sung as an unaccompanied three part chorus by the Harmonisers on the mountain when they are banishing the Discords, and it is played an octave higher by the flute and sung by the sopranos in the Finale, with full choir and orchestra. Lumped all together like this, it might seem too repetitive, but the great variety of the treatments, added to the interweaving of totally differently-themed sections, led to a very satisfactory final result. Once the music was finished, I sent the full script plus music to every participant. And then, of course, I needed to isolate instrumental parts and send those to the players I had selected for the orchestra. I also made sound files of each vocal line to help the singers. The casting of Gaia’s Messenger was worrying me. Originally I had envisaged a male Gaia’s Messenger—but the male singer I had in mind was unable to commit to the project. It wasn’t until the beginning of our two weeks’ rehearsal in Japan that I settled on a young Taiwanese woman as Gaia’s Messenger. This worked perfectly well, except for the fact that in the last verse of Gaia’s Messenger’s song, Follow the Music, Gaia’s Messenger is required to sing above both the full choir and the full orchestra. Probably the solo would have been more audible if it had been a strong male voice. The part of Sol was solved once we arrived in Japan—we were extremely lucky that the only twelve-year-old boy in the 100 participants turned out to be a splendid singer and actor. Of course, he had to practise his spoken English intensively! In May of 2017 Jess and I began the process of designing the visual effects to be created by costuming, props, set, stage movements and lighting. I painted images of our hoped-for costumes, and looked online for fabrics which would suit our colour scheme, fall well and not break the bank. Huge swathes of cloth were ordered. Volunteers and I then spent several days creating and cutting out paper patterns for each garment in a variety of sizes. When the cloth arrived, we cut the lengths which would be needed for each costume, and then packed them and sent them all to Japan. Jess drew a series of sketches showing the placement of the Movers and the main actors for each scene. It was of course necessary to devise a piece

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with minimal set requirements. Jess is very experienced in using bodies of actors to create a wide range of effects, so all we needed to prepare besides costumes was three large swathes of cloth for the ocean, strong bamboo sticks for each Mover, and several stage blocks. We also discussed our lighting ideas. Once we all arrived in Japan in late July, 2017, it was marvellous how well everything fell into place. An army of dedicated Japanese mothers turned up every day to measure performers, cut out and sew their costumes. Teenagers helped me create several papier maché fake ocarinas—one for each dress rehearsal and performance—necessary so that our one real one would not be broken in the fight scene. They also studied the images I had printed out of the four Peruvian medicinal plants which are mentioned in the song Wondrous Plants, and spent hours cutting, painting, glueing and sewing felt. And during the weekend between the two weeks of rehearsal, those teenagers who loved painting turned up and spent happy hours painting the five scenes of Sophia’s trials onto Chinese scrolls. One scene still needed music written for it—the Maypole Dance. I had held off writing that, hoping to find a Japanese or Korean folk melody which would suit. And when I told the performers what I was looking for, a Korean boy sang me a tune which exactly suited the dance, whereupon I immediately arranged it for wind trio and percussion, and that problem was solved. We were extremely fortunate that on day one in Japan Jess discovered in her Movers group an extraordinary Australian boy, Yani, who understood her every need, and became our stage manager. One of the amazing aspects of this project was the necessity to have every utterance of Yani’s or Jess’ (to the movers or the actors) or of mine (to the singers or the orchestra) translated immediately into three other languages—Mandarin, Japanese and Korean. And marvellous lighting effects were achieved by the Japanese teachers with minimal bilingual conversation. In both countries the essence of each scene was conveyed in advance by teenage narrators speaking in Japanese or Korean. Every performance was met with ecstatic appreciation. All in all, creating and performing Harmonia Mundi was one of the most satisfying collaborative projects I have ever undertaken (Fig. 7.6).

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Fig. 7.6  Yu Hsiu Huang (Taiwan) as Gaia’s Messenger and Morgan Smith (Australia) as Sophia (photographer: Jessica Dixon)

References Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Second ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968. Clingan, Judith and Jessica Dixon. Harmonia Mundi—New Songs for a New World: Canberra: Clingan Publishing, 2017. ———. Harmonia Mundi, Japan 2017. Waldorf Wayfarers, 23 December, 2019. https://youtu.be/ef5YHZJDAdY.

CHAPTER 8

Blocking Out Noise: Metamorphosis and Identity in the Recent Chamber Music of Vivian Fung Vivian Fung

Introduction The music of Vivian Fung is commissioned, performed and celebrated across the globe. The Canadian-born, American-based composer is known for her engaging and dramatic works, which have entered the repertoire of ensembles and soloists of renown. Her work explores intersections between the multi-cultural musics of her own heritage and the western classical tradition. I spoke with her about recent chamber works, the Fourth String Quartet (2019) and a new piece for Pierrot ensemble and

In interview with Natalie Williams, 29 May 2020 (New York / Melbourne, via Skype)

V. Fung (*) Kensington, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 L. Kouvaras et al. (eds.), The Composer, Herself, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23922-9_8

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percussion, Corona Morphs (2020),1 and the connections between the geneses of these two pieces.

Chamber Music Natalie Williams (NW): Your recent chamber works explore techniques of metamorphosis. Describe the genesis of your Fourth String Quartet and how it embodies this technique. Vivian Fung (VF): In 2019, during February and March, I visited Cambodia to learn more about my family history. My extended family— including my maternal grandmother, uncles, aunts, and cousins–lived in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, in the 1970s as part of the overseas Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia. They were there quite happily, in fact, until shortly before the Khmer Rouge stormed the capital in April 1975 and drove everyone out. My family miraculously survived an arduous journey—over a month on foot in the countryside of Cambodia, and then in Vietnam. Ultimately, they ended up in Paris and Canada, but those events changed the course of my family forever. I also was born in 1975, and even though I was born and raised in Canada, my birth and childhood were deeply affected by omnipresent anxiety and uncertainty over my family’s situation and safety. Only recently have I been able to piece together more completely my family history and how it affected my family members’ subsequent lives. I went to visit Cambodia for the first time in 2019 with my family—parents, son, and husband—and with some detective work, we were able to find my family’s former home and the hospital that my aunt ran, still standing all these years later but now abandoned. On the trip I walked in the thick  jungle and heard the deafening  sound of cicadas swarming and pulsating, and this cacophony gelled with my emotional reaction to the terrible genocide of the Khmer people. This visceral experience  remained with me upon my return to the United States. I was attracted to the idea of the constantly shifting, ambient noise of these insects–their metamorphosing tones stayed  in my mind long after the experience. In our everyday lives, we are bombarded with noise, but we don’t really pay attention to it, instead we block it out. I wanted to bring these background noises to the forefront, thereby purging these persistent sounds from my consciousness.  I noticed that even though the 1  Corona Morphs was planned for online première from a recording made in Vancouver, due to lockdown restrictions caused by the 2020 Coronavirus pandemic.

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encircling sounds were constant, they shifted as our perception and awareness of our surroundings also changed.  I wanted to use these observations as the inspiration of my fourth quartet and set out to compose a one movement work which constantly shifts its material from idea to another in continual transformation. In essence, the work can be seen as one long transition, since the music never settles or resolves. The set patterns repeat and relate to each other, but the material constantly morphs motivically, harmonically, and gesturally. This same concept is magnified in my current piece, Corona Morphs. The technical process of metamorphosis is common to both these works. Corona Morphs is a twelve-minute piece for Pierrot ensemble,2 plus percussion, completed in April 2020. The work was premiered as a digital performance and  was intended  as a piece with film, but the film never materialized so it is now performed in a concert hall space. I wrote this work quickly, during the first months of the global pandemic at a time when life was confusing and changing quickly. This piece is my reaction to what was happening. NW: You spoke about the metamorphosis technique in your music. Can you speak about your approaches to composition, in general? VF: Ever since my son was born, time has been limited and my compositional process has shifted as a result. An intensity for life permeates my music, in general. In 2018 I wrote an orchestral piece called Earworms for the National Arts Centre Orchestra (Canada). The inspiration for that work came from my son when he was about three years old. At that time, he listened to the same piece of music incessantly, the “Wheels on the Bus Go Round and Round” children’s song. Over and over he would play the song and I used the constancy of my son’s listening as inspiration for the piece. The “Wheels on the Bus” theme itself even became a part of my orchestral piece, as it was an earworm for both myself and my son.  The work features a few snippets of some of the best (or most insistent and annoying, depending on how you want to look at it) tunes that were stuck in my head and combines them into a playful and quirky arrangement. I worked fragments of these songs into the piece the way I would hear them at night–incomplete, sometimes looping just a little lick, sometimes simultaneously or consecutively, and always heavily developed to evoke the feel 2  A Pierrot ensemble is a mixed chamber group comprising the same instrumentation as Schoenberg’s 1912 song cycle, Pierrot Lunaire: Flute, Clarinet, Violin, Cello, Piano. Fung’s piece adds one percussion player.

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of my irrational obsession. The piece culminates in a chaotic mashup, with the orchestra building its force and repeating musical gestures with different, often conflicting rhythms. It ends loud and strong, as the earworms take hold of my psyche. I take inspiration from everyday life for my music; this is one of several paths that I take in my working approach. I find there is a stream of consciousness relationship between things, for example, the earworm scenario, and this has become a part of the fabric of my recent music. These ideas emanate from my own experience of life, as a social commentator and as a humanist. I see myself not only as a composer, but someone who documents the way we perceive and live our lives today, through the medium of music. NW: Can you describe how your fourth string quartet was commissioned? VF: I have a long relationship with the American String Quartet (ASQ). I first met members of the quartet in 2001 while I was still a graduate student–we were all gathered at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in Florida for a residency where the ASQ read new student works. They read my first work for string quartet, Pizzicato3  and  responded very  positively to the piece. From that reading they encouraged me  to build a whole quartet from the short 4-minute piece. I heeded their suggestion and composed what became my First String Quartet in 2004, though it ended up being premiered by another quartet. The ASQ subsequently heard my first quartet and decided to being the piece to Beijing since they were the resident quartet at the Great Wall International Music Academy. Since that time, they have championed my music, especially my “Pizzicato,” over the years. So, for their forty-fifth anniversary, they commissioned another piece from me, which became my Fourth String Quartet (2019). It is very meaningful to come full circle like this and to reconnect with the American String Quartet again after many years. NW: Can you expand upon your experience of composing the fourth quartet, especially considering your strong emotional connections to the place which inspired the work, the Cambodian jungle? VF: I wrote the piece quickly. Initially I struggled with ideas about capturing the “noise” aspect, but once I decided how to capture the insects and those ideas solidified, the inspiration took over and I 3  Vivian Fung, Pizzicato, Ying Quartet: Telarc, CD-80690, 2008, compact disc, https:// vivianfung.ca/music/pizzicato/.

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completed the piece in short time. The quartet loved the new work, it is fast-paced and difficult to play, but very rewarding for a quartet. I made connections between insects and machines through the use of rapid and repetitive musical ideas. The work explores ways that background babblings infiltrate our lives by organizing the various moments as episodes that freely morph from one event into another. One can hear buzzing at the beginning that turns into a waltz, which in turn transforms into a motoric adventure of machine-like chuggings-along. Much like the sound of thumping bass in a neighboring car, the episodes come in as waves and then disappear into the distance to be replaced by other soundscapes. Living in large cities, we become numb to the myriad city noises–they infiltrate our hearing but we block them out instinctively. My goal was to personify these noises and bring them back to the front of consciousness in this work. I amplified the “annoying” constancy of those sounds, that constantly pervasive noise, and brought it forward from the background where it usually resides. The concept of morphing also occurs in this work; I gradually transform these constant sounds, the buzz of a refrigerator, the hum of a car, ambient noises, cars parking, machines buzzing  – all the noises we usually block out. The American String Quartet premiered the piece in 2019 in New Jersey and they also performed it at the Aspen Music Festival.4

Compositional Approaches NW: How do your own life experiences permeate your music, and can you expand on your role as a social commentator? VF: In 2013 I wrote an article called “Embracing My Banana-ness”5 speaking about my Canadian childhood as the daughter of Chinese parents. I was born in Canada, into a “white” society, but my “yellow-ness” as an Asian person is also part of my identity. My identity was therefore physically linked to Canada, but with different cultural influences from my heritage. The result was that I didn’t feel that I fully belonged to one culture or the other – my life sometimes felt like a hinterland, or purgatory of 4  Andrew Travers, “American String Quartet Bringing Sounds of Insects and Machines to Aspen Music Festival,” (18 July 2019), https://www.aspentimes.com/magazines/aspentimes-weekly/american-string-quartet-bringing-sounds-of-insects-and-machines-to-aspenmusic-festival/. 5  Vivan Fung, “Embracing My Banana-ness,” New Music Box, 29 June 2011 https:// nmbx.newmusicusa.org/embracing-my-banananess/.

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cultures, between China and America/Canada. As a child I was exposed to Chinese culture, but this was difficult when the life around me in Canada was overwhelmingly Caucasian.6 Growing up outside of China in this way, I felt I could morph between different cultures; that I was on the outside, looking in, and I could explore the ideas and practices of both, while having flexibility within both. Morphing, for me, was a process of cultural understanding. Morphing is fluid and it’s not mired in labelling. I’m not a “Chinese” composer, I don’t like that term. Sometimes I get bunched in with other Chinese composers, as though that is an aesthetic priority. I see myself as a morphing of two cultures, but I don’t think that applying labels is fair to anyone. Instead, I take aspects of both cultures, morphing them together – in this way my compositional morphing techniques have their base in my own lived experience, moving fluidly between the cultures. For me, morphing is more than a creative technique, it’s an identity, a representation of myself in my work. NW: How does your identity and family history manifest in your compositional output? VF: My 2019 Cambodian trip changed my life in many ways. I was quite shaken when visiting Angkor Wat and I am still unravelling all that my family went through. My maternal uncle and aunt were living in Phnom Penh in April 1975, at the time of the forced exodus from the city. That was around the time I was born (February 1975). My mother worried about my family and all that was happening around them. The events of the exodus shaped my childhood, including anxiety, uncertainty, a form of PTSD – I didn’t know all this until years later, when I saw more clearly its influence on my life, over time. My journey to Cambodia was meaningful to me, to understand my family history and learn what they endured. Walking in the Cambodian jungle and hearing the cicadas gave me the catalyst for composing my Fourth String Quartet. The idea of the ever-­ present noise of the cicadas linked well with the idea of ever-present “background” noise in daily life. Combining my emotional journey of the visit with my memories of the cicadas was a moving experience for me. The cicada noise became a catalyst for the idea of the “ever-present” and I explored this concept within my quartet. As a freelance composer, I don’t always have freedom of choice of what to work on, but I like to connect 6  Vivian Fung, “Embracing My Banana-Ness: One Composer’s Journey Towards Finding Her Identity,” (18 Nov 2013), https://nmbx.newmusicusa.org/embracing-mybanananess/.

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emotionally with my subjects. This quartet is not Cambodian in its musical language, but the emotional connections from my visit are a strong aspect of the piece. The constancy of the cicada noise was also representative of my emotional journey, alongside the idea of the constant noises of life, in general.

Corona Morphs, for Mixed Chamber Ensemble (2020) NW: In contrast to the devastatingly loud noise of Cambodian cicadas, how did you approach the concept of morphing with the silence of the Coronavirus, in your most recent chamber piece, Corona Morphs (2020)? VF: This was a very emotional piece for me, written during the unsettling first weeks of the global pandemic. A film is being created in response to my music, which reflects and reacts to the morphing within my piece. This work, Corona Morphs explores the circumstances of the virus, not the actual virus itself. The piece represents my initial reactions to the global situation and crisis, rather than the medical details of the virus. NW: How do you depict the massive social changes of 2020 through the vehicle of this new piece? VF: I am focusing on the idea of illusion, of things being “not as they seem.” In this way, the idea of morphing is consistent with how the world is reacting to the pandemic; the situation is constantly changing; therefore, my music does the same. Cadence points in the piece mark places of transformation and shift/morph from one state to another. There is no sense of resolution until the very end of the piece. I used pointillistic dots on a map as representative of the exponential growth of the virus, and my piece reacts to its impact on the global community. NW: How do you represent the current social situation of mass isolation through your piece? VF: The work begins simply and is minimalistic in style at the opening, but it changes dramatically after the initial section. This piece is similar to my Fourth String Quartet (2019), it is fast, rhythmic, and morphs into a Latin-inspired section, then moving into a high-pitched “insect” type sound. I did not use obvious musical quotations, but again represented the virus itself by using pointillistic dots on a map that reflected the locality of cases. The intended film has not materialized so the pointillistic dots are not visualized as yet. 

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NW: You spoke about your role as a social commentator, speaking about social issues and concerns through your music. What do you hope your listeners take from your works? VF: This quartet documents my emotional reaction to a situation, and I hope that my listeners will react similarly. The piece also connects with the film, which will be produced later in the project. The morphing ideas in Corona Morphs come from the Fourth String Quartet but are magnified more in this piece. The process of morphing is made more transparent and using the technique was a more conscious decision, on my part. I took a more fluid approach to the string quartet, but in Corona Morphs, the morphing process was at the forefront of the creation of the piece. I made conscious use of the metamorphosis technique here. In general, I take a subjectively  oriented approach to my work. Through music, a person experiences emotion and this is important to me as a composer. I have no agenda for my music. Craft is important because the piece is ultimately about the music itself, not about the social message. Music itself is the experience, the transformative experience and my desire is for listeners to experience the piece, and not the commentary aspect of my work.

The Creative Future NW: Where do you see your creative future? VF: Morphing is a valuable technique for me here; it allows freedom and flexibility and enables me to fit into a spectrum of identity at many different points. My work has evolved over time and I hope to work on larger pieces in the future. I would like to work on an opera about my family history, surviving the Cambodian genocide–a dramatic piece to capture the threads of my family and their history and life events that will be a culmination of my life’s work and output to date. NW: Do you see this moment in time as influencing your output? VF: I think all composers, and creative artists more generally, are still processing what is happening. Right now, I am choosing not to respond. More processing must happen for me to fully understand this moment. Up until recently, I have been in a fully-fledged composing mode. At the  time of writing, I had just completed Corona Morphs which is to be premiered by the Standing Wave Ensemble on 29 November, 2021, in Vancouver, and I am releasing an orchestral piece on Canada Day, 1 July, 2020. In general, I am still processing the situation and feel this will definitely impact creative life. I am working on some chamber pieces, that

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have not been cancelled due to the pandemic, and maintaining online interviews and mentoring work. I hope to reflect more on the coronavirus situation as time passes. I think that Corona Morphs and Prayer,7 an orchestral work premiered by a virtual orchestra in 2020, are both responses to the pandemic. NW: What advice would you give to composers emerging now? VF: I consider myself a late bloomer. Looking back, I wish I had not listened to so many outside forces. I wish someone had instilled in me earlier a greater sense of trust in my own instincts. The impact of a mentor, earlier on, would have reshaped my life. This is why I offer mentorship to composers coming up through the ranks. I enjoy mentoring young composers; craft can be taught, but it’s harder to teach how to compose, that must come from the individual student. Mentorship is so valuable because it gives students permission to follow their own voices. I encourage students to listen to this internal voice; if it is loud enough, it will guide you, and you will find your own path. This internal voice can have a great impact on a life and listening to it will guide a person towards their future. In my own career, I feel I am often labelled, but whatever label is applied to me, I feel conscious of not “fitting in” to that category. But my heritage enables me to connect widely; I was working with a Chinese-­ British composer, who was born in a western culture but was of Chinese family origin. We connected through our shared cultural history and identity, and he felt drawn to the commonality of our Chinese backgrounds. Identifying with both Chinese and Western cultures means our sense of identity is split between the two contexts–where are we? We need to find our own cultural place within that duality. I have sought a sense of cultural “place” for my own life,  When I speak with musicians from mainland China, I often feel like a foreigner in my own homeland. I speak two dialects of Chinese, Cantonese and Mandarin, and I am fully ethnically Chinese. Therefore, I have a foot in both cultural camps and the fullness of who I am is not really revealed in either one. This comes back to recognising the loudness of your own inner voice, realize the impact of external noise in your world, and focus on the inner vision of who you really are. NW: Thinking about our discussion, how do these pieces represent your life and career, bringing together all the topics we’ve explored?

7  Vivian Fung, Prayer, CBC Virtual Orchestra, cond. Yannick Nézet-Séguin, CBC Music, 22 June 2020, https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/1757827139996/.

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VF: Right now, I am at a very full time in my life. I have lots of creative things to say. My continuous search for identity leaves me feeling like a late bloomer, but I see the cumulative effect of the career steps I have taken. There will always be obstacles to creativity, but my well of creative juices is quite full. In my latest piece, Corona Morphs, I connected in strong emotional ways with my music, even at times when I did not want to write. Overall, I feel that I am at a very creative time in my life. 30 May 2020 Natalie Williams

References Bill Holab Music. Vivian Fung. Accessed, 7 June 2020. https://www.billholabmusic.com/composers/vivian-­fung/. Fung, Vivian. Vivian Fung Biography. Accessed, 15 May 2020a. http://vivianfung.ca/bio/. ———. “Embracing My Banana-ness: One Composer’s Journey Towards Finding Her Identity.” 18 Nov 2013. http://vivianfung.ca/2013/11/embracing-­my-­ banana-­ness-­one-­composers-­journey-­towards-­finding-­her-­identity/. ———. Pizzicato. Ying Quartet: Telarc, 2008. https://vivianfung.ca/music/ pizzicato/. ———. Prayer. CBC Virtual Orchestra, cond. Yannick Nézet-Séguin. CBC Music, 22 June 2020b. https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/1757827139996/. ———. Corona Morphs. Uploaded, 16 November 2021. https://vivianfung.ca/ music/humanoid-­5p7d9. ———. “Embracing My Banana-ness.” New Music Box, 29 June 2011 https:// nmbx.newmusicusa.org/embracing-­my-­banananess/. Travers, Andrew. “American String Quartet Bringing Sounds of Insects and Machines to Aspen Music Festival.” 18 July 2019. https://www.aspentimes. com/magazines/aspen-­times-­weekly/american-­string-­quartet-­bringing-­sounds-­ of-­insects-­and-­machines-­to-­aspen-­music-­festival/.

CHAPTER 9

Across Te tai o Rehua: Writing for the taonga pūoro of Aotearoa Dame Gillian Karawe Whitehead DNZM

Context I grew up in Whangārei, a small town in the north of Aotearoa/New Zealand, studied at the universities of Auckland, Wellington, and Sydney; then, from 1967, studied privately with Peter Maxwell Davies in London on a casual basis for a couple of years. I lived in Europe, based mostly in England, for the best part of fifteen years, working mainly as a freelance composer. After the death of Don Banks, I was invited to Sydney in 1981 to help Graham Hair in the newly founded composition school at the Conservatorium of NSW (later the Sydney Conservatorium) and taught there for ten years or so. I spent increasing lengths of time back in New Zealand, and, after holding a residency with the Auckland Philharmonia for two years, moved permanently back to Aotearoa, working again as a free-lance composer, with homes at the far ends of the country, on the Otago peninsula in the south and in Ruakaka, north of Auckland. A lot of my work over the last twenty-five years has involved taonga pu ̄oro—the

Dame G. K. Whitehead DNZM (*) Dunedin, New Zealand e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 L. Kouvaras et al. (eds.), The Composer, Herself, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23922-9_9

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singing treasures or musical instruments of the Māori people of Aotearoa/ New Zealand. I am of Ngai Terangi, Whakatōhea and Tūhoe descent.

Pre-Colonisation Māori Society and Oral Tradition In pre-colonisation times, oral tradition held Māori society together. Mātauranga Māori—knowledge and understanding of everything visible and invisible that exists in the universe—was carried in whakapapa (complex genealogical histories), mōteatea (sacred chants), karakia (incantations for spiritual guidance and protection) and waiata (songs). Some of these were extremely sacred and held only by the tohunga (experts), others were shared by everyone in the iwi (tribe). Taonga pūoro (singing treasures, instruments of sound) are now classified as musical instruments, but in pre-European times were not used as we might use them today; they served a practical purpose. Made of wood, stone, shell, gourd, pounamu (greenstone), harakeke (flax) or bone, they were blown as flutes or trumpets, or were shaken, beaten, or swung. They are the children of the atua, or gods. Wooden taonga are the children of Tānemahuta, the god of the forest and of birds, those of shell are of Tangaroa, the god of the sea and sea creatures, swung instruments of Tāwhirimātea, the wind god. The taonga had specific functions. Some were for signaling. Some were to assist communication with the atua. Some were used to attract birds for food, or for healing, for accompanying the sacred chants, or for accompanying singing and dancing. Some were public, some were intimate. Some, elaborately carved, were tapu, or sacred, while others were found objects— tapped stones or fashioned out of leaves. Some taonga produced a single pitch, or in the case of trumpets, a pitch and its overtones, but most melodic instruments had small ranges, rarely exceeding a minor third, similar to the vocal range of the traditional monodic chants and waiata, and also, incidentally to the ranges of most of Aotearoa’s birds. The taonga pūoro held within them a whole world of sound and meaning, and today they bring us something of the sound world of the past.

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1970s Māori Resurgence, Post-Arrival of the Missionaries in New Zealand in the Late Eighteenth Century When the missionaries arrived in New Zealand in the late eighteenth century, they understood the spiritual significance of the sounds of the taonga to Māori, and ordered them destroyed, replacing them with western flutes, fiddles and bugles as they reinforced Christian beliefs. The old playing traditions were fragmented, lost. In the 1920s, Te Rangi Hiroa (Sir Peter Buck, politician, anthropologist, physician, and leader in the field of Polynesian studies) declared the instruments were “forever mute.” This may have been because ethnologists and western musicians couldn’t get the instruments to sound in any meaningful way, as the playing techniques and concepts of music were so very different from those of the west. Many of the taonga which were not destroyed finished up in museums around the world, where they are indeed mute. From the 1970s in Aotearoa there was a renaissance and resurgence in things Māori. There was a burgeoning awareness of the bad effects of colonisation, and of the two differing versions, Māori and Pākehā (New Zealand non-Māori), of the Treaty of Waitangi, the founding document of the nation, and of the language, which had been beaten out of school children in previous generations to enforce English as the only permissible spoken language. (Today, Aotearoa has three official languages: English, Māori, and Sign.) Māori arts and crafts were revived, and painters, sculptors and writers began drawing on the old traditions. And the world of the taonga pūoro was rediscovered. A group of makers and players, known as Haumanu, or the breath of birds, came together, with a nucleus of three men. One was Hirini Melbourne, a singer, composer and holder of the language and traditions of his Tuhoe and Ngati Kahunguru heritage. The other two were Pākehā: Brian Flintoff, a master carver, and Richard Nunns who, as a former flute and trumpet player, had the ability to make the taonga “speak.” Nunns and Melbourne travelled the country, taking the instruments back to the iwi, sharing the music and in return receiving fragments of information from memories of the old people, who were moved and stimulated by the sounds. Of course, the recovered knowledge is fragmentary, thanks to the destructive force of the missionaries, but a surprising amount of information has been regained.

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Hineraukatauri, Goddess of Music and Entertainment, and New Sound Worlds I first came across this new sound world when I met Melbourne and Nunns in the 1990s, and I was blown away by the sound quality and spirituality of their musicianship. A short time after that, at the Melbourne Composing Women’s Festival (1994), I joined a bi-cultural contingent of women from New Zealand, where I met Tungia Baker, an actor and storyteller, who told me a story she had written. The three protagonists are Waka, a canoe, Kōwhai, a graceful tree with elegant yellow flowers, and Tūı ̄, a cheeky, curious bird with a variety of quirky songs. Tūı ̄ tells Waka and Kōwhai about each other and they are attracted to each other. There is a storm (originally it was a tsunami) and Waka is washed up into the hills and the backwash carries Kōwhai down to the coast. After Tungia told me the story, I woke up in the middle of the night and thought that I could tell it, using a cello to represent Waka (they are both hollow and made of wood), improvising piano to represent Kowhai (the keys moving like leaves in a breeze) and the taonga pu ̄oro to represent Tūı ̄ and generally add to the narration. This project came to fruition with Judy Bailey as pianist, Georg Petersen as cellist, Richard Nunns playing the taonga pūoro and Tungia Baker as narrator as a CD put out by Rattle Records as Ipu.1 Around the same time, I was working on an opera, Outrageous Fortune (1998), written to celebrate the sesquicentenary of the southern city of Dunedin and the province of Otago. The libretto by Christine Johnston wove together strands of goldfield-related tales, including two real Māori stories; one told of two men, crossing a flooded river to rescue a dog (which became a person in the opera) and finding gold, and the other of Māori dancing a haka to frighten off claim jumpers. To amplify and enhance the Māori scenes, I brought in as ghostly presences Richard Nunns playing taonga pūoro and Tungia Baker, representing the mother of the central woman character; she chanted karakia to open and close the proceedings, to lament, and so on. In both Ipu and Outrageous Fortune, I used the taonga to symbolise specific things—the pūtatara or shell trumpet to signal something significant, the pūkaea or long wooden war trumpet to suggest hostility, a pūpūharakeke, a large snail shell, to represent foreboding, upcoming 1  Gillian Whitehead, Ipu, Tungia Baker (voice), Richard Nunns (taonga puō ro), Judy Bailey (piano) and Georg Pedersen (cello), Rattle Records, RAT-D007, 1998, compact disc.

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danger, and so on. The symbolism was always connected in some way with the traditional use of or knowledge concerning the taonga. A few months later, Richard Nunns asked me to write a piece for him to play with Alexa Still at the Atlanta Flute Convention. Previously, when he and I were walking down a street in Nelson, New Zealand, where Richard lived, he showed me some spleenwort growing at the base of a tree in one of the main streets. “This is the hair of Hineraukatauri. One day I’d like you to write a piece about her.” So now, for the first time, I began to think of how to write for flute and taonga pūoro as equal partners in a piece of chamber music. Hineraukatauri is the goddess of music and entertainment. She is also the casemoth, which you often see hanging on shrubs in the forest. The female casemoth lives her whole life in the case and attracts males by singing in a pure quiet tone; the males come, impregnate her, die and remain within the case as food for her young. She is also the favourite food of the kōkako, who, by feeding on her, attains his wonderful voice by amplifying her pure, quiet song. Hineraukatauri is embodied in the pūtorino, which is shaped like the casemoth. The instrument is the only musical instrument truly unique to Aotearoa, and can be played as a trumpet, with a male voice, or as a flute, with a female voice. The differences in range between the two voices depends on the bore and material of the instrument, and there is often a third, or spirit voice. The main instruments used in the first iteration of Hineraukatauri were three pūtorino, one made of albatross bone, the others of native woods, all with different ranges and tone qualities, suggesting the song of Hineraukatauri. Other instruments are a karanga manu (bird caller) evoking the forest, tapped sticks accompanying a flute solo suggesting dramatic storytelling, and a pūrerehua, swung in the manner of a bull-roarer. Its name translates as an attractive or attracting sound, and is reminiscent of the beating wings of a male moth drawn to Hineraukatauri. I wrote this piece instinctively, in rather a hurry, to meet a deadline, and only thought in retrospect about the problems working with the taonga. The range of the flutes is very small, usually not exceeding a minor third, but making use of microtones within that third, and there is no standard basic pitch. To write effectively for them, you have to know the pitch and quality of individual instruments, and individual players have playing techniques which vary markedly. The small range with its microtones has also to be balanced with the tempered scale of western instruments. The wind instruments are really slow to speak, so rapid figurations are really only

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possible on percussive instruments. And they need to be equal voices; they mustn’t be colonised or overshadowed by western instruments. Few players can read music, which is another consideration; music had never been notated in an old tradition, but most players have very good ears and are extremely good improvisers. But reading precise measured notation doesn’t seem to work, or not in anything I’ve heard to date. When I was working with Richard, I would specify the sequence of instruments, and the manner of playing them, and when to start and stop. He was cued through eye contact with the other players. I also encouraged the other players at times to improvise alongside Richard, and after a performance or two, once the performers had stopped waiting for each other, any hiatus between improvised and notated material disappeared. Richard could, in fact, read a score, but I noticed that when he did, his playing became less spontaneous, less intuitive. After Hineraukatauri, over the next few years I wrote several other pieces which use taonga pūoro. Some of these draw on the stories of the goddesses, whose place in te ao Māori (the Māori world) would have been well-known in pre-contact times, but thanks to the suppression of things Māori in the intervening years, and the fact that male ethnographers spoke to men rather than women, and there appear to be few if any women ethnographers, the knowledge concerning them is quite fragmentary. I wrote Hinepūtehue, for Richard and the New Zealand String Quartet. Hinepūtehue is the goddess of peace, and her attribute is the gourd, a vessel that holds food or water. Most of the taonga I used were made of various sizes of gourd, or were replicas in other material that were traditionally made of gourd. The gourds varied greatly in size and were blown (either with the mouth, or the nose), shaken or swung. Western stringed instruments are akin to gourds, in that they have hollow bodies and are made of wood. I also used the ku, a musical bow which uses the mouth as a resonator as the string is tapped, an instrument with a very quiet, intimate voice whose tone varies as the shape of the mouth alters. I wasn’t sure how audible it would be in a concert hall, but in performance, with very light scoring around it, it was amazing how that very quiet sound drew the audience in. Another piece I wrote for Richard and the New Zealand String Quartet was Pūhake ki te rangi, which translates as “spouting to the skies,” and was my response to the Japanese breaking of the moratorium on whale hunting about fifteen years ago. This piece uses taonga fashioned from whale bone (all sustainably harvested from whale strandings in central Aotearoa,

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and gifted to the instrument makers). Other instruments were made from creatures the whale would have heard or encountered: a karanga manu or bird-caller from the land, and pūtorino made from the wing bones of albatross. Hinetekakara was a collaboration with Aroha Yates-Smith, who had researched the wahine atua (goddesses) for her PhD thesis. This piece was not about a goddess but about her own ancestress, Hinetekakara (sweet-­ scented woman) who, in the early days when iwi were first exploring the lakes in the Rotorua area was found by Ihenga, her husband (or brother: the stories differ), murdered at the edge of the lake, whereupon he sang an angry lament. I wrote the piece, which was initially for bassoon, taonga pūoro and voice, leaving room for Aroha to come up with text but providing the texture she would sing against. On the day of performance, she devised the text and the piece was performed in the wharenui (meeting house) at Ohinemutu, maybe 200 yards from where Ihenga discovered Hinetekakara’s body. The response, in that place with many of the audience related to the protagonists, was electrifying. It was a work where my piece enclosed hers, like jewels set in a necklace; an interesting way of working, and we subsequently worked on two other pieces together. She wrote me a poem, Taiohi Taiao (2004), for an a cappella setting for the New Zealand Youth Choir, and another work which again drew on her knowledge of the wahine atua. Hineteiwaiwa is an exemplar for women; she oversees our entrances into and departures from this world, and the work of women, such as weaving and assisting at childbirth. In both these pieces, I told the story using Māori and western instruments, while Aroha drew on Māori chant traditions to tell the same story. A more recent piece, set during World War 1, has twice been postponed thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic; the baritone, who is descended from the same family as the Army Captain protagonist, lives in the States; he is unable to come here and the taonga pūoro player is unable to travel there, so performances in both countries are cancelled in the meantime. In Hineraukatauri and subsequent pieces, I tried to evoke a pre-­ European contact world, something without obvious reference to common European practice. Frequently I use low, sustained fifths. I came to that really by observing the importance of the third overtone, which sounds a twelfth above the fundamental. I remember hearing the men of an iwi chanting, where the pure fifth, dancing above it, was almost as dominant as the basic pitch, and was a richness of sound to marvel at. And

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at another time, for some reason I transcribed the melody of a particular koauau at two different times, and found I’d written the two versions a fifth apart, having heard them differently each time. So, by extension such experiences led me to use a lot of parallel chordal movement. The other, more obvious things that were experienced in both the pre- and post-­ contact world were the sounds of nature—of birds, of water, of weather. In fact, if you think about it, the sounds of the taonga pu ̄oro would have been the only non-natural sounds the pre-European Māori would ever have experienced. My music involving taonga pu ̄oro draws on a language which combines narrative, the sounds of the natural world and extensions of parallel movement. Melodies are often contained in a very narrow range, and the instrumental movement is in part based on the need to get from one tonality where a particular taonga can shine to another tonality that enhances the next instrument.

Turning Points in Compositional Language; Appreciating te reo Mao ̄ ri (the Mao ̄ ri language)

Working with the taonga pu ̄oro has influenced my writing in general. Every few years a composer’s style of writing changes. As a student in Auckland, I began writing in a style described by someone as somewhere between Schoenberg and Bartok. In Britain, I found my way into and out of the serial tradition, finding my own way of controlling material through devising structures based on mensuration canons evolved far from their Renaissance predecessors, which would provide a complex framework of fixed pitches that spanned a whole piece. But it was just a framework—the skill came in joining and elaborating and entwining these points of sound. Then I began introducing elements of free rhythm or controlled improvisation at key points in the structure, so that the structure would be always the same but the detail always varied. It was a good time to be writing, during the late 1960s and 1970s, as composers from New Zealand and Australia were finding their individual ways beyond the European post-war serial stranglehold before the strictures of set theory took hold from America, so in my generation here and in Australia there are widely differing voices. Teaching at the Sydney Conservatorium took me back to in-depth analysis of the music of the Renaissance, Mozart, and Debussy as well as

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the leading twentieth-century icons, and after a brush with breast cancer in the 1990s, my writing moved away from the structural pieces of the 1970s and 1980s and became much more intuitive again. The Chromatic Maps of New Zealand composer Jenny McLeod (who studied with Messiaen), which refine Forte’s set theory by focusing on six intervals (and their inversions) rather than twelve notes and is much more creative and user-friendly theory, suggested new paths to me as well. Then, during the 1990s and 2000s, I was working with taonga pūoro, and now I’m moving again in a slightly different direction. Richard Nunns asked me once how I felt about writing music that would probably never be played again, as Richard in the beginning was the only player to work in contemporary art music. I wasn’t too bothered as I was exploring something new and exciting which seemed to be working, and if the music didn’t get played again, that wasn’t very important, especially after some of it was released on disc. Now things have changed. Richard and Hirini, Hirini maybe twenty years ago and Richard this year, have both passed on, but they mentored and enthused many young players, who, with their different playing styles, have now come to the fore. Composers are writing music for the taonga, and some of these players and composers are very good indeed, producing really imaginative work. For a long time, the players seemed to be always men, but this has fortunately changed in recent years; now there are some outstanding women players. Working with the taonga pu ̄oro and te reo Māori (the Māori language) has taken me to some wonderful places, both physical and spiritual, and given me some amazing experiences. I have learnt so much and met so many wonderful people on this journey. And the wish for understanding of te ao Māori, and the use of the language, seems at present to be growing exponentially in the country at large. It’s an exciting time to be living and writing here in Aotearoa. Te tai o Rehua, meaning the tide or current of the star Antares, is the Māori name for the Tasman Sea, the part of the Pacific Ocean which separates Australia from Aotearoa, also known as the ditch.

References Flintoff, Brian. Singing Treasures: The Musical Instruments of the Māori. Nelson: Craig Potton, 2004. Nunns, Richard (with Allan Thomas). Te Ara Pūoro: a Journey into the World of Māori Music. Nelson: Craig Potton Publishing, 2014.

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Sanders, Noel. Moon, Tides and Shoreline: Gillian Karawe Whitehead, a Life in Music. Aotearoa: Steele Roberts, 2010. Whitehead, Gillian. Ipu. Richard Nunns (taonga pu ̄oro), Judy Bailey (piano), Georg Pedersen (cello) Tungia Baker (narration). Rattle Records, RAT-D007, 1998, compact disc. ———. Outrageous Fortune. Richard Nunns (taonga pūoro), Deborah Wai Kapohe, Te Oti Rakena, Robert Wiremu, Ana Good, Judy Bellingham, Tungia Baker, Richard Nunns. Conducted by Michael Joel. Wellington: SOUNZ, 1988, compact disc. ———. Puhake ki te Rangi. Performances of Puhake ki te Rangi, Hineraukatauri, Hinetekakara (Aroha Yates-Smith, text) and Hineputehue. Richard Nunns (taonga pūoro), New Zealand String Quartet, Alexa Still (flute) and Tuhonohono. Atoll, ACD 107, 2007, compact disc. ———. Taiohi taiao. Aroha Yates-Smith (text), Karen Grylls (conductor), Richard Nunns (taonga pūoro). On Spirit of the land. Tower Voices New Zealand. Morrison Music Trust, MMT2065, 2006, compact disc.

CHAPTER 10

An Overview of my Compositional Practice and Collaborations in China Rachel C. Walker

Introduction I am an American composer now living in Germany. My primary musical concerns are time (both in exploring its different manifestations, and in the manipulation and elasticity of time over long-form compositional structures), language (pieces involving text, but also using the mechanics of Chinese as a stepping stone for notational and rhythmic development), and my ongoing artistic research into Chinese folk music (2014—). In 2015, I first travelled to Beijing as a Visiting Scholar at the China Conservatory of Music 中国音乐学院. The school focuses primarily on the study of Chinese folk song and traditional instruments, but also has

R. C. Walker (*) Fellow, Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 L. Kouvaras et al. (eds.), The Composer, Herself, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23922-9_10

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departments in composition, theory, and Western music. During this time, I studied intensively with composer Gao Weijie 高为杰, and began writing for Chinese instruments as a natural outcome of being in an environment with adventurous performers who wanted to push the boundaries of their instruments. I have continued this work into the present, and in many ways, Beijing has become my artistic home as a composer. I stayed on further in China as a Schwarzman Scholar of Tsinghua University, and have been back and forth in the meantime while continuing projects with performers and writers in the capital and across the country. My musical collaborators in China have included pipa player Xia Yuyan 夏雨言, sheng player Li Yifan 李怡凡, percussionist Zhang Yongyun 张永 韵, dizi player Wang Meng 王猛, and yangqin players Jia Wei Ng 黄嘉微 and Zhu Jiangyang 朱江阳. I have also had the opportunity to interview, meet with, and receive mentorship from many established performers and composers across China. These conversations have helped me to better understand and navigate Chinese music across many of its past and present incarnations. Apart from being rich both musically and intellectually, this is a community that is open and welcoming to curious minds. I would not have been able to enter into it without the help of many friends, colleagues, and mentors. As a composer, I find China to be a fascinating place to work in: I am not an ethnomusicologist in that I am not treating Chinese music as something that is fixed, but I am actively engaging with a living tradition on its own terms—which is to say, through musical means. My goal in researching contemporary and traditional Chinese music has not been to imitate or produce chinoiserie, but rather to reconsider through deep musical investigation what engagement with modern China can be while taking into account the technical and acoustic possibilities of Chinese instruments. This immersion has changed how I hear music, as well as my methodology in approaching new compositions, but, moreover, has opened my mind to alternate ways of operating in the world.

Writing Music My initial forays into composing for Chinese instruments were difficult, due to the thousands of years of technical and historical knowledge I was trying to make up for; the gaps in experiences and expectations between

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myself and the performers, and the pressure I felt to retain my compositional voice. With violin, a Western composer has an ingrained sense of what is idiomatic, but also for what is clichéd, what is stretching a performer’s limits, and what is borrowed. Learning all of this on the spot while working with a performer who is a virtuoso of their respective instrument is daunting, and for me it has required a substantial investment in time and research in order to write in a way that feels both non-imitative and organic. All of my pieces for Chinese instruments have thus involved anywhere from six months to several years of hands-on investigation. This process has included listening, reading, and score study; shadowing rehearsals and attending concerts; one-on-one meetings with performers; observing lessons to see how traditional music is taught from a young age; travel to local regions to hear a genre in its natural setting; myself learning an instrument hands-on; and long-distance communication over WeChat 微信 to share videos and files. This education across various Chinese instrument families is constantly evolving, but has become easier as I am able to build upon what I have learnt up until this point. A side-effect I did not anticipate after becoming engaged with these research processes for Chinese instruments was that I have had to reconsider the knowledge  I hold about the Western instruments I grew up with. Much of my research process from learning Chinese music now transfers across to new compositions regardless of the instrument or tradition at hand, in the forms of reappraising technical possibilities and learning to listen to sounds on their own terms. As with any collaboration, there is a certain level of recalibration needed on both sides, but time and time again I have discovered that what I am required to give up compositionally is not without gains. My first major work for a Chinese instrument was a large-scale pipa solo written for Xia Yuyan 夏雨言 in 2015 called For Summer Rain. Yuyan thinks like a composer herself, and, as a result, is incredibly exacting in her demands. Because of this, it proved to be a considerable challenge in moving from the exploratory phase to the point where there was a finished piece. In particular, I struggled with the idea of misconstruing connotations encoded in sound— for instance, if a pipa has a specific technique used for emotive effect, treating it as a found object or artifact might lead to a result that is along the lines of one taking a sentence and mixing and matching the grammatical syntax with no regard for the meaning. I also found myself dealing with the hurdle of trying to fit Yuyan’s seemingly incompatible taste and experiences

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within my own. It was only when we each gave up a portion of our expectations for what a pipa piece could or should be that the music could come into existence. Yuyan had to open herself to the possibility of interpreting an aesthetic she did not immediately connect with; I had to allow myself to write without fear and lend myself creative freedom. In doing so, we opened the doors to a long-term collaboration, which has led to the creation of a trio for pipa with saxophone and yangqin in 2016; a second solo work, this time for singing pipa player 琵琶弹唱, in 2018; and a work for two vocalising performers on nanpa and tambourine that premiered in 2019. In fact, many of the things that scared me as a composer working with Chinese music in the beginning are, if not resolved, now possible to consider more objectively. At the beginning, I strongly remember wanting to hold onto an extended chromaticism. When I started collaborating with sheng player Li Yifan 李怡凡, she demonstrated and explained the characteristics of the instruments she owned, and I was faced with writing for either the traditional or modern sheng. Traditional shengs have amazing timbral possibilities resulting from their open-faced mouthpieces, whereas, in order to accommodate total chromaticism versus the diatonicism of their predecessors, modern shengs are limited by a thin bocal-like mouthpiece with no open face. To compose a piece with seven notes in return for the timbre I so wanted sounded unbearable at first, but I eventually found a way to contextualise the pitches of the traditional sheng within a chamber ensemble including toy piano and yangqin. I also realised the relativity of the initial sentiment as I familiarised myself more with Chinese folk song: how could I be afraid to be pentatonic when so much Chinese music is not even fully pentatonic itself? It is richly microtonal, and there is a polyphony of points in the heterophony. Further, Chinese music is far from monolithic—the question of tradition or what is traditional is so layered that ultimately Chinese music is comprised of hundreds of genres, covering countless dialects, locations, and minorities. Any fear of how to maintain my voice while composing for Chinese instruments has worked itself out through becoming intimate enough with the instruments, but it was also in China that I learnt that one’s voice as a composer is not static—it adapts to your circumstances and to your environment, and the music you discover through that process can change you in return.

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Writing Music, Writing Words Past being musically engaged in China, some of the most eye-opening experiences that I have had have resulted from speaking Mandarin, and the subsequent possibilities for dialogue with artists in different fields that this affords. Language—figuratively and literally thinking about linguistics and syntax, but also the inner logic of sounds—has always played an important role in my music, and in China I have explored this further through working in tandem with living writers. Over the past five years, I have collaborated with Zheng Xiaoqiong 郑小 琼, a former migrant worker from Sichuan now living in Guangzhou; Shenzhen-based poet Ruan Xuefang 阮雪芳; and Autumn Yunting Tsai 蔡 昀庭, a writer and interdisciplinary artist from Taiwan now based in Europe. Many wonderful projects outside of China have also developed from the friendships I have made there. In 2019, I wrote a new piece for soprano and double bass with text by poet Eleanor Goodman, whom I met through Xiaoqiong after Eleanor translated several of her poems. Several of the pieces that have emerged, particularly those with texts from Zheng Xiaoqiong and Ruan Xuefang, have bridged the space between being translation projects and compositions. Thinking firstly as a translator, I have started by creating a new version of the text, and then cutting away from both it and the original, thus unraveling webs of connections between the Chinese poetry, my translated version, and the spaces in between. This way of working has opened up the expressive possibilities in the text, while allowing me to probe the multiplicities present in the poems at hand. Stemming from this, further projects have explored transcription from poetry recitation (for instance, projects with Ruan Xuefang and her readings in Chaozhou dialect) as a source for rhythmic and structural development in the background layers of my recent compositions. The research phases of these text-focused pieces have closely mirrored those I have experienced while composing for Chinese instruments, and have included extended periods of reading, memorisation, and going firsthand to meet the writers. After years of reading and memorising her work, in May 2018 I visited Zheng Xiaoqiong in Guangzhou. Over the course of several days, I traveled with her, Ruan Xuefang, and several other writers to visit factories in nearby Dongguan in order to better understand the imagery that features so prominently in Xiaoqiong’s work and the place she writes from. Hearing the soundscapes of the various factories directly informed the creation of a percussion duo with heightened recitation from

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her poem 铁钉 An Iron Nail. This piece was premiered by percussionist Zhang Yongyun 张永韵 and Xinyi Zheng 郑心怡 in 2018, as part of several years of collaboration on works for percussion and spoken voice with Yongyun. In Spring 2021, I made a new version of this piece, which can be performed without live spoken voice and includes Xiaoqiong’s own voice within the electronics. While in some cases I have set pre-existing texts from writers I know, at other times, the creation of the text has occurred in direct conversation with the author. Autumn Tsai and I discussed quite concretely our plan for Ebb and Flow, a work that premiered in September 2019 in Qingdao and Beijing, and which is scored for two vocalizing performers on nanpa 南琶, the pipa of Fujian Nanyin 福建南音, and tambourine. I fell in love with nanpa while in Lukang on a fellowship from the University of Cincinnati Research Council in 2014, and, during the course of my first collaboration with Xia Yuyan, I discovered that she too owned one. In November 2015, I heard Yuyan perform a concert including a piece of Nanyin she learnt while undertaking fieldwork with performers in Fujian. From that moment on I was determined to compose for it if the opportunity arose. Although I was interested to write for nanpa, or, more specifically, to continue my collaboration with Yuyan through the lens of this instrument, I had no desire to write a piece that was trying to “rewrite” or “recreate” the traditional music. Rather, what I hoped to explore were what other sonic possibilities could nanpa have, and how narrative, which is for me the inner force propelling the genre, could be re-explored in a piece that expanded the vocal requirements of all of the performers, so as to create a multidimensional dialogue. I had acquired several scores to traditional works from the Nanyin repertoire through a dizi performer and researcher in Fujian Province, and knew that I wanted to engage with the words in a distilled way. Autumn selected phrases and fragments from two of these pieces, at times signalling for the Hokkien dialect of Nanyin to be pronounced when the fragments are sung or spoken, while also composing a new text in Mandarin around them. At the same time, various parts of the new and the original texts were brought into the foreground in her typesetting (this text was in black ink, which indicated for it to be sung or spoken), or erased (present lightly in Autumn’s poem, but musically left unsaid). As Nanyin lyrics are love songs, we felt that having two performers who could both play their instruments and vocalise (as opposed to a single singer acting as a conductor for the chamber ensemble through giving percussive direction, as in standard

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Nanyin works) would allow for a widening of viewpoints and best represent the inner conflicts of the women in the stories. As Autumn wrote in the preface to the score: Two female characters from two different social statuses, while falling within a similar domestic image, experience unrequited love. With the interplay of the two languages, Mandarin and Nanyin text fragments from the original works, a sense of time is suggested. Yet, throughout the reinterpretation of the text, the boundaries between time and space are blurred.

Perhaps what contributed most to making this project meaningful was the bringing together of individuals with whom I had collaborated with for several years in other contexts. Directly parallel to the previous projects I had undertaken with Xia Yuyan in China, I had been collaborating long-­ distance with Zhang Yongyun 张永韵 on the series of works for percussion and voice. In Ebb and Flow, the world of spoken text and percussion we had created could meet the musical explorations with pipa and singing up until that point, tying together different threads of my work with poetry and Chinese instruments.

Challenges and Future Projects The barriers present when interfacing with Chinese music are many. Particularly because Chinese music is so deeply connected to language, I know that I would not be able to write for these instruments with the level of detail that I wish for without having placed myself there. It requires near-fluency or fluency in the language, and, even once one has obtained that in Mandarin, many folk musicians in remote areas speak local dialects. Then there are problems with transmission and reception for music that is neither Chinese nor not-Chinese—where does it belong? Many of these pieces I have composed for Chinese instruments are also quite virtuosic and can only be performed by a handful of performers, either inside of China or out. Lastly, because I have been writing quieter works that do not necessarily pair well with the large venues or concert culture of modern China, and because it can be difficult for Chinese traditional instrumentalists to travel internationally, recordings, at times, have to serve as the main means of transmission. So, in some senses, living in China at length has heightened my awareness to sense of place. I see location not as a specific constraint on what I

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write but rather as a factor that subtly imbues my music on levels both conscious and unconscious; while I am not actively manipulating my compositional voice because I am writing for a Western or non-Western instrument, living there has gradually led me to approach sounds and ideas that I would not have come into direct contact with had I remained only in the environment of Western classical music. Perhaps it is not only that there are certain intangible elements that one can only understand through longterm cultural immersion, but that the music one might write for pipa in China is touched by the other elements of living there—the language, its orthography, and, maybe, even the pollution—in a way that a piece for pipa written outside of China might not be. But the biggest challenge I feel that I face at this stage is a logistical one: there needs to be more dialogue with non-Eurocentric places, but the structures that are in place do not easily support deep cultural engagement with China. I want there to be a fluid conversation going in both directions: to examine the sounds, and find commonality through that, but most artistic programming around China seems more interested in marketing programs around embedded clichés rather than working to deterritorialise them. And because the landscape for contemporary music is still very much centered around traditional venues, ensembles, and instrumentations, I have found that writing for Chinese instruments, or being based off-the-­ radar, has sometimes limited me from taking on other projects with Western instruments that I am equally interested in. I want to do many different types of things, so it is a matter of balance and also one of fluidity. Although I have relocated to Germany, I am actively continuing my collaborations in China and with Chinese music while simultaneously pursuing new projects in Europe. In Spring 2019, I began research on sanxian 三弦 in Hangzhou with performer Chen Jingjing 陈京京, and I recently completed a longterm collaboration for Beiguan 北管 musicians and electronics with Autumn Yunting Tsai, The space in between, which premiered in September 2020 at the Kuandu Arts Festival’s Opening Concert in Taipei. A second performance took place at the Sprengel Museum in Hannover in November 2022. During the pandemic, percussion has been an interesting in-between point for me, as have works for non-Chinese instruments and voices incorporating Chinese texts. Percussionist Allen Otte and I have been exploring the possibilities for prepared yangqin for

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the past four years, and I am now preparing a new piece for him, closing in on, incorporating the  poetry  of Ruan Xuefang, prepared yangqin, and electronics.  As a composer, my ongoing research on and interactions with Chinese traditional instruments have enabled me to explore new musical directions in my compositional output. However, it is the close friendships I have developed with these performers and my love of Chinese music that have kept me going back.

CHAPTER 11

Luck, Grief, Hospitality: Re-Routing Power Relationships in Music Liza Lim AM

Luck I don’t think we should underestimate the intensity with which women’s work and personhood continues to be devalued, suppressed, and marginalised in various ways. These are consequences arising from deeply ingrained societal structures, and so my focus is on depersonalised collective power that manifests to impact individuals in personal ways. Creating and sustaining a career as a composer in the twenty-first century may seem like a Sisyphean endeavour no matter what one’s gender, but statistics overwhelmingly show that for women, passion, hard work, persistence, and brilliance are not sufficient qualities on which to build success. Two recent studies of gender inequality in music powerfully underline the chasm between talent and reward when it comes to “women’s music.” Catherine Strong and Fabian Cannizzo’s report for APRA-­ AMCOS (2017) and “Skipping a Beat,” (2017) co-authored by the University of Sydney’s Rae Cooper, Amanda Coles, and Sally

L. Lim AM (*) University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 L. Kouvaras et al. (eds.), The Composer, Herself, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23922-9_11

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Hanna-­Osborne, illustrate in painful detail the enormous attrition rate occurring for women in music. The 50/50 gender-split of incoming students to tertiary music studies dwindles to a participation rate for women of about 20–25% in the music profession, with the screen music industry and areas of composition evidencing figures that are very much lower. The data and the reporting make very apparent the structural barriers to women’s participation, particularly through unconscious bias (from both men and women), as well as through a high incidence of the whole spectrum of societal sexism, including sexual harassment and outright sexual assault in the worlds of music training and the music business.1 Sexism is embedded in our society, and as a corollary, it also structures the magic ingredient that allows an artistic practice to thrive—the element we call “luck.” Rather than being a random, chance element, I want to uncloak what structural luck looks like and give some examples of how I and others have navigated this and then offer suggestions for how we can reroute these structures. One of the most personally affecting pieces of recent research on women’s exclusion in music is the damning set of figures from the 2016 Gender Relations in New Music study led by composer Ashley Fure that looked at participation data from the seventy years of the Darmstadt Summer Course for New Music. I was named as amongst the top ten most-performed women composers at Darmstadt, where I had taught in both 1998 and 2010, and I can see how that relative personal success masked my understanding of the wider systemic problems at work. The statistics show a persistent ceiling of 13–14% in the inclusion of women as composers (in the years when they were performed at all!). This is the case, no matter what the total number of composers was and whether there were fifty or 300 works being performed. The highest rate for the programming of women composers is a figure of 19% that dates from 2014 (the last year of the data represented) (Fig. 11.1). This second graph (Fig. 11.2) shows the number of women as participants, both performers and composers, against total participants at the 1  Since early October 2017, recognition of the role of sexual harassment and rape culture in the entrenchment of gender inequality has exploded in the wider world following the accusations against Harvey Weinstein that triggered the #MeToo social media campaign. Beyond the high-profile stories of abuse in Hollywood, we also see toxic anti-female sentiments in our own new music community. See Rebecca Lentjes’ article on her experiences at the last Ostrava Music Days, “Ostrava Days, Brooklyn Nights,” Van Magazine, accessed 27 September 2017, https://van-us.atavist.com/ostrava-days.

