In our occasional series on Australian composers we have over the past few years had entire programs on Graeme Koehne, Stephen Leek and Nigel Westlake. Today I’m thrilled to be able to welcome to the program one of Australia’s best-known and most widely-performed composers, Ross Edwards. Ross, welcome to Keys to Music. 

I’m hoping that in the course of our time together we can find out a little about what makes you the composer you are, because looking at the music you’ve written over nearly 40 years, it seems to me like you’ve been on an incredible journey. I want to start in the deep end.

Ross Edwards Piano Concerto: 1st mvt (extract) ABC 426 483-2 track 1 (first 1’45 then fade out completely)

Ross, that of course is the opening of your piano concerto of 1982 and it strikes me that this was a pivotal work for you. It makes me ask the huge question: what is “being a composer” all about for you? 

When I found myself composing that concerto – which, incidentally, surprised me as much as anyone else because it was manifestly so different to the  language of my earlier work – the reality of being a composer suddenly came to embrace more possibilities than it had before. First of all, I knew I’d have larger audiences with new expectations of me, and that whilst I could still operate from the fringes, as it were, and be a navel gazer and just compose for myself and a few other people when the opportunity arose, I felt that broadly speaking, I had a responsibility to communicate my own vision of the world as widely as possible, provided that I, myself, was convinced by the quality – and the relevance – of the music. I was no longer happy to indulge in art for art’s sake.

I suppose the confronting, out-of-doors ethos of the Piano Concerto was a response to my own experience of the ecstasy of nature and the world of the senses which, incidentally, seemed very strongly to imply dance – the dance of the sun on the water, the joyful interplay of birdsong and so on – I happened to be living in an idyllic place at the time and it had a positive effect. And this, for me, restored the inevitable, age-old connection between music and movement, music and ritual – and so on – which I felt had been neglected in

much contemporary art music, isolated, as it often was, from its natural associations with other art forms and  more or less neutralized in the modern concert hall.

The other aspect of being a composer that this concerto prepared me for was the need to toughen up my response to criticism and reject it as a potential

influence. As long as I’d only composed the austere, apparently cerebral music I produced in the 1970s, I didn’t offend the guardians of cultural purity, but once I started to produce music with an attractive surface – which was a real no-no in those enlightened times – I immediately copped a barrage of stinging criticism in the press – accusations of having sold out, and so on. Now that kind of ordeal by fire can either make you or break you as an artist. You can either take the soft option of returning to the fold and conforming to whatever stylistic orthodoxy prevails, or you can continue to stick your neck out and compose from an inner dictate – what you actually feel and believe – and, thankfully, that’s what I found myself doing.

When did you start composing? Was it always what you wanted to do?

I started making up things at the piano pretty much as soon as I could reach the keyboard. I also had the facility – which I’ve since lost – of being able to replicate any music I heard – at kindergarten, for example, or on the radio. Today, of course, composition is a much more arduous process. I started taking it seriously from the age of 13 when I was galvanized by the Sydney Symphony playing Beethoven into realizing that writing music was what I simply HAD to do – much more than just something I WANTED to do. I’d long since discontinued music lessons from my aunt, who was a good pianist, and now I suddenly had to make up a lot of ground. Before that I’d assumed I was going to be a visual artist – with my father quietly insisting that this should mean being an architect – for obvious practical reasons, and also there’s a strong family tradition of design which my daughter seems to have inherited. But when the true vocation hit me, NOTHING else mattered, and the normal adolescent preoccupations with sex, sport, the need to pass exams and so on – were, for me, largely eclipsed by the overriding necessity of learning how to become a composer. And in 1950s and 60s Australia, let me tell you, that was considered very weird and antisocial – so I was an outsider for many years – and I got used to it. It was only later, after I met my wife, Helen, that with her patient help and guidance, I gradually regained some semblance of normality. And, of course, being a composer gradually became less outré – to the point where these days it’s hardly even regarded with suspicion – people probably just think you’re a harmless idiot although they wonder how you survive. I don’t know how we’d have managed in the early days if Helen hadn’t combined motherhood with giving millions of piano lessons.

