Interview with ROSS EDWARDS - Septemper 2000

Conducted in in Ross' newly completed studio, in the grounds of the Edwards' property in Leura, NSW
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On the wall above the piano behind where we sat, were the pages of the then
unfinished final movement of the Third Symphony. References to this work are
made throughout this transcript.
PC: Ross, I’d like to begin by talking about your life in general during the last
ten years. Where were you living then?
RE: Ten years ago [1991] I was writing the First Symphony and I moved to
Leura in the middle of it. I actually know exactly the point where I moved
because the tempo slowed down because I was more relaxed. When I say “I
moved”, Helen and the family too; and the kids went to local schools and we
stayed here for a wonderful year (not in this house, in another one in Grose
Street). I was very busy working on that [the First Symphony] and a couple
of other things including Prelude and Dragonfly Dance. The kids really
hated it in the Mountains and, to cut a long story short, we had to move
back [to Sydney] which I was very, very unhappy about. So we moved back
to our house. This is the house in Sydney which we had rented out. So I reestablished
myself in that situation. We stayed there for a further ...... well
we moved around several times in Sydney and ended up in Artarmon at one
stage,
PC: When Don Featherstone’s film was made.
RE: That's right, that's when that film was made. Artarmon really didn't work
for us I have to say. It wasn’t a congenial atmosphere for composing. So
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then we went to Annandale which is where we are now and this house up
here [in Leura] which Helen is running as a guest house. But we came up
with this idea of putting the studio out here because I really can't work very
well in the city. It's not that I don't like it so much, but I just find that I am
constantly on call from one thing or another and that I can't sustain
concentration. So I’m working in the front room and the dog barks at
passers by, you know, lots going on in the street. I don't find that very
satisfactory at all. But the latest thing is to come up here whenever possible.
PC: Can you tell me about how you deal with living in an urban environment,
especially with the importance that the bush environment has had in the
development of your music?
RE: We moved from Pearl Beach in 1984. I was again very distressed about that
because I loved it there but Helen got a bit fed up with it because she felt
that there was no stimulation. There was for me but not for her. The kids
were getting older and we thought that there were no opportunities for them
up there.
So we moved to a little place in the inner city which, in fact, was in
Paddington. It was a leaky terrace which was all we could afford. It was a
silly place to move to as it turned out. I used to go for walks all the time at
Pearl Beach and the environment was so important and there was nothing
like that in the inner city. There was a park but not the sort of park you’d
really want to walk in. So I felt very cut off from my source of inspiration,
for the want of a better word, and it took me quite a while to adjust to that.
So in some ways, perhaps, the music I wrote there was different from the
Pearl Beach music, although I wasn't consciously writing urban music. My
first piece was Reflections and I had to remember how I felt about Pearl
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Beach to write it. I felt it was, in a sense, second hand to me, but I don’t feel
like that about it now. Then I wrote Maninya III for wind quintet and
Maninya IV. After a while we moved again. Helen was teaching piano in
this little old leaky terrace which was three storeys, very narrow, and
whenever her students came I had to stop work. So, one day I said, “Let’s
just find a place that's laid out in such a way that we could both work there
with sound”. Well that sort of worked, but that's another long story. I had
a dungeon underneath the new house, also in Paddington, where I was able
to concentrate pretty well. And there I wrote Maninya V, Flower Songs, the
Violin Concerto and Yarrageh. We moved again during Yarrageh, to yet
another house in Paddington.
So many moves, I hate moving! The third Paddington house had a little
shed out the back. That’s the one we let when we came to Leura in 1991.
After that, I think, we went to Artarmon and then to Annandale. And at
Annandale we thought we'd got it right.
PC: In all that change, how do you nurture that inspiration from the
environment?
RE: I miss going for walks and things but I can once again here in Leura. We’re
on the edge of the [Blue Mountains] National Park and I really want to be
able to wander out at any time, come back feeling full of everything I’ve
seen and heard. Just looking out this window is wonderful too. I’d like to
be able to sleep at three in the afternoon, get up and work all night. I want
to exist outside of structured time for a while, without the telephone ringing.
PC: So you’re not going to follow a regular pattern like Schubert, for example,
and go down to a building at nine o'clock in the morning and work till ......
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RE: Well, I don't know, I might, but I don't have to, that's the thing. I don't have
to do that when I’m here.
PC: You've been recognised in 1997 with a Member of the Order of Australia
and earlier you received an Australian Creative Fellowship. What effect
have they had on you?
RE: Yes, that Fellowship is what made it possible for me to keep going. This is
going back about ten years. It’s what enabled us to come up to Leura and
send the kids to school here. I didn't have to teach, I could just get on with
my work. And I’ve had two of those [Creative Fellowships]. I met Paul
Keating the other day and I told him, “It saved my life” and he said, "Well,
that's what I intended, you know".