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Fig. 11.1  Relative numbers of male and female composers’ works performed at the Darmstadt Summer Course in composition (1946–2014)

Fig. 11.2  Numbers of women as participants (composers and performers) at the Darmstadt School, during fifty years, 1963–2014, compared with total participants

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summer school. The participation rate remains under 20% for forty years with a trend upwards in the last few years to 40%. The trending rise in the last ten years is not matched by the programming figures, which remain below 20%. Amongst the statistics is an Australian connection that is not widely known and is, for me, a sign of how histories of achievement by women are all too easily erased: in 1974 Moya Henderson won Darmstadt’s Kranichstein Prize in composition—one of the most prestigious of composition prizes in Europe. Henderson was the second woman to do so and the only Australian. In the history of the festival, women have been awarded 18% of the prizes and men 82%. I alluded to my personal lack of awareness above: I have never particularly felt that things were more difficult for me because I was a woman, even though I could see more clearly how being Chinese and Australian were downsides to developing an international career in music. Yet I have had the experience of being the sole representative of my gender or in a significant minority in almost all public, career, creative, and academic spaces in the arts for more than thirty years. I can still count on one hand the number of times that my work has been programmed in a concert with all women composers; four of those concerts were given in the last year. I think that that kind of blindness is partly a function of how contemporary music functions as an area that encourages and rewards abstraction. In its art-classical models (here I also include traditions of experimental music from John Cage onwards), it often operates inside hermetically sealed system-making of one kind of another, with composition largely taught as a concern with “materials” that are self-referential. Even with political positioning and engagement with de-hierarchialised structures, as is often the case in the visual arts, work can just as easily be assimilated and accommodated into a “brand” that becomes neutralised into existing structures of late capitalist consumption and reproduction. The Darmstadt figures are highly significant because the data spans seventy years. What distresses me more than the raw low figures, is the compelling evidence of the difficulty of building on any gains beyond those low figures from year to year. All the studies show a continuing and gaping deficit of space for women in the music industry. One of the things that the social economist Pierre-­ Michel Menger talks about in his book The Economics of Creativity (2014) is how in the creative arts, relatively small gains at the beginning of a career—of opportunity, of exposure, of association—are massively

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amplified into benefits and so-called lucky breaks as one continues.2 The gendering of access and inclusion in the music business means that women overall make fewer such gains and tend to have less structural luck. When I look at my own career as a composer, I see that many of my earliest musical experiences are still highly influential. I see that the space that I was given as a thirteen-year-old by my high school music teacher, Rosalind McMillan, to write for orchestra has continuing impact forty years later. After two early pieces for school orchestra (one of them called Brain Salad Surgery after Emerson, Lake and Palmer’s 1973 album…), I took part in the 1986 Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra’s Composers’ School. Counting these early efforts, I’ve written eleven works for orchestra. I really hit my stride with orchestral writing at the eighth work in, with Flying Banner (after Wang To). This was the second work that I wrote as Composer in Residence with the Sydney Symphony in 2005, and this is after earlier commissions from the BBC Symphony, the WDR Sinfonie  Orchester, and the Los Angeles Philharmonic  Orchestra. I tell this story as an example of how there’s a feedback mechanism around opportunity where it is only after some time has passed, that things reinforce themselves and start to create more luck, more success, and so on. But for this luck mechanism to kick in where one’s work gains momentum from being interwoven with other people’s artistic lives, with institutions, and therefore with on-going opportunities, it requires that you’re “given a go” in the first place. It requires multiple opportunities to try things out, to practice, to fail, to partly succeed, and to keep trying. It requires a trust in the future. When we talk about the urgent need to create space for women in music, we’re also talking about long-term impacts on what our culture will be like all the way into the future. If we envision a culturally vibrant future, it’s absolutely imperative that we make space for and invest in a diversity of artists right now. Luck gifts energy, it gifts the power of ease (another word for this is “privilege”). Rather than seeing luck as random fortune, we can be much more conscious of how this power arrives. What cultural positions are at play and entangled with it? How is cultural value produced and reinforced—by and for whom? Who and what is included or excluded? By seeing luck in a systemic way, we can begin to act to shift how it works and impacts on us. 2  Pierre-Michel Menger, The Economics of Creativity, trans Stephen Rendall, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014.

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Power is relational. It grows between people, ideas, and things and it is produced and reinforced by the stories we tell ourselves and tell each other.

Grief If the story of luck is about a politics of distribution, this story is one of a politics of recognition. This is a story about grief, specifically in Indigenous Australian Yolŋu women’s culture, but there are resonances here that tell us important things about how women’s doings are or might be perceived and categorised, and how they therefore may or may not accrue value. Back in 2005, I was invited to curate a twilight concert series for the Adelaide Festival of the Arts in South Australia, and I heard about an Aboriginal women’s tradition of singing the light onto the land at dawn and off the land at sunset. After following various avenues of research, I finally found out about a rather hidden tradition in which the Yolŋu in North East Arnhem Land have clan ownership of the light, and the women in particular bring in the light and guide deceased souls in the departing light by performing grieving songs. These intense crying songs: tears and wailing mixed with song, play an important role in funerary rituals. When I tried to find out more from Aboriginal musicians whom I knew—they all happened to be men—everyone told me that “the women don’t have any music.” This was in relation to a more traditional ceremonial context rather than the pop music world, but I was really taken aback by this statement. Women’s ceremony has long been documented in academic contexts. In the 1940s, the anthropologist Catherine Berndt discussed women’s song cultures in North East Arnhem Land, including crying songs. Anthropological research on Indigenous women’s music has been published by generations of researchers such as Elizabeth MacKinley, Fiona MacGowan, Linda Barwick, Myfany Turpin, and others. But of course, I was asking the wrong people and asking the wrong kind of question. One important reason for that response (“the women don’t have any music”) might be that as an Aboriginal man, one would not presume to talk about women’s business even if one knows something about it. As anywhere, open secrets may also be unspeakable. Another might be that the cultural activity of women that involves sound might not be seen as “music” because it doesn’t occupy the same kind of public performance space that men’s music does.

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The Yolŋu women of the Gumatj clan decided to accept the invitation to perform their music at the 2006 Adelaide Festival. The Grant Pirrie Gallery in Sydney, who have a long-standing relationship with the famous Buku-Larrnggay Mulka Arts Centre (in Yirrkala in Australia’s Northern Territory), organised for me to meet the senior women in Yirrkala; but as it happened, the senior custodian of the songs passed away and so I visited Dhanaya to attend her funeral. Because of their hospitality, I was able to hear their powerful, mournful, and heart-wrenching crying songs, or milkarri, at dusk in the bush. In 2006, one year after the funeral, a group of women led by the senior artist Mrs. [G.] Yunupingu sang these keening songs and showed a video of their sister and mother on a stage next to the Torrens River in Adelaide. The women broke with cultural protocol to publicly name their sister and mother and to show her image, thereby asserting their political right to control information that would traditionally remain veiled. I want to stress that this was very much a power shift for these women on their own terms, in a specific social context where it mattered for the women. The women’s power in this instance lies in the construction and assertion of rights of permission-giving and permission-taking within a specific cultural system. Grief is both emotionally private and also performed and understood in highly codified ways in the Yolŋu community and, in the instance of the Adelaide Festival performance, was put to work for multiple purposes reaching into and radiating out from a specific cultural context. The daughters who performed at that Adelaide Festival, as the “Gay’wu Group of Women” (with other collaborators), have published a book discussing their deep knowledge of milkarri and honouring their mother.3 The book is also clearly a further assertion of their rights to knowledge, and they say: Most of the books written about songlines have been written by white people, and mainly white men…We also find that most of what’s written talks about men’s knowledge and doesn’t pay attention to or value women’s knowledge and milkarri. So, we decided we would write this book ourselves as Yolŋu women. […] When women cry milkarri our tremulous voices sing a story about pain, heartbreak, hope, loss, anger, frustration, happiness and love. When we say love, we are talking about what binds us 3  Gay’wu Group of Women, Laklak Burarrwanga, Ritjilili Ganambarr, and Merrkiyawuy Ganambarr-Stubbs, Song Spirals: Sharing Women’s Wisdom of Country Through Songlines (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2019), XXV.

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together. We are talking about loving our family, our land, our life, and loving who we are and where we come from. Yes, because when we cry milkarri for our Country, us women are claiming our self and the land, we are one.4 The Yolŋu are famous for initiating the 1963 Yirrkala bark petitions that sought recognition from the Australian government of traditional ownership of Indigenous land, and in the same year, their artists created the Yirrkala church panels that asserted title deeds to the land. More recently, the successful negotiation in 2008 of a Native Title Claim over sea rights—involving, again, paintings made by forty-seven male and female artists as evidence of title deeds—shows the community’s exquisitely strategic use of art for political leverage. I see the women’s use of their cultural rights around grief  and their work to assert power  both inside and outside their community, very much in this light. Rather than labouring comparisons to women’s work in other areas, though I think we can find many, I’m going to leave this “up in the air” as an example that I hope has resonance for the topic of gender and power. Obviously, my access to and knowledge of Yolŋu women’s culture is extremely limited and I point towards the art and writing of the cultural custodians themselves for more information. But of particular interest to me, related to the idea of women’s work, is thinking about the power to be found in the act of crossing over between private and public spheres, particularly seen here as a collective rather than an individual act. There’s the potential status shift to be found by repurposing what is seen as women’s work, from hidden activity to art making, that is, acting to change the code (something I think that can also be seen clearly in many feminist projects in the visual arts). Finally, there is the power of linking the personal and the cosmic: tears and light; grief and the ancestral domain; presence and absence as dimensions of spiritual power.

Hospitality And what about this “woman artist,” “woman composer” label…? It is one that is easy to reach for, but historically and in our present (though I sense it is changing), it can mean that one is outside of, is a stranger to 4

 Gay’wu women, Song Spirals, 18.

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systems of access, respect, rights, responsibilities, and power. This is a social label for something that is different for each composing woman: different as felt from the inside, from the zoomed-in view. That’s the inside where you have a name…where you don’t represent a whole gender but inhabit your own subjectivity…where you’re an independent spirit with very particular ways of being, knowing, and creating in music. I’ll tell you an origin story—this is about relational politics. My lived experience and a large part of my psychological make-up springs from feeling that I come from and inhabit several worlds; that I slip between different cultural skins, some of which are more ill-fitting than others, and that I also construct hybrid versions of them as a survival mechanism. It’s no accident that my artistic practice has an anthropological orientation—an ethnographic view that is afforded by being a stranger, or perhaps to put it more positively, of being a guest. I experience an existential in-betweenness that comes from having grown up between several cultures in Brunei and Australia, both places very much formed by British colonial rule. Brunei is a place where people speak a hotchpotch of languages, moving between them to find words to fit a situation: English, two or three Chinese dialects, Malay, and perhaps Tamil. When I was a child there, Islamic, Christian, Buddhist, and indigenous animistic beliefs all had a place with their customs, festivities, and social codes. Having to translate between languages and learn cultural dialects “on the run” has imprinted on who I am in a positive way. That kind of fluidity of identity formation was further complicated in the Australia I grew up in, through the Fraser-Hawke-Keating, prime-­ ministerial years and then later, living in Brisbane during the first era of Pauline Hansen’s One Nation political party and its anti-immigration populism. My experience of the political ethic of multiculturalism has been of a pluralism emptied of power within a political container of nationalism that is basically exclusionary—in Australia’s national imagination, multiculturalism still doesn’t extend very far beyond having more restaurant choices. With a pang I recall Sara Ahmed’s observation that “this very structural position of being the guest, or the stranger, the one who receives hospitality, allows an act of inclusion to maintain the form of exclusion.”5 So much for self-made and for externally imposed myths of identity…  Sara Ahmed, On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012): 43. 5

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Where Is “Home”? Home for me is an intersectional vastness, it has uncertainties but also immediacy. That’s the hyper-realness of estrangement, the more real than real feeling that kicks in when you’re in strange places—think of jetlag! Usefully for a creative life, that alertness and sense of the weirdness of things, brings many highly specific sensations and particularities of meaning, articulation, emotion, and gestures. As a stranger, one gains new ears and eyes! In this space, my senses are sharpened. I find when travelling to a place where I don’t know the language or the social codes that I switch my attention to the semantics of inflection and intonation, the semantics of time and space, of micro-gestures and micro-timing. This is a very musical way of receiving information. My compositional antennae notice the hesitations, pauses, the little softenings or perhaps tensions that are part of the rhythmic enactment of thinking and feeling processes. As I notice, as I listen, I tune in; I am linked to whatever I pay attention to. There is vulnerability in that coexistence. I stop being outside the culture and am drawn into it. I become implicated in it. I am learning and being transformed by the experience. So, I’m talking about life experience and I’m also talking about aesthetics and ultimately also about politics in the ways in which we belong and don’t belong. The heightened experiences brought by de-familiarisation that I describe really highlight how making sense of life is aesthetics.

Re-Routing Power Relationships Power is relational—it grows between people, ideas, and things. It is produced wherever one places one’s energy and attention. Hannah Arendt says that freedom doesn’t comes from the individual but arises, “as a relation between us, or, indeed, among us.”6 The politics of distribution, of recognition and relationality, is co-produced by communities. At a basic level, whatever we give our attention to is amplified, and when it comes to creating space for women, that means paying attention to everything. Everything is interlinked: curatorial choices, support

6  Stephanie Berbec, “An Interview with Judith Butler,” Verso Books, 30 June 2017, https:// www.versobooks.com/blogs/3304-an-interview-with-judith-butler.

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structures, funding, physical spaces, what we discuss and write about, what we give time to, whom we reference, and how we refer to things. Like the Yolŋu women, out of attention and attunement, we can take a strategic position: • we can take space (intervention) • we can change the terms of representation—break the rules, change the code • through a combination of both rigour and emotion, we can create a critical mass of attention that shifts the field and re-routes the lines of power. The optics and atmospherics of how something is represented and performed, that is, the art, carries the charge that communicates ideas across boundaries that have been resistant to change. I propose that the aesthetic dimension, and what we do as artists, is a profoundly useful way of experimenting with what the world is like and can be. Through art, we can experiment with forms that contain, split and spill, organise and dis-organise. Those forms expose hierarchies that show prioritisations and investments in different values; their rhythms reveal how we pattern and repeat those values; they show how we are linked to people, their ideas, and labour. As artists, what we do creatively, aesthetically, is implicated in causal relations. Where we place the power of our attention is also expressive of social and political relationships. • What do we make space for? • To whom and also how do we offer our hospitality? • How do we collectively take space and build alliances to redistribute power? I strongly advocate intervention as the strategy to make and take space, to build new structures that are hospitable to women and to address the deficits in structural luck that women experience again and again; I strongly believe in the use of quotas. There’s always some controversy around them, but let me turn around that perception of quotas as a crude and simple thing. A “quota” means “a share,” “an apportionment.” Quotas create pathways—to careers, to skills and to re-imagining legitimacy. Quotas create a space for talent to rise up and come through. My belief is that there is

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enormous value, through the use of quotas, in jumping immediately to the result one is looking for, rather than just talking about it and relying on incremental creep to get there, which history shows us never arrives. By modelling the results one is looking for, one can help normalise perception—for instance, that women have the right to occupy cultural space and to hold positions of authority. I want to address the criticism that tends to come out whenever there are any discussions of positive discrimination, which is around the question of legitimacy. On the one hand, everyone wants to be chosen on merit rather than seemingly crude attributes. On the other hand, as activist Peggy McIntosh has said, unconscious bias and invisible privilege also work to give “crude” results. As the statistics show, our current systems more readily recognise the merit of men than the merit of women. It’s actually really easy to show that including women means increasing standards with the example of orchestral auditions where musicians play behind a screen. The fact that there is good representation of women in orchestras can be directly traced to the use of blind audition processes.7 So, it’s not either/or, not a case of quotas versus quality. We can have the best and have women. We can get there through gender-blind assessment or by quotas (a space is opened for women where their merit can be recognised) or by bypassing entrenched systems of exclusion by choosing women who are the best. This is what Harvard University’s music department did recently. They chose the best and simultaneously addressed the problem of the underrepresentation of women in contemporary music and jazz by simply inventing new faculty positions and appointing the MacArthur Prize winner, flautist Claire Chase and the Grammy Award-­ winning jazz musician Esperanza Spalding as Professors of Practice. And of course, making space for someone who is usually a man, is how it’s always been done in the field of music… So, I would like to put to rest the merit question as a justification for exclusion of women. In my own experience as a composer (as I’ve related above, with my story about writing for orchestras) and in my experience of teaching composition over many years, I can say that talent, skill, and excellence are not static values but are developed in tandem with opportunity. Merit does not exist in a vacuum. It’s obvious when one says that the more chances one has to practise something, the better one will become, 7  Goldin, Claudia, and Cecelia Rouse. “Orchestrating Impartiality: The Impact of ‘Blind’ Auditions on Female Musicians,” The American Economic Review 90, no. 4 (2000): 715–41.

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but it has to be said again because the language that is used to cloak ideas around excellence such as genius and mastery (highly gendered words!), as well as just competence, hides the structural fact of opportunity. Give her access to the orchestra, the recording studio, the soldering iron, and the string quartet, support her with skills development, and fabulous results will flow. It feels like a fertile time for change. It’s heartening to see a number of important shifts in response to all the reports and statistics. The performing rights society APRA AMCOS have implemented a requirement of 40% male, 40% female, 20% male/female participation rates in order for projects to receive their funding, and I hope other funding bodies will follow suit. As a direct result of the Darmstadt research, five major European festivals in new music—Darmstadt, Donaueschinger Musiktage, Maerzmusik Berlinerfestspiele, Ultima Festival, and the Huddersfield Festival—have publicly committed to a 50/50 gender split in their programming over the next five years. Showing how ideas can magnetise action and be amplified when they reach a critical point, Klangspuren Schwaz in Austria has also responded to the Darmstadt statistics and has curated a programme with 76% women composers in their festival this year, which is a significantly better level of representation than in any previous festival. I am making a call for Australian festivals and concert programmers, our orchestras, and other groups and venues to similarly examine their statistics for new work and make similar commitments to gender equity in commissioning and performance. We are starting to see change, and there are bold examples of addressing inclusion, such as the Ensemble Offspring and Claire Edwardes’ 2017 all-women composers programming; Lisa Cheney and Peggy Polias’ Making Waves podcast series; the work of leaders such as Professor Cat Hope at Monash University, Dr. Natalie Williams at the Australian National University, Professor Vanessa Tomlinson at the Queensland Conservatorium, Professor Matthew Hindson at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, and their  National Women Composers’ Development Program,8 amongst others. The more models we have of 8  Later renamed ‘Composing Women’ under my leadership 2018–2022 when I joined the Sydney Conservatorium of Music as Professor of Composition. In the five years following this conference address, we have seen a remarkable shift in the conversation and positive signs of change around gender equity, diversity and belonging in classical music.

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this kind of attentiveness and action in opening up more space for women, the more likely it will be that we’ll see sustainable positive change. Our attention and attunement can shift us towards bringing about a more equitable worldview that includes and values women’s power and creativity. As artists, we do not exist apart from the world and the operations of power. As creative thinkers, seeking more space for our work in this relational world, we can challenge old systems and discover ways of re-routing that power in unexpected places —even in the forms of the things we call luck, grief, and hospitality. Acknowledgements  Permission to cite the example of the Adelaide Festival performance of milkarri was given by the Buku-Larrnggay Mulka Arts Centre. This chapter was written on Wurundjeri country, part of the unceded sovereign lands of the Kulin Nation. I also acknowledge the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation on whose unceded sovereign lands I work at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, University of Sydney and pay my respects to Elders past and present. This text was finalised during my residency at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, Germany in 2021 who provided assistance with copy-editing.

References Ahmed, Sara. On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012. Berbec, Stephanie. “An Interview with Judith Butler.” Verso Books, 30 June 2017, https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/3304-­an-­interview-­with-­judith-­butler. Buku-Larrngay Mulka Centre. Saltwater: Yirrkala Bark Paintings of Sea Country: Recognizing Indigenous Sea Rights. Sydney: Jennifer Isaacs Publishing, 1999. Cooper, Rae, Amanda Coles, and Sally Hanna-Osborne. Skipping a Beat: Assessing the State of Gender Equality in the Australian Music Industry. Sydney: University of Sydney Business School, 2017. Fure, Ashley. “GRID—Gender Research in Darmstadt.” GRID Darmstadt, 6 August 2016. https://griddarmstadt.wordpress.com/about/. Gay’wu Group of Women. Song Spirals: Sharing Women’s wisdom of Country Through Songlines. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2019. Goldin, Claudia, and Cecelia Rouse. “Orchestrating Impartiality: The Impact of” Blind” Auditions on Female Musicians.” The American Economic Review 90, no. 4 (2000): 715–41.

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McIntosh, Peggy. “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.” The National Seed Project. Accessed 20 June 2017. https://nationalseedproject. org/Key-­SEED-­Texts/white-­privilege-­unpacking-­the-­invisible-­knapsack. Menger, Pierre-Michel. Translated by Stephen Rendall. The Economics of Creativity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014. Strong, Catherine and Fabian Cannizzo. Australian Women Screen Composers: Career Barriers and Pathways. Melbourne: RMIT University, 2017.

CHAPTER 12

In Search of the Artistic Moment: Interdisciplinary Collaboration and “The Space Between” from an Australian Female Composer’s Perspective Yantra de Vilder

The Artistic Moment The Artistic Moment is a state of being that goes beyond time and personality in creative practice. It is the liminal space where an artist loses their sense of separateness and becomes one with their collaborators. Listening, respect and trust are the vital pre-requisites. I first came across the expression “Artistic Moment” when reading an interview with Guy Laliberté, creative director of Cirque du Soleil, Canada’s leading multimedia physical theatre circus company. Laliberté was using this term in an attempt to define the moment of lucidity and

Y. de Vilder (*) Sydney, NSW, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 L. Kouvaras et al. (eds.), The Composer, Herself, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23922-9_12

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timelessness that may transpire in creative endeavours.1 In September 2009, Laliberté became the first artist to explore space with his Poetic Social Mission in Space, an innovative project that used art and culture to raise international awareness of the necessity to protect our water. From a space station, he created a two-hour online program uniting various artists, politicians and activists, who either read poetry or shared a performance. Performers and speakers included Peter Gabriel, Cirque du Soleil, Al Gore, U2, and David Suzuki. The event took place simultaneously in Montreal, Moscow, Santa Monica, New  York City, Johannesburg, Mumbai, Marrakesh, Sydney, Tokyo, Tampa, Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro, Paris, London, and the International Space Station. Poetry, music, dance, visual arts and photography served as the connecting thread for Guy Laliberté’s project. In each of the cities, an Artistic Moment unfolded, defined within this outer space context as a particular “physical moment.” The Artistic Moment can be described as a type of flux within interdisciplinary and cross-cultural artistic practices. It is the moment where the conditions allow optimum creativity in collaboration, and provide a meeting point where all the elements come together to bring about a transformative experience. This phenomena manifests as an “interlock.” I define an “interlock” as a variety of characteristics that fit together, for example rhythmic and melodic elements, synchronicities operating between visual and musical media, and the different cultural perspectives between people. It is through these “interlocks” that a connected artistic cogency evolves—a nexus where things and people come together: a collaborative happening (Fig. 12.1). In every creative project my quest for experiencing the Artistic Moment is driven by a search for a place where I can become “a cultivator of infinite time,” and where “time and space are equivalent.”2 Although, in many ways, the experience of the Artistic Moment goes beyond words, in order to articulate it and attempt to unpack its nuances, I have come to view it through the Japanese concept of Ma. In colloquial terms, Ma is a “gateway” phenomenon—a between place, a zone of space and pause. Metaphorically, I see myself as a gateway. In addition, I imagine I am standing as a bridge between places; what Steven Nuss has described as a “border crosser.”3 These in-between spaces may be  Guy Laliberté, “Poetic Social Mission,” uploaded 12 October 2009, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpfTDflB2Wc. 2  Toru Takemitsu, Confronting Silence (Berkeley: Fallen Leaf Press, 1995). 3“   Steven Nuss, “Hearing Japanese, hearing Takemitsu.” Contemporary Music Review 21 (2002): 4, 35–71. 1

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Fig. 12.1  In Search of the Artistic Moment, Charcoal Drawing by Yantra de Vilder, 2012

charged with tension and revelation. I believe that if this “space between” is infused with listening, respect and trust, for both self and other, it transforms the creative experience far beyond the limited strength of the individual components. Ma, the ancient philosophical aesthetic encompassing architecture, music, theatre and visual arts is a framework to my understanding of the imminence of the space between things. Viewing collaborative relationships as being within a “gateway” experience, the intent is on what lies between rather than the individuation of the separate entities. This allows things to exist and have meaning through intervals of spatial designation. It is further elucidated in Japanese theatrical arts, where the talent of the actor is judged by their ability to enliven the Ma—the pause, the space. The success of this delivery is accompanied by the presence of those in the creative team, how they have been, and continue, to listen to each other. My approach to collaboration arises first and foremost from friendships with key colleagues in a place where we can be “trading in

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imagination”—not cultural domination.4 In this way and inspired by Japanese sensibilities, in 2015 I created Haiku, a site-specific, multi-artform immersive installation designed as an honouring to the fragility of our life, and our environment. The artistic vision of the work was born when I was wandering through the Gosford Edogawa Japanese Gardens and was struck by its sheer beauty. It seemed the perfect place to deepen and refine my exploration of the Artistic Moment. Haiku created a bridge between creative collaborators and gardens in Japan, Australia and France. I presented it in a number of different forms—an immersive installation, a multi-media theatrical performance, a film and an orchestral work.5 It was a collaborative exploration incorporating dance, contemporary western and eastern music, visual arts, film and text. All these elements were underpinned by the environmental influence of the Japanese Garden. Haiku, with its strong Japanese elements of the ancient form of haiku text, taiko and shakuhachi instrumentation, and Butoh6 dance elements, created the exciting possibility of unearthing new artistic ground for me as a performer, composer and collaborator. At the heart of this project was my collaboration with my mother, Faith Reid, who is the author of the Haiku poems.7 These poems were used as an inspirational source for the music composition. Within the art installation, the haiku text faded in and out, projected into the core of a spiral of white stones in the centre of the room, framed by leaves and bamboo. Faith had been writing haiku for over fifty years, and the sense of belonging and identity that is embedded in this creative relationship with my mother injected deep meaning to my role in Haiku. A sense of urgency further drove the creation of this work due to my ageing mother’s fragility and impending blindness.

4  I first came across this concept in a conversation with Bruce Crossman, referring to a conference organized by Merlinda Bobis entitled Trading in Imagination (Bobis 2001) at the University of Wollongong and mirrored in his dissertation discussing orientalism in Bruce Crossman, Personal Creative Process towards a Pacific-European Identity, (Doctor of Creative Arts diss., University of Wollongong, 1999), 76. 5  Haiku won the APRA Western Sydney University Award for composition in 2015. 6  Butoh (舞踏 Butō) is a form of Japanese dance theatre that encompasses a diverse range of activities, techniques and motivations for dance, performance, or movement. Following World War II, butoh arose in 1959 through collaborations between its two key founders Hijikata Tatsumi and Ohno Kazuo. I worked with Ohno Kazuo presenting a work for the Adelaide Arts Festival in 2009. 7  Haiku is the shortest among the traditionally accepted forms of Japanese poetry. It consists of seventeen syllables divided into three sections of five-seven-five.

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In creating the work, my aim was to be the “navigator” for the team. As I was a performer as well as creative director, it was important to be able to retain the big picture while adhering to the immediacy of the task at hand, whether it be playing the Tibetan bowls, harp or merely guiding us all through the environment. At the heart of generative, shared creativity is the concept of the “mind meld”8 that grows through collaboration— an unspoken communication that is felt through the bodies of collaborators, often not discussed or processed cognitively. I have found that often these non-verbal domains of connection and feel can give rise to the Artistic Moment. This unity of purpose is strengthened by the creative decisions intuitively arising out of an embodied process and sensitised awareness. The different influences from each collaborator’s unique musical voice dissolve into each other’s, reforming into a united entity. Individuality of each collaborator is forgotten as a new, group identity is realised (Fig. 12.2). Collaboration and improvisation are constants in my creative practice. I am reminded that collaborative musical improvisation has been compared with the swarm of a bee colony, “engaging all the participants whilst distributing responsibility and empowerment among them.”9 A growing number of researchers in the scientific community are exploring ways of applying swarm intelligence to diverse situations including the social and cultural dimensions of network systems and human hierarchical interaction. Swarm theory maintains that the distributive and co-operative approach used by many social insects can have resonances for our understanding and development of social clustering and enfoldment in a group musical improvising context. This swarm relationship may co-exist within a sense of Ma, where the space allows a collective atmosphere to emerge. I have sensed and observed it arising organically in my musical ensembles as we become the performative swarm. Borgo goes on to describe this swarm phenomenon as “simplexity”10 that is, the manner in which the complex yet immediate nature of ­improvisation can focus the attention on the emergent performance and produce qualities of what may be referred to as “orderly disorder.” It is 8  Karen Pearlman, “Intuition and Collaboration,” Lumina Australian Journal of Screen Arts and Business (Sydney: Australian Film Television and Radio School, 2012). 9  David Borgo, Sync or Swarm: Improvising Music in a Complex Age (New York: Bloomsbury, 2005). 10  Borgo (2005).

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Fig. 12.2  Swarm, Collage by Yantra de Vilder, 2013

often the case that players cannot even predict how, or when, an improvised piece will end until it is has reached its own natural conclusion. This randomness of outcome, both in a durational and compositional sense, strengthens the swarms acts of improvisation and interaction. Social networks are facilitated in a somewhat chaotic process arising within the “gateway” of simple musical rules.

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These “systems poised on the edge of chaos”11 and produce deeply-felt aesthetic responses. They are often characterised by the inherent permeability of uncertainty, articulated and defined by the improvisation process itself as a means of unravelling and journeying to the Artistic Moment. In short, each composition, each rehearsal, each performance, is unique. This notion of “reverence to uncertainty”12 in both the audience and performer is also at the heart of Jason Stanyek’s definition of free improvisation, that it is a “fertile space for the enactment and articulation of the divergent narratives of both individuals and cultures.”13 I believe collaboration, improvisation and Ma can combine to bring about expressions of ritual engendering a transformative experience. I am aware that the term “spiritual” tends to be an overloaded and at times misunderstood term. It can encompass a broad range of nuances including (but not limited to) mythical and magical elements, eclectic metaphysical sensibilities, religious spirituality, environmental spirituality, and non-­ religious spirituality. Yet my focus on drawing together creativity and spirituality is not a new concept and is gaining traction amongst contemporary researchers and artists. Composer Liza Lim describes this intersection as a “shimmering… recognising… a deep inter-relationship between the realms of the visible and invisible.”14 Australian academic and musician, Richard Vella further explores these ideas further, to quote: “Through these sonic human experiences one develops a deeper relationship with the other, that other being a beloved, our environment, or God.”15 These invisible connections as felt vibration I believe are at the heart of collaborative improvisation, taking it into a realm beyond language and into a mystical sphere of sound and resonant emergence. My own spirituality has an eclectic foundation. I identify it as being a bridge between Buddhist and Christian contemplative and musical practices, and it influences much of my creative life. For example, whenever I am entering a recording studio, rehearsal room, or before performances, there are certain exercises and rituals that I regularly go through to prepare the ground for the Artistic Moment, such as lighting a candle, meditating and praying. At its essence is my own quest for peace and inspiration.  Borgo (2005).  Borgo (2005). 13  Stanyek, cited in Borgo (2005). 14  Liza Lim, “Staging an Aesthetic of Presence,” Search Journal for Music and Culture 6 (2006): 1. https://www.searchnewmusic.org/lim.pdf. 15  Richard Vella, A–Z of Spiritual Music: A Users Guide (Sydney: ABC Books, 2006). 11 12

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Whether I am collaborating or working alone, preparation of the physical (room or environment) and psychic (mood) space is important. The mechanics of this are connected to a personal aesthetic of beauty and harmony, whereby I am preparing myself to change into sound in the sense that Takemitsu defines listening: “Listening probably means changing into sound itself by existing within it.”16 Another important process in my preparation for performance and rehearsal is the finger warm up. This is purely physical and related to the dexterity of my fingers so that they can follow inspiration without limitation. I always practice a series of exercises, which includes scales, modes and rhythm exercises. This warm up not only serves to lubricate my fingers, but also sets the scene for a certain readiness, and a deeper way of listening that goes beyond the physical, realm of muscle memory into the more transcendent realm of metaphysical sounds. Takemitsu believes that the substance of art is already in existence. He states that: “One whom we recognise as a poet is, then, one who is able to read, to perceive, and make available to us the poetry which is already inexistence in the world. Music, too, exists everywhere around us, but laziness inhibits most of us from hearing it; the composer can. We live in a world full of music and poetry to which we are generally insensitive. The function of the artist is to overcome this laziness.”17 All these elements are what I consider my preparation tools so that I may be used as a channel for music, that it may flow through me, unencumbered by the negative thoughts that can diminish a creative act. I also use Christian based Centering Prayer, a meditation technique (as taught by Trappist Monk Father Thomas Keating), as well as the Buddhist practice of chanting. The album Devotion that I recorded with Tibetan Buddhist nun Venerable Robina Courtin was an extension of these rituals, and produced over a period of three years, with much time and space for reflection, listening and analysing. My ethnomusicological research involved intensive inter-cultural hybridity, listening to traditional Tibetan Buddhist chants

16  Toru Takemitsu, “Mirrors,” Perspectives of New Music 30, no. 1 (Winter 1992): 36–80, https://doi.org/10.2307/833284. 17  Takemitsu (1992: 76).

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and also the compositions and liturgical songs of the eleventh-century German abbess, Hildegard of Bingen.18 The final result was a unique acapella recording of Robina’s and my voices, multi-layered into a sonic tapestry. The two voices were “interlocked” with complex audio production techniques, resulting in the sound of a female choir as it might be heard in a reverberant ancient monastery or temple. The process of our work together required a challenging level of intimacy throughout the many hours we spent in the studio together. And the work did not stop there: our many shared meals together also became a place of deeper communication, discovery and renewal. All these moments in close proximity further informed the musical and studio processes, contributing to the vibrational fabric of the final recorded work. Creative meetings like this contain in-between zones imbued with pressure and release. I have found these juxtapositions of tension and surrender can result in spiritual and creative emergences. In addition, viewing my collaborative relationships from a Ma perspective, I have also come to identify many salient qualities that give rise to a profound immediacy of what lies between people, rather than the egotistic individual elements that separate. As I have said, this notion of the space between things directly informs my thinking. It encompasses the space between the breath, the space between eastern and western modes of spirituality, the space between musical notes, and the space between people. It inhabits an invisible zone charged with potential—a silence within the sound. I believe humans are primarily social creatures. The concept that we are not alone but interdependent is clearly demonstrated in the Japanese word for human being—ningen, which graphically has two calligraphy strokes leaning up against each other. This combines the characteristics of human and betweenness—implicating that to be human is to be among other people. 人 ningen – human being

18  Hildegard of Bingen was an eleventh-century German abbess, composer, writer, visionary, artist, mystic, philosopher and polymath. She formed the core of a growing community of women attached to the male monastery. She is recognized as a saint by the Roman Catholic Church and in 2012 was named a Doctor of the Church by Pope Benedictine XVI. She is also known for the invention of a constructed language known as Lingua Ignota.

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Personal Creative History The composer Brian Eno states that the art of composition is akin to gardening, where a seed is planted, and its ongoing development process is subject to a range of external forces. Similarly, a composer’s original momentum is one where “old ideas don’t go away, new ideas get added.”19 My personal ecology has grown from a colourful and creative home life, starting from a childhood where house concerts and soirées were a regular occurrence. My mother, being involved with the early days of Australian radio and television as a presenter and broadcaster, was pivotal in creating this environment. I remember well her involvement in the Argonauts Club, one of the ABC’s (Australian Broadcasting Commission) most popular programs running six days a week from 1941–1961. It had over fifty thousand members who were encouraged to submit writing, music, poetry and art, and as my mother was one of the broadcasting team, this was the beginning of my cultural life. I attended a Rudolf Steiner school (Glenaeon) where languages, gardening, woodwork, music, mythology and art were instilled in us from an early age. Creativity was high on the agenda. However, academic performance was somewhat neglected, so my parents decided to send me to Abbotsleigh, a private girl’s school in Sydney, to complete my matriculation. I believe I had the best of both worlds in my education—a strong foundation in creativity and spirituality at the Steiner school, refined in my later school years by a more academic environment under the tutelage of the engaging and forward-thinking headmistress Betty Archdale. After school I spent most of my time exploring music as a career, working in the industry composing music for film, theatre and as part of many contemporary music ensembles including Do Re Mi, performances with Robyn Archer, and my work with the BBC. I worked as a composer and audio consultant for the BBC over a period of ten years on a range of international projects in Bangladesh, Afghanistan, London and Myanmar. Then after the age of thirty, I decided that I wanted to try academia. I enrolled in the contemporary music course majoring in composition at Southern Cross University. For my undergraduate degree, I produced a major work entitled The Twelve Caverns of the Underworld. This multimedia music theatre production was based on Amduat, an Ancient Egyptian  Brian Eno, My Year with Swollen Appendices (London: Faber and Faber, 1996).

19

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funerary text of the New Kingdom, considered a guide for the stages of the afterlife. My interest in music and ritual had begun. My Masters research degree focused my enquiry into the place of Trance Music in contemporary culture. I received an overseas scholarship and travelled to Europe interviewing contemporary trance practitioners and participating in associated musical events, culminating in the production of a sixty-minute recording, Evolution Journey and written exegesis, In Search of Contemporary Trance Music. I have developed my own approach to composing through research into the nature of trance music (traditional and contemporary). I discovered that drones, specific beats per minute, and the repetition of rhythmic and melodic structures could induce a trance-like quality in the performer and listener, adding to a sense of timelessness, which provided a musical illustration of the concept of sonic space as a division of time.20 Through drones, static harmonic languages are conveyed, establishing a dream-like plateau. These techniques have developed as the musical basis in my compositions and performances in my endeavour to evoke ritual spaces. As discussed above, using the Artistic Moment as a lens through which to view my aesthetic impulse implies a context of spirituality. However, as I do not ascribe to any one particular ethos of spiritual or religious tradition; I find that describing this aspect of myself is challenging—like trying to pour an ocean into a teacup. I am seeking a sense of meaning and experience that go beyond the realms of human vernacular. I am looking for a sense of connection and feel that is imbued with a resonance, opening up a space of immanence and which has a lasting impact on the work and those involved in the process—not just the artistic collaborators but the audience as well. Consequently, in synthesising the ideas of the Artistic Moment, Ma, border crossing, swarm, and ritual, I have developed a personal creative credo. I believe every artist tackles such questions as: what am I saying, how do I want to say it, and why do I want to say it? Is it for money, self-­ expression, communication? What drives the meaning of the work? How am I contributing to beauty on the planet? These questions have been recurrent in my creative practice, and in each project I am involved with, whether it be a performance, film, theatre event or recording, I find my

20  José Maceda, “A Concept of Time in a Music of Southeast Asia (A Preliminary Account).” Ethnomusicology 30, no. 1 (Winter 1986): 11–53.

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key creative impetus resides in the objective of what I came to define as The Artistic Moment. Over the past twenty years I have found that my understanding of the Artistic Moment has deepened and with it has come an acceptance of the “complexity, uncertainty, instability, and uniqueness,”21 accompanies the human condition. I have become more aware of the intangible connections between collaborators, which I consider to be the source of a sacred potency. I identify this as a locus whereby collaborative arts practice can take an event beyond the predictable and known into a realm of discovery and renewal. My projects have encouraged me to uncover systems of meaning within an internalised view of creativity—a “feeling” approach that informs the collaborations across the interdisciplinary and cross-­ cultural nature of the work. The threads of this artistic cogency are based in a colourful organicism that is beyond the rulebook of any predetermined theoretical constructs. They are radical spontaneous impulses, which can become manifest in a quickening of artistically dangerous moments, such as the practice of improvisation where there is no safety net—only an ongoing vigilance to the revelatory moment of here and now. Two years ago, after the realisation of my projects Haiku and Devotion, and on completion of my doctorate, I sat in my garden one spring afternoon and felt compelled to distil the essence of what I had been thinking about during these years, and these words came to me: The Artistic Moment I stand at the Gateway Where heaven meets earth Where silence meets sound At the precipice of birth Colours dissolve All time melts away I arrive where I started Transformed in a new way (Yantra de Vilder, 2016)

21  Donald Schön, The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action (New York: Routledge, 1991).

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References Bobis, Merlinda. “Sounding the Ritual: Backgrounding the Pacific-European Resonances in Daragang Magayon – Cantata.” Asia and Australia: Trading in Imagination. Creative Arts Conference, University of Wollongong, August 2001. Borgo, David. Sync or Swarm: Improvising Music in a Complex Age. New  York: Bloomsbury, 2005. Crossman, Bruce. “Personal Creative Process towards a Pacific-European Identity.” Doctor of Creative Arts Thesis, University of Wollongong, 1999. Eno, Brian. My Year with Swollen Appendices. London: Faber and Faber, 1996. Fox, Matthew. Hildegard of Bingen, A Saint for Our Times: Unleashing her Power in the 21st Century. Oakland: Namaste Publishing, 2012. Hildegard of Bingen. Canticles of Ecstasy. Accessed 20 June 2013a, https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=5PlFFCDhtYc Hildegard of Bingen. Chants for St Ursula. Accessed 20 June 2013b, https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9uMd1ap51A Hildegard of Bingen. Kyrie Eleison Accessed 20 June 2013c, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8yXJ0MDTI4Q Keating, Thomas. “The Classical Monastic Practice of Lectio Divina.” Contemplative Outreach News 12, no.2 (Winter 1998). Laliberté, Guy. “Poetic Social Mission.” Accessed 17 November 2021. https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpfTDflB2Wc. Lim, Liza. “Staging an Aesthetic of Presence.” Search Journal for Music and Culture 6 (Fall 2006). http://www.searchnewmusic.org/lim.pdf. Maceda, José. “A Concept of Time in a Music of Southeast Asia (A Preliminary Account).” Ethnomusicology 30, no. 1 (Winter 1986): 11–53. Morishita, Chikako. “Ma, Heart of Silence.” CeReNeM Journal 1 (2010). Nuss, Steven. “Hearing Japanese, hearing Takemitsu.” Contemporary Music Review 21 (2002): 4, 35–71. Pearlman, Karen. “Intuition and Collaboration.” Lumina Australian Journal of Screen Arts and Business. Sydney: Australian Film Television and Radio School, 2012. Schön, Donald. The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action. New York: Routledge, 1991. Takemitsu, Toru. “Mirrors.” Perspectives of New Music 30, no. 1 (Winter 1992): 36–80. Takemitsu, Toru. Confronting Silence. Berkeley: Fallen Leaf Press, 1995. Vella, Richard. A–Z of Spiritual Music: A User’s Guide. Sydney: ABC Books, 2006.

PART II

Philosophical and Phenomenological Dimensions of Musical Time

CHAPTER 13

Finding Time, Finding Space: An Autoethnography of Compositional Praxis Christine McCombe

Introduction: Claiming the Space Finding Time and Space to compose is a challenge for many working in the field of contemporary music and is shared by many artists, female and otherwise. Nearly a century ago Virginia Woolf wrote about the importance of a room of one’s own,1 and although many things have changed since then, it remains true that in order to undertake any creative work, one needs some form of income and a space in which to work. For creative artists, and in this instance, composers who are women, the juggling of family commitments, earning income and carving out time for one’s own creative practice can be complex and at times overwhelming.

1

 Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, (London: Bloomsbury, 1928).

C. McCombe (*) Melbourne, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 L. Kouvaras et al. (eds.), The Composer, Herself, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23922-9_13

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In this chapter I offer myself as both researcher and research subject in order to reflect upon how “Composition by Women in the Twenty-First Century” happens, and by discussing the range of factors that have impacted upon my compositional practice. Through an auto-ethnographic approach, I can offer my own unique and personal contribution to knowledge in this field. Elliot Eisner proposes several ways in which the arts contribute to knowledge in his chapter “Art and Knowledge” in The Sage Handbook of the Arts in Qualitative Research. Art encourages us to see and hear in new ways, revealing new ways to experience the world. Art can engender empathy and insight into the experience of another through engaging with their art. Art can challenge use to take a fresh perspective, to imaginatively challenge habitual ways of interpreting and reacting to the world. And he states that “Art helps us connect with personal, subjective emotions, and through such a process, it enables us to discover our own interior landscape.”2 Auto-ethnography allows the author as research subject to “use personal experience to illustrate facets of cultural experience.”3 Writing about personal experience becomes a way of knowing, a way of making sense of and understanding the context for personal lived experience. This approach is both useful for the person constructing the auto-ethnography and also for those reading the account, as a way of connecting through shared experience.4 The author as research subject becomes a “witness” to a particular cultural moment in time.5 In their article “A Participatory Inquiry Paradigm,” John Herron and Peter Reason outline an epistemological framework around ‘Critical Subjectivity’ based on four ways of knowing: Experiential, Presentational, Propositional and Practical. The act of composing sits within field of “Presentational Knowing”, which they describe: “It clothes our experiential knowing of the world in the metaphors of aesthetic creation, in expressive spatio-temporal forms of imagery.”6 Critical Subjectivity is grounded in an acceptance of primary subjective experience as an 2  Elliot Eisner, “Art and Knowledge” in Handbook of the Arts in Qualitative Research: Perspectives, Methodologies, Examples and Issues (Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 2008): 12. 3  C.  Ellis, T.  Adams, T & A.  Bochner, “Autoethnography: An Overview,” Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research 12, no.1 (2010): 3. 4  Ellis (2010: 5). 5  Ellis (2010: 6). 6  J. Heron & P. Reason, “A Participatory Inquiry Paradigm” Qualitative Inquiry 3, no.3 (1997): 281.

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articulation of being “in the world” and therefore “the ground for all our knowing.”7 As a research methodology it also acknowledges both the “authentic value and […] restricting bias” of a subjective perspective and affirms the need for Critical Subjectivity to include “a self-reflexive attention to the ground on which one is standing.”8 With this in mind, I offer my lived experience and reflections on my compositional praxis as one part of the broader picture of “Composition by Women in the TwentyFirst Century.”

Moments in Time and Space When I started studying music at university in the mid-1980s, there were no works by women composers included in the syllabus that I recall. Having studied piano since the age of eight, I was familiar with Dulcie Holland and Miriam Hyde but at university I had a strong sense that these composers were more “music educators” and so not considered as equal in importance to their male contemporaries. This, combined with the “cultural cringe” that instilled the idea that any music composed by Australians in the twentieth century was almost by definition “second-­ rate,” meant that Australian female composer role models were pretty thin on the ground. An absence of role models is often cited as a potential explanation for the continued gender imbalance in contemporary composition. Although I don’t recall ever thinking that I couldn’t be a composer because of my gender, I do believe my lack of confidence in my own abilities could stem from this absence of role models when I first started composing. In the 1990s with the upsurge in “women’s studies” and feminist musicology it became apparent that there were in fact many excellent composers who happened to be women and I remember feeling extremely excited at the prospect of getting to know these works and be involved in their public presentation. From the age of twenty, when I decided that composing was something I wanted to pursue, all my composition teachers and mentors—throughout my composition studies in Australian and the United Kingdom—have been men. I have on many occasions been the only female composer in the concert program, or the only female composer on a panel and as a teacher I notice the continued gender imbalance in the composition student cohort. My commitment to being a composer has not wavered, although 7 8

 J. Heron & P. Reason: 282.  J. Heron & P. Reason: 282.

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at times there have been crises of confidence and a tendency to underestimate my own abilities—much of this I suspect is the product of being a woman in a male dominated field, where, by their sheer weight of numbers, male voices have been heard at the expense of female voices in the same space. Claiming the Space to be a female composer in what is still a male dominated field and to be transparent about what that means as a woman in the twenty-first century is an affirmation that what I have to say (musically and otherwise) is worth hearing. As a “mid-career” composer I no longer feel the need to compartmentalise my life—my lived experience is very much connected to my output as a composer. When I was younger and focused on learning the technical aspects of composition it seemed appropriate to create more abstracted works that focused on formal or structural concerns but even then, my tendency has always towards the expressive end of the spectrum. Finding one’s own voice as a composer has brought with it the realisation that my creative impulse is usually connected to what is going on in my life. Motherhood, grief and loss, and other life challenges are all absorbed and integrated into the person I am and the work I create. In the introduction to her book The Divided Heart: Art and Motherhood, Rachel Power reflects on the particular tensions and challenges met by mothers who are artists. “The psychic transformation that occurs with motherhood arrives simultaneously with the cruelest of constraints on a woman’s time and freedom to create.”9 These constraints ease somewhat as children grow older but I agree with Power in her observations: “Motherhood challenges an artist’s practice and identity in ways she could never have foreseen. If children plunge us into anything, it is the fullness of the present moment.”10 Motherhood has been and continues to be one of the most challenging and transformative factors on my creative life. The Time and Space in which I find myself now is rich with interconnecting strands and influences—I am a composer, a music educator, a creative arts therapist, a pastoral care practitioner at a busy public hospital and a mother. The theme that connects these different strands is the power of creativity in supporting and articulating meaning in our lives. These various professional and personal perspectives inform my creative practice as a composer and reinforces my belief that creativity, and for me specifically composition, allows us to connect with others and to ourselves. 9

 Rachel Power, The Divided Heart: Art and Motherhood (Melbourne: Red Dog, 2008): 1.  Power, The Divided Heart, 6.

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Discussion and Contextual Exploration of Three Works Ebb Tide (2016) When I first read the poetry of Judith Cramond in 2015, I felt a strong connection to the creativity of another. Although Judith had died several years earlier, I had a powerful sense of her through her words and her use of imagery. Having lost my own mother to cancer in 2011, I felt the rawness of Judith’s words as a mother, writing for her daughter, knowing that time was short and precious. I also connected with Judith’s words as a mother of daughters myself, imagining what it would feel like to know that you would soon have to leave them. Feeling a strong emotional and aesthetic connection to a text is important to me—there needs to be a compelling personal motivation for me to embark on the composition of a new piece. The work that emerged, Ebb Tide (2016), was commissioned by the poet’s brother and the process of deciding which poems to set, what instrumentation to use, how long the work should be, was one of consultation and collaboration with the commissioner. From the outset I felt a sense of personal responsibility to both the poet and her brother—these words were not anonymous and abstracted but connected to a particular family and their story of loss. The first stage of the compositional process was becoming familiar with the words—the way they sit on the voice, their shape, resonance and resonant meaning. I love writing for voice and for this piece I spent time improvising melodic lines, sketching out accompanying textures, singing with these to get a sense of what worked and what didn’t. In this respect, technology becomes a valuable tool in the compositional process. I would record melodies using ProTools and then transcribe them. Then I would create instrumental textures and sketch these out using notation software or midi playback and then experiment with singing the melodic lines over the top, adjusting and tweaking the pitch and rhythmic contour. This process was iterative and allowed for a gradual development of material but always referring back to my own voice to see how the vocal line “felt” when sung (I always sing through my own material for voice and always strongly recommend my students do the same). The first time I read through Judith Cramond’s poems I knew immediately that they would sit beautifully on the voice. Not all poetry does— some of the most evocative and expertly crafted poems feel awkward and

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“un-singerly” when sung—although I acknowledge this is probably a very subjective assessment. The poems that I chose for the work are all short— the longest has only ten lines. They are succinct, carefully weighted, almost like haiku in their observation of the natural and experiential world. The task of setting these words, so full of understated emotion and with an undertow of foreboding, required a similar reserve and care. The accompanying textures are sparse, sometimes delicate, sometimes bristling with energy but never overwhelming. The voice has space and time to gently unfold, held and supported by the instrumental textures. The experience of writing Ebb Tide (2016) for contralto, cello, clarinet and percussion was a particularly powerful one—I would often find myself in tears as I wrote and sang through the material. The words are exquisite and the pain of a mother facing her own mortality sits just below the surface—never stated explicitly, just hinted at. The lines from the fourth song Spring Again are intensely poignant: Spring Again Another spring. Never thought I’d feel the leafing of my branching arteries and knot of pear-tree blossom opening in my chest again, but I can ruffle unfurling oak leaves growing in my hair and if I open my beak out comes the voice of the mistle-thrush.11

In Ebb Tide the poet reflects on the space or absence that will remain once she has gone: Ebb Tide This is how it will be after tides and storms have washed up and over me. Ropes will untie and my boat will be taken by the running ebb and leave a hollow water print of moving sky.12  Judith Cramond, Early and Late, Poems by Judith Cramond (Ipswich: Sole Press, 2004).  Cramond, Early and Late, Poems.

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This sense of absence is something that music is uniquely able to evoke. In his article “The Poetics of Musical Silence” Thomas Clifton discusses the impact of “creating gaps or absences in registral space.”13 He describes how silence in a particular register, the ‘absence’ of sound in the midst of a musical texture, can function as a sonic metaphor and in some instances “such a silence is felt as a loss.”14 In the section five of my work, the sparse texture creates an intense focus on the voice, emphasising the text and its implications.15 The connection between art and grief is something I have explored in earlier works and is something I am always interested to observe in the work of others. In my experience, grief is embodied and often resistant to words. It is a feeling of heaviness or emptiness or isolation or disconnection and much more. My own creative practice and way of being in the world has undergone some marked changes in response to my own grief and subsequent training and work in therapeutic arts practice. After the death of my mother in 2011 I experienced a profound sense of being detached from my past as well as feeling unconnected to my present. Having two young children and the usual financial and professional imperatives, I was busy trying to juggle work and childcare, too busy to attend to the grief and guilt associated with my mother’s death. About eighteen months after her death, I found myself exhausted, depleted and doubting my own abilities as a composer and as a person. Beneath this was a sense of disillusionment and an inability to see a way forward as an artist; a profound crisis of meaning compounded by my very tenuous employment situation as a freelance composer and sessional university lecturer. After taking some time to reflect and work through these issues, I decided to undertake further training as an Arts Therapist, in response to my realisation that connection and meaningful engagement with creativity could offer a new way of being me in the world. I have always recognised that composition can be a particularly isolating pastime, and often my experience has been of working and creating in a void, particularly when performances are not forthcoming and my work seemed to fall through the gaps in terms of funding and public presentation. Composing music 13  Thomas Clifton, “The Poetics of Musical Silence,” The Musical Quarterly 62, No. 2 (1976): 174. 14  Clifton (1976: 185). 15  Ebb Tide was a private commission, and was premiered at the National Gallery of Victoria, Federation Square, Melbourne (Australia) in September 2017.

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and hearing it played is the most gratifying and fulfilling thing, but writing music that is performed once and then put in a drawer can be a deflating and demoralising experience to which many composers can attest. Knowing that creativity is central to who I am, it made sense to find a new way of working creatively that also incorporated working WITH people, learning new skills with which to use creativity in a therapeutic context, to connect with people in a meaningful way. Through this very intense period of grieving and reflection and refocussing, I came to realise that my own creativity as a composer is nourished and supported by the work I do in clinical and therapeutic settings. Now having a stable financial base-line, for the first time since having children, and working in a role that holds very significant meaning and satisfaction, I feel that my own creativity is better nurtured. Working with people who are ill, facing mental health challenges or indeed their own mortality brings a new perspective to my work, reminding me of the power of art to connect and reflect on what it is to be human. Finding What’s There (2017) I feel that in some ways my music becomes simpler and more direct as I mature, perhaps as life experience teaches me that simplicity and directness are to be valued over complexity and obfuscation. Being at a point in my career where I can accept my limitations and no longer be motivated by trying to impress others with technical virtuosity, I feel comfortable in expressing my musical thoughts in a pared back and uncompromising language. Less is more. In 2016 I was commissioned by Melbourne-based ensemble PLEXUS Collective to write a new work for their 2017 series at the Melbourne Recital Centre. Writing chamber music is something I love and the instrumentation of violin, clarinet and piano offered a sound palette both varied and intimate. The timing of the commission offered an opportunity to reflect on some of the themes I had been exploring in the previous couple of years while undertaking a Master’s degree in Therapeutic Arts Practice. Part of this training focuses on “making sense” or finding meaning in life’s experiences. As Warren Lett writes in his book An Inquiry into Making Sense of our Lives (2011), “In ordinary experiencing there is too much to remember. The process of looking for core indicators of meaningfulness is what is called reduction to essence.”16 This “reducing to  Warren Lett, An Inquiry into Making Sense of our Lives (Melbourne: Rebus Press, 2011): 24. 16

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essence” is something that has always been of interest to me as a composer and this commission was an opportunity to distil some of what I had come to know about my own patterns and ways of being. My training in the field of therapeutic arts practice also involved developing skills in an iterative form of reflexive practice using creative “representation” (usually in the form of visual art) as a way of reflecting on lived experience and patterns of behaviour. I was interested in the possibility of applying this reflexive approach to my compositional praxis—using an iterative process of creation / reflection / creation. Starting any new work requires a conscious starting point and for this piece it was a sense of “opening out” or expanding possibility. I created a pitch set in which intervals increase incrementally (2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 semitones) and then explored various ways of reducing and reconfiguring this pitch material— reducing it down to an octave scale form, inverting it, transposing it, exploring different chord spacings, linear arrangements for creating melodic material and so on. I then “played” with the material, creating short sections of material incorporating different rhythmic figures, gestural shapes, harvesting the potential of the initial pitch structure. This “playing” with the material allows me to move away from the initial very systematic approach to the pitch material into a more intuitive phase where improvisation and spontaneity lead the process. At this point I then cast a composer’s eye and ear over the material and started to combine these gestures and rhythmic figures into an opening section, very conscious of the process in which I was experimenting, trying out different possibilities, new ways of composing with the material. The playfulness and curiosity I felt in exploring the material I think is reflected in the music that emerged— full of energy and a sense of “trying out” different combinations of material. Having created this section, I stopped, had some time away from the score, then returned to the material with a fresh perspective, to see what was there, how I felt about the material, and what suggested itself as a way forward. Looking at the material, I had a sense of material that was quite complex, full of energy but lacking a focus. The more rigorous and systematic approach to the material at the outset has resulted in a lot of notes and energy but not a strong sense of “where” it was going. This “experience” of being limited or constrained by a system felt familiar, and also a sense of losing control over material because of a set of arbitrary rules or procedures. Reflecting on this observation of the work so far allowed me to see the “trap” I had set for myself, and how I could reconnect with the material to say what I wanted to say with the piece. The light bulb moment

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came in recognising that the real “essence” of the piece was there all along in the original pitch set, but that it had been over complicated and obscured through the overly systematic approach used to explore the material’s potential. This informed the structure of the final work—complexity gives way to exhaustion and from this emerges the essential idea of the piece. As I wrote in the program note for the premiere: In this piece I was curious about rules and processes and how these things can become a trap. Reflecting on how I create things, I noticed that I can sometimes feel tied up in knots by the “rules,” overthinking the material and losing sight of what I really wanted to say […] the first section is about the rules I set myself around pitch, then the music explores the feeling of getting stuck and losing direction. The rest of the piece represents how I find my way out of the “stuck-ness” and discover what it is I really wanted to say, and realising that it was there all along, hidden in the complicated material I started with.

The resulting work, Finding What’s There, can be heard as a musical enactment of the process of recognising and reflecting on patterns of behaviour in order to reveal the essential “truth” that was there all along.17 The power of music to provide a kind of “sonification” of an experience or process is something that I have explored in many of my works as the titles suggest: The Fastness of Forgetting, Night Alchemy, Divergence, Utterance, To the wider ocean. Susanne Langer offers insight into this power of music as symbol for something other than itself. Langer states, “The real power of music lies in the fact that it can be “true” to the life of feeling in a way that language cannot; for its significant forms have that ambivalence of content which words cannot.”18 Langer believed music can function as an implicit symbol: “The assignment of meaning is a shifting kaleidoscopic play […] The imagination that responds to music is personal and associative and logical” and connects with a “wealth of wordless knowledge” of “emotional and organic experience.”19 Music as a symbolic form allows me as composer to create a sonic metaphor for my experience

17  Finding what’s there for clarinet, violin and piano (2017) was commissioned by Melbourne-based ensemble PLEXUS Collective and premiered as part of their season at the Melbourne Recital Centre in November 2017. 18  Susanne Langer, Feeling and Form (New York: Scribner, 1953): 243. 19  Langer (1953: 244).