One of the earliest works you still allow to be in circulation was written when you were in your mid – 20s, Monos I for solo cello. This to me sounds light years away from the world of the piano concerto, but it was written twelve years before, in 1970. What was Ross Edwards the composer aiming for in 1970? 

I clearly remember composing that piece when I was a post graduate student in London – it was one of the pieces I submitted for my Masters degree. And of course I did what young composers always feel the need to do – first of all, to learn lots of technical tricks and then display them so people know how

clever you are. It’s not a bad thing – I must say that labouring intensively to produce Monos I helped give me a solid technical grounding in composing for string instruments. But when you think of the cello’s capacity for profoundly touching the soul – and some of the music composed for it – the Bach Suites of course, the wonderful Kodaly Solo Sonata – the sublime cello movement from Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time – it seems like sacrilege to make it squeak and pop more or less gratuitously. Not that I went to that extreme, but these days I’d want to explore the depths of its capacity for melody. I think, if you listen to Monos I, you might feel there’s a repressed lyricism wanting to burst out – I do, because I know it’s there. But I had to disguise it – not so much because I had to pass an exam, but because I felt a bit self conscious and ashamed and that people mightn’t take me seriously as a composer. As you gain confidence, of course, you realize the importance of being yourself and not being restricted or inhibited by opinions you don’t share.

Here’s the opening section of Monos I, played by David Pereira.

Ross Edwards Monos I (extract) TP 075 track 4 (first 3’40 only)

Three years after writing Monos I, Ross, you wrote an orchestral work called Mountain Village in a Clearing Mist. Perhaps this was more pivotal than the piano concerto; you wrote it after three years of study in the UK, and I’m wondering if the sense of calm in this later piece is a conscious rejection of your earlier directions, or in some sense a logical result of where you had been going

Did you have a specific mountain or village in mind, or is the title more generalised than that? 

It was 1972. I was a student in Europe. I’d rejected the rather densely overloaded musical idiom of my earlier work – of which Monos I was an example. I’d come to the conclusion that it was neurotic, reflecting the values of a neurotic society – and that I, too was neurotic – and I felt lost, disconnected, and I suppose rather despairing. I wonder if I wasn’t also a bit self indulgent – but I couldn’t see it at the time. I smoked French cigarettes and read a lot of Asian philosophy – we all did in those days – and I became interested in Zen. No doubt that’s what induced me to throw out everything I’d learnt about writing music – all the rules and habits I’d formed – and try to start again from scratch. Impossible, I suppose – but that was my new approach.

Mountain Village was actually composed after my return to Australia late in 1972. I added the title after I’d completed the score – it’s taken from a 13^th century Chinese brush painting – A Mountain Village in a Clearing Mist – and I remember making the outrageous statement that I, like the Zen monk who painted it, was expressing the essence of nature with the utmost economy of means. The painting, of course, would have been executed with a few technically assured brush strokes, whereas I had no idea what I was doing. I turned this ignorance into a virtue, though, because I kept my mind open – and also the window – so that various nocturnal sounds of insects and frogs got into the music and started to determine its shape, texture and so on. What I ended up with was a calm, uneventful and transparent piece of music that evoked a sense of timelessness whilst going nowhere – a complete antithesis of the dense, logically structured works that preceded it. It’s still a mystery to me – I don’t know if it’s ultimately a good piece – and I’m not sure that really

matters – but you’re right about it’s being pivotal – had I not composed it I couldn’t have kept going: I’d reached an impasse. I was always surprised – and of course pleased – that audiences have on the whole responded well to it. I suppose lots of people feel the need of that kind of focussed mind clearing as I do.

This is a piece in which it’s hard to select an extract because it’s so static – what the piece is all about really – but this is just a taste of it, near the end.

Ross Edwards Mountain Village in a Clearing Mist (extract) ABC 476 227-0 track 7 (start at 8’21, play to 10’40) (= c. 2’25)

Asian influences – indeed, Asian thinking – seem to be so important to your music in the 70s. In 1978, five years after Mountain Village in a Clearing Mist came The Tower of Remoteness, a work for clarinet and piano. I get the feeling that you’re wanting to explore pockets of what Buddhism calls “mindfulness”, that sense of – on a cosmic level – taking the time to smell the flowers; to slow down and examine something – or just experience something – with no thought of passing time or conventional connections. Am I on the right track here? 

