2019 Concert Series: Turning 10
Melbourne Recital Centre Primrose Potter Salon March 27, 6pm
Concert 1: Turning a Phrase
Programme: Elliott CARTER: Epigram No.11 (2012) Elena KATS-CHERNIN: Stur in Dur (1998) Elliott CARTER: Epigram No.10 (2012) Tristan MURAIL: Unanswered Questions (1995) Elliott CARTER: Epigram No.7 (2012) Pascal DUSAPIN: If (1984) Elliott CARTER: Epigram No.2 (2012) Tom HENRY: Towards Patmos (after Hölderlin) (2018)
Tonight’s concert will run without interruption or commentary, with minimal pause between works
Just Stop Talking (or: Verbal Crimes Against Music)
On the surface of it, it would seem that words and music were made to go together – indeed, the ‘song’ is perhaps the most ubiquitous creation in all music-making. Songs in one form or another are found in practically every culture on Earth, and the voice is the one instrument that even the poorest of us own. But the power of the song comes about not because the relationship between words and music is easy, but because it is difficult and fractious. One could argue that the easier the relationship is between the words and the music, the less interesting the song is: a basic nursery rhyme in a major key with happy words and predictable rhymes is only really designed to hold the attention of a young child, whereas a Schubert lied like ‘Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel’ holds our attention because the music acts like the ‘set’ for the drama of the text, helping to contextualise the action. More complexly still, a song like ‘Walk on By’ by Burt Bacharach has words that contradict the music – the lyrics implore the song’s subject to just keep on walking, but the music itself seems to keep stopping and faltering, suggesting that precisely the opposite is happening and neither party really wants this newly ended relationship to actually end. Stretch these contradictions out, and you have a Schumann song-cycle; add extra characters, each with their own contradictions and nuances, and you have the entire basis for Wagnerian opera – the text gives us a superficial meaning, the music gives us a psychological insight. It’s complicated.
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Our concert tonight explores this uneasy relationship between text and music, but we’re muddying the waters further by not including a single song in our set list – that’d be too easy. In fact, although we love nothing better than excitedly chatting to our audiences about the music we’re about to play (as many of you would know!), we’ve chosen tonight – our concert about Words – to be our first concert where none of us actually utter a single word about the compositions we’re performing.
asked them to read it and summarise it back to me (“What is this story about?”), you could imagine I’d get 10 fairly similar answers. But now imagine I took that same story and used it as a basis to write a piece of music, where I had everything from a suspenseful-sounding passage for the jewel heist to triumphant music for the ending, and even a recurring ‘corrupt cop’ motif. My musical intent may be just as focused as my earlier, literary intent. But if I played this piece of music to 10 people without any context and asked them the same question (“What is this story about?”) it’s unlikely anyone would tell me it’s about cops and robbers, let alone give me the specific details of the plot that I’ve laboured over. And yet composers – from Biber to Berlioz to Stravinsky – have routinely tried to convey a narrative through music. They try, but despite their best efforts, the only way this wordless music (think Symphonie Fantastique or The Rite of Spring) can be explained is with an accompanying verbal explanation – that is, adding back the very words they’ve gone to great pains to eliminate.
Perverse, huh? But please stay with us – there’s some deep exploring we’d like to do, and some fun concepts we’d love to kick about with you. We’ve established that the concept of ‘words set to music’ is fraught, albeit all the more interesting for it. But words and music can co-exist in other ways – we can write words about music, and we can write music about words.
Let’s start with ‘music about words’.
So, why bother?
Well, frankly, the concept is a nightmare. Hopelessly, there’s just not that much that music can convey in a concrete way. Consider this: Imagine I write a short story (using actual words). It could be any genre, but let’s say it’s a fictional crime thriller. It involves a jewel heist, a corrupt cop, the wrongful conviction of an innocent person, a couple of unexpected twists and turns, and – finally – a victorious ending. If I presented this story to 10 different people – without a cover, title, or any other preamble – and
Our final piece tonight is in this vein. One could almost describe it as a tone poem and, in fact, the name of a poem is in the title of the piece, as is the author of said poem. Towards Patmos (after Hölderlin) by Tom Henry is a musical response to the first stanza of Friedrich Hölderlin’s ‘Patmos’. It is a masterly and complex construction – it is the most substantial work in tonight’s concert and the final destination towards which all the other 4
pieces lead. Henry conveys the fragile heights of the “lightly built bridges”, the fearful “abyss” and, by the end, the “calm waters” and “loyal minds” all mentioned in the poem, while still managing to keep cohesion within a 20-minute sonata-form structure full of dense counterpoint and thematic transformation. It’s a staggering achievement and yet… and yet… who would ever know the music was based on a poem about a Greek island by a niche German poet unless the composer told us? If he wants us to experience this text so badly, why doesn’t he simply supply us with a Google link to the poem and be done with it?