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and communicate something of its essential quality to the listener: to explore the connections between musical form and emotional experience. Although finding time and space to compose is necessary, I also believe that finding time and space to NOT compose is also important. The concept of “fallow” time is something I have been reflecting on as a composer, having noticed a feeling of exhaustion and flatness after a particularly busy and stressful period of time. Finding myself between commissions, I have had an opportunity to consciously not write, not bounce straight into the next project when my energy reserves are low. Part of my reflective practice is to be aware and mindful of how I am travelling creatively, and in general. When a large part of one’s identity is being a “composer:” not composing can be problematic. I notice a feeling of anxiety associated with not writing—a string of “what ifs”—what if I never get another commission, what if I lose the ability to compose music, what if I never have another idea, what if my profile drops and opportunities dry up? I can notice these thoughts and then park them to one side as I make the most of the space that has opened up to focus on other aspects of my life. From time to time, I experience this need to withdraw, to keep silence, to not listen to music, I choose not to attend performances and events and instead turn my attention inwards. Reading, spending time outdoors and by the sea, yoga, meditation, spending time with my family, are all restorative choices that allow me to re-charge my creative battery without a sense of guilt or self-criticism. I am fortunate to be in a situation where my income does not depend on writing music and so I can take this fallow time to reflect and refocus. Journeywork (2018–) As I embark on the next compositional project, I am aware of the factors impacting upon me. I am busy with paid work and the day-to-day demands of being a parent, and although these experiences in many ways energise my creativity, they also take time away from composing. As has been the case with earlier compositions, I can work with these constraints and find ways to compose around them. Working in multi-movement forms has always appealed to me, for various reasons, and it is certainly a practical solution to the issues of fragmented time to compose. Exploring essential qualities or elements through sound is something I find aesthetically and philosophically interesting—how to distil something into its most compact and clear form is a recurring compositional preoccupation. Working

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in movements or sections that function as both discrete works and as parts of a larger composite work offers a mobility of form and function. The working title for my next composition is Journeywork, referencing the nature of life as a journey, made up of many different events, and the artisanal quality of sculpting sound into music. The work is from its inception, deliberately functional and pragmatic—both in terms of the compositional process and in its aim to be performable by a number of different instrumental combinations and in varying orders of the sections. The work will be for piano, violin, clarinet and cello as a way of eliding two of my favourite trio line-ups—violin / clarinet / piano and violin / cello / piano—in order to maximise the performance outcomes of the possible subsets of the piece. The multi section form is important to me, offering a series of “moments” or glimpse that form part of a larger whole, and incorporates the possibility for performers to curate the sections using silences between the sections or choosing to perform them without gaps. The arrangement of the sections can be thought of in almost architectural terms, the ordering of blocks of musical material of different densities and characteristics contributing to a unified structure. The full work will be over thirty minutes duration and so the composition process will be quite extensive but the sectional form of the work will allow me to build it over time. The sections will range from solo piano to different instrumental combinations including the full line-up of piano, cello, violin and clarinet. As the work starts to take shape in my mind, I sense the possibilities for the work as a significant moment in my compositional life—a compositional reckoning and taking stock, reflecting on my lived experience and the sometimes chaotic, unpredictable, and breathtakingly beautiful moments that life throws at us. Journeywork is a new work currently underway.

Conclusion: Finding Myself—Converging Paths As a “snapshot” of this moment in Time and Space as a Composer, I am aware of the integrative role that composition plays in my life. Composition is the Time and Space in which I make sense of my life—the challenges, sorrows, wonders, beauty and complexity that make me who I am. The act of composing can be an act of reflexivity, a kind of meta-praxis that enables me to process and analyse my emotional responses to being a human in the world, to articulate in a non-verbal form that which is real to me. Like any art form, it is at its heart an act of communication, a way of reaching out and offering my creative reflections to others. Whether that is about

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my experiences of grief and motherhood (Ebb Tide) or reflections on my own patterns of behavior (Finding What’s There) or trying to piece together the disparate and random strands of my lived experience (Journeywork), each composition is an act of making sense and finding meaning in experience. Warren Lett describes one of the functions of art making as being an intention to “represent experiencing” and he believes that this “representational forming has a basic epistemological function— we try to know more about experiential events in our different levels of awareness and consciousness.”20 Composition is a space where I can draw on all the varied strands of my life and experience and attempt to distill some essential qualities into sound. In Daniel Stern’s book The Present Moment: in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life he explores the power of subjective experience. “We are subjectively alive and conscious only now. […] The only time of raw subjective reality, of phenomenal experience, is the present moment.”21 For me, music epitomises the quality of the “present moment”: when we listen to music we are in the moment, held in that moment by our subjective experience of the phenomena of sound. Through finding time and space for composition, I find myself.

References Clifton, Thomas. “The Poetics of Musical Silence.” The Musical Quarterly 62, no. 2 (1976): 163–81. Cramond, Judith. Early and Late, Poems by Judith Cramond. Ipswich: Sole Press, 2004. Eisner, Elliot. “Art and Knowledge.” Handbook of the Arts in Qualitative Research: Perspectives, Methodologies, Examples and Issues. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 2008. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781452226545. Ellis, C., Adams, T., & Bochner, A. “Autoethnography: An Overview.” Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research 12, no.1 (2010). https://doi.org/10.17169/fqs-­12.1.1589. Heron, J. & Reason, P. “A Participatory Inquiry Paradigm.” Qualitative Inquiry 3, no.3 (1997). Langer, Susanne. Feeling and Form. New York: Scribner, 1953.

 Lett (2011: 138).  Daniel Stern, The Present Moment: in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life (New York: Norton, 2004): 3. 20 21

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Lett, Warren. An Inquiry into Making Sense of our Lives. Melbourne: Rebus Press, 2011. Power, Rachel. The Divided Heart: Art and Motherhood. Melbourne: Red Dog, 2008. Stern, Daniel N. The Present Moment: in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life. New York: Norton, 2004. Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. London: Bloomsbury, 1928.

CHAPTER 14

A Compositional Life in Time: The Recent Operas of Elena Kats-Chernin Elena Kats-Chernin AO

Introduction Time, in its many dimensions, plays a controlling role in musical life, none more so than in the output of Australian composer, Elena Kats-Chernin, one of Australia’s most beloved and performed composers. Her long-­ established career spans decades of output, including music for dance, theatre, digital media, and the concert stage. In late 2019 I was privileged to speak with her about her recent work in opera composition, particularly two works that premiered that year, Whiteley for Opera Australia, and Jim Knopf und Lukas der Lokomotivführer, a children’s opera for the Komische Oper, Berlin. We spoke candidly about her life and work in Germany, Australia, and the many worlds in between. Our discussion revealed a composer deeply in touch with her artistic relationships, who crafts and shapes time as a creator, producer, and listener, as she reflected on the In interview with Natalie Williams, 29 Sep 2019 (Chicago/Berlin (Skype))

E. Kats-Chernin AO (*) Sydney, NSW, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 L. Kouvaras et al. (eds.), The Composer, Herself, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23922-9_14

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challenges and joys of creative life. We spoke together about her recent works and her unique relationship with musical time, from small note-to-­ note decisions to the larger considerations of a project timeline, and the benefit of decades spent within the field. The passion for her art is evident in every anecdote and this interview is a record of our explorations of her musical life, in time.

A Life in Composition Natalie Williams (NW): This year has seen two of your operas premiered. Can you speak about these recent works, the creative process, and how they changed your life? Elena Kats-Chernin (EK-C): I enjoy the process of working on operas, particularly working with a director, and I value the importance of a deliberate, cognitive approach to new work. As an opera director approaches a production from two standpoints, (1) Haltung (conceptual/ attitudinal), and (2) Vorgang (activity), so must a composer carry the how and the what of a new piece, foremost in their mind while writing. I enjoy writing music that includes mischievous elements and I feel at home with the absurd, quirkiness and “strangeness” imbued within my pieces. I like to infuse a work with surprise elements “playing” with both the compositional process and the listener’s experience itself. My music includes plays-­ on-­words within sung text, rhythmic quirks, and embedded musical codes. I delight in the “fun of the process” and a child-like approach, whether evident to the listener or not. During 2018, I worked on two operas, concurrently, Whiteley (2019) and Jim Knopf und Lukas der Lokomotivführer (2019). Whiteley explores the life and work of an iconic Sydney-based painter, Brett Whiteley; troubled, flawed, glamorous, exciting, introverted, and extroverted, and deeply involved with artists and musicians. The work was commissioned by Opera Australia with a libretto by Justin Fleming and premiered at the Sydney Opera House on July 15, 2019. Jim Knopf was commissioned by the Komische Oper, Berlin with a libretto by Susanne Felicitas Wolf, and premiered by the house on November 3, 2019. I experienced two opposing realms while composing the disparate works; the troubled world of artist Brett Whiteley, filled with turmoil, infidelity, and personal struggle, juxtaposed with the magical and fantastical story of Jim Knopf, a fictional children’s adventure novel featuring a talking locomotive. I felt that both operas were better for being contemporaneously written, that switching

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between the two works enabled a fruitful creative distance, a change of pace between topical contexts and a relaxation of the demands of one creative domain from the other. Whiteley (2019) NW: Whiteley is a major work in the Australian operatic literature. How do you view your place in Australia’s creative landscape? EK-C: In a way I feel like I am part of the compositional texture of Australia, the one that keeps developing, constantly mutating and being invigorated by new voices and yet nourished by the previous and currently flourishing composing generations. I feel I have been influenced largely by my teachers and mentors, two of which we sadly lost recently-Martin Wesley-Smith and Richard Toop.1 Also Helmut Lachenmann, Germany’s leading composer, who was my teacher in 1980–82 was an important influence on me. When attempting to define my place in the tapestry of Australian music I come to the realisation that my responsibility is to compose, not to teach, analyse or comment; I write out of my stomach, the music is like an invisible brainwave, it just rushes past me, it comes and goes. A diversity of projects is important for me and I enjoy changing working modes from small to large commissions, from the enormity of grand opera to my delight in writing miniature piano pieces, gifted to friends. I feel blessed and appreciative to have a stream of commissioned work ahead. My advice to young composers is to treat everything they write as a learning opportunity, even if a piece turns out sub optimally. Some works will inevitably “flop,” but they can be tools to learn from; was a wrong approach taken at the beginning, or a commissioner’s voice too strong? Whiteley is my eighth opera, premiered at the Sydney Opera House on July 15, 2019, by Opera Australia. The librettist for Whiteley was Justin Fleming, an Australian playwright and author, currently based in London. There were challenges in the compositional process, necessitating revisions and redrafting to find the essence of the ideas. Justin sent me a libretto and I wrote the whole opera once through. In that first round I set each word to music and each phrase was sung either as a song or 1  Angus McPherson, “Richard Toop has Died,” Limelight Magazine, 30 June 2017. Richard Toop taught Elena Kats-Chernin at Sydney University and wrote the libretto to her 1997 opera, Iphis.

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recitative. However, I decided that I did not like the style and direction that the work was taking and wanted to approach the words in a different way. I wanted to get the sense of each scene and where it pointed towards— to consider, was a particular scene actually signalling the eventual climax of the opera? I also mapped out different kinds of thematic materials throughout the opera and created music that would envelop the scenes. Then, as Whiteley did in his works, I distorted some of the material, often making it less obvious. I created vocal lines to be placed inside those distorted chords and textures or (instead) place them on top of a pattern or atmosphere. I modelled this technique on Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin, specifically the “Letter Scene” wherein Tatiana’s text is placed against the orchestra. Tatiana sings alongside the orchestra in a very pretty and famous aria, but the music is not text-driven, in itself. Whiteley received good critical feedback and I was pleased with how the many creative processes unfolded.2 I took inspiration from Whiteley’s own paintings and visited his Sydney studio in preparation for the composition.3 The “New York” scene passed through five versions before finalising. Whiteley painted “The American Dream” while living in New York in 1968–69, a failed sale attempt blamed upon the piece’s size (18 wood panels) and its violent subject matter. The noisy, rhythmic soundscape which accompanies this scene came easily to me only when I let the material naturally shape my musical thoughts. I stopped trying so hard! Within almost every scene, two themes appear: “Brett” and “Wendy” (his wife and muse), as an embedded code woven throughout the opera.

Compositional Process NW: Can you describe your compositional process in creating these major works? EK-C: My concern for the listener’s journey is very strong as I write. Often, my early drafts seem like a patchwork, pieced-together and not functioning coherently. If I feel that my initial attempts do not hit the 2  Peter McCallum, “Whiteley: an Opera about Sydney, its People, and One Extraordinary Artist,” Sydney Morning Herald, 16 July 2019. “The work sustains interest, however, through Kats-Chernin’s finely-crafted score of variegated mood, texture, tone and style, fine performances, and the themes of Fleming’s libretto which, at key points, take one to the edge of what it is to be human, to create and to cease to be.” 3  Nicholas Routley, “Whiteley, Opera Australia,” Australian Stage, 25 July 2019.

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right tone or language, I rewrite the material. The revelation to approach Whiteley’s composition differently arrived after more than a year, but I finally felt like I had cracked the code. Someone famous said something like, “it’s never too late to turn back from the road you should never have been on.”4 Whiteley is my first operatic work that uses a full opera chorus. The chorus is capable of so much, a thick, rich, and incredible power of sound. It allowed me to write diverse textural sections throughout the work. Brett Whiteley’s character pervades the opera, appearing in every scene, for the entire two hours of the score. The role develops from boy to emerging artist, to an established creative man, in a relentless drive of energy and experiences, career accolades, meeting Queen Elizabeth, awards and prizes, to deportation from Fiji, the sickness and death of his best friend Joel Ellenberg and battling personal demons. I wrote the piano score in three months (Dec 2018–Feb 2019), followed by almost four months of orchestration. For this time period I was immersed in the operatic compositions, concurrently working on Whiteley and Jim Knopf. My composition process began with a short score written at the piano, progressing to the orchestration stage, and incorporating revisions made within rehearsal workshops. Following some early development workshops with principal singers, I knew the work was shaping in a fruitful direction. Time pressures are always dictated by the first rehearsal date, and parts and score delivery for the conductor and singers. It is challenging to work concurrently from the piano score and the full opera score, with changes captured by the rehearsal pianists and transferred back into the orchestral score, often with rapid turnaround times. In contrast, the children’s opera, Jim Knopf brought a sense of self-­ satisfaction to my work. Children’s opera is generally considered lower prestige in a field dominated by the grand operatic tradition, yet at the Komische Oper Berlin they treat it as an equally complex production, the same as any other opera in the repertoire. They dedicate some amazing resources at the children’s operas. I welcomed the smaller forces and shorter duration of the children’s opera, following the enormity of the Whiteley project. Effective collaboration was the lifeblood of success for these projects and my creative partners. After Susanne Felicitas Wolf had written her first draft of the libretto, we met for three weeks in Berlin and improvised together—we built a creative synergy around the Jim Knopf project. Susanne’s purposeful, determined artistic input enabled us to 4

 Jennifer Williams, “Interview: Elena Kats-Chernin,” Opera Australia, June 2019.

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strike directly at the most potent ideas, turning my fleeting improvisations on the piano into arias, songs, duets, trios, large ensemble numbers, as well as scenes for the children’s choir. Susanne loved my endless improvising and we fed off each other’s creativity as I wrote music and she added text, we continued to create together in real time.5

Mechanics of Composition NW: Can you describe your day-to-day life as a composer, and what advice you would give to emerging composers? EK-C: I feel a sense of ownership in my projects and I engage deeply with my work. I seek ways to make the writing process easy, i.e.: using an inked pen, which glides more easily than pencil (a pencil “fights back” as I push it across the page!), to allow ideas to flow at speed while I write. For me, the orchestration process is similar to the work of a dentist, checking every single tooth. There is no shortcut for orchestration and for writing everything down, by hand. For a long time, I have preferred pen and paper over computer notation as my working method. I don’t like to delegate my work—I prefer to complete all the orchestration myself, making changes and revisions of material that are truly from my own pen. I write the first ideas that come to mind, which are often rough, but then I return and examine each sketch for elements to correct; I check for melodic similarities to other works and I sometimes change 1–2 pitches for differentiation. The pitch language may be similar to other pieces, in general style and flair, but I work hard to eradicate existing chord progressions or material that borrows too closely from other literature. My approach is to grab music from the air, but that raises the danger of a similarity factor to other musics. A similar style it may be, but similar material it may not. I would remind emerging composers that they are not alone, and I’d encourage them to embrace self-doubt as a positive reflective tool. Composers can always improve their work and self-introspection and doubt can bring change and improvement at deep creative levels. I’d caution against hubris and would advise an open mind and a welcoming approach to feedback, especially when the same criticism arrives from 5  Williams, J, “Interview,” “Kats-Chernin loves to improvise. She can write a melody a minute—but if no one tells her to stop and write it down, it’s gone… “Improvising is how I write, even when I’m on my own. Improvising with other people in the room, who can respond to what I do, is the best.””

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multiple sources. Before I make cuts to a work in progress, I try hard to trust the eventual quality of the artistic outcome, even though the excisions are often difficult, as months of labour can be lost. Cuts lead to diamonds (!) and diamonds may only shine if bronze lies around them. We as composers rarely discuss these aspects of composition; that sometimes it is an advantage to not saturate an audience with strong, vivid melodies, as they can become like white noise to a listener. I wonder why composers do not discuss aspects of the decision-making process in our work more often, when inevitably we make the same types of basic constructional choices? The essence, and problem, of composition are the constant decisions required—harmony, melody, textures, colours and pacing. I always place myself in the role of listener, evaluating how each decision is received. In the early construction of the Whiteley score, self-doubt was a powerful reflective tool, and this was important as I shaped the integrity of the piece. As I mentioned earlier, I threw out the first version of Whiteley and started the entire score a second time. Early feedback and responses suggested the piece would benefit from revisions. While this news was difficult to assimilate, I accepted the advice as well as my own judgement—ultimately, no-one told me to change the whole thing, but it was my decision and I chose to start the opera over. This task was enormous, and I often felt overwhelmed, like I may not survive the process, but I was ultimately grateful for the chance to reset. I am reminded of the many edits and versions of Beethoven’s Fidelio—introspection is so important within a composer’s life, both its blessings and its curses. Eventually, I felt that I could move mountains, having sustained the protracted process of a second start, coupled with the resulting time pressures and creative dissonances. The process led me to a new-found sense of capability, born from the metaphorical weight of a creative death and rebirth. For Whiteley the deadlines were tight, but I remained optimistic in both my approach and in my determination to get the job done. The project was enormous, with the constant pressure of deadlines, but I used self-doubt as a constructive tool and called on my inner critic as a powerful reconstructive force.

Composing Children’s Opera NW: Can you speak about writing children’s opera; how does it differ from the grand opera context?

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EK-C: The children’s opera, Jim Knopf und Lukas der Lokomotivführer, was collaboratively written with Susanne Felicitas Wolf in just three weeks. I enjoyed working with the absurdist world of the Jim Knopf story in contrast to the aesthetic complexity of Whiteley’s life story.6 In contrast, the simple, fantastical, and humorous domain of the children’s story appealed to my own innately playful nature. Working with Susanne again reignited a creative synergy in which the music just comes straight out of us. We work well together, Susanne’s rhythmically lyrical text coupling easily to child-like melodies. Our nonsensical subject matter in Jim Knopf provided more creative flexibility than Whiteley, using the children’s chorus both on and offstage, involving the audience in the narrative, and writing surrealist material to fit a scene. I find an ease in writing for children, the emotional scenes are lighter and simpler, and melody can proliferate. Time is always a challenge; timely score delivery, managing rehearsal time and measuring time itself in the work’s duration.

Instruments Within Opera The function of instrumental voices is an important creative decision in all my music. I love all the instruments, but I usually prioritize one (especially) within a work.7 The saxophone’s role within Whiteley represents love, the artist’s love for his wife, daughter, art, and brush, but also his yearning for drugs. The saxophone voice opens the opera, annunciating Brett and Wendy’s theme in complete darkness, symbolic of the darkness and mystery of the protagonist’s life. In my operas I make instruments function as sonic pillars and shape the creative drama around that. Or perhaps it seems that I make a certain instrument “suffer” within every one of my works, from the extra responsibility that it carries? Whiteley’s orchestration carries the main atmospheric material, but in Jim Knopf the ­orchestra engages almost as a character itself. In the children’s opera we used Chinese 6  Routley (2019). “Whiteley is a tragedy. The tragedy of an artist rushing through the doors of perception in search of transcendence, destroying himself and damaging others in the process of creating some of the most profound canvasses ever to come out of this country.” 7  David Larkin, “Opera Australia’s Whiteley Brings Together Three Icons to Tell the Artist’s Complicated Story.” The Conversation, 18 July 2019. In Whiteley, “…plot elements were given recurring musical motifs. Drug use was signaled by thin, dissonant notes high on the strings, while creative acts were often accompanied by solo winds, including the rare alto flute. The melancholy saxophone music that began the overture later returned as Brett questioned whether Wendy still loved him.”

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instruments including the Erhu and Sheng, to create certain otherworldly atmosphere. Sheng features alongside a high woodwind cluster, to emulate a locomotive whistle. I felt my own child-like nature emerging more through Jim Knopf. I love the woodwind family, particularly the oboe, thinking here of my long friendship with fellow Australian composer and oboist, Catherine Milliken. I see the oboe as “shining” from inside the orchestra and the double bass voice as being the “ground,” in contrast. Overall, this was a busy time. I wrote Jim Knopf in tandem with Whiteley, alternating chunks of the day between the two. The orchestral score for Jim was rehearsed in Berlin during May (2019), before Whiteley rehearsals commenced in Sydney in June. Directly after the premiere of Whiteley, I fulfilled a string orchestra commission for Steel City Strings (in Wollongong, Australia), a 20-minute piece, comprised of dance movements. I enjoyed working on this piece for the smaller forces of strings alone, even though it came directly after the Whiteley premiere so I could not take a break between work, this time. But the music often tends to flow out of me, and I am grateful and happy in the busy-ness of a composer’s varied life.

Operatic Development NW: Composing opera is a monumental task. Can you describe the production and rehearsal process, beyond the many months of creating the actual score? EK-C: The composer is really the creative centre of a new work, but I am acutely aware of the roles and influence of the entire creative team in the development process. I honour the working relationships with players; I write solo lines when they ask me, and I accommodate their change requests. The working relationship with the Opera Australia Orchestra was warm and inspiring, working with the singers, players, and conductor Tahu Matheson to refine and premiere the piece. Tahu took a very supportive role during the composing and workshopping process. The delicacy and challenges met during new work development can be demanding as a multi-faceted production comes to life. I often felt the pressure of rehearsal situations—using rehearsal time fruitfully is so important. Additions and subtractions to the musical content, while inevitable, will cause performers to relearn material and this was felt across the production. The orchestral parts are crucial to the success of the final piece, and I insist upon checking every part for accuracy, prior to rehearsals. The parts are like the inner workings of the body, like the organs functioning

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as part of a larger whole—if one part does not function correctly, the entire body is affected. After years of experience (and having on occasion discovered missing or wrong bars, and even misplaced chunks of music in this or that part, at the first rehearsal of some pieces) I try to prepare for rehearsals with care, making trumpet parts in both C and B-flat, adding cue markings wherever necessary, triple-checking the percussion parts, and writing accessible material for the performers. Having said this, the Whiteley production timeline was more extreme than usual, and I would have liked to prepare the parts further ahead of time and added more cues. As it was, some scenes were newly written or added during June rehearsals, with the first full orchestral rehearsal at the end of June. I was still composing and orchestrating those added scenes, while other scenes were rehearsed. I was always sitting in the rehearsal room and had to split my attention between the action on rehearsal stage and score pages on my table. Whenever those new lines were added, singers had to try them out and then memorise them very fast, that was a real challenge. There were two fabulous copyists as well as Opera Australia’s amazing librarians supporting me through that tough month.

A Compositional Life in Time NW: The concept of time has arisen frequently during our conversation. Can you describe your relationship with time, throughout your compositional life? EK-C: I prefer an abundance of time to adequately shape a project and I always embed overflow time into the creative process. A composer must have “time to be wrong,” as one cannot always write the best material on the first attempt. The flow of a project can often be found where time exists to revise and rewrite. Time is the only element that ensures the right ideas for the piece, allowing an incubation and gestation period as creative ideas form. Time also enables the exploration of unrelated material and the chance to step back and consider the work as a whole. All composers know that the music should not be forced; time to do nothing is the most precious thing, to just sit! Quietude and reflection are a part of my working life. I am an early riser, someone who arrives at rehearsals ahead of the musicians, taking that gap of time to sit and observe the world. Time alone in these ways is precious, offering the chance to assimilate to surroundings and absorb the atmosphere. This, in contrast to the time pressures of rehearsals and performance

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preparation, is a space that I relish in creative life, the space to reflect and consider feedback from the sea of collaborators involved in the opera. I also value time between projects, to recover artistically before changing pace into the next work, even though that time is not always available. Time, in all its levels, pervades my working life. This current era is really the time of my life, as it feels to me now. As a composer, I constantly deal with time; recognising deadlines and time pressures in artistic creation and knowing the importance of climatic timing within a piece. Overall, time is a vehicle to handle my emotions in artistic contexts, something I would not have said, or felt, even ten years ago. I am more assured about my musical ideas and decisions; the more I write, the more the ideas flow— the more hours I work, the better I feel. Composing is not a tiring process for me, and I take my cues on fatigue from the quality of the material— one is directly proportional to the other. Creating new work is a reflection on the creator themselves, an intimate and terrifying endeavor. When my new pieces are publicly performed, a private part of my soul becomes public in the same way. As time has shaped my career, I feel more forthright about my work—I’m now comfortable with the public eye and secure about my place in the musical world.

Summary NW: As our conversation concluded, we revisited the many aspects of “time” in this musical life, from marking delivery milestones prior to a deadline, to managing the flow of time from measure to measure (or bar to bar), Kats-Chernin’s affiliation with time is both intimate and reciprocal. This relationship is something she cultivates throughout her compositional life, looking back over the many decades that time itself has afforded her to live as a blessed and active member of an artistic community. Hers is, securely, a compositional life in time. When I suggested this approach for the chapter she responded, “I love idea of time as it plays role in all our lives. I wrote Clocks for Ensemble Modern, of which Catherine Milliken was one of the founding members. I remember being fascinated by beating of time during composing this work and what it means for time to slip away with a bang!” Composers craft sonic worlds, parsing time through texture and memory through atmosphere. Kats-Chernin’s engaging and captivating output is bound to achieve that goal for a long time to come.8 8  Elena Kats-Chernin’s music is published by Boosey & Hawkes. Scores and further information about the composer’s works are available from the publisher.

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References Boosey & Hawkes. Elena Kats-Chernin. Biography. Accessed 10 March 2020. https://www.boosey.com/composer/Elena+Kats-­Chernin. Fairley, Gina. “Review: Whiteley, Opera Australia.” Performing Arts Hub, 17 July 2019. https://performing.artshub.com.au/news-­article/reviews/ performing-­arts/gina-­fairley/review-­whiteley-­opera-­australia-­nsw-­258405. Larkin, David. “Opera Australia’s Whiteley Brings Together Three Icons to Tell the Artist’s Complicated Story.” The Conversation, 18 July 2019. https://theconversation.com/opera-­australias-­whiteley-­brings-­together-­3-­icons-­to-­tell-­the-­ artists-­complicated-­story-­120575. McCallum, Peter. “Whiteley: an Opera About Sydney, its People, and One Extraordinary Artist.” Sydney Morning Herald, 16 July 2019. https://www. smh.com.au/entertainment/opera/whiteley-­a n-­o pera-­a bout-­s ydney-­i ts-­ people-­and-­one-­extraordinary-­artist-­20190716-­p527kr.html. McPherson, Angus. “Richard Toop has Died.” Limelight Magazine, 20 June 2017. https://www.limelightmagazine.com.au/news/richard-­toop-­has-­died/. Nguyen, Justine. “Whiteley The Opera: a Difficult Pleasure.” Limelight Magazine, 25 June 2019. https://www.limelightmagazine.com.au/features/ whiteley-­the-­opera-­a-­difficult-­pleasure/. Opera Australia. “Whiteley.” Accessed 10 March 2020. https://opera.org.au/ whatson/events/whiteley-­sydney. Plush, Vincent. “Martin Wesley-Smith has died.” Limelight Magazine, September 27, 2019. https://www.limelightmagazine.com.au/news/martin-­wesley-­ smith-­has-­died/. Routley, Nicholas. “Whiteley, Opera Australia.” Australian Stage, 25 July 2019. https://www.australianstage.com.au/201907249020/reviews/sydney/ whiteley-­|-­opera-­australia.html. Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Ilyich. “Letter Scene.” Eugene Onegin. Accessed 10 March 2020. https://youtu.be/kYArgBeeHag. Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Ilyich. Eugene Onegin. London: Schauer, 1971. Williams, Jennifer. “Interview: Elena Kats-Chernin.” Opera Australia, June 2019. https://opera.org.au/home/productions/whiteley/interview-­with-­elena-­ kats-­chernin. Wolf, Susanne Felicitas. Susanne Wolf. Accessed 20 March 2020. https://www. susannewolf.at/new/index.php/vita.

CHAPTER 15

Einstein’s Dream: At the Threshold Between Science and Art Cindy McTee

Musical Time Art objects, such as sculptures or paintings, exist in space. But what about music? What is it that contains a string quartet or a piano sonata? The answer, of course, is time. Music philosopher Susanne K. Langer has written that the plastic arts have the purpose of “making space visible.” She has also said that “music makes time audible.”1 Jonathan D. Kramer, in his book The Time of Music, further asserts that “time is … the vehicle by which music makes its deepest contact with the human spirit.”2 1  Susanne K.  Langer, Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1953), 84, 110. 2  Jonathan D. Kramer, The Time of Music: New Meanings, New Temporalities, New Listening Strategies (New York: Schirmer Books, 1988), 2.

C. McTee (*) St Louis, MO, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 L. Kouvaras et al. (eds.), The Composer, Herself, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23922-9_15

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Musical time is not like ordinary clock time. To paraphrase Kramer, it is more like the kind of time experienced when reading a story in which time is imaginary … repeating, reversing, accelerating, decelerating, and possibly stopping. Marc Chagall’s famous painting Time Is a River Without Banks (1928) portrays such an imaginary world in which time, represented by a grandfather clock with a wildly swinging pendulum, appears to be simultaneously suspended and in motion.3 The violin in the painting suggests that there might be a relationship between this temporal ambiguity and music. The depiction of worlds in which time behaves in extraordinary ways is also the subject of a book entitled Einstein’s Dreams. Written in 1993 by American physicist Alan Lightman, each short story in the book is presented as the dream of a young patent clerk working in Bern, Switzerland in 1905. The dreamer is, of course, Albert Einstein. Lightman writes of worlds where time is circular and all events repeat themselves indefinitely, or where there is no past, or where there is a fixed future. Reading the book motivated me to completely reconsider the issue of temporal organization in my music, and it led to the creation of a new chamber work in seven brief movements, funded by the National Endowment for the Arts (Washington D.C.). I borrowed Lightman’s title, Einstein’s Dreams, and heard the piece first performed in Dallas by the ensemble Voices of Change in 1996. Einstein’s Dreams begins with a one-page movement entitled “Timescape” (Fig. 15.1), based on the story in Lightman’s book depicting a world in which time flows at different speeds in different locations. To create an analogous musical environment, I structured the movement so that the speed at which events occur is different for each instrument. Short musical gestures are repeated five to eight times, with varying amounts of silence inserted between repetitions, creating a simple but multidimensional musical fabric in which strands of repeated events are heard in ever-changing relationships with each other—a non-linear texture of circles within circles. This is vertically conceived music that, according to Jonathan Kramer in The Time of Music, “… does not build to a climax, does not purposefully set up internal expectations … does not build or release tension, and does not end but simply ceases.”4 3   A photograph of the painting is included in Franz Meyer, Marc Chagall, trans. Robert Allen (New York: H.  N. Abrams, 1964), 425, https://archive.org/details/isbn_ 0116411111614. 4  Kramer, The Time of Music, 55.

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Fig. 15.1  “Timescape” from Cindy McTee’s Einstein’s Dreams for six instruments (1996)

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This work has not been professionally recorded, so I will not elaborate further, but more information can be found on my website at http:// www.cindymctee.com.

Technology and the Creative Process My desire to experiment with new ways of controlling musical time eventually led to the acquisition of some new computer equipment in 2003, supported by a generous grant from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Using computers to make music was not entirely new to me, but it wasn’t until the 1980s—when Apple Inc. released a computer named after a fruit that smiled at you when you turned it on and was operated by a mouse—that I decided to embrace digital technology. At that time, I worked with the earliest Macintoshes and some Yamaha tone modules to write two electronic pieces, Metal Music (1989) and “M” Music (1992), both using a variety of FM synthesis techniques, and the latter employing an application entitled M. What I found most interesting about M was a particular algorithm designed to manipulate time: A sequence of predetermined notes passed through a note-density filter that decided what percentage of notes would be heard and what percentage would remain silent, thereby creating rhythm through omission. Subsequent to those two electronic pieces, I wrote what has become my most-performed orchestral work, Circuits (1990). The language of that piece—the cut-and-splice textures, the loops, the metallic percussion sonorities reminiscent of those I had created electronically, the measured and precisely controlled rhythms—was very much influenced by my early work in the electronic music studio. The experience of making electronic music changed not only the way I listened to music but also my approach to writing for traditional instruments. My hearing was sharpened; I became much more attentive to nuances of attack, sustain, and decay; I was able to imagine new textures and timbres; and I acquired the ability to hear more details of pitch and rhythm as if looking at sound and time through a microscope. The computer, used in this way, assists me in working out a variety of musical problems in advance of the first rehearsal. My virtual orchestra puts sound into an otherwise silent working environment. Although I need to have complete silence to order to fully imagine new sound, I always enjoy having sound around me during part of the compositional process. Perhaps most importantly, the computer allows me to step back as if I were a member of the audience and to experience my music’s effect

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on time. Imagined time is so very different from real time, and I believe I benefit from the kind of objective perspective I am able to experience with the assistance of this technology. Computers provide a wonderful way of manipulating sound, and they help us make music that could not be created using traditional instruments alone. Some people question the use of machines to make music. But I would likewise question whether or not an instrument like the piano, with its elaborate mechanism of moving parts, is any less a machine than a computer. Perhaps our attitude toward computers would be more forgiving if we talked about them in musical terms—as instruments to be played rather than machines to be used. We don’t, after all, call pianists “piano users.” There is always, however, the danger that our technology (heavily dependent upon physics) will become an end in itself, or as Rollo May points out in his book The Courage to Create, that it will “serve as a buffer between us and nature, a block between us and the deeper dimensions of our own experience.”5

“The Greatest Scientists Are Artists as Well” (Einstein)6 Albert Einstein fully embraced physics and art as essential partners. It is interesting to note that both disciplines confront the mystery of the unknown, propose theories, experiment with possibilities, attempt to resolve paradoxes, and generally help us to better understand ourselves and the universe in which we live. After a certain high level of technical skill is achieved, science and art tend to coalesce in aesthetics, plasticity, and form. The greatest scientists are artists as well.7—Albert Einstein

According to psychologist Rollo May, Einstein believed that creative science was “bound up with the freedom of human beings to create in the pure sense” as exemplified in poetry, music, and art.8 And a PBS (Public  Rollo May, The Courage to Create (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975): 70.  Alice Calaprice, ed., The Ultimate Quotable Einstein (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011). 7  Calaprice, ed., The Ultimate Quotable Einstein. 8  May, The Courage to Create, 71. 5 6

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Broadcasting Service, United States) program from a number of years ago made the point that Einstein worked more like an artist than a scientist, arriving at a theory not so much by experimental deduction, but confidently by intuition. Personally, I experience the greatest degree of pleasure in having contact with works of art. They furnish me with happy feelings of an intensity that I cannot derive from other sources.9—Albert Einstein

Einstein lived in a world where intuition prevailed—a place where science and art merged. Could Einstein have made his discoveries without thinking artfully about science? Barbra Streisand posed a similar question in an address she gave at Harvard University in 1995. She asked, “When you take into consideration the development of the human heart, soul, and imagination, don’t the arts take on just as much importance as math or science?”10 Albert Einstein’s participation in the arts began at an early age. His parents, and especially his mother, a pianist, insisted that he study violin as a child. Continuing his musical activities into adulthood, Einstein played Bach, Mozart, and Schubert in small groups, often with musicians far more gifted than himself, one of whom had the thrill of asking the world’s most famous scientist, “Einstein, can’t you count?”

Einstein’s Dream (2005) As I mentioned previously, a grant allowed me to buy some computer hardware and software in 2003. And shortly thereafter, the Dallas Symphony Orchestra (DSO) called to say they wanted to commission a new piece for their 2004–2005 season. I proposed that the piece include electronic media, and much to my surprise, the DSO welcomed the idea. I began work in May of 2004, finishing the piece about seven months later.11  Calaprice, ed. The Ultimate Quotable Einstein.  Barbra Streisand, “The Artist as Citizen,” February 3, 1995, https://www.barbrastreisand.com/news/artist-citizen/. 11  Einstein’s Dream was commissioned by Andrew Litton and the Dallas Symphony Orchestra with funds made possible by the Norma and Don Stone New Music Fund. In seven sections and lasting fourteen minutes, the work was premièred on March 31, 2005, at the Meyerson Symphony Center in Dallas. McTee’s score calls for string orchestra, percussion, and computer-processed sounds recorded on CD.  In 2013, the work was recorded (Naxos 8.559765) by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra with Leonard Slatkin conducting. 9

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I decided to give the work the title Einstein’s Dream, essentially reusing the title of my earlier chamber piece but changing Dreams to Dream. I knew this might cause some confusion down the road, but I just had to do it because the title seemed perfect for what I wanted to express. Now, I had no idea what I was getting into. Basically, I took a flying leap and hoped for a soft landing. My proposal was obviously convincing, but underneath it lay a great deal of fear. I knew I hadn’t yet identified all the problems, let alone found solutions to them. But I was very motivated. Part of the motivation came from my memory of the growth I had experienced previously in the electronic music studio. Moreover, I was very much intrigued by the idea of creating the illusion of a larger concert space. This would be accomplished by musically animating the area around the orchestra and by using the magical properties of invisible sound—the sound coming from the loudspeakers—to evoke exterior space and even time past. Paul A. Griffiths talks about this quite eloquently in the preface to a DVD by Roger Reynolds entitled Watershed (1998). I too have always been fascinated by those moments in electroacoustic music when one can’t really tell where the sound is coming from—is it from a person playing an instrument or is it from the loudspeakers? Griffiths makes the point that this phenomenon happens, for example, in churches when chanting priests, choirs, and organists are situated where they cannot be seen—their sounds, then, more easily associated with the “beyond.” The orchestra in the pit and offstage instruments are also examples. From the very beginning, I was committed to the idea of unity, of merging the orchestral and computer music sounds to create a single sonority and a confusion of identities at the threshold between visible and invisible sound, to borrow an idea from Paul Griffiths. To create that desired confusion of sound sources, I did two things: 1. I used samples of some acoustic percussion instruments as points of departure in designing my electronic timbres. These sounds merged very well with their acoustic counterparts in the orchestra; the percussion, therefore, served as a kind of “sound bridge” between the computer music and the orchestra. 2. I tried very hard to create string sonorities that would blend with the overtone-rich sounds I was making in the computer music studio. I might have used technology to help with this, perhaps

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providing me with some frequency analysis data, but I decided to rely only on my ear. One of the things I noticed was that a sustained, relatively unchanging string sonority would not effectively merge with the electronic sounds. It needed to be “on the move,” if only slightly, so I used several glissandi in the piece. Movement through a range of frequencies created the desired complexity and timbral match. When I began work on the piece, I felt I needed a container for my ideas, something to give the work form. Quite by accident while online, I discovered that 2005 would mark the hundredth anniversary of Albert Einstein’s “miraculous year” in which he published his famous papers on relativity and other topics. To commemorate this remarkable achievement and to raise awareness of physics on a global scale, 2005 was designated the “International Year of Physics” by UNESCO and other organisations. I really took notice when I read about the Einstein year because I had been interested in Einstein for quite some time, and because Einstein’s work, as previously explained, represents a coming together of the arts and the sciences. Since I was about to attempt a synthesis of technology and music, I decided once more to turn to Einstein for inspiration. As we know, Albert Einstein gave much thought to issues of space and time, and he dreamt about finding a theory of everything, or a broad, mathematical structure that would fully explain and link together all known phenomena, just as composers attempt to connect parts of pieces and integrate their materials into a single, focused expression. I dream of instruments obedient to my thought and which with their contribution of a whole new world of unsuspected sounds, will lend themselves to the exigencies of my inner rhythm.—Edgard Varèse12

When Edgard Varèse wrote these words in 1917, I wonder if he had any idea that about seventy years later, his dream would become reality through the dissemination of affordable personal computers and associated electronic devices.

12  Edgard Varèse, “Que la musique sonne,” trans. Louise Varèse, 391 no. 5 (June 1917), quoted in Elliott Schwartz, Barney Childs, and Jim Fox, eds., Contemporary Composers on Contemporary Music (New York: Da Capo Press, 1998).

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In studying and practicing the art of computer music, we place a great deal of emphasis on the ways in which hardware and software expand our ability to make sound. But computers also allow us to change traditional concepts of musical time—to effectively “stop” sound—to capture, store, modify, and play back sound events. Like many composers, I am particularly fascinated by the interplay between the kind of time embodied by pre-recorded computer music (which is fixed and machine-like) and the kind of time represented by live performance (which is approximate and human). So, the idea of combining pre-recorded computer music with real-time performance satisfied an urge in me that goes way back to my first experience of listening to pieces like Ives’ Unanswered Question (1908, rev. 1935), and this idea has manifest itself in several of my pieces where multiple strata are defined largely by the way in which time is managed—one stratum remaining relatively unchanged, the other flexible and evolving. To achieve flexibility in the orchestral music and to minimize the possibility of an adversarial relationship between the conductor and me, I decided not to use timing devices, headphones, or click tracks to coordinate the orchestral music with the computer music. All the cues come from the computer music itself, and there is some wiggle room at the ends of gestures to accommodate tempos that might be slightly too fast or slow. Of course, in thinking about this piece, I also did entertain, for a moment, the idea of technological interactivity. But I quickly ruled that out: (1) because I didn’t have time to learn programs like MAX or SuperCollider; (2) because I knew rehearsal time would be short; (3) because orchestral musicians are sometimes not comfortable with improvisation; and most importantly, (4) because I generally prefer a more predictable result than some forms of interactive performance allow. To facilitate coordination between the conductor and the sound engineer during rehearsals, I made a CD of the computer music with twenty-­ nine index numbers also marked in the score so the conductor could begin most anywhere in the piece. One of the theories that Einstein proposed in 1905 was, of course, the Special Theory of Relativity. Among other things, this theory postulates that time flows more slowly for persons or things in motion. For example, moving clocks appear to tick more slowly relative to their stationary counterparts. Time is said to be dilated or stretched. Time-stretching exists in the computer domain too. Musical time-­ stretching involves changing the speed or duration of a sound event

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without affecting its pitch. In the old days, if you sped up a turntable or analogue tape, what happened to the pitch? It got higher. Computers, however, are capable of doing the complex math required to stabilise pitch across the time domain. To accomplish the phenomenon of time-stretching, I used granular synthesis, a common technique in which computer software cuts up or granulates a sound into very small pieces with durations of fifty milliseconds or less in most cases. The grains can then be manipulated in various ways. For example, they can be reproduced in high densities to create clouds of sound. Or the time interval between grains can be lengthened to produce “slow motion” or “stretched sound.” It is also possible to shuffle the positions of the grains and to apply filters to create bell-like sonorities. Many of the bell sounds in my piece were created this way. In a lecture I heard some years ago, Nobel Laureate Wolfgang Ketterle spoke of slowing down the speed of atomic materials through super-­ cooling in order to discover new matter. Isn’t it interesting that through granular synthesis and other processes, composers too can experiment with the “quanta” of sound in their search for new materials?

Controlling Time Given Einstein’s interest in Bach, I chose to use a Bach chorale with a particularly beautiful melody and message of unity (Wir glauben all’ an einen Gott) in my piece. But I wanted to use old music for another reason—to control time. How does old music, played in the context of new music, affect one’s experience? It folds the past onto the present and the present onto the past; it interrupts our perception of the linear flow of time and makes us wonder just “when” we are. To me, it is enough to wonder at the secrets.—Albert Einstein

The Bach melody is used at both the beginning and the end of my piece. At the beginning, it is enveloped and contained by the computer music, whereas at the end, it is set free, unaccompanied, and stretched to last two minutes. I was intrigued by the idea of using time-stretching techniques in the acoustic domain, as well, to shift the listener’s attention toward the inner components of the sound—the harmonics and the

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overlapping resonant regions—as if to invite a kind of meditation to “wonder at the secrets.” To synchronise the orchestral music with the computer music, it was necessary to create flexible musical spaces at the ends of gestures. For example, the orchestra might hold a note while waiting for the computer music to provide a cue. Or perhaps two computer events would happen in a row, setting a tempo for the conductor. The computer music is notated minimally with horizontal arrows (Fig. 15.2). Only the necessary cues are notated precisely. The 2/X metric idea owes a lot to Jacob Druckman and others. But what’s different is the idea that the spatial meter of 2/X is positioned in the same place that a player would normally expect to find a traditional meter, and the top number means the same thing as it means in traditional notation: the conductor will beat a 2-pattern. In the players’ parts, the

Fig. 15.2  Excerpt from Cindy McTee’s Einstein’s Dream (2005)

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Fig. 15.3  Excerpt from Cindy McTee’s Einstein’s Dream (2005)

2/X is not positioned above the staff, nor does the X appear by itself, as is sometimes the case in other composers’ music. The beats are separated by a specified duration, in this case, three and seven seconds, respectively. The 3/M metric idea (Fig.  15.3) denotes spatial notation, but this time, the beats are regular at MM = 48. What’s handy about this notation is that it affords the opportunity to have 3/4 and 3/M happening simultaneously if desired. The conductor does the same thing regardless. He or she just beats a 3-pattern at bar 48. Explanations from the score follow:

Spatial Notation • 2/M, 3/M, 4/M etc. denote 2, 3, or 4 conductor’s beats per bar where “M” refers to metronome speed.

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• The harmonic language of Einstein’s Dream ranges from triadic and tonal, to triadic with octatonic ornamentation, to 12-tone, to microtonal. • 1/X, 2/X, 3/X etc. denote 1, 2, or 3 conductor’s beats per bar where “X” refers to variable time between beats (indicated in seconds after the bar lines). • Rhythms are proportional to their spatial placement in the bar. Accidentals remain in effect throughout the bar but are sometimes re-­notated as a reminder. Figure 15.4 presents an example of a series of triads whose base notes are organised in a repeated pattern of two falling major thirds and a falling minor third, eventually yielding all twelve tones. But I kept the pattern going until E turned up again, because this piece is all about E—E for Einstein, of course. A violin solo based on the trumpet tune from Ives’ Unanswered Question is heard over top of these triads. The pitches of this violin tune are drawn from the octatonic scale, which of course contains major triads among other sonorities. As the triads shift, so does the compatible octatonic scale. There are some more “traditional” twelve-tone sections in the piece as well. I once again relied on Bach. If the B-A-C-H motive is rotated once,

Fig. 15.4  Triad pattern and octatonic scale examples featured in Cindy McTee’s Einstein’s Dream (2005)

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Fig. 15.5  Twelve-tone row based on the B-A-C-H motive, as utilised by Cindy McTee in Einstein’s Dream (2005)

and then again, and if the second two tetrachords are transposed, a twelve-­ tone row result (Fig. 15.5). The structure of the row is actually trivial—a chromatic tetrachord can always be transposed at these intervals to make a twelve-tone row. But the row was useful to me because I needed one with a clear sense of direction and no leaps to facilitate speed. Much of the fast music is based on this row.

So—What Was Einstein’s Dream? To find a theory of everything that would unify time, space, and all matter. Albert Einstein taught us that we live in a universe where time can behave in very extraordinary ways, and in so doing he challenged us to look for answers in those magical places where reality and fantasy become one thing—at the threshold between science and art. Excerpts from Einstein’s Dream by Cindy McTee, copyright © 2007 by Rondure Music Publishing (BMI). All Rights Reserved. Sole Agent: Bill Holab Music. Used by Permission.

References Calaprice, Alice, ed. The Ultimate Quotable Einstein. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011. Einstein, Albert. “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies.” In The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, Volume 2, translated by Anna Beck and Peter Havas, 140–71. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989. Ketterle, Wolfgang. “The Story of Bose-Einstein Condensates: The Coldest Matter in the Universe.” Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT-Harvard

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Center for Ultracold Atoms, Cambridge, October 11, 2001. Video of lecture, 01:05:47. https://youtu.be/NoO7XKVmZC8. Kramer, Jonathan D. The Time of Music: New Meanings, New Temporalities, New Listening Strategies. New York: Schirmer Books, 1988. Langer, Susanne K. Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art. New  York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1953. Levenson, Thomas, writer. NOVA. Season 23, episode 11, “Einstein Revealed.” Directed by Peter Jones. Aired September 9, 1997, on PBS. https://www.pbs. org/video/nova-­einstein-­revealed/. Lightman, Alan. Einstein’s Dreams. New York: Pantheon Books, 1993. May, Rollo. The Courage to Create. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1975. Meyer, Franz. Marc Chagall. Translated by Robert Allen. New York: H. N. Abrams, 1964. https://archive.org/details/isbn_0116411111614. McTee, Cindy. Einstein’s Dream. On Cindy McTee: Symphony No. I. Detroit Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Leonard Slatkin. Naxos 8.559765, 2013, compact disc. Reynolds, Roger. Watershed. Recorded, edited, and mastered by Josef Kucera. Mode 70, 1998. Interactive DVD. Streisand, Barbra. “The Artist as Citizen.” February 3, 1995. https://www.barbrastreisand.com/news/artist-­citizen/. UN General Assembly. Fifty-eighth Session. Agenda Item 169. International Year of Physics, 2005. UN General Assembly Resolution 58/293. June 10, 2004. Varèse, Edgard. “Que la musique sonne.” Translated by Louise Varèse. 391 no. 5 (June 1917). Quoted in Elliott Schwartz, Barney Childs, and Jim Fox, eds. Contemporary Composers on Contemporary Music. New  York: Da Capo Press, 1998.

CHAPTER 16

The Pendulum Process: Point of Balance Mary Finsterer

Introduction Beneath the surface of the earth lies a history, a stratum of layers, each marking the place of a time passed, each holding a key to processes of change. This process is not unlike the journey of a composer, whose development, through the passing of time, is represented in each composition as a layer in their body of work. This chapter delves into compositional methodology from a personal perspective, my own “geology” as a composer. It investigates the coalescing of twentieth- and twenty-first-century innovations with influences stemming from early music practice. It casts light on a compositional process that brings together historical, metaphoric and poetic references with an art music convention spanning more than a millennium. Composition is like a map. Finding the potential of that map determines the nature and margins of the music. It is about setting up a structure for an aesthetic from which to move in a methodical way, beyond style and fashion. Within that structure there is a hierarchy of levels and attributes. From the larger framework to micro-units characterised by

M. Finsterer (*) Melbourne, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 L. Kouvaras et al. (eds.), The Composer, Herself, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23922-9_16

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gestural language through pitch and intervallic formations, rhythmic devices, articulation and orchestration, each of these levels informs the other. They are interconnected in a vertical harmonic framework that then extends horizontally. This compositional process plays out much like a force; a pendulum moving from one reference point to another seeking polarities that determine the pathways within the map. Examples of this contradistinction of materials and compositional strategies will be illustrated in this chapter, drawing from two of my chamber works, Ruisselant (1991) for chamber orchestra and Silva (2012) a percussion concerto.

Ruisselant (1991) Ruisselant was first heard in Montreal in 1991 as part of a competitive event called Forum by French Canadian chamber orchestra, Le Nouvel Ensemble Moderne. A French title was chosen as a dedication to the ensemble and acts as a metaphor for particular structural devices prevalent throughout the work. Literally translated as “streaming,” certain streams of timbre and texture delineate each of the three major sections. In some instances, these streams are non-developmental. By contrast, the stream in the third section transforms as it passes from one timbral and gestural context to another, continually emerging and vanishing only to reappear in a different guise. The abundant appearance of the word ruisselant in French literature is evidence of the rich suggestive element inherent. The idea of water pouring continuously—originating from one source, dividing into smaller streams, is overlain with poetic innuendo, of life itself igniting a multiplicity of streams of thought. In a musical context, streaming implies movement and time, a momentum being created through incessant waves interlocking and compounding in a complexity of texture. This multiplicity extends beyond the macrocosm of a stream-like sound texture—infiltrating into smaller dimensions of cell-like structures, which, by their hyperactive nature, propel the motion of the stream or larger structure ever forward. The artificial string harmonics featured in the first and penultimate sections emulate this process. Played with tremolo articulation, these artificial harmonics are grouped in such a way as to overlap and, with the assistance of Renaissance-inspired ornamentation in the celeste, create a delicate and shimmering continuum or stream of texture that provides a foundation for the solo violin to

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emerge and develop throughout the section, a melodic contour comprised entirely of natural harmonics. The first note of each artificial harmonic group is accented to give the effect of “bursting out,” thus offsetting the otherwise fragile and consistent texture while also reflecting the tutti punctuations that feature throughout the work as seen in bar twenty-three in the score (Fig. 16.1). The schema of the artificial harmonic groupings relies on a numerical system inspired by serialism. With the original statement being a repeated numerical pattern comprising the numerals 1, 2 and 3, a series of numerical patterns is developed through variation and applied combinatorial processes as illustrated in Table 16.1: The artificial harmonics in the cello and viola are grouped according to Variation #4a and Variation #4c respectively, while the violin II artificial harmonics are grouped according to Variation #4b. In referring to Table 16.1, the numerals that appear in bold correspond to the groupings from bar twenty-two in the score in Fig. 16.1. The pitch material is also derived from the numerical system. Founded on the original numerical pattern displayed in Table 16.1, the intervals from each line range from the smallest interval of one semitone to three semitones and follow the pattern in cyclical formation. Each line is transposed by four semitones and begins at a different point of the numerical system by one step. The reason for this is to provide harmonic possibilities. Each line of Pitch Grid A is assigned to an instrument (Fig. 16.2). Lines 1 and 2 are delegated to violin II and viola respectively, while Line 3 is assigned to the cello. In striking contrast to the fastidious hyper-­refinement of the string stream is the large band of multiphonics that characterise the second section of the piece. Introduced by a tutti punctuation in bar 108 (Fig.  16.3), they announce themselves unabashed, creating a stark and dramatic shift to the preceding section with a continual stream of interlocking parts. As the section builds, the level of intensity increases as the oboe and flute multiphonics make way for the bass clarinets (Fig. 16.4). The fastidious hyper-refinement of the string stream in Sect. 1 is now converted into grace-note figures in the piano, while the rhythmically metrical brass configurations interplay with the tubular bells, all working in counterpoint to the broad woodwind stream of multiphonics (Fig. 16.5). The brass configurations are diminutive in comparison to the sweeping gestures that surround them. None-the-less, they are significant. Amidst the microtonal and serial elements that define the streams, they offer harmonic contrast,

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Fig. 16.1  Ruisselant, by Mary Finsterer—bars 22-24

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Table 16.1  Ruisselant, by Mary Finsterer—Numerical Patterns

Fig. 16.2  Ruisselant, by Mary Finsterer—Pitch Grid A

being the only reference to triadic and medieval harmonic practice. String quadruple stops and tutti punctuations continue throughout the section, acting as triggers for the commencement or finalisation of other gestures from the different instrumental groupings. The gestural palette of Ruisselant, typified by continuously unfolding textural streams and bold contrasts of delicate and filigree ornamentation set against the bold homorhythms, is clearly positioned in an aesthetic that embraces modernist interpretations of tonality. Silva, a work composed some twenty-one years following Ruisselant, draws from this same gestural palette but, rather than formulating pitch structures derived from twentieth- and twenty-first-century innovations, delves into tertian harmonic principles that originate as far back as the Renaissance.

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Fig. 16.3  Ruisselant, by Mary Finsterer—bars 106-108

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Fig. 16.4  Ruisselant, by Mary Finsterer—bars 115-117

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Fig. 16.5  Ruisselant, by Mary Finsterer—bars 133-135

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Silva (2012) The idea of the forest has always figured high in our collective consciousness. Through the stories we first heard as children, the forest plays on our imagination as a place of wonder, escape, danger and adventure. In many folk tales the forest is even seen as forbidden—a place full of mystery and shadows. In the words of Robert Louis Stevenson: “It is not so much for its beauty that the forest makes a claim upon men’s hearts, as for that subtle something, that quality of air, that emanation from old trees, that so wonderfully changes and renews a weary spirit.”1 Silva derives from the Latin word meaning forest. Taking the form of a percussion concerto for chamber ensemble, it was composed for, and first performed by, Claire Edwardes and Ensemble Offspring on 23rd October 2012, in the Utzon Room at the Sydney Opera House. The work is a tribute to Tamsin Cowling, a friend and young mother who lost her life. With this in mind, the thematic material of the work is inspired by the notion of metaphor and memoriam through the exploration of the memory, symbolised by repeated echoes from Spem in alium by Thomas Tallis (1570). Literally translated from Latin as “Hope in Any Other Have I None” this poignant musical theme is entwined with an equally moving fragment from the Death and the Maiden string quartet (1824) by Franz Schubert to form a recurring melodic figure that characterises the opening and final sections of the work. Each section within the over-arching ternary form contrasts dramatically, to evoke different impressions of the forest as a metaphor for life and renewing a weary spirit. The work opens with an atmospheric ambience and a sense of vastness through space and time evoked by a percussion palette that includes vibraphone, four gongs and three cymbals (Fig. 16.6). The lingering resonances typifying the percussion solo, as seen in Fig. 16.7, develop throughout the opening section, beginning with cymbal tremoli and single notes and dyads on the vibraphone and gongs before finally arriving at expansive phrases of Renaissance-inspired ornamentation in the vibraphone at bar fifty. In contrast to the continually unfolding development of the solo percussion is a backdrop of interconnecting gestures and themes. Musical references from Spem in alium, Death and the Maiden and Ruisselant converge to create a continuum or stream of simultaneous cycles. These cycles 1

 Robert Louis Stevenson, Essays of Travel (London: Chatto & Windus, 1905): 170.

Fig. 16.6  Silva, by Mary Finsterer—bars 1-6

Fig. 16.7  Silva, by Mary Finsterer—bars 7-12

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are never identical, but constantly vary, the idea being to avoid predictability, which, in itself, is a metaphor for the unpredictability of life. Large phrases in the piano establish a musical reference from the second movement of Schubert’s Death and the Maiden. Each statement begins on a different beat in the bar and is interlocked with a quote articulated in the violin and cello from Tallis’ Spem in alium. The large phrases initiated by the piano trigger other gestural elements in the woodwinds and strings (Fig. 16.8). As seen with the celeste material in Ruisselant, this florid duet in the flute and clarinet is also inspired by Renaissance-style ornamentation. The entry of the duet creates a dovetail interplay with the finishing of each phrase of the piano before finally trailing off itself in the upper register. The strings follow suit, overlapping with the woodwinds with a delicate texture that extends to an even higher register (Fig. 16.9). Establishing further the notion of memory as a metaphor, this second gesture for the violin and cello also harks back to another time, in this instance with quotations from music composed twenty-one years earlier, the first “stream” of Ruisselant.

