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Brett Dean
RESIDENT ARTIST PORTRAIT: BRETT DEAN Meurig Bowen introduces the festival’s featured artist – composer, violist and conductor Brett Dean.
As a viola-playing composer Brett Dean is in good company: ˇ Hindemith, Vaughan Williams, Bach, Mozart, Schubert, Dvorák, Bridge and Britten were no strangers to the alto clef either – though only Hindemith pursued a parallel professional career. On the possible compositional advantage of being a viola player, Brett Dean once told me: ‘There’s something distinctive about playing inner parts, for sure. It gives you an overview upwards and downwards of what’s going on, of the workings of a piece. Perhaps you’re not as intensely busy as the first violins might be, and you’re not so heavily engaged in pumping out the bass line...so yes, it does give you time to take in other things that are happening around you.’ Dean’s journey with composition started in the late 1980s as an improvising performer, working on experimental film and radio scores in Germany – where he was a member of the Berlin Philharmonic from 1985-99. This initiated an interest in electronics and sampling technology which has featured significantly in subsequent orchestral works, such as the Gesualdo-infused Carlo (1997), the satirically-charged Game Over (2000), or the environmentally-concerned Pastoral Symphony (2001) and Water Music (2004). Dean’s self-acknowledged ‘coming-of-age’ piece was the clarinet concerto Ariel’s Music (1995), a prize winner at the 1999 UNESCO International Rostrum of Composers in Paris. ‘It was very important in those early days,’ Brett recalls, ‘that there were enough people who would say, “Look, this isn’t bad – you should keep doing this”. Then, after the premiere of Ariel’s Music in Brisbane, the Australian composer Richard Mills came up to me and said, “You know, you’re a real composer now”, which was a fantastic, encouraging thing to hear. The subsequent successes of his piano quintet Voices of Angels (1996 – Festival Academy 2, 8 July), Carlo (Festival Academy 1, 7 July), Twelve Angry Men (1996) for 12 cellos, and Beggars and Angels (1999) encouraged a shift of emphasis from performance to composition, as well as a return to his native Australia from Berlin. The superficial extremes of Dean’s musical experience – Berlin’s darkly cerebral centrality to European culture, Australia’s sunny distance from it – generate an important tension in his music. For someone who readily admits to being obsessed with Germanic culture as a teenage student at the Sydney Conservatorium (‘Hesse, Mann, Webern, Death and the Maiden,
all that stuff...’), it isn’t surprising who his musical heroes continue to be, and with which musical aesthetic his own music is most aligned. There is an admiration for such middle European heavyweights as Kurtag, Henze, Lutoslawski and Ligeti, and a tendency to re-create the same brooding intensity in his music that he experienced living in a place like Berlin. But here, the balancing perspective of different cultures asserts itself. ‘I think complexity is great,’ he says. ‘But if a piece is complex from beginning to end it’s not complex, is it? It’s just chaos – which some people might be into. But I think complexity only means something when it’s put against something that isn’t complex. Then you’ve got the gamut of emotions that makes complexity complex. I find it important to write music that invites the listener in, without necessarily making it easy for them. But I tend also to turn off with music that’s so head-driven that it’s slamming the door in my face as soon as I’ve heard five seconds of it. There’s quite a lot of that, particularly from the ‘60s.’ Brett Dean’s decade living back in Australia has more than consolidated those early few years of success as a composer. There have been numerous prestigious commissions from orchestras, promoters and festivals around the world, and further championing of his work by Simon Rattle, no less, with the orchestral works Komarov’s Fall and Songs of Joy. He has written concertos for viola – which he premiered in London with the BBC Symphony Orchestra in 2004 – and for violin. This work, The Lost Art of Letter Writing, he conducted at short notice when the sudden illness of Martyn Brabbins’ wife forced my predecessor to withdraw. The 2007 premiere was with soloist Frank Peter Zimmermann and the Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam – and the concerto subsequently won Brett Dean the coveted Grawemeyer Award in 2009. Earlier this year, Dean’s first opera, Bliss, was premiered to great acclaim at the Sydney Opera House. Based on Australian author Peter Carey’s eponymous novel, and with a libretto by Amanda Holden, the Opera Australia production of Bliss comes to the Edinburgh Festival in early August. With Brett Dean’s intelligence and alert socio-political antennae, certain extra-musical preoccupations have emerged. There have been works about madness and despair: the stringorchestral piece Carlo, based on the tortured life and music of Gesualdo; Testament, for 12 violas, inspired by the self-pitying pathos of Beethoven’s 1802 Heiligenstadt document; and the Wolf-Lieder, an investigation of Hugo Wolf’s dementia.
Brett Dean
‘I think complexity is great. But if a piece is complex from beginning to end it’s not complex, is it? It’s just chaos.’