As far as he was concerned, the people who were being supported should
have ideally had about ten years to get on with their work without having to
go crazy trying to make ends meet.
PC: Let's move on to the music itself and begin by discussing changes in works
first of all in the sacred style which perhaps, I think, have been the most
significant changes in the last few years. Which works of the 1990s would
you identify as belonging to your sacred oeuvre?
RE: Well I suppose you have to say the First Symphony is. 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.
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Then there’s Pond Light Mantras for two pianos which I wrote in Leura in
1991 and which was drawn from other pieces like The Tower of Remoteness
and those meditative piano pieces.
This piece I’m working on now, the Third Symphony, which is supposed to
be a Centenary of Federation piece has elements (which you’d call icons -
bird song etc.) drawn from nature, and passages which are designed to
promote deep contemplation. But the trances are always dispelled and the
textures much more varied than in the so-called sacred pieces of the 1980s.
The first movement is quite spiky and, as in White Ghost Dancing, it seems
to contain little bits of me all strung together from diverse sources. The
second movement slows right down to virtually nothing and you have
patterns of bell sounds which are rather like bellbirds, over a very low
drone, and various patterns which recall the sacred series and then it
suddenly turns into a pulsating dance.
I think what facilitated this process was composing that Series called
Enyato, the last one of which, I just finished quite recently, for the Canberra
School of Music - Enyato V. More and more I’m bringing plainsong into
these pieces. In fact the plainsong Ave Maria Gratia Plena, the one which I
used thirty-five years ago in Five Carols. That seems to have come back
now and I'm working with it all the time. It runs all through this piece
[Third Symphony]. It seems to be fusing European music with my own
static, environmental music as an integration of the two. This at first
happened subconsciously, although I'm aware of it now and I expect it.
PC: In the address that you gave at the Conference of Belonging you said that
there was a point when you felt that you had found your own direction and
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then you would go back and listen to European music with new ears. Can
you identify when that point was?
RE: There was a point when I couldn't write music at all, at that was 1974-1976.
All I wrote during two whole years was the Five Little Piano Pieces.
Which, interestingly enough, I thought were just marginal pieces which
had nothing to do with my real work because they were just children's
pieces. Of course they became very important and the scales I used
permeated all the later Maninya pieces.
.
In 1977 I was struggling to write music again and for the next few years
(well certainly 78, 79) I avoided European music. That was when I was
really listening to the environment and trying to draw everything from the
environment because I wanted it to be fresh and new and based on my own
perceptions.
But not long after that I started to listen to music again. Apart from
teaching. When I was teaching at the Con?
PC: 1977-1980.
RE: It was a strange experience being a lecturer because it was the time when I
was rejecting everything I was obliged to teach. So that I found very
difficult - I felt that I wasn’t being genuine. Any enthusiasm I had about my
lectures was somehow contrived. It was a strange period for me to be
focussing on the very things that I was trying to get away from. The
Western system of tuning sounded wrong to me and I found that I couldn’t
use it. Those [sacred] piano pieces and The Tower of Remoteness, and so
on, are based on what I felt were the only possible combinations of the
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sounds of the piano and they’re confined to the extremes of the keyboard. I
found that Equal Temperament and Western harmony was unacceptable to
my ears. Later it came back in a much simplified form based on drones. I
suppose I was just reacting against atonality, because the relationships
between pitches have always been of the utmost importance to me and I
could never have compromised in that direction. It's just the way I am, for
some reason.
PC: So how do you, hearing those sounds - whether they are Japanese and
Indonesian tunings or bird song - reconcile that with writing for European
instruments?
RE: Well you have to make adjustments. I never directly imitated anything. I
never take an insect pattern directly, or very rarely has it happened. Bird
song you can't because the tessitura is too high anyway, and even arranging
that Madagascan folk song in Laikan, I had to make conscious compromises
because it was impossible to replicate its subtleties on Western instruments.
But that was all okay for some reason, because all these elements fused into
a style that was recognisably my own. Once I’d accepted equal temperament
again - on my own terms -new pitch relationships began to form and make
sense to me. I didn’t have to fall back on resonances at the extremes of the
piano keyboard. I even developed a problem with unpitched percussion
because, for a time, it didn’t fit into my sound world.
PC: That's interesting, because one of those icons you mentioned before is the
falling minor third, and a string player or singer, it’s been pointed out to me,
will perform that differently - the intonation will be different. And yet I
know that in your music now there appears to always be a tuned percussion
or a bell which echoes that icon when it appears in another instrument or
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voice. Is that indicative of an exact pitch for that interval which is
important to you?
RE: Not consciously. I don't know why it happens. But I mean it always has
been, right back to something like Monos II. That falling semitone within
the minor third. It runs through all my music. I have no idea why.
