by Andrew Ford
Where the folk song in The Unquiet Grave had led me into a particular harmonic area, and the measurements in Mondriaan forced me to deal with formal restrictions, so in Manhattan Epiphanies the artists’ techniques obliged me to come up with new approaches to composing – well, new for me. What I found particularly interesting was the way in which the abstract expressionism of Rothko and Pollock, so redolent of the 1950s and 1960s, led me, through adapting their techniques, to compose music that evoked the same era. My Rothko pieces had a good deal in common with the slow-moving wodges of sound in early 1960s Ligeti – pieces such as Apparitions and Atmosphères, and particularly the string orchestra piece Ramifications – while my ‘Blue Poles’ recalled pieces from that same era by Lutosławski, a mass of tangled lines, occasionally cut off by a big twelve-tone chord. Once again, it was only when I heard the pieces that I noticed the similarities, and it was only then that it struck me how close 1960s art and music had been.
Scenes from Bruegel, for small orchestra and recorded sounds, was mostly composed in 2005, and this time I didn’t set out to ape the artist’s techniques, but to compose equivalent pictures in sound, little tone poems for three of his paintings. I remember exactly how the idea for the piece came to me. It was in the new concert hall at Lahti in Finland. I can barely recall the concert itself – Osmo Vänskä was conducting – because there was something about the gleaming wooden stage that instantly conjured up the yellow ochre of Bruegel’s Children’s Games, and after that all I could think of was how I might make a musical version of the picture.
The answer lay at home. Most days I walk to the post office to pick up my mail. My route takes me past the local primary school, where there is sometimes a playground full of children engaged in a variety of games. One sunny morning, the penny dropped. This would be a piece about Robertson, New South Wales, as much as about the Low Countries in the sixteenth century. I arranged with the school to be in the playground with recording gear at recess time and my piece begins with the clunk of the school bell followed by approximately a hundred noisy children emptying out of their classrooms, their voices gradually replaced by scurrying strings and woodwind in the orchestra. At the end of the movement, as the orchestral pianist becomes fixated on Philip Glass-like arpeggios, children’s voices chant the skipping rhyme, ‘My Aunty Anna / Plays the pian-na / Twenty-four hours a / Day’.
Now that I had a Robertson recording alongside the orchestra in my first movement, it seemed appropriate to record some local sounds for the other movements. The Hunters in the Snow didn’t immediately suggest anything, though it’s true that Robertson is 700 metres above sea level and some years it does snow. But in Bruegel’s leafless trees big black birds sit that presumably squawk at the hunters as they trudge homewards; in the central movement of my Scenes from Bruegel, then, as the brass swells and a blizzard issues from the accordion’s bellows and a wind machine, I introduced recordings of Australian ravens and magpies, currawongs and gang-gang cockatoos.
Finding some local connection for the final movement, based on The Peasant Wedding Dance, was more of a poser. Drunken peasants with giant codpieces, bagpipes, lascivious dancing: it was not obvious where to turn; probably not the monthly ‘old-time dance’ at the Robertson school of arts. But I had a tune in my head – a repetitious and rather annoying little march – that I thought might serve, and I suddenly remembered the Robertson Public School Band. They might not have been drunken peasants, but as you would expect from players between six and eleven years old, some of whom had been playing their instruments only a matter of months, they were never quite together or in tune, so perfect for my needs. I rehearsed them for a few weeks, and for the actual recording session a few friends came and played along, including my piano tuner, David Ricketts, whose trumpet playing added a certain lustre to the sound.
The children themselves were surprisingly savvy. I had told them their recording would be played at a concert in New York – the piece was co-commissioned by the New Julliard Ensemble and the West Australian Symphony Orchestra – and at the end of one rehearsal, I was approached by a boy who had clearly been elected the players’ shop steward.
‘Is there going to be a printed program with our names in it?’ he asked. I wrote everyone’s name down and sent them to Joel Sachs. A few months later, at the premiere of Scenes from Bruegel in Alice Tully Hall, the Lincoln Center Playbill listed all the Robertson Public School players alongside their counterparts from the Juilliard School.
