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Preparing the Way

19/6/2024

the composer hard at work

The first stage of composing a new work is (in most cases) research. When writing to a commission, I like to get as much detail about the commissioner’s expectations as I can, so that I’m not endlessly wondering about it while trying to compose.

“What do you want the music to sound like? Give me some examples!”

This is when I get to listen to music for several hours and call it working. It’s pretty fun. The hard part is having to stop and go on to the next stage (actually composing). It’s tempting to just keep ‘researching’ instead…

I’ve been listening to many different ‘Communion Services’ in preparation for writing my own. It’s a whole subgenre of Anglican church music which I’m not heaps familiar with. The idea is to get a feel for musical ‘language’ and conventions of the style – not because I want to write something the same, but because I want to write something that will fit its context, and be understood.

The context is a church service. And the focal point of a Communion Service is Communion, the Eucharist. This is where believers take of the bread and the cup (of wine), just as Jesus told his disciples to do at the Last Supper before his crucifixion.

Everything in the Ordinary of the Mass is designed to lead up to this, as the primary reason for the gathering.* I can see this shape of this in the texts…

Kyrie (‘Lord have mercy’)

We come before God humbly, relying on his mercy.

Gloria (‘Glory to God in the highest’)

… to worship him for who he is and what he has done…

Sanctus (‘Holy, holy, holy’)

… remembering both his transcendence (how far he is above us)…

Benedictus (‘Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord’)

… and his immanence (how he has drawn near to us)…

Agnus Dei (‘Lamb of God’)

… and remembering that all of this is only possible because of the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, as the ‘Lamb of God’, to atone for our sin.

After listening to communion services by Francis Jackson, Harold Darke, Herbert Howells, Charles Villiers Stanford and John Ireland, I’ve begun to get a sense of the kind of ‘thing’ that will do. I’m not making detailed lists of musical conventions or anything like that… I prefer to keep this process as intuitive as possible, so I can simply ‘feel’ my way into the new piece I’m going to write.

I find it curious that many of these composers were not themselves believers. They wrote church music because they wanted to write beautiful music, and the Anglican Church was where that was possible. I think this points to music’s transcendence – that it is able to ‘mean’ something bigger and more real, or true, than the ideas or beliefs of any individual person who writes it.

So, I submit the music I’m composing to God, and ask him to do more with it than I can!

*This is quite different to my own tradition (Evangelical/Baptist), in which the delivery of the Good News (‘evangelion’), expounded in a sermon, forms the focal point of the service. This isn’t the place to explain the difference; just to point out that I’m sympathetic to both ways of doing things. :)

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The Mass of History

12/6/2024

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me being crushed by a particularly weighty mass

Which piece of writing has been set to music the most times, by the most composers? I’m pretty sure it would have to be the Ordinary of the Mass of the Western Christian Church. ChoralWiki has over 1,500 different Mass settings listed – and that’s just the ones in Latin, freely available online.

My job right now is to compose another one. Technically, it’s going to be a Communion Service, because it will be in English and for an Anglican church. But the foundational text is the same.

For centuries, this text has been heard (spoken, chanted, sung) in church services all over the world, week after week. It’s called the “Ordinary” because it’s the unchanging part, the same words every service. Around this fits the “Proper”, the bits of the liturgy that are specific to that particular day.

I’m a Baptist, and – like a lot of present-day Protestants – we don’t use this text anymore. But a great many churches still do. And for all Christians, it’s part of our shared heritage. It’s the way that God has been worshipped, and the way that the Good News of Jesus Christ has been proclaimed, for millions of people, for well over a thousand years.

How is a composer to deal with such a huge historical burden? How am I going to come up with music for this text that is different from everybody else’s? (Different enough to be worth writing!) And… why am I doing this?

I’m doing this as an act of worship. And because of that, the weight of history is actually not a thing. Worship is not a competition! And worship is not a burden either… it’s a “giving up” of whatever I have to God, including myself.

All I have to do is find an authentic way to “speak” this text in music, in my own language, as I really mean it. Which I do…

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Musica Viva: A Winter's Journey

25/7/2022

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REVIEW

PROGRAM

Franz Schubert - Winterreise ('A Winter's Journey'), D.911

Thursday 21 July 2022, 7:30pm
Adelaide Town Hall

Allan Clayton, voice
Kate Golla, piano
Lindy Hume, director
Fred Williams, artist
David Bergman, videographer
Matthew Marshall, design & lighting

It has been four days since I went to this concert; too late, perhaps, to write up a conventional review. This is likely to be a bit more philosophical…

What stands out in my memory now? First of all, that the music was wonderful, and I loved how Allan Clayton and Kate Golla sang and played it.