Yes, I’m a pretty withdrawn person by nature and especially since the time I lived in London, the pace of city life has been something I’ve instinctively recoiled from. However my wife, Helen, thrives on it, so we try to divide our time between Sydney and the mountains, which is where I go to really concentrate on my work. (Helen loves being there too, incidentally – but not for too long). In the late 70s and early 80s we lived on the central coast of New South Wales, and when I wasn’t commuting  90 kilometres to Sydney to teach, I spent as much time as I could walking in the national park just passively absorbing the sounds I heard – a sort of daily ritual which was also a meditation. I tried not to think of any music – I just listened and received. And then I’d go back to work, to face a blank sheet of manuscript paper and see what might happen.

What was the impetus for The Tower of Remoteness? 

I know I come across to a lot of people as a pretty wafty person, but in some ways I’m the opposite. In fact, all the internal proportions of my music – the shapes, the relative lengths, the balancing of one phrase or section against another – are agonized over for an absurdly long time. I can’t help myself because, by and large, it’s a product of my musical training, the influence of my teachers, all of whom were concerned with making things at the highest level – and they, of course – in their respective ways – were my models. Also, my father, who was a designing engineer, like his father and grandfather, was a quietly obsessive man, who took great pride in his work – I used to watch him draw incredibly precise plans – also, fixing things around the house on weekends – and for relaxation, if you could call it that, given his intensity – he used to love making furniture and it would take him ages to perfect the details, which always made my mother hopping mad, because she liked things to be done quickly and efficiently.

So when all this rubbed off on someone as vague and dreamy as me – always in a world of my own – there was an inevitable conflict which I tried hard to reconcile.  And I think this is reflected in pieces like The Tower of Remoteness, which I wanted it to sound mysterious – I wanted to invite people into the inward experience – the daydream – that I found naturally congenial – but, in fact, I also wanted to get as close as I could to structural perfection and I agonized over every particle. So whereas the score of The Tower of Remoteness is quite slim, I’d nevertheless accumulated a big pile of rejected sketches before I felt it was ready for performance. I was determined it should sound calm – as a distillation of the way the complex events of the natural world intersect with one another  in a sort of timeless continuum – that’s the state of mind – or more accurately, I suppose, of no-mind – I wanted to bring into the concert  hall. (Incidentally, Allan Holley, who commissioned it, had asked for a music theatre piece – and the very first performance was accompanied by a solo dancer). I was a bit shocked, some years later, when a film director chose a fragment of it to underscore a horror scene – an attempted stabbing, in fact. Evidently he perceived a tension in the music that I didn’t .think I’d put there. Perhaps I’d been trying too hard to make it calm. But of course music can be like that – it affects different people in different ways.

Here’s part of a recording of The Tower of Remoteness with Nigel Westlake and David Bollard. It’s just the opening of the piece.

Ross Edwards The Tower of Remoteness (extract) TP 051 track 5 (first c. 1’20 only)

I want to invoke the name of Olivier Messiaen here, for two reasons. One is that in hearing these very “Zen” type pieces of yours, I’m reminded of the timeless nature of some of Messiaen’s more meditative music. (I’m thinking of the solo cello movement in the Quartet for the End of Time, for example.) And secondly, you discovered about ten years after writing that last piece that the opening was unintentionally based on a bird call, and of course birdsong is a vital component of Messiaen’s music. Do you sense in Messiaen a kindred spirit? 

Messiaen consciously sought out birdsong, notating it precisely – insofar as that’s possible, which it isn’t – sometimes cataloguing it according to its region – esp. in Catalogue of the Birds – and labelling it with its scientific terminology in his scores. He even accompanied scientists on ornithological expeditions – there’s a famous photograph of him in the field with notebook in which he’s evidently writing down what he’s hearing. So his approach was systematic, and whilst, as a mystic, he retained his sense of mystery and awe – and timelessness – when he contemplated the natural world – perhaps as a European – and especially a Frenchman – he felt a need to reconcile it, albeit in a highly personal manner, with post Enlightenment European consciousness.

