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Introduction to the Sacred Series
by Philip Cooney

Pieces and Movements in the Sacred Style

Mountain Village in a Clearing Mist
Shadow D-Zone
The Tower of Remoteness
Kumari
Marimba Dances (2nd Movt..)
Etymalong
Reflections
Yarrageh
Prelude and Dragonfly Dance (1st Movt.)
Pond Light Mantras
Raft Song at Sunrise Enyato I (1st Movt.)
Enyato II (1st Movt.)
Enyato IV (2nd Movt.)
Binyang (2nd Movt.)
Symphony No. 1 Da Pacem Domine
Symphony No. 2 Earth Spirit Songs
Symphony No. 3 Magna Mater
Symphony No. 4 Star Chant
Tyalgum Mantras
Dawn Mantras

The terms sacred and maninya are used to describe and distinguish the music of Ross Edwards, especially the two distinct styles of in the 1970s and 1980s. The term sacred was first applied to Edwards’ music in 1985 by Corinne d’Aston in an Honours thesis and subsequently by Michael Hannan in 1986. However, Edwards continues to write and develop his personal style of meditative music in both his chamber and concert hall works.

The sacred style

The style of the pieces is termed sacred, not in a conventional religious sense, but because their musical language is set apart, special and "ideal". The overall trend of the early sacred pieces was a continuing reduction in gesture. There is also a sense of the eternal, drawn from an oriental understanding, in the recurrent use of piano figures or “archetypes” from piece to piece. Edwards says that the sacred sound world was defined in Mountain Village and that the later pieces were just a process of refining this sound world This re-use or re-working of material is more than just refining. It also involves exploring the potential of the material in new contexts, and discovering new meaning, or layers of meaning, within the material. This reduction and re-use of gestures is seen in the use of similar sonorities and clusters in works such as Mountain Village in a Clearing Mist (1973), The Tower of Remoteness (1978), Etymalong (1984) and Pond Light Mantras (1991) which is based on only three fragments taken from The Tower of Remoteness.

Other characteristics of Edwards’ sacred style are long-held sonorities, slow tempi, mostly quiet dynamics, repetitions of short gestures and subdued mood creating a quiet and contemplative atmosphere. The sacred pieces of the 1970s and 1980s were always instrumental and usually featured the piano. In addition, other instruments used in the sacred works often suggest a spiritual focus, for example, the use of bells, gongs and other percussion.

Edwards says that he is writing an Australian equivalent of the meditative music of eastern cultures, for example, the driving hypnotic rhythms of Islamic mysticism or the Japanese honkyoku music for shakuhachi - from which the clarinet writing in The Tower of Remoteness, for example, derives - a connection which is certainly explored in the piece Raft Song at Sunrise (1995) written for shakuhachi master Riley Lee.

Here is a summary of the characteristics of the sacred series.

Melody small repeated†fragments or formulae (cells), usually at the far extremes of register.
sonorities, which Edwards like to call archetypes rather than motifs or clusters
Harmony/Sonority identifiable harmonic language of “ideal” intervals and relationships
high second, seventh and ninth intervals in characteristic shapes (archetypes)
light water-colour sonorities, bell-like sonorities
static harmonies
descending chromatic passages
augmented fourths and fifths
Rhythm metric structure is usually trochaic, (stressed unstressed)
occasionally iambic (unstressed, stressed) or a combination such as stressed, unstressed, stressed
static quality, sense of timelessness
emphasis on silences
Tempo slow
Texture austere
Structure characterised by tight structures and immaculate sense of timing
an obvious asymmetrical quality to these works, random quality (planned)
little or no repetition of sections

Both the sacred and maninya styles have developed a set of recurrent musical gestures figures which Paul Stanhope first labelled as “icons”. More information on the nature and role of icons in the music of Ross Edwards is available in The Music of Ross Edwards: Aspects of Ritual by Paul Stanhope - www.members.optusnet.com.au/paulstanhope/thesis.html, and Beyond Sacred and Maninya: Developments in the Music of Ross Edwards 1991-2001 by Philip Cooney. There are links with information regarding these studies elsewhere on this website.