There was something touching about being at a concert in mid-town Manhattan and hearing those Australian birds. There’s nothing like the calls of a currawong or an Australian magpie to make you homesick. A few of the Juilliard players wondered if the sounds were electronically produced, so remote and foreign did they seem. But equally touching was the way in which the Juilliard Ensemble morphed into the recording of the Robertson band playing my annoying march, and then finally took up the tune themselves, bringing it into Alice Tully Hall (suddenly in tune and in time) at the very end of the piece. Joel was happy with the commission and amused by the Robertson Band: ‘Still, that kid on trumpet can certainly play.’
Having moved to Robertson in 2000, when my time in the Peggy Glanville-Hicks house was up, I had quickly come to feel part of this rural community – in fact, within minutes of my arrival. I reached my new house ahead of the removal van only to discover I had left my kettle in Sydney. With removalists due to turn up in the next hour and no way to make them a cup of tea, I walked into Robertson’s General Store, figuring that ‘General’ might include electric kettles. It didn’t, but Hope behind the counter told me she was about to drive to Moss Vale and could buy one for me. I handed her $50 and an hour later, as the removalists were unloading the first boxes, she arrived at my front door, with the kettle.
At the end of that year I married Anni Heino, so my life changed doubly and very much for the better. I first met Anni at an international conference of music information centres at the Sydney Opera House. She was there in her capacity as Head of Classical Music at the Finnish Music Information Centre; I was there as a local composer. She was obviously smart, with a very dry sense of humour, not to mention beautiful, and without going into unnecessary details one thing led to another and eighteen months later we were married on the verandah of our Robertson home, though she wasn’t able to leave her job in Helsinki for another six months.
I had never been to Finland before, so in addition to a new rural existence and a new wife, I was gaining a new country. We had often had Finnish musicians on The Music Show – classical, jazz and folk – because it’s a country that treasures its culture and especially its music. There are approximately five million Finns, a million of whom sing in choirs, and while the population might be less than a quarter of Australia’s, Finland has more orchestras. Most Australians interested in classical music would find it easier to list conductors from Finland than from Australia. Indeed, some of Australia’s best conductors, such as Benjamin Northey, are from Finland in a sense, because that’s where they went to study.
Even now when I visit Finland I feel an ineffable and beguiling foreignness. This is a pagan culture hiding beneath a thin veneer of Lutheranism: a culture where Father Christmas is a goat and effigies of witches are on display at Easter. It is a culture where the sauna is so much a way of life that for centuries babies were born in them and the dead taken there to be washed, where there is still one sauna for every three Finns, and where they think so little of nakedness you sometimes see it on children’s television. So there are palpable differences between Finland and Australia, but also similarities. Perhaps it comes from being at the periphery of Europe (in Finland’s case) or the world (in Australia’s), but many Finns and Australians share a diffident manner, an uncertainty, perhaps, about how their countries fit with all the others. I’m told, by friends who attend international conferences, that the Finns and the Australians invariably end up together, drinking in the corner.
Finla
nd has turned up in my music quite a bit in recent years. I’ve used its folk poetry in three of my song cycles – Tales of the Supernatural, Learning to Howl and Domestic Advice – especially words from the Kanteletar, a collection of short, often aphoristic writings with a domestic bent, the work of women, one imagines, in contrast to the heroic, epic Kalevala. But a moment of Finnish history inspired Rauha.
In 1929 the Imatrankoski rapids on the Vuoksi river in Southern Karelia was dammed for hydroelectricity. It was big news, a symbol of twentieth-century progress; foreign dignitaries visited for the occasion and Sibelius was asked to compose an Imatra symphony, which he failed to deliver. But only hours after the damming, the local people began to doubt the wisdom of it. Having grown up next to this raging torrent of water, they found the silence creepy. You can get an idea of the effect because in summer they open the dam each evening for about twenty minutes and let the water through. Anni’s family comes from Imatra, and one June evening we went to see and hear the rapids. Anni told me the story of the damming and the people’s reaction, and I saw the potential for a piece of music that begins with its climax, a great roar from woodwinds, brass, bell plates and cowbells, the energy quickly dissipating, before fifteen minutes of mostly very quiet music with lots of silences (rauha is the Finnish word for peace). Sometimes the first idea for a musical work is structural.