Franz Schubert’s Winterreise is a kind of 1820s singer-songwriter concept album of 24 songs for voice and piano, all written (in character) in response to a love affair gone wrong. The poems (by Wilhelm Müller) are in the voice of a man who has been rejected by his love. Compelled to leave her behind, he is journeying through a German winter wasteland, filled with snow and ice, destination nowhere. The music and words together are quintessential early romanticism: deeply melancholy, in love with nature, in love with love (especially unrequited), and unashamedly naïve with heart-on-the-sleeve expression.

It’s easy to overdo, and turn the whole thing into a melodrama that no one could ever take seriously in our cynical postmodern age. But this performance had just the right balance between simplicity and drama. Kate Golla, despite her face being in the spotlight throughout, almost disappeared into one of the most unobtrusive piano accompaniments I’ve ever heard. Every note was there, and everything was expressively played, but nothing – and I mean nothing – was overdone.

And Allan Clayton was a convincing winter wanderer, striding around the full stage space with a shaggy beard, making everyone (except the editor of the surtitles) believe that he meant every line he sang. I was impressed at the emotional range of his voice, how he brought out a slightly different sound for each song, and made all this expressive singing sound like the most natural thing in the world for his voice to do (rather than an elite challenge that he had spent his life training for).

If I’d gone along to this concert blindfolded, I would have loved it without a doubt. Possibly I’d still have some reservations about how ‘polished’ it sounded, and wish for a more rustic, unkempt, frostbitten Winterreise next time; but it’s not really fair to complain about something being too good.

But that wasn’t all there was to it. The piano was positioned at an angle (hiding the keys) inside two walls of a rectangle, creating a right-angled screen behind the performers on which images could be displayed. These showed subtly animated images from paintings by Fred Williams, a 20th-century Australian artist. Semi-abstract and filled with much seemingly empty space, it was art that spectacularly evoked the vastness and ruggedness of the Australian outback. The chosen paintings were not particularly ‘wintry’, apart from the snowy Kosciusko pieces, but they gave a new and perhaps more locally familiar landscape to the songs as we heard them.

I liked the idea, I really did, and it seemed to work OK at the time. But the more I have reflected on it, the more I find it rather gimmicky. Reading about it in the program hasn’t helped. In his introduction, Paul Kildea (artistic director of Musica Viva Australia) mentions the songs’ and paintings’ shared fascination with landscape, but seems reluctant to draw any further comparisons. ‘Rather than looking for literal overlaps between poems and paintings… we have sought to underline the universal qualities in the work of these three great artists.’

The problem is that Winterreise is not just an abstract work of art, but actually rather specific in its purpose and meaning. By pairing it with some paintings of a totally different nature, you abstractify it. This, indeed, seems to be the mission: ‘to celebrate the timelessness and universality of Schubert’s great work,’ as director Lindy Hume writes. This probably explains why they infuriatingly left out most of the surtitles; presumably they didn’t want us to get too clear a picture of what the man was singing so earnestly about, lest we see that it didn’t quite fit with their carefully animated Fred Williams paintings.

But if you blur, obscure, or take away the heart of the artwork – its actual, specific subject – what’s the point? It turns Winterreise into a piece about ‘art’ instead of about what it’s actually about. I’m not saying that there aren’t universal meanings to these songs, but the reason they work so well is because Schubert and Müller used very specific imagery, and a specific story, set in a specific landscape. When you make it abstract again, it loses some of its power. No one likes to read a story in abstractions.

The confusion was perhaps best summed up by the poetry. Judith Nangala Crispin was commissioned to write 24 stanzas for the program booklet, ostensibly to match the 24 songs of Winterreise and to connect them somehow to the paintings of Fred Williams. It was an impossible task, so she simply wrote 24 poems that imagined Fred Williams in his own landscapes, chasing an elusive white emu. I could not discern anything of Schubert and Müller’s bitter, lovelorn wanderer in that.

A lot of careful thought had gone into the staging, the lighting and the musical performance. I wish the same passion and attention to detail had been used at the conceptual stage of this project. Schubert and Müller spent hours on those songs. Fred Williams spent hours on those paintings. But the idea of putting them together seems more like a whim.

