Free Music No.2 [1937]
Percy GRAINGER [1882-1961]
Realized for trios of violas & contrabasses by Alan STOUT [Northwestern
University, Chicago, August, 1972] **
Grainger always maintained that his greatest contribution to music
would be to restore to it the freedom of Nature. In human terms,
folksong, with the unique personalities of its singers and players
embedded in it, came closest to his ideal. Beyond that, he would have
to build machines.
“My chief thought has always been that the first ‘free
music’ – towards which the whole path of all music has
been headed – shall be written by an Australian & the thought
that Australian music can be freed from the absurdities, ignorance
& good-for-nothingness that plagues European & American
musical life.”
Grainger to Everhard Feilding, 7th Feb. 1936
Grainger was ten when he first conceived the notion of “Free
Music” in 1892. First experimenting along these lines came in
1907,he then worked with a number of early electronic instruments,
like the Theremin, but none of these could even approximate the sounds
he had in mind. In June 1945 he met the young physicist Burnett Cross
and together they began to build a series of machines which could
realise their ideas. The final one, completed just before Grainger’s
death in 1961, was at last capable of producing those sounds. Coming
so tragically close to Grainger’s death, no complete compositions
exist for these machines, only sketches. Over the years, the late
Burnett Cross has restored the unfortunately named “Kangaroo-Pouch
Oscillator” machines to working order in the Grainger Museum
in Melbourne.
Vincent Plush
“The original of this piece was scored for six Theremins and
was written on graph paper, with one graph for pitch, the other for
dynamics. The scoring for violas and contrabasses [realised in the
present performance by pre-recording] was done because of the ranges
of the individual parts… The manuscript is undated. I have given
1937 as the year of composition because on October 12 that year Grainger
had transcribed his Free Music No.1 for four Theremins. This
work was originally composed in 1935 for string quartet. I know of
no other version of Free Music No.2”
Alan Stout
Like the Lily [2000]
Frances WHITE [born 1958]
This piece was inspired by the chant Alleluia:Justus germinabit,
which appears in the Liber Usualis for the Feast of St. Joseph,
March 19. The text for the chant, (derived from the Book of Hosea)
is:
Justus germinabit sicut lilium:
et florebit in aeternum ante Dominum.
Alleluia.
(The just shall spring like the lily: and shall flourish forever
before the Lord. Alleluia)
I was raised a Catholic in the belief that chants such as Justus
germinabit were dictated by God to Pope St. Gregory the Great.
Frances White
Turkish Toy Duck Machine [1974]
Warren BURT [born 1949]
This piece was written for the Decorative Arts Trio of San Diego.
Scored for viola, bass and piano, it consists of two phrases stolen
from other music. A phrase from William P. Gillock's My Toy Duck
is played by the strings, while the piano plays a phrase from Constantinople
- Marche Turkique by Frank P.Atherton, which originally appeared
in The Etude Magazine - a source of great inspiration for the young
composers in San Diego in the early 70s, who were looking for historically
relevant schlock to plunder in their quest for a nascent Post-Modernism.
The ethos behind the piece may best be summed up in one of the Fatty
Acid Manifestos : "Tho totally effete, we, the sissy bourgeoisie
shall harp and grouse til bitter denouement." Or, in less poetic
language, this is a piece made of two found objects, placed together
in a way that was hopefully both simultaneously cute, and also a provocation
towards the mainstream Modernism of the time.
Warren Burt
Renzo Piano : Piece by Piece [1999/2001]
Richard VELLA [born 1954]. First performance.
These musical excerpts from the film about the Italian architect
Renzo Piano [born 1937] explore various aspects of space, texture
and memory in music. The brief given to me by director Christopher
Tuckfield when writing the score was simply to "orchestrate"
Piano’s buildings. It was from the music that the film was edited.
As the film was primarily about Piano's philosophical approach to
architecture, I wanted to compose music that was not descriptive but
rather analogical to his ethos. Hence density, mass and time became
basis for the musical score. The score for the film is 55 minutes
in duration and in many ways functions like Mussorgsky's Pictures
at an Exhibition: the viewer experiences the image through the
music. Due to time restrictions and editing concerns, some of the
excerpts presented tonight were not included in the final cut of the
film but were some of my favourite sequences. In 1999, the music was
awarded "Best music for a documentary film" by the Australian
Screen Composers Guild.
Richard Vella
Part Four Notes
Pieces froides [1897]
Erik SATIE [1866-1925]
Arranged for small ensemble by Kelly TRENCH [2002]. First performance.
These three short “cold” pieces share the title, Danses
de travers, which might be translated as “crooked dances”
or even “round-dances" Published in 1912, they are dedicated
to the wife of one of Satie’s plus noirs bêtes,
the critic Jules Ecorcheville, which doubtless explains the ‘frigidity’
implicit in the title.
Once again, Satie has written a trio of miniatures, each sharing
the gentle arpeggio figure which opens the first. The second and third
pieces view the same material from a somewhat different angle, a ‘cubist’
perspective, perhaps.
Harmonically, each piece shifts subtly to a key based on mediant
relationships. The third piece starts in F major and ends “très
loin” – very remote – in the key of b minor, a
tritone apart. Had Satie painted himself into a corner? He swiftly
pulls a rabbit from his hat, producing a not-terribly-convincing ending
in d minor.