The sacred and maninya styles are both influenced by Edwards’ experience and observation of the Australian environment, particularly the sound of insects such as cicadas. This is not to say that Edwards’ music is solely based on environmental sounds or that his musical language is made up transcriptions of insect rhythms or bird sounds, in the way that Messiaen’s music is; but at the time when Edwards sought to free his musical language and searched for the inspiration to begin composing again after a period of non-composition, the insect sounds were the element that initiated his new creative energy. As the years have passed, he has drawn on other influences in the development of his style. These, like the insect chorus, have been filtered and internalised - “distilled”- by Edwards, but the importance of the environment remains strong. This process of distillation transforms any source of material or inspiration into the composer’s own language. Another influence of the environment on Edward’s music is what is referred to as the composer’s use of “planned randomness” that is, a deliberate but intuitive process of spacing the appearance of these gestures or events to suggest the random appearance and overlapping of sounds, their temporal relationship and connection, in the natural world.

Thus Edwards’ strong sense of the natural environment, and the high value he places on it, influence his writing. His music, and his attitude to it, are also informed by an understanding and deference to the Oriental tradition of the role and purpose of music, which is to engage the society in which the composer lives, and to serve that society by revealing other planes of awareness and contemplation. This is evident in both the hypnotic or mesmerising rhythms of the maninya pieces, similar to Sufi chanting, as well as the calm meditative style of the sacred pieces, similar to Japanese and Korean Buddhist traditions.

There are discernible changes in the sacred style pieces from the mid-1980s, for example Etymalong (1984), in which there is more continuous movement created by the figures or cells being stated fairly close together. Long durations and intervals do separate many cell statements, but not in the drawn out manner of, for example, The Tower of Remoteness. Much of Etymalong is based on repetitions, rather than variations of one particular motive, and there is a broad formal plan to Etymalong involving repetition of sections: Intro A A B A1 B A2. Reflections (1985) is another piece that shows a change from the character or style of earlier sacred pieces. It has more rhythmic/melodic cells than previous sacred works, and the use of numerous percussion timbres tends to negate the sense of exact repetition, especially characteristic of the style of the earlier sacred pieces.

In the 1990s Edwards deliberately began to bring together movements based on the two styles, sacred and maninya. Edwards chose the title Enyato, meaning contrast, for many of these pieces. The aspects contributing to this contrast are discussed in the Introduction to the Enyato Series on this website. During the 1990s the Enyato works for various solo instruments: viola, clarinet and oboe, would explore further the linear possibilities of the sacred idiom.

The other change to the sacred series was heralded by the First Symphony (Da Pacem Domine), which, at first, appeared a departure from the static, austere writing of the sacred pieces of the 1980s. The Symphony relates to the sacred style in its slowness of tempo and use of few melodic cells, but deviates from the sacred†style in its use of minor tonality, employment of diatonic harmonies and a wider range of dynamics (mf or f at times). It also has a “modal” quality derived in part from the use and treatment of the plainchant melody in the middle section.

Edwards says that at the time of writing the First Symphony, he didn’t immediately place it in the sacred style. “Well I suppose you have to say that the First Symphony is [in the sacred style]. I didn't necessarily think so at the time. It’s not directly drawn from the natural environment and yet it’s so obviously influenced by patterns of insect sounds, as is Veni Creator Spiritus, the string piece written soon after that.”

However different the language in the First Symphony may have seemed initially, Edwards’ description of it soon after as a “contemplation object”, having “an intense inward focus”, and “a quiet intensity in the orchestral chant”, identify it as a sacred work. The prolonged pitches or drones create a timeless effect - a symbol of eternity. Stanhope (1994) further identifies these string drones as being based on the timeless eternity of the insect chorus, while observing that cello drones based on frog and insect sounds also appear in the earlier sacred piece Yarrageh. The composer confirms this connection, describing the writing in the First Symphony as “insect patterns but they’ve been ironed out”. Further, the connection between the drones in the First Symphony and Edwards’ writing in the earlier sacred pieces is found in the understanding that the perfect fifth drone is a development of the drone effect or resonance in the sacred piano pieces - created with the low chords and the use of the sustain pedal. For the composer, the drone represents the “continuum of life”.

