12: Amongst the Ashes

Well, now this blog has caught up with itself.

Mao's Last Dancer: Lulu Liu - Pipa

In mid-December Mao’s Last Dancer was finished and I was free to concentrate wholly on Lightfall. I gathered together all the ideas and materials created to date and was faced with the reality that I was completely at sea.

Normally I have an idea, then write the piece, generally quite quickly. But it was close to three years since I had conceived the shape of the concerto and the long wait, first to get a commission, then to find time in my schedule, had dulled my imagination.

I find that when a concept occurs to me there is an external shape that can be written down immediately, along with various details such as instrumentation or tonal approach. But the thing that is really important, the reason for writing the piece, the emotional kernel of the work - the spiritual centre, if you like - can only be retained internally until it is worked out through the composing. Connection with this internal feeling can be maintained for a long time but eventually the colour fades out. After all this time I was left with a bunch of charts, sketches and ideas that held little meaning for me.

Of course, it was largely my own doing. I was very excited about that first octatonic sketch that I had written as a submission for a film I didn’t get and despite intending to expand and explore the possibilities further with the horn concerto I found I couldn’t wait. First, You Dead Kings Rising, then Freefall, Free Dance and much of Daybreakers all offered opportunities to explore the octatonic scale further and I couldn’t resist. Gradually the substance, as well as the soul, of the concerto was being burnt away by the inexorable need to keep composing.

As I have already shown, I had begun looking at other synthetic octatonic scales, even using a few instead of one. This seemed a logical progression from my previous work but it was a cerebral occupation and was not connecting with that internal spirit that was Lightfall.

The pilfering was happening the other way as well; the techniques of free time that had appeared in Night Is What Remains (2005) and most specifically the slow section of Baba’s Birthday (2006) I had earmarked to develop in a cello concerto. I was making approaches to an orchestra about a possible commission at the time that Robert Gay offered to commission the horn concerto (late 2007), so that took precedence over the cello concerto, which is still on my list of future compositions. Having learnt from the above experience I tend not to think about the cello piece in the hope that it will survive through to life. But during all of Lightfall’s gestation I wanted to apply aspects of the free time technique. So, here I was in December-March 2009 with the horn concerto stealing from the unformed cello concerto.

Now, it seemed the obvious solution was to start again from scratch, free of any pre-conceived ideas. But the Sydney Symphony’s education kit was already printed and knowing that hundreds of students around the state would be studying it I had difficulty moving completely away from the earlier concepts. And the publicity machine was already in motion and audiences would (will) be turning up to the premiere with expectations of hearing the original concept. I knew that I should not allow such things to influence the composition but it was hard not to feel the pressure of expectations.

Sydney Opera House, Concert Hall

So between January and March 2009 I composed a number of fragments and sketches that, when added to the opening section that I had already composed by September 2008, totalled about 17 minutes of the concerto. On the surface this looked good and I probably would have finished some sort of piece by mid-April but most of it meant nothing to me, just a lot of cerebral noise. I felt there were some useful passages in there and that they would survive but it just wasn’t adding up as a piece.

I will post those ‘useful passages’ in 11. Three Sketches and talk a little about them. The other fragments are not worth showing, although the opening idea, along with the comet structure, I have since put on the backburner for an orchestral work without soloist.

By mid-March I was playing with canons at various ratios 7:1, 7:3, 7:5 and 7:7. The numbers 7, 5, and 3 come from the Three Sketches; more on that later. Nor have I talked much to date about canons because they are so much a part of my technique that I forget to mention them. (I will be going into all that in more detail once I have posted the final concerto in a few days time.) But once again this was the act of a desperate composer flailing around looking for some system to make the music work.

Some days I would try to retain the earlier concepts, other days I recklessly grabbed at any shard of an idea that flew past. Manuscript was spread all over the floor and furniture, being moved around into different orders in an attempt to find a structure, a connecting thought, a musical argument and most of all, a reason for its existence.

The breakthrough came without warning on 29 March 2009.

Butcher Bird sees light (photo: Robin de Crespigny)