And they tried to make it work, they really did. But why?

To be clear: I’m not against the idea of presenting music in new ways, and looking for interesting connections between very different works of art. I applaud Musica Viva for doing something like this, and I should restate that on the whole I very much enjoyed the experience – and the way it has made me think subsequently!

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Musica Viva: Van Diemen's Band

29/4/2022

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REVIEW

PROGRAM

Dietrich Becker - Sonata No.5 in F major (1674)
Borderlands Suite (assembled by Julia Fredersdorff)

Samuel Schedit - Galliard Battaglia (1621)
Dietrich Becker - Paduan
Jean de Sainte-Colombe - Les Pleurs
Samuel Scheidt - Courant
Philipp Heinrich Erlebach - Chaconne from Ouverture No.2 (1693)

Tomaso Albinoni - Sonata II in C major, op.2, no.3, from Sinfonia à 5 (1700)

INTERVAL

Georg Muffat - Sonata No.1 in D major, from Armonico Tributo (1682)
María Huld Markan Sigfúsdóttir - Clockworking (2013)
Anonymous (attributed to Biber or Schmelzer) - Sonata Jucunda
Donald Nicolson - Spirals (2022)

Thursday 28 April 2022, 7:30pm
Adelaide Town Hall

Van Diemen's Band
Julia Fredersdorff, artistic director & violin
Simone Slattery, violin & recorder
Katie Yap, viola
Laura Vaughan, bass viol
Anton Baba, bass viol & cello
Donald Nicolson, harpsichord

I like the idea of a Baroque ensemble being called a band. Just a group of enthusiasts hanging out, having a jam session, enjoying each other's company and the sound they can create together. That's what the Van Diemen's Band were like; and when their director, Julia Fredersdorff, spoke from the stage between pieces, it was warmly and concisely, and with a little humour, as though we were an assortment of friends they had invited along to hear their latest Baroque discoveries.

Van Diemen's Band play like a band; they come from diverse corners of the country (I wonder what qualifies them as a Tasmanian group?), but they blend well in sound and phrasing, and also in physical gesture and visual expression. Fredersdorff reminded us that Baroque music is all about the extremes of emotion, and this came through strongly in their playing: there were no 'neutral' passages, everything was played with expressive intent. Yet it never sounded forced or heavy or tiring. There was a lightness even to the bleakest emotions – which got me thinking, because this kind of lightness seems to be missing in most contemporary art of every genre, perhaps for fear that it belittles those negative emotions which are 'all the rage'. But what's the point of art if it doesn't do something with an emotion, put it in a context, a story?

The music (as always) being incapable of selling itself, we were offered a context for it in the form of the concert's title: 'Borderlands'. It's a nice little spark of an idea to set the brain whirring, and to fill program notes and reviews with many fuzzy statements about what borders are and how music (of course) transcends them. And it encourages us to make connections between the music and certain current world events involving borders, which all involved in presenting this program were at pains to point out. But the truth is that such a nebulous term was only ever going to be peripheral to my enjoyment of the concert; it feels weird to even bring it up, except that everything in the program booklet told me it was important. It's funny how complicated it can be to enjoy music. As one given to over-thinking, I know all about this; what I particularly enjoyed about this music was the way it quietened, rather than engaged, that part of me. At least until I sat down to write just now.

There were six musicians in Van Diemen's Band, and most played in all the pieces. Simone Slattery, second violin, also whipped out a recorder for a few of them. Several of the works made full use of the available five-part counterpoint (most notably Tomaso Albinoni's C major Sonata, dominated by its two wonderful fugues), but at times I wished more could have been done to aid the spatial-acoustic separation of parts. The ensemble stayed in an identical formation throughout, with the two violins side by side (their sounds virtually on top of each other), and the viola and first bass viol separated by the continuo (harpsichord and cello/second bass viol). This was all quite understandable, given the need for optimal projection in a space like this, and the presence of ABC's microphones, but it obscured the counterpoint in the fugues a little, and made the duelling 'trumpets' (violins) in Samuel Scheidt's Galliard Battaglia sound more like they were echoing rather than fighting.