Fig. 16.8  Silva, by Mary Finsterer—Bars 55-58

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Fig. 16.9  Silva, by Mary Finsterer—Bars 59-62

The complete impression of the first section, with the multiple tiers of gesture epitomised in the whimsical, faster moving soft articulations of the woodwinds and string harmonics set in counterpoint with the slower moving quotations in the piano and strings, aims to look out, as if to experience the forest through layers of branches and leaves; drawing a metaphorical association with the idea of reaching out, beyond place and time, beyond life itself. After the delicate filigree of gestures that characterise the opening of the work, the second section provides a dramatic contrast, offering an impression of the forest from a completely different perspective. If the first section represents the leaves and branches and openness of the sky, then this section signifies the tree trunks and soil that beds the forest. Earthy timbres from the Tom-toms introduce the section in a theatrical display of virtuosity. The homophonic material that follows unites the ensemble in a rhythmically driven texture of clearly delineated antecedent and consequent phrases, harking back to harmonies originating from medieval musical practice. The percussion is always highlighted, moving between the tom toms and fast-moving alternating dyads on the vibraphone.

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A contrasting interplay of loud and soft dynamics distinguishes each phrase, augmenting the spirited momentum of the material as it ultimately finds resolution in an ephemeral vibraphone solo at bar 207 before returning to the opening material, completing the ternary form. In the penultimate moment of the piece, a vibraphone cadenza elaborates on the melodic material of the opening and final sections to give a feeling of completion and coming the full circle before the musical references from Spem in alium and Death and the Maiden make a final appearance to conclude the work. Three ascending notes in the highest register of the vibraphone are bowed. They linger, until finally, all sound fades away.

Conclusion It might appear, on first impressions, that Ruisselant and Silva draw from compositional practices on opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of style and aesthetic. Beyond immediate impressions, however, both draw inspiration from and have reference to similar sources. Broadly speaking, the opening sections of both works explore more delicate textures, while the middle sections exude a more bold and powerful character. In delving into the structural layers of the work, it is clear the influences of both works originate from similar sources, those being early music and twentieth- and twenty-first-century innovations. The distinction, then, as to why both works appear stylistically diverse, is due to how those influences have impacted on each of the structural levels within the architecture of each work. From the smallest micro-unit to the largest structural levels of the streams, the character of Ruisselant is defined by numerical patterning derived from twentieth- and twenty-first-­ century serial procedure determining both the pitch and rhythmic elements, which in turn shape the aesthetic nature of the music. The influence of tertian harmony from early music serves to create a contrast with the predominance of a modernist harmonic palette as seen in the Renaissance-­ inspired ornamentation in the celesta and piano in sections one and two respectively. Silva inverts the roles of influence of the polarities by which the compositional process is governed. It places at the heart of the structural framework two recurring quotes whose functional harmonic composition links back to tertian harmony and early music practice. Together, complemented by a resonant pedal note of G on the gong, these two musical references recur like a soft chant to form a continuum or stream that

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underpins the framework for other levels within the hierarchy. The stream of artificial string harmonics that characterises the first section of Ruisselant, now plays a secondary role, dovetailing with the Renaissance-inspired ornamentation of the woodwinds to introduce the next reiteration of musical references that continues the chant. The rhythmically driven homophonic framework that underpins the middle section of Silva carries the momentum, creating a stream of energy as the harmony unfolds with singular purpose. In reflecting how this material relates to Ruisselant, it could be seen that the triadic brass configurations that emerged in section two of this earlier work, was not unlike a seed from which grew a complete section two decades later. Beyond style and aesthetic, the pendulum that moves from one reference point to another in the process of establishing the pathways within the compositional process, can only exist once the polarities are in place. In the case of Ruisselant and Silva those polarities are not dissimilar. Medieval music and twentieth- and twenty-first-century innovations both play their part in determining the boundaries for each work. The distinction of how style and aesthetic evolve is directly linked to how those polarities or influences have determined the pathways of the compositional process. With respect to Ruisselant, influences originating from twentieth- and twenty-first-century serialism govern the principal pathways within the map, while in the case of Silva, the roles of the polarities are reversed with tertian harmony playing the primary role. In each work, however, the pendulum gathers momentum through a compositional process that is guided by a point of balance; a point of balance between the polarities and one that navigates a pathway within the hierarchy of levels that forms the structure of the composition.

References Finsterer, Mary. Ruisselant. Sydney: Australian Music Centre, 1991. ———. Silva. Sydney: Australian Music Centre, 2018. Stevenson, Robert Louis. Essays of Travel. London: Chatto & Windus, 1905.

CHAPTER 17

Casting Musical Spells: Time, Passion, and Inevitability in the Music of Shulamit Ran Shulamit Ran

Introduction The work of Israeli American composer Shulamit Ran spans a half-century of output, in diverse genres such as chamber music, opera, orchestral music including concertos, vocal and choral music. Ran’s 1990 Symphony won the Pulitzer Prize for Music and she spent her professional teaching career at the University of Chicago from 1973–2015. I was privileged to speak with Professor Ran about her life and work, particularly her string quartet works, in October of 2019, at her private Chicago residence. The conversation ranged widely exploring some of her chamber music, her

In interview with Natalie Williams, 13 Oct 2019 (Chicago, Illinois, at Ran’s private residence)

S. Ran (*) University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 L. Kouvaras et al. (eds.), The Composer, Herself, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23922-9_17

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reflections on the contemporary efforts of women composers and, most significantly, her relationship with musical time. The strong themes of Ran’s work include journey, return, time, and passion. A musical journey of inevitability, recapitulation as renewal, the shaping of musical time into expanding circles, and a passion for the projects she undertakes, are defining factors of her creative output. Her advocacy for the work of women and her deep engagement with her craft was strongly evident throughout our conversation. This is a composer whose contribution to the chamber music literature of the modern era is widely considered and meticulously crafted. Ran’s approach models that of a quiet leader in our field, intimately connected with the past and strongly focused on the future. Natalie Williams (NW): Your musical output demonstrates genre diversity, particularly within your chamber works. Is there a type of ensemble that you favor? Shulamit Ran (SR): My chamber music ranges from mixed instrumental and vocal ensembles of diverse sizes, including some rather unconventional groupings, to works composed for what one tends to think of as standard genres such as string quartets and piano trios. They each pose their own challenges and potential rewards, and the opportunity for learning and discovery is inherent in each one of them. NW: Can you give an example of a work scored for an unconventional grouping that you especially enjoyed writing? SR: An example I remember fondly is Amichai Songs (1985) for Mezzo-Soprano, Oboe/Cor Anglais, Viola da Gamba and Harpsichord. The impetus to write Amichai Songs was a commission by the Eastman School of Music made on behalf of the late American mezzo Jan DeGaetani (1933–1989), her husband Philip West, Martha McGaughey, and Arthur Haas.1 The year 1985 was a special year, marking the Bach, Handel, and Domenico Scarlatti tri-centennial (all born in 1685) and the Heinrich Schutz quad-centennial (b. 1585), and the four artists were planning a concert of music by these great masters. They also sought to commission a new work to include in their program. Of course, I was intrigued by the idea of writing for what is essentially a Baroque combination associated with those composers. At the same time, I had never imagined I’d be composing a work with viola da gamba, and frankly knew little about it 1  Theodore Presser, “Amichai Songs,” accessed 10 March 2020, https://www.presser. com/111-40144-amichai-songs.html.

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from my perspective as composer. But I had boundless admiration for Jan DeGaetani, who was one of the true great performers bringing to life the music of her era (among others she premiered George Crumb’s genre-­ defining Ancient Voices of Children, which he wrote for her), and so I leapt at this opportunity, and began thinking of how I would blend her voice with the three instrumental personalities who were to partner with her.2 As is always the case for me, knowing an instrument begins with an understanding of its technical basics. To help facilitate this I met with Mary Springfels, an outstanding, Chicago-based gamba player, who gave me something of a primer on the principles and layout of the seven-string gamba. But that, of course, is only the beginning. What is of the essence for me is to uncover what I think of as the “soul” of the instrument, and that process is what allows me to feel that I can say something special, something that needs to be said. Eventually, I believe I unearthed what were, for me, the special qualities that became the “voice” of not only the viola da gamba but of this unique ensemble as a whole, and I recall the time when I created this work as being especially joyous. Yet another element that is intricately bound with what ultimately becomes “the composition” is, where relevant, the choice of texts. In the case of Amichai Songs a crucial moment happened, in what can only be described as an incredible stroke of good timing, when Yehuda Amichai, the great Israeli poet, gave a poetry reading in Chicago, which I attended. It was DeGaetani’s expressed preference for this new work to be set to English, and the poetry I heard Amichai read was part of Love Poems, a collection of his poems in a bilingual edition (Hebrew and English). Normally I would think twice about setting poetry in translation, but in the case of Amichai I sensed that the poetry, supremely expressive yet highly distilled, transcended language. I contacted the poet and was thrilled that he gave me his full blessing to proceed with the poetry in its English translation. To this day, the choice of texts is a powerful determining aspect of my music. At all times, choosing and assembling the texts becomes a creative act of sorts for me as well. I will mention two works that are cases in point. My Credo Ani-Ma’amin of 2006 commissioned by the 12-male voiced choir Chanticleer, and Moon Songs of 2011, commissioned by Dolce Suono Ensemble. The first, as the name suggests, is a Credo movement 2  Kenneth Herman, “Fame Comes a Piece at a Time,” Los Angeles Times, 12 November 1991, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-11-12-ca-1334-story.html.

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that was commissioned to be at the center of “Peace on Earth: a Chanticleer Mass,” a full Mass with various composers invited to write other parts, and music by Carlo Gesualdo and Andrea Gabrieli added to the mix. No less challenging, Moon Songs was commissioned as a companion piece that also pays homage to Arnold Schonberg’s seminal work Pierrot Lunaire on the 100th anniversary of its creation. In both cases, though in quite different ways, I found myself gripped and enthralled by the inherent possibilities of the commission’s parameters, and ended up composing fairly extended works that used an array of texts spanning various periods, each with strikingly different expressive possibilities. It literally took months to not only find but also assemble these texts into a meaningful narrative, but I think the end result laid a powerful framework for the compositions I was envisioning.

Women in Composition NW: Your career achievements are held in high esteem and you are recognized as an influential female creative voice. What advice would you give to women composers, emerging now? SR: My advice to young composers, particularly women, is, “the sky is the limit!” I remember my early musical steps were fostered by my parents, for whom the idea of me, as a young girl, striving to be a composer and live my life in music was perfectly natural, even though neither one of them was a musician. Their love, support and encouragement from the earliest age have been my guiding light and invaluable for the way my life had moved forward. As a child I made up tunes, tunes that grew into little pieces, then bigger pieces. Growing up in Israel, I cannot say that gender presented a roadblock in my development as composer. This is certainly not every woman’s experience, and I know how very fortunate I was! I strongly believe in the power of giving your all, which often means hard work and great discipline, aiming for your absolute best. I would advise composers to be their own best selves first, get first-class training, strive for excellence! First, be excellent, and then try to create opportunities, build relationships with other composers and most especially with performers, and hope to see your hard work rewarded. And don’t become a composer unless you absolutely must, spurred on by a need that comes from within. Without such a passion, it’s useless to continue. Don’t do it unless there’s an overriding need, but also long-range patience.

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When I was twelve, I felt for the first time that what I myself could do in order to hear the music playing in my head—namely play it on the piano, and in some cases sing and dramatically narrate it (yes, that was part of my self-created “repertoire” of the time…)—was no longer enough. I decided to venture first into the wind-instrument world, specifically the flute, and composed my Sonatina for Two Flutes. But of course, I had to hear it, too! Not knowing any flutists, I made a daring move and telephoned Uri Teplitz, principal flutist with the Israel Philharmonic who was also the orchestra’s program note annotator, requesting that he let two of his flute students try out my piece for me to hear. Mr. Teplitz was a very distinguished, well-known gentleman, and I was very nervous calling him. So nervous, in fact, that I breathed through my little prepared speech which I scribbled down on paper, with what must have been a barely audible voice, because he immediately asked me to repeat what I was saying. It was all quite frightening, and I remember that phone call to this day. But Mr. Teplitz could not have been kinder, and did send two of his students to play my piece for me. Later on, some unexpected and wonderful things happened with the Sonatina, but the most important part was the push that it gave me to move forward, and not be fearful about taking action on behalf of the music I composed. NW: Is the qualifier of “woman composer” important to you? SR: No. We don’t talk about Beethoven as a man composer and there is no reason that we should be content being put in a ghetto as women composers. The ultimate goal is the music itself, and I fervently hope that ours is the last generation for which a composer’s gender is of concern, and where concerts devoted expressly to women’s music are the chief way to highlight music by women. Sweeping statements about “women’s music” are irrelevant at best and demeaning at worst, when evaluating the quality of our imagination and craft. My gender does not consciously influence the perception through which I create, but all of our life’s experience goes into our music. Being female is an essential part of who I am and of my life experience, so of course my gender enters my music; but I am not going to be the one pulling it apart to say in what way. I want to believe that my music is capable of invoking emotion in my listener, but the fact that it may be passionate, or ecstatic, is it so in a way that can be defined as female? Perhaps, but I can’t say that this is something I think about. I predict that the pendulum will swing in the future—it already is, finally—towards the inclusion of women composers, creating greater equilibrium in the playing field. The sheer number of terrific women

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composers composing now,3 winning awards, gaining public exposure, the growing prevalence of women in the arts industry, offers promise of a vibrant future.4 That there are more and more women in leadership positions will flow on to support the growth of young women in the field. The musical landscape is changing, and the younger people shaping the music of the future and becoming the decision-makers in all fields are bringing a different kind of attitude to the matter of gender, too. In am optimistic that this will all factor into the future landscape of musical activity.

Programming Contemporary Music NW: Can you describe your background in promoting the works of women composers? SR: There have been many occasions through the years when I was able to highlight the work of women composers in various contexts, but I would say that most meaningful of these were my years as artistic director of Contempo, the important new music ensemble at the University of Chicago (known as Contemporary Chamber Players for many years prior to my appointment). In this role I programmed many works by women, though I selected repertoire based principally upon merit and not the gender of the composer. Merit-based selection was a natural approach for me, and I sought out a programmatic chemistry between the works I chose. Aesthetic and production planning issues were considered, and programming music by women was for me a natural part of the equation. I want people to be excited about new music, and there is so much wonderful repertoire that you, as a program curator, want your listeners to hear. I made it a priority to seek out the best music I could find, no matter its source, and clearly there was much by women that I was able to select and introduce to our audiences. Sitting on boards, committees, juries and panels, and of course through my own teaching, gave me access to a wide range of repertoire; I was a curious observer, learned widely, and found an abundance of new works to choose from. 3  Recent list sources of women composers include the Donne, Women in Musica database (Italy) http://www.drama-musica.com/Donne.html and the Institute for Composer Diversity (USA) https://www.composerdiversity.com/. 4  Jordan Wilson, “Oscars: ‘Joker’s’ Hildur Gudnadóttir Becomes First Woman to Win Best Original Score,” Hollywood Times, 9 February 2020. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/ news/oscars-hildur-gudnadottir-becomes-first-woman-win-best-original-score-1276317.

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The Contemporary Chamber Players was founded in 1964 by Ralph Shapey, who was invited to the University of Chicago to establish the ensemble. I directed it from 2002 until my retirement from the university. My programming for Contempo ensured a representative balance of work by women, and not by way of a token gesture. Frankly, with there being so much to choose from, I believe today there is no excuse to do otherwise.

Compositional Process in the String Quartets NW: In establishing this interview, you spoke of your string quartets as important in your output. Can you speak about these works and what they mean to you? SR: Broadly speaking, I would not single out one genre of my music as dominant in my works. They all are “my children,” and occupy a position in my output that I consider important in my creative journey. I think the trigger for suggesting we discuss the quartets was that I was engaged just them in rehearsing Vistas, my second string quartet, with the Spektral Quartet, and was also looking ahead to hearing the first recorded edits of Glitter, Doom, Shards, Memory, String Quartet No. 3 as performed by the Pacifica Quartet for whom it was composed (released in the summer of 2020 by Cedille Records).5 So you could say that I was in a string quartet mood as we were preparing for our conversation! My three full-scale string quartets, plus the much shorter Bach Shards and the miniature set Ringtone Suite, are all quite different from one another. Each was designed with its own set of compositional limitations that served also as sources of inspiration. All were written by commission, and I have found over time that the boundaries set by a commission can also inspire a certain approach, a path to pursue, that is up to me to “unlock.” I am hardly the first composer to note that creating boundaries is essential, setting one on a search that will stretch your imagination, often bringing about fresh revelations. With less to work with, one is left having to push oneself further, be more inventive with materials. String Quartet No. 1 was commissioned in 1984 by the Mendelssohn Quartet, and as I look back, it seems to have a “familial relationship” to other music I composed during that time period, and especially Excursions 5  Shulamit Ran, “Glitter, Doom, Shards, Memory  – String Quartet no. 3,” Pacifica Quartet, Cedille Records, CDR 90000 196, 2020, compact disc. This recording won a Grammy Award in 2021 for Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance.

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of 1981, the first of my two piano trios. In both works I was interested in the idea of the different paths that the same musical materials can engender. Unique to this quartet, upon hearing the Mendelssohn Quartet in concert I decided to treat both violins as equals. In fact, the seating for the quartet has both violinists sit at the front of the stage facing one another, while the viola and cello are seated behind them as a kind of powerful “back orchestra”. Not that they are in any way secondary in their importance—all four strings have equally virtuosic and important roles! And to be sure, this unusual seating arrangement is not just about “stage visuals,” but is reflected also at a deeper structural level, both in terms of the relationship between the two violins, but also between the two-violin pair with the viola/cello pair. At many points within the quartet materials are circled back, but their “story line” keeps changing, evolving. This is most evident when the third movement begins with the exact same music as does the first movement. It then takes a detour into what is almost another expository section using the same materials as did the first movement; but at the same time, one could not just “flip” the two “expositions,” because the third movement is at a different place in time, and could have happened only once we have traversed the kind of distances, and evolution, that the piece has gone through in the first and in the strongly contrasting scherzo-with-trio second movement that separates the two outer movements. That new exposition of the last movement, in fact, leads us to a type of passacaglia that brings back other materials from the first movement, but build this time into a major climax and the close of the quartet. Five years later, when composing Vistas, my second string quartet commissioned for the Taneyev String Quartet of Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), I was in a different place in terms of my musical language. Some people would say that I was composing in a different style. But I think of it as a different language, because I believe that “style” is that deeply personal, instinctive voice a creative artist has, something one carries throughout one’s life. Leaving that question of language aside, I think of Vistas as belonging to a set of three works, begun with East Wind (1987) for solo flute, later followed by Mirage (1990) for a mixed quintet, and having repercussions for music that comes later on (including Legends for orchestra, and Voices, my flute concerto). All three works are built upon the same three-pitch cell of an axis pitch, with a half-step above and a whole step below. I first used this little cell in East Wind where it is presented immediately as a distinctive gestural flourish, thus imbued right from the get-go with a characteristic ecstatic quality that defines the entire

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piece. When I began the second quartet in 1988, I found myself wanting to go back to that very simple cell, as it suggested much more that I wanted to do, this time within the framework of a string quartet. I have always been drawn to a structural device that I can best describe with an image of a stone thrown into water, causing concentric ripples to emanate from a central point. While watery ripples dissipate in ever broadening circles, though, my musical ripples gain momentum, providing a structural apparatus for the music. These broadening and intensifying circles govern, to a degree, the shape of a number of my works in different ways, providing not just a motivic element, but also a formal and structural plan. This is certainly true of the second string quartet. The pitch cell provides me with a concise musical idea, one that I can shape into “beings in sound.” I am attracted to the development of a small musical kernel as an integral compositional device. Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is the most obvious, unforgettable model here, a work constructed from the simplest of musical motives. I often begin with a seemingly simple musical idea. I search for an idea that I can shape and mould, often an idea that will remain recognisable as it evolves. And although I tend to start by thinking of a broad formal plan, I also leave myself open to just where the musical material will take me. I have often compared this to characters in a play or in a novel, where the author must listen to where a character leads, something that may become clear only as the play unfolds. My formal plans will often crystallise, at times change in unanticipated ways, as the piece builds in my hands, organically. My third string quartet Glitter, Doom, Shards, Memory (2014) was composed nearly twenty-five years after Vistas, and it again is quite different in many ways. I never would have predicted that I would compose a work with an “extra-musical” dimension, a narrative as it were, in a genre that is most often associated with “pure” music. But the Pacifica Quartet, with whom I have enjoyed a great professional and personal association, asked that I consider composing a quartet that would refer in some way to the visual arts, and expressed special interest in art created in the earlier part of the twentieth century, perhaps between the two World Wars. Thinking about this propelled me to contemplate painters who created their art during the Holocaust; not just the work itself but also what it took to create under circumstances of the greatest peril and duress. Eventually this led me to Felix Nussbaum, the German-Jewish painter who perished in 1944 in Auschwitz when he was not yet forty years old, and who created some beautiful, deeply moving, and disturbing art while

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fleeing and hiding. The quartet I composed is not so much about specific paintings, though, and more about what I imagine as the disruption, the frightening rupture, of all that is normal and familiar in life. At the work’s conclusion, Glitter, Doom, Shards, Memory brings back only “shards” of memory rather than a return of actual materials, unlike the two preceding quartets. These tiny shards function as a posthumous aftermath, depicting a sense of musical memory to honor the sounds, emotions, and forgotten characters, through the memory itself. For me, forgetting is obliterating; forgetting, too, is a crime. NW: How do you approach string quartet composition, considering the history and revered significance of the genre? SR: Whatever instrument, or ensemble-type, large or small, for which I create a work, I want it to say something that is worth saying. And I certainly would put a high bar for myself where writing a string quartet is concerned. Otherwise, why add to a canon with such a weight of history, so many sublime masterworks, already bestowed upon it? I’ve always been drawn to music that allows one to dig deep and that has a multi-­dimensional quality to it, an approach which finds a natural home in my string quartets. A medium distinctive for its homogenous sound quality, inherent in the string quartet is nonetheless the capacity of unleashing great power, contrast, subtlety, through its four individual “voices.” I think that in each of my three string quartets there is the ongoing interplay of four characters who are brought together. They can deliberate, confront one another, they are pitted against each other, are pulled apart, and coalesce together. They can act as a single body, but also as four soli. There is an ongoing drama that can get both complex and dynamic. That kind of complexity often begets virtuosity, and I don’t just mean at a surface level, enabling me to explore a multitude of musical affects, textures and approaches.

String Quartets and the Influence of Bach NW: Your works sometimes reference historical forms and your string quartet Bach Shards incorporates the work of Bach. Can you speak about how you incorporated Bach’s work within your own? SR: My brief string quartet work of 2003 Bach Shards was composed for the Brentano quartet when I was commissioned, as one of a group of composers, to write a prelude or postlude movement to Bach’s Art of Fugue. The idea initially seemed like a “tall order” but was also quite

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irresistible. I chose to compose a prelude to Contrapunctus X and began to write. In Bach one occasionally finds, in moments of complex voice leading, a fleeting hint of a later, far more dissonant style. But rather than compose a piece predicated on this glimpse into the future, I decided right from the start to compose in what I think of as a “mildly deconstructed” Bach style: if you could cut my piece into small vertical segments, everything could be said to be in a Bach style. The difference is that it is assembled in ways Bach never would have, the texture and coloring is often different, there is a speeding of processes that is not Bach-like, etc. So, I don’t believe this is in any way “imitation Bach.” The program notes also reveal, “…other important challenge I set for myself was building up the latter, toccata-like portion of Bach Shards in a way that would make the entry point of the fugue that it precedes, Contrapunctus X, seem thoroughly natural. It was my intent to have the first fugal entrance feel like a huge and much welcomed release of the energy created by my Prelude’s penultimate stretch.”6 In other words, it was my goal to provide a “red carpet”, as it were, to organically introduce Bach’s Contrapunctus X as a natural musical consequence of my own preceding Prelude.

Connecting with Listeners NW: Do you feel a sense of responsibility towards your listeners? SR: I have always felt that I, as a composer, am entrusted by my listener with that which means the most to all of us as human beings: time. It is therefore my responsibility, my obligation, to use my listener’s time in the best way I know. I write to satisfy a deep need inside myself to create with sound and time. And although it is not about “pleasing” others, I do have a strong desire to connect with others. My connection with the performer is also a huge motivating factor. There is a special kind of intimacy, of fulfillment, that comes with the engagement with musicians, bringing the music to life. In fact, many collaborations I have had with performers have turned into lifelong friendships, professional as well as personal. Similarly, I view my listeners as indispensable companions in a musical journey.

Compositional Aesthetics NW: How would you describe your overall creative approach? 6

 Shulamit Ran, “Bach Shards,” Program Notes, supplied by the composer, 2019.

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SR: It is important for me that my music have an organic quality to it, by which I mean that everything that happens sounds as though it absolutely is meant to be that way, that there be an urgency, a sense of necessity, a flow. You could call it “inevitability.” The music I admire the most strikes a perfect balance between sounding fresh, surprising, unpredictable on the one hand, and yet seamless, flowing, perfectly “natural”—as though it could only be that way—on the other. Of course, I don’t get up in the morning and say to myself that I am going to sit down and compose music that will be “organic, urgent, flowing, fresh”—you can fill in any of the adjectives I just listed. I work with musical materials, sound and time, texture, and color (harmonic colour first of all, but of course instrumental/vocal colour too). I sometimes take forever to come up with my initial musical materials, as I feel they need to have the seeds of being powerful, resilient, malleable, memorable. And as I move forward, I am bound and determined to try and create something that really holds together, that has a musical logic—by which I mean that nothing in it sounds arbitrary, or merely some notes casually strung together. I labour hard at my music. In some sense it feels to me as though in each composition, no matter its performance forces or duration, I want to create something that encompasses a whole world. And I know that that is a quixotic goal, and unattainable. But I do try to at least touch on something, and do so honestly, with hopes that the resulting composition will have an emotional resonance and leave you feeling that you had “an experience” on this ride that you took with me. Music has the capacity to “cast a spell,” by which I mean that when we listen to great music we are drawn inside, we are swept by it, as though to another state of being. And so, I hold this up as my ideal. I am an intuitive composer, and do not have a method, or system of any kind that I use when I compose. Of course, I am the one who wills my musical materials. But they also will me. To compose means, for me, listening deeply to what the next note, next phrase, next section, must be; the “pull” that they exert. Listening to the way every moment, every line, harmony, phrase, functions in the larger context. I am always cognizant of the interaction between the tiniest detail to the full phrase, to the next level, and the full architecture of the composition; everything is always part of a much broader web that eventually becomes the piece. The passage of time is always at the heart of composing music, and the role and function of repetition and musical return is an important part of that. I do not see Recapitulation merely as a technique to “bring back” material, but rather as a way for the listener to discover what has changed

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within a musical idea, as it returns to attention later in a work. There is no such thing as a “return in time”—time always moves forward, but in music we can see how ideas transform and how later materials are affected by the return of earlier content. For me, recapitulation is akin to a “renewal,” when musical ideas are changed, altered, and seen through a new prism upon their return within a piece. My 1992 piece, Legends for orchestra, juxtaposes the musical past and future through the technique of return; [from the program notes] “a recapitulatory statement of thematic materials is no more a true return than the possibility of going back in time. In much of my music, the idea of the cyclical—as in the seasons—versus the inevitability of the forward flow of time, two major currents at the source of all of life and nature, are inextricably bound.”7

References Drama Musica. “The Big List.” Donne, Women in Music. Accessed 3 March 2020. http://www.drama-­musica.com/TheBigList.html. Feldman, Martha. “Contempo Chamber Players. Blog, accessed 1 March 2020. https://lucian.uchicago.edu/blogs/contempo/about/. Fleisher, Robert Jay. Twenty Israeli Composers: Voices of a Culture. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1997. Herman, Kenneth. “Fame Comes a Piece at a Time.” Los Angeles Times, 12 November 1991. Ran, Shulamit. “Legends.” Program Notes. Supplied by the composer, 2019. Ran, Shulamit. “Glitter, Doom, Shards, Memory – String Quartet no. 3.” Pacifica Quartet, Cedille Records, CDR 90000 196, 2020, Compact Disc. ———. “Bach Shards.” Program Notes. Supplied by the composer, 2019. State University of New  York, Fredonia. “Institute for Composer Diversity.” Accessed Mar 10, 2020. https://www.composerdiversity.com/. Theodore Presser. “Shulamit Ran.” Accessed, 10 Mar 2020. https://www.presser. com/shulamit-­ran. Wilson, Jordan. “Oscars: ‘Joker’s’ Hildur Gudnadóttir Becomes First Woman to Win Best Original Score,” Hollywood Times, 9 February 2020. https://www. hollywoodreporter.com/news/oscars-­h ildur-­g udnadottir-­b ecomes-­f irst-­ woman-­win-­best-­original-­score-­1276317.

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 Shulamit Ran, “Legends,” Program Notes, supplied by the composer, 2019.

CHAPTER 18

Low Frequency as Concept in The Music of Cat Hope Cat Hope

Introduction I am an Australian composer based in Melbourne, Australia, whose thirty-­ year music creation career has spanned improvisation, songwriting, installation, electronic works, performance art, noise music and a wide range of notated compositions that combine electronic and acoustic instruments. My work ranges from solo pieces, to laptop orchestra, networked music, film soundtrack and opera. This chapter outlines my ongoing fascination with low frequency sound, how I became engaged with it, and the way it is employed in almost every work I create. This engagement with low frequency sound an be categorised into four general approaches: instrumental, timbral, structural and conceptual.

C. Hope (*) Monash University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 L. Kouvaras et al. (eds.), The Composer, Herself, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23922-9_18

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My composition practice is facilitated by animated notation: a dynamic form of digital, coloured graphic notation,1 that, in the case of my work, is presented to performers on networked tablet computers. This notational approach facilitates glissandi, drones, noise notation, aleatoric elements, unusual instruments and fixed media components in  my work. This notation method continues to develop and evolve, informed by my ongoing practice as a flute and electric bass performer. It also facilitates a collaborative practice that enables rich co-authorship experiences with other composers in addition to deep creative engagement with particular musicians, film makers and artists. The chapter explores how what I call a “concept of low” is engaged in these forums, and how it presents in various ensembles I have formed. These include the pop band Gata Negra, multi bass guitar noise collective Abe Sada, The Australian Bass Orchestra, my extensive solo bass noise practice, and the new music ensemble I direct, Decibel, which explores the combination of electronic and acoustic instruments.

Arriving at a Practice As a classically trained musician, I was taught common practice notation, as one may expect. In my composition classes with Roger Smalley at the University of Western Australia, I never seemed to find a way to express the musical ideas I imagined, and left composition studies feeling that I just didn’t have enough control of the tools we were taught. This led me to focus on sound installation, non-notated song writing and improvisation. Between 1989 and 2007, I created a range of music and sound works that were not notated. It was through this engagement that I became particularly interested in low frequency. I began playing bass guitar and spent some years living near the active  volcano Etna, in Catania, Sicily, where I would love the occasional rumbling that would sound out. I spent a lot of time thinking about how low frequencies functioned in the classical music I studied at University, so much so that in 2005 I began a PhD entitled “The Possibility of Infrasonic Music.”2 As part of these studies, 1  Cat Hope, “Electronic Scores for Music: The Possibilities of Animated Notation,” Computer Music Journal 41.3 (2017): 21–35. 2   Cat Hope, “The Possibility of Infrasonic Music,” PhD Thesis, Edith Cowan University, 2008.

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the multi bass group Abe Sada developed, and I began creating text scores to outline the practical and conceptual approaches to the works performed by the group.3 Text scores enabled me to provide a framework for activity that could be repeated, whilst enabling a very open invitation for the creative contributions of others. After a number of these text scores, I began to make line drawings, where different textures, durations and pitch movements were indicated. It wasn’t until I found the coloured sketches for drafts of works by György Ligeti (1923–2006) and Iannis Xenakis (1922–2001) that I realised there was a way to notate music with a focus on texture and dynamic whilst maintaining a strong sense of formal structure. Thier drawings indicated the impressive microtonal movement, textural and dynamic shading of works before they were notated in common practice notation, and I read them as aleatoric versions of the final works, in that all the formal information was provided without the need for any precise pitches or rhythms. Italian composer Giacinto Scelsi’s (1905–1988) late string quartets (1963–1974) and ensemble pieces such Pranam II (1973) were resisting metrical rhythms and tempered pitches, and when I learnt about Scelsi’s process of creating works by improvising to tape, I realised that my concern was something that had been shared before me. How do we notate work where metered pulse is not the primary concern, and textural and dynamic fluctuations can become central? How can I notate the conceptual concerns I had explored in sound art and installation into chamber music performance? It was working with my colleagues in the new music ensemble Decibel that helped me to realise my early  line drawings as notation for performance, and signalled the beginning of my notated composition practice. By putting them into motion, past a fixed line, or “playhead,” they became coordinated and readable scores. Within the group a software application, the Decibel ScorePlayer, was created to facilitate the reading of these scores, now available worldwide for the iPad. This started as a simple mechanism for coordinating the reading of predominantly graphic scores from left to right, but has since developed to present scores that shuffle score images, count down time segments, embed audio and communicate with other computers.

3  Cat Hope and Jack Sargent, The End of Abe Sada (Perth: Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, 2014).

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One of my first works read in an early laptop-based version of this software, was In the Cut (2009), a seven-minute work for cello, violin, bass clarinet, bass guitar and an EP record cut with a descending sine tone. This work was an exploration of pitch descent, notated with lines that descend downwards over what would be two metres of paper, ending in the lowest possible sound for each instrument. Each of the five instruments are assigned a colour. No pitches are specified, but the score is proportional—that is, the instrument pitches have to fit together in the pitch order presented, with the top of the page being the highest pitch, and the lowest pitch at the bottom. There are no bar lines or time signatures, and the rate of progression through the piece is set in the software. The musicians must listen carefully to each other, to ensure the ensemble’s pitch relationships are as is represented on the score. The ability to realise this work as an ensemble performance changed the way I wrote music from thereon in. To date, I have now written over sixty works to be read on the Decibel ScorePlayer.

Low Frequency as Concept In the Cut is an example of a conceptual interest in low frequency sound. Even though the lowest sounds possible feature in the final seconds of the work—using tubes to extend the clarinet, tuning down the string instruments and bass guitar as far as is playable, and recording the lowest audible sine tone onto the EP record, the majority of the work does not focus on low sounds, but rather, the core exploration of the work is around descent— the process of getting to a low sound, never going upwards in pitch through time. Almost all my notated music, and most of my improvisatory work, has this aspect of pitch descent built in, by way of different approaches and levels of complexity. Dark Hip Falls (2019), for example, follows slow descent as an overall form, as did In the Cut, but the seven individual instruments may themselves rise and fall in pitch throughout. The piano in Kaps Freed (2017) for piano and electronics, undertakes a general, steady downward direction, yet the gliding sine tones derived from the live piano pitch choices swirls around it, as shown in the notation screenshot at Fig. 18.1. This downward pitch direction is often reinforced by the use of an electronically generated, very low frequency tone in my chamber music works featuring acoustic instruments. The way I use these electronic tones can be loosely grouped into three ways, according to how they are produced: tones  embedded in the score, live sounds  sampled in real time, or

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Fig. 18.1  An screenshot score excerpt from the score of Kaps Freed (2017) by Cat Hope showing the piano part (solid, horizontal coloured lines) and the electronics (opaque coloured lines)

performed on an instrument. I have created a number of works where static, low frequency sine tones are embedded into the score, reproduced into a subwoofer speaker directly connected to the iPad running the score during performance. I call these low tones subtones, as they are consistently pitched in the very low frequency range. A term often referring to the very soft tone created on single reed instruments when less lip pressure is applied, it also references the subwoofer speaker required to produce the tone. The first work to feature embedded subtones was Shadow (2016), for string duo and subtone. In addition to the downward pitch movement in the strings, an embedded series of sine tones under 70 Hz undertake a similar downward trajectory. The tones are often layered, creating beating patterns against each other. The tones step, rather than slide, but the long durations of the tones mask this effect, creating the impression of a constant downward trajectory. Sub Decorative Sequences (2019), a work that

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exists as a score as well as an art installation, introduced glissando tones for the first time. In this work, subtones would slowly glide downwards in pitch, to join stable, ongoing pitches, as shown in the pink detail in Fig.  18.2. The tones gradually accumulate, creating very powerful and complex beating patterns toward the end of the work. The downward direction of pitch through the duration of all these works is an example of what I call the “concept of low”—whilst the pitches may not be consistently low in frequency throughout the works, they do examine the trajectory of descent, expanding upon the idea of what “low sound” is and is understood by listeners structurally and timbrally.

Low Frequency as Instrument These embedded low tones, or subtones, are one way of exploring the relationship of low electronic and acoustic sounds inside a chamber ensemble, enabling the electronic sounds to operate in a way more akin to

Fig. 18.2  An excerpt of the score from Sub Decorative Sequences (2019) by Cat Hope, showing the pink subtone parts, and the coloured, instrumental parts

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the acoustic instruments. Electronic tones are subject to the subtle variety of loudspeaker tone colour, room shape and speaker placement, resulting in quite different tone colours and beating results in different performances. This is something I acknowledge and welcome into the works. This makes the tones more “instrument”-like when performed in an ensemble. But for me, the quality that makes tones instrument-like is in the real-­ time performance of them. In many works, my intention is to give a performer agency over the creation and reproduction of the tones. The instructions are scored as any other instrument may be—the sounds required are represented proportionally on the score. I do not provide any software recommendations or preconstructed patches with which to create the tones—the tools are left up to the electronics musician. This is a deliberate approach with two aims: to enable each computer musician to use their preferred tools, and to preserve the score’s viability into the future, beyond a particular version of a software program that may become redundant in time. The first work to employ this technique was Cruel and Usual (2011) for string quartet and bass amplifiers. The strings are sampled at different points in the piece, the pitch of that moment transposed to a new one within a specified pitch range provided and played back for a specified duration through an assigned bass amplifier. This is notated on the score, which the electronics musician follows in real time with the acoustic performers. Later works, such as The Lowest Drawer (2014), samples and plays back the pitch of the sampled moment as an ongoing sine tone that sounds for the remainder of the work. As in Sub Decorative Sequences, the tones gradually accumulate, creating a “drawer cabinet” of low tones, scored by way of opaque coloured lines, positioned proportionally on the score alongside other parts. This process also features in the second act of my opera, Speechless (2019). In Sogno 102 (2013), a homage to Giacinto Scelsi, the notation indicates how the sampled pitches gradually ascend or descend after the sampling moment, to create different beating patterns that change speed as they interact with each other and the acoustic instruments  over time, forming complex layers throughout the piece. These sampling processes are conceptually linked to the title or theme of the work, as is clearly the case in The Lowest Drawer,. In Sogno 102, the process of sampling references Scelsi’s own technique of recording his

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improvisations and notating them for others to perform.4 The Post Truth Pleasure Garden (2018) is another work that uses this sampling process, as notated with a vertical line (for sample point) and subsequent indicative line for manipulation as seen in Fig. 18.3. The number “6” refers to the sixth sample in a sequence that unfolds throughout the piece. In this work, the sampling is employed as a methodology to interrogate the overarching concept of the piece: the idea of “post truth” — noting the similarity of live and sampled acoustic timbres, and the confusion they create between which is the live, or so called “real” tone of an instrument. This post truth examination is also related to the concept of low; very low sounds beyond a certain pitch are inaudible to humans– yet there are ranges where they sounds are just heard “differently”—through the skin rather than the ears.5 Listening is still a kind of truth telling.

Fig. 18.3  A screen shot of anexcerpt from the score for The Post Truth Pleasure Garden (2018) by Cat Hope, showing the sampling point of an instrument (6.) and the subsequent electronic part 4 5

 Cat Hope, Sogno 102 (2013) https://doi.org/10.26180/5ce34fa60b7eb.  Cat Hope, “Infrasonic Music,” Leonardo Music Journal 19 (2009): 51.

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The free pitch choices presented to performers at the start of my works means that the sampled sine tones will never be the same in any performance, ensuring the live sampling process will create different tones each time, just as the live instruments will. This is in contrast to works that feature embedded subtones discussed earlier, which are fixed for each performance, providing the performers with a stable pitch reference, often leading to similar pitch choices for them on repeat performances.

The Timbre of Low Frequency Sound In other compositions of mine, low electronic tones are generated by electronic instruments within the ensemble. In Our House is on Fire (2019), an Electro-Harmonix “Freeze” sound retainer pedal is used to prolong notes played on the bass guitar into a smooth, ongoing tone. This guitar effect pedal is an essential part of my solo bass improvisation set-up and is notated specifically in works such as Human Cathedral (2019) for two bass guitars and Black Vulture (2019) for bass guitar, synthesiser and electronic harp. The sampled bass guitar tone has a  different timbre to the computer generated sine tone, identifying more strongly with the guitar timbre, effectively operating as an extension of the instrument. In Black Vulture, Erst (2015), Dark Hip Falls and Speechless I write for synthesiser, using a similar approach to the embedded tones: long held tones and glissandi. Again, the aim is that the part can be created by any synthesiser, featuring any timbral quality of choice, leaving the colour and texture of the sound up to the musician. This differentiates from works where a specific timbre is sought—such as the requirement for “Hammond organ” in The Aesthetics of Disappearance (2018) and U Mangibeddu Nostru (2018). As may be evident by the number of works featuring the blending of acoustic sounds with the low electronic tones, their relationship is of great interest to me. In Tone Being (2016), a work for tam-tam and subtone, the Tam-tam’s sway almost seems to respond to the tones emanating from the subwoofer speaker, at times consumed by the powerful volume the Tam-­ tam is capable of, other times seeming to interact with the low frequency sound in the air. The Lowest Drawer sees the bass clarinet, bass flute and cello weave in and out of the thickening electronic subtones, at times seeming to mirror them timbrally. An excerpt of the score shown at Fig. 18.4 illustrates the electronic subtones (horizontal straight, colour lines), the instruments

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Fig. 18.4  A screenshot excerpt from the score for The Lowest Drawer showing the grey scale instrumental parts amongst the coloured lines representing sampled instruments as sine tones

(black and grey shaded lines) and sample points for the different instruments  with vertical lines. In this way, the low sine tone becomes a truly integrated part of the ensemble: demonstrating a rich sonic potential highlighted through the interaction with other instrumental sounds. My solo electric bass guitar noise improvisation practice is focused on the timbre of low frequency sound, and how the sounds of bass guitar can be augmented and manipulated using analogue effect pedals. The sounds created drive the structure of the work completely: if I enjoy the sound world of a particular moment, I will continue to explore it, until something else appears for me to follow. The album Fetish (2002), and the related collection of live bass solos on Bandcamp of the same name, features bass improvisations edited from very long takes that engage this method, creating very dense works exploring a wide range of textures with a focus on distortion, feedback, delay, looping, sampling, phasing, transposition and flanging as applied to low frequency sounds produced on the bass guitar. This exploration is further expanded in the Abe Sada performances for multiple bass guitars, enhanced by an increased multiplicity of sounds and the input of a diverse range of performance approaches.

Low Frequency as Structure As suggested in The Lowest Drawer, the subtone and instrument often merge into what is heard as a single sound, providing a range of opportunities to explore the arrival or departure of that state from a compositional

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perspective. This is most pronounced in solo works such as Shadow of Mill (2017–2018) and Dynamic Architecture (2015), the latter featuring a tone played through a transducer attached to the body of a retuned double bass, instead of the subwoofer speaker engaged in the other works. The volume emitted by the transducer is soft, which matches the delicacy of the double bass tone, yet lacking the dynamic energy I sought for future subtone reproduction. Unusual extended performance techniques are employed in both these pieces, expanding the range of sounds of the instrument, drawing them into the tone, or pulling them further away. Office grade paper is crushed and rubbed over the cello body and strings in Shadow of Mill, creating at times airy, other times crisp timbres that work with, then in contrast to, the tones. Playing the double bass in Dynamic Architecture with two bows, one re-haired with a material of the performer’s choice, creates a complexity in the sound that often envelopes the subtone. These timbral qualities and variations provide structural points and materials for the compositions. Careful placement of the subtones acts as a kind of timbral frame for different elements of these works piece. As part of my practice, I often engage standard compositional processes such as variation, inversion, retrograde treatments and cadential moments in the handling of acoustic, electronic and sampled materials. Whilst the choice of pitch is open at the commencement of my compositions, the way the chosen pitches proceed throughout the piece is quite controlled—the direction they take, their duration, the way they relate to other pitches. Yet the actual, precise pitch choice remains free. I have created a number of works for open instrumentation, with the aim of inviting other approaches to the concept of low that may not be entirely of my making. This can take the form of a completely open choice, as with Sub Decorative Sequences, or by the nature of the instruments: such as the “sustaining instruments” called for in works such as Marking Time (2016) or “electronic performers” in Kingdom Come (2008). On a larger scale, the Australian Bass Orchestra project, established in 2014, runs according to a manifesto that states any instrument that can play below middle C can take part, as long as they stay below that pitch in their range of choices. The End of Abe Sada (2014) was the first composition I wrote for this group, but by far the most ambitious has been my opera, Speechless, which uses the Australian Bass Orchestra manifesto as a foundational approach for the way the orchestra is used. At each performance venue for the opera, the orchestra is drawn from the community of the location. Due to the open nature of the graphic notation,

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any type of musician can join: classical, jazz, popular, folk, as long as they play pitches on their instrument below middle C. The Australian Bass Orchestra project brings together musicians who love to engage with the low frequency aspect of their instrument, with the aim of creating rich timbres made possible but the combination of different musical styles performance techniques. This stylistic diversity was also a key aspect in the Abe Sada project, where bass players of any background would join multi bass player performances. The text score piece Abe Sada Redux (2011) calls for at least twenty electric bass guitarists and double bassists of any musical genre to take part. I have exolored low frequency as part of my song writing practice, where I have composed over thirty songs, mostly for my pop project Gata Negra (1998–2008) but also for other groups of which I was a part, such as the Italian based projects Mice Vice and Quartered Shadows. Most of these songs began as solos for bass guitar and voice, self-released on a tape entitled Black in Perth in 1997. None of these songs were notated as part of the compositional process, not by chord charts or other means: only the lyrics are written down. Being composed directly onto the bass guitar results in a different final product than most popular music, even after parts such as drums, string instruments, guitars, electronics and backing vocals have been added. Songs such as La Scalinata (2002), the opening track of Gata Negra’s album Saint Dymphnae feature sparse additional instrumentation, that includes reverb drenched guitar, viola, drums and cymbals played with brushes. The main propellant of the song lies in the bass part, directing the vocals and other instruments. This is quite a different role for the bass guitar in a pop song, usually assigned a fundamental rhythmic support. The songs have a dark timbre and unique sound that I would argue are a direct result of predominant bass guitar. The songs recorded on the three Gata Negra albums show the importance of collaboration in the rendering of my compositions, as all parts outside the skeleton bass and voice parts are devised by band collaborators. This is also realised in collaborative notated compositions, such as The Last Days of Reality (2019) and The Earth Defeats Me (2014), co-­ composed with French musique concréte artist Lionel Marchetti, and The Talking Board (2011) co composed with Lindsay Vickery. The Marchetti collaborations see a similar process as employed in Gata Negra, except that they are notated. Works are composed, notated then recorded. This recording is then given to Marchetti who creates what he calls a “partition concréte,” a fixed media part that is embedded into the score in a similar

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way to the fixed subtones discussed earlier. In this case, however, the low tones are featured mostly in the acoustic parts. I also particularly enjoy collaboration with other artists and artforms, and what this brings to my concept of low. This has led to ongoing collaborative relationships, such as that with visual artists Kate Macmillan and Erin Coates. Art installation often facilities the engagement of larger audio reproduction equipment than found in concert venues, such as large, isolated sub-woofer speakers, and large open spaces for sound to travel through. For example, Islands of Incarceration (2010) a large-scale installation by Kate Macmillan and myself, featured large subwoofer speakers in the basement beneath the visual installation, where  large, long curtains hang in an open space, moving freely in response to the environment, referencing the air pressure emitted by the large subwoofer speakers. The setting on Cockatoo Island in Sydney, as part of the Sydney Biennale, further enhanced this sense of “open space.” Projects such as this facilitate longer form compositions—with installations being open for hours at a time. Film music also offers better playback facility for low frequency sound reinforcement than found in most concert halls, designed to facilitate sound effects, but equally useful for compositions focused on low frequency sound. My soundtrack for Erin Coates and Anna Nazzari’s film Cetaphobia (2015), takes advantage of this, with very low frequency tones inserted into a mix of acoustic instruments, and used to reflect motion as the protagonists descend underwater for a significant segment of the film’s narrative.

Conclusion This chapter has provided an overview of my interest in low frequency sound and the way it is employed in the music I create. Four general approaches to my engagement with low frequency have been outlined: instrumental, timbral, structural and conceptual, and the ways these are facilitated by animated notation is discussed. The employment of electronic tones as embedded subtones or other fixed audio, sampled material and live instrumentation reinforce the “concept of low,” an overarching framework where low frequency sound is used as a model for a range of approaches that traverse music style, method of creation or application of music in different artistic mediums. This approacht has been used in a range of art music compositions using text and animated scores, as stand-­ alone as well as collaborative projects, as well as pop songs and sound

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installations. This unifying framework over such a broad range of practice creates what I consider to be unique in my practice, a practice defined by the concept of low.

References Abe Sada, redux. Australian Bass Orchestra. Heartless Robot Productions, HRP#007, 2000, LP record. Hope, Cat and Lionel Marchetti. The Last Days of Reality. Decibel Ensemble. Room 40, RM4102, 2019, compact disc. Hope, Cat. “La Scalinata” on Saint Dymphnae. Gata Negra, Bloodstar, 2002, compact disc. ———. “The Possibility of Infrasonic Music.” PhD Thesis, Edith Cowan University, 2008a. ———. Fetish. Cat Hope, Abe Sada, Lux Mammoth and Gata Negra. Menschenfeind Productions. Feind 13, 2000, compact disc. ———. Cruel and Usual, 2011. [DOI: https://doi.org/10.26180/5c eb3fbba477f]. ———. Dynamic Architecture, 2015a. [DOI: https://doi.org/10.26180/5c da0c33b2428]. ———. Film Music for Cetaphobia. Decibel Ensemble, 2015b. High-­ Definition Video. ———. Human Cathedral, 2019a. [DOI: https://doi.org/10.26180/5e 1e801746c3a]. ———. Kaps Freed, 2017a. [DOI: https://doi.org/10.4225/03/5 9f736cfd58c8]. ———. Kingdom Come, 2008b. [DOI: https://doi.org/10.26180/5c db6fa9dbca7]. ———. In the Cut, 2009a. [DOI:https://doi.org/10.26180/5cecb784c267e]. ———. Marking time, 2016a [DOI: https://doi.org/10.26180/5cd cd1931116d]. ———. Our House is on Fire, 2019b. [DOI: https://doi.org/10.26180/5d7 8fee2c9ea8]. ———. Shadow, 2016b. [DOI: https://doi.org/10.26180/5cda1bd41b1a8]. ———. Shadow of Mill, 2017b. [DOI: https://doi.org/10.26180/5cf ee98f15396]. ———. Sogno 102, 2013. [DOI:https://doi.org/10.26180/5ce34fa60b7eb]. ———. Sub Decorative Sequences. 2019c. [DOI: https://doi.org/10.26180/ 5d7844c902b34]. ———. The Dark Hip Falls, 2019d. [DOI: https://doi.org/10.26180/5cf ee98f15396].

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———. “Electronic Scores for Music: The Possibilities of Animated Notation.” Computer Music Journal 41.3 (2017c): 21–35. ———. “Infrasonic Music.” Leonardo Music Journal 19 (2009b): 51–56. Hope, Cat & Lionel Marchetti. The Earth Defeats Me, 2014a. [DOI: https://doi. org/10.26180/5cda6656aa7b0]. ———. Last Days of Reality, 2014b. [DOI: https://doi.org/10.4225/03/5af 6bdc02f2c3]. Hope, Cat & Lindsay Vickery. The Talking Board, 2011. [DOI: https://doi. org/10.26180/5ceb41e023365]. Hope, Cat & Stuart James. “Sogno 102: Revisioning Compositional Techniques of Giacinto Scelsi.” Proceedings of the Australasian Computer Music Conference, University of Melbourne, 2014. Hope, Cat, and Jack Sargent. The End of Abe Sada. Perth: Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, 2014. James, Stuart, and Lindsay Vickery. “Representations of Decay in the Works of Cat Hope.” Tempo 73, no. 287 (2019): 20. McMillan, Kate and Cat Hope. Islands of Incarceration. Sound installation. Cockatoo Island: Sydney Biennale, 2010. Milligan, Kate. “Identity And the Abstract Self on Cat Hope’s Speechless.” Tempo 73, no. 290 (2019): 13–24. Xenakis, Iannis, Ivan Hewett, Sharon E.  Kanach, and Carey Lovelace. Iannis Xenakis: Composer, Architect, Visionary. New York: The Drawing Center, 2010. https://drawingcenter.org/bookstore/books/drawing-­papers-­88-­i annis-­ xenakis-­composer-­architect-­visionary.

CHAPTER 19

A Drone Opera Recast: Threat, Allure, Promise Judith Dodsworth and Susan Frykberg

Introduction A Drone Opera Recast: Threat, Allure, Promise is a reworking of Matthew Sleeth’s A Drone Opera (2015), which was an ambitious multimedia work combining a battalion of flying drones, lasers, video projections, opera singers and an electronic soundscape. The version written about here furthers the explorations from that work, specifically the variety of human responses to the promise, allure and threat of technology. A Drone Opera Recast: Threat, Allure, Promise, encompasses elements of opera, liturgy, new myth, chamber music, ritual, electronic music, audience participation and the latest in audio technology. In it we assert, through the structure and content of the work itself, that the “problem” of the relationship between technology and people is best dealt with interactively, with many people involved, and through a feminist, or at least “womanist” lens.

J. Dodsworth • S. Frykberg (*) Melbourne, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 L. Kouvaras et al. (eds.), The Composer, Herself, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23922-9_19

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Matthew Sleeth’s A Drone Opera1 was an ambitious multimedia work premiered in September 2015 at North Melbourne’s Meat Market (Victoria, Australia). A battalion of actual flying drones, a pair of cages in which the audience were enclosed for safety, spectacular lighting, video, laser effects, an electronic soundscape and an evocative score by composer Susan Frykberg for three unaccompanied, amplified operatic voices all combined to explore possible human responses to the promise, allure and threat of technology. A Drone Opera became successively a gallery installation at Carriageworks, Sydney; a short film at the 2019 Sydney Film Festival and in March 2020, a cinematic installation for Lyon Housemuseum Galleries in Melbourne. Following the success of A Drone Opera, composer Susan Frykberg and original soprano Judith Dodsworth approached Matthew with a proposal to recast it as a smaller, tourable performance, by extracting and developing the musical elements, in effect creating an independent “concert version” of the work. In the new version, the three original voice types, soprano, baritone and countertenor, are retained but instead of the various extra-musical elements, (drones, lighting, video and lasers), there is increased use of text (both spoken and sung), electronic music, flute, cello and percussion. The audience is no longer passive but has a co-creator role. The original Icarus myth, interwoven throughout the work, has been replaced by three imaginative, feminist re-tellings of foundation stories: Adam and Eve, Pandora’s box and Guan Yin, the Buddhist goddess of mercy, kindness and compassion. Most crucially, the audience now assists in the creation of some of the libretto. There is a very conscious attempt to break down the fourth wall. In a sense, this new creation furthers the explorations raised by the original A Drone Opera—the possible human responses to the promise, allure and threat of technology. The musical, performative and conceptual reimagining, encompassing elements of opera, new myth, liturgy, chamber music, ritual, electronic sound, audience participation and the latest audio technology, all derive from this. Yet, in the new work we assert, through the structure and content of the work itself, that the “problem” of the relationship between technology and people is best dealt with interactively, with many people involved, and through a feminist, or at least 1  Cameron Woodhead, “A Drone Opera Review: Fusing Art and Technology in a Whirr of Possibility,” The Sydney Morning Herald, 11 September 2015; Andrew Fuhrmann, “Targeted by Art Drones – A Drone Opera,” Realtime Arts 129 (2015): 36.

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womanist lens. Thus, A Drone Opera is now called A Drone Opera Recast: Threat, Allure, Promise. After referring briefly to the first production, we will articulate how the key elements of the original work, both musical and dramatic, will be retained, distilled and extended to create a more intimate performative experience. Conceptual, musical, textural, electronic and formal variations will all be described, along with the crucial role of the audience and the equally crucial function of the method developed by soprano Judith Dodsworth for working in real-time with audience-given text. We will include a description that details one example of the “Dodsworth method.”

Key Conceptual Elements: Extensions, Retentions and Distillations A Drone Opera was a large-scale undertaking, heavily reliant on the use and almost fetishisation of technology, creating an immersive, highly charged and pertinent commentary on its current and future role. We did feel however that the dramatic spectacle, magnificent though it was, created an audience of passive receptors to whom the performance was “done to.” We do not feel, as a general principle, that top-down models are entirely helpful for understanding or developing complex ideas such as the relationship between technology and humans. Therefore, we wished to create an alternative to the top-down model in a number of aspects of this work. Our first alternative is our relationship with the audience. Being of the view that co-creation is the best approach to further a positive relationship between technology and humans, we have now transformed the work to a structure which mimics, we believe, a healthier and more productive model. The audience is now an active participant, creating some of the libretto anew for each performance. Thus, the current state of the human/ technological relationship can be shown at every performance. In addition, the staging deliberately blurs the fourth wall, with the audience and the performers integrated into the one performance space. The original A Drone Opera had an interwoven myth, the story of Icarus, at the centre of the work. Being of the view that many foundation stories, valuable though they are, have nevertheless been interpreted for too long through the male lens, we have replaced the original incorporated myth by three imaginative, feminist re-tellings of the Adam and Eve

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story, Pandora’s box and the Chinese goddess Guan Yin. This is because we feel that technological development has been primarily advanced through a male lens. While useful, this is only partial. Therefore, in this creative retelling of A Opera, we are using women’s myths to contribute a womanist perspective. We have retained some of the original libretto and also created additional text. Most importantly, we have developed a method to create improvised song based on text given to us by the audience in real-time that combines the “Dodsworth method” (detailed below) with electronic vocal processing that transforms the text both semantically and sonically.

