Notes

*This work has been commissioned with the assistance of the Federal Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

The composers of two of the works to be performed tonight have, sometimes for quite extensive sections of their pieces, chosen not to indicate such parameters as rhythm, pitch, loudness, and even the instruments on which the music is to be played. The prefaces to these pieces contain a range of instructions such as ‘a player could choose to remain silent for an entire repetition or even the whole piece,’ ‘Play independently, or together, or overlapped, and combinations,’ ‘Treble or bass clef can apply to any note,’ and (Tilbury) ‘Any of the instructions for these pieces can be used for any part of the pieces.’

Many audience members today react to such music similarly to the audiences of the 1950s and 60s, the period when such works began to be (relatively) widely performed. Although improvisatory activities had been an integral part of European music making throughout most of its history, by the 1950s they had assumed a low status within the concert-music tradition in comparison to notated music. Musical works were understood to be the product of individual compositional minds shaping every musical detail into a calculated and hopefully inspired aural experience. The composer was (again, hopefully) a genius whose arrangement and control of all of the different parameters of sound formed what was presented to us as a work of art in its most prestigious sense: a positive creative act that was a lasting expression of the human condition. Of course there was scope within this conception for a performer to interpret the work, making decisions as to the exact timing and relative loudness of the carefully indicated pitches and rhythms, but this interpretation had to be faithful to what was understood as the genius-composer’s intention. A work was seen to have an ideal identity abstracted from individual performances, and no part of the musical experience could, in this view, be left to chance.

Pieces such as the two presented this evening thus work against the very conception of what constituted a musical work within the tradition of European concert music. The creation of a body of works such as these has meant the creation of a tradition with an alternative conception of the role of the composer; and the intentions behind this conception have been accepted by some audiences, and rejected by others. Composers who neglected to provide traditional, exacting notation, at times even faced charges of laziness.

It’s not hard to see why, then, this music was placed under the rubric ‘experimental.’ Music historians associate Christian Wolff with the New York school of experimental composers: John Cage, Earle Brown, and Morton Feldman. His philosophy is therefore partly related to that of Cage’s notorious 1952 piece 4’33” – the famous work in which the performer is instructed to remain silent for a length of time so that the audience is encouraged to listen intently to environmental sounds, to afford them the status of ‘music.’ 4’33” represents the zero point in the trend to an abdication of control exercised by composers and performers over the sounds within a musical work, and may be seen as a radical opposition to the tradition outlined above.

The Role of the Performer

However, if much of Christian Wolff’s music has manifest a corresponding interest in both silence and unexpected collisions of sounds, many of his pieces also proceed from a philosophy that conversely grants the performers an enhanced role in musical production, stepping forward to fulfil functions more traditionally assigned to composers. Wolff, like Cage, was interested in liberating sounds to ‘be themselves,’ but his music can also be allied with that of the Englishman Cornelius Cardew, who wanted to liberate people. For Wolff it was important to place the performer in a role of ‘parliamentary participation,’ and his use of a political metaphor was no accident, as he believed the role undermined the potentially dictatorial function of the composer.

The Tilbury pieces exemplify this approach. The very title of the cycle derives from the name of a performer, the English pianist John Tilbury, who has been instrumental in the dissemination and promotion of this repertoire. The series of works themselves involve an invitation to the performers to take up a range of different attitudes to the interpretation of notated material, which also varies greatly in its specificity. Most of the pieces may be performed on any number of different instruments at the performers’ discretion, and in several instances options are presented for recomposition or orchestration of the given pitches. In one instance, Tilbury 1, an option is provided for performers to embellish the notated music by making their own arrangement with the suggestion that the arrangement will methodically exclude pitches given by the composer in the score. Such ‘compositional’ preparation prior to the act of performance has been taken up by Plastic Atlas for tonight’s concert.

Other decisions are to be made in the time-frame of the performance itself: players must frequently choose their own rhythms, for example, or the clef to be applied to each note (this radically changes both the register and the identity of pitches). And although most of Tilbury 5, composed many years after the other Tilburys, is, conversely, notated almost conventionally, sections are interspersed which recall activities from the previous pieces in the cycle. It is in this final piece that the cueing techniques for which Wolff is well known are most obvious, as the performers must act in response to actions of their colleagues. The performers must work together as an ensemble in a way that requires an intensity of listening and cooperation that exceeds what is often required in much music of the traditional concert repertoire.