PC: Raft Song at Sunrise is a meditational piece which harks back to The Tower
of Remoteness. Is that a purely sacred piece?
RE: I hadn’t thought of that but yes I suppose you could call it that. It was
written for a particular purpose and that was Ross Mellick’s Bamboo
Construction “Raft No. 3”. We hoped that it would have a life after the
exhibition and I know it still gets played. I’ve just heard that there’s a
performance coming up in a Welsh castle, at sunrise! Of course, I was very
aware of the honkyoku pieces for shakuhachi.
PC: To me that piece is representative of a change from the importance of the
piano and the very vertical figures on the piano in the early sacred pieces,
to a wind instrument, a linear instrument.
RE: Yes, and it’s followed by some others - the new solo oboe pieces for
example.
PC: They’re on Diana Doherty’s CD? [Blues for DD] .
RE: Yes, there's Ulpirra but there's another one called Yanada which simply
means 'moon' which again is a linear, slow, calm piece.
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PC: That description of Yanada as a slow, calm piece is significant, I think. One
of the things that I'm teasing out in my writing is the changes in the sacred
style in particular. There are aspects of the maninya which have stayed
constant in many ways but the sacred seems to be where the most changes
are occurring.
You've referred to the fact that these pieces are meditational objects and they
have names like Pond Light Mantras, which you’ve mentioned and Tyalgum
Mantras, which is another sacred style piece. And then we have that same
term mantra in Dance Mantras, which is a very different piece in style.
RE: Yes, but it's repetitive, it's a prayer or some kind of ritual. Peter Sellars
wants me to do a piece for the Adelaide Festival and I am hoping very much
that it can be the one I want to write called Star Chant for chorus and
orchestra1. I've got a text, devised by my friend Fred Watson, an
astronomer. It’s the names of the constellations of the southern sky in both
Aboriginal and Western scientific terminology. So, that will be chanted and
that would certainly be a sacred piece.
PC: Tell me what's going to make that a sacred piece.
RE: The fact that it will be out of time. I want the lights right down and I'll
want the audience to go under. That will be the concert version but [what]
I’d ideally want to happen is to have the whole thing recorded and played
back in a suitable space over and over. So I have to design it so that it's a
seamless, timeless unity. I tried to do that 27 years ago with a piece called
Antifon, also for the Adelaide Festival, and I found it very difficult to
achieve. That piece consisted of chanting by a very large choir, as many as I
could get. They were supposed to carry candles and the Fire Department
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moved in before the performance. And also there was a brass ensemble and
two tam tams and an organ. I’ve re-made that piece recently; it’s now called
Eternity.
A lot of people responded very positively to it. I remember afterwards there
was a barrage of boos and a whole lot of cheers at the same time, so it
provoked the sort of reaction which festival director’s love. But it couldn't
have been quite what I wanted. The brass players were so upset. I’d given
the trumpets a lot of high Bs on the understanding that it was the only thing
on the programme but it turned out they had a whole programme of brass
music to play and broadcast. They were furious and I had to cut the piece
down to 18 minutes. I’ve been looking for an opportunity to try something
like this again.
Of course, I’ve done it in Pond Light Mantras which was also meant to be a
seamless continuum. That's what I've been trying to do, avoid beginnings
and ends. Whereas, most of the other pieces I've been commissioned to do
have to fit into conventional concert programs.
PC: We talked about the First Symphony. I actually feel that is a very pivotal
work and you’ve said that as well. I describe it as such because it is a
departure from the sacred style of the 1980s.
RE: Yes, that quite surprised me. I always wanted to do something like that. I
could feel it coming years before I started composing.
PC: I'm interested that you describe that as a sacred work. I mean I felt that the
things that you said about it, that it had an intense inward focus and a quiet
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intensity in the orchestral chant, which are all descriptions or terms
associated with the sacred style.
RE: And you get the insect patterns but they’ve been ironed out.
PC: And the E minor tonality.
RE: Certainly the harmonic language has changed. Perhaps I felt I needed to
reach a larger audience.
PC: So that's sort of a significant work at the start of this period we are talking
about, the 1990's. How do you see the relationship between that work and
the subsequent things that you have written?
RE: The next piece I wrote was Veni Creator Spiritus and I felt a need to use
plainsong again. The first movement is a very strict cantus firmus
composition. The whole Veni Creator chant is long values in the viola and
the other parts weave around it. It sounds almost like a sixteenth century
composition: the instruments play with little or no vibrato, but you can still
feel Australia - the drones, the insect patterns, the timelessness.
After that it turns into a dance which is essentially a maninya and it treats
the plainsong in very different ways. So that was the next piece. What I
wanted to do, was to try and make this process very strict. In the First
Symphony I simply turned the plainsong into a hymn. And then I got rid of
the plainsong because I thought it was rather unmemorable actually. But I
took the title.