Audience Co-creation of Some of the Libretto The audience provides text for some of the libretto on three occasions during the work. They are asked to contribute words or phrases relating to the promise, allure or threat of technology. They therefore contribute not only to the words of some of the sections, but to the overall temporal form of the work, since the sections based on their words will be of a length determined by their input. The places in the score where the audience are invited to contribute have a quasi-liturgical flavour. Invitational arias are sung to the audience while three assistants with bowls move ceremonially through the space, inviting audience members to place their words and phrases in the bowls. These words are then presented to the singers who interpret them as acceptance arias, using the “Dodsworth method” and electronic vocal processing. Thus, through sonic ritual, invitation and acceptance arias, the audience contribute to concepts relating to the threat, allure and promise of technology (originally stated by Matthew Sleeth as three states: seduction, surveillance and menace). At the time of writing, composer Susan Frykberg was moving all her production from an Ableton-based platform incorporating plugins, to an application-based iPad platform. She was particularly interested in the work of Swedish App developer Jonatan Liljedahl,2 who has designed programs such as Aum (a flexible plug-in host, audio mixer and recorder) and Sector (which creates complex rhythmic and timbral modifications through stochastic sample-slice sequencing). Other Apps used include

2

 Jonatan Liljedahl, “Kymatica,” accessed 3 November 2021, http://kymatica.com/.

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Borderlands3 which does excellent granular synthesis, Looperator4 and a variety of App-based synthesis algorithms to control the spectrum of complex sounds.

The Dodsworth Method, from Soprano Judith Dodsworth As the soprano soloist I will be one of the performers who will be required to select from the audience’s given words, phrases or sentences and execute these improvisations. With no preparation time and no way of predicting the nature of the source material, prior experience has shown that I will be drawn to certain words and sounds as offering greater scope than others for exploration, reinforcement and enhancement. This process can simultaneously encompass both the semantic and the sonic qualities of the text. Within the improvisation, the choice of text becomes the catalyst for, and governs all other musical choices, such as pitch, duration, use of breath, tone colour, resonance, melodic contour, rhythm, amplitude, repetition and dynamics. There is even a visual element that comes into play with the physicalisation of the choice of sound, and the degree to which the performer chooses to express this. To provide an example of a possible musical treatment and to document the improvisatory process, I select the word “seduction” (/sɪˈdʌkʃ(ə)n/), as a possible word offered by an audience member. This word immediately offers a myriad of sonic possibilities, both in addition to and reinforcing its semantic meaning. The component syllables of seduction are: an unvoiced sibilant sss; a voiced plosive d; an unvoiced plosive k; an unvoiced fricative sh; a voiced nasal n. These are separated by three vowels of varying degrees of openness and resonance, all suggesting different musical treatments. My instinct in improvising on the word “seduction” therefore is to deconstruct it into its smallest component elements and explore musical treatments for each. Unvoiced consonants on their own by their nature cannot be matched to a sung pitch, although perceptible pitch variations can be approximated by 3  Peter Kirn, “The Best App for Exploring Sound Just Got Better: Borderlands 2.0,” CDM Link, 30 March, 2015, https://cdm.link/2015/03/best-app-exploring-sound-just-gotbetter-borderlands-2-0/. 4  John Walden, “Sugar Bytes Looperator,” Sound on Sound, November 2015, https:// www.soundonsound.com/reviews/sugar-bytes-looperator.

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varying the air speed and narrowing or widening the aperture of the mouth. The tonal colour can also shift through a continuum, encompassing every degree from a bright, forced hiss to what becomes in effect almost a whistle as the lips are rounded. This sound continuum can be punctuated by silences or given an ascending or descending pitch. The dynamic trajectory and rhythmic aspect can be modified in any number of ways. Words and phrases offered by the audience and placed into bowls for transportation to the performers, are freely selected and combined by the singers. They are then electronically transformed in real time via a variety of vocal processing methods such as those mentioned above. The resulting acceptance arias further the relationship with the audience as a catalyst, initiating a chain of responses: audience response, singers’ response, composer/vocal processing response, then back to the audience again, thereby creating an ever-widening sonic landscape in which the entire room has some creative stake. Because the words are requested on three different occasions via the previously described quasi-liturgical interaction, everyone in the room—performers, the composer and the audience—has a stake in the textural and temporal development of the whole work. Governing all of these choices is an awareness of the “seductive” qualities of this consonant, suggesting intimacy and contact. Varying the speed of breath-release and the physiological manipulations involved in changing the tone colour may be perceived as reminiscent of seduction, both aurally and visually. Releasing the sibilant into the vowel which follows, naturally introduces pitch into the equation. There are suddenly many more musical choices to be made. Which vocal register? Should the pitch remain static or create a melodic contour? What happens if the air speed remains constant in the transition? What happens if it doesn’t? In creating a voiced sound for the first time I may choose to establish it in a comfortable middle register of the voice before moving by it by varying increments throughout the range. Maintaining the vowel is crucial as variations in range, dynamics and tonal colour are introduced. Intervallic relationships between notes can be explored, from infinitesimal to extreme pitch variations. Melodic contours can suddenly be introduced. All of these variations can then be repeated, or varied, or inverted, or given any number of treatments. The next step might be to explore the entire first syllable of the word, moving from the sibilant into the vowel and closing with the plosive “d.” This immediately becomes a discrete unit, a pleasing ‘building block’ of sound with which to play, with its own inherent sonic qualities. It is also remarkably similar to the word “said.” What might happen to the sound if

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it suddenly takes on the intention and meaning of this word, so similar to the ear but opening up a completely different world in terms of intention? Thus, the improviser is faced at every turn with an infinite number of musical and extra-musical choices. During rehearsal with all the singers, parameters must be introduced to ensure both that the choice of techniques to apply doesn’t become overwhelming, and to give coherence and form to the improvisations and to express in some way the meaning of the text. Making the text a catalyst for many of the musical decisions in A Drone Opera Recast: Threat, Allure, Promise reinforces not only the importance of the three states that inform the premise of the entire work, but also the value of the audience’s understanding and experience of the threat, allure and promise of technology. Their contribution is thus vital to the success or otherwise of the entire work.

Key Musical Elements: Extensions, Retentions and Distillations In a sense, A Drone Opera Recast: Threat, Allure, Promise is a creative research project. Evaluation is therefore crucial. Primarily of course, the contributions of the audience to both the content and form of the work will be the most fascinating. Since at the time of writing, this new version of the work has not yet been performed, we look forward to analysing the role of the audience, as well as refining the methodology for future explorations. Analysis will include a critique of the following: the musical choices for transforming text in the context of the Dodsworth method; the vocal signal processing; the quasi-liturgical interaction with the audience; the incorporation of womanist myths; the spatialisation of sound; the working and rehearsal strategies between the composer and the performers. A key issue to be worked out in rehearsal is the inter-processes between vocalisations and electronic vocal processes, for example, which parts of words— vowels, plosives, sibilants, fricatives, etc., work best with what processes? Other questions include: how do electronic modifications of words extend the semantic meanings of the words; how will the consequent layering, as a by-product of the method, be considered? One pre-rehearsal action may be to create a table that pre-selects appropriate matchings between specific parts of words and detailed processing modifications. Finally, we hope the idea of a re-casting of an existing piece and its extensions, retentions and distillations as outlined above bodes well for a future of many more re-castings.

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The original work had an electronic soundscape created by Philip Samartzis. While this worked well in that context, we have chosen to replace it with soundscapes created by Susan Frykberg as well as live instruments: flute, percussion and cello. In addition, a large collection of methods for electronically modifying both voices and instruments is used. We retained three singers, soprano, countertenor and baritone, and many of the original musical sources (rhythmic and pitch modes, and a reference to traditional opera). We kept the formal musical structure where the interwoven ancient myth is set as solemn chant and alternated with contemporary vocal writing and electronics. We kept three original vocal solos as well as some melodic material from previous duets and trios. We removed all sonic traces of technology as spectacle, such as the sound of the drones and some of the industrial-style noise interludes. Instead, we created sonic relationships that model connection and transformation through the instruments of flute, percussion, cello, voice, electronics and audience. We consider the notion of sound in space, in other words where the sound is coming from including how close or far away it is, as crucial to the way we connect with the audience. Therefore conceptually, the sonic space is no longer considered as immersive but participatory, and the audience and performer occupy the same sonic reality. We believe that when the audience can contribute to not just the libretto but the structure of the piece itself, particularly regarding such an important topic, this aspiration will have the effect of empowering all who are involved.

References Fuhrmann, Andrew. “Targeted by Art Drones – A Drone Opera.” Realtime Arts 129 (2015): 36. Kirn, Peter. “The Best App for Exploring Sound Just Got Better: Borderlands 2.0.” CDM Link, 30 March, 2015. https://cdm.link/2015/03/ best-­app-­exploring-­sound-­just-­got-­better-­borderlands-­2-­0/. Liljedahl, Jonatan. “Kymatica.” Accessed 3 November 2021. http:// kymatica.com/. Walden, John. “Sugar Bytes Looperator.” Sound on Sound, November 2015, https://www.soundonsound.com/reviews/sugar-­bytes-­looperator. Woodhead, Cameron. “A Drone Opera Review: Fusing Art and Technology in a Whirr of Possibility.” The Sydney Morning Herald, 11 September 2015.

PART III

Musical Awakenings: Reflecting Back, Projecting Forward

CHAPTER 20

Composing the Rolls-Royce: A Composer’s Adventures in Orchestral Composition Maria Grenfell

Musical Background and Experience I blame it squarely on my high school music teacher. While sitting through music classes in tears because my four-part writing was so terrible, I was astonished to realise that not all composers were dead, nor were they all men. I had no real idea what career awaited me after school, as I was mostly focused on passing all my subjects and participating in any orchestral project I could get into. My family had moved from Malaysia to New Zealand when I was eight years old, and I begged and pleaded with my parents to let me begin violin lessons at the late age of nine. I did not want to attempt a third start at piano lessons, which I’d started and given up twice already in Malaysia, but I loved music and desperately wanted to play in the school orchestra. During my high school years, I continued playing in the school orchestra, youth orchestra, and the inter-school orchestra at festivals, for which Christchurch was a centre, and slowly began to realise that music was what

M. Grenfell (*) University of Tasmania, Hobart, TAS, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 L. Kouvaras et al. (eds.), The Composer, Herself, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23922-9_20

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I loved and wanted as a career. I also had another run at piano lessons, with more success this time. After a devastating failed audition to enter the performance stream at university, it was suggested that I enrol in composition because they didn’t require an audition. Completely deflated, I started finding out more about this thing called Composition of which I’d been offered a taste at high school, but never realised it was something that I could study. For two years I spent most of my spare time practising and playing in orchestras and writing enough music to get by in my composition lessons. Was there a way to enjoy writing music and continue playing? By the time I reached the final year of my Bachelor of Music, I realised that I rather enjoyed writing music. The best part of this was still being able to make music as a performer, as well as working as a composer with musicians who wanted to play my pieces. Such a concept had never occurred to me before, and it was a revelation. My composition skills were beginning to develop to the point where I finished the Masters course with the nationally-competitive Phillip Neill Memorial Prize (1991) and two paid commissions with which to step into my (so I thought) post-study life. I had worked hard enough on my violin playing to be a member of the Christchurch Symphony Orchestra, and the New Zealand National Youth Orchestra. Working my way through the standard repertoire of Beethoven symphonies, some Mozart and Haydn, Brahms, and works by Copland, Stravinsky, Shostakovich, Sibelius, Walton, Bartók, Tippett, Ravel, Liszt, and Kodály, a sprinkling of New Zealand music entered the mix. I found twentieth-century music very challenging and “contemporary,” and I began wondering how to solve the puzzle of writing music that was playable, yet my very own. I had been commissioned by two different organisations to write orchestra pieces: one for a large children’s ensemble, and the other for a community orchestra. The parameters provided by both were a challenge and a blessing. I began attending rehearsals as an observer, taking notes and asking questions. The children’s ensemble piece had to include a part for third violin, catering for beginner violin students, and children’s choir, requiring text. Writing the text (about Scott and Amundsen’s race to the South Pole, 1911–1912) was probably not my best decision, but solving the third violin challenge came easily to me and being able to orchestrate to accommodate children at varying capability levels gave me confidence that the players would be able to cope with the music. While the resulting piece was a beginner work that I wouldn’t want to revive, the next piece, for community orchestra, was a step up and my attraction to orchestral music continued, unabated.

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An Accidental Student Abroad: Studying in the USA After a good deal of research, filling in forms, writing letters and sending scores, I flew to Rochester, New York in January 1993, where I had been offered one semester as a non-degree student at the Eastman School of Music with Samuel Adler, renowned composer and author of a seminal textbook on orchestration. I had not expected to be away from New Zealand for long, hoping to return from “the big O.E.” (overseas experience) and find a job somewhere, possibly teaching music and composing. I had also been offered a place at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, where I hoped to spend a second semester before returning home. I had no interest in completing more degrees. However, after one extremely rigorous yet rewarding semester with Dr. Adler, he retired and I was offered a place for another year, this time as a legitimate Master’s student, so I took it. My new teacher was Joseph Schwantner, a Pulitzer Prize-winner and master of orchestral composition. I loved my lessons with him. He waxed lyrical about texture, colour, orchestration, notation (pencils, score paper, and special architects’ rulers), his disdain for set theory analyses on his music (“It’s a phone book, for crying out loud!”), and taught me how to pay attention to every phrase and how to distribute foreground and background material throughout the orchestra for my thesis piece, Serenades and Skirmishing (1994). While I never had the finished piece read by an orchestra at Eastman, I conducted a small ensemble piece of mine at a composition departmental recital. In classes, hearing the other composition students discuss a vast range of music in detail was immensely intimidating. However, a critical part of my musical education was working through a huge listening list of repertoire I had never encountered, especially that of American composers. I am not one of those musicians who can remember details, dates, tunes, and instrumentations of pieces. The luxury of the listening room in the Sibley Music Library at Eastman, sitting in a carrel with headphones and vinyl, has now been overtaken by YouTube and Naxos, but I became glued to the scores and records. By the end of a year and a half in Rochester, I had learned more than I could have ever anticipated. Moving to Los Angeles in August 1994, I reluctantly began a doctorate at the USC Thornton School of Music. I wasn’t sure why I was doing it. I didn’t realise that it would open doors for me, provide me with incredible learning experience, find me lifelong friends, and—not least—lead me into paid employment. I was fortunate to have a Teaching Assistantship that

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provided full fee remission and a part-time teaching stipend, the only way I could afford post-graduate study at a private university in the United States. Despite Los Angeles being a commuter city, I made a conscious decision to live close to campus, so I could work hard, learn everything I could, and return to the safe bubble of New Zealand as soon as I could finish my doctorate. However, the more engrossed I became in my studies, the more I realised what amazing learning opportunities were before me, and what wonderful people I was meeting. The faculty at USC was first-rate. My teachers were brilliant and had an ability to talk in detail about any topic, not just musical. I took composition lessons with Erica Muhl, who had been a very young student of Nadia Boulanger, and she pulled no punches. I also studied with Morten Lauridsen, one of the world’s most well-known choral composers and then head of the composition department, and he was kind enough to allow me to take a special study with him on choral literature. James Hopkins taught orchestration and counterpoint, and Stephen Hartke taught graduate classes in form and analysis from an historical perspective. He became a particularly important mentor and friend. I thoroughly enjoyed the history classes, which filled the enormous gaps in my knowledge. USC was the leading school for film composition, and it was quite common to see Elmer Bernstein, Buddy Baker and Christopher Young strolling the corridors to teach film music classes. The composition department frequently welcomed guest composers, some who imparted gems of wisdom like: “If you want to make it in this industry, you need to compose like a man.” Given the expertise of faculty and the emphasis on traditional training of craft and technique, as well as developing our voice as a composer, the “icing on the cake” of the program included opportunities to write pieces for ensembles and have them read through, as in a professional composer’s workshop. I had never experienced this before, having been flung into the deep end with ensemble commissions for public performances in New Zealand. This opportunity was different. Composition students’ works or orchestration projects would be selected, the composer would supply score and parts to the ensemble director (either the orchestra, the wind ensemble, or the new music ensemble), and on the day you would wait your turn. The reading sessions were always recorded, and they were run like professional orchestral rehearsals. The composer and their teacher would sit at the front of the room next to the conductor’s podium, with score, sticky notes, and pencils at

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the ready. If something was unclear, the conductor would turn and ask a question, and if you didn’t have an immediate answer, he would make the decision for you. Time limits were strict. I recall one undergraduate composer who forgot to put bar numbers and rehearsal letters on his orchestration’s score and parts, which had been hand-written, those being the early days of computer notation programs. When they had to stop, the conductor would deliberately have the orchestra start again at the beginning, getting more and more aggravated each time. Naturally, those composers whose turn it was yet to come became increasingly terrified as the conductor’s fuse shortened. I was fortunate to have several orchestration exercises read, including a version of Bartók’s Minor Seconds, Major Sevenths (No. 144 from Book VI of the Mikrokosmos).1 These methods afforded me the use of the orchestra in an experimental way: to try out different things, learn about orchestral etiquette, work with conductors, the craft of making scores and parts, and working with experienced teachers and my performance contemporaries. Together with my background as an orchestral musician, the reading sessions and performances contributed enormously to my development as a composer. By the end of my studies my Concertino (1995) for clarinet, cello, double bass, and strings (a commission from New Zealand), and my flute concerto Maui Tikitiki a Taranga (my doctoral dissertation piece, 1998) had been performed by the USC Symphony, one of the finest college orchestras in the country.

Welcome to Australia Moving to Australia in 1998, I took up a lecturing position at the University of Tasmania  in Hobart. I felt well prepared for the position, and not long after that I found myself fortunate to be commissioned by Australian symphony orchestras for a range of projects. Emerging composers were typically offered short commissions for “composer development workshops” as well as pieces for education programs. On receiving my first Symphony Australia commission, Stealing Tutunui (2000) for the West Australian Symphony Orchestra’s New Voices composer program, it felt like I had previously been driving an average automobile, but now I was being given the chance to take the Rolls-Royce out for a spin. I 1  Béla Bartók, “Minor Seconds, Major Sevenths, Mikrokosmos: Progressive Piano Pieces (London: Boosey & Hawkes, 1940).

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continued to balance my teaching with orchestral and chamber composition, as well as family life, and in 2006 an opportunity came along that I was delighted to accept.

Mentoring Future Composers Orchestral composition workshops were funded by both the umbrella organisation Symphony Australia, and by the Australian Music Centre, before the orchestras became self-governing following the Strong Report of 2005.2 With the decision not to keep funding the emerging composer programs, the Director of Australian Music at the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra (TSO), Richard Mills AM, suggested that the TSO should fill the void and run its own composer program. There were two main reasons for this; first, to fill the gaps in training composers in orchestral composition that were rapidly disappearing from university music departments; and second, to seek out emerging talent and start commissioning and performing the next generation of orchestral composers. Symphony Australia contributed to the project, as they could see its immense value. In 2006 I was engaged as administrator of the inaugural TSO Australian Composers’ School. In collaboration with the Manager of Artistic Planning and the Education Co-ordinator, we planned workshops and orchestral rehearsal calls that were modelled very much along the lines on which I had learned so much at USC. The first Composers’ School received over sixty applicants for six places. The composers were flown to Hobart for a week of workshops, rehearsals of their music, and a final public presentation to an invited audience. Richard conducted the orchestral rehearsals and ran lecture-demonstrations where he had the orchestra play through a range of excerpts to demonstrate various aspects of orchestration. Two professional composers were engaged as tutors, and ran post-rehearsal de-­ brief sessions, one-to-one lessons, and gave short presentations. The participants often said that they learned more in one week at the TSO Composers’ School than in an entire music course, as described by Jim Coyle in 2014: “This week is one of the most instructive experiences an emerging composer can undergo.”3 The TSO Australian Composers’ 2  James Strong, “A New Era—Orchestras Review Report 2005,” Australian Government, Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts, 14 March 2005, https://www.agsm.edu.au/bobm/teaching/SSO/strongreport.pdf. 3  Jim Coyle, “Composers’ School in Hobart,” Limelight Magazine, 10 July 2014, https:// limelightmagazine.com.au/composers-school-in-hobart.

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School has been through a number of transformations since 2006 but its basic design remains the same, and it is a firm fixture on the Australian music landscape of training opportunities. Experience and training in writing for orchestra, such as provided in these programs, is an important facet in being able to adapt to requirements when a composer is commissioned. Orchestras are increasingly expanding their repertoire of work by Australian composers to fulfil different “briefs.” In many ways this is not unlike the composer-patron relationship of the Baroque, where music was commissioned for specific occasions, as gifts, for educational opportunities, or as compositional exercises, to name a few. I have been fortunate to write several different types of pieces for orchestras in Australia, three of which I will discuss here: the education piece, the “functional” piece, and the “free choice” piece. Roar! (2003) was commissioned by the West Australian Symphony Orchestra as an education piece with a circus theme. It was part of a commission series called 5x25 where the orchestra commissioned twenty-five five-minute works across a range of size and scope to celebrate their seventy-­fifth anniversary, and the piece was requested to fit in a concert of circus-themed music. I decided to write my piece to feature the four sections of the orchestra featuring acts in the circus, inspired by an old-­ fashioned notion of the circus. There is an opening tutti fanfare, followed by the woodwinds representing dancing monkeys (Fig. 20.1). The music has a lively bossa nova rhythm with 8-bar phrase lengths and a tonal harmonic language but the harmony is not always functional. Education music doesn’t necessarily need to be tonal, per se, but I wanted my piece to be tuneful, colourful, and upbeat, in order to catch children’s attention. Then the music slows tempo and moves into triple meter to illustrate the trapeze artists swinging gracefully high above the audience (Fig. 20.2).

Fig. 20.1  Maria Grenfell, Roar! (2003), bars 8–16, clarinets and bassoons

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Fig. 20.2  Maria Grenfell, Roar! (2003), bars 54–62, strings and harp

The waltz-like melody in the first violins is accompanied sparsely by the strings and harp. Suddenly there is a change of mood and the percussion section takes over, using the lion’s roar, from which the work’s title comes, and the whip used by lion-tamers in old-fashioned circus acts. Rhythmic ostinati are layered one after another, in the lowest strings, low harp, timpani, tom-toms, tam-tam, bass drum, with the xylophone introducing a jaunty little tune that is accompanied by gradually increasing layers from low brass and woodwinds. All the instruments of the orchestra finally come together, bringing the piece to a rousing final cadence (Fig. 20.3). I enjoyed composing Roar! because it gave me the opportunity to write music that was tuneful, fun to play and listen to, and bring in many of the orchestral colours I had experimented with in various chamber pieces during my time as a student. Having three percussionists plus timpani was another factor in my decision to write a  percussive, jazzy, and exciting piece. Roar! is often performed by Australian orchestras for education concerts, and it is not too challenging to be played by youth orchestras. In 2012 I was commissioned by the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra to write a piece for the Hush Foundation (Melbourne, Australia), a

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Fig. 20.3  Maria Grenfell, Roar! (2003), bars 153–56, percussion (xylophone, tom-toms, lion’s roar, whip)

remarkable organisation founded by Professor Catherine Crock AM, a paediatric physician at the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne. Professor Crock founded the organisation to seek out and create music that could reduce stress and anxiety for patients, families, and hospital staff.4 With eleven musical albums already in their catalogue by 2012, Hush approached the TSO with their most ambitious project: a disc of orchestral music to be played in patients’ homes, waiting rooms, recovery rooms, and surgical theatres. First and foremost, it was crucial that composers writing for Hush visited the Royal Children’s Hospital in Melbourne and spent time familiarising themselves with the atmosphere, talking with patients and families, and even sitting in an operating theatre wearing scrubs while the medical staff undertook their incredible work. It was an extraordinarily humbling experience. The musical brief was very specific: the piece had to be of a resting heart-rate tempo (to convey a sense of calm and optimism), tonal and accessible, and use major keys and gentle orchestration. I composed Rock Hopping (2012), inspired by my own children, taking them for walks 4  Hush Foundation, “About Hush,” accessed 10 November 2021, https://www.hush. org.au/about.

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Fig. 20.4  Maria Grenfell, Rock Hopping (2012), bars 1–12

along the beach and rock-hopping. I describe this as a “functional” commission because it was written with very detailed requirements, aimed for specific environments. Rock Hopping follows an AABA musical form and is in the key of F major, with solos for oboe, muted trumpet, and cello. The orchestration has a quietly “rocking” syncopated motive in the accompaniment, coloured  by the use of egg shakers in the percussion. Rock Hopping is one of thirteen pieces on The Magic Island5 disc, and it was thrilling to be included alongside composers I had admired since finding my own way as an Australian composer (Fig. 20.4). After writing a range of different orchestral works for most of the Australian orchestras and working closely with the TSO for many years as a composer, mentor, and Board Director, it was a compliment in 2019 to be asked to write what I describe as a “free choice” composition, commissioned by a patron of the orchestra. I discovered the story of Captain Matthew Flinders (1774–1814) and his cat, Trim, who circumnavigated the globe together from 1799–1804, and I wrote an eighteen-minute orchestral work, Flinders and Trim (2019). Written as a commemoration of the patron’s much-loved cats, I wanted to create a larger story by acknowledging the aspects of companionship and devotion that a special animal can provide, while maintaining the privacy of the work’s patron. Flinders and Trim is not a narrative musical composition; it does not tell a story, but it attempts to capture the essence of the ocean, friendship, companionship, humour, love, and loss. The orchestral palette is used in a picturesque way in large sweeping gestures that contrast with intricate passages, a recurring “cat motive,” inspired by sailing ships and 5  Hush Foundation, The Magic Island, Vol. 13, Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra, HUSH013, 2013, compact disc.

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surreptitiously including a reharmonisation of the hymn Eternal Father: “Eternal Father, strong to save, whose arm has bound the restless wave, who told the mighty ocean deep its own appointed bounds to keep: O hear us when we cry to thee for those in peril on the sea.”6 From a musical perspective, over the preceding ten years or so, I had found the compositional technique of “re-composing” very relevant to my work process. By re-composing the Eternal Father hymn, I laid down an orchestral bed of ostinato material with interlocking contrapuntal lines in the woodwinds, over which the horns begin playing the hymn tune (Fig. 20.5). During the composition of this piece, I heard the shocking news of the Christchurch massacre. Incorporating the melody from “Now is the hour” felt like a meagre response to this tragedy, which is repeated far too often on distant shores, seemingly from another world, but becoming all too real when these shocking events happen closer to home. Christchurch was my hometown, and I grieved for it and for those who have lost loved ones. When Matthew Flinders lost his cat Trim, he wrote: “Thus perished my faithful intelligent Trim! The sporting, affectionate and useful companion of my voyages during four years. Never, my Trim, ‘to take thee all in all, shall I see thy like again.’”7 “Now is the hour” (“Po Atarau”) is often sung at funerals in New Zealand in te reo Māori, and I used the opening phrase in a poignant Cor Anglais solo at approximately two-thirds through the piece, accompanied by gentle string chords that re-harmonise the tune with an almost Charles –Ives-like atmosphere. This is achieved by the simple rhythmic technique of using four-against-three in the divided string chordal texture, during the break between two phrases of the hymn tune (Fig. 20.6, bar 262), and stacking chords vertically using mixed intervals on top of parallel fourths (bar 265). The instrumentation includes thunder sheet and ship’s bell, both of which contribute to the maritime sound of the composition, and I was happy that, within the orchestra’s requirements, I had been given the keys to the Rolls-Royce. Flinders and Trim was nominated for an Australian Art Music Award in the “Work for Large Ensemble” category in 2020, during the pandemic year in which I wrote my first film score for Quoll

6  William Whiting, “Eternal Father, Strong to Save,” Hymnology Archive, accessed 19 November 2021, https://www.hymnologyarchive.com/eternal-father-strong-to-save. 7  Matthew Flinders, Trim, posthumous (Sydney: Harper Collins, 1997): 48.

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Fig. 20.5  Maria Grenfell, Flinders and Trim (2019), bars 55–59

Farm (2020),8 a Tasmanian documentary about the Eastern quoll. Because of social-distancing restrictions caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, I was limited to using ten musicians for the film score recording, and I felt that my prior training and experience as an orchestral composer held me in good stead for making musical and instrumental decisions where limitations were a factor. The music for Quoll Farm was subsequently a finalist 8  “Quoll Farm,” directed by Simon Plowright, Wild Creature Films (2020, Sydney: Flame Productions), HD / 4K, https://www.screenaustralia.gov.au/the-screen-guide/t/ quoll-farm-2020/37146.

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Fig. 20.6  Maria Grenfell, Flinders and Trim (2019), bars 258–70

in the category of Best Music for a Documentary in the Australian Screen Music Awards 2021. It is very rewarding to mentor emerging composers and to see the thread of continuity in creating part of a beneficial training program: from composer workshops in a higher education setting, to emerging composer development programs hosted by professional orchestras, leading to commissions with specific briefs, and developing a composer’s capacity to write a large-scale orchestral work with their own compositional voice. Having benefited from these experiences, one can see the value in promoting two crucial teaching factors: mentors, and access to professional-standard orchestras, both of whom can provide feedback to composers at all stages of their development. Composers are storytellers; they create work that lingers in the ears and mind, and it is wonderful to see so many orchestras maintaining a commitment to working with composers to create new work. Orchestras must tread a delicate balance between programming “old” and “new” music, and while they need to be aware of their programming, in a tight financial climate it is not helpful to throw around sweeping criticisms about what they “should” and “should not” program, as there will never be enough. I prefer that we should work co-operatively with the resources we have available, make use of the opportunities that come along, and be as

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creative as possible. Composers are always seeking new projects. The Rolls-Royce will not start if left unused for too long; let’s keep it in motion and take it on many orchestral adventures.

References Bartók, Béla. “Minor Seconds, Major Sevenths.” Mikrokosmos: Progressive Piano Pieces, Book 6, no. 144. London: Boosey & Hawkes, 1940. Coyle, Jim. “Composers’ School in Hobart.” Limelight Magazine, 10 July, 2014. https://limelightmagazine.com.au/composers-­school-­in-­hobart. Flinders, Matthew. Trim. Posthumous. Sydney: Harper Collins, 1997. Flinders, Matthew, ed. Tim Flannery. Terra Australis. Melbourne: The Text Publishing Company, 2012. Grenfell, Maria. Roar! Sydney: Australian Music Centre, 2003. ———. Rock Hopping. Sydney: Australian Music Centre, 2012. ———. Flinders and Trim. Sydney: Australian Music Centre, 2019. Hush Foundation. “About Hush.” Accessed 10 November 2021. https://www. hush.org.au/about. ———. The Magic Island, Vol. 13. Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra, HUSH013, 2013, compact disc. https://www.hush.org.au/product-­page/ hush-­volume-­13-­the-­magic-­island. Plowright, Simon, dir. “Quoll Farm.” 2020, Wild Creature Films. Sydney: Flame Productions, HD / 4K. https://www.screenaustralia.gov.au/the-­screen-­ guide/t/quoll-­farm-­2020/37146. Strong, James. “A New Era—Orchestras Review Report 2005.” Australian Government, Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts, 14 March 2005. https://www.agsm.edu.au/bobm/teaching/SSO/ strongreport.pdf. Whiting, William. “Eternal Father, Strong to Save.” Hymnology Archive. Accessed 19 November 2021. https://www.hymnologyarchive.com/eternal-­father-­ strong-­to-­save.

CHAPTER 21

Finding a Reason: A Composer’s Pathway Forged Through Social Justice Advocacy Kathleen McGuire

Introduction The outset of my path to becoming a recognised composer could be considered typical, but the journey then took unconventional turns while I pursued an international conducting career. Through professional experiences—and impacted by being a gay-identified woman—the Composer role later returned in unexpected ways. When I penned my first piece of music, as an eight-year-old, the experience was organic and instinctive. Unaware that composition was a particular skill, I simply wrote music whenever a need arose or when the mood took me. A decade later, however, having amassed a portfolio of works, I switched my major from Performance to Composition during a Bachelor of Music degree at the University of Melbourne. Thus began my formal studies in composition. My teachers were Peter Tahourdin (1928–2009) and Barry Conyngham AM (1944–), plus we had seminars with visiting international composers such as Sir Michael Tippett OM CH CBE

K. McGuire (*) Australian Catholic University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 L. Kouvaras et al. (eds.), The Composer, Herself, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23922-9_21

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(1905–1998) and Donald Erb (1927–2008). I also met Peggy Glanville-­ Hicks (1912–1990) at the Melbourne Composers Symposium in 1984. She was the sole professional woman composer I encountered during those years.

Navigating Inexperience and Discrimination After graduating, I grappled with how to proceed professionally as a composer, lacking suitable role models or mentors. I could not see beyond the Beethovens or Bernsteins of the compositional world. Instead, I turned to conducting. In retrospect, I chuckle at my younger self who believed there would be more opportunities for women on podiums! This career decision was based on the confidence I had in my abilities, derived from receiving paid work as a conductor since my teens. While teaching music in schools and conducting community musical theatre, I was accepted for private lessons with Romanian-Australian conductor, Robert Rosen (1921–2000). A year later, in 1989, I was offered a place at the Victorian College of the Arts (VCA), where I undertook postgraduate conducting studies with Rosen and Nicholas Braithwaite  (1939–). Students of conducting were required to find an orchestra external to the VCA for their assessments, so I assembled some musicians and we launched the Victorian Women’s Orchestra (VWO). Our concerts were well attended and received positive reviews, so I was certain women would flock to join us. However, that was often a struggle. Eventually I learned that some players shunned the VWO because it was rumoured to be a “lesbian” orchestra. I assumed the musicians who stayed away were homophobic, or at least fearful of associating—or being seen to associate—with women labelled as “homosexual.” For context, this occurred four or five years prior to the Australian Government establishing the Human Rights (Sexual Conduct) Act 1994.1 Nonetheless, I felt rejected and dejected. It was one of my earliest experiences of discrimination based on sexual orientation. The formation of the VWO was somewhat ill-conceived. I was caught unprepared when interviewed, around that time, on Australia’s national ABC Radio by a male journalist. “Why do we need a women’s orchestra?” My response focused on lack of opportunity for players, but in 1  Australian Government, “Human Rights (Sexual Conduct) Act, no. 179, 1994,” Federal Register of Legislation, 19 December 1994, https://www.legislation.gov.au/Details/ C2004A04852.

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hindsight the issue I should have discussed was the under-representation of works by women composers in  orchestral programming. I was yet to learn of the existence of the Women’s Philharmonic in the United States that performed, almost exclusively, orchestral music composed by women. Nor was I aware of the many women composers who were making professional inroads in various countries.2 I have often experienced gender discrimination, but some of the worst of it stemmed from a trusted teacher in the 1990s. I learned about the discrimination levelled at me by this teacher after several years of frustration and lack of forward momentum in my career. For instance, peers and mentors encouraged me to audition for the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC) orchestras, but my applications were repeatedly unsuccessful. This did not make sense to me, knowing the level and experience of my male counterparts who were being selected for auditions. Eventually I sought feedback, making inquiries via an ABC employee. I was stunned to learn that a referee I had listed on my application—my teacher—had not recommended me. Subsequently, I secured from my teacher a written reference to include in my application materials and I re-applied to the ABC orchestras. This time I was successful. I auditioned with the Adelaide Symphony and was provided with useful, positive feedback, including encouragement to pursue opportunities overseas.

New Horizons As a Rotary Ambassadorial Fellow, I moved to England to undertake a Master of Music degree in conducting at the University of Surrey. There, I was immersed in rich experiences that deepened my music knowledge and skills. For my Master’s dissertation, I researched the works of composer John Rutter (1945–), who continues today to be one of the most prolific, living art-music composers.3 I spent an afternoon interviewing Rutter in his home studio, learning directly about his life and influences. He related to me some of the realities of being a successful, working composer, such as the pros and cons of accepting commissions while trying to 2  Robyn Bramhall, “The Women’s Philharmonic (1980–2004),” Women’s Philharmonic Advocacy, accessed 4 February 2021, https://wophil.org/the-womens-phil/. 3  Nick Galvin, “A Very English Superstar,” The Sydney Morning Herald, 9 July 2019, h t t p s : / / w w w. s m h . c o m . a u / e n t e r t a i n m e n t / m u s i c / a - v e r y - e n g l i s h - s u p e r s t a r20190709-p525j1.html.

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stay focussed on one’s own compositional goals. His ideas resonated for me, considering my own path away from composition: If you’ve got a choice between something that’s just a pipe dream and a piece that’s wanted next month, you do the piece that’s wanted next month. Consequently, an awful lot of pipe dream pieces […] remain unwritten. […] Pretty soon you find you’ve built up a body of work, which is not necessarily the body of work you thought you were going to build up.4

In England, I received mentoring from two of the world’s most renowned women conductors: Sian Edwards  (1959–) at the English National Opera, and Simone Young AM  (1961–), whom I first met at Covent Garden. Discussing my career prospects with Young, she suggested the United States might have suitable opportunities. A year later I was accepted as a candidate for the Doctor of Musical Arts in conducting at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Although focused on conducting, my doctoral work also contributed to my development as a composer. For instance, an area of research was the Requiem in Memory of Those Who Died of AIDS by composer Gareth Valentine  (1956–), written for his partner who died in 1993. I had conducted the Australian premiere in 1994 and then the American premiere in 1997. The doctoral work included engraving and editing the composer’s manuscript, plus arranging a piano reduction of the score.5 Other components of the doctorate involved a musicological analysis of historic works, and research focused on other contemporary music written in response to AIDS. These, too, deepened my knowledge of music composition.

Queer Choirs I became the artistic director of the Rainbow Chorus in 1997, an LGBTQIA+ community choir based in the remote town of Fort Collins in northern Colorado.6 The choir had commenced in October 1992 and 4  John Rutter, in Kathleen McGuire, “John Rutter at Fifty: A Survey of His Music and Influences” (Master of Music diss., University of Surrey, 1995). 5  Gareth Valentine, “Requiem in Memory of Those Who Have Died from AIDS,” Choir of Southwark Cathedral (London), Jay Records, CDAY 1358, 1993, compact disc. Liner notes. 6  Michael Gold, “The ABCs of L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.  PLUS_SPI ,” The New  York Times, 21 June, 2018 https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/21/style/lgbtq-gender-language.html.

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then, a month later, Amendment 2 was passed by a ballot initiative that prohibited the state from enacting anti-discrimination protections for gays, lesbians, and bisexuals.7 Choir members were afraid of the situation (for instance, refusing to be photographed or have their names listed in concert programs), yet determined to have their voices heard. Although Amendment 2 was quashed by the Supreme Court on 20 May 1996, it left a social residue of hatred and fear of minorities. (That this occurred coincidentally on the day I arrived in Colorado had especial significance for me.) The world was soon shocked by news of the murder of gay university student Matthew Shepard (1976–1998) in Wyoming.8 The Rainbow Chorus, the only nearby gay-identifed choir, sang outside the hospital while Matthew was in a coma. Later, when the choir presented a Matthew Shepard memorial concert at the University of Wyoming, I was afraid of being a target. I scraped the rainbow sticker from my car before entering the state of Wyoming and I was on tenterhooks when walking through campus. My interest in conducting an LGBTQIA PLUS_SPI choir grew from previous experiences in Australia. I had conducted the Melbourne Gay and Lesbian Choir (MGLC) on several occasions after it had been formed by my brother Lawrence McGuire  (1966–) in 1990.9 I also conducted impromptu choirs formed for the annual AIDS requiem services at St Mark’s Anglican Church in Fitzroy, during my time as a student. Initially, the choir sang movements from historic requiem settings by such composers as Mozart or Fauré, but in 1994, the service featured Gareth Valentine’s Requiem (as mentioned above). Valentine’s highly personal, AIDS-focused cantata had a significant impact. There was not a dry eye in the house when the choir—comprising singers from MGLC, Melbourne University Choral Society, and Monash University Choral Society—sang a work that spoke directly to the reason we were all there. That moment has influenced me ever since.

7  Constitutional Rights Foundation, “BRIA 12 4c, “Should Homosexuals Have the Right to Laws Protecting them from Discrimination?”” Accessed 2 December 2021, https:// w ww. c r f-us a. org /bill- o f- r ig h t s - in - act io n /b r ia- 1 2- 4- c - s houl d- homos e x ua l s have-the-right-to-laws-protecting-them-from-discrimination. 8  Jude Sheerin, “Matthew Shepard: The Murder That Changed America,” BBC News, 26 October 2018. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-45968606. 9  Melbourne Gay and Lesbian Chorus, accessed 18 November 2021, https://www.mglc. org.au/.

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Publications In my role as artistic director of the Rainbow Chorus, I joined the Gay and Lesbian Association of Choruses (GALA). GALA hosted regular conferences and festivals, where I met others who had been part of a movement that had i evolved since the 1970s.10 A common conversation was the challenge to find suitable, authentic repertoire to inspire audiences on “queer” themes of love, honour, dignity, and pride. Composers were often commissioned to write on specific themes. Out of necessity I, too, composed and arranged music for my choir, due to the lack of suitable repertoire. Adding a further challenge, music publishers had refused to adopt this new body of work. In response, composer Roger Bourland (1952–) established Yelton Rhodes Music (YRM), which grew from his frustration in trying to publish his composition, “Hidden Legacies,” after it had been commissioned and performed widely by the Gay Men’s Chorus of Los Angeles (GMCLA). Bourland explained to me: In 1993, after touring America with the GMCLA’s AIDS cantata “Hidden Legacies,” I learned that composers who wrote queer specific music could not get their work published. I learned that the main publishing houses avoid anything gay because they have such large Christian and fundamentalist Christians as large paying customers. I realized I had nothing to lose, having tenure at UCLA and openly gay, I started Yelton Rhodes Music whose motto is: YRM provides quality printed music whose message speaks of inclusivity and tolerance of the broad spectrum of human nature. This catalog reflects a wide variety of viewpoints in terms of religion, sexuality, entertainment, death, life, love, and society.11

YRM added me to their composer list and published some of my work. Similarly, R.  Anthony Lee, organist at St. Aidan’s Episcopal Church in Boulder, Colorado (where I was the music director) was a composer who also  ran a small publishing house: Coal Creek Music. After I had composed some pieces for the church choir—including two commissions for same-sex commitment ceremonies—Lee wanted to publish my liturgical works. Somehow, without seeking it, I was once again back on the composition path. 10  GALA Choruses, “About GALA Choruses, History,” Gala Choruses, accessed 29 May, 2021, https://galachoruses.org/about/history/. 11  Roger Bourland, personal email communication, 9 May, 2021.

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San Francisco After completing my doctorate, I was eager to stay in the United States. I joked that I would apply for a particular position “to mess with the men,” believing my submission to lead the 200-voice San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus (SFGMC) would not be taken seriously. This choir was, after all, a renowned bastion of masculinity. The joke was on me, however, because I was selected. I moved to California in 2000 to start my new job. Suddenly I found myself at the helm of an iconic, performing arts organisation in a city emerging from two dark decades of decimation caused by AIDS. To show gratitude to the community that had provided support, SFGMC’s focus moved from AIDS to transgender and women’s rights, breast cancer research, LGBTQIA PLUS_SPI youth, and same-­ gender marriage. For one month in 2004, the City of San Francisco permitted same-sex weddings.12 The mood was joyous as SFGMC sang “ Chapel of Love,” day after day, on the steps of City Hall. I witnessed and experienced countless transformative moments in San Francisco, which instilled in me a resolve to use music as an expression for positive change. With this determination, I arranged hundreds of works during thirteen years in San Francisco, continuing to hone my composition craft. Shortly after my San Francisco arrival, I was also invited to guest-­ conduct the Women’s Philharmonic and its adjunct Community Women’s Orchestra (CWO), then becoming CWO’s principal conductor. On every program we performed at least one work by a historic or contemporary woman composer. Working with these women and this body of work affected how I viewed myself as a composer. I was enriched by interactions with, commissioning works from, or writing arrangements for composers and singer-songwriters, including: Gwen Avery (1942–2014), Kay Gardner (1941–2002), Jennifer Higdon  (1962–), Janis Ian  (1951–), Libby Larsen  (1950–), Cindy McTee  (1953–), Holly Near  (1949–), Hilary Tann (1947–2023), Linda Tillery (1948–), Joan Tower (1938–), Gwyneth Walker  (1947–), Mary Watkins  (1939–), and Cris Williamson (1947–). In 2023, I continue to serve as a board director for the Women’s Philharmonic Advocacy, whose motto is to “level the playing field for 12  David Stout, “San Francisco City Officials Perform Gay Marriages,” The New  York Times, 12 February 2004, https://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/12/national/san-francisco-city-officials-perform-gay-marriages.html.

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women composers.”13 The board includes composers Beth Denisch (1958–), Pamela Madsen, and Chen Yi (1953–), who share their success through being role models and helping to shape opportunities for emerging women composers.

Australia and South Africa After a decade with SFGMC, I was urged by pastors of the San Francisco Metropolitan Community Church to establish Singers of the Street (SOS), a choir for people affected by homelessness in San Francisco. SOS was inspired by Melbourne’s Choir of Hard Knocks, led by Jonathon Welch AM  (1958–). Initially I was trepidatious, but soon embraced this new experience. I adopted a “harm reduction” model of leadership, which I learned from Zen Buddhist priest Junsei Jana Drakka (1952–2017).14 She sang with the choir as part of her street ministry in San Francisco. Rehearsing and sharing meals together had a palpable effect on the SOS choir members. One singer remarked that our gatherings were the only time in his week when anyone knew his name or cared if he showed up. Another sought housing for the first time in years, accrediting this to the choir for giving her a renewed sense of hope and confidence. An addict told me: “being sober for choir practice taught me I could be sober on other days, too.” Once again, I was struck by the immense power of music, witnessing lives changed—and saved—by the simple act of making music together. When I relocated back to Australia in 2013, Welch approached myself and writer Andy Payne to compose, in collaboration with Welch, a Requiem for those who have died on the street. The idea arose following the inner-Melbourne murders of David Bryan (a homeless man) and Jill Meagher (an ABC staffer). Street Requiem received its premiere at the Melbourne Recital Centre on 7 June 2014. We did not imagine the impact this work would have; it has since been performed more than thirty times, across three continents, and was recognised by the American Prize in Composition for “dignifying the homeless

13  Women’s Philharmonic Advocacy, “Homepage,” accessed 18 November 2021, https:// wophil.org/. 14  Brian Dean Williams, “The Dharma of Harm Reduction,” Buddhist Peace Fellowship, 6 April 2015, http://buddhistpeacefellowship.org/the-dharma-of-harm-reduction/.

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through song.”15 On 25 January 2015, I attended the American premiere of Street Requiem, conducted by Professor  Jonathan Palant, in Texas. Performers included the Dallas Street Choir (making its debut), and Frederica von Stade  (1945–), who came out of retirement to add her inimitable voice as a soloist.16 The first movement completed for Street Requiem was the Gloria, which I composed after returning from a trip to South Africa early in 2014. Among many formative experiences was a day spent with Neo, a guide who had survived the 1976 Soweto Uprising. He was only thirteen years old when the riots began. Standing with Neo at the exact place where he had witnessed police killing dozens of innocent school children, I asked, “How can you keep re-living this every day as a guide”? He responded, “I have to. Otherwise, my life makes no sense.” I promised Neo I would continue to tell the story. The Gloria incorporated Xhosa and Zulu language Neo had shared with me. The movement became the cornerstone of the requiem.17

New Compositional Paths; Writing on Domestic Abuse New opportunities arose for me to focus further on composing. Geelong Grammar School (Victoria, Australia) commissioned a Latin mass setting. While working on the new work, titled, Missa de Spiritu Sancto, I became aware of the ongoing Syrian Civil War where havoc had been wreaked on the lives of thousands of children since 2011.18 I researched and then incorporated elements of Syrian folk music into the Sanctus, my goal being to encourage students at this prestigious Australian school to learn 15  David Katz, “Composer Winners: Chorus Music, 2015,” The American Prize, 30 November 2015, http://theamericanprize.blogspot.com/2015/11/composer-winnerschorus-music-2015.html. 16  Wayne Lee Gay, “Visiting Opera Star Shows Solidarity with Those in Need,” D Magazine, 26 January, 2015, https://www.dmagazine.com/arts-entertainment/2015/01/ visiting-opera-star-shows-solidarity-with-those-in-need/. 17  Rachael Myrow, “‘Street Requiem’ Inspires Choir to Tackle Homeless Problem,” KQED Public Media, 27 January 2017, https://www.kqed.org/arts/12685435/ street-requiem-inspires-choir-to-tackle-homeless-problem. 18  Joe McCarthy, “Syrian Children Have Now Known a Decade of War: Report,” Global Citizen, 12 March, 2021, https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/how-has-the-syrianwar-impacted-children/.

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about the plight of Syrian children. The other movements were written in a typically Anglican style, but responses to the Sanctus reminded me overwhelmingly to allow a yearning for justice to guide my creativity. In 2015, I was commissioned to create a work on a theme of family violence.19 This was a highly personal subject, as several people close to me were survivors of domestic abuse. I invited composer Christina Green (1963–) to collaborate. She was working as a music therapist at a women’s shelter and brought several of her clients into the project. No Excuses! was created: a thirty-minute choral suite for women’s choir and instrumentalists, inspired by true stories from women survivors of violence. Multiple performances across Australia were well received, and Australia’s ABC Classics (label of the national, classical music radio station) recorded it for a television special on findings from the Victorian Royal Commission into Family Violence.20 Other national recognition included interviews on ABC Radio and TV, and a feature article in the Australian Women’s Weekly.21 Encouraged by an SBS television journalist, benefit concerts were held in 2021 featuring No Excuses! Funds were raised for women and children seeking refuge from violent homes.22 The project led to Australian Catholic University’s Vice-Chancellor, Professor Szlatko Skrbis, recognising my work on the project with a Staff Excellence Award in Community Engagement. No Excuses! inspired many who experienced it as audience members or performers. Following a Brisbane concert, a stranger related to me details of her thirty-year marriage to an abusive husband. A choir member declared that she had finally accepted she was an abuse victim, attributing the music as her “wake-up call.” Many individuals have said No Excuses! helped them to understand, heal, or seek help.

19  Tom Clift, “Big West Festival 2015,” Concrete Playground, 16 November, 2015, https://concreteplayground.com/melbourne/event/big-west-festival-2015. 20  Cathy Jacobs, “Victims of Family Violence Form ‘No Excuses Choir’ to Inspire Others,” ABC News, 1 April, 2016, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-04-01/victims-familyviolence-form-no-excuses-choir/7292076. 21  Australian Women’s Weekly, “Giving Victims a Voice: The Choir Using Song to Spread Their Message of Resilience and Hope to Family Violence Survivors,” PressReader, 15 December, 2016, https://www.pressreader.com/australia/the-australian-womens-wee kly/20161215/281689729404204. 22  Australian Catholic University, “No Excuses! Choir,” ACU Engagement, 18 August 2021, https://staff.acu.edu.au/our_university/news/2021/august/no-excuses-choir.

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Coming Full Circle I ponder what my career would look like today if I were to start again. Thirty years ago in Australia, I regularly experienced homophobia and gender inequality, which stifled my creativity and contributed to self-­ doubts as a composer. Compared with  emerging consciousness around gender equality and women’s rights in the 2020s, the twentieth century was a different world.23 General acceptance of LGBTQIA PLUS_SPI communities—at least in many Western societies—has also shifted significantly.24 While times have changed, music by women composers is still seldom programmed to the same extent as works by their male counterparts.25 However, in 2019 the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra (MSO) performed Eumeralla: A War Requiem for Peace composed by Deborah Cheetham Fraillon AO (1964–, a Yorta Yorta woman), who describes herself as a “composer by necessity and lesbian by practice.”26 The work received multiple performances, with critical acclaim.27 Subsequently, Cheetham Fraillon was appointed as the MSO’s composer-in-residence for 2020, and then the orchestra’s First Nations Creative Chair in 2021. Sustained acknowledgement of a woman composer by a major orchestra is largely uncommon but Cheetham Fraillon’s rise has been impactful and influential, perhaps heralding a shift in attitudes towards orchestral programming.28 Her success has shown what is possible for women composers and has motivated me to contemplate my own aspirations. 23  Bonnie Chiu, “2020s Mark a New Wave of Feminist Mobilization,” Forbes Magazine, 8 March 2020, https://www.forbes.com/sites/bonniechiu/2020/03/08/2020s-marka-new-wave-of-feminist-mobilization. 24  Gwen Aviles, “LGBTQ Acceptance Grew Globally Over Past Four Decades—But Not Everywhere,” NBC Universal News Group, 12 November, 2019, https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/lgbtq-acceptance-grew-globally-over-past-four-decades-noteverywhere-n1080706. 25  Mandy Campbell, “Give Women Composers a Break!” The University of Sydney, 11 August, 2017, https://www.sydney.edu.au/news-opinion/news/2017/08/11/givewomen-composers-a-break-.html. 26  Short Black Opera, accessed 25 May 2021, https://www.shortblackopera.org.au/team. 27  Maxim Boon, “‘Momentous’ Eumeralla: A Dark Past, a Hopeful Future,” The Sydney Morning Herald, 16 June, 2019), https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/music/ momentous-eumeralla-a-dark-past-a-hopeful-future-20190616-p51y8o.html. 28  Nicholas Collon, et  al., “Blistering and Virtuosic, Depth and Wisdom… Women Composers We Should Listen To,” The Guardian, 8 March, 2020, https://www.theguardian. com/music/2020/mar/08/hitting-the-right-notes-leading-conductors-on-the-womencomposers-we-should-listen-to.

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Decades of studying and teaching music honed my skills and expanded my knowledge, but my best creative voice surfaces when encapsulating a burning need to share stories of injustice. My advice for emerging composers: Look for what drives your passion. When you find the right path, the road will reveal itself. There will be challenges along the way, which is the nature of life, but the hurdles can serve to strengthen your resolve and even ignite your creativity. Ironically, factors that were obstacles early in my career have now become the very reasons I am invited to compose music, collaborate on projects, conduct at festivals, or even write book chapters! Undoubtedly my output would be different had composition always been my primary focus, but my personal growth—while focusing on other areas—produced the composer I am today. In sharing my story, I encourage women composers to consider the vast potential in their musical expression: To imagine, discover and embrace the pathways ahead.

References Australian Government. “Human Rights (Sexual Conduct) Act, no.179, 1994.” Federal Register of Legislation, 19 December, 1994. https://www.legislation. gov.au/Details/C2004A04852. Australian Women’s Weekly. “Giving Victims a Voice: The Choir Using Song to Spread Their Message of Resilience and Hope to Family Violence Survivors.” PressReader, 15 December, 2016. https://www.pressreader.com/australia/ the-­australian-­womens-­weekly/20161215/281689729404204. Aviles, Gwen. “LGBTQ Acceptance Grew Globally Over Past Four Decades—But Not Everywhere.” NBC Universal News Group, 12 November, 2019. https:// www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-­out/lgbtq-­acceptance-­grew-­globally-­over-­ past-­four-­decades-­not-­everywhere-­n1080706. Boon, Maxim. “‘Momentous’ Eumeralla: A Dark Past, a Hopeful Future.” The Sydney Morning Herald, 16 June, 2019. https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/music/momentous-­eumeralla-­a-­dark-­past-­a-­hopeful-­future-­20190616-­ p51y8o.html. Bramhall, Robyn. “The Women’s Philharmonic (1980–2004).” Women’s Philharmonic Advocacy, accessed 4 February 2021. https://wophil.org/ the-­womens-­phil/. Campbell, Mandy. “Give Women Composers a Break!” The University of Sydney, 11 August, 2017. https://www.sydney.edu.au/news-­opinion/news/2017/ 08/11/give-­women-­composers-­a-­break-­.html.

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Chiu, Bonnie. “2020s Mark a New Wave of Feminist Mobilization.” Forbes Magazine, 8 March, 2020. https://www.forbes.com/sites/ bonniechiu/2020/03/08/2020s-­mark-­a-­new-­wave-­of-­feminist-­mobilizat ion/?sh=6d3e3cee485e. Clift, Tom. “Big West Festival 2015.” Concrete Playground, November 16, 2015. https://concreteplayground.com/melbourne/event/big-­west-­festival-­2015. Collon, Nicolas, Edward Gardner, Robert Hollingworth, Kirill Karabits, Sakari Oramo, Vasily Petrenko, Simon Rattle, Santtu-Matias Rouvali, Lars Vogt, and Omer Meir Wellber. “Blistering and Virtuosic, Depth and Wisdom… Women Composers We Should Listen To.” The Guardian, 8 March, 2020. https:// www.theguardian.com/music/2020/mar/08/hitting-­t he-­r ight-­n otes-­ leading-­conductors-­on-­the-­women-­composers-­we-­should-­listen-­to. Constitutional Rights Foundation. “Amendment 2BRIA 12 4c, “Should Homosexuals Have the Right to Laws Protecting them from Discrimination?”” Colorado Encyclopedia, 20 August, 2019, https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/ article/amendment-­2. Accessed 2 December 2021, https://www.crf-­usa.org/ bill-­of-­rights-­in-­action/bria-­12-­4-­c-­should-­homosexuals-­have-­the-­right-­to-­ laws-­protecting-­them-­from-­discrimination. GALA Choruses. “About GALA Choruses, History.” Gala Choruses, accessed 29 May, 2021. https://galachoruses.org/about/history/. Galvin, Nick. “A Very English Superstar.” The Sydney Morning Herald, 9 July, 2019. https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/music/a-­very-­ english-­superstar-­20190709-­p525j1.html. Gay, Wayne Lee. “Visiting Opera Star Shows Solidarity with Those in Need.” D Magazine, January 26, 2015. https://www.dmagazine.com/ arts-­e ntertainment/2015/01/visiting-­o pera-­s tar-­s hows-­s olidarity-­w ith-­ those-­in-­need/. Gold, Michael. “The ABCs of L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. PLUS_SPI .” The New York Times, 21 June, 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/21/style/lgbtq-­ gender-­language.html. Greenblatt, Lilly. “Junsei Jana Drakka Dies at 65.” Lion’s Roar, 30 October, 2017. https://www.lionsroar.com/junsei-­jana-­drakka-­dies-­at-­65/. Jacobs, Cathy. “Victims of Family Violence Form ‘No Excuses! Choir’ to Inspire Others.” ABC News, April 1, 2016. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2016­04-­01/victims-­family-­violence-­form-­no-­excuses-­choir/7292076. Katz, David. “Composer Winners: Chorus Music, 2015.” The American Prize, 30 November, 2015. http://theamericanprize.blogspot.com/2015/11/ composer-­winners-­chorus-­music-­2015.html. McCarthy, Joe. “Syrian Children have Now Known a Decade of War: Report.” Global Citizen, 12 March, 2021. https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/ how-­has-­the-­syrian-­war-­impacted-­children/.

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McGuire, Kathleen. “John Rutter at Fifty: A Survey of His Music and Influences.” Master of Music diss., University of Surrey, 1995. Melbourne Gay and Lesbian Chorus. Accessed 18 November 2021. https:// www.mglc.org.au/. Monash University. “Deborah Cheetham.” Accessed 25 May, 2021. https:// research.monash.edu/en/persons/deborah-­cheetham-­ao. Myrow, Rachael. “‘Street Requiem’ Inspires Choir to Tackle Homeless Problem.” KQED Public Media, 27 January, 2017. https://www.kqed.org/ arts/12685435/street-­requiem-­inspires-­choir-­to-­tackle-­homeless-­problem. Patterson, Nicole. “LGBTQIA PLUS_SPI Communities.” Australian Institute of Family Studies. November, 2019. https://aifs.gov.au/cfca/publications/ lgbtiq-­communities#footnote-­001-­backlink. Sheerin, Jude. “Matthew Shepard: The Murder That Changed America.” BBC News, 26 October, 2018. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-­us-­canada-­ 45968606. Short Black Opera. Accessed 25 May, 2021. https://www.shortblackopera. org.au/team. Valentine, Gareth. Requiem in Memory of Those Who Have Died from AIDS. Choir of Southwark Cathedral (London). Jay Records, CDAY 1358, 1993, compact disc. Williams, Brian Dean. “The Dharma of Harm Reduction.” Buddhist Peace Fellowship, 6 April 2015. http://buddhistpeacefellowship.org/the-­dharma-­of-­ harm-­reduction/. Women’s Philharmonic Advocacy. “Homepage,” accessed 18 November 2021, https://wophil.org/.