More Recent Compositional Responses: Cycles

Plastic Atlas has commissioned two pieces from local composers which react to different aspects of the Tilbury cycle. Some of Wolff’s work is based on strict cycles of pitches which are more or less audible depending on the approach of the performers, and it is in the use of cycling pitches Jane Stanley’s Spindrift / Interiors shares common ground with Tilbury. Stanley’s cycles, however, are of a radically different character: much of her recent music is composed onto skeletons of rhythmic patterns and pitch sequences of several bars length that underlie the busier surfaces of her music. She identifies these with the mediaeval techniques of isorhythm and isomelos, repeating patterns of pitch and rhythm whose beginnings and endings don’t usually coincide.

At first glance the use of such constructivist devices might seem to indicate an aesthetic akin to the strictness of 14th and 15th century compositional techniques, or even to that of post-war avant-garde composers. Indeed, Stanley crafts them with much care in order to create a ‘pleasing’ structure. Their function, however, is simply to provide the bones of the composition: they are an ordered space on which to work an organic surface composed with a more instinctive approach and an emphasis on free melodic development.

The evocative title might be seen to hint at this, and also to the work’s sensual approach to texture – one of the references of ‘interiors’ is to the emphasis on sounds generated inside the piano. But the title in part also pertains to an aspect of the skeletal cycles: if across Wolff’s body of compositions there is a common concept of the performer’s function and certain common performance proposals, for Stanley it has been musical objects – the actual content of the cycles – that sometimes finds its way from piece to piece. The cycles in Spindrift / Interiors were first used by the composer in a recent song that set poetry by David Malouf – At My Grandmother’s. Two words in this poem resonated with aspects of the Plastic Atlas commission: ‘spindrift,’ spray swept from waves by a strong wind, related to the tone colour of the glissandi inside the piano, and ‘interiors,’ to the work’s introspective mood. The derivation of the title from words in the poem signals the connection between the two pieces.

Whilst the Tilbury pieces adopt a flexible approach to instrumentation, allowing for substitution of different instruments at the performers’ discretion, the highly composed nature of Spindrift / Interiors has afforded an opportunity for the writing of instrumental parts that bring forth characteristic qualities of the specified instruments. This is particularly the case in the mandolin/mandola part, as Stanley worked closely with Michael Hooper shaping the actions of that instrument – a different expansion of the role of the performer from those in the more flexibly scored pieces, if one that has more often been utilised by composers in previous eras.

Response #2: Experimental Schools

James Humberstone is a composer who identifies philosophically with the English experimentalists – composers whose aesthetic is in many ways related to that of the New York school. But chance: chants is not experimental in the sense that Humberstone has carefully imagined the range of results that his instructions will produce. The music is written out in 5 levels through which the players proceed successively and then return through, exercising their own discretion as to when they move into each different musical activity or material. These are: silence, in which each player begins (and in which they may even choose to remain for the entire duration of the work); chants, sequences of pitches with very freely notated rhythm (the performers interpret the duration of each pitch, as is traditional in many chant repertories); ostinato, small fragments that are repeated continuously, and which we will be able to recognise in the performance by a regular sense of pulse and beat; song, another level of contrasting material that the composer characterises as ‘serene’; and free improvisation, a section in which the players are invited to respond freely to the soundworld in which they find themselves.

Humberstone has thus controlled the harmony – the flavour of sounds that result from the combination of pitches – in all but the free improvisation sections, and he describes the work as a harmonic map through which the performers chart their own path. Additional choice has been given to the ensemble in the overall duration of the piece: each player’s material is to be repeated a particular number of times, different in each case, and after deciding the duration of the performance that duration is divided by the number of repetitions each part requires. Renditions of the work can therefore range from those of a very brief time-span up to (theoretically) an event lasting a number of days. Plastic Atlas have in this instance chosen a duration considered suitable for the format of an evening concert.

Humberstone’s approach to performance accords in many ways with that of Wolff, proceeding in the former’s case from a conviction that there are certain compositional decisions for which performers are better qualified than composers, particularly when these are played out with the additional element of spontaneity. As in Wolff’s music, Humberstone’s requires a mental rather than a necessarily physical virtuosity. Humberstone feels, based on his own experience as a listener, that this quality lends such pieces an immediacy and almost theatrical presence that draws the listener into what is potentially a more intense engagement with the work than might otherwise have been the case.