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In the other piece, Veni Creator Spiritus, it’s such a beautiful plainchant I
had the first violin play it solo at the beginning. And then I used it as a
scaffolding for the whole movement - a technique that was centuries old,
you know. It was a way of ensuring I’d write something a bit different.
PC: What is it about plainsong that appeals to you?
RE: Its stillness, remoteness - although I do prefer to listen to other kinds of
meditational music, the shakuhachi repertoire, for example. With plainsong,
it's probably got a lot to do with association. For me it represents spiritual as
opposed to “Enlightened” Europe, which is perhaps the way I think about
Europe in an idealised form. I’m totally aware that the Enlightenment was
very important and good things came from it, but it’s time, I think, to
reinstate - reinvestigate - our sense of wonder at the mysteriousness of the
world.
And I have to come to terms with the fact that, of course, I’m European
originally. I would say that it’s symbolic in many ways, although Da
Pacem Domine was chosen more for its title as I found the chant itself a bit
drab, I have to say, and I made my own hymn out of it.
In the case of Ave Maria Gratia Plena (Hail Mary full of grace), it’s
symbolism of the feminine in nature. And being full of grace means, to me,
living in an appropriate, in a right manner in your environment and with
gratitude. Gratia could be “with gratitude”. It’s really about not despoiling
your environment but being integrated with it, which, of course, is one of the
great challenges of our time, to which we have to respond in order to
survive.
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I think it’s a beautiful chant and I used it once in a nativity play I wrote
when I was very young and it survived in some carols which I extracted
from that. And I quoted it because the associations never left me, the
beautiful melody though, of course, only now can I appreciate the
significance of what it means. To me, plainsong symbolizes the spiritual
side of our European heritage and it symbolizes the need to revitalise the
landscape we’ve devastated. Where do we stand? I mean nobody quite
knows, it’s a very difficult question. Without appropriating Aboriginal
music (which would be just silly, I think), I have to use something that is
more from my culture as a symbol but place it in a context which is also
where it could be renewed.
PC: In the First Symphony, you use the fifth drones and the parallel string
writing which you use again in the Guitar Concerto and the Second
Symphony. And there is also, I see, some of that writing in the second
movement of the Piano Concerto.
RE: Yes, I think that the second movement of the Piano Concerto has a lot in
common with the second movement of the Guitar Concerto. They both
relate to water, in some ways consciously. The Piano Concerto was written
at Pearl Beach. But in fact, I listened to it again not so long ago and to me it
sounds very coastal Australian - Australia as I feel it musically, and people
at the time were saying it sounds English, like Vaughan Williams no doubt
because it uses Western Church modality. But they’re missing something
essential.
PC: I’ve heard other names like Tippett and Barber come up.
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RE: I don't know much Tippett. I haven't heard much. Some of what I have
heard, I really like. I was accused of imitating Barber in the slow movement
of the Violin Concerto, probably because it has an elegiac tone like his
Adagio. In this country people always have to identify some sort of model
you’re supposed to have used. You’re not allowed to be yourself - we’re
still cringing.
PC: I know this is a very obvious or often-asked question, but I look at the
Piano Concerto and I hear how Australian that is ... can you explain that to
me, what is it about that music?
RE: I think it was the result of my jumping out of a navel-gazing attitude to one
where I suddenly became acutely aware that I had the privilege of living in a
wonderful place. It had its share of problems, as a small community - but
the physical environment was spectacular. That's what got into that piece,
this sudden revelation that this is what I should be doing - I dared myself to
carry it out - (to do what I actually felt which, of course, in those days you
certainly weren't supposed to do.... it was 1982, and orthodox modernism
still prevailed. That kind of very narrow Eurocentric “thou shalt not do this
and if you do that we will get you and sideline you”. And the English
press, of course, got me and vilified me.
For me the Piano Concerto, apart from being a response to the sheer
ecstasy of being a Pearl Beach was a rude gesture against the establishment
whose response was predictable. When you say it sounds Australian, I
allowed the richness, the colour and the ecstasy of the place where I felt at
home into the music. To me it certainly has an Australian quality which I
think I’ve defined in the music. I’m incapable of defining it in words -
people have tried: I leave it to them.
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PC: What's interesting is that there is that on top of all the environmental
influences, which are probably the most discussed and documented about
your music, I hear things like an optimism in what you’re saying ... almost a
brashness, a confidence in what you're saying which is one of the things that
people would associate with Australia.
RE: I got very sick of dicta from the Northern Hemisphere as to what you should
and shouldn't do. I reacted spontaneously. I suppose it is a brash piece. I
mean it's not a subtle piece. I'd had enough of being subtle at that time.
PC: You mentioned the importance of the Enyato series in the 1990s. In that
series you have this juxtaposition of two movement (or some have three),
the linear style and more references to sacred pieces. And I think there are
crossovers between styles within the movements. And you could put
Binyang in the same category.