The centre of the first half was a Borderlands Suite assembled by Fredersdorff, made up of five short movements from a diverse selection of composers, structured into a effective 'war and its aftermath' narrative. We were assured that this kind of Baroque mix-tape approach was common practice back in the 1600s, and I thought it worked beautifully. The standouts for me were Les Pleurs ('The Tears') by Jean de Sainte-Colombe, for its evocation of tortured despair; and a Courant by Samuel Scheidt which Fredersdorff told us would express 'resentment' – and somehow it did exactly this, its dark, compelling energy reminding me how easily resentment can turn to hatred. And yet, in music, still be beautiful.

The highlight of the concert's second half, for me, was the anonymous Sonata Jucunda. This came across as more of a riddle than a joke, its bizarre excessive repetitions, crazy harpsichord cadenzas, moments of whole ensemble unison, emphatic semitone clashes, and overall restless structure appearing to be laced with some inscrutable meaning. If it was a joke, it was like one of those elaborate narrative jokes in which it suddenly dawns on you that there is no punchline to make sense of it all, just a weird and wonderful array of bizarre images.

The were also two contemporary pieces on the program. Clockworking was written for Baroque string trio and backing track by María Huld Markan Sigfúsdóttir, an Icelandic composer who also plays in an indie band, amiina. While very beautiful, this work confused me a bit: the backing track consisted of acoustic sounds (more strings playing glassy ostinatos, along with some kalimba or bell-like sounds moving in slow, regular patterns), which drew attention to its 'not live' quality, because it's always impossible to perfectly balance such things. Here, the pre-recorded accompaniment was slightly too loud, and definitely too 'bassy' compared with the thin sound of gut strings coming from the live instruments. The music itself stood out from the rest of the program because of its simplicity, being essentially a single extended gesture. A cloud of ostinatos created a neutral-sounding chord below which a bass line was slowly repeated and developed. It was like someone sitting at a piano and looking for a tune to go with a single chord, very gradually getting more harmonically adventurous (yes, I've been there).

The concert concluded with its newest piece, Spirals, commissioned from the Van Diemen Band's harpsichordist, Donald Nicolson. It was a carefully crafted passacaglia for the whole ensemble, using a very Baroque harmonic progression. It slowly dissolved into a Slavonic Orthodox lament, led by Slattery on the recorder and shadowed closely and thinly by the treble of the harpsichord. This special ending was apparently added to the piece as an afterthought, in February, from a desire to include something in the program that acknowledged the unfolding events in Ukraine. While I am a big fan of drawing connections between music and the world around us, this did feel a little forced to me. It's hard to fault the motivation, but motivation isn't everything.

I sat down to write about this music, because I really liked it and wanted to re-enjoy it, and now I've found that it's disappeared like dust. If I started writing about borders and Ukraine and bandwagons, maybe what I would have to say would seem more relevant, but simultaneously the music would be further away. So I will stop now.

4.5 stars

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Adelaide Festival 2022: Prayer for the Living

23/3/2022

2 Comments

REVIEW

PROGRAM

Pēteris Vasks – Lūgšana mātei (Prayer for a Mother)
Lili Boulanger – Psalm 129
Maurice Ravel – 'Kaddisch' from Deux mélodies hébraïques
Lili Boulanger – Vieille prière bouddhique (Old Buddhist Prayer)
Pēteris Vasks – Dona nobis pacem

INTERVAL

Francis Poulenc – Gloria

Sunday 20 March 2022, 4pm
Adelaide Festival Theatre

Benjamin Northey, conductor
Carl Crossin & Karl Geiger, choral directors
Stacey Alleaume, soprano
Nicholas Jones, tenor
Adelaide Symphony Orchestra

This one-off performance in Adelaide's Festival Theatre was one of the closing events of the 2022 Adelaide Festival, held on the final Sunday afternoon. By this stage in March, a sleepy, after-dinner feeling is kicking in around the city. Having loaded their plates with Fringe and Festival offerings (not to mention WOMADelaide), most Adelaideans are feeling more than sated when it comes to the arts, and just want something light to "fill up the corners". Prayer for the Living wasn't that exactly, yet the simplicity and clarity of its presentation (not to mention the fact that we've all been starved of massed choral singing) made it a joyful event, despite the gravity of its subject matter.

A large, socially-distanced choir (mostly constituting the Elder Conservatorium Chorale and the Graduate Singers) took up the entire stage, spread across the tiers in Carl Crossin's much-loved 'random' formation – that is, with all voice types mingled together. I wondered later if this was wise, given that the choir sounded rather soft and tentative in the first half, as though the singers could barely hear one other. A smattering of masks lingered on a few of the choristers' faces, a reminder to be thankful that such an event is even possible. The Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, meanwhile, was crammed below in the pit.