CHAPTER 22

“When It Comes to Music Notation, I’m a Type Triple-A Composer!” Augusta Read Thomas

Introduction The composer and professor Augusta Read Thomas treats her scores with a meticulous hand. When composing, she is always thinking about the conductors and performers who will interpret them. Thomas is drawn to the details of notation, explaining, “My scores are highly nuanced, certainly detailed, every note having a dynamic, articulation and/or adjective. The notation explains exactly what I heard.” Unlike composers such as Alice Parker or even Gabriela Lena Frank, Thomas believes that all the

In interview with Jennifer Kelly, 30 June 2010 (Becket, Massachusetts, at Thomas’ private residence) From In Her Own Words: Conversations with Composers in the United States. Copyright 2013 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Used with permission of the University of Illinois Press.

A. R. Thomas (*) University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 L. Kouvaras et al. (eds.), The Composer, Herself, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23922-9_22

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information one needs is provided in the score, and she prides herself on crafting such a detailed score that few questions are left unanswered. Thomas’s catalogue includes music for varied ensembles, although she emphasises orchestral composition. Championed early in her career by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra as composer-in-residence from 1997–2006, she has numerous large orchestral works to her name. Certainly able to compose for any level of ensemble, Thomas is like Shulamit Ran in the sense that her music tends to be self-selected by more technically proficient musicians. She admires the young students emerging from conservatories with the technique to play any repertoire, and she cuts, crafts, and constantly re-edits to create a composition perfectly suited for those technically proficient players. Thomas’s concern for specific detail does not negate her acceptance of varied interpretations. During our conversation, she recounts an experience she had in the audience during the premiere of one of her works when the tempo was slowed beyond her initial level of comfort. Eventually, the conductor’s choice taught Thomas something new about her own composition. Thomas believes in the power of listening to understand a composer’s output, compositional choice, and musical development. A self-proclaimed “voracious listener,” she extends this importance of listening to all aspects of her career: she includes large listening assignments in her teaching; she listens extensively to a commissioning body’s representative recordings; and she laments past concerts where no lasting record exists. Sharing Hilary Tann’s desire to be present for all recordings, Thomas points out, “If recordings do not exist, there is much less work…. Composers depend heavily on past recordings to be offered future employment.” Born in 1964, Thomas has composed actively since her twenties and is already thinking about the legacy of her music and the legacy of compositional art. Composing in the large forms approximately every ten years, she wants to leave a developing chronicle of her compositional voice. She appreciates the need for an audience to hear more than a single work of a composer to gain any real insight into her or his work, and she supports festivals of just one or a few composers, exposing an audience to their depth and breadth. Thomas has consistently volunteered her time to serve on artistic organisational boards and to program festival concerts as an advocate for “musical excellence,” expressing great hope for the future of her profession. Although her compositional style contrasts starkly with that of composers such as Alice Parker, Maria Schneider, or Tann, they all share a desire to leave a recorded output and involve themselves directly in recording their works.

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Currently a professor of composition at the University of Chicago, Thomas has also taught at Eastman and Northwestern. In addition to her longtime residency with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Daniel Barenboim, she was also the Music Alive composer-in-­ residence with the New Haven Symphony 2009–11, as part of the national residency programme for the League of American Orchestras and Meet the Composer. Her works have been commissioned and performed by a number of high-profile orchestras and ensembles around the United States and in Europe. She curated the Festival of Contemporary Music at Tanglewood in 2009 and founded and curated the Music Now Series at the Chicago Symphony during her residency. The recipient of numerous awards and accolades, she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2007, and her work Astral Canticle was one of two finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in Music in 2007. Her works are published through G. Schirmer. JK (Jennifer Kelly): Being so busy, how do you balance the work and non-work parts of your life? ART: They’re the same. I can’t separate my life from my life. It’s all the identical integrated, holistic existence. JK: You must love what you do. ART: I do. It’s fun! It’s hard—very hard. But for instance, if we have family coming for a picnic, I’m not going to be at the piano. I’m going to be laughing, cooking and eating. That could seem like I’m outside of or away from the music but I’m not. I’m going to be thinking about music, carrying it in my ears. JK: Your husband [Bernard Rands] is also a well-respected composer. Do the two of you have a sense of competition among composers? ART: I don’t feel competitive with anybody in the world. JK: That’s a nice place to be. Have you always felt that way? ART: Well, I’m competitive with myself. Like all artists, I want to improve and make my pieces better—more refined—more elegant—more nuanced. To satisfy my own ears is demanding enough. I don’t think the arts are competitive in the purest sense. Monteverdi was fabulous, Mahler was spectacular, Ella Fitzgerald was a genius. They’re all A+ superstars none of whom does anything similar to another. History has shown us that there are a lot of brilliant ways to make and shape sounds. Vision, craft and excellence are key. Both Bernard and I want to create elegant

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pieces while hoping to be in good health with physical strength to compose. JK: When you sit on the boards, judge a competition, or program festivals, when you look at new music how do you choose what is programmed? ART: There’s a side of me that’s a twenty-first century musicologist because I listen to lots of current music and tend to know about what’s being written. James Levine asked me to curate the Festival of Contemporary Music at Tanglewood for the summer of 2009; I founded, and curated for nine years, the Music Now Series at the Chicago Symphony. I listen daily, always seeking excellence, asking: is the piece superlative on its own terms? The sounds could be of any style, syntax, language, duration or genre. I ask myself: is it excellent at what it set out to achieve and mean? I like to put great music on concert menus where diverse compositions start talking to one another such that there are far-reaching, interesting shifts from voice to voice. Concert programs should be like wonderful, delightfully arranged menus. In the process of looking for excellent compositions, often, one will find a score with a magnificent opening section but then it falls short of itself; or another score that worked up into something superior but it took forever to get there; or a score where the ending didn’t work, or was way too long for its ideas, or was far too compressed, or didn’t breathe musically. Then you come across a composition with stunning proportions, beautiful harmony, gorgeous notes, extremely creative hearing and thinking, plus a striking individual voice. A blockbuster! You know it when you hear it! Additionally, if we’re going to do a deep listen into the works of a composer, we’ve got to really listen not just to one piece. Any serious composer, when being reviewed, deserves to have ten pieces heard. We need to hear different genres as well as different eras from that composer. When we listen to Mahler, Stravinsky, Bach or Mozart, we listen across their lives and genres. Too often with contemporary composers, an audience member will sadly hear only one short piece. JK: When you are creating those menus for the programs is there a sense of responsibility of being a programmer to be egalitarian about it? To make sure that certain new composers are represented, living composers, women composers, and other underrepresented composers? Is that part of the decision process? ART: My first criterion is excellence, second is diversity of sounds (appetising menus) and third is egalitarian balance.

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JK: You were saying that when an audience hears a piece by a living composer that may be the only chance that they get to hear not only that piece but also that composer. ART: Right. A person might hear one piece and then five years later they’ll hear another piece by the same composer but they can’t remember the first one! Three years later they’ll hear another piece, but alas it’s hard to string those memories all together in one’s inner ear. Among the things composers enjoy are residencies when people invite us to visit and they perform many of our compositions on a “portrait” concert at which there’s a body of work being shared—it’s alive, it’s out there, being played, breathing, evolving. JK: As a composer, do you compose with that in mind knowing that that may be the only time an audience member hears you? ART: No. When I’m composing I’m just humbly seeking beautiful, integral sounds for my ears. I’m the first and most analytical, questioning, deeply listening audience member. JK: Some people consciously want to make sure it’s accessible to the audience member. ART: There are a lot of things in life that contain mystery such as religion, death, nature, the stars, the cosmos, trees, poetry… Likewise, music can be mysterious and does not need to be instantly accessible. If a composer has a voice and is writing music which has a richness about it, (if it isn’t just “surface-y” but rather truly has some nourishing protein in it) such as Bach, Mahler, Debussy, or Stravinsky, and so forth, then there exists a genuine artistic fortitude. All great composers’ works require multiple hearings; that’s why we keep coming back to their music for centuries. The music is lavish, life affirming and teaches deeply about the universe—thus we revisit it and crave it often. No problem if someone says, “Gusty, I think I liked your premiere. It was sparkling, colorful and I loved the rhythms but… I don’t understand it all…” That’s okay! Hopefully, they can hear it again someday because fertile music has to withstand multiple hearings. Some music is instantly accessible but alas, the second time we hear it, it’s over quickly if in fact there’s no meaningful, personal, imaginatively nourishing, original content. JK: How do you know when a piece of yours is making an impact? ART: One of the things that was characteristic of my career—I hate that word “career”—my life—is that I wrote a piece, somebody heard it and they commissioned another piece. Then somebody heard those two scores and commissioned a third work, perhaps even as much as

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twenty-five years later. My life evolves as people are playing the music, hearing the music and then commissioning another composition. I feel blessed indeed. JK: Your catalog is quite diverse. Is that part of what keeps the curiosity alive? ART: It is. Every composition is a new adventure. If anyone listened to the one hundred pieces published by G.  Schirmer, it would be obvious that they’re all tailor-made, vivid journeys. For Absolute Ocean, I listened to 15 recordings of the soprano for months before I wrote it. Composing for a wide variety of genres and custom-making distinct pieces is my deep-­ rooted passion. JK: That leads me to ask, what would be your ideal relationship between you and a performer or conductor of your pieces? Are you very hands on and want to be there or do you give your piece and then back off? ART: I can go either way—am very flexible. I try hard to be sensitive to how they wish to collaborate. My scores are highly nuanced, certainly detailed, every note having a dynamic, articulation and/or adjective. The notation explains exactly what I heard and players are often saying, “These are the most articulate scores. I have no questions. Thank you.” I kind of pride myself a tiny bit on such comments from virtuosic musicians. To give you an example, if I were rehearsing with a musician I might say, “This should be majestic, or play here with a lightness of touch…” So why not write that down on the manuscript? I feel responsible to present a commissioner with a lucid, nuanced artwork, not an amorphous blob. Proofreading carefully is essential. JK: So on the continuum of one side being everything you’d ever want to know is in the score and on the other side the score is only the beginning, you’re way over on the first side. ART: Way over there. Yes, I guess I’m a type triple A (laughs). It’s not vague for me. The players are awesome—super “chops-y.” They come out of Juilliard, Eastman, Northwestern, etc. and can play the entire repertoire. If I want the crescendo on the second beat, then I should put it there. They’ll play it and they can also feel why the crescendo had to be right there—same with articulations and other nuances. It’s akin to a beautifully punctuated poem where you know exactly what the poet wanted and meant. I like my music to be sculpted, skillfully punctuated and clean.

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JK: Does that equate to the performer not having much interpretive freedom? ART: Well, no I see it differently. I present artists with an eloquent, fluent poem and then, with their sublime expertise, musicianship, years of training, they take the sounds to a higher level. At least we start our journey together with a persuasive text and with their technical instrumental brilliance. Subsequently, performers can spin and weave their inspired magic and make the music theirs—‘tis not mine anymore. JK: Can a conductor ever pull something out of a piece of music that you didn’t know was in it? ART: Yes, definitely! One instance where this often comes up is with tempos. Christoph Eschenbach has premiered many my works and I remember he took exceedingly slow tempos in one of the movements from Chanting to Paradise for chorus, solo soprano, and orchestra. I thought the whole thing was going to grind to a halt and was a nervous wreck. There are big, rich chords and Christoph wanted the chorus to be holding them in the air, like floating sunshine, just hanging in the resonant concert hall. My thinking was that the harmonic rhythm was stagnant because, although the chords were plush, when you slow it down that much…? And when he came off stage he said, “I love that—hear the space!” The next night I listened to it through his ears and thought, “It really does work well at his tempo.” It worked because the manner in which he conducted the one hundred eighty choral members as if virtually not breathing. Christoph generously taught me something. Whether I changed the tempo marking for those twenty bars of the piece is neither here nor there; rather, it’s that it taught me something for my next pieces for which I remain forever in his debt. Ditto with all the musicians with whom I have had the luxury and privilege to work closely. My favorite thing in life is working closely with performing musicians as they have been among my most vital teachers. I love to hear their critique and advice and am never defensive. When they will tell me exactly what they think, I consider it a huge gift they are granting. JK: Since we’re dealing with certain details like articulation, dynamics, and tempo, let’s talk a little bit about creative process. You mentioned the piano earlier. Do you compose at the piano? ART: I do use the piano daily but I don’t compose AT it. In Chicago, I will play for two hours in the morning, writing chords, notes, tunes, rhythms—generally creating a force field of musical materials. Then I move to my drafting tables, in a different room, to compose on manuscript.

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JK: When an idea first comes to you, what do you hear? ART: It’s different for every piece as well as for every section of each composition. Some pieces start with a motive, others start with a chain link of chords, or with a color, or with a capricious rhythm. Never the same twice! The beginning of my ballet Terpsichore’s Dream is dance like with motivic materials built for pizzicati and two harps. Then there is a long section with lush chords that span five octaves, hanging in the sonic space, through which threads a long, lyrical, high trombone solo accented by bells and cymbals. There’s another section where it’s fast, punchy and jazzy. Each section is uniquely composed. In short, I try to invent a force field of plentiful, flexible materials, always transform and sculpt those materials, hopefully, creating sounds that are vivid, alive and imaginatively moving. JK: At what point does architecture come into it? ART: Right at the beginning. JK: So you know the form or the architecture before you start? ART: Well, genre and duration are prescribed. When I know the musical materials, I draw lots of formal maps. I feel that for my music (and this does not apply to how anyone else should compose!) the form should be the reaction to the objects calling it into being. The opposite of what I describe casually as ice cube trays, where all of the formal “phrases” are predefined. The formal, block, ice cube like sections are prearranged and one pours the material into them. I’m doing the opposite by, to continue the silly metaphor, letting the water settle where it naturally settles; that’s then the form. The form is a response to the objects calling it into being not unlike a jazz improvisation. Added to this method, then I’m constantly editing down to only the essentials. Cut, cut, cut so that before anyone hears my music I have tightened the form countless times, taking my organic field of ice, fashioning and sculpting it. JK: I think one of the hardest things for any creator to learn is how to self-edit. Where did you learn it? ART: From twenty-five years of wanting to create concise music. Even a tiny cut makes clarity. Removing ten seconds makes a world of difference. I constantly ask my performers, just out of curiosity, if they think the music needs a short cut of a few bars here or there. JK: I know that you read a lot of poetry. Your compositional process sounds like you are crafting a poem, everything is very deliberate. ART: Crazy as this sounds, I think of my compositions as poems on fire—very precise—yet with a lot of spontaneous life and human spirit.

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[Gerard Manley] Hopkins poems are burning off the page they’re so hot, imaginative, creative and full of explosively gorgeous images and words. Ditto with Emily Dickinson. Every word is like a little bomb—beautiful words in elegantly crafted, blazing juxtapositions. Here are two poets whose works are vastly inspiring for their content, sounds and concision. Yes! Definitely a corollary! JK: So when you’re writing for chorus or for voice, what’s the relationship you like to have with text? ART: I have to love the meaning of the words as well as the sounds of the words. JK: The way you verbally speak them? ART: Yes. If the poem is one and my music is one it shouldn’t add up to two because, in that scenario, the poem didn’t need my music and my music didn’t honor the poem. One plus one has to add up to something like twenty-seven, to multiply, transform and turn into another object. Also vis-à-vis the sounds of the words themselves, I’m very aware of the physiology of a singer. JK: So you’re consciously thinking about this when you choose the text? ART: I sing all my pieces thus am aware of a singer’s lungs, tongue, cheeks and throat. I’m really thinking about what they are physically doing to make this exact vowel sound right here on this pitch. So, when looking for poems to set, yes, I’m already thinking about vocal mechanics. JK: Do you feel a responsibility to use the entirety of the poem? ART: Yes, generally. JK: Was there a defining moment that you realized you were a composer? ART: Gradually, over twenty years, I started to find composition more interesting than playing. I thought it might be more fun to make everything up out of thin air rather than sit and play my one part. So steadily composing evolved and bloomed from a childhood filled with singing, playing, and writing. My childhood was akin to a big, musical river morphing into a composer as a deep result of twenty years practicing, performing and singing. JK: Did you have mentors that helped bring you along? ART: Yes, I did. MANY! One of the high school teachers noticed how much I was composing. Consequently the school had an outside composer, Marilyn Ziffrin, come to campus to teach me. It was amazing. When I went to college I had many wonderful mentor teachers, Alan

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Stout being especially fantastic. I still consider him my teacher even though I haven’t had a lesson in over twenty-five years. The other teachers I’ve had, not to sound preposterous, include Byrd, Bach, Mozart, Ravel, Debussy, Stravinsky, Berio, Takemitsu, Boulez, Knussen, among many others including countless jazz artists and numerous performing musicians. JK: So you really studied their works. ART: Yeah I did. Mahler. Mingus. Art Tatum, Schumann. There’s a lot to learn. You don’t have to sit with a composer, nor show them your own music seeking their comments, in order to be taught directly from them. Music by others is a mammoth, lifelong inspiration. JK: You bring up a good point. How does one teach composition? ART: It depends on the student but the way my private lessons were structured at Eastman and at Northwestern was with a third of the lesson as an exercise, not necessarily to go into a piece (make three chords that progress, or make three chords that don’t progress, or take this rhythm and transform it eleven times—i.e.: tiny crossword puzzle assignments). A third of the lesson was repertoire study and listening. (In-depth listening assignments for which students had to write what they liked, didn’t like, and what they learned from the music. This was something I learned to include in lessons from my close friend Chris Rouse.) The remaining time was spent on the original music they composed. JK: What does classical music have to do to make sure it’s still viable fifty years from now? ART: Classical music is viable because the repertoire is excellent and performers are awe-inspiring. What Beethoven made changed the universe—same with Mozart, Mahler, Brahms, Debussy, Ella, Miles, Coltrane, Tatum, Evans, etc. The early Stravinsky ballets are unbelievable and among the greatest constructs of civilisation. The Goldberg Variations—transcendent! Glenn Gould plays Bach beyond gorgeously! JK: Do you think people just find them? ART: There are infinite amounts of great music as well as musicians who have the chops to perform it exquisitely. I don’t think the problem is on the performance or creative side, nor people fundamentally needing and loving music. People want to play and hear the Rite of Spring. It’s fun! With all of that positive energy… I get up every morning for the past thirty years and compose. We have to be optimists that people will seek and find all kinds of music. JK: What skills did you need beyond your formal training to prepare you for a life as a composer?

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ART: OY! (laughs) Let’s see…in any random order…time management, compartmentalising various duties into certain sections of a given day, citizenship at large, stopping everything in one’s inner ear plus creative life to try to help a student in some small way, acting like a travel agent, disciplined diet when traveling, working on very little sleep, catching a 6:00 AM flight from O’Hare, which means arriving at the airport at 4:30 AM, chairing Boards, responding for requests for CDs and scores in a timely fashion, delivering pre-concert lectures, delivering on-stage lectures just before a world premiere, participating in interviews and radio shows, hiring someone to build a website, chairing faculty searches, programming the music of my colleagues, advocating for the music of my colleagues, administrating engravers’ schedules, getting to Fedex, fifty-five seconds before the cut off time, all while being a devoted family member to my siblings, taking charge and care of a mother with Alzheimer’s for a decade…. JK: As someone who has spent many years teaching the next generation of composers, what has become important to you to pass on to them? ART: Earlier you asked about how I teach composition lessons and I replied: 1/3 Craft; 1/3 Repertoire study; 1/3 Creative work. In addition to these three top priorities for students, it is fundamentally my passion to inspire them to be 100% honest, pure, soul-searching and iconoclastically who THEY are as artists—to be THEM to the max. Furthermore, they need to recognize, from my teaching of the great repertoire, that spending a lifetime creating new sounds and forms out of thin air each day, for eighty years, takes the determination of a rock solid, purposeful, visionary soul. Teaching is a natural extension of my creative process and of my avid enthusiasm for and curiosity about the music of other cultures and artists so it is also my hope to pass along to my student colleagues the simple and humble model of my sheer daily enthusiasm for and delight about all kinds of music. I want them to love music. I need them to love music for me to be effective as a mentor. JK: Who is sitting in the audiences today? ART: It depends. For a chamber music event it’s one group; for an orchestra event it’s a different group of people. If it’s a solo violin recital, it’s again a different audience. Choruses usually have yet again a different set of devoted audience members. I don’t feel that I’m going from hall to hall, city to city, encountering the same “generic audience.” JK: So, does it come down to programming?

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ART: It takes time to get to know great music, to study it and inform oneself about its contexts. These days, people don’t have a lot of time; furthermore, they can do hundreds of other things such as watch videos, movies and sports. Who is going to sit down and listen to a forty-five-­ minute symphony when they could watch the New England Patriots, play ping-pong, or go swimming? It’s a devoted type of person who wants to read all of James Joyce. Who has read the complete Emily Dickinson? If people can get to the music, they’ll like it. Part of the problem with classical art music, especially in the large genres, is disseminating recordings. It’s a tricky thing, for instance, I never received recordings of four of my Chicago Symphony Orchestra world premieres. Heartbreaking!! JK: That would be hard. All the work you put into it. ART: And all the work they put into it. There’s no document—whatever it was evaporated instantly into thin air unless G. Schirmer can inspire another orchestra to play the composition. Unless we can sort out how to get new music recorded and circulated, it’s going to be problematical because, as I said earlier, most of the work composers receive is due to people hearing recordings of their music. Patrons don’t commission just because they like us. They carefully listen to previous works; hence composers depend heavily on past recordings to be offered future employment. JK: Was there a point when you realised that you were a woman in this compositional career? ART: Sometimes people refer to me as a woman composer. I remember The New  York Times wrote a very long time ago about me as “the young woman composer.” They used “woman” but I don’t have the word female or woman on my website, resumé, nor biography. I’m a composer. Yes. JK: Do you think there’s still a need nowadays for things like women only concerts, festivals and CDs? ART: What we need is excellent work by whoever wrote it, male, female, gay, bi-sexual, transgender, old, young, green, blue or purple. I teach, program and listen based on artistic excellence and grace. JK: Where would you like to see classical art music go fifty or a hundred years from now? ART: I would like to see it well funded. It takes a lot to write a quartet. It takes a lot to perform a quartet. It takes a lot present a quartet. JK: It takes a lot. And more so for contemporary music. ART: Exactly. Sports stars making twenty million dollars a year and bankers paying themselves million-dollar annual bonuses when compared

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to a string quartet that asks for an extra hour of rehearsal space and they’re told, “No”—is truly crazy. If the arts are going to survive, we all have to support them. I have never been an “each man for himself” type person. Rather, it interests me to be part of an international team of musicians working together to continually elevate and fund the arts for all. JK: Reading your biography, you consistently are part of a board or are volunteering here or there. Not only are you an artist-creator but also you’re an artist who is a citizen of art to perpetuate the art. ART: I’m trying to be, yes. Endeavoring every day to spread positive ripples. JK: Why is it important to you to spend so much time in volunteer positions and what do you hope to affect? ART: There are many close mentors in my life who are sublime artist-­ citizen-­leaders in the profession. Far too many to list in this interview though, for your reference, a very short list would include: John Harbison, Oliver Knussen, Steven Stucky, Pierre Boulez, Shulamit Ran, Ed Harsh, Fran Richard, James Kendrick, Daniel Barenboim, Yehudi Wyner, Cliff Colnot, Gunther Schuller, Ed Yim, David Robertson, David Rakowski, Martin Bresnick, Tony Fogg, David Felder, Claire Chase, Frank Oteri, Jesse Rosen, David Skidmore, Aaron Kernis, Gil Rose …and the list goes on, on and on… I could spend this whole interview just listing some very small portion of the rest of these superstars! Citizenship is important because our art form at large immensely needs numerous mentors and leaders creating broad and creative contexts in which we can all work together to further music’s flexible, diverse capacity and innate power. So yes, for this reason, I consider it a huge honor to try, in some tiny way, to serve, hoping to make a modest effort to affect, for the better, with energy and love, our huge and vibrant profession. All composers throughout history have needed the strong backing of great leaders, colleagues and musicians, who have depth, soul, excellence, vision, and who think, program and perform with expertise and sparkle. Without such complete backing, composition is an impossible endeavor at which for a culture to improve. JK: Many people would love to commission a composer but don’t know the first thing about what’s a fair price or how to go about it. Some of it would be the responsibility of the composer in marketing so that the conductors know where to find the composers and the composers know where to find the people that are looking to have commissions.

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ART: Yes! True! The history of music is a history of private individuals who took the leap of faith to commission a new piece. Due to such vision and generosity, humanity has a treasure-trove of masterpieces. JK: Is there a piece you’d love to write and you’re just waiting for the right commission to come along? ART: I’d like to compose another cello concerto… I have an early one titled Ritual Incantations from 1999, of which I’m proud, though am yearning to create another. I’d also like to compose a piece for a hot big band. Every ten years I want to continue to do a substantial solo piano work. In 1989 I composed Concerto for Orchestra and then seventeen years later I created Helios Choros. Accordingly, in five to eight years, I’d like to share another extended orchestral vision. JK: It sounds like even in your mid-forties you’re already thinking about legacy. ART: The difference between early Stravinsky and mid-period Stravinsky is fascinating. Early Beethoven/late Beethoven. Early Mozart/ late Mozart. I’m an avid listener and I find it remarkable how artists transform. JK: As a conductor, I’m really interested in identity, the nuance of identity and how that comes out in a composer’s work. What was going on in their lives at the time? What part of the country do they live in? What’s their first language? I see so much of that in my study of scores that comes out in the music and it changes over time. You are somebody who has been well vetted by musicians and critics, and certainly a publisher is championing your work. Are there ever periods of self-doubt in your writing? ART: I am very grateful for G. Schirmer’s support. Every moment of my life has a yin and yang of complete self-doubt balanced, interconnected and interdependent with utter hope. As if one hundred percent full of self-­ doubt and one hundred percent full of hope. They flip back and forth. I ask, “Can this chord or motive be improved? It’s got to be more integrated. How can I refine it? Oh my goodness, this is weak. Oh my goodness, it’s good.” Back and forth… I torture myself daily! My core needs to design and shape things so even in periods of doubt I still invent something. The best way I might put it: I exert endless self-criticism but the creative river runs very deep inside of me so I don’t have “freakouts.” I am too entrenched in artistic journeys, every day trying to fill silence with a graceful, personal sound.

CHAPTER 23

How My Music Is Made: “Tantôt Libre, Tantôt Recherché” Nicola LeFanu

Introduction As I compose, in “real time”, my pencil is guided by my intuition. I do not know from what hinterland of the imagination the next aural ideas will come. But as each moment takes shape, it does so within a larger context which, however obscurely perceived, has been present from the beginning. A half-conscious sense of what this new work may be overall, together with glimpses of its myriad tiny details, is there at its conception. Sketching seems like training the inner ear, just as an athlete trains for a race. At first, my playing with shapes and colours, with rhythms, pitches and timbres, seems somewhat arbitrary: a limbering up. As the imagination quickens, my ear comes into focus. Suddenly I can hear as if I had Absolute Pitch, and the sketches needed for this particular piece and no other, come sharply into relief. I feel like a poet who has discovered the imagery for a poem, and the form in which it will be cast, and now has to find the words that will express it. Sometimes they are elusive and the search requires tenacity; sometimes they flow, like a benison. N. LeFanu (*) York, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 L. Kouvaras et al. (eds.), The Composer, Herself, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23922-9_23

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In this chapter, I look back across fifty years of composing and explore the way in which harmony creates the structure of my music. Harmony operates through space (register) and time (rhythm) to shape and pace my compositions, both in instrumental concert works and in dramatic works for the opera theatre. As my figures illustrate, harmony is implicit in melodic lines as well as explicit in “vertical” sonorities. My harmony is always functional: it is best described as modal, since its use of pitch centres and pitch sets creates clear hierarchies. It is not tonal, though it is always influenced by my understanding of long-term tonal voice-leading. Similarly, though never strictly serial, my music could not have been written without my knowledge of (and love for) the music of Berg, Webern, and Dallapiccola. European modernism in art, literature, and music has been the single strongest influence on my work. Undoubtedly too, the music of my mother, the composer Elizabeth Maconchy, has been a continuous inspiration. My pitch sets are chosen so that they encapsulate the sound world I imagine for a particular work. I use them to create a network of relationships. I extend and develop musical ideas or images through transformation, not through direct or sequential repetition. I like to make sets that enable me to move out from chromatic harmony, to a diatonic harmony or a microtonal language. To use a visual analogy, I create different harmonic planes in order to suggest perspective. I am a practitioner, not a theorist: systematic process is inimical to me. However, intuitive composing is not a case of bumbling around in the dark. The imagination must be nurtured through performance, analysis, and whatever studies and pre-compositional sketching are appropriate. It is for this reason that I like to cite Beethoven’s prefix to the Grosse Fuge: “tantôt libre, tantôt recherché”.1 For me, it captures the essence of what it is to compose—a quest, a search, in which all the forces of the intelligence are harnessed, to fire the imagination.

But Stars Remaining (1971) My 1971 work, But Stars Remaining for solo soprano (written for Jane Manning), embodies my understanding of the word “melody” and exemplifies a clear voice-leading. An unaccompanied scena, it is a literal monody, whereas the works that followed it, though monodic in 1

 “Somewhat free, somewhat scholarly/academic.”

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Fig. 23.1  Nicola LeFanu, But Stars Remaining (1970)

Fig. 23.2  Nicola LeFanu, But Stars Remaining (1970)

structure, were conceived for large forces—ensemble or orchestra. But Stars Remaining, setting lines from C.  Day Lewis, is an aubade which contrasts open, extroverted musical images with an intimate, inward music. In its first phrase it opens up three registers: the initial D5, emphasised by its neighbour note decorations, acts as a reference from which we can hear the higher register gradually ascending (to A5); meanwhile the lower register (“to be with you”) is opened up, but only hints at its longer-­ term function (Fig. 23.1).2 The lowest fifth of the soprano voice offers the advantage of moving between speaking and singing; provided the singer does not over-project, it gives the tessitura a peculiarly vulnerable quality (one exploited brilliantly by Mozart). In But Stars Remaining, the journey of the lowest register goes from its embryonic beginnings to its fulfilment in the quiet centre of the piece: “rest from loving” (Fig. 23.2).3 Just as a braid of several strands is stronger than a single thread, so the interaction of the different registers in But Stars Remaining creates a “braided” melody: there is a rhythm of contour as well as the highly 2 3

 Nicola LeFanu, But Stars Remaining (London: Novello, 1970).  LeFanu, But Stars Remaining, 3.

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Fig. 23.3  Nicola LeFanu, But Stars Remaining (1970)

articulated foreground rhythm of the unfolding line; there is a rhythm of timbre as the voice moves between its different tessitura. In particular, a “braided” melody allows for richer possibilities of pitch function. Thus, at the beginning D5 is a stable pitch, helping to create a hierarchy in which it has a primary place, but in which its function evolves so that it becomes increasingly unstable and mobile. Meanwhile, C5 is almost unnoticed at the beginning, merely an ornament. In the final phrases of the piece, these pitches function very differently in order to create closure. C5 is the point of symmetry in the cadential ninth, (F4 to G5); unheard, but implicit as a stable centre because of its position in the preceding phrase. B-flat5, earlier the goal and focal point of the piece, is now part of a melisma (Fig. 23.3) that acts as an extended appoggiatura, drawing together the disparate registral threads in preparation for the cadence. Despite its apparent role of reprise, D5 has been displaced by this melisma: its quality now is akin to that of a supertonic and rhythmically it disappears into an afterbeat to the G5 (Fig. 23.3).4 Of the analysis above, not one whit was present in my mind when But Stars Remaining was composed one summer weekend. It was written intuitively, without preconceived intentions as to its use of register to create a complex line. It was the fruit, perhaps, of earlier studies: exploration of serial and post serial techniques in Chiaroscuro for solo piano (1970); the double variations of my Oboe Quartet (1968), in which rhythm becomes released from metre; the several dramatis personae contained within the single line of my oboe Soliloquy (1966). With hindsight, But Stars Remaining was a fruit with a number of seeds. It was followed by substantial works: two for symphony orchestra, The Hidden Landscape (BBC Proms, 1973) and Columbia Falls (City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, 1975), and my first opera, Dawnpath

4

 LeFanu, But Stars Remaining, 4.

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(New Opera Company, 1977). Structurally, each of these works can be understood as a monody, though one expressed through multi-faceted textures created by sixty or seventy musicians rather than a lone singer.

The Same Day Dawns (1974) Between these two big orchestral pieces, I wrote The Same Day Dawns (The Fromm Foundation, Boston 1974), a chamber work for voice and small ensemble, a cycle of song miniatures set to Oriental texts. I needed to go back to the drawing board; I wanted too, to explore musical forms that were not goal-directed. Where the orchestral works are directional, moving inexorably to climax and resolution, I wanted to discover what happens when the music is elliptical, avoiding dialectic, avoiding any kind of rhetoric. If there is a narrative, it is no longer a linear one. The words I chose were brief and fragmentary; all are translations, their origin in ancient Asian texts thus doubly remote from us. There is no progression from one to another, nor any consequentiality as to which settings return unchanged, which reappear in new guises and which pass fleetingly, never heard again. In these songs of distance and desire, time is the time of dreams: it passes without measure, a moment expanding or contracting beyond rationality. That harmony is implicit in the melodic line is readily apparent in The Same Day Dawns. “The time I went…” opens up a single chord, moving from its lowest components to a focal G5 (Figs. 23.4 and 23.5).5 The texture is heterophonic, and the material essentially diatonic. As such, it is the complement to the chromatic collection (a hexachord built on F-sharp) which underpins “The still drone”, the setting which initially precedes it, later follows it. Their complementarity allows either position, formally. Harmonic movement is created as we pass from one setting to the next. But it also exists on another level: in “the still drone” the chromatic line etched by the voice continually changes our perception of the chord prolonged underneath. Since each song is a miniature, the music is pared down, as economic as possible: every event has its role in creating a tiny structure that must be at once self-contained, yet open. Heterophony is the predominant texture, since this allows for rhythmic and melodic fluidity while retaining the harmonic clarity necessary for such “bare essential” forms. In “O my Lord 5

 Nicola LeFanu, The Same Day Dawns (London: Novello, 1974), 4.

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Fig. 23.4  Nicola LeFanu The Same Day Dawns (1974)

Fig. 23.5  Nicola LeFanu The Same Day Dawns (1974)

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Fig. 23.6  Nicola LeFanu The Same Day Dawns (1974)

Jasmine” from this cycle, movement is created through a succession of tetrads, the initial central E-flat4 gradually transforming into the wide E-flat octaves that form the cadence (Fig. 23.6).6 A further kind of harmonic movement comes in the instrumental sections cast as mobiles, creating multiple glimpses of a single harmonic field. If The Same Day Dawns is predominantly a lyric work, its harmony understood through melody, here is its inverse side: consecutive line is absent. Each musician has a group of fragments that they use, in any order, to 6

 LeFanu, The Same Day Dawns, 6–7.

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build up successive passages. The unfolding of time is comprehended through the articulation of a vertical sonority, rapidly changing at the surface, slow moving underneath.

Columbia Falls (1975) After The Same Day Dawns, I returned to orchestral composition with a broader technical vocabulary. This enriched technique meant that I was ready to create movement on a much larger scale. In Columbia Falls (1975) an orchestral work commissioned by the Feeney Trust, I worked for the first time with pitch sets that would enable me to move from a fully chromatic vocabulary to a diatonic one; and enable working with pitch hierarchies that would allow a much more diverse harmony that nevertheless retained its coherence (Fig. 23.7).7 Figure 23.7 shows the “home” transposition of the set for Columbia Falls. In the sketches I made before beginning the piece, I used this transposition in several ways; one was to explore symmetrical harmony around an axis of G. Writing out the chromatic set in a 12 × 12 matrix with the prime as first line and inversion as first column, created a kind of reservoir of pitches in which my imagination roamed freely. I was looking for nontwelve-note collections; for closely related pitch collections of from four to eight notes, which were sufficiently characteristic to retain their as I moved between them. Unlike later pieces of mine, Columbia Falls was not primarily concerned with symmetrical harmony as such. More important was my use of the two hexachords of the set in combination with their seventh order transformation, explored through the so-called “Gemini” matrix. This was a 6 × 6 matrix created by David Lumsdaine in the 1960s8 and subsequently used by a number of his pupils. Seventh order transformation applied to a

Fig. 23.7  Nicola LeFanu, sketch for Columbia Falls (1975)  Nicola LeFanu, “Columbia Falls Sketch,” unpublished manuscript, 1975.  Michael Hall, Between Two Worlds: The Music of David Lumsdaine (Todmordon: Arc Music, 2003), 44. 7 8

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chromatic scale produces its polar opposite, the cycle of fifths; applying it to a set of my own was equally illuminating. The first task was to create the right set: one that encapsulated my vision for the piece and contained the seeds to generate all that must come from it. The original ideas for Columbia Falls came to me while I was listening to the rehearsals of my previous orchestral piece, The Hidden Landscape (1973). Huge, high-density chords were a part of this; finding the appropriate harmonic field for them was one priority. Another initial idea was of different musics for each orchestral “family” (strings, wind, brass); the rhythmic shaping of their pitch material, and the nature of their different textures would create the separate harmonic paths they pursue. Only when their separate planes finally come into phase with one another can the music achieve a climactic resolution and the possibility of closure. Register was the crucial parameter that allowed me to shape this substantial work, a single arch of some twenty-five minutes. It could operate at a simple level in the line of a soloist, defining “home” registers for particular pitches and defining the hierarchies that clarify which pitches are structural and which are decorative; which are relatively stable and which will prove highly mobile. Rhythmic contour interprets this for us, so that the harmony is lucid; though the listener has no vocabulary to describe it, nor needs one, nevertheless the aural experience of harmonic movement must be vivid. Pitch and rhythm work together to create the larger anacruses and the focal arrival points that allow listeners to orient themselves. These arrival points are structural downbeats, but they do not act as brakes on the music’s flow. Rather, they gather up energy, the better to move forward: the evolving harmony transforms them into upbeats, so that the overall harmonic rhythm is cumulative, moving inexorably to the moment when everything comes into phase. Register could also be used so that the entire musical space was saturated like an enveloping mist, blurring all familiar outlines. In Columbia Falls, I avoided complete chromatic saturation, using instead different glimpses of the latent harmonic field so that it might be partially revealed, now in diatonic guise, now more highly coloured. Like using a band-pass filter, a new area of the underlying resonance could be brought into relief. Whatever emerged from these dense sonorities would take the next step in the long-term voice-leading, as if an endless melody was unfolding; not a melody to be understood only in single notes, but one that could encompass the widest or most intricate textures in its expression.

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The Old Woman of Beare (1981) The Old Woman of Beare for soprano and large ensemble (Lontano/ Macnaghten Concerts, 1981)9 was a work in which I was able to bring together both the dramatic and lyrical aspects of my music. Although this monodrama is a narrative work, the deliberate confusion of tenses in the text suggested a cyclic approach rather than a directly progressive one. I made my own libretto from this famous Irish mediaeval text, drawing heavily on the beautiful version by Brendan Kennelly.10 The poem is written in the first person: recalling youth from the vantage point of old age, the old woman transcends time, creating the present out of the past. Living on Ireland’s wild Atlantic coast, all her imagery is drawn from the sea; from the ever-recurring cycle of the tides, surging at equinox or retreating to leave a trail of flotsam. It is both a literal imagery and a metaphorical one, as she relives her turbulent sexual history. In my vocal line there are no boundaries between speech and song: melody reaches from the half-heard contour of a whisper to the highly charged articulated rhythm of fully projected singing.11 As the work concludes, the fragmentary diatonic line is close to that of folksong (Fig. 23.8).12 The tide-cycle imagery of the text was ideal for the harmonic language I wanted to create; on one level, highly directional and chromatic; on another, moving cyclically through a slowly evolving harmonic field. No longer is the harmony predominantly to be understood in terms of its fundamental, heard “from the bass up”; there is much more use of harmonies understood from the centre outwards, radiating asymmetrically (never symmetrically) from a pivotal axis. I allied the movement of the pitch to a contracting rhythmic cycle: this was liberating, broadening the language both as to colour and to procedure. Although The Old Woman of Beare still uses pitch material generated from a single twelve note set, it is also a work in which the harmony can be understood modally. The pitch E acts as a focal pitch for much of the piece, moving in and out of stability as it changes its tessitura. Towards the end, the focal pitch moves to C, first the ‘cello open C2, and then through 9  Nicola LeFanu, “The Old Woman of Beare,” on British Women Composers Volume 1. Conducted by Odaline De La Martinez. Lorelt, LNT 101, 1997, compact disc. 10  Brendan Kennelly, The Penguin Book of Irish Verse, ed. Brendan Kennelly (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970): 62–64. 11  “Nicola LeFanu,” Contemporary Music Review 11 (1994): 186–87. 12  Nicola LeFanu, The Old Woman of Beare (London: Novello, 1981), 63.

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Fig. 23.8  Nicola LeFanu, The Old Woman of Beare (1981)

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middle C4 to C5 as the work dissolves in an open cadence: its mode can have no final, since the Old Woman is drifting, cast up on a metaphorical strand as she awaits her death.13

A Penny for A Song (1981) My previous years of composing, and the studies I had made, enabled The Old Woman of Beare to be written in a matter of weeks. It was followed by the song cycle A Penny for A Song for soprano and piano (1981), written without prior sketches: born directly from the experience of the large ensemble work, these songs could be written straight down, intuitively, though their formal shapes and imagery are from a different world. Together, these pieces from the summer of 1981 mark a watershed moment in my work. From then on, modality played a larger part; from this time too, music from outside my immediate tradition makes its presence felt. The Old Woman of Beare has a debt to Korean p’ansori; discovering the colotomic structure of gamelan, and experiencing its tuning, had also left their mark. The “winter journey” song in A Penny for A Song reconstructs Chopin while acknowledging Schubert; but a visitation of the past did not happen in a thoroughgoing manner until Light Passing, a chamber opera with a libretto by John Edmonds (2004).

Extension of My Chromatic Language: Microtonality and Diatonic Modality More significant at this stage was the extension of my chromatic language in two contrasting directions: into microtonality on the one hand, and into a diatonic modality on the other. My undergraduate exploration of microtones in the 1960s had been comparatively superficial, inspired by Lutosławski’s Trois Poèmes d’Henri Michaux (1963), and Jeux Venitiens (1961). Nor, in the years immediately following, was I aware of what was happening with my contemporaneous generation in France: Tristan Murail, Gérard Grisey; the French music I knew was Messiaen, Boulez,  The last part of the piece appears in: James R. Bristow, ed., A Contemporary Anthology of Music by Women (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 130–54. 13

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and Jolas. Only in Catena for eleven solo strings (2000)14 can the influence of Spectralism be heard. The possibility of adding a microtonal gamut opened up again for me in 1983 after hearing the playing of John Edward Kelly (saxophonist) and the Rascher Saxophone Quartet. The ease and delicacy of their tuning was extraordinary. It allowed me, in the quartet I wrote for them, Moon over Western Ridge, Mootwingee (1984) to create a harmonic world that was much simpler, but no less rich in possibility. From a modal, Aeolian homophony, the music could shift perspective as it was inflected, first chromatically, and then by quarter tones. I found it entrancing to create shadows and ambiguities around the simple skeletal modality and explored this again later in my Saxophone Concerto (1989) for saxophone and string orchestra. In the meantime, the greater transparency and range of reference this gave my language proved invaluable as I moved towards a more consistent engagement with opera.

The Story of Mary O’Neill (1986) The Story of Mary O’Neill (BBC Radio 3, 1986), a radio opera for voices alone, provided an ideal opportunity to discover how this extended harmonic palette could be used to unfold a dramatic narrative. The opera begins in the nineteenth century as the O’Neills emigrate from famine-­ struck Ireland to South America; it follows the tale of Mary O’Neill and her descendants, up to the present day. In its reflections on colonialism, the opera needed to overturn our understanding of “primitive” and “civilised,” “raw” and “cooked,” and thus it is the music of the Irish and Guarani characters that is the most evolved, in contrast to the well-­ intentioned English. While the musical debts are there—Luciano Berio, Luigi Nono, Olivier Messiaen’s Cinq Rechants for twelve a capella voices (1949)—the melodic contours and the harmonic resonance they create are very much my own (Fig. 23.9).15

14  Nicola LeFanu, “Catena,” on Nicola LeFanu: Cantena for Eleven Solo Strings. String Quartet No. 2. Clarinet Concertino. Goldberg Ensemble, Naxos 8.557389, 2004, compact disc. 15  Nicola LeFanu, “The Story of Mary O’Neill Sketch,” unpublished manuscript, 1986.

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Fig. 23.9  Nicola LeFanu, The Story of Mary O’Neill (1986), early sketch

Blood Wedding (1992) Blood Wedding (Women’s Playhouse Trust, London 1992), the most substantial of my eight operas, took my technique further, even though I chose to cast Lorca’s text in a traditional operatic mode. In Lorca’s tragic play (1932), the anguish of forbidden love, the unbearable tenderness of transgression, are played out in a dry and unrelenting landscape: a stony confinement both literal and metaphorical. Fired by the knife-edged clarity of Lorca’s text, I needed a musical language that could be both spare and transparent, or claustrophobically dense. Moving between the most diatonic modality and a fully chromatic vocabulary, I secured the harmonic rhythm through the longest-term voice-leading I had yet attempted, expressed across two hours in a Fibonacci-derived set of proportions. However, Lorca’s play undergoes a sea-change when the scene changes to the forest in Act Three. Where previously all has been dialogue, cut and thrust, the long scena for the personified Moon takes us into the world of Romance, of poetic fantasy:16 Cisne redondo en el río ojo de las catedrales, alba fingida en las hojas soy; ¡no podrán escaparse! (Round swan on the river/cathedrals’ eye/I am the false dawn on the leaves/they shan’t escape!)

16  Federico Garcia Lorca, Bodas de Sangre, Ed. Allen Josephs and Juan Caballero (Madrid: Ediciones Catedra, 1989).

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This was the scene with which Lorca said he was most satisfied, and at this point in the opera, microtonality appears for the first time. Our sense of gravity is dislodged; as moonlight splinters through the dark forest, lighting up the fleeing lovers, so the music moves into the cracks of its former harmony. I cast the Moon as a countertenor, and in Clapton’s inspired performance, the probing microtones of the melodic line were as eerie as I had intended.17 My musical language for this opera, with its unashamed debts to Dallapiccola, if not Janáček, had been inescapably penetrated by the microtonality. The most brilliant stroke of Deborah Levy, the librettist, lay in the last scene, and made the work’s feminist deconstruction unambiguous. Unlike Lorca, Levy’s final tableau is for women alone: each generation trapped in a web of its own making. I set this as an extended passacaglia, through which I threaded a strophic folksong. In the wide-ranging tessitura of the chromatic harmonies of the passacaglia (an expanding cycle of thirteen chords) I could gradually bring closure to the voice-leading begun two hours earlier. In my diatonic folksong, written in a quasi-Phrygian mode on F-sharp and sung by the child, the successive verses take us away from cadence: there is no reason why the pattern of love and loss should not repeat to eternity. Only in the open fifths of the lullaby from Act 1, briefly echoed, is there a possibility of optimism, a glimpse of reconciliation between these polarised moral and musical worlds.

Light Passing (1992) It was some twelve years and many works later that I once again confronted the challenge of reconciling different worlds in a dramatic work, and this time in a more radical way. Light Passing (BBC Radio 3, National Centre for Early Music, 2004) is an opera on the life of Clement VI (1291–1352), Pope in Avignon at the time of the Black Death. John Edmunds’ libretto, originally intended for John Potter and the Hilliard Ensemble, envisaged “real” fourteenth-century music being heard throughout the contemporary score, just as the words of the Latin liturgy and other mediaeval texts underpinned his own words. John Edmonds sent me his libretto in February 2002. In preparation for composing the score, I immersed myself in the music that Clement and 17  A concert work taken from this scene of the opera can be heard on: Nicola LeFanu, “Canción,” Goldberg Ensemble, 2004.

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his contemporaries at Avignon would have known. I re-learnt plainsong notation and spent summer 2002 with plainchant melodies in my head, along with journeys of discovery in the polyphonic repertoire. I marvelled at the sophistication of Philippe de Vitry, the leading composer in fourteenth-­century Avignon, and I sang Machaut with friends. Meanwhile, I was re-reading Petrarch and Boccaccio; the late mediaeval era was coming alive for me in all its vividness and paradox. Since Clement’s Papal coronation took place at Whitsun in 1342, and he identified his papacy with light—with the descent of the spirit at Pentecost—I decided that the two best-known of the Whitsun hymns would run through my score: Veni Sancte Spiritus and Veni Creator. Beautiful, easily memorable tunes, they are well suited to a chorus of untrained voices (my opera is written for a small group of professional soloists and instrumentalists, with an amateur chorus.) Moreover, these Whitsun melodies provided endlessly fruitful material which I could transform in my own score. (For example, modal, diatonic pitch contours become chromatic when they are inverted symmetrically.) I could identify appropriate polyphony both by text (e.g., Gloria: Clemens Deus artifex, tota clemencia,) or by historical documentation: de Vitry’s so-called “coronation” motet Petre Clemens is extant. My choices were always guided by my musical instinct; in relating my own music to the mediaeval, I was particularly interested in proportion. Thus, I chose the initial Kyrie, Clemens Pater, because I was fascinated by its perfect “golden mean” proportions. Its metric structure is fashioned according to the Fibonacci series and I kept to it as I composed Clement’s opening soliloquy which runs through it. Similarly, I preserved the proportions of the de Vitry Petre Clemens motet; its isorhythmic structure underpins the entire Coronation scene, drawing together plainchant, secular music, and my own music, in which we glimpse Clement’s imagined thoughts. Pitch material, metric practice, and polyphonic practice all led to ways in which my own musical language was transformed by the mediaeval material. Instead of working with harmonic fields, I worked with line, and with accretions of lines. Transcriptions were sometimes literal, sometimes transformed. One music may be hidden within another: as the plague sweeps up the flagellants, the Dies Irae gradually invades their melodic line. Often, I threaded fragments of fourteenth-century music into my instrumental music. Veni Creator runs right through the last scene in this way, hidden in the ensemble, only emerging in the voices as Clement is dying.

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Fig. 23.10  Nicola LeFanu Light Passing (2005)

Throughout, I wanted to ensure that the mediaeval music was an essential part of both the dramatic and musical fabric. Thus, at the crux of the opera, when Clement, despairing, even doubts his faith, so my music fragments and destroys the plainchant materials that have underpinned it (Fig. 23.10).18 Following this, to make the transition to the final scene of Clement’s death, I placed de Vitry’s motet Adesto sancta trinitas, musice modulantibus. Its music made it particularly suited, but even more so its text, with its musical references and its plea: “Firmissime fidem teneamus”—“let us hold firmly to faith…” It is still possible to visit Clement’s superb palace at Avignon and to stand, as I have, in his study-bedchamber, lavishly decorated with the pastoral scenes he loved. He was a brilliant man: scholar, theologian, an intellectual with a questing and restless spirit. Above all, he stood for tolerance in the face of religious bigotry. The issues that plagued Clement are still those that we seek answers for today: Why the bigotry? Why the violence? Why the inhumanity? Like him, we live in turbulent and uncertain times:  Nicola LeFanu, Light Passing (London: Edition Peters, 2005), 116.

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like him, we need to stand up for tolerance and justice. For me, the over-­ riding reason to conjure up Clement and his distant era in Light Passing was so as to illuminate our new century.

Chamber Operas My chamber operas Dream Hunter, to a libretto by John Fuller, (Lontano, 2011) and Tokaido Road, libretto, Nancy Gaffield, (Okeanos, 2014)19 and the orchestral scena The Crimson Bird, setting John Fuller’s poem Siege, (BBC Symphony Orchestra, 2017) all continue my fascination with dramatic lyricism. Tokaido Road follows the life-journey of the Japanese artist Hiroshige; composing for both Western and Japanese instruments brought a welcome challenge to my language. As a modal instrument, the Koto imposed a discipline of restriction; in complement, the Sho plays aitakes— cluster chords. These aspects of Japanese music were integrated seamlessly into my music, to parallel Nancy Gaffield’s libretto, poised elegantly between two cultures.

Seminal Influences At the beginning of my career in the 1960s, harmony was not a problematic term. The framework in which I discussed it with my contemporaries was that of the European avant-garde. Stockhausen’s 1957 essay, How Time Passes, was seminal for many of us. I was particularly at home with Italian music, especially Berio, as well as music from central Europe— Witold Lutosławski and early György Ligeti (György Kurtág, I did not discover until later on). An orchestral work like Ligeti’s Lontano (1967) made manifest the relationship between linear voice-leading, harmony and timbre. I also was engrossed by Messiaen’s sound world: the radiance of his harmonic language, and the way it was expressed (“rhythm, the primordial element”). The music I heard most was that of the composers close at hand: Alexander Goehr—hearing The Deluge, (1958) a Cantata for soprano, contralto and instrumental ensemble, when I was a schoolgirl was a catalyst—then Peter Maxwell Davies and Harrison Birtwistle, then Anthony Gilbert and David Lumsdaine. My contemporaries were equally important—music by Gillian Whitehead and Michael Finnissy. All these 19  Guildhall School of Music & Drama, “Tokaido Road,” uploaded 26 May 2016, 1:08:51, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_EG0ps2jr9U.

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composers were a part of the marvellously fertile musical climate in the 1960s; if not directly influential on my work, they were a source of nourishment and inspiration. My studies in the United States with Earl Kim reinforced this focus on European music, paradoxically, but also made me aware of the most deep-seated role model. Kim’s inimitable music can never be pigeon-holed into a “school” and so it was with my mother Elizabeth Maconchy, who pursued an independent path all her life. It is curious to look back across fifty years and reflect on the fortunes of the concept of harmony. Was it minimalism that swept aside the notion that harmony was an ever-evolving concept, one that it was worth, indeed necessary, to keep exploring? Perhaps it was the overwhelming tide of populism that surged through the 1990s. Terms such as “serious music” became taboo; indeed, “intellectual” began to be used as a pejorative word, much as “intelligentsia” (or “degenerate music”) were used by totalitarian regimes of the 1930s. In such a context, concepts inherited from European modernism were not likely to thrive.

Current Perspective: libre…recherché Currently, I am optimistic, for I know a new, much younger generation of composers who have left these dilemmas behind. They move happily between genres and are not afraid to speak of “art music,” nor do they turn their backs on the intellectual activity which some call “elitist.” Beethoven’s prefix, (libre…recherché) acknowledges the need for a freely roaming imagination to be supported by a searching intelligence. The search is not for a knowledge that can be expressed in words, but one that will be embodied in music. When I compose, I think in music, not in words; so this chapter can only offer pointers towards the path in which I delight to roam, seeking my music. The scores referred to in this chapter are published by Novello and Co Ltd (music from 1968–1999) and by Edition Peters (music since 2000.) Figures are reproduced by kind permission of the publishers.

References Bristow, James R., ed. A Contemporary Anthology of Music by Women. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997. Guildhall School of Music & Drama. “Tokaido Road.” Uploaded 26 May 2016. Video, 1:08:51. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_EG0ps2jr9U

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Hall, Michael. Between Two Worlds: The Music of David Lumsdaine. Todmordon: Arc Music, 2003. Kennelly, Brendan. The Penguin Book of Irish Verse. Ed. Brendan Kennelly. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970. LeFanu, Nicola. But Stars Remaining. London: Novello, 1970. ———. The Same Day Dawns. London: Novello, 1974. ———. “Columbia Falls Sketch.” Unpublished manuscript, 1975a. ———. Columbia Falls. London: Novello, 1975b. ———. “The Old Woman of Beare.” British Women Composers Volume 1. Conducted by Odaline de la Martinez. Lorelt, LNT 101, 1997, compact disc. ———. The Old Woman of Beare. London: Novello, 1981. ———. “The Story of Mary O Neill Sketch.” Unpublished manuscript, 1986. ———. “Canción.” Nicola LeFanu: Catena for Eleven Solo Strings. String Quartet No. 2. Clarinet Concertino. Goldberg Ensemble. Naxos 8.557389, 2004a, compact disc. ———. “Catena.” Nicola LeFanu: Cantena for Eleven Solo Strings. String Quartet No. 2. Clarinet Concertino. Goldberg Ensemble. Naxos 8.557389, 2004b, compact disc. ———. Light Passing. London: Edition Peters, 2005. ———. Tokaido Road. London: Edition Peters, 2014. “Nicola LeFanu.” Contemporary Music Review 11 (1994): 183–87. https://doi. org/10.1080/07494469400640941 Lorca, Federico Garcia. Bodas de Sangre. Ed. Allen Josephs and Juan Caballero. Madrid: Ediciones Catedra, 1989.

CHAPTER 24

Carnivals of Voice, Musical Playgrounds: Music from Text in Works of Andrée Greenwell Andrée Greenwell

Introduction Having a love for song and the expressive release of voice; working in post-dramatic and traditional theatre; my studies in music composition and screen arts practices; blending electronic and acoustic instruments; engaging with post-minimal composition techniques, experimental, and independent music subcultures including post-punk; all contribute to the diverse outcomes of my creative work which features my original music composition, often led by voice.1 This has led to my working in a cultural space of the “in-between,” that is never pure and eludes classification, offering immense creative possibilities. 1  Andrée Greenwell, “ ‘Theatres of Music’: Recent Composition-led Works of Andrée Greenwell” (Doctor of Creative Arts, University of Wollongong, 2013).

