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Maninya I (1981)
Ross Edwards
In 1986 I completed a series of five instrumental and
vocal pieces under the generic title Maninya. Two of the pieces (I and
V), were later used in my violin concerto Maninyas. The title was extracted
from the text of the first piece, Maninya I (1981), for voice and cello,
in which randomly chosen phonetic units are grouped together to form rhythmic
cells. As I proceeded with the series the 'word' maninya, meaningless
at first, began to connote, for me at least, certain characteristics of
the music I was writing: its chant-like quality, resulting from the subtly
varied repetition of material within a narrow range of limitations; its
static harmonic basis; the general liveliness of its tempi; and so on.
The evolution of this 'maninya style' may have been influenced by my sub-conscious
absorption of a variety of non-western musics. African mbira music, for
example, may be responsible to some extent for the characteristic terseness
and angularity of the melodic shapes, while the manner in which these
are woven together sometimes recalls the textures of Indonesian gamelan
music. Some listeners have detected Japanese, Indian and Indonesian scales;
others have considered the repetitive processes to be similar to those
used to induce heightened awareness in much of the world's functional
religious music, e.g., Australian Aboriginal chant, Sufic ritual music
etc.
Far more important an influence than any music, however, was the natural
environment, a timeless continuum from which much of the structural material
was distilled. I've found the ecstatic and mysterious sound-tapestry of
the insect chorus in the heat of the Australian summer to be a particularly
fertile source of inspiration, and this is manifest in the somewhat quirkish
periodicity of some of my early music. Although its presence is more abstract
in the maninya pieces, it remains the supreme generative force behind
everything I write.
Maninya I, for voice and cello, was commissioned by Hartley Newnham, to
whm it is dedicated, and who gave the first performance, with cellist
Susan Blake, in Ballarat in July 1981. In 1985 I revised and extended
the work at the request of the Viennese cellist Florian Kitt, for the
duo consisting of himself and English singer Jane Manning.
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