19: The Heart of the Matter

Sometimes a composer is clear from the start how a work will unfold, while at other times a lot of ground needs to be traversed and paths explored before the shape and internal meaning of a work becomes clear.

Lightfall started out with a clear structure and journey and with a language that interested me but began to disintegrate, first while it simmered on the backburner, then once the composing began. After kicking around in the ashes for some time a new concept spontaneously combusted on 29 March 2009 and Lightfall was written with ease over a seven week period.

It is possible that the concerto is a subconscious expression of the ordeal it took to compose it and the sense of freedom that came with finally being able to write. This thought was certainly lurking in the back of my mind during those seven weeks but I was scared to bring it to full consciousness in case it became a new impediment to the free flowing ideas.

The original concept had been that of life’s circle, beginning in unknown regions gradually moving through to blazing light before returning to the dark depths of physical and spiritual space. The new concept simply juxtaposes the two extreme states without a narrative, two static images without the journey between.

It is not my intention to make excuses or rationalise my way out of a contradiction but I do believe that I have composed the work I originally intended; that the structure I came up with in that Rozelle café in 2006 was merely an attempt to draw (literally) an emotion, a questioning of life and existence; that the heart of the matter finally broke through only once the mind, with its diagrams and charts, became weak. Then again it might be that, like a dam, the subconscious needed to be blocked for a period until it overflowed.

Of course, this is not a particularly accepted view of how a ’serious’ composer should go about his/her work but I have found that forcing myself to compose by the standards of others, such as with formulas, calculus and magic squares, leaves me barren and cold. Well, now we are at the point where I will enact the artist’s right not to self-analyse further.

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Melencolia I (Albrecht Dürer (1514)

…the first of the three types of melancholia defined by the German humanist writer, Cornelius Agrippa. In this type, Melencholia Imaginativa (which Agrippa believed artists to be subject to), ‘imagination’ predominates over ‘mind’ or ‘reason’.