A. Greenwell (*) Sydney, NSW, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 L. Kouvaras et al. (eds.), The Composer, Herself, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23922-9_24

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My music education began at the age of eleven, singing and strumming a guitar in a group class of forty, at St Christopher’s Primary School, Syndal (Melbourne, Australia). I was learning music by ear and developing memory skills—understanding lyric, melody, harmonic function, and then the expressive release of all this through song. When I started classical piano lessons the following year, I found it difficult to learn to read music, and as I progressed through the Australian Music Examinations Board examinations, I became aware of value judgements around different kinds of music practices, and I learned to de-value my early-learned aural skills. In secondary school, I was intimidated by heroic culture about the famous European male composers, which seemed utterly disconnected to my experience as an Australian teen. At the age of fifteen I wrote my first song using a guitar, but it was not until the later part of my undergraduate study that I attempted to compose music for Western classical instruments. Luckily, my undergraduate studies were during 1980s in Melbourne, Australia—a time and place that exploded with artistic confluence and musical invention. I was living two music lives—studying flute and piano at the Victorian College of the Arts (VCA) School of Music while spending three to four nights weekly seeing bands at notable “underground” venues, including The Seaview Ballroom, Jump Club, Venetian Room, Prince of Wales Hotel and the Hotel Esplanade fondly known as “The Espy.” Many venues were grand dilapidated Victorian or early-twentieth-­ century buildings that fed a perverse kind of romanticism for us young Melbournians who yearned for grander habitats beyond our flat streets, grey pavements and muted skylines, as we transitioned to adulthood. I was drawn to the viscera of those wild and often physical post-punk performances, the unruly mixes, and the seductive and dangerous nature of late-­ night entertainment. My hunger for “alternative” and “fringe” performances expanded to other experimental performance and music scenes including at the Clifton Hill Community Music Centre, Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA), then located in Kings Domain (Melbourne), and Linden Arts Gallery, St Kilda—where I later rented a studio. The grit and viscera of Melbourne’s post-punk music scene starkly contrasted my specialist classical music school training—a learning environment that critiqued and valued young people’s attainment of virtuosic technical facility in heritage Western art music traditions. I could not imagine reconciling these very different kinds of music that I loved. However, upon hearing “Kneeplay 1,” the opening to Phillip Glass’ 1975

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opera, Einstein on the Beach in a lecture, I was captivated by Glass’ choral setting of banal numerals 1–8I: I found it utterly poetic, and could imagine that the varied music worlds I loved might somehow work together. Even more revelatory were the works of North American composer-­ performers Laurie Anderson, Meredith Monk and Diamanda Galas—all self-determining women artists who were creating music led by their own voices, crossing boundaries through multi-disciplinary art forms, and who blended historic and contemporary music idioms and instrumentations.2 I wanted to belong to a creative community and make music like these artists. The advent of MIDI in 1982 had a profound impact. Suddenly, technology was widely available to the broad community outside of the academy, and at relatively cheap cost. Having a general introduction to the Fairlight CMI sampler by Warwick Bone during my tertiary studies, I purchased my first electronic FM synthesiser, a Yamaha DX7, followed by a Yamaha RX11 drum machine not long after. Learning was do it yourself—reading instruction manuals, intuitive experimentation, and then problem solving via telephone conversations with friends. Taking this leap at a young age to self-educate has been crucial to the scope of my music making, especially in creating scores for other performing arts forms, by having a willingness to update and learn new music-making skills using current technologies. In my The Backdoor Songs,3 scored for soprano, violin, viola, bass clarinet, guitar, Yamaha DX7 keyboard and magnetic tape, I was keen to use these new electronic instruments in ways alternative to the popular music applications they appeared to have been designed, and also write for the classical instrumentalists around me. The small song collection created for the Backdoor Sinfonietta is set to poems by George Franklin (a VCA writing student at the time). To form a collection of five songs, I made significantly contrasting settings of two of Franklin’s three poems. The opening song “Moonlight #1”4 could be described as a post-­ minimal art song, and my aim was to enhance the reflective tone of Franklin’s abstract narrative from the vocal line, including occasional use  Greenwell, “Theatres of Music,” 34–38.  Andrée Greenwell, The Backdoor Songs, poems by George Franklin, composed for the Backdoor Sinfonietta. Trinity College Chapel, Parkville, 1 August 1988. 4  Andrée Greenwell, The Backdoor Songs (“Moonlight #1”), Victorian College of the Arts, November 1989, MP3. https://soundcloud.com/andr-e-greenwell/1-moonlight-1. 2 3

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of quotation and diegetic technique. Using the same poem, I took a different composition approach for “Moonlight #2.”5 Inspired by multitracking, sampling and electronic processing, I sought to relocate the usual linear role of the sung text to the vertical, and in doing so, refocus the linguistic text as music texture. This was achieved using the sampling feature of the Lexicon 480L FX unit, with Michael Letho engineering the sessions in the VCA recording studio. A loop of the word “moon” repeated for the song’s duration, strongly inspired by Anderson’s famous syllabic loop of “O Superman.”6 Figure 24.1 is an example of my taking advantage of the unusual rhythmic ratios that digital sampling affords, and by layering looped words and word fragments, I achieved surprising harmonic progressions and textures that pivoted the ostinato spine. The vocal texture was multi-tracked to 24-track magnetic tape and mixed down to ¼” tape for performance playback, accompanied by the acoustic ensemble. This second musical rendering of the poem actioned a different way of listening, in that the poetic fragments, stripped of syntax, operated as music texture; while the instrumental parts were assigned poetic-like functions—discreet motifs that impressionistically floated and overlapped the layered vocals. This early exploration concerned the activation of different intertextual relationships of the songs, and their sequence, with the listening experience of the audience in mind. Soon after writing The Backdoor Songs, I worked with the ground-­ breaking theatre group The Sydney Front from 1987–1993,7 which taught me more about structuring non-linear narrative. Texts were sourced from highly diverse literary and media origins. Through rigorous group dramaturgy and editorial, the non-linear theatre works were structured by dynamic episodic juxtaposition, including disruption, irony, perversion, catharsis and bricolage. During rehearsals, the contribution of the music/ sound score was tested alongside the other performative elements, and this impacted my thinking about score as text—its capacity to valuably contribute to an entire theatrical argument. Despite being non-linear, the theatre works of The Sydney Front were highly expressive. While not works of drama in the usual sense, with an identifiable narrative arc, each 5  Andrée Greenwell, The Backdoor Songs (“Moonlight #2”), Victorian College of the Arts, November 1989, MP3. https://soundcloud.com/andr-e-greenwell/2-moonlight-2. 6  Laurie Anderson, “O Superman.” Laurie Anderson. Warner Bros. Records, DWBS 49888, 1981, Vinyl EP. 7  Greenwell, “Theatres of Music,” 57–59.

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Fig. 24.1  Andrée Greenwell, “Moonlight #2” bars 33–41

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show nevertheless unfolded a clear, dramaturgically refined sequence of actions. Rather, a specific performative intention was revealed across an episodic structure.

Green Room Music: A Flexible Platform to Produce My Own Works Following studies in screen sound at the Australian Film Television and Radio School (AFTRS), and the international success of my video-opera clip Medusahead, a video opera clip for decapitated soprano and 3D animated snakes,8 I established Green Room Music9 (GRM) as a flexible platform to create original performance and screen works, led by my own music. The production procedures for GRM works are project-specific, which is more in step with independent theatre and performing arts makers than a concert music ensemble of fixed instrumentation. I love the artistic growth and freedom that a flexible model brings. Often, I bring together musicians and artists who would not ordinarily work together which is enormously stimulating. Saying that, to be an independent self-­ determining artist is not without drawbacks—without ongoing production support, I undertake many roles beyond composition. These include music direction, sometimes performance, then producing and administration, which all take time away from creative work. My interest in narrative, particularly non-linear, has continued in GRM works for which I have sought out poetic collections that integrate diverse writing forms; or have explored concepts by combining existing texts with newly commissioned writing. Here, I have been fortunate to work with leading contemporary Australian women dramatists and poets, and themes have often concerned a female perspective. Not all creative writing is appropriate for a music realisation. In seeking out a text or a writer to collaborate with, I assess the potential “space” for music to intervene, or co-exist. The sing-ability of the language, and the imagination of the kinds of temporal and textural changes that a music realisation might ensue need assessment, so sonance, rhythm, syntax and formal arrangement are important. Finally, there is the aspect of artistic 8  Andrée Greenwell, Medusahead. Filmed 1997, Australian Film Television and Radio School. YouTube Video, 5:09. Posted 2 April, 2014. https://youtu.be/YiA8z0_VcS8. 9  Andrée Greenwell, Green Room Music, accessed 12 December 2021, http://www. andreegreenwell.com/green-room-music.html.

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connection which involves personal taste—by identifying mutual or overlapping interests, and in the case of commissioned original text, an openness to work in an editorial back and forth. In the setting of text to achieve music, it is important to me that the creative work of the writer is apparent; but also that the act of musical transfer will expand or enlighten meanings beyond the written word. Furthermore, much of my music values melody and vocal line. Though I am largely a self-taught vocalist, I test all vocal lines, and have a constant awareness that my music interventions upon a text are a kind of pre-­ performative interpretation. Here, I consider the singer’s revelation of text and melody in song, and the intertextual nature of this. I think about the singer’s responsibility to measure and regulate the comprehension of melodic and linguistic syntax across musical phrasing. Then there is the vocal arts specialisation and/or individual vocal characteristics which might introduce further nuance. I think about the pleasure involved for both performer and audience in the unfolding, decoding and physical reception of all this, as bearing inter-textual relationships.

Playing with Voice in Long-Form Works Dreaming Transportation: Voice Portraits of the First Women of White Settlement at Port Jackson10 (2003), is a music theatre work based upon the poetic history Botany Bay Document11 by Melbourne poet, Dr. Jordie Albiston. It is conceived for five amplified women vocalists, seven-piece instrumental ensemble, and triple-screen projections that blend screen conventions of the biographic documentary and the rock-video clip.12 Albiston had addressed the little-documented history of European women of Australia’s colonisation through real and imaginary experiences. Her poems were made from found texts such as shipping logs, letters, paintings and newspaper articles, alongside highly personal perspectives of convict, free settler, aristocratic and convict women. The 10  Andrée Greenwell, Dreaming Transportation: Voice Portraits of the First Women of White Settlement at Port Jackson. Sydney, Australian Music Centre, 2003. Libretto by Jordie Albiston. Composition, music direction and image direction by Andrée Greenwell, commissioned by Sydney Festival, produced by GRM, directed by Chris Ryan. Presented in association with the Sydney Festival, Music Theatre Sydney and Riverside Theatres, Parramatta, 2003. 11  Jordie Albiston, Botany Bay Document (Melbourne: Black Pepper, 1996). 12   Greenwell and Albiston, Dreaming Transportation, ABC Audio, 2004. https:// andreegreenwell.bandcamp.com/track/dreaming-transportation.

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diverse range of writing approaches suggested a framework in which I could literally “play” with vocal and musical realisations—a veritable composer’s playground. The idea of “giving voice” to real and imagined characters in both literal and metaphoric ways was asserted through a performative collection of “voice portraits”—and this descriptor made its way into the title. Many poems were written in first person and sustained a singular emotional state. From these I envisaged traditional song forms such as aria or ballad; and then others that merged new and old—such as folk-rap or spoken word with abstract texture. I sought a dynamic of vocal portraiture through vocal assignations—as solos, duets, trios and chorus. Outside of the details that distinguish each song, the sequence of expression, voicing, instrumentation and music style propel the music and narrative arcs across the whole experience, which I think about as a kind of dramaturgy of composition. In a 2006 article, Corrina Bonshek observes my use of a dynamic emotional flux as a structural device in my earlier work Laquiem: Tales from the Mourning of the Lac Women (1998),13 inspired by the novella of Kathleen Mary Fallon: The work follows an emotional trajectory (of gradually increasing emotional states) rather than a dramatic plot. Musical refrains are used to bind narrative personae experienced as states of joy, degradation and sorrowing in various states of attraction and repulsion.14

Albiston provided context to her poetic subjects through brief factual introductions. Given these were reminiscent of the film-documentary “voice-over,” the use of narration was developed to structure the performance work into three main sections—transportation; work and domestic life; and emancipation. Additionally, many documents, drawings and paintings that inspired Albiston’s poems were re-sourced for integration in the triple-screen projections. A cast of five outstanding specialists brought these “vocal portraits” to life—rock/pop icon Deborah Conway; young soprano Miriam Allan; operatic soprano Christine Douglas; and actor/singers Justine Clarke and Amie McKenna. Given this array of vocal talent and skill, many combined 13  For another discussion on this work, see Linda Kouvaras, ‘Review of Laquiem, by Andrée Greenwell,’ Sounds Australian 54 (1999): 37. 14   Corrinna Bonshek, “Interdisciplinarity and Vocal Performance in Australian Contemporary Music Theatre,” Contemporary Music Review 25, no.4 (2006): 343.

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striking vocal palettes were possible; and diverging from the virtuosic and star casting of music drama and traditional opera, each singer featured equally. Vocal specialisation was also useful to delineate convict, servant, free settler and aristocratic status. For example, two found poems quote the colony’s first newspaper, Sydney Gazette.15 These are declaimed by the two operatic singers in a neo-­ Baroque/post-minimalist style which is repeated later in the work for narrative connection. The public and formal oratory mode provides relief from the intense personal expression of songs such as “Lizzie’s Pact”16—a highly charged rage episode by Lizzie, against her sexual abuser and employer, Master Monroe. The song slowly builds over a low bass drum motive, as a ragged punk-folk, reminiscent of the music of Tom Waits and Nick Cave. “Parramatta Female Factory”17 led by the spoken voice of a factory worker, references the “beat poet” style. Over a fast-pulsed high-­ hat agitato ostinato, disruptions ensue from the instrumental ensemble, while cast members perform chaotic “foley” actions—ringing bells, dropping heavy books from height to the floor, etc. All this suggests a mood of discipline and anxiety. The factory worker’s singular perspective transitions to a folk a capella trio-canon, upon the lyric “and this pattern of hands,” and this vocal switch suggests a communal experience of day-­ dream release, through musical metaphor. Dreaming Transportation relayed many disturbing accounts of oppression and hardship. Like my earlier work Laquiem: Tales from the Mourning of the Lac Women,18 its vocal approach was dynamic and inclusive. The apparent pleasure elicited by the cast in performing with singers of diverse music specialisation contributed a vital performance energy, altogether suggesting alternative and forward-looking production models for new music theatre and contemporary music drama creation—about, created by, and featuring women. It was immensely exciting that the premier season was presented at Riverside, Parramatta, commissioned for the Sydney 15   Greenwell and Albiston, Dreaming Transportation, “Sydney Gazette,” https:// andreegreenwell.bandcamp.com/track/sydney-gazette. 16   Greenwell and Albiston, Dreaming Transportation, “Lizzie’s Pact,” https:// andreegreenwell.bandcamp.com/track/lizzies-pact. 17   Greenwell and Albiston, Dreaming Transportation, “Parramatta Female Factory,” https://andreegreenwell.bandcamp.com/track/the-parramatta-female-factory. 18  Andrée Greenwell and Kathleen Mary Fallon, LAQUIEM: Tales From the Mourning of the Lac Women. Green Room Music, 1998, MP3. https://andreegreenwell.bandcamp. com/album/laquiem-tales-from-the-mourning-of-the-lac-women-2.

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Festival, 2003. Dreaming Transportation went on to be performed at the Sydney Opera House (SOH).19 and was studio-recorded at the ABC studios, Ultimo (Sydney), for radio feature broadcasts. Listen to Me: Responses in Words, Music and Creative Audio to the Problem of Gendered Violence in Australia (2018)20 is a broadcast and podcast work of eleven pieces, that also streams online as a music-concept album.21 It is built from original lyric writing, factual quotes from around thirty sources, and anonymous written accounts. Seven featured tracks are created from contributions by six Australian women writers: Yankunytjatjara woman Ali Cobby Eckermann, Candy Royalle, Alison Croggon,22 Donna Abela, Eunice Andrada, and Anja Walwicz. Because the project involved particularly sensitive subject matter, I invited Sydney writer Hilary Bell to join the project as dramaturg.23 Motivated by my wish to “engage with an urgent pressing social issue,” which effects women the world over,”24 and again thinking about the value of “giving voice” through musical means, I sought a “prism of multiple perspectives” to allow for individual and communal reflection. In dealing with extra-musical concepts, it is important to me that there is a logical connection between the driving idea, musical means, and outcome. Listen to Me presented many challenges. Individual responses to gendered violence and its impacts, be that first- or thirdhand, are dynamic—one might be comfortable discussing certain things at different times. Thus, I sought a framework that was both flexible in form, and that gave permission for each writer to respond freely, avoiding didacticism. My first title, “The Prayers,” was motivated by the meaning of prayer as a plea, a wish, a desire. However, I reviewed this because of potential confusion with religious connotations. I chose the title Listen to Me because of its many “active” meanings—writerly, performative, personal, musical, 19  A second production of Dreaming Transportation produced by Performing Lines, was presented at the Sydney Opera House, 2004. 20  Andrée Greenwell, Listen to Me. FBi Radio 94.5FM, Sydney, 1 August 2018, Podcast. http://allthebestradio.com/shows/1826-listen-to-me/. 21  Greenwell, Listen to Me. http://andreegreenwell.bandcamp.com/album/listen-to-me. 22  I had previously collaborated with Croggon on two projects. Her frank and alarming piece “Trigger Warning,” led me to invite her to contribute to Listen to Me. 23  The Australia Council for the Arts, Musica Viva Countrywide and Four Winds, Bermagui (New South Wales, Australia) supported creative development. 24  Creative development grant from the Australia Council for the Arts, (2016). I acknowledge the editorial input of Professor Linda Kouvaras to that artistic statement.

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aural and communal. Furthermore, my initial concept was for a touring choral work with fixed and flexible elements. In partnership with arts organisations Musica Viva Countrywide and Four Winds, we undertook preliminary development in a region that had a strong culture of community choirs. However, the scope of the work was problematic in the small regional community setting. Eventually I reviewed the project as a studio composition for radio broadcast and podcast, which was liberating. These media formats offer flexible access in terms of time and location for the listener and broaden community reach, through on-demand delivery. This solved issues around privacy that had meant something entirely different in a performative community setting, and considerably expanded the scope for music creation. I considered professional and home studio environments25 as key composition and production tools. New modes of vocal delivery were possible—sung, spoken, multi-tracked, and digitally processed vocals, and then the possibility of involving many types of vocalists. Because the writers Cobby Eckermann, Royalle and Walwicz were also highly experienced performers, I invited them to record their own texts. For the sung parts, I sought out outstanding vocalists from the indie-song writing scenes in Sydney and regional New South Wales: Melanie Horsnell, Elana Stone, Jessica O’Donoghue, Louise Nutting (all talented song writers in their own right), singing one track myself, and performing backup vocals and some piano. I worked toward the most diverse music palettes possible, so that each original piece was distinguished by a discreet vocal, instrumentation and production character. Cobby Eckermann sent me the poignant poem “Memory”26 that was both a personal and cultural response. When she posted “I Am a Survivor”27 -on social media at the time of the #MeToo movement, I requested to include that poem as well, and her two poems bookend the work. Both are recorded with musicians Alana Blackburn (recorders), Holly Conner 25  David Trumpmanis engineered the main recording sessions at Hercules Street Studios, Surry Hills (Sydney). In my home studio I undertook further editorial of the studio recordings, with creative digital audio processing of other elements and recorded the vocals for the interludes. Trumpmanis final mixed and mastered the whole project. 26  “Andrée Greenwell and Ali Cobby Eckermann, Listen to Me, “Memory.” Green Room Music, 2018, MP3. https://andreegreenwell.bandcamp.com/track/memory. 27  Greenwell and Eckermann, Listen to Me, “I Am a Survivor.” https://andreegreenwell. bandcamp.com/track/i-am-a-survivor.

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Fig. 24.2  Logic Pro X premix session, Andrée Greenwell, “Fire”

(drumkit and percussion) and Jessica Dunn (bass) responding in real-time to Cobby Eckermann’s vocals. For “Memory” I incorporated vocal fragments from alternate takes and “bussed” 28 these to large reverberant spaces, placing the alternate takes either just before or after phrase entries to emphasise the poem’s haunting tone and layered temporality, and to suggest a vast open space. To underpin “Fire”29 by the late writer and activist Candy Royalle, a poem about a woman’s annual cathartic rite that marks her exit from domestic abuse, I created a sequenced beat track using the digital audio workstations, Ableton Live and Logic Pro X. Figure 24.2 shows my pre-­ mix collage of sound effects—the slamming and closing of doors and windows; the smashing of glass and plates etc. These build over kick drum-beats and percussive loops, with low EQ emphasis, to assert an increasing claustrophobic tension. In response to this, and Candy’s vocals, Ruth Wells contributed a wailing tenor saxophone improvisation. This instrumental line seems to assert an internalised emotional dialogue to Candy’s wilful vocals, while providing sustained timbral contrast.  Sent the audio to another mix channel.  Andrée Greenwell and Candy Royalle, Listen to Me, “Fire.” https://andreegreenwell. bandcamp.com/track/fire. 28 29

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Eunice Andrada’s powerful poem “Mosaic”30 presents the viewpoint of a daughter who bears witness to her mother’s suffering horrific physical abuse. I spent months wondering how I could effectively turn the complex poetic form and its painful emotions, to song. I clearly recall the moment when, improvising at the piano, I found a couple of lines midway in the poem that struck me as “lyrical”, from which the process of structuring a lead vocal line unfolded quickly. This felt like a kind of unravelling, a propulsion toward a music logic. In consultation with Andrada, the poem was altered to accord with the song’s evolving form, which involved switching sections and editorial contractions. Conceived for a vocal trio and five-piece ensemble, a certain lightness proceeds in the opening section of “Mosaic” through a confluence of jazz and popular styles, that cut against the brutality of the text (Fig. 24.3): Thinking about a podcast format, I sought to develop the use of factual material and position these around the highly expressive pieces made from the original texts. Following consultations with radio producers I decided against recorded interviews,31 and incorporated published quotes. Hilary Bell compiled quotes made by notable Australian women who have campaigned against gendered violence including Rosie Batty and journalists Annabel Crabb, Sarah Ferguson and Clementine Ford while I collected anonymous personal contributions from individuals we had met through the project’s first development. There was the question: what performative voice would deliver this factual material? Aiming for neutrality I experimented with computer text-­ to-­speech conversion but found this too dry. I moved on to the idea of recording two young community radio presenters and Bridie Tanner and Tegan Nicholls from Sydney’s radio station FBi 94.5FM, came forward to fulfil this role. The factual material evolved into four interstitial segments, “interludes.” They have a distinctive composition and production approach, informed by the cinematic underscore and documentary voice-over. Their chorus-like rub progresses the narrative sections and assists structural cohesion, delivered calmly in comparison to the intense vocals of the songs. 30  Andrée Greenwell and Eunice Andrada, Listen to Me, “Mosaic.” https://andreegreenwell.bandcamp.com/track/mosaic. 31  Former ABC radio Australia feature producer, Jane Ulman, and audio producer and writer, Masako Fukui, provided generous consultation to this process. It was discussed that lengthy interviews of a personal and potentially harrowing nature would be required to achieve short linking quotes. Fukui suggested written or published quotes as a solution.

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Fig. 24.3  Vocal and piano parts, opening, Andrée Greenwell, “Mosaic”

Current Work Empathetic connection is a vital part of my music making and the disruption that the global pandemic to music and arts activities has focussed this. Currently I am developing my second chamber opera Three Marys, with Washington DC-based, West Australian librettist, Dr. Christine Evans and Brisbane-based theatre creator Angela Chaplin as dramaturg. After making many works that are best described as contemporary music theatre, I am returning to the form nearly thirty years after my first chamber opera

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Sweet Death32 which was adapted by Abe Pogos from Belgian writer Claude Tardat’s novel of the same name.33 Three Marys is a secular work developed from a religious myth, about the exile of the three biblical Marys who travelled by boat to the South of France. Following the delivery of a scenario and first draft libretto, I am reminded that an original story takes considerably longer than adaptation. While my approach will be similar to the way I work into non-linear or more abstract narrative forms, however, the temporal unfolding of linear narrative (and the music narrative) is much more complicated and fragile—withdrawing or adding a line can mean the near re-composition of a scene. Typically, the music language is hybrid and the notated parts will be complemented by a cinematic audio component. Three Marys features a teen choir; however, the work’s realisation is less clear due to the global pandemic. I am finding this challenging because I work well under pressure and to deadlines. The projects I make are dependent on the input of other creative and performing artists and thinking about the GRM catalogue, I have been immensely lucky to work with so many outstanding literary artists. In writer-composer collaborations, not all composers are concerned with linguistic meanings and preference sonic or compositional complexities. However, the inherent and consequential meanings of making music from text are fascinating to me, that there is a flux and dynamic of meanings in the making, which is further nuanced through performance. Meaning that it is important to me that my music changes because of the written word, and its writer. Further to this, I love the critical thinking that writers demand, that there is an exchange of concepts through conversation, and that my music and artistic practice has grown and continues to be forward-­ moving because of them.

32  Andrée Greenwell and Abe Pogos, Sweet Death (Sydney, Australian Music Centre, 1991). A chamber opera based upon the novel Une Mort Sucrée by Claude Tardat, in which a young woman gorges herself on gourmet pastries and sweets, to death. Premier season at Melbourne International Festival of the Arts, directed by Douglas Horton, produced by Chamber Made Opera, Melbourne, 1991. 33  Sweet Death was the subject of Linda Kouvaras’ doctoral thesis, “Sweet Death: Strategies of the Feminine Grotesque in a Contemporary Australian Chamber Opera (PhD Thesis, University of Melbourne, 1996). Also see Linda Kouvaras, “Operatic Snuff?: Gender Matters in Music Criticism,” Australian Feminist Studies 20 (Summer 1994): 119–30.

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References Albiston, Jordie. Botany Bay Document—a Poetic History of the Women of Botany Bay. Melbourne: Black Pepper Press, 1996. Anderson, Laurie. “O Superman.” Laurie Anderson. Warner Bros. Records, DWBS 49888, 1981, Vinyl EP. Bonshek, Corrina. “Interdisciplinarity and Vocal Performance in Australian Contemporary Music Theatre.” Contemporary Music Review 25 no. 4 (2006): 341–351. Croggon, Alison. “Trigger Warning.” Overland 218 (Autumn 2015). https:// overland.org.au/previous-­issues/issue-­218/regular-­alison-­croggon/. Glass, Phillip. Einstein on the Beach. The Phillip Glass Ensemble. Conducted by Michael Riesman. Nonesuch, 79323–2, 1993, Compact Disc. Greenwell, Andrée and Kathleen Mary Fallon. LAQUIEM: Tales From the Mourning of the Lac Women. Green Room Music, 1998, MP3. https:// andreegreenwell.bandcamp.com/album/laquiem-­tales-­from-­the-­mourning-­ of-­the-­lac-­women-­2. Greenwell, Andrée and Pogos Abe. Sweet Death. Sydney: Australian Music Centre, 1991. Greenwell, Andrée and Pogos Abe. “‘Theatres of Music’: Recent Composition-led Works of Andrée Greenwell.” Doctor of Creative Arts, University of Wollongong, 2013. Greenwell, Andrée and Pogos Abe. Dreaming Transportation: Voice Portraits of the First Women of White Settlement at Port Jackson. Sydney: Australian Music Centre, 2004a. Greenwell, Andrée and Pogos Abe. Dreaming Transportation: Voice Portraits of the First Women of White Settlement at Port Jackson. ABC Audio, 2004b, MP3 recording. Greenwell, Andrée and Pogos Abe. LAQUIEM: Tales from the Mourning of the Lac Women. Sydney: Australian Music Centre, 1998. Greenwell, Andrée and Pogos Abe. Listen to Me. Green Room Music, 2018, MP3 recording. https://andreegreenwell.bandcamp.com/album/listen-­to-­me. Greenwell, Andrée and Pogos Abe. Medusahead. Filmed 1997, Australian Film Television and Radio School. YouTube Video, 5:09. Posted 2 April, 2014. https://youtu.be/YiA8z0_VcS8. Greenwell, Andrée and Pogos Abe. The Backdoor Songs. Victorian College of the Arts, November 1989, MP3 recording. https://soundcloud.com/andr-­e-­ greenwell/sets/the-­backdoor-­songs-­1988-­set-­to-­poems-­by-­george-­franklin. Kouvaras, Linda. “Operatic Snuff?: Gender Matters in Music Criticism.” Australian Feminist Studies 20 (Summer 1994): 119–130.

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Kouvaras, Linda. “Review of Laquiem, by Andrée Greenwell.” Sounds Australian 54 (1999): 37. Kouvaras, Linda. “Sweet Death: Strategies of the Feminine Grotesque in a Contemporary Australian Chamber Opera.” PhD Thesis, University of Melbourne, 1996.

CHAPTER 25

The Mirror: A Novel in Reflections—Excerpts Lera Auerbach

Introduction I’m hard put to define the precise genre of this work. Notes in a diary? An autobiographical novel? As a child I spent hours gazing into a mirror, pressed against reflection—eye to eye, trying to understand, who picked out this face, this body, these eyes? The excruciating dissimilarity of a copy that’s been separated from the original and has entered into its own existence. The further it moves away—the more obvious become the differences from the original source—almost a violent separation. The idea of writing this book came to me on 20 October 1994, the eve of my twenty-first birthday—the day I am now writing these lines. Coming of age is a peculiar trait devised by civilization—a point of demarcation. A visiting card to the adult world. Responsibility for one’s actions (including criminal ones), permission to drive an automobile, to buy cigarettes, to

Translated from Russian by Ronald Meyer and Lera Auerbach

L. Auerbach (*) Auerbach Studio, New York, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 L. Kouvaras et al. (eds.), The Composer, Herself, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23922-9_25

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participate in the consumption of alcoholic beverages, to visit certain entertainment establishments, and all the other charms that open up to a person with the magic number “21.” Spangles, ribbons, tinsel and the like fly past us, beckoning us to take part in their unpredictable dance; they whirl—ever faster and faster… Later the chaff settles, a new sun rises and illuminates the recent banquet: colorless paper wrappers and dust, dust. And you can’t shake off this dust or sweep it out of the corners. Dust is ashes—the true face of time. What remains? The pattern of the wallpaper in the nursery? Mama’s lullaby that goes back to grandmother’s childhood, the Hebrew words of which neither I nor my mother could understand, but which were imprinted on my soul? The darkness and closeness of the old wardrobe in the pantry, smelling of mothballs, where I spent long hours of my infancy, hiding from the eyes of strangers? What remains?

(1) —The pure voice of a flute.

Pan would play the flute. He had goat legs, leaves in his hair and the sad eyes of a spaniel. He evidently knew that he didn’t exist and that’s why he had such sad eyes. I have always felt sorry for Pan. I understood—he was embarrassed by his goat legs and his appearance in general. Pan had a flute. The flute was made from pot-bellied reed pipes of different length. When Pan played it, he would forget all his sorrows and the flute’s pure voice would resound faraway in the forest. In that voice one heard the rustling of leaves, the singing of frogs, the crackle of grasshoppers, and the sighs of the wind. There was also the Tzarevna-Swan. I didn’t like the Tzarevna as much, although she did have beautiful large eyes. Half-god, half-bird. A sphinx. An enigma. Not a tzarevna and not a swan. The dual nature and mystery of metamorphosis. And cold. The cold of snowy white wings, dark water, the cold of night. Br-r! But no, Pan was much dearer to me. And there was the Daemon. The Daemon was magnificent. He was painted in various poses: lying down, sitting, flying. My favorite was the Daemon sitting. Elbows on knees, his eyes looking into the distance. Those eyes are frightening. There’s poison in them, pride and

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melancholy—more than a person could bear. An outcast. I was secretly in love with the Daemon. And the artist was named Vrubel. V-rubel. Like a stone plopped into the water–Vrubel—and the circles disperse. A surprisingly ridiculous name. * * * In the darkness, in childhood, lying at night with eyes open and listening to the ticking of the clock on the wall. Second followed by second—I knew for certain—those seconds would never return—they sank into oblivion. Later this terror intensified and at age twelve I would stop the pendulum on the wall clock, I would remove it, I’d banish the clock from the room, but all the same at night rang out: tick-tock, tick-tock—that was my heart beating. And I had neither the strength nor the will to tear it from my breast. From early childhood, from the age of six, the fear of Time passing. Not just passing but slipping away. Almost physically, visibly seeping through my fingers. This terrifying and inevitable feeling poisoned my childhood and youth. Every day—a challenge to my invisible and indifferent rival. A successful day is like recaptured territory, a respite, a truce until the following day. And the despair and terror during the lost day. Life is an attempt to swim out of the whirlpool, where Time bears our days. Because of this—all my early poems are variations on the theme of the passing day and interminable epitaphs on Time. In my early infancy, before the age of six, this was not the case. The “Apple of Knowledge” had not yet been plucked (by whom and when?). The days were as long as eternity, and the clock was an empty knick-knack on the wall. Interminable illnesses were transformed into dreams, dreams flowed into days, and days into illnesses. The world was wise and clear. It became overgrown, like seaweed, with fantasies and visions, but nevertheless it preserved some part of its original harmonious foundations. And the boundary between existence and nonexistence was fragile. The latter was too recent and close, the former too amorphous. My Teachers (Oh, I had marvelous Teachers; in infancy while I hid in the wardrobe that smelled of mothballs, I would talk to them at length and there was nothing more fascinating than those conversations), my

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Teachers would tell me how the world was organized. These stories were as far away from that which I later learned by rote from textbooks and found in books, as that blessed time is far from me now. Stars, leaves and music, the smells and sensations of past lives and all their accumulated experience found a place in their stories; they cast a spell over me and turned into dreams, and dreams into illnesses and again that fine thread separating me from my recent nonexistence quavered and broke. With age these conversations with my Teachers (with an ever-­ increasing and obvious switch in favor of existence) became more and more rare… It was a peculiar loss of my ability to comprehend their voices. Or rather not even their voices, but feelings, since we communicated without the aid of words (words do not help, words separate, and any act of speech is nothing more than a translation from the original). But they are some place, close by, my guarding angels. I know that. And Time, awful Time, nonexistent Time will not overpower us. * * * It’s not necessary to search for chronological order in these notes. There isn’t any. There isn’t any in life. Chronology… Chronos plus Logic. To dismantle harmony by means of logic. The science of numbers—mathematics—is sheer abstraction. Cause and effect. A row of non-coincidental coincidences. Lethe… The river of oblivion, whose waters are filled with the sweet poison of unconsciousness. The same Chronos. Zero absorbs infinity. Memory prospecting for gold. The golden grains remain, the sand is born away by the waves. And is chronology so important? The crooked mirror of time does not reflect events but distorts them. Numbers are an illusion, empty signs devised by mankind—myth. The past tense does not exist. Nor does the future. There is only the present. Right now—I am that same child standing pressed against my reflection in the mirror, eye to eye, trying to understand “Who am I?” And this book is my mirror. “A novel in reflections” does not have anything to do with memoirs if only because for me past tense does not exist. There are only the reflections of memory—my mirror double.

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(2) To be a chronicler is a difficult and thankless occupation. Only good about the dead. Even more so about the living. Better not to write at all. Let the secrets remain secrets. What is mine will die with me. The pain will ferment and be poured into a new vessel, it will take on a new form. Just as grapes become wine, a caterpillar becomes a butterfly, and a seed becomes a flower. We learn about objects by the shadows they cast. —Keep silent, sphinxes.

—Keep silent, Tzarevna-Swan. Keep silent, Daemon. Don’t give me away. In each mirror there is a place where it is always twilight. And it reflects everything except for me. * * * The mechanism of memory is complex. The Time Machine—a dream of dreamers—was created long ago. It is human memory. I am certain that we have been granted the power to remember everything; that in the depths of the human brain are preserved imprints of every moment we have lived in past and future lives. The only complication lies in the ability “to find” them in the labyrinths of memory. To find them by secret guiding signs: smells, a certain refraction of light, everyday trifles. To unwind the ball of string as I make my way to my beginnings. I am my memory, the sum total of all the moments I have lived. Moreover, my “I” divides and multiplies: I am an infant, and an elderly person, and an artist, and a thief, and a murderer. All of these possible past incarnations swarm past in my subconscious like phantoms. When I begin a monologue in my own name (as I see myself at this very moment), I inevitably put it into the mouth of a phantom from my own midst. I see crowds and crowds of people. Among them are artists, captains, artisans and kings, musicians and circus performers, milkmen and criminals. And all of them are me. Every time I begin to wind the thread that leads me out of the labyrinth toward the light, instead of exiting I fall into a new labyrinth. In each of the labyrinths a Minotaur lies in wait—sin that arrives from my former incarnation. And my goal is to kill the Minotaur.

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Here are several characters from my spectral retinue: Madman Gambler Robber Adventurer Wise Hermit Skeptic Child Artist (Odysseus) His Muse Apollo (Rational Force) Dionysus (Elemental Force) Gaiea (Primordial feminine, the mystery of birth passed on from mother to daughter) Savage (Mowgli) Nymphette Homeless Wanderer (The Wandering Jew) Martyr Hero (for whatever you like: faith, fatherland, ideas) Clown Whore and Nun Don Quixote Maniac Murderer Joseph, sold into Egypt     —Well, who else is there, come out into the light!

The characters are wearing masks, one transmutes into another. A mirrored hall, where the mirrors reflect one another, fracturing the reflections. A carnival of phantoms; bifurcation, disorder, division of myself. …In his own likeness and image…

A crowd of mirror werewolves. Welcome to the theater of the absurd. Abel = Cain. And so, ladies and gentlemen, let’s begin.

(3) The theater is a dark pantry full of junk. The hall is a wardrobe. I am an actor—and a spectator. The curtain rises. The stage depicts a wild jungle. Climbing flowers encircle beautiful trees.

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A damp, sensual mist rises to the sky from the new earth. Two multi-­ colored birds with long beaks and tall crests perch on the nearest branch. “Chirlim-chirlyum,” says the first. “Chirlyum-chirlim,” says the second. “Chirlyum-chirlyaminam?” asks the first. “Tsi-koon, tsi-koon,” confirms the second. “Tsipun, tsypun-tsy,” laughs the first.

The birds fly away. …Evening. The golden gloom of twilight. A flute can be heard in the air. One and the same octave—a lonely and strange interval that repeats and bewitches. It is seconded by the languid muttering of the frogs and the whispers of the leaves. The goat-legged god Pan appears playing a flute. The god Pan clearly does not want to be seen—at first, he hides in the high grass, then behind a tree trunk, then jibs back to front. The flute’s octave is repeated, either calling out to someone or simply repeating the same question, sadly and alluringly. A naked Eve steps from the golden dusk toward the sounds of the flute. Her hair is wet and heavy from bathing in the pond, the nearness of which is reminded by the croaking of the frogs, and from time to time the plash of water. Eve’s hair is wet, heavy and dark—the dusky gold flows down her naked shoulders and breasts. The flowers’ half-opened cups, weighted down by the dew, emit a sweet and subtle scent. The flute sounds more and more insistently. From the lonely octave, from the whispering of the leaves, from the saturated fatigue of the vegetation, from the languid muttering of the frogs is born a strange melody, full of the sadness of loss that has not yet come to pass. Eve, enchanted and filled with this melody, repeats her movements in the strange dance, which is unpredictable and is interwoven into a single whole with the flute, with the plants, with the gloomy, golden twilight. The flute seconds the flowers, which sing the bewitching language of scent. Eve’s movements become more and more jerky—bewitched by the flute, she dances closer and closer to the place from which the marvelous sounds are coming—toward the moss-covered tree under which the goat-­ legged god Pan is hiding. The flute copies Eve’s movements, playing passages to her jumps, trills to her turns, and pauses when she becomes still. Eve’s body, young and supple, the color of golden wheat, wheat-like gold, repeats, like a mirror, all the melody’s inflections, rises and falls. This is the primal union of music and dance. Dancing, Eve approaches closer and

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closer to the moss-covered tree, to where the goat-legged god Pan entices her. Her breasts heave. The flute falls silent. Eve stops. The air is filled with the plants’ breathing. Right behind Eve, arises Adam and places his hand on her shoulders. …Again, the flute sounds. Having now settled down on a thick tree branch, the god Pan sadly watches the game Adam and Eve are playing. His hooked fingers carefully hold the fragile instrument, his goat legs are crossed, and his lips tenderly pass over the round openings in the flute, which emits tender and weary sounds. Adam and Eve’s game becomes more and more passionate. In turn, they change roles, thinking up new rules as they go, until finally Eve, tired by the jumps and caresses, sits down on the soft grass and leans back on the moss-covered tree. Adam lies down, putting his head on her knees. The gold of the wind dissolves in the approaching night. The cups of the flowers are now closed. The flowers have fallen asleep until morning and even while sleeping they continue to give off a sensual and tender scent. Adam is falling asleep. Eve quietly strokes his hair and looks with half-­ closed eyes at the dark leaves of the tree through which enormous stars are visible. The flock of birds leaves the tree and flies off into the depths of the jungle where it will pass the night. Night.

Ritornello I When the first two chapters of this book were finished, the author and The Mirror’s first listeners (friends of the author) had the following conversation: Friends: “Well done! But you won’t get it published.” Author: “Why not?” Friends: “There’s no plot. It’s a novel-improvisation. It’s unusual. They won’t understand it.” Author: “But what is life if not a never-ending improvisation?” Friends: “It doesn’t matter. Besides, it’s not clear what genre it belongs to. If it’s autobiography, then what are Adam and Eve and life in Paradise doing there? And if it’s not, then why bother to include real people and events?” Author: “But why are they real?”

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Friends: “If you’re going to conduct the narrative (if this can even be called a narrative) from a first-person point of view and mention real names and events, then you can’t deny the text’s autobiographical nature.” Author: “But how do we know what’s real and what isn’t; who’s more real—the Cheshire Cat, Anna Karenina, James—the thick-jowled doorman at the Juilliard School, or Georgy Wainer, the editor of the newspaper New Russian Word, with whom I happened to have a chat yesterday about The Mirror. Who of the above-mentioned persons is the most real? I don’t know.” Friends: “All the same, if you want to convince your readers what you’ve written bears no relation to you, nobody will believe you!” Author: “You underestimate the reader.” Friends: “That’s better than writing without any hope of publishing.” Author: “Are you sure?” Friends (mockingly): “Oh, of course, pardon us. Like all greats you, of course, are above the opinion of the masses, so of course, it goes without saying, that such lowly concepts as royalties and the like shouldn’t defile lofty thoughts. Nectar and ambrosia are the food of the muses. Daily bread should only be in the form of manna from heaven. Payment for a job is a completely abstract concept. Write for yourself as much as you like.” Author: “I don’t like to at all. And as far as the great writers are concerned, you’re mistaken. As a rule, they suffered from the opinion of the masses a great deal more than that opinion deserved. Friends (in a conciliatory tone): “Well, okay. Can you at least tell us what the main idea of this book is?” Author: “That’s the same thing as asking me what my music is about.” Friends: “Not entirely. After all, you don’t write, for example, in the style of the Symbolists.” Author: “All art is symbolic.” Friends: “Besides, a novel is not a musical piece and it isn’t a poem. It’s not so abstract. A novel unfolds in time and space. Without an intrinsic idea the form loses its shape and the magnetic quality becomes lost.” Author: “If the meaning of the text isn’t heard in the pages of the text, then how can you expect me to express it in a few words in an interview?” Friends: “This isn’t an interview. Don’t get angry. We’re talking now from the standpoint of the average reader.” Author: “Let the average reader read average books.” Friends (with a smile): “A typical Lera pronouncement. You won’t die of modesty.”

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Author (also with a smile): “Well… at least I don’t have to fear that diagnosis.” Friends: (raising their non-existent glasses): “Then—to life! The Mirror is life. Real, unreal, imaginary, lost… Adjectives are masks. A pack of mirror werewolves. What you believe in is what exists.” Author: “Flute, ancient pipe of the sunny Hellenes and mournful Pan, lead me on further. Your tune is pure and touching as it encircles my heart, like a serpentine ribbon—a silver bell in the darkness of the unknown. I am coming, I am listening to your pure sound and my ear is tuned to your overtones.”

CHAPTER 26

Sometimes Dreams Do Come True: Thea Musgrave’s Exploration of Dramatic-Abstract Forms in her Instrumental Music Thea Musgrave CBE

Introduction I have always prided myself on being a practical Scotswoman, and therefore never at all subscribed to the mystical power of dreams to foretell the future. In fact, I would rather cynically and skeptically challenge anyone who did! And yet a very powerful dream I had about fifty-five years ago changed the course of my thinking in ways I never would have predicted. It was in the mid-1960s. I had settled back in London after spending time in Edinburgh and Paris and I had just been studying conducting in several private lessons with the very versatile French composer, pianist and conductor Jacques-Louis Monod. I was curious to learn a skill that might come in handy one day—and it definitely has—as throughout my career I

T. Musgrave CBE (*) New York, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 L. Kouvaras et al. (eds.), The Composer, Herself, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23922-9_26

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have been invited to conduct my own works—whether it was the premiere of my Viola Concerto (for my husband Peter Mark) at the BBC Proms (1973), the premiere of my opera, Mary, Queen of Scots at the Edinburgh Festival (1977), or my Concerto for Orchestra which I conducted for the Philadelphia Orchestra (1976). I knew that studying conducting would be useful for me, if and when I took the podium (which I did quite regularly while my ears were still working well). I only ever conducted my own works, where I thought it might be an advantage to have the composer extracting from live players what had formed in my mind and what I had tried to realise in writing it down. Then, if there were to be any discrepancies, I could always fix them there on the spot. But what I was unprepared for was the impact this one dream had on the direction of my compositions, leading to several works that I later labeled “dramatic-abstract.” In that dream, which occurred concurrently with those conducting lessons, I was startled and shocked when the principal clarinetist suddenly stood up and played in a wholly independent way, defying me as I continued to try to maintain control over the rest of the orchestra. To my continuing amazement and frustration that solo clarinetist encouraged other instruments to stand up and rebel as well! Well, fortunately I woke up before this mounting rebellion completely overwhelmed me, and then realised it was just a dream. That night at a pre-planned dinner with friends I told them all about this momentous and threatening dream I had just had, and we all had a great laugh which defused the power of the dream. Or so I thought! The very next day I received in the morning post a commission from the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra to produce an orchestral work of about twenty minutes length. In response, I wrote my Concerto for Orchestra (1967). It only took me a minute to decide that the Principal Clarinetist was, at a particular point in the piece, going to stand up and defy the conductor and encourage others to follow. I had enormous fun composing this piece and working out the dimensions of the growing clarinet lead in open rebellion against following the conductor’s beat. It occurred to me that I tend to hear music as a dialogue between instruments  — and was happy to have this theatrical element to the musical “argument.”

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In order to accomplish this, I even had to create a new system of notation in order to cope with the soloist’s mutiny with his compatriots—at cross purposes to the conductor’s beats. I developed a system of an open measure under a big fermata with signals on specific cues between the principal clarinetist and the responsive players. This system has worked well for my other dramatic-abstract works (meaning, non-programmatic music with dramatic interaction between members of the orchestra) such as my Clarinet, Horn, and Viola Concertos which followed, as well as some purely orchestral works Memento Vitae (1970), Night Music (1969), and my recent Trumpet Concerto (2019) which premiered in 2019 at the Cheltenham Festival. This all came from that one dream I had in the mid-1960s!!!

Exploration of Works The works in this chapter were inspired by my search for dramatic elements in my instrumental music. Each piece explores my dramatic-abstract style, using instrumental interplay for dramatic effect. The summaries below describe the dramatic trajectory and the specific interaction of the players, which is unique to each piece.

Concerto for Orchestra (1967), Program Note by Susan Bradshaw Concerto for Orchestra was commissioned by the Feeney Trust for the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, was written between March and November 1967, and was first performed by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Hugo Rignold at the Royal Festival Hall, London, on 8 March 1968. It is one of a series of works (including the second and third Chamber Concertos), in which Thea Musgrave has been preoccupied with the search for “vivid dramatic forms for abstract instrumental music.” This has led her to explore the possibilities for freeing the vertical aspect of the music from the rigid control of the barline—or, in this case, from the conductor’s beat—without losing control of the overall musical content, so that, whatever the arbitrary melodic

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coincidence, the harmonic sense is always clear. Besides being a virtuoso work for orchestra, this is also a concerto in the more usual sense of a conflict between solo and tutti. This conflict is muted at first, becoming more intense as the tempo increases throughout the work, and ending with a fierce musical confrontation. The five sections are played without a break. In the opening Adagio, various solo instruments unfold slow, expressive ideas which are later overlaid by spikier, fanfare-like figurations suggested by the first entry of the trumpet. The tutti background is almost entirely static: basically, a single note (E flat) resolving to closely spaced chords. The divisions between solo and tutti are intentionally blurred by the changing instrumentation. In the Andante Velato, the sustained background is formed by a series of chords— a continuous, though slow-moving harmonic ostinato in the strings and brass. Above and around these, as in the first section, legato melodic lines contrast with fragmentary rhythmic fanfares and cadenza-like flourishes. These ‘solo’ elements gradually suffuse the whole texture, encouraging the break-up of the sustained harmonic background—which only then returns to form the final cadence. In the third section, Calmo, a gently shifting, rather neutral background is provided by some of the solo strings, while others interweave freer, more brilliant passages between the staccato chords (always in equal note-­ lengths) of wind and brass, which insist on a return to a regular rhythmic pulse. The tempo quickens as these elements weave into the beginnings of a full orchestral tutti, dramatically interrupted at its first climax by the solo clarinet who, during the course of a wild and uninhibited cadenza, incites other instruments to join in. This, the player eventually does, in spite of their initial reluctance, and three attempts by the tutti orchestra to take back control. In an extended cadenza, Tempo rubato ma fantastico the clarinet gradually recruits and enlarges the concertante group, spurring it on to ever more frenzied activity. During this, the tutti orchestra has little chance to assert itself but, as the soloists reach a climax of complexity, it starts to regain control, finally submerging the rebellious elements (with the clarinet the last to admit defeat) as it moves into the final presto. The warring instruments resolve to co-operate in this tutti section, although the clarinet cannot resist a few penultimate wistful reminiscences of the opening sections of the work.

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Fig. 26.1  Thea Musgrave, Concerto for Orchestra (1967) Clarinet solo and concertante group

So, you can see here how the dream I had was transformed into a piece of music for orchestra with the same open rebellion against the conductor, lead also by the same principal clarinetist of the dream. Figure 26.1 shows the end of the soloist’s cadenza, and the gradual addition of other instrumental voices.

Concerto for Clarinet (1968), Summary by Thea Musgrave The Clarinet Concerto is one of a series of works where I have explored certain dramatic-abstract ideas: that is, dramatic in presentation but abstract because there is no programme or story. In this work, the

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dramatic idea is basically a simple one and arises out of the original meaning of the word concertare—that is, struggle or conflict, in the sense of balancing unequal forces; solo versus tutti, or individual(s) versus crowd. The Clarinet Concerto was written in 1968 in response to a commission from the Royal Philharmonic Society (in association with the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation). It was first performed in February 1969 by the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Colin Davis, with Gervase de Peyer as soloist at the Royal Festival Hall, London. The solo clarinet, as well as having a virtuosic role, also here has another function in that it moves around the orchestra to play with various smaller concertante groups. The groups in turn are set against the rest of the orchestra. At these moments the solo clarinet is usually independent of the conductor and leads the other members of the group. Many notational problems had to be solved to write down these ideas in a clear and practical way without losing general harmonic control. Figure  26.2

Fig. 26.2  Thea Musgrave, Clarinet Concerto (1968) clarinet solo, Quasi Improvisando, leading subset groups of the orchestra

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demonstrates a notational solution to combining aleatoric figures in the solo Clarinet and Trumpet lines, set against the temporally notated string section. The work is in one continuous movement and is a kind of concerto grosso; a recurring tutti section, easily recognisable with its fast, rhythmic figurations, and then the various contrasting episodes sandwiched in between, with a different concertino each time.

Night Music (1969) Night Music for Chamber Orchestra was commissioned by the BBC and given its first performance by the BBC Welsh Orchestra in 1969. In this work, the two horn players are featured in a soloistic and dramatic way. Contrasting musical ideas are explored dependent on where they are seated in the orchestra—more lyrical when they are seated close together, more dramatic later on, when they stand either side of the conductor at some distance from each other, and then near the end the musical contrasts are further heightened by the echo effects produced by one distant offstage horn. The dream landscape painted in Night Music is in one continuous movement. As so often in dreams there are quickly changing moods; (frightening, eerie, peaceful, romantic, stormy), and so in this work highly contrasted musical sections quickly follow on from each other, they interchange and even at times overlap.

Memento Vitae (1970) Subtitled “A Concerto in Homage to Beethoven,” Memento Vitae was commissioned by BBC Scotland and the Saltire Society to commemorate the bicentennial of the birth of Beethoven (in 1770). The first performance was by the BBC Scottish Orchestra, on 22 March 1970, conducted by James Loughran. Memento Vitae is one of the works in the series of dramatic-abstract forms and in the subtitle the word concerto is relevant. The conflict, however, is not so much between solo and tutti as between past and present— hence the quotation from T.S. Eliot in the score:

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Time present and time past. are both perhaps present in time future, and time future in time past.1

Time past is presented here by certain memory elements taken from the works of Beethoven, some actual quotations; some references to works; and third, the structural element which welds the whole work together. This latter concerns the essential feature of the last movement of his Eighth Symphony—the clash between the main tonality F major and the sudden C sharp outbursts, which Beethoven only “explains” much later in the coda. The short introductory Adagio Drammatico of my piece, with its mood of restlessness and inherent violence, immediately presents this F/C sharp element, but filled in to become a chord cluster. Figure 26.3 shows the chord cluster at the end of the opening’s brief Adagio Drammatico section. In the ensuing Andante Teneramente, delicate, melismatic writing for solo string quartet and winds is all centered around F, but from time to time the texture is interrupted by distant sounds of trumpets and drums (based on C sharp). This latter is not a quotation but a reference to the

Fig. 26.3  Thea Musgrave, Memento Vitae, chord cluster (strings and horns), F/C sharp elements

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 T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets (New York: Harcourt, 1943): 17.

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Fig. 26.4  Thea Musgrave, Memento Vitae, “Ecossaise” scoring for wind parts

“Dona Nobis Pacem” section of the “Agnus Dei” in Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis (1823). We also hear short excerpts from the Ecossaise scored for winds, as demonstrated in Fig. 26.4. Much later a short excerpt leading to the storm section from Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony (1808) is heard (F major) and then the heralded storm arrives (D flat, alias C sharp). However, the previous reference to trumpets and drums calling for “Dona nobis pacem” makes clear what kind of a storm is intended here. The storm is the climax of the work, and the timpani player has a very important solo role. The well-known chorale theme from Beethoven’s Opus 132, the String Quartet no. 15 in A minor (1825), is played by the solo string quartet (F major but ending in A major and thus including C sharp) and is heard in the gaps of the storm as it gradually dies away. After some moments of partial recapitulation, the string quartet offers a resolution of the F/C sharp conflict in the shape of a softly sustained D flat major chord, but this is abruptly shattered and the work ends not on a note of peace, but with feelings of desolation, lamentation and with an overriding memory of the storm’s violence. Apart from the Eliot quotation referred to, the other words written at the top of the score are “Dona nobis pacem.”

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Concerto for Horn (1971) The starting point for this work was a picture postcard from Mexico by Australian horn virtuoso, Barry Tuckwell: the postcard showed several monolithic statues surrounding a central figure. This inspired the idea for the last section of the work where the orchestral horns are strategically placed round the perimeter of the hall, thus “surrounding” the soloist. The Horn Concerto was composed in 1970–1971  in response to a commission from Mario. di Bonaventura for the Hopkins Center Congregation of the Arts Festival at Dartmouth. College, Hanover, New Hampshire (USA). The concerto is dedicated to Barry Tuckwell. It belongs to the series of my dramatic-abstract works (following the Clarinet Concerto, Night Music and Memento Vitae); that is, dramatic in presentation and abstract because it contains no. programme. Throughout the work the brass section forms a kind of concertante group set against the rest of the orchestra—they break up the mood of the opening misterioso with their parodia con violenza and later overwhelm the capriccioso with wild fanfares. The percussion, spread around the back of the orchestra, helps to build this climax, and when the trumpets take up new positions on either side of the platform, the scene is set for the horns to move out into the hall to explore the spatial effects of this arrangement in a very dramatic way. An example is seen in Fig. 26.5 of the interactions between the soloist and the tutti horns.

Fig. 26.5  Thea Musgrave, Horn Concerto (1971) spatial interactions between solo and tutti horns

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Fig. 26.6  Thea Musgrave, Horn Concerto (1971) quarter tone writing in solo horn part

One particular effect used in the Concerto came about after Barry Tuckwell had heard some recordings of American jazz trumpeter Don Ellis, where he uses an extra valve to allow for quarter tones. On an orchestral horn, some of the natural harmonics are a quarter tone flat, so in certain registers a quarter tone scale is perfectly feasible, and I have used Barry Tuckwell’s fingerings for the quarter-note scale here and in other works, as demonstrated in Fig. 26.6.

Viola Concerto (1973) The Viola Concerto was commissioned by the BBC. The first performance was by the Scottish National Orchestra, at a BBC Promenade Concert in the Royal Albert Hall in 1973, with the composer conducting and with Peter Mark as the viola soloist. Many of my orchestral works have been written in what I call dramatic-­ abstract forms. The form is quite different in each of these works but technically they do have certain things in common. In order to underline the dramatic nature of certain solo parts, the players at times play independently from the conductor, so they have the same kind of rhythmic freedom as they would in a virtuosic cadenza or lyrical rubato. This meant finding a notation that allows the synchronisation of events simply and practically, leaving the players free to concentrate on presenting their lines in an uninhibited way. The Viola Concerto explores the dramatic interplay of the solo viola with different small orchestral groups, and, equally important, the relationship of the soloist with their colleagues in the viola section. To this end, the viola section is seated where the first violins normally sit, thus focusing attention on them right from the start. The opening tutti forms the framework to the whole work; it is often loud and characterised by sharp jagged chords or whirling passages with chattering wind and brass. But there are also softer moments, such as

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Fig. 26.7  Thea Musgrave, Viola Concerto (1973), “Andante: Espressivo Molto” viola soloist cantabile line, accompanied by an undulating horn figure

when the soloist makes their entry, and later when there is a cantabile line accompanied by softly undulating horns, illustrated in Fig. 26.7. There are two central episodes where the soloist is heard in combination with two small orchestral groups; an unconducted soft lyrical section when the viola soloist is accompanied by the flute, bass clarinet and harp, and later a grotesque scherzo with the bassoon, first cello and first double bass. During this scherzo the orchestral violas become increasingly restive and finally break out with an impassioned declamation. They are dramatically interrupted by a solo trombone. The soloist then joins the violas and leads them to a brief recapitulation and coda, seen in Figs. 26.8 and 26.9.

Trumpet Concerto (2019) Unlike most other commissions where I have had more time to ruminate about the subject and the form that the music would take, the inspiration for my Trumpet Concerto came from two distinct but immediate “light bulb” visions. The first came at my initial 2019 meeting with the uniquely virtuosic trumpet soloist who triggered the commission, Alison Balsom, when in an off-the-cuff remark she said she loved to “sing” with her instrument. I have, of course, written many works using the trumpet but never as a solo instrument in a concerto. This idea of using the trumpet as a singing instrument immediately captured my imagination. The second

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Fig. 26.8  Thea Musgrave, Viola Concerto (1973), tutti violas, impassioned soloistic lines

revelation occurred a month later when I was in Edinburgh for the Festival. I happened to attend an exhibition by the magnificent painter Victoria Crowe, whom I first met when she painted my portrait for the Scottish National Portrait Gallery. This particular exhibition “A Certain Light,” was all of still life trees—which I found mesmerizing and evocative.2 I was immediately grabbed by the image of the very first painting I looked at, Opening Out, with the energy of the tree reaching from the roots upwards and outwards. I felt it could be a metaphor for the journey of life: reaching out to find colleagues, friends, lovers, but also ideas and projects—all those things that make life meaningful and fulfilling. I thought that this painting along with several others that I saw could form an overall shape to the work as well as the right environment for the trumpet’s singing. Vicky, who has long since become a friend as well as a colleague, generously agreed to support this musical work with her masterful images. 2  Victoria Crowe, “A Certain Light” exhibition, The Scottish Gallery, 2 Aug 2018–1 Sep 2018, https://scottish-gallery.co.uk/exhibitions/a-certain-light.