At the back of the stage was a square screen (its top frustratingly cut off for those of us in the cheap seats) which was used throughout to display a combination of live close-up video footage of the performers and (in the first half) photos from the Red Cross archives. Occasionally we also got some of the text that was being sung, although far less than I would have liked. There seemed to be a desire to present the music as abstractly as possible, probably to broaden its appeal and message.

Yet I was impressed at how clear and coherent the message of the concert came across. The first half of the concert was presented as a prayer for world peace – 'prayer' here covering a spectrum from vague ideal to intense longing to hopeful actual request. All five pieces before interval were performed back-to-back without applause, giving it more the feeling of a ritual than a performance, especially since the works matched and complemented each other so well. I was not in possession of a program booklet, but apparently Alan John was the curator (if so, he deserved more credit). The projected photos from famines, wars and refugee camps invited us to draw connections between what we were hearing and what we knew about the outside world. The prayer was thus at least partially directed to the audience, almost as a challenge: "You also value peace, yes? Well, look around, the world is crying out for it. What are you going to do?"

Pēteris Vasks' Prayer for Mother began the ritual quietly, a clarinet solo gradually opening up over a haze of strings before Stacey Alleaume's warm soprano entered. The tenderness of motherhood was presented here (images complementing the music) as something extremely valuable but under threat: the first entry of the choir was pointedly on a tritone. The eerie end of the work, with the clarinet solo returning over a warm aleatoric choral 'cooing' from the choir, didn't quite live up to its potential magic in the unforgiving Festival Theatre acoustics. No thanks either to the usher whose radio kept crackling away in the near silence.

Lili Boulanger's dramatic setting of Psalm 129 for choir and large orchestra came next. A passionate cry against affliction and oppression, led by unison male voices, this is music of intense pain and anger, written during the First World War. Some indication of the text would have helped here, but the images and music nevertheless plunged us into the thick of a violent, unforgiving world.

Maurice Ravel's 'Kaddisch', his setting of a traditional Hebrew mourning song, was the expressive, personal heart of the set, its intricate melodic line sung with assurance by tenor Nicholas Jones. The projected images here spoke of death, the unanswered question.

Lili Boulanger's Old Buddhist Prayer is not the ethereal, meditative oasis one might expect. Its persistently repeated musical refrain suggests more the longing of its petition rather than the detached "let it be" philosophy it is asking for. This time the text was deemed worthy of translation, although it wasn't always easy to read over the changing images.

Vasks' Dona nobis pacem then took Boulanger's prayer even further, the repetitiveness of its phrases now suggesting desperation and perhaps even bitter resignation as the prayer seemed to go on and on, unanswered. And yet, there is a note – or rather, a modulation – of renewed hope towards the end, from somewhere... somewhere...

After the interval the mood shifted abruptly. Francis Poulenc's Gloria for soprano, choir and orchestra is a delightful musical patchwork of bright, bold colours in clear and distinctive patterns. It is also, of course, a hymn of praise to God, although once again the text was deemed redundant to enjoyment of the music (except for those of us already familiar with it). The orchestra was in great form here, and the choir sang much more confidently and with the necessary exuberance – you could tell they were enjoying it. Occasionally, however, the inadequacy of the stage setup was apparent – the choir never sounded quite together in their consonants, and got a step or two out of time with the distant orchestra in the jaunty 'Laudamus te'. Stacey Alleaume's voice was perfect for the soaring yet prayerful soprano solos, making the high notes sound easy, floating up to the tops of phrases ("Domine Deus") like incense.

Was it appropriate to be singing such joyful music after the serious prayers in the first half of the concert? Only if God is actually good, and does actually hear our prayers. Poulenc's "refreshingly human take on the Latin mass", as the Festival guide described it (as opposed to all those, you know, inhuman masses we know and hate) is either worshipping a worthy Creator and Saviour, who truly "takes away the sins of the world", or it's just a playful game. Or... could it be both?

4 stars

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Audio Divina

The Blog in which David John Lang listens to Good Music

About this Blog

The views expressed in this blog are my own, and don't necessarily have anything in common with the views of other composers or musicians mentioned herein.

Preparing the Way

The Mass of History

Musica Viva: A Winter's Journey

REVIEW

Musica Viva: Van Diemen's Band

REVIEW

Adelaide Festival 2022: Prayer for the Living

REVIEW

Audio Divina

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