expectation (good or bad) of a response to it. Well, Tom Henry has studied the poetry of Hölderlin. He wants to share it with us. He wants to do a ‘group forward’, if you like. His cover letter to us just happens to be a 20-minute musical quintet. And for the very reason that music is better at conveying emotion than information, this piece is exponentially a more multifaceted and nuanced exploration of the world of Hölderlin than reading about him for 20-minutes could ever be. The music can’t convey the poem wordfor-word, but it can connect with each of our own emotional and intellectual centres in a variety of ways, sparking moments of joy (thanks, Marie Kondo), profundity, terror, or even simply a desire for more exploration. And because music can’t lecture to us, it means our individual experience of the piece can’t be invalidated, and is likely to be different for each of us. For example, I hear the “lightly built bridges” in the opening piccolo solo and piano pizzicati, and I hear the “abyss” in the opening tune’s recapitulation by the cello at around the half way mark. I sense something of Hölderlin’s mental illness in the snaking, overlapping instrumental lines, and my favourite part of the piece is the coda, where a noble tune is decorated with spry and cheeky fanfares in the ‘wrong’ key – although I’m aware that I probably like this the most because it reminds me of Charles Ives, one of my favourite composers. So, in the space of a few minutes, emotions and memories related to the following: Hölderlin, Charles Ives, low-register cello playing, artful
There are many reasons, of course, and I’m being slightly* (*very) facetious, but this idea is worth exploring a little further. Almost any work of art – including a bunch of words – is shared using (you guessed it) additional words. I might hand you my favourite poem with a breathless exhortation: “You have to read this!”; You may forward me a Netflix trailer with a cover email: “Clearly terrible lol”; and what is every book review if not a response to words with more words? But in every case these words lack objectivity. They are loaded. Mostly, they contain clues as to how the initial recipient of the text has reacted to it – whether they loved it, hated it, were frightened by it. But even if a concrete reaction is somehow absent, there is still emotional content in every single case. Even the simplest “Hey! I found this”, accompanying a dumb internet meme contains emotion: the emotion (good or bad) in wanting to disseminate information, and the emotional
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counterpoint, Tom Henry, what Tom Henry thinks of Hölderlin, mountains, extended piano techniques, and hundreds more things I may not even be consciously aware of, have synthesised together into a brand new sensory input. I now have a new memory residing in me, born of this combination of emotional and intellectual stimuli, and it will stay with me forever. You will all have one too, and all of ours will be different and, ultimately, indescribable. Perhaps writing music about words isn’t such a waste of time after all.
Additionally, and something which has always troubled me, is this idea we mentioned earlier about the description being emotionally loaded. It is virtually impossible to verbally describe a piece of music without allowing something of our own opinion of it to leak through.
But what if we allowed other music to do the talking for us? Elliott Carter’s Epigrams for piano trio is his final work. He was 103 years old when he wrote it. The dates are astonishing – he was born the day after Olivier Messiaen, while Debussy, Ives and Saint-Saëns (!) were all still alive, and lived to see the premiere of two operas by Thomas Àdes. While his own output is enormous and stylistically varied, his compositional development follows a fairly familiar template of beginning with works which mostly imitate his mentors, through to masterful works of originality and hyper-complexity, and arriving at a late style which retains this originality within a new-found economy and leanness.
What about the inverse – writing ‘words about music’? Well, there have been plenty of people throughout history who have thought that this is most definitely a waste of time. Martin Mull famously remarked that “writing about music is like dancing about architecture”. I don’t really agree with this statement. If I did, I wouldn’t have just used 1000 words to describe Tom Henry’s ‘After Patmos’, and Syzygy wouldn’t have spent 10 years (yes, 10!) chatting with you all about the richness of contemporary art music. But I get his drift: you can bang on about how great or lousy a piece is, how it’s constructed, what narrative it’s trying to convey, until the cows come home – but nothing you say can accurately place an aural image in the audience’s mind of exactly what it’s going to sound like. Any such verbal description that achieved this would take longer to read or recite than the piece would take to perform – much like a map of a city that is so detailed that it is as large as the city itself.