Composer Biographies

James Humberstone grew up in the Lake District in the north of England. In 1993, after a year traveling the world when James first visited Australia, he commenced studies in composition at the University of Exeter with Philip Grange. It was here that he began the research that would most influence his compositional aesthetic, the late experimental period and in particular the composer Howard Skempton. In 1995 James shared the University Sinfonietta commission and wrote This Place, which he conducted at premiere and which gained two further performances with Challis’ Duddon Sinfonietta. That year he also wrote the successful pieces the String Quartet, Five Short Poems Set to Music and the Ferneyhough variations, Three Fragments and a Melody.

In 1996 James graduated from Exeter, completing a dissertation on Skempton’s music, and studied on occasion with the composer until migrating to Australia at the end of the year. Since arriving in this country he has built a career in the music industry, specialising in typesetting for music publishers and providing support for music software as well as lecturing in composition. In 2000 he began his masters in composition at the University of Sydney, studying with Anne Boyd.

In 2000 the university symphony orchestra premiered his charity work God-Child, and the evocative First of Winter was written for the university’s C21 festival. James also began research into Australian experimental composer David Ahern which has in turn fuelled more ideas for pieces and happenings.

Recent works include commissions for the Nova Orchestra, the Sydney Grammar school, some smaller piano pieces and two more works for the C21 festival. One of these, Ropaloon, performed by Michelle Morgan and the Chelate compound, has found its way onto a promotional CD for community radio stations, and got him a nomination for an AMC award in 2002.

Jane Stanley was born in 1976 in Sydney. After graduating from the University of Sydney with a Bachelor of Music (Honours I) she completed a Master of Music degree and is presently enrolled in a PhD (composition) under the supervision of Anne Boyd. She has studied with Ross Edwards and Peter Sculthorpe. In addition to her doctoral research, Jane works as a lecturer in the University’s Department of Music. In 1997 she received the Sarah Theresa Makinson Prize for Musical Composition and was joint winner of the 2MBS-FM Young Composers Award. Her research on the music of Elena Kats-Chernin was published in Context in 2001.

Stanley’s music has been performed by Bernadette Harvey-Balkus, Claire Edwardes, Niels Meliefste, the Sydney Mandolins, Coruscations and the Spring Ensemble. Whistling Kite on Yellow Water was performed both at the Sydney Spring Festival in 1998 and at the Asian Composers League Young Composers Concert in Taipei. In 2001 Jane was a participant in New Voices, a programme administered by Symphony Australia, for which she composed Splintered Rose. This work received its first performance in 2001 by the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra and was subsequently broadcast by ABC Classic FM. Last year The Spirit’s Lay, a concerto for mandolin and orchestra commissioned by Ars Musica Australis, was premiered by the Sydney Youth Orchestra at Angel Place with soloist Michael Hooper, conducted by Simon Hewett. In early 2003 ABC Classic FM broadcast a studio recording by the Sydney Mandolins of Midnight Meditation, and in April the AURA Contemporary Ensemble in Houston programmed Firefly with dancers from the Sandra Organ Dance Company.

Projects for 2003 include pieces for Halcyon, Duo Vertigo and the Sydney Mandolins.

Christian Wolff (born 1934 in Nice, France, living in the United States since 1941) holds a doctorate in classics from Harvard, where he taught until 1970. Between 1970 and 2000, Wolff was the Strauss Professor of Music at Dartmouth College where he also taught classics. As a composer he is basically self-taught, although his association in the early 1950s with John Cage, David Tudor and Morton Feldman provided a music background unmatched by any formal education. He has received a number of commissions, was ‘Ford Composer’ at Mills College and was composer/lecturer at the Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik in Darmstadt.

Wolff’s work has concerned itself principally with the introduction of various new modes notation and freedom of the musical event, both for the composer and performer as well as the listener. Wolff described his current concerns in the following manner: ‘To turn the making of music into a collaborative and transforming activity (performer into composer into listener into composer into performer, etc…), the cooperative character of the activity to the exact source of the music. To stir up, through the production of the music, a sense of social conditions in which we live and of how these might be changed.’

Presently Wolff lives as an independent composer in New England, commuting between Hanover, New Hampshire and Royalton, Vermont and he will be a lector-composer at Ostrava Days 2003 Institute and Festival.