Edwards says, “The piano sonorities in [the sacred work] Etymalong are very subjective, chosen after much experimentation, and they are a personal expression of perfect consonance, whereas in the Symphony, the fifths are intended to be of both a personal and (I imagined) universal significance”. In the First Symphony, the intervals that had made up the archetypical piano chords at the extremes of the piano register are reduced in range and expressed as linear melodies or as points of contact between moving string layers. Edwards feels that these layers continue to create a hierarchical arrangement of pitches which produce resonant, often bell-like sonorities.

Symphony Da Pacem Domine introduced new elements which were to reappear or be re-visited in the subsequent works. The opening movement of the Third Symphony (Mater Magna), for example, is imbued with melodic cells taken from the First Symphony. The sacred idiom is also still present in the extremes of register, and there is certainly still the presence of second and ninth intervals in the writing. This fusing of the diatonic/modal harmonies with sacred gestures including the extremely slow tempi of the sacred writing is found in later works such as the Guitar Concerto, Movt. II, the Second Symphony, Movt. II and Enyato V, Movements I and II.
The use of plainsong in the First Symphony is another reference to a meditative quality in the music. It is also evidence of the influence of pre-Sixteenth Century Europe in Edwards’ music since 1991. In the First Symphony only the opening bars of the Da Pacem Domine chant are used in, but later works, such as Enyato V and the Third Symphony, contain more extensive use of the Ave Maria Plena Gratia plainsong. Veni Creator Spiritus, the work which immediately followed the First Symphony, is based on a plainsong of the same name.

The linear expression of the harmonies, rather than as vertical piano figures, and the use of longer melodic motifs rather than the short iconic motifs, are important elements in the developing sacred language of the period from 1991-2001. The insistent repetition of these melodic cells or phrases in the First Symphony is reminiscent of the sacred style and is a characteristic which, along with the falling shape of many of these phrases of the First Symphony, continued to be used in the subsequent works.

Melodies in the First Symphony are also characterised by mainly conjunct intervals with simple ascending or descending step-wise patterns within a limited range. These are very different from the gapped scales, pentatonic writing and spiky, jagged melodies which continue to characterise the maninya writing throughout the 1990s, and remain more closely identified with the sacred or contemplative writing.

In addition to the fragment of plainchant, the more public quasi-religious symbols in the First Symphony include the use of percussion, especially gongs, and the slow, pulsing drone which is drawn from Korean Buddhist chant. Also fused or integrated into Edwards’ writing in the 1990s are gestures and shapes from Aboriginal chant - “not actual Aboriginal chant but based on recordings I've heard: the gestures, the drones, the sound world are all integrated”. Examples of the influence of the falling shape and intervals of Aboriginal melody in Edwards’ music may be found in White Ghost Dancing, the Guitar Concerto, Movt. I and the Second Symphony Movt. III, where the falling melody at Fig. 63 is accompanied by Aboriginal clapsticks. Like the plainsong examples, these melodies usually appear in a context of tone colours and textures associated with the composer’s sacred or contemplative style.

Edwards says that the juxtaposition of the maninya and sacred styles, or ecstatic and introspective passages, highlights “the schism our society has inherited between matter and spirit, masculine and feminine, mind and body and so on.” Edwards says that he is “subconsciously reflecting our increasingly collective need for balance and conciliation”. This juxtaposition also throws “unexpected light on what has just been stated/is about to be stated”. Edwards feels that this is effective in the concert hall, but his preference remains for writing purely meditational music, which he describes as “an Australian form of musical ritual”.

In the sacred style, Edwards continues to be concerned with meditation, with exploring “the spiritual ... potential of this kind of music to aid in meditation.” He wants “to give it a sense of place by relating to the sounds of the Australian bush - especially the sound patterns made by insects, which, if you listen long enough, can lead you into a timeless domain where the concerns of self and society are temporarily suspended”. The music of the sacred style is “calm” and capable of “extended hypnotic incantation”. This is brought about because the music is “out-of-time”. Edwards says “I hope that I can transcend the barrier of the concert hall and the beginning, middle and end and so on. The music should lead the audience “to go under”, to enter a meditational or contemplative state. That was my aim with the Third Symphony and certainly with the Fourth Symphony: Star Chant.”