And boy, are the Epigrams lean. The whole set of 12 barely clocks in at 15 minutes, and the shortest is only 35 seconds. But a quality that Carter’s music always possesses, through his 70-odd years of output, is that of constant transformation - there is always morphing, overlapping. As one idea winds down, another is taking wing; one musical gesture often serves simultaneously as the closing motif of one section and the opening of another. Even each of these 6
tiny Epigrams contains complements and contradictions. As such, they make ideal mediators – their internal transformative qualities allow them to reflect on what has just been heard and set the scene for what is to come. So tonight, we’ve selected just four of these Epigrams and set each of them as a prelude before a longer work, in much the same way as a dispassionate Greek chorus might comment in between a series of soliloquies. These deft sketches will, hopefully, be more objective than we could hope to be with our words, providing context and atmosphere for tonight’s three monologues.
distortions, but in the great tradition of introspective inquiry no real answers are arrived at. ‘If’ for solo clarinet also tries to answer questions in its own way – the title itself is a question of sorts. But, unlike Murail’s work, when Dusapin can’t find answers he gets angry. The work starts out with confident strides but ends with the wild snarls of a caged animal. When it’s over, it’s up to the ethereal string harmonics of Carter’s second Epigram to restore calm and light. It is the piano outburst that ends Carter’s eleventh Epigram, however, that leads us to our first monologue of the night. Elena Kats-Chernin’s Stur in Dur is not so much a rhetorical soliloquy as a Dadaist rant from inside a padded cell. The pianist boldly declares at the beginning of the piece a desire to “stick to major [keys] because I want to be happy”, and then is driven mad by their own tendency to skid into minor keys. The whole exercise is terrifyingly pointless and pointlessly terrifying, and yet is perhaps the most straightforward example of words paired with music in tonight’s concert. The stark, almost naïve, contradictions in the work are precisely what gives it its power which leads us, once again, back to the notion that words and music are most interesting together when they live in acrimony rather than harmony.
You see, our journey tonight from Carter’s words about music to Henry’s music about words is by way of three solo works. And this is yet another way of exploring the relationship between words and music: the idea of solo performance as rhetoric, as a speech without words. This is certainly the idea behind Murail’s Unanswered Questions and Dusapin’s If. Even the titles of each piece imply trying to connect with an audience in an act of existential persuasion. ‘Unanswered Questions’ for solo flute takes as its point of departure the more famous orchestral piece ‘The Unanswered Question’ by Charles Ives. In Ives’ work, there is just one ‘question’, asked by the trumpet, in the guise of a 5-note motif that keeps recurring throughout the work. Murail’s flute piece takes this motif and puts it under the spectral microscope to produce the ‘questions’ (plural) of the title. The motif is stretched, compressed, added to, and subjected to a range of microtonal
May we always be grateful for this uneasy living arrangement – and for the incredible art it produces. © Leigh Harrold 2019.
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Syzygy Ensemble
Syzygy thanks
Laila Engle; flute, piccolo
Zoë Engle; programme design and format
Robin Henry; clarinet
Kim Chalmers; and all at Montevecchio wines
Leigh Harrold; piano
Tom Henry; for ‘Towards Patmos’
Jenny Khafagi; violin Campbell Banks; cello, piano interior
Elaine Smith; for commissioning ‘Towards Patmos’ as part of the Glen Johnston Commissions Project Helen Murdoch and John Payne and the Macedon Music Society Melbourne Recital Centre; for its ongoing support
Syzygy at Melbourne Recital Centre in 2019 May 27: Song for Dulka Warngiid 6pm
Syzygy celebrates the achievement of female Australian composers in a concert showcasing a new work by the recipient of the 2019 Merlyn Myer Music Commission, Yorta Yorta composer and soprano Deborah Cheetham AO. Her new work responds to the magnificent Dulka Warngiid tapestry displayed here at Melbourne Recital Centre. Lisa Cheney: When we speak Rosalind Page: Being and Time II: Tabula Rasa Alice Humphries: Salt Deborah Cheetham: Song for Dulka Warngiid*
Sept 26: Turning Circles 6pm *World Premiere **Australian Premiere
Syzygy’s second and final concert in our ‘Turning 10’ series focuses on cycles and seasons, where beginnings and endings meet Tansy Davies: Grind House (Electric)** Andrew Byrne: New work* Liza Lim: The Turning Dance of the Bee Sean Shepherd: Lumens