RE: Binyang is an Enyato piece. The latest of the Enyato series, is a Guitar
Quintet. That’s also based on a plainsong, the same Ave Maria as I used in
the Third Symphony. It’s actually stated in the cello, in a short introductory
movement and the violin joins in . Then there’s a very maninya type of
movement for full quintet. I mean absolutely characteristically maninya.
After that a movement called De Profundus which is a very dark and very
ruminative adagio, mainly for violin and cello. And then, at the end, it
becomes a version of Ulpirra for piccolo and guitar - I mean there’s real
contrast between these four movements. They cover a lot of different - not
styles - but stylistic elements.
PC: The decision to write multi-movement pieces - which the Enyato pieces are -
with the contrast which is the essence of the Enyato series; I’m wondering
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how conscious that was. Given the distinction earlier between the sacred
and the maninya, were you consciously drawing them together or did that
just happen?
RE: Well, I probably was. I think I was quite conscious from the beginning that
that was what was happening. By the time I wrote Enyato V, I was
actually exploiting the idea of contrast.
PC: White Ghost Dancing is another piece you mentioned earlier. It has a very
commanding blend of all those different stylistic elements or influences.
RE: It seems to be getting everything together. There’s plainsong, but there is
also a hint of Aboriginal chant - not actual Aboriginal chant but based on
recordings I've heard: the gestures, the drones, the sound world are all
integrated. The surface of the music seems to be much more chameleon-like
- kaleidoscopic, constantly shifting material. It came on the radio recently
and my son, who’s 23, happened to hear it and he made the comment that it
sounded like “lots of little bits of Dad all stuck together”. I thought that was
quite perceptive. It's a mosaic of little bits: plainchant and Aboriginal
chant, bird song, imagined bird song, drones, you know, we've even got the
“maninya” gesture. The “maninya” pattern (rising minor 7th+falling minor
3rd) seems to have a permanent place in my music. It obviously signifies
something positive - an optimistic gesture. I can't pinpoint what it is, but I
know it’s very significant.
PC: That symbolism is something we were talking about before. There’s an
example of the sacred icon which appears in the Second Symphony. The
same figure which you use once at the start of the second movement also
appears in Yarrageh where it’s repeated a number of times.
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RE: It symbolises wildness - something beyond the known.
PC: Do you discover that meaning as you use a figure or does it begin with that
association?
RE: No, the association gradually accumulates until you know that it’s
important, if not precisely what it means. I don't start off with, “this is a
symbol for something”, but it acquires its meaning, or at least its place in my
work over years sometimes.
PC: What holds the mosaic of White Ghost Dancing together?
RE: The associations …. well, the fact that they are all bits of me, I think. They
seem to hold together but there isn’t one thing in that piece that hasn’t been
used in some way or touched upon before. So, it’s all these icons glued
together in different combinations, little fragments that recur and recur
slightly modified and that’s all done by intuition. But, I realise that the
whole piece had been, in a sense, composed before and now is reassembled
to make something else. Well, that’s maybe too strong a statement but
nearly everything in it is either in the style of or touching on something I’ve
done before - a direct quotation in which is placed in another context so that
it’s renewing it in some way.
PC: You talk about the shapes of Aboriginal melodies in some of the
correspondence that we’ve had, as becoming important in your music.
You've talked about recognising over time that there is an Aboriginal
influence in the shape of melodies.
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RE: That's not of paramount importance. I think more of the drone that underlies
everything, symbolising eternity. Again its not something I'm consciously
cultivating but it’s always there. Whereas Peter Sculthorpe has used actual
Aboriginal melodies, I’m always hinting at something over the horizon - a
shape, a sound world which hasn’t quite crystallised and can’t quite be
justified intellectually.
PC: Are shapes like that falling shape becoming as important as the specific
intervals that we've talked about?
RE: I don't consciously think in terms of intervals at all. I look back and I see
naturally that there are intervals e.g. falling 3rd and falling 2nd, but I never
think in those terms or even in terms of what mode I’m in or it’s
associations. Occasionally, I'll have some awareness at the moment of
conception but it’s usually a mystery, something which will only come into
focus later.
PC: To advance that idea of the mystery in the process there a little bit, you
mentioned to me a little while ago that it might be possible to be too
intuitive and yet, intuition is important in what you do. What did you mean
by that?
RE: Oh, well, you can't be overly intuitive or you wouldn't have any control over
what you are doing. I’ve found that as I get older, and it’s been a long
process because I'm a pretty slow learner, feeling my way. I think that I
just get better over the years at fusing my intuitive process with the cerebral
one so the two become more integrated and unified.
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PC: I see that the more recent works have a much more formal design in them.