But if Finland has found its way into my music, Robertson may be fairly said to have embedded itself. Shortly after I arrived in the Southern Highlands, Richard Buckham, then a manager at Radio National, emailed to say the ABC had a new fund for regional artists and producers, and that I should come up with a proposal. By the time he emailed the next day to explain that he’d discovered ABC employees (even part-time ones like me) were ineligible to apply, I’d had the idea for Elegy in a Country Graveyard, and it wouldn’t go away.
You have to be a little careful hanging on to an idea for too long. The playwright Alan Bennett once spoke in an interview about how a perfectly good idea can go stale if you don’t act on it swiftly, and his words chimed with my own experience. But I’ve discovered a strategy: if you are careful not to think too much about the idea and you do no planning, no sketching, it can remain fresh when you come back to it. I carried around the notion of an electric guitar concerto called Raga for nearly two decades before I finally composed it, but I committed nothing to paper during that time. Early sketches would have killed it off long before Kim Williams’s generous commission allowed me to devote half of 2015 to writing the piece. With Elegy in a Country Graveyard, I had to wait only a couple of years until a grant from the New South Wales Arts Ministry and the promise of studio time at the ABC enabled me to work on the piece.
The Robertson cemetery is a little way out of town. You reach it by trekking down (and up and down and up) a dirt track. You pass rolling hills and paddocks crisscrossed by the crumbled remains of drystone walls. These used to puzzle me, because it was impossible to imagine what their function might have been. Finally someone explained they were part of the film set of Babe, which was shot in those paddocks, the walls never intended to stand for more than a few weeks. When you reach the cemetery, there is a spectacular view and graves dating back to the 1880s, though they look much older. Lichen-encrusted and in some cases quite dilapidated, they have been regularly lashed with rain, baked by the sun and bulldozed by wombats. I wondered what it must have been like in the late nineteenth century getting a coffin up the steep, stony lane in intense summer heat.
Thinking in general of Robertson’s past, I decided to record the memories of some of the senior residents. To their voices, I added that of the young daughter of some friends reading the funeral sentences from the Book of Common Prayer, and then set about composing a slow procession of chords – fifty-five of them.
In the studio, we invited the harpist Marshall McGuire to play the sequence of chords very slowly and in his own time. He took more than fifteen minutes over them. Then, since Marshall is also a fine pianist, we asked him to do the same on piano. Percussionist Daryl Pratt played the same chords on a vibraphone and a second time on a harmonium. The Sydney Conservatorium’s harmonium was in a delicate state and we had to record it in situ, the producer Andrew McLennan lying under the instrument by Daryl’s feet, working the bellows with his hands. Next we layered the four recordings on top of each other, lining up their first notes. Of course the ensuing chords were almost immediately out of synch, creating a marvellously blurred effect. I added to this, having brass players and members of the Sydney Chamber Choir listen to the passing chords, pick out a note, play or hum it very softly until out of breath, then choose a new note. By the time we had finished, my fifty-five chords had turned into twenty-minute smear of slowly shifting harmony, ready for the speaking voices to be added, along with recordings of bird song, thunder and rain.
Working with Andrew McLennan and the engineer Russell Stapleton – possessor of the most imaginative ears at the ABC – was a great luxury. So was the experience, rare for me, of starting the week with an idea, a page of chords and some recorded interviews, and ending it with a 24-minute piece in the can. When I write a score, it will usually be months before I hear it played, but building a radiophonic piece provided instant aural gratification. The ABC submitted Elegy in a Country Graveyard for the Prix Italia in 2007, and it nearly won, runner-up to a sassy French Radio entry (its high energy levels the very opposite of Elegy), created at IRCAM, the Paris Institute for Acoustic and Musical Research founded in the 1970s by Boulez.