There have been directly political commentaries: Ceremonial for orchestra and the string quartet Eclipse – dealing respectively with the Iraq war and Tampa boat people crisis – and an appeal against environmental degradation, the Pastoral Symphony from 2001. And there have been works that reflect on aspects of modern life. The Lost Art of Letter Writing dwelt in part on the potentially isolating effect of electronic communication compared with the warmly human, tactile nature of handwritten contact. His Sydney Olympic Arts Festival commission in 2000, Game Over, was a bleak, black-humoured critique of modern TV – its corrosive, soul-bludgeoning influence and, in particular, the crushing banality of its game shows. And his ‘sociological cantata’ for chorus and orchestra, Vexations and Devotions, premiered in early 2006, deals with technology’s power to alienate, and language’s power to render itself meaningless through jargon and corporate-speak. There have been literary and visual stimuli too: lines of Rilke in Voices of Angels, Sidney Lumet’s tense courtroom drama from 1957 for the cello ensemble work Twelve Angry Men, and the paintings of his wife Heather Betts, such as for the 1999 orchestral work Beggars and Angels. With such a broad ‘world view’, and with culturally diverse reference points, Brett Dean is very good, stimulating company. I first got to know him when I was working for the Australian Chamber Orchestra in the late ‘90s. The ACO premiered Carlo – which we shall hear on Wednesday 7 July, and which I am particularly pleased to be able to present in Cheltenham – in a winery four hours west of Sydney in December 1997. Carlo was subsequently recorded there in 2000, and I had the privilege of playing the sampler part for this, and for a 15-concert tour of the USA (though it was scary too, given the clunky technology of those early samplers: all the weird and wonderful Gesualdo sounds managed de-programme themselves just minutes before a performance at the Lincoln Center, New York...) I have had the pleasure since of hearing a number of Brett’s subsequent works, of interviewing him for podcasts and preProm talks, and writing CD booklet notes. It’s my enormous pleasure to welcome him to Cheltenham again – he was here in July 2004 – and I sincerely hope you enjoy your encounters with Brett and his music this year.
BRETT DEAN IN CHELTENHAM As conductor 6 July
BBC Radio 3 Discovering Music Two Dean works, with Birmingham Contemporary Music Group and soprano Claire Booth
As violist 7 July 9 July 9 July 10 July 11 July 12 July
Britten and Woolrich Schumann, Brahms and Kurtag Schumann Schumann Brahms Bruckner and Dean
Brett Dean compositions 6 July 6 July 7 July 8 July 10 July 10 July 12 July
Wolf Lieder Recollections (UK premiere) Carlo Voices of Angels Winter Songs Demons String Quintet: Epitaphs (world premiere)
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Music from the Genome
MUSIC FROM THE GENOME Andrew Stewart describes a fascinating collaboration between a composer, a poet and a geneticist.
Michael Zev Gordon
The ‘two cultures’ of art and science have certainly grown closer in the half century since C.P. Snow delivered his famously incendiary lecture. The gulf between works of art and science, however, remains easier for journalists to measure and the inexpert to fear. A new work for unaccompanied voices speaks clearly of a common culture, one directed to the public understanding of science and guided by a scientist’s understanding of the arts. Michael Zev Gordon’s Allele, for forty-part choir, draws together the intuitive, the cerebral, the metaphysical and the scientific to provide an immediately accessible creative response to the truly vast if not entirely unfathomable subject of the human genome. Zev Gordon’s composition has been informed by a corresponding investigation of the genetic determinants of musical ability, funded by a Wellcome Trust Arts Award and linked by the title Music from the Genome. Poet and novelist Ruth Padel, Charles Darwin’s great-great granddaughter no less, fashioned the words for Allele. 41 members of the New London Chamber Choir, meanwhile, supplied samples of their DNA for analysis and translation into unique musical material for Zev Gordon’s work: each performer sings a fragment of his or her genetic code as part of the composition. The project’s begetter, Dr Andrew Morley, a consultant anaesthetist at Guy’s and St Thomas’ Hospitals in London, explains that Music from the Genome began with basic what, how and why questions. He offers an outline definition of the project’s central components when we meet at Guy’s. ‘DNA from a group of choral singers, including the New London Chamber Choir (NLCC), was compared with the DNA of non-musical people,’ he notes. ‘One of the project’s aims is to establish preliminary evidence for a possible difference in the brain chemistry of people with musical ability. Through its second aim, genetic information from the NLCC singers’ DNA samples was included in Michael’s new score.’ Morley articulates Music from the Genome’s biological underpinning. ‘We’re made of billions of cells, most of which contain a cell nucleus,’ he notes. ‘And in most of your cell nuclei, you have a set of chromosomes unique to you. These are arranged in 23 pairs. Each single chromosome comprises two very long molecules of deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA, which face each other but run in opposite directions.