Is that a product of that connection between the intuitive and the cerebral?
RE: I never pre-plan in any detail, I have an intuition of what I'm doing, where
I’m going but it’s always been a mysterious journey.
PC: I've drawn a comparison there between you and Peter Sculthorpe because he
does sit at a desk and say, here are the sections and here are the
interrelations that I want to make.
RE: Yes, he’ll draw a beautifully symmetrical plan and then fill in the details.
PC: Rosalind Halton mentioned to me an observation of the similarities between
your sacred piano pieces and the New Zealand composer Douglas Lillburn.
RE: I don't know enough of his work to know.
PC: She thought that the similarities could be attributed to a response to distance
and isolation, alienation.
RE: I see, so it’s not in the physical sound of the music ....
PC: Yes, it’s the similarity in the piano sounds.
RE: I'm really ashamed that I know so little about Douglas Lillburn's work.
PC: Can we talk about some other composers now? When I read about them
things jump out at me as being similar to your approach to your music. The
first is Stockhausen, who is often writing in a very different genre and yet he
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said his aim is “to engage the listeners full attention and not for one single
moment to have a greater priority than another”. He writes what he calls
“musical meditations” that shouldn't have “a sense of beginning and end”.
He also emphasises intuition. Are these descriptions just sort of superficial
similarities or ....?
RE: Well, I've heard little bits on the radio of that interminable opera he’s
writing and, I must admit I turned it off - it sounded excruciating. In a piece
like Stimmung, I think he was trying to draw people in to the “now
moment”. I haven't heard it for years, but I remember responding positively
to it in the 1970s when I heard it live in London. A lot of his other work
leaves me cold - he seems not to be very self-critical, so that you get
inspired moments juxtaposed with prosaic ones. He would have probably
come to that kind of understanding about music in the 1970s because,
before that, his music was extremely and, I think, pretentiously cerebral.
He started to break away from the strictures of serialism and so on at that
point and became very eclectic. Another piece I remember, Anthems
(Hymnen), I found impressive at the time. On the whole I can’t relate to his
work, although his stated aims and intentions are very similar to mine. And,
in fact, to much of the world’s music ... I mean anything used for a
ceremony or a religious ritual conforms to his post-concert hall outlook.
PC: Another one is Arvo Part. .
RE: I saw the St John Passion on television and I think it’s just wonderful. It
takes me right back to Orlando De Lasso - you know, the pre-Bach passions
which are very, very austere. I think that’s what he’s about - trying to bring
a new austerity to music. Apparently he goes and stays in monasteries.
Quite the opposite of Stockhausen’s melting pot - much closer to
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Stravinsky’s Apollonian phase. (I mean Apollonian as in serenely,
classically beautiful) I love and admire what I’ve heard of his music, but I
like a bit more open air myself, if you know what I mean.
PC: There are other parallels as well, I feel. He wrote in the “modern” style and
he just stopped and then he moved to a new style and interestingly its based
on the old sounds. Well, I'll read you a description here: He wrote in a
“modernist” style in his youth, then fell silent. In 1976, he emerged with his
new style which he called “Tintinnabulist” (Based on the sound of bells).
This new style is triadic plus step-wise movement creating dissonance and
consonance (which I see as being similar to the style of Symphony Da
Pacem Domine). He writes music that he says “induces a trance”, where
silence is as important as sound. His piano and orchestral writing in a work
such as Cantus in Memoriam of Benjamin Britten where the piano sounds,
the extremes of the registers and things like that are similar to your sacred
piano works, although perhaps the intervals are more consonant. I would be
interested to hear your responses to the similarities in experience and style.
RE: I can completely relate to that - a necessary cleansing. I stopped composing
for several years in the mid 1970s and listened only to the environment - a
similar sort of experience which changed me. I wasn’t taken seriously when
I emerged.
PC: An example of which is the reaction you experienced with the Piano
Concerto?
RE: Yes.
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PC: So does that rejection of “modernism” mean that a label like “Post-
Modernist” is applicable?
RE: I find that sort of label very ephemeral and it’s only for critics and boring,
conformist people wanting to establish themselves as authorities in
universities and so on. No, it's not me.
PC: And yet, some of the supposedly underlying principles of post-modernism
such as an appreciation of the value of things from the past, ancient things,
and different cultures apart from the Western world is represented in your
music isn't it?
RE: Oh sure. People are welcome to call me a post-modernist if they really
must. It just think it sounds silly. People say to me, “What sort of music do
you write?" and I never know what to answer. But I would never say, "I'm a
post-modernist" because it somehow suggests I’m being led by the nose, or
categorised, so I can safely be put on a shelf and allowed to gather dust. I
might, after all, change - evolve.
PC: Another thing that strikes me are similar aspects of your musical style and
paintings by Arthur Boyd. He painted in series, like the “Bride” series. He
has icons, like “the watcher” re- appearing in works. Is that a similarity of
which you’re conscious?