I find myself unable to think like that – it’s ALL mysterious to me and I offer no  labels or explanations.  Because I don’t have any. In most cases birdsong has INTRUDED into my work – sometimes it’s real – sometimes mythical – I mean, is it really birdsong or is it the result of my imagination responding to birdsong? I hardly ever know the names of the birds that my work accommodates. For example, The Tower of Remoteness incorporates the song of the Spotted Pardeloe – a fairly common bird around Sydney, but I wasn’t aware of its presence, or indeed of its existence, until my wife’s sister-in-law, who’s an ardent birdwatcher, pointed out to me that I’d pinched it –

pinched its song, that is. Obviously it had entered my subconscious and emerged, pretty much intact, as a musical motif. The strangest experience – which I sometimes have when I’m working in the Blue Mountains – is hearing a bird outside repeating what I’ve just played on the piano, leaving me to wonder whether I’m responding to it or it’s responding to me – quite a weird sensation.

Straight after The Tower of Remoteness came the Ecstatic Dances for two flutes and this introduces us to the style we’re more familiar with from your later works. It’s still meditative and mindful, just faster! Am I right in saying there’s an aspect of “obsession” in this music, where you want to meditate on a fragment of music – a tune or rhythmic pattern, perhaps – and see how much material it can yield? 

Ecstatic Dances was begun about the same time as The Tower of Remoteness but it was finished more than ten years later. It grew out of a little flute duet which Vincent Plush asked me to contribute, in 1978, to a garland of pieces by Australian composers celebrating Peter Sculthorpe’s 50^th birthday the following year. It’s true, though, that it contains the seeds of the dancing, chant-like obsessively rhythmic music that was to come, and when I came to write Ecstatic Dances for Geoff Collins in 1990, I pulled the garland piece out of a drawer and it became my starting point. (Poor Geoff had actually asked for a piece for flute and piano, but when I told him I was mad keen to compose for two flutes, he took it very well and he actually plays both tracks on the recording by Belinda Webster. The second dance, by the way, I later arranged for many different combinations including full orchestra, so it’s come a long way from its humble origins in the garland).

And here we see the elements of dance and, in a general sense, spirituality in your music so clearly. Is it possible to put into words what these concepts mean to you? 

I find it difficult to separate so-called art music from what I feel are music’s ancient, natural,  associations – dance, for example, and various kinds of ritual elements which the European Enlightenment and the upsurge of materialist culture pushed below the surface. They’re inevitably springing back, of course, to restore the balance we’d temporarily lost. Pieces like Ecstatic Dances, don’t fit quite comfortably into a concert program – they seem to imply another dimension – and certainly they’ve been choreographed often enough. Music has always been used as an aid to spiritual awareness

and at the back of my mind I’ve always been aware that in Australia it should be used in a special way. I’ve preferred to grope towards this goal rather than  systematically pursue it – that would be too easy and probably false. People have compared the phrase structure of The Tower of Remoteness to that of the Japanese honkyoku, which is a revered collection of meditation music for  the shakuhachi, or bamboo flute. I’d been drawn to this music for some years and it was undoubtedly a subconscious influence underlying, or at least tempered by the Australian landscape. By the time I came to compose Ecstatic Dances I’d discovered the music associated with Islamic Sufi ritual – highly repetitive, obsessive, and designed to promote heightened awareness – and, of course, the devotees DANCE themselves into a state of ecstasy –  which is why they’re called Whirling Dervishes. This was undoubtedly a backdrop, as it were, to my galvanized insect patterns – although MY Ecstatic Dances are gentle, without anything like the sheer physicality of a dervish dance. They’re confined by the dictates of the concert hall and the concert program, but I hope one day to explore their wider implications.

This performance of the first of the two Ecstatic Dances features the flautist Geoffrey Collins, for whom they were written.

Ross Edwards Ecstatic Dances: 1st mvt TP 069 track 12 (3’48)

Ross, I’m fascinated by an apparent contradiction here. In one sense in the 80s you were becoming more accessible to your audiences by writing in a style which uses more recognisably “traditional” elements of