I made a second version of Elegy, for live performance by a choir and instrumental ensemble, with a backing track of harp, piano, vibes and harmonium, the spoken voices and the environmental sounds, and I conducted it the same year at Belinda Webster’s new Arts in the Valley festival in Kangaroo Valley. The performers were a choir from Berry on the New South Wales coast and the Southern Highlands Concert Band. Most of the band had never played anything like Elegy and they found it hard, at first, to stifle their amusement. They reminded me of the audience at a concert in Gouda, where the Bradford University Chamber Choir once gave a concert. It was in a big Calvinist church in the town square, and until the final item, the locals, mostly members of the congregation, were respectful and attentive, just what you’d expect of Dutch Calvinists. Then came Stockhausen’s Atmen gibt das Leben. It’s one of its composer’s more fanciful pieces – music about breathing – in which the choir, half of them lying on the ground, not only sing on the out-breath but also while inhaling. It sounds quite strange (try it), and is made even stranger by the sporadic and unpredictable hiccuping of some of the singers. The devout burghers of Gouda tried terribly hard to hold it all together – you could actually hear the effort – but in the end gales of laughter filled the church.
I wasn’t asking the Southern Highlands Concert Band to lie on their backs and hiccup, but in place of the lines of music they were used to, there were only a few indications of the notes they should play. Moreover, they were not expected to play in synch with each other, but to choose and sustain their notes individually and hold them as long as they were able. I’m not sure the band’s conductor, Mike Butcher, had had much experience of this sort of music, either, but he was a complete pro and a gentleman to boot, calm and practical, with an air of the Beatles’ George Martin. Though I conducted the piece, Mike’s presence in the room and the seriousness with which he took the music helped the band settle. At the concert, they played the piece very beautifully.
Largely on the strength of this performance, another Southern Highlands project came about at the suggestion of Jenny Kena, the Cultural Development Officer at Wingecarribee Shire Council. This was A Singing Quilt (Jenny’s title, which I initially resisted, then came to like), and as with Elegy it started with interviews. I spoke to people who had been born in the Southern Highlands and people who had come from other countries. I asked them to describe the landscape and their early memories of it. The big difference was that this time the large ama
teur choir had words to sing, and the words came from the interviews. This meant that in performance you might hear the recorded voice of an elderly man or a small girl speaking words that would later be sung. The large chorus consisted of seven local choirs, and some singers joined up just for A Singing Quilt. A few of the participants had never sung in a choir in their lives, but no one was turned away. Faced with having to make the music simple enough for such a motley bunch of singers, yet interesting enough to sustain an audience’s attention for twenty minutes or more, I decided to compose canons. These would sound quite rich and complex, but for each canon the singers would only have to learn a single melodic line. The piece was in discrete sections, linked interludes played by five percussionists, the only instruments in the piece. This meant that the individual choirs could learn their canons on their own, coming together for final rehearsals with each other and the percussionists. It worked better than I’d hoped, and at the end of the first performance, something surprising occurred.
In the final minutes of the piece the recorded voices of the immigrants describe the view from their Southern Highlands window in their native languages, Italian, Irish, Dutch and Finnish (Anni, of course). Then we hear some words in the now largely forgotten Gundungurra language, spoken by an Aboriginal elder, Velma Mulcahy, known to all as ‘Aunty Val’. Specifically, we hear the word for ‘home’.
‘I’m home,’ Aunty Val then says in English. ‘This is my grandmother’s land. You can’t get more home than that.’ The choir has been softly humming under Aunty Val’s recorded voice, an intense, almost hypnotic sound. Suddenly, on her final word, the humming cuts out, jolting us into the present. It’s a Saturday afternoon in the Soldiers’ Memorial Hall at Bundanoon. After a moment’s silence, enthusiastic applause breaks out. I take my bow and begin walking off, but spot Aunty Val in the front row with tears in her eyes. So I walk over to give her a hug, but as soon as I do, I am wracked with sobs. I turn to look at the choir, and see that many of them are crying too. Later, people will keep mentioning ‘your reconciliation piece’, though it has never occurred to me that this is what I’ve written. I had put Aunty Val’s words last because ‘I’m home’ seemed like a good place to stop, but others have heard it differently. ‘All the spirits were here,’ one Aboriginal woman tells me as she leaves the hall.