RE: No, I’m not particularly conscious of the Boyd parallel, but I see exactly
what you mean, and it’s an interesting observation. I suppose I will be
conscious of it now... Certainly, I’m an “icon” person - they just keep
asserting themselves - obviously they’re embedded in my sub-conscious.
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I think some people have these icons and other people try to be original or
try to avoid repeating themselves.
PC: You've written a lot about what you see as the role of music and the role of
your music and I was interested that Peter Greenway who was out here for
the Adelaide Festival said that Art and Culture are resources of which we
should all make more use.
RE: I entirely agree, as would the current director of the Adelaide Festival, Peter
Sellars. He’s a remarkable man, who generates real enthusiasm but
inevitably gets a lot of people off side. What he is saying essentially are the
things that I would like to say if I were that articulate though, of course, noone
wants to listen a mere Australian saying them anyway. But he is
helping to make it possible for us to do things.
PC: Greenway was talking about Art and Culture as a spiritual resource, a
concept with which you would agree, I think.
RE: I couldn't agree more. Music is an incredibly powerful resource whose
spiritual potential is due for a huge revival, I think. I don't mind people
making money out of writing music (in fact I'd like to myself!), but I think
the main reason for doing it is to somehow enhance life, the community, as
it has always done in healthy societies.
That's why I hope that I can transcend the concert hall in the music I’m
writing now - the Third and Fourth Symphonies. All those so-called sacred
pieces were written for the concert hall but I wanted them to be something
more. I wanted to try and use them myself as a sort of tool for meditation.
That’s one instinct I’ve been following.
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PC: You talked about being able to articulate things before. Some time ago, you
mentioned to me David Malouf's book 'Spirit of Play' and how he is able to
articulate things that you would like to express in your music.
RE: I can't remember what the things were, but I did appreciate the book very
much.
PC: If I may, I’ll read a few things that struck me in the book. One of the things
Malouf says is, that “our uniqueness as Australians might just lie in the
tension between environment and culture rather than what we can salvage
from insisting on one or the other”. It seems to me that you express in Earth
Spirit Songs, that tension between environment and ....
RE: To try to spiritualise a landscape or an environment seems absolutely
necessary. Otherwise it could simply appear empty - terra nullius. And for
me to do it musically seems natural.
PC: Malouf says that “This business of making accessible the richness of the
world we are in, bringing density to the ordinary, day-to-day living in a
place; is the real work of culture ... Enriching our consciousness;
increasing our awareness of what exists around us, making it register on
our senses in the most vivid way; but also of taking all that into our
consciousness and of giving it a second life there, so that we possess the
world we inhabit imaginatively as well as in fact.
RE: I would certainly agree with that.
PC: Interestingly, he refers to poetry as the best interiorising activity.
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RE: Well to him of course it would be.
PC: And yet the things he talks about poetry in terms of rhythm, its appeal to the
way our bodies move, involving the body and mind are very musical and
relate directly to your own expressed view of your maninya pieces in
particular.
RE: Well David does like music very much, I know that. But primarily he works
with words and so that would be the terms that he could work with. He
writes opera libretti, of course.
PC: Isn’t that interiorising of the external world something that you would be
seeking to do with your music.
RE: Interiorising, processing in some mysterious way, and re-presenting.
PC: And he talks about the idea of blending society. And he says that one of the
things that will blend the Australian community, is through being an
audience. It seems to me that is something that you see as important as well,
that music as a ritual activity, gives the opportunity to be together and ........
RE: Yes, I think that is terribly important. That's what I feel like working
towards but it's a perilous process because it can blow up to Wagnerian
proportions and become fodder for the worst kind of nationalism. And yet, I
think music is capable of promoting unity and preserving diversity when it’s
used wisely.
26
PC: Let's tease out that idea of drawing an audience together a little bit more in
terms of the way that you write music and perhaps the move of your music
from those extremes, particularly as the sacred style was, to the music that
you write now that draws an audience in.
RE: If you go back five centuries, to the kind of music that the Catholic Church
officially approved of as a means of contacting and celebrating the ultimate
mystery, it’s easy to see how fragmented we’ve become. Something must
change.
I’d love to help promote unity, to bring people together as a community so
that certain values are sustained - certain ways of looking at things that we
desperately need. Obviously we don't have any satisfactory rituals for
facing death. Which is what my First Symphony tried to do - create the
possibility of a collective response to death, danger.
Bach’s music tries to do this, but of course it’s much harder today.
PC: The Third Symphony is also about a collective response in some ways, given
that it is for the Centenary of Federation. We can see the third movement,
upon which you’re presently working on the wall here behind us. Tell me
more about the first two movements.