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Fig. 26.9  Thea Musgrave, Viola Concerto (1973), viola soloist leading the tutti violas as a section recapitulation

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In the first movement, “Opening Out,” the trumpet interacts just with the strings, harp and percussion, and relationships begin to form. One of these moments occurs early on where the trumpet, with physical dramatic cues, encourages solo string players to embellish the music in the strings. This generally ascending, slow misterioso, four-note figure found there, with three crotchets rising over the bar line, is first started in the earthy lower strings and is then joined by the trumpet and the upper strings in their lower registers. Although rising passages are common in my music, here they are particularly emblematic of the kinetic growth of the trees and the movement’s title “Opening Out.” This figure reappears several times during the work. Similarly, at the end of this first movement, the trumpet incites the solo clarinet to join, followed by the horns. In the following movement, “How the Snow Fell,” the music begins before snow falls. A pizzicato theme on the cellos playfully accompanies the clarinet. A big string chordal cluster grows ever larger and represents the gradual arrival of the snow. A dramatic interchange between trumpet and orchestra depicts the frustration of the trumpet who can no longer be playful because of the deep snow! The trumpet then turns to the horns to begin the next movement, “Between Two Windows.” This is a triptych picture with trees on each side.3 Towards the end of this movement, the growing tree figure returns. Horns and bassoons join the upper strings in their higher register to expand the figure. Similar passages in the upper woodwind and rumbles from the percussion adorn the expanded music, as if like a beautiful bowl of luminous flowers. Now it is the clarinet who calls the trumpet to re-join the group and spur on a brief call and response of the figure between the strings and woodwind. In the fourth movement, titled “White Nights of a Northern Summer,” I decided to return to my Scottish heritage and have the trumpet play a wonderful Scottish tune called “The Bonnie Earl of Moray” with a simple accompaniment, the melodic line of which is given in Fig. 26.10. The last movement, “Landscape with Hidden Moon,” is a wonderful painting of trees in the darkness with the flickering of hidden life in the distance. I imagined it to be early dawn, and at first the trumpet is rather reluctant to wake up. Suddenly in the distance the sound of an off-stage trumpet… immediately the solo trumpet reacts to this with excitement.

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 Crowe, “A Certain Light” exhibition.

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Fig. 26.10  Thea Musgrave, Trumpet Concerto (2019), trumpet soloist plays traditional Scottish tune, “The Bonnie Earl of Moray”

After a momentary disappointment when the offstage sound seems to go mute, the offstage trumpet enters and stands upstage beside the percussion. The two trumpets engage in an increasingly excited duet which builds to a big climax. A two-trumpet cadenza follows, along with a few other instruments which leads to another big climax. The coda, “Sonorous Tree,” which follows is quiet and marked “Serene.” Though this relationship is certainly intended to be exciting and fulfilling, it is also grounded in an inherent quietness and solidity, which means that it can last. These works each demonstrate the musical techniques that I used to embody the “dramatic-abstract form” in my works. These pieces have spanned my career output, ever since that dream almost fifty-five years ago. The idea has inspired my large-scale works and allowed me to shape dramatic musical narratives around an “abstract” premise.

References Crowe, Victoria. “A Certain Light” exhibition. The Scottish Gallery, 2 Aug 2018–1 Sep 2018. https://scottish-­gallery.co.uk/exhibitions/a-­certain-­light. Eliot, T.S. Four Quartets. New York: Harcourt, 1943. Musgrave, Thea. Concerto for orchestra. London: J. & W. Chester, 1968. ———. Clarinet Concerto. London: J. & W. Chester, 1969. ———. Night music, for chamber orchestra. London: J. & W. Chester, 1972. ———. Memento vitae: A concerto in homage to Beethoven. London: J. & W. Chester, 1975a. ———. Horn concerto. London: J. & W. Chester, 1974. ———. Viola Concerto. London: Novello, 1975b. ———. Trumpet concerto (Rev. 2019). London: Novello, 2019.

CHAPTER 27

My Awakening as Composer—No Adjective Judith Lang Zaimont

Early Years I was born to write music. Being a composer channels all the perceptions of my outer and inner lives and every aspect of my life resonates to that central fact. As a creator, I understand it is my job to imagine what might be and strive always to make that vision manifest in indelible, fullest form by using every resource of taste, style and imagination I can summon. To arrive at such an understanding mandates confidence in one’s abilities, the belief ratified over time that one’s artistic process will be one of integrity, and that a worthy final work will eventually be achieved. The journey to understand this in full took some time, and to fulfill myself as an artistic whole has taken almost my entire life. But I had a head-start due to the good fortune of being born into a family already profoundly sensitive to the compelling power of classical music. Though I was born in Memphis, Tennessee (1945), my family was from Brooklyn, NY and we moved back to Brooklyn before I turned one, then on to the borough of Queens where we stayed all through my college years. Growing up in New  York City was especially significant since in New  York

J. L. Zaimont (*) Maricopa, AZ, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 L. Kouvaras et al. (eds.), The Composer, Herself, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23922-9_27

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performance standards in everything, for all, were at a high international standard. Family musical talent was definitely positioned on the female side. (This, despite the fact that it’s my brother who is the only family member with perfect pitch; and our father—a world-recognized chemical engineer, and everyone’s best audience—was the only person I’ve ever known who could modulate unthinkingly while presumably holding a single pitch.) My mother, Bertha F.  Lang, was an accomplished pianist. She taught piano and voice privately and later on became president of New York State Music Teachers Association. My sister, Doris Lang Kosloff, morphed from piano into conducting in her early twenties and now heads the Opera division at The Hartt School-University of Hartford, and is also Artistic Director of Opera Connecticut. From earliest years I was drawn to music. (There are family tales that I sang in my sleep from age two on.) Piano study with my mother began at age five, by eight I was winning local prizes and by ten international awards. Being selected at eleven to perform live on national TV (The Lawrence Welk Show) was notable—but the actual experience terrified me: I had to play Lecuona’s “Malagueña” and also a duo with Pete Fountain, the stage band’s skillful clarinetist, a piece I had to learn in the hotel room by practicing on the side of the bed while sitting on the floor. After some time had passed, I realized that this performance prompting the subconscious recognition that I wasn’t really suited by personality to be a performer: I preferred practicing to performing. But Why? Outwardly it looked like I was firmly on the performing track. While attending New York City’s public schools with a regular schedule all the way through high school, I entered Juilliard’s Preparatory Division at age thirteen to study piano with Mme. Rosina Lhevinne and her chief assistant, Leland Thompson, and duo-piano with Anne Hull (along with theory, and Miss Goldstein’s infamous keyboard harmony class). Professional management began at fourteen: touring, recording, radio, more TV—it seemed as if being a performer was a done deal. Yet this all happened after I already knew I was meant to be a composer, not performer. From about age ten on I was required to practice three hours every day of the week. Practicing became a bit of a chore, especially when the music at hand was not some fascinating Beethoven sonata or a Liszt Hungarian Rhapsody but one or another of the endlessly boring 240 exercises in Hanon’s The Virtuoso Pianist—each repeated fifteen times over. After searing Hanon’s passagework in memory or repeating knotty passages

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from actual pieces over and over again in the hope of improving the execution, I would give myself the treat of finishing out the three hours by sight-reading Mozart sonatas or Chopin nocturnes—and it was Chopin himself who did the trick. Sight-reading Chopin’s Berceuse woke me up to the fact that even Chopin did not like to play the same thing over and over again—Chopin also did not like to practice! The D-flat major Berceuse is built from many variants of a sweet melodic germ over a one-measure semi-cadence progression in the left hand which remains constant in layout, register, and rhythm right up to the very last bars. I played the piece through a second time to understand the music’s message clearly—and it was as if a lightbulb suddenly started brilliantly shining above my head. Every time the open-ended progression repeated Chopin would always make it different—something was always being tweaked on the melody’s surface or elaborated in fleeting transitional harmonies that flew by in right-hand figurations. All at once, here was Chopin himself letting me know that even he did not like to practice: he also was as impatient as I was! I took this as a personal invitation to go right ahead and do my own tweaking—to mess around with the notes and explore something new. And I began to write. It took a fair while to advance towards completion as a composer. Right away in junior high school I started reading biographies of composers of past eras. Small incidents in these resonated, like a young Franz Schubert sneaking downstairs at night to unlock his brother’s music cabinet to read through his music. Or Beethoven’s great, largely unreturned affection for his nephew, and the composer’s several unrequited loves. These spoke of composers’ single-focus character, not to mention music’s enormous, magnetic power—both of which certainly described me and what drew me to music. In those early teen years, it never dawned on me that all the composers whose names and music I knew were male, and I was not. Even when I came across Cécile Chaminade’s famous “Scarf Dance” tucked away in a collection, I misconstrued the composer’s name as a misprint for Cecil Chaminade. Why care about gender?—what did it matter? After all, we were all composers…. At age twelve I composed my third piece, a suite of five movements titled American City—A Portrait of New York. My mother had me copy it out in pen on formal manuscript paper, then without another word submitted it to a national composers’ competition which included a section for composers up to age eighteen. Again, I was the beneficiary of good

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fortune when the suite won first prize. We had to go to Washington, D.C. so I could perform it at the prize concert. Getting ready to perform my own notes in public was nothing like the drudgery of much other practicing—this music was a joy to practice. It seemed utterly natural that the notes should un-scroll precisely in this very way and I enjoyed the performance. Even in this early piece my groping to bend music to my own locution is clear. Note the 7/8 meter interpolated into the rat-tat-tat of eighth notes in the opening page, plus the setup of nested, crossed hands, left over right (Fig. 27.1). During those junior-high and high-school years, of course I had no idea where I might fit into music’s eternal continuum. I’d come to see that the largely nineteenth-century music I’d been playing for years didn’t quite gibe with the more angular sounds (like clouds of fourths) springing up inside my head. So, I listened to as much music as I could. The best of these discoveries was pieces I found fascinating and complex and could listen to every night—and did! They didn’t have to sound modern—just needed to have depth, intriguing surfaces, and fully sustain themselves over their entire length.

Fig. 27.1  Judith Lang Zaimont, American City—a Portrait of New York

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Starting in sixth grade, every evening while my mother gave lessons upstairs, I’d go into the basement and listen to recordings of both Mozart’s 40th and Tchaikovsky’s 6th Symphonies. The Mozart came together like an intricate, perfect necklace of clean-cut, slightly-contrapuntal jewels; the Tchaikovsky always tugged at my heart. In high school it was Gieseking playing mid- and late-Debussy, and anything Rachmaninoff. Later on, during freshman and sophomore years in college, it was Berg’s Op.1 Sonata and Ravel’s String Quartet, soon joined by Richter’s transfixing performance of Scriabin’s Fifth Sonata, and Berg’s Violin Concerto. Earlier in my teens, once Saturdays meant the whole day at Juilliard, I especially relished light-classical works that just happened to be on the radio during the one-and-a-half-mile car ride each way. These were a somewhat eclectic group broadcast on New Jersey’s WPAT 930 AM radio station—pieces like Leroy Anderson’s Syncopated Clock and Morton Gould’s Pavanne, some more melodic Debussy, big-band music from the 1940’s, etc. On one drive they played “Hoedown” from Copland’s ballet Rodeo, and I said out loud “I like that!” Then when a neighbor gave me a birthday gift of the story of Cinderella featuring movements from the Prokofiev ballet, I listened to this over and over. Whenever it came to the great Waltz at the Prince’s palace with its crunched, chromatic melody, I’d say every time “I want to write that!” Finally, in college, after I became intrigued by works like Sacre de Printemps and Berg’s Wozzeck, and after myself studying and performing Prokofiev’s Op. 11 Toccata, Peter Mennin’s Five Pieces, Ravel’s Jeu d’eux and Tombeau de Couperin, I’d found true companions in the twentieth century. All the way through high school and college years I never studied composition, except for the one-semester college Composition class with Hugo Weisgall which I petitioned the school to take a second time. But that didn’t really matter: the strong overall theory and analysis approach at Queens College, City University of New York (CUNY), as distinct to a performance approach, put the composer’s-eye-view first and foremost and was an eye-opener. Previously music theory had seemed to zero in on a “laboratory” approach to sonorities, using micro focus to study sonority interactions in slivers, a bit like samples on a microscope slide. Now, with analysis to counterbalance on the macro level, I saw interactions operative over an entire movement or even a whole piece. How composers plotted form over the long term, based on large-scale harmonic interactions, was revealed. No longer was I living in musical “flat land,” dependent on barto-bar happenings—now I could comprehend my world in three dimensions.

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Graduate School and Beyond: Composer! It was in graduate school at Columbia University that my only one-on-one composition lessons took place, first with electronic music pioneer Otto Luening and then with opera-forward Jack Beeson. They were both wise with no strong stylistic bias to impose on students. Most helpful to someone like myself who still needed to stretch and grow but already knew she was a severe critic of her own work, something of a perfectionist, and clearly self-directed. Though all my piano instructors save one had been women, it was solely men who taught the formal courses in school. (The piano-teacher “exception” was the skilled, and helpfully goading Zaven Khachadourian at the Long Island Institute of Music. I’d switched there when I determined not to continue at Juilliard for college: Composers, I felt, needed a full humanities background.) During all the undergraduate school years, age sixteen to twenty, I continued to win prizes in composition and also to perform regularly. Only twice during these years did I ever encounter a “reaction” to my being female. Both of these came from classroom teachers, and both were cautionary rather than negative. Just as in any sphere, in Composition there’s a pipeline to “favored” status: study with the right teacher(s); write in the currently fashionable style; generally, get yourself noticed. The first “reaction” came from a rather disillusioned composer, who himself was a magnificent illuminator of music theory. I’d taken a special seniors honors course with this teacher in my last undergraduate semester (petitioning the school to create the class just for me) to explore twentieth-century composition innovations through analysis of key works, then composing companion pieces of my own. At the semester’s end he invited my fiancé and myself to his home for dinner. Following the meal he took me aside to impart three truths, as he saw them: • I write tonal music in a non-tonal current style; • I had ability as a pianist, and life would be a lot more pleasant as a performer than a composer; and, • I was a woman in a man’s world. While I appreciated that his comments arose from a sincere wish to spare me grief, it was clear that he was dead wrong (an immediate reaction borne of affirmed confidence in my abilities):

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• I was a composer, period; • Styles change; and, • Being female didn’t matter one whit. (It had never really risen to my consciousness at all.) I consistently believed that only talent counts, and what you do with it. The second teacher’s “reaction” in 1970 was more unusual. After completing my master’s degree in 1968 I’d thought a lot about all the music presented in school, and recognized that not all genuinely spoke to me; that I had to be true to my musical nature, writing only what I would want to hear. So, I determined always to be artistically genuine, and my music began a new chapter: almost immediately performers wanted to play this music. Though I’d written for orchestra already, most of my music so far had been for winds, voices, and piano. Orchestration classes at both universities hadn’t had enough depth, and I was sure I needed more study. I applied for an international postgraduate fellowship to study orchestration with either Luigi Dallapiccola or André Jolivet, and approached Luening for a letter of recommendation. He refused, saying his years of teaching at a women’s college resulted in almost all his students deserting composing for domesticity once they were out of school. So he’d developed a personal policy to not endorse any female student until she was five years out of school and still writing. I privately thought the policy was misguided (after all, I’d just won first prize-gold medal in the international competition for Gottschalk’s centenary) and made a mental note to come back to him later on. And later he did write on my behalf, including for a Guggenheim fellowship in 1983. After a year abroad working with maître Jolivet, I returned to the United States in 1972, took a full-time university teaching position in music theory, and began a two-year self-designed study of orchestration based upon the works of Stravinsky, Ravel, and the last symphonies of Tchaikovsky. Now I could hear accurately from a printed, complex orchestral score! The fruit of this self-study was the commissioned seventy-­ minute 1976 Sacred Service for baritone solo, double chorus and orchestra. The Service was successful and led to other commissions and to my first publications. Finally, after composing for ten years, I felt ready in embryo. The 1970s were also when scholars woke up to the fact that women had written music all throughout time, and female composers of substance were being “discovered” at a rapid rate. I rejoiced at meeting the music of

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Elisabeth Claude Jacquet de la Guerre, Grażyna Bacewicz, Lili Boulanger, and Amy Beach, Louise Farrenc and Louise Talma. And learned that Cécile Chaminade was a woman! It was energizing to now lay claim by gender to being some species of composer: a woman composer, occupying a subset of the whole. This was a way to be identified! Though this was comforting, what continued to perplex me most was how in the world so many notable musical women of the past, writing substantial pieces or contributing significantly in other musical capacities, could be lost to scholarship over time—thoroughly absent from current books, recordings, and other key resources for the study of music. As time passed, I became increasingly incensed at such sustained dismissal.

The Issue of Adjectives For that reason alone, I was content to accept an adjective qualifying the identifier Composer—to accept the adjective Woman Composer (for a while). I gave service to women composers’ organisations, organised concerts, and published a book with profiles of a good number of living women who wrote (a project of the League of Women Composers). Because I knew that evaluation was the necessary next step after sheer “discovery,” I took steps to design a multi-book series on musical women of every kind. (A series was important, so any lingering “novelty” that might cling to the idea of women as significant musical contributors could be countered over time with the reinforced understanding that we were always doing this, in numbers.) I would serve as editor-in-chief, gladly doing everything else this position entailed just so a group of Critical Appraisal essays on individual living women composers could be commissioned from recognized music critics and be seen in print. Though still rare for today’s female composers, this precise type of credential was much needed in order to establish their presence and artistic personality indelibly, and to give staying power to current reputations. The fat volumes in the three-book series The Musical Woman: An International Perspective (Greenwood Press) remain significant to me precisely because of the composer Critical Appraisals contained in each. After some time had passed, I began to think about other “qualifier” adjectives apt in my own instance: Living; American; Jewish. Ultimately, in the 1990s, I began to be uncomfortable with any qualifier. Yes, adjectives

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serve usefully as sociological basis for savvy programming; and they can generate interest and sales. But every one of those adjectives put a composer into a particular subset box separate from the entirety of all composers. Frankly, it irked me to be relegated to a “Column B” position—any species of Column B; I was uncomfortable to be primarily considered only when attention turned to “other.” Besides, I knew I needed at least one more incremental step forward to keep growing artistically. This final step was to jettison any vestige of the strong “piano-forward” influence of my earliest training. I’d slightly favored composing for coherent mediums, meaning mediums where the complete range was colored in roughly the same timbre. (Mediums such as voices; piano; chamber winds). Certainly, I was also composing a huge quantity of mixed-timbre chamber works, and orchestral compositions: tone poems, beginning with 1988’s Monarchs; and symphonies, starting with Symphony No. 1 (1995) (the first of six to date). But it wasn’t until 2001 that I internally felt I was dealing effectively with symphonic wind ensemble; the first decade of this century was heavily devoted to large wind/brass/percussion ensembles. Last of all was the string quartet—the quintessential test of a composer’s ingenuity, passion, and precision in imagining and corralling musical thought. String Quartet The Figure (2008), composed at age sixty-three; A Strange Magic—String Quartet No. 2, in 2016, age seventy-one. That the first quartet subsequently won the 2015–2016 The American Prize in Chamber Music Composition made me finally smile. With these last steps I finally felt fully-­fledged as Composer. I’d long since stepped away from comfort with “Adjective Compose” and shifted attention to a composer’s larger concerns, like the factors active currently in place to slowly change concert music’s position within all music, and just which societal changes are subtly altering how we listen. Music now is in the air all around us—all-pervasive, disembodied, flattened out for electronic transmission. There is music in grocery stores, elevators, restaurants, and public restrooms. There is music in banks, in law offices, doctors’ waiting rooms. At the airport there is music and television. What kind of music is this? How does such a bombardment of sound alter how we hear and cheapen the experience of listening? Following one 2002 photo session, the news photographer casually mentioned that his young daughter became quite nervous whenever there was no music playing in the background. It struck me: As never before, music has become a secondary, partnering art—a constant underscore to

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life and buttress to other art forms. Once listeners accept such a new “constant” it becomes that much harder to commit to listening as a foreground activity. Concerns such as these are now my focus.

Conclusion: Maintaining Balance The good luck to grow up in a cosmopolitan environment and additional good fortune with grants and prizes over time taught me many truths in addition to producing confidence in my artistic instincts. Chief was that I did have something real to offer. And that to survive as a composer you cannot have a too-thin skin: Art is a demanding master; very good art passes through a critical lens sporting a mighty small aperture, and composers must be their own most critical reviewers before the music ever leaves the studio. Performance serves as crucible, and the composer must deliver the goods every time out  — in her own voice, manner, and imagination. Without doubt it’s tricky to balance all areas of life: wife, mother, teacher—composer, person; to navigate the balance between being thoroughly oneself in every sphere, as an individual and musically. And especially tricky in terms of the essential Composer self. Reaching listeners calls for the finest of calibrations on a continuing basis, and constructing an artwork of substance takes time, thought, a detailed editorial eye, and demands much of the maker. The lessons of experience were alerts to require of myself that my music be the finest it can be, to the greatest extent humanly possible, in every piece. And that identifying oneself as an emblem of some subset is ultimately a transitory spotlight, not always so bright, or so helpful. Like all creative folks I am a tinkerer—I think of life as a proof, not a final finished document but something always subject to change, to improvement. My constant hope is to compose durable works of musical art distinctly identifiable as my own which, when taken together, will become a particular artistic legacy leaving a genuine imprint on this most magnificent art.

Score Excerpts—Judith Lang Zaimont The Wizards opening is the music slice played when my website opens, www.judithzaimont.com, performed by a contestant in the San Antonio International Piano Competition (Figs. 27.2, 27.3, 27.4, 27.5, and 27.6).

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Fig. 27.2  Judith Lang Zaimont, Wizards—Three Magic Masters (excerpt). (Copyright © 2005 by Subito Music Publishing (ASCAP). All Rights Reserved. International Copyright Secured. Used by permission)

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Fig. 27.3  Judith Lang Zaimont, When Angels Speak (excerpt 1)

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Fig. 27.4  Judith Lang Zaimont, When Angels Speak (excerpt 2). (Copyright © 2005 by Subito Music Publishing (ASCAP). All Rights Reserved. International Copyright Secured. Used by permission)

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Fig. 27.5  Judith Lang Zaimont, Jupiter’s Moons (excerpt). (Copyright © 2005 by Subito Music Publishing (ASCAP). All Rights Reserved. International Copyright Secured. Used by permission)

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Fig. 27.6  Judith Lang Zaimont, Astral … a mirror life on the astral plane … (excerpt, solo violin version). (Copyright © 2009 by Jeanné, Inc. (ASCAP). All Rights Reserved. International Copyright Secured. Used by permission)

The Astral ending is an example of my incorporation of non-­ instrumental sounds in some pieces. Other examples: the foot-stamps at the mid-section climax portion of my String Quartet “‘The Figure” (see video list); and City Rain, for concert band: commissioned for a crack junior-high band by the American Composers Forum for its BandQuest project, the piece uses the sounds impatient kids might make during a long rehearsal: finger snaps, foot stamps, hand claps, and tapping pencils on music stands (Fig. 27.7).

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Fig. 27.7  Judith Lang Zaimont, Wind Quintet No. 2, Homeland, Mvt II “Echo (Intermezzo)”. (Copyright © 2003 by Jeanné, Inc. (ASCAP). All Rights Reserved. International Copyright Secured. Used by permission)

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References Lang Zaimont, Judith. String Quartet, “The Figure” (Movement 1, “In Shadow”). Harlem String Quartet, uploaded 13 September, 2013a. https://youtu.be/ kNRxenK-­5q8. ———. A Strange Magic—String Quartet no.2. Amernet String Quartet, uploaded 7 October 2019. https://youtu.be/GAnG9VLIi_4. ———. Elegy for Symphonic Strings. Czech Radio Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Leos Svarovsky and Doris Kosloff. Arabesque, CD Z6742 (ArchivMusic), 2000. https://youtu.be/HSoGypYNknE. ———. “Growler” (Movement I), from Symphony for Wind Orchestra in Three Scenes. University of Minnesota Symphonic Wind Ensemble, conducted by Jerry Luckhardt. Uploaded 12 November 2009. https://youtu.be/ hP26a5tvg4Y. ———. Chroma: Northern Lights. Slovak National Symphony Orchestra conducted by Kirk Trevor. Naxos American Classics, 8.559619, 2010, compact disc. https://youtu.be/wtlYvWv1uLk. ———. Serenade for Solo Piano. On Prestidigitations: Contemporary Concert Rags by JL Zaimont. The American Ragtime Ensemble. MSR Classics, MS1238, 2007, compact disc. https://youtu.be/GkkhcZzv3DE. ———. “Temperate” (Movement III), from ZONES, Piano Trio no.2. Peter Winograd, violin; Peter Wyric, cello; Joanne Polk, piano, uploaded 11 September 2012. https://youtu.be/8HfcOn_yPrc. ———. Nocturne, La Fin de Siècle. Elizabeth Moak, piano. “Art Fire Soul”—Piano Works of Judith Lang Zaimont. MSR Classics, MSR1366, 2013b, compact disc. https://youtu.be/lmGVrIzdQu8. ———. “Folderol” (Movement III), from Parallel Play for Saxophone Quartet. Presidio Saxophone Quartet, uploaded 18 February 2013c. https://youtu. be/ze28ut2BGso. ———. City Rain. South Portland High School Wind Ensemble, uploaded 8 December 2016. https://youtu.be/t2u0jxFycuI.

CHAPTER 28

Epilogue Susan McClary

When I completed my PhD in musicology in 1976, none of my courses had ever mentioned even a single woman. When we had the temerity to ask, we were told quite bluntly that there had been no composers who were women. Twenty years later, a colleague argued vehemently against having Hildegard von Bingen on a syllabus, that she was just a passing fad enflamed by radical feminists. The murder of George Floyd in May 2020 has compelled North American musicians to think seriously about racial diversity in concert programming, commissioning, teaching, and research. To be sure, a more gradual version of diversification—the inclusion of women—had already begun to modify those enterprises, however slowly. Since 2010, as many women as men have won the Pulitzer Prize in music, and standard textbooks now allocate space for music by women. Yet the frequency with which major performing institutions program that music remains still distressingly low. The Metropolitan Opera has performed only two operas by women: Der Wald by Dame Ethel Smyth in 1903, and L’Amour de loin by Kaija Saariaho in 2016. Missy Mazzoli has received a commission for a

S. McClary (*) Case Western University, Cleveland, OH, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 L. Kouvaras et al. (eds.), The Composer, Herself, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23922-9_28

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Met opera in the next couple of years. But this counts as scant recognition of the creative energies of fifty percent of the population. For all we would like to declare that we are post-gender and post-race, we still have a long way to go. That is why this volume is cause for celebration. The Composer, Herself: Contemporary Snapshots of the Creative Process offers interviews and first-­ hand accounts of nearly thirty women who reflect candidly on their training, aesthetic priorities, compositional processes, and much more. The editors approached both senior and junior artists, from Australia, New Zealand, Europe, Asia, and North America, allowing for comparisons across generations and continents. It should come as no surprise that these musicians differ as much as do male composers from one another. Many of the composers whose words appear in this volume identify to some degree as feminists; most have had to confront the challenge facing all women who dare to encroach on turfs long regarded as exclusively male, and they express commitments to supporting younger artists beginning their careers. But beyond that, they diverge, contributing an astonishing array of new possibilities in music composition. They do so by dent of sheer craft and imagination, intersecting with gender, national traditions, ethnicities, and intellectual investments in science, literature, or philosophy. Drawing on their experiences as humans living in the twenty-first century, they are forging unprecedented ways of communicating through the medium of sound. These are women who happen to write music—innovative, effective, brilliant music. Most remarkable to me as a music historian is the fact that they also exert considerable influence on today’s cultural landscape. Previous generations of women also produced extraordinary music: no male equivalents exist for Hildegard or Barbara Strozzi, for instance. But despite their local fame, they soon got pushed to the margins and then to oblivion until recent rescue missions. I do not anticipate that this generation of women will succumb to that fate, in part because their much greater number has reached a critical mass in which none of them individually counts as an anomaly. Indeed, we are approaching the tipping point when studies that group artists together on the basis of gender may come to seem counterproductive. The Composer, Herself joins other projects that offer a benchmark of where the feminist enterprise in music stands now, only a very few decades after Pauline Oliveros and others had to push back against the “lady composer” pigeonhole. As companions to this volume, I would recommend

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the Oxford series edited by Laurel Parsons and Brenda Ravenscroft, Analytical Essays on Music by Women Composers, that invite scholars to pay close attention to the music itself—as do the composers in Part II of the present volume. The first two volumes have won major awards from the Society for Music Theory, and a third volume is now in progress. The time for exclaiming “Wow! A woman composer!” is long past. Now comes the much more pleasurable activity of listening, performing, and engaging critically with these new voices. But before we declare victory and the arrival of a post-feminist future, we need to reflect on how very radical it still is for Ravenscroft and Parsons to solicit analytical studies of music by women. In other words, we have a lot of work left to do before we can claim that women genuinely have reached parity with respect to programming or serious aesthetic attention. The Composer, Herself lays the foundation for that next stage.

Index1

NUMBERS AND SYMBOLS #MeToo, 14, 355 2016 Gender Relations in New Music Study (Fure), 156 A Abbott, Katy, 6, 8, 9, 18, 19, 21, 23 ABC studios, Ultimo (Sydney), 354 Abela, Donna, 354 Abe Sada (Hope), 18, 258–259, 266–268, 270 Ableton, 276 Ableton Live, 356 Absolute Ocean, 316 Adam and Eve, 274, 275 Adelaide Festival of the Arts, 160, 161 Adelaide Symphony, 299 Adler, Samuel, 285 Advice for composers, 308 Aesthetic responses, 177 The Aesthetics of Disappearance (Hope), 265

AIDS, 300–303 All’s Well That Ends Well (Shakespeare), 47 Allan, Miriam, 352 American, 396, 403 American City–A Portrait of New York (Zaimont), 391, 392 “American Dream,” The, 98 The American Prize in Chamber Music Composition, 397 American String Quartet, 128, 129 Amichai Songs (Ran), 244, 244n1, 245 Amichai, Yehuda, 245 Love Poems, 245 Ancestral domain, 162 Ancient Egypt, 53 Ancient Voices of Children (Crumb), 245 Andrada, Eunice, 354, 357 Animistic beliefs, 163 Anthropological research, 160 Anti-immigration populism, 163 Aotearoa, 135–143

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 L. Kouvaras et al. (eds.), The Composer, Herself, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-23922-9_28

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INDEX

APRA-AMCOS, 155, 167 Arendt, Hannah, 164 Argonauts Club, 180 Art, 371 Artistic cogency, 172, 182 Artistic Moment, 171–182 Art Tatum, 320 Art Therapy, 193, 195 As You Like It (Shakespeare), 48 Aspen Music Festival, 129 Assumptions–Western, 147 Auckland, 135, 142 Audience, 102–104, 107 participation, 273, 274 response, 83 Auerbach, Lera, 19, 23 Australia, 111, 124, 142, 143, 193n15 Australia Ensemble, 58, 58n5 Australian, 158, 160, 162, 167 Australian Art Music Award, 293 The Australian Bass Orchestra, 258, 267, 268 Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC), 299, 304, 306 Australian Catholic University, 306, 306n22 Australian Government, 162, 288n2 Australian Music Centre, 288 Australian women writers, 354 Australia’s Northern Territory, 161 Autobiography, 370 Autoethnography, 187–199 B Bach, Johannes, 314, 315, 320 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 218, 222, 225, 244, 252–253 Art of Fugue, 252 Bailey, Judy, 138 Baker, Buddy, 286 Baker, Tungia, 138 Batty, Rosie, 357

BBC, 374, 378, 379, 383 BBC Symphony Orchestra, 159 Beethoven, 326, 343, 379–381 Grosse Fuge, 326 Symphony No.9, 40 Beijing, 128, 145, 146, 150 Beijing Festival, 128 Bell, Hilary, 354, 357 Berg, Alban, 326 Berio, Luciano, 320, 337, 342 Bernstein, Elmer, 286 Beth Morrison Projects, 92n2, 99 Bias, unconscious, 156, 166 Birtwistle, Harrison, 342 Black Vulture (Hope), 265 Blain-Cruz, Lileana, 92 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 340 Borderlands, 277 Borgo, David, 175 Boulanger, Nadia, 286 Boulez, Pierre, 320, 323, 336 Bowie, David, 94 Brahms, Johannes, 58, 60–62, 66–74 Brain Salad Surgery (Lim), 159 Braithwaite, Nicholas, 298 Bravery, 78 Breaking the Waves (2016), 92n2, 93, 93n3, 98 Brentano String Quartet, 252 Brunei, 163 Buck, Sir Peter, 137 Buddhist, 163, 274 Buku-Larrnggay Mulka Arts Centre, 161 C Cadenza, 376, 377, 383, 388 Caesar, Julius, 50 Cambodia, 126, 130 Campbell, Joseph, 112, 113 Canon, 29, 97, 142, 252, 353 Carriageworks, Sydney, 274

 INDEX 

Catania, 258 Cedille Records, 249, 250 Centering Prayer, 178 Chagall, Marc, 214 Chamber opera, 336, 342, 358, 359n32 Chanticleer, 245, 246 Chanting to Paradise, 317 Chaozhou dialect, 149 Chaplin, Angela, 358 Cheetham, Deborah, 307 Cheney, Lisa, 167 Chicago Symphony Orchestra, 312, 313, 322 Childhood, 364, 365 China, 111, 145–153 Chinese, 158, 163 Chinese instruments, 208–209 Choir of Hard Knocks, 304 Christchurch Symphony Orchestra, 284 Christian, 163 Chromaticism, extended, 148 Chronology, 366 Cicadas, 126, 130, 131 Circuits (McTee, 1990), 216 City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, 374, 375 Clarke, Justine, 352 Climax, musical, 204 Coates, Erin, 269 Collaboration, 5–14, 30n112, 103, 105, 109, 171–182, 359 Colonial rule, British, 163 Combinatorial, 231 Coming of age, 363 Commission, 40, 45, 48 Community choir, 300, 355 Complexity, 51, 182 Composer, 155–157, 159, 166 Composer, role of, 101–103 Composers, gender-­ nonconforming, 97

413

Composers, non-binary, 97 “Composing Out,” 41–43 Composing Women Program, 99 Composition, 40–45, 49–51, 54, 408 Compositional practice, 101–109 Compositional process, 191, 198 Computer music notation of, 223 synthesis with orchestral sounds, 219, 221, 223 Concerto, 376, 379, 382–384 Concerto for Orchestra, 324 Contempo, 248, 249 Contemporary Chamber Players, 248, 249 Contemporary composition, 189 Contemporary Trance Music, 181 Conway, Deborah, 352 Corona Morphs (Fung), 126, 126n1, 127, 131–134 Country, indigenous, 162 Courage, 78, 79, 88, 89 Coyle, Jim, 288 Crabb, Annabel, 357 Creative practice, 171, 175, 181 Creative process, discomfort in, 99 Creativity, 190, 191, 193, 194, 197 Credo Ani-Ma’amin (Ran), 245 Critical Subjectivity, 188, 189 Criticism, 98 Crock, Catherine, 291 Croggon, Alison, 354, 354n22 Cross-cultural, 4, 10–14 Crowe, Victoria, 385 Cruel and Usual (Hope), 263 Crumb, George, 245 D Dallapiccola, Luigi, 326, 339 Dallas Symphony Orchestra (DSO), 218, 218n11 Dark Hip Falls, 260, 265

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INDEX

Darmstadt Summer School, 156 Davies, Sir Peter Maxwell, 135 Day Lewis, Cecil, 327 De Vilder, Yantra, 10, 14, 25n86, 26 De Vitry, Philippe, 340, 341 Deadlines, 207, 211 Debussy, Claude, 315, 320 Decibel ScorePlayer, 259, 260 DeGaetani, Jan, 244, 245 Deterritorialise, 152 Dhanaya, 161 Dickinson, Emily, 319, 322 Dietrich, Albert Hermann, 68 Digital sampling, 348 Digital technology, use of in classical music, 216 Diversification, 407 Dizi, 146, 150 Domestic abuse, 356 Donaueschinger Musiktage Festival, 167 Dongguan, 149 Donne, Women in Music, 32n117, 248n3 Dorian mode, 114 Douglas, Christine, 352 Dowland, John, 41, 42 Drama/dramatic, 373–388 Dramatic abstract, 373–388 Dream, 373–388 Drone, 273, 274, 280 Druckman, Jacob, 223 Dynamic Architecture (Hope), 267 E Earth Plays (Milliken), 101, 103, 105, 107–109 Eastman School of Music, 285, 313, 316, 320 Ebb and Flow (Walker), 150, 151 Eberhardt, Isabelle, 92, 92n2

Eckermann, Ali Cobby (Yankunytjatjara woman), 354–356 The Economics of Creativity (Menger), 158 Edinburgh, 373, 385 Edinburgh Festival, 374 Edmunds, John, 339 Edwardes, Claire, 167, 237 Edwards, Sian, 300 Egyptian Pharaohs, 53 Einstein, Albert, 214, 217–218, 220–222, 225, 226 Special Theory of Relativity by, 221 Einstein’s Dreams (McTee, 1996), 214, 215 Einstein’s Dreams (McTee, 2005), 218–226 harmonic language of, 225 spatial notation in, 224 Einstein’s Dreams (Lightman, 1993), 214 Electric bass, 258, 266, 268 Electronic instruments, 347 Electronic music, 273, 274 Eliot, T. S., 379, 381 “Embracing My Banana-ness” (Fung), 129 Emotion, 81, 82 Empathy, 78, 81, 88 The End of Abe (Hope), 259n3, 267 Enlightenment, 112, 113 Ensemble Offspring, 167, 237 Eötvös, Melody, 6–8, 11, 19, 23 Equality, 39, 53 Erst (Hope), 265 Eschenbach, Christoph, 317 Eternal Father, hymn, 293 Ethnographic, 163 Eugene Onegin (Tchaikovsky), 204 Eumeralla, 307 Evans, Christine, 358 Eve, 369, 370

 INDEX 

F Fallon, Kathleen Mary, 352 Fauré Requiem, 40 FBi 94.5FM, 357 Female composer, 395, 396 Feminism, 3, 4, 6–14, 24–31 Feminist, 39, 48–51, 162, 273–275, 407, 408 Ferguson, Sarah, 357 Festival of Contemporary Music, 313, 314 Fetish (Hope), 266 Fetishisation, 275 Fibonacci series, 340 Finnissy, Michael, 342 Finsterer, Mary, 15–17, 25n86 Fitzgerald, Ella, 313, 320 Fleming, Justin, 202, 203, 204n2 Flinders, Matthew, 292, 293 Flintoff, Brian, 137 Floyd, George, 407 Flute, 258, 265, 364–366, 369, 370, 372 Flying Banner (after Wang To) (Lim), 159 Foley, 353 For Summer Rain (Walker), 147 Ford, Clementine, 357 Fourth-Wave feminism, 2, 6, 7, 10, 12, 28 Four Winds, 354n23, 355 Fraser-Hawke-Keating, prime-­ ministerial years, 163 Frei Aber Einsam, 62, 66–70 Frykberg, Susan, 15, 18, 19, 23 Fujian Province, 150 Fuller, John, 342 Fung, Vivian, 3, 10, 12 G Gaffield, Nancy, 342 Gaia, 115–120, 122, 124

415

GALA Choruses, 302n10 Gata Negra, 258, 268 “Gay’wu Group of Women,” 161 Geelong Grammar School, 305 Gender, 2, 2n3, 4, 7, 9, 13, 25–30, 25n86, 28n107, 32, 33, 155, 156n1, 158, 162, 163, 167, 189, 408 imbalance, 39, 48, 53 inequality, 307 Gendered violence, 354, 357 Geology, 229 Gesamtkunstwerke, 95 Gilbert, Anthony, 342 Glanville-Hicks, Peggy, 1, 2, 298 Goehr, Alexander, 342 Goerke, Christine, 93 Goldberg Variations, 320 Goodman, Eleanor, 149 Grammy Award, 166 Grant Pirrie Gallery, 161 Granular synthesis, 222 Green, Christina, 306 Greenwell, Andrée, 19, 22, 23 Grenfell, Maria, 3n4, 5n6, 19–21, 25, 25n86, 29n109, 32n118, 33 Grief, 155–168, 190, 193, 199 Griffiths, Paul A., 219 Grisey, Gerard, 336 Guangzhou, 149 Guan Yin, 274, 276 Gumatj clan, 161 H Hair, Graham, 135 Hamlet, 50 HappiOki, 106, 108 Harmonia Mundi, 111–123 Harmonics, 230, 231, 233, 240–242 Harmony, 240–242 Hartke, Stephen, 286 Harvard University, 166

416 

INDEX

Hatshepsut, 53 Hatten, Robert, 61 Heaston, Nicole, 93 Helios Choros, 324 Hellenes, 372 Henderson, Moya, 158 Henson, Jim, 94 Hero’s journey, 112, 113 Hidden Thoughts (series) (Abbott), 77–89 Hidden Thoughts I: Do I Matter? (Abbott), 87 Hildegard, von Bingen, 49, 407 Hindson, Matthew, 167 Hineraukatauri, goddess, 138–142 Hivemind, 52–54 Hojuji Temple of Kamaishi, Japan, 106 Hokkaido, Japan, 11, 111 Homage, 57–75 Homophobia, 307 Homophony, 337 Hope, Cat, 15, 17, 18, 25n86, 26, 29, 32, 167 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 319 Hopkins, James, 286 Horsnell, Melanie, 355 Housemuseum Galleries, Melbourne, 274 Huddersfield Festival, 167 Human Cathedral (Hope), 265 “Humanist,” 128 Humanity, 52–54 Hush Foundation, 290, 291n4, 292n5 I Identity, 125–134, 174, 175 Immanence, 181 Improvisation, 175–177, 182, 370 In-betweenness, 163 Identity, 12, 26, 29, 125, 129–130, 132–134, 163, 174, 175, 190, 197, 324, 332

Indigenous, 160, 162, 163 Information–control of Indigenous, 61 Insects, 128, 129, 131 Inter-disciplinary, 171–182 International Year of Physics, 2005, 220 Intersectional feminism, 10–14 Intertextuality, 59–62, 348, 351 Intervention, 165 “In the Cut,” 260 Invisible sound, concept of, 219 iPad, 258, 259, 261 Islamic, 163 Italy, 149 Ives, Charles, 221, 225, 293 Iwasaki, Akiko, 106–108 J Japan, 111, 122, 123 Jewish, 396 Jim Knopf und Lukas der Lokomotivführer, 201, 202, 208 Johnston, Christine, 138 Jolas, Betsy, 337 Joyce, James, 322 Judith, Dodsworth, 15, 18 Juilliard School of Music, 316 K Kaps Freed, 260, 261 Karanga manu, pūkaea, pūpūharakeke, pūrerehua, pūtatara, pūtorino, 138, 139, 141 Kats-Chernin, Elena, 3, 15, 16 Kaufman Music Centre, 97 Kelly, Jennifer, 3, 3n5, 21, 25 Kelly, John Edward, 337 Kennelly, Brendan, 334 Ketterle, Wolfgang, 222 Kim, Earl, 343 Kingdom Come (Hope), 267

 INDEX 

Klangspuren Schwaz, 167 Klein, Michael L., 60, 60n7 Knussen, Oliver, 320, 323 Komische Oper, Berlin, 201, 202, 205 Kramer, Jonathan D., 213, 213n2, 214, 214n4 Kurtág, György, 61, 61n11, 342 L Labyrinth, 367 Labyrinth (film), 94 Lachenmann, Helmut, 203 Langer, Susanne K., 196, 213, 213n1 Lauridsen, Morten, 286 Layers, 229, 240, 241 Le Nouvel Ensemble Moderne, 230 LeFanu, Nicola, 19, 21, 22, 327, 328, 330–332, 335, 338, 341 Blood Wedding, 338–339 A Penny for a Song, 336 LeFanu, Cancion, 339n17 But Stars Remaining, 326–329 Catena, 337 Chiaroscuro, 328 Columbia Falls, 328, 332–333 Concerto for alto Saxophone, 337 The Crimson Bird, 342 Dawnpath, 328 Dream Hunter, 342 The Hidden Landscape, 328, 333 Light Passing, 336, 339–342 Moon over Western Ridge Mootwingee, 337 Oboe Quartet, 328 The Old Woman of Beare, 334–336 The Same Day Dawns, 329–332 Soliloquy, 328 The Story of Mary O’Neill, 337, 338 Tokaido Road, 342 Lesbian, 298, 301, 307 Lethe, River, 366 Letonja, Marko, 40

417

Levine, James, 314 Levy, Deborah, 339 LGBTQIA, 300, 301, 303, 307 Libretto, 274–277, 280 Ligeti, Georgy, 259 Ligeti, György, 342 Lightman, Alan, 214 Liljedahl, Jonatan, 276, 276n2 Lim, Liza, 5–14, 26, 27, 31, 177 Lincoln in the Bardo, 94 The Listeners (2021), 92–94 Listening, 171, 173, 178 Listening, ways of, 348 Literature, 40, 53 Litton, Andrew, 218n11 Liturgy, 273, 274 Lived experience, 188–190, 195, 198, 199 Logic Pro X, 356 Looperator, 277 Lorca, Federico Garcia, 338, 339 Los Angeles Philharmonic, 159 The Lowest Drawer (Hope), 263, 265, 266 Low frequency, as concept, 257–270 Low frequency, as instrument, 262–265 Low frequency sound, 257, 260, 265–266, 269 Luck, 155–168 Lumsdaine, David, 332, 342 Luna Composition Lab, 97, 99 Lutosławski, Witold, 336, 342 M Ma, 172, 173, 175, 177, 179, 181 MacArthur Prize, 166 Machaut, Guillaume, 340 Maconchy, Elizabeth, 326, 343 Maerzmusik Berlinerfestspiele Festival, 167 Mahler, Gustav, 313–315, 320

418 

INDEX

“Making Waves,” 167 Malay, 163 Mandarin, 149–151 Manning, Jane, 326 Māori, 136 Map, 229, 230, 242 Marchetti, Lionel, 268 Mark, Peter, 374, 383 Marking Time (Hope), 267 Masks, 89 Matheson, Tahu, 209 Maxwell Davies, Peter, 342 May, Rollo, 217, 217n5, 217n8 Mazzoli, Missy, 3, 6, 9, 11, 12, 19, 23, 31n113, 407 McClary, Susan, 6n9 McCombe, Christine, 15, 26, 27, 31 McGuire, Kathleen, 19, 21, 22, 24 McKenna, Amie, 352 McLeod, Jenny, 143 McMillan, Kate, 269 McMillan, Rosalind, 159 McTee, Cindy, 15, 16, 25n86 Measure for Measure (Shakespeare), 47, 48 Medieval music, 242 Meditation, 178 Melbourne Composing Women’s Festival, 138 Melbourne, Hirini, 137, 138 Melbourne Symphony Orchestra (MSO), 307 Mendelssohn String Quartet, 249, 250 Mensuration canons, 142 Mentoring, 133 Mentorship, 97, 133, 146 Messages for You (Milliken), 106–108 Messiaen, Olivier, 336, 337, 342 Metal Music (McTee, 1989), 216 Metropolitan Opera, 91, 92, 94, 96, 407 Microtonal, 148, 225, 231, 259, 326, 337, 339

MIDI, 45 Milkarri, 161, 162 Milliken, Catherine, 10, 11 Milliken, Cathy (Catherine), 209, 211 Mills, Richard, 288 Minotaur, 367 Mirror, 363, 366–369, 372 Missionaries, destructive force of, 137 “M” Music (McTee, 1992), 216 Modes, 178, 179 Monarchs (Zaimont), 397 Monologues, 39, 40, 45, 47 Monteverdi, Claudio, 313 Moon Songs (Ran), 245, 246 Mother/daughter, 111, 115–117, 119 Motherhood, 190, 199 Mozart, Leopold, 314, 320, 324, 327 MTV, 95 Much Ado About Nothing (Shakespeare), 47 Muhl, Erica, 286 Multiculturalism, 163 Multiphonics, 231 Murail, Tristan, 336 Musgrave, Thea, 19, 23 Musical quotation, 61 Musical time, 213–216, 221 The Musical Woman: An International Perspective, 396 Music as symbolic form, 196 Musica Viva Countrywide, 354n23, 355 Music Now Series, 313, 314 Musicology, 407 Music theatre, 111–123 Music, tonal, 394 Myth, 273–276, 279, 280 N Nanpa, 148, 150 Nanyin, 150, 151 Narrative, 371

 INDEX 

Narrative, non-linear, 348, 350, 359 Narrator, 39, 40, 45 Native Title Claim, 162 New England Patriots, 322 New York Times, 322 New Zealand String Quartet, 140 New Zealand voices, 142 New Zealand Youth Orchestra, 284 Nexus, 172 Ngā taonga pūoro, 135–143 Ningen-human, 179 No Excuses! (McGuire and Green), 306 Noise, 125–134 Nono, Luigi, 337 Non-Western instruments, writing for, 152 North East Arnhem Land, 160 North Melbourne Meat Market, 274 Northwestern University, 313, 316, 320 Notation, 375, 383 Novella, 23, 352 Now is the hour (Po Atarau), 293 Nunns, Richard, 137–139, 143 Nussbaum, Felix, 251 Nutting, Louise, 355 O Ocarina, 114, 115, 117, 118, 123 Octatonic, 225 O’Donoghue, Jessica, 355 Oliveros, Pauline, 408 Opera, 273, 274, 280 Opera America, 99 Opera Australia, 201–203, 204n3, 208n7, 209, 210 Oral tradition, 136 Orchestra, 39, 45, 374–379, 382, 387 Orchestration, 84 Osgood, Steven, 99 Othello (Shakespeare), 47

419

P Pacifica Quartet, 249, 249n5, 251 Pan (god), 364, 369, 370, 372 Pandemic, 141, 358, 359 Pandora, 274, 276 Paradox, 78 Paris, 373 Parsons, Laurel, 409 Patterns, 231, 233 Patterns of behaviour, 195, 196, 199 Pauline Hansen’s One Nation political party, 163 Pentatonic, 148 Petrarch, Francesco, 340 Phillip Neill Memorial Prize, 284 Pierrot ensemble, 125–127, 127n2 Pipa, 146–148, 150–152 Pitch set, 195, 196 PLEXUS Collective, 194, 196n17 Plowright, Simon, 294n8 Poetry, 191 Pogos, Abe, 359, 359n32 Polias, Peggy, 167 Post-feminism, 6, 7 Post-minimalism, 345, 347, 353 Post-punk, 345, 346 Post-structuralism, 27 The Post Truth Pleasure Garden (Hope), 264 Potter, John, 339 Power, 155–168 Practice-as-research, 30, 31 Pre-European, 136, 141, 142 Prepared yangqin, 152, 153 Privilege, 159, 166 Programming, 40, 48 Protagonist, 112, 116 Proving Up (2018), 92n2, 93 Pulitzer Prize, 98, 285, 407 Pung, Alice, 12n33

420 

INDEX

Q Qingdao, 150 Quarter tone, 383 Quoll Farm, 293–294 Quotas, 165, 166 R Rabe, Pamela, 39 Ran, Shulamit, 15, 17, 20, 26, 243–255 Bach Shards, 249, 252, 253 East Wind, 250 Excursions, 249 Glitter Doom Shards Memory, String Quartet No. 3, 249, 249n5 Legends, 250, 255 Mirage, 250 String Quartet No. 1, 249 Vistas, String Quartet No. 2, 249–251 Voices, flute concerto, 250 Rands, Bernard, 313 Ravel, Maurice, 320 Ravenscroft, Brenda, 409 Reflections, 78, 80, 84 Regenlied, 62, 71–74 Rehearsal, 177, 178 Reid, Ellen, 97 Renaissance, 230, 233, 237, 239, 241, 242 Renewal, 179, 182 Representation, 165–167 Reynolds, Roger, 219 Rite of Spring, 320 Ritornello, 370–372 Ritual, 273, 274, 276 Ritual Incantations, 324 Rolls-Royce, 283–296 Rotary, 299 Rouse, Christopher, 320 Royalle, Candy, 354–356 Rudolf Steiner school, 180

Ruisselant (Finsterer), 230–233 Ruler of the Hive, 39–44, 46, 53 Russell, Karen, 93 Rutter, John, 299, 300n4 S Saariaho, Kaija, 407 Sada, Abe, 258, 259, 266, 268 Samartzis, Philip, 280 Same-sex marriage, 303 San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus (SFGMC), 303, 304 The Saqqara Bird, 40 SARS-CoV-2, 31 Saunders, George, 94 Scelsi, Giacinto, 259, 263 Schema, 231 Schirmer, G., 313, 316, 322, 324 Schonberg, Arnold, 246 Pierrot Lunaire, 246 Schubert, Franz, 237, 239 Death and the Maiden, 237, 239, 241 Schumann, Clara, 49 Schumann, Robert, 58, 58n5, 59, 61, 63–68, 65n21, 71, 320 Schwantner, Joseph, 285 Science and art, relationship of, 213–226 Scottish, 387, 388 Second-Wave feminism, 6, 24, 27 Semantics, 277, 279 Septet, 58 Serialism, 231, 242 Shadow (Hope), 261 Shadow of Mill (Hope), 267 Shakespeare, William, 39–41, 47, 49–54 Shapey, Ralph, 249 Sheng, 146, 148 Shepard, Matthew, 301 Sibley Music Library, 285

 INDEX 

Sichuan, 149 Silva (Finsterer), 230, 233, 237–242 “Simplexity,” 175 Singers of the Street (SOS), 304 “Skipping a Beat” (Strong and Cannizzo), 155 Smalley, Roger, 258 Smyth, Dame Ethel, 407 Sobekneferu, 53 Sogno 102 (Hope), 263 Sonatina for Two Flutes (Ran), 247 Song Company, 78, 80, 86 Song from the Uproar (2012), 92 Sophia, 112, 113, 115–119, 122–124 South Africa, 304–305 South Australia, 160 South Korea, 111 Soweto Uprising, 305 Space between, 171–182 Spatial notation, 224–226 Speechless (Hope), 263, 265, 267 Spirituality, 177, 179–181 Steiner school, 111, 112, 115, 120 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 237, 237n1 Still, Alexa, 139 Stockhausen, Karlheinz, 342 Stone, Elana, 355 Stout, Alan, 319–320 A Strange Magic-String Quartet No. 2 (Zaimont), 397 Stravinsky, Igor, 314, 315, 320, 324 Street Requiem, 304, 305 Streisand, Barbra, 218, 218n10 String Quartet The Figure (Zaimont), 397, 403 String quartets (Fung), 125, 126, 128, 130–132 Strozzi, Barbara, 408 Sub Decorative Sequences, 261–263, 267 Subtones, 261, 262, 265–267, 269 Sydney, 155, 161 Sydney Conservatorium, 135, 142

421

Sydney Conservatorium of Music, Australia, 99 Sydney Gazette, 353 Sydney Opera House (SOH), 237, 354, 354n19 Sydney Symphony Orchestra, 159 Symbolism, 139 Symphony (Ran), 243 Symphony Australia, 287, 288 Symphony No. 1 (Zaimont), 397 Syzygy Ensemble, 78, 80, 83, 86, 88 T Taiwan, 111, 124, 149 Takemitsu, Toru, 320 Tallis, Thomas, 237, 239 Spem in alium, 237, 239, 241 Tambourine, 148, 150 Tamil, 163 Tamsin Cowling, 237 Taneyev String Quartet, 250 Tanglewood, 313, 314 Tannahill, Jordan, 92 Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra (TSO), 39, 40, 42, 48 Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra’s Composers’ School, 159 Te Rangi Hiroa, 137 Teachers, 365, 366 Teachers, composition, 189, 203, 286, 297, 317, 320, 365 Technology, 273–276, 279, 280 Technology, use of to manipulate time, 216 Teplitz, Uri, 247 Terpsichore’s Dream, 318 Text setting, 78, 80, 89 Texture, 230, 231, 239–241 Thomas, Augusta Read, 3, 19, 21, 25 Time, 364–367, 369, 371 Time Is a River Without Banks (Chagall), 214

422 

INDEX

Timelessness, 172, 181 Time-stretching, phenomenon of, 222 Tippett, Michael, 297 Tokenism, 28, 31, 32 Tolle, Eckhart, 77 Tone Being (Hope), 265 Toop, Richard, 203, 203n1 Torrens River, 161 Trim (the cat), 20, 292, 293 Trust, 88 Tsai, Autumn, 149, 150 TSO Australian Composers’ School, 288–289 Tsunami, 106–108, 138 The Twelve Caverns of the Underworld, 180 Twelve-tone music, 225, 226 U Ultima Festival, 167 U Mangibeddu Nostru (Hope), 265 Unanswered Question (Ives), 221, 225 Uncertainty, 177, 182 United States of America (USA), 126, 130 University College, London, 50 The University of Chicago, 243, 248, 249 University of New South Wales, 58, 58n3, 58n5 University of Southern California, 285 University of Tasmania, 287 V Varèse, Edgard, 220, 220n12 Vavrek, Royce, 92, 94, 96 Visual arts, 158, 162 Vulnerability, 78, 81, 89

W Walker, Rachel C., 10, 13, 14 Walwicz, Anja, 354, 355 Warm up, 178 WDR Funkhausorchester Orchestra, 159 Webern, Anton, 326 Welch, Jonathon, 304 Wesley-Smith, Martin, 203 West Australian Symphony Orchestra, 287, 289 Western instruments, writing for, 152 “The Wheels on the Bus,” 127 Whitehead, Gillian, 10, 12, 13, 22, 342 Whiteley (Kats-Chernin), 201–205, 207–210, 208n7 Wieck-Schumann, Clara, 57–59, 61–68, 71, 72, 74, 75 Williams, Natalie, 3, 5, 6, 8, 9, 12, 15–17, 32n118, 33, 167 Wolf, Janet, 29 Wolf, Susanne Felicitas, 202, 205, 208 Woman, 155, 156, 158–166, 168 artists, 161, 162, 347 composers, 57, 58, 75, 156–158, 162, 167 orchestra, 298 Womanist, 273, 275, 276, 279 Women’s Philharmonic, 299, 303 Women’s thoughts, 77, 78 private, 77–78 Women’s voice, 93 X Xenakis, Iannis, 259 Xiaoqiong, Zheng, 149, 150 Xuefang, Ruan, 149

 INDEX 

Y Yankunytjatjara, 354 Yates-Smith, Aroha, 141 Yelton Rhodes Music (YRM), 302 Yirrkala, 161, 162 Yirrkala bark petitions, 162 Yolŋu woman, 160–162, 165 Yorta Yorta, 307 Young, Christopher, 286

Young, Simone, 300 Yunupingu, G. (Mrs), 161 Yuyan, Xia, 146–148, 150, 151 Z Zaimont, Judith Lang, 19, 24–26, 26n92, 28 Ziffrin, Marilyn, 319

423