My arrangements of these little-known gems pick up elements that
might have attracted contemporary gents like Messrs Cage, Glass and
Duckworth!
Kelly Trench
Sapphire, from Centaur [2001-2]
Lynette LANCINI [born 1970]. First performance.
This is the fourth movement within the larger work commissioned by
Topology and premiered on 9th May.
The naming of a piece is very important to me, and acts like an invocation
for a poetic world in which the as yet unwritten music might live.
Around the time of promising Topology a piece, I dreamt of a family
of cavorting centaurs (mythical half-human half-equine creatures),
so centaurs figured in my imagination from the inception of the work.
Similarly, the titles of the four movements were chosen for their
poetic resonance and could belikened to four facets of one imagined
persona. Archetypical examples of this four-in-one structure include
the ideal person of medieval physiological theory with an equal balance
of choleric, phlegmatic, melancholy and sanguine humours, and Ezekiel's
ancient vision of the divine tetramorph.
Sapphire can be perceived as a series of travelling vignettes.
Lynette Lancini
NRG [1997]
Gerard BROPHY [born 1954]
I have always been excited by bass instruments and so I was delighted
when Dutch bass clarinettist Henri Bok approached me to write compose
a piece for Bass Instincts. Some time before I had composed Bisous,
a languid nocturne for cor anglais and bass clarinet, however in this
instance I wished to compose something a little more up-tempo. Another
nacht-stucke yes, but this time much more funky and dance-like. The
result was IZA for bass oboe and bass clarinet which in turn
eventually was reincarnated as NRG for solo bass clarinet.
[In Topology’s version, the solo line is shared by baritone saxophone
and contrabass.] And I warn you that it may not stop here...
Gerard Brophy
Milanda Embracing [1993-94]
First performance in Australia.
Stuart DEMPSTER [born 1936]
On October 1993, I was in Minneapolis with members of the New Performance
Group from Seattle, my home base. One day we visited the studio of
Jay Johnson, a member of the renowned percussion ensemble, Zeitgeist.
Jay’s daughter Milanda, then three-and-a-half years old, threw
her arms open to greet us, her warmth setting the tone for our residency
there.
This was part of the Music in Motion project “designed
to support the development and presentation of contemporary non-commercial
music through a network of ensemble-composer-in-residence and outreach
activities” administered by the visionary Joseph Franklin and
his ReLâCHE ensemble in Philadelphia, in association with the
Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and the Atlantic Center for the Arts
in central Florida.
For this project with my Seattle colleagues, I devised a graphic
score of instructions which I called “A Med-I-tatioM
work in progress”, MiM being the acronym for Music in Motion.
This ‘process’ work should not be thought of as being finished
but, literally, as a “music in motion”. It will be useful
to recognize this process as developmental and long-term. Ideally,
it will be an influential process valuable for any work an ensemble
might ever perform. However, it is designed specifically to point
both performers and audience toward what should be the inherent joy
of music, and the healing and therapeutic properties that seem to
have been lost in much 20th century music.
Stuart Dempster
Tyalgum [1998]
Robert DAVIDSON [born 1965]
The small village of Tyalgum, in northern New South Wales, is nestled
in a spectacular landscape dominated by Wollumbin (Mt Warning) - the
first place on the Australian mainland lit by the sun each day, and
the core of an ancient, enormous volcano.
Commissioned by the music festival in the village, I spent a week
there composing and found my resistance to landscape-inspired music
stood little chance against the inspiring forms around me. The piece
is a kind of personal mythology in response to the land, ending with
reflection of the intense quiet I often experienced there.
Robert Davidson
Mysterious Numbers [1996/2002]
First performance in Australia
William DUCKWORTH [born 1943]
This work was developed over a year-long series of residences at
the Atlantic Center for the Arts in Florida as part of the Music in
Motion project. Over three week-long periods, the Seattle-based ensemble
New Performance Group [subsequently known as Sonora, and directed
by Vincent Plush from 1997-99] and I were faced with the challenge
of writing and performing a new work, essentially in front of an audience.
Although at first somewhat sceptical of this process, we quickly
found common ground as the piece took on a life of its own. Having
never worked this way before, I found the tension and energy of the
interaction to be a wellspring of new ideas. As the piece evolved,
it became obvious that the creative process was working for us in
a new and exciting way. None of us is still quite sure where this
music came from, hence the title: "Mysterious Numbers".
The first public performance was given by Sonora at the Orlando Museum
of Art in Florida, in June 1996. The work also exists now in versions
for synthesizers and orchestra and has been rearranged by Robert Davidson
for this evening’s concert.
William Duckworth
A Whip-Round for Percy [2002]
First performance
Kelly TRENCH
Much has been made of Percy’s penchant for “unusual personal
practices” such as vegetarianism, animal rights, the American
Red Cross and sadomasochism. Thoughtfully, he left the results of
his experiments in this latter field for future generations to see,
all dutifully catalogued and annotated in boxes now at the Grainger
Museum.
Digging a little deeper, so to speak, postmodernist scholarship is
speculating on themes running through such pieces as Let’s
Dance Gay in Green Meadow, My Robin is to the Greenwood Gone
and Shepherds Hey! Not only is his predilection for off-beat
rhythms and undulating modalities in clear evidence, one is lead to
consider the dynamic thrust of their post-Jungian motivation.
My new work celebrates this liberation of Percy’s muse with
the rainbow colours of Postminimalism.
Kelly Trench
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