RE: The first movement is quite extreme in it’s contrasts. It’s spiky. It’s got
some violent gestures and upheavals and it’s also got, for example, the chant
which keeps coming back and calming everything down. On one occasion,
it’s expressed as a lullaby in the violas and harp and becomes almost
schmalzy in a Mahleresque way. Many different ways of looking at the
same thing. Lots of contrast (enyato).
27
The second movement, I conceived up here. There’s a lookout somewhere
over there, you can look out on this shallow valley and you can see the hills
going to the horizon. A couple of years ago I was standing there and the bird
song got into my head. I brought it back and it inevitably became essential
to the piece. The beginning of the second movement I actually wrote in
1998 and then I put it aside and did various other things including White
Ghost Dancing before resuming.
For me it’s associated with that view of wilderness to the horizon and also
the sounds associated with it. It’s a very calm, very slow, inward-focussed
movement and it arrives at a state where all the lights come down, the
players have patterns which they memorise, double basses are just playing a
sustained drone, and eleven of the players have specially-designed hand
bells. And then it turns into a very slow chorale with the lights coming up
…. just the strings, who play very slowly with a hint of the plainchant. The
lights come up enough for the strings to be able to see their music and then
gradually to full, and we’re into the last movement which is a pulsing drone
which builds up to a real dance movement that explodes, not unlike White
Ghost Dancing. At the coda it will go completely over the top, and
orchestral bells will ring out in wild patterns while the trumpets blare out my
Dawn Mantras theme.
PC: And that description of the central movement with the bell sounds, the
unpredictability of it, the overlapping,
RE: almost like bellbirds
PC: is a description of your sacred pieces.
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RE: Yes, but I’ve relinquished a bit of control over it. I mean I’m totally in
control of the texture but the details aren’t explicitly notated. .
PC: That’s interesting because in writing your sacred piano pieces you had total
control of them but the idea was to make it sound like you didn’t.
RE: Yes, I went to great pains to make sure that I was aesthetically sure of the
placement of every event. In this case, I’ve created the same kind of effect.
There’s always some kind of drone in the piano pieces - with the pedal. It
was always there but now it’s a sustained 5th. How universal!
PC: The open 5th from the First Symphony. That’s one of the reasons I see that
as a pivotal work. Although that 5th appeared in some earlier mainly
maninya works, it’s very established in that Symphony in a sacred context.
RE: Drones have become an indispensable part of my music. They anchor it.
There’s a tendency now to modulate dramatically - something that I
wouldn’t have one even in the Violin Concerto.
PC: You've got this new work space. You're about to finish the Third Symphony.
How are you feeling about your music and your confidence in writing, in
establishing your own voice, your own musical language?
RE: I’ve never been so confident. I feel that I've really got things together and
since that's a dangerous way to feel, I’m very concerned. If I’m careful and
I can use this space properly it could be and should be the most creative time
of my life. I always thought that as I got older, I would get better. I'm not
the sort of person who does a whole lot in his youth and burns himself out.
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I’ve always been very conscious of that. I gradually acquire more
confidence and ability as I get older . I hope I've got time to do what I want
to do. I’m only just starting really, I've still got a long way to go.
PC: And you mentioned the other day, with regard to the Blue Mountains, that
the things that you write here will have that sacred quality.
RE: Well, I have to respond to commissions - I’ve been a freelance composer for
twenty years now - and I’m about to provide some brass music for ABC TV
to accompany bells pealing on Federation Day ... I mean I still do these sorts
of things. I don't think it’ll be very “Blue Mountains” inspired but writing
Star Chant (my Fourth Symphony) here and where I can actually see the
stars, is very exciting, because that's the sort of piece you've got to conceive
in a space like this without phones, computers, people wanting this and that
and dogs barking. So I'm very much looking forward to re-establishing
contact with this place. I mean just looking out the studio window
immediately gives you a view of both European and native Australian flora
which seems to be what I've come back to. Whereas I was opposed to
anything European in those early pieces, I’m much more accommodating of
peach blossom and other imported stuff. It’s an acceptable part of our
diverse environment.
But the sky is unmistakably Australian. I feel very privileged to be here -
it’s a wonderful working space - and I’m conscious of the fact that it’s
perched on the edge of a vast ancient wilderness.
PC: If I may finish on a personal note, I was very chuffed when you wrote and
said that you were learning things about yourself in what I’ve written about
your music.
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RE: Just to have things externalised like that is very good for me. When I have
to think about things to answer your questions it really helps me to
understand what I’m doing. I very much appreciate your interest.
PC: Thank you, I’ve enjoyed our time together immensely.
.
1 Edwards’ work on this is now well under way. The title is now Fourth
Symphony, Star Chant. The text was devised by Dr Fred Watson,
Astronomer-in-charge, Anglo-Australian Observatory, Siding Springs,
NSW.