The long backbones of the molecules are on the outside with inward-facing rungs. They twist around each other so the whole thing looks like a spiral ladder. Those rungs are part of the chemical structure of the DNA and are known as bases or nucleotides, of which there are four types.’ Genome is the term for an organism’s complete hereditary information. Work on mapping the entire human genome began in the United States in the 1980s, gathered speed and international collaborators in the following decade, and was published in its final form in 2003. Its importance to medical research and the future development of health care would be hard to overstate, as would the Human Genome Project’s determination to address the ethics and social implications of examining our genetic predispositions. The human genome contains around three billion base pairs that stretch from chromosome one to chromosome 23. This vast sequence is produced by the permutation of four bases made from molecules of adenine, cytosine, guanine and thymine (or A, C, G and T), adenine always paired with thymine, cytosine always with guanine. The published map of the genome shows that human beings are more than 99% genetically identical. ‘We know which bits are the same in almost everyone and that differences between individuals occur on average around one in every few hundred bases,’ observes Andrew Morley. ‘At these points of difference, or polymorphisms, it may be that most people have an A and a small proportion of others have a C, for example. Sometimes the number of bases in a particular stretch of DNA between two points will vary between individuals.’ Polymorphisms are at the root of many differences between us, whether in terms of predisposition to a particular biological characteristic like blue eyes or a disease like diabetes. For the sake of science and music, Morley opted to examine two genes already identified as being likely to affect whether individuals possess an aptitude for dance. ‘At the time we delivered our Wellcome Trust application last year, nobody had published anything on the precise genomic locations associated with musical aptitude. Since then, the first such paper has come out. He adds that this recent Finnish study generally supports his belief in the importance of two particular genes he is investigating, snappily named AVPR1a and SLC6A4. ‘What we are doing is to see whether particular alleles [or
Music from the Genome
Michael Zev Gordon’s Allele draws together the intuitive, the cerebral, the metaphysical and the scientific to provide an immediately accessible creative response to the truly vast if not entirely unfathomable subject of the human genome.
alternative DNA sequences] in and around these genes occur more commonly in our sample of choral singers than in our control sample of non-musicians.’ The familiar nucleotide letters happily presented Michael Zev Gordon with analogues for three scale notes and the syllable for the diatonic scale’s seventh degree (‘ti’ in Tonic sol-fa notation), which he has woven into the musical fabric of Allele. ‘The starting point for Michael’s composition was for him to use those sequences of four letters to create some music,’ recalls Morley. The chosen letter combinations emerged from a range of 18 polymorphisms in the two genes potentially associated with musical aptitude. In addition to supplying basic building blocks drawn from singers’ DNA, the medical researcher also encouraged the composer to follow his creative nose. ‘My view was that he should use whatever genetic information was expedient to produce good music. His view was that he was unable to produce his best work without applying certain formal constraints.’ Michael Zev Gordon prefaced the job of composing his 40-part composition with a period of dialogue and exchange with Ruth Padel. She prepared a cycle of 23 poems on the subject of cell division, which Zev Gordon studied before suggesting that Padel create another text exploring the tiny differences inherent in genetic polymorphisms. The poet supplied several further drafts, reacted to Zev Gordon’s observations and criticisms and finally delivered a text to give the composer ‘the “hold” I need’. The venerable question of the relationship between words and music was addressed as part of their collaboration. ‘I took an image from Alan Bennett’s new play, The Habit of Art, in which he considers how words serve as the midwife that allows music to be born. But they have to be the right kind of words, otherwise the music simply ends up trying to portray the text. Before Ruth wrote her text, we spoke about the way the genome is both hard matter and something mysterious. Those two ideas have guided our work.’ The ‘hard matter’ of Zev Gordon’s Allele is built into the work’s tonal fabric and its structure. The composer has used genetic sequences to determine pitch cells and rhythmic durations in his piece; he also employed the Fibonacci sequence to establish its formal ground plan and disposition of voice parts. ‘I want the work to unfold in six sections,’ he observed in an initial e-mail to
Ruth Padel, ‘to grow in length according to the Fibonacci series: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8 in terms of length in minutes, adding up to twenty.’ The challenge of introducing melodic material based on singers’ genetic polymorphisms, explains Zev Gordon, added to the practical demands of writing a score 40 real parts. ‘In many ways this is the hardest thing I’ve written, precisely because of the thinking in so many parts,’ he explains. ‘The key is to think in very slow harmonic movement, which is what Tallis does so majestically in Spem in alium. My piece begins with one part, which becomes two, then five, then 10, 20 and finally 40. I had the idea of replication of the genetic image in mind here. When the piece reaches its final climactic moment, each of the singers will sing his or her allele. The genetic sequence underlies everything I’m writing and it will be heard as a work of art.’ We will have to wait until 10 July to hear the art of Michael Zev Gordon’s genome-derived score. Is Andrew Morley, meanwhile, prepared to say whether individuals are genetically predisposed to be good choral singers? ‘The headline news is not going to be “Music gene discovered”,’ he replies. ‘We know that musical ability is very complex and so it’s certain that there is no single music gene – many different genes all contribute. The chances of musical ability are apparently increased a bit by having particular genetic polymorphisms.’ Other studies show that the alleles associated with musical aptitude also appear to predispose to more altruistic behaviour and better socialisation. ‘Happily for the singers of the New London Chamber Choir, the anonymisation process means I can’t identify any of the singers. If I could, I reckon that singer forty-one might be the best person to stand next to at the bar after the performance. By the time the project is complete, I might also have a view on the musical significance of his genetic arrangements!’ Allele is performed by the New London Chamber Choir in Cheltenham College Chapel on Saturday 10 July. This article originally appeared in the current issue of Choir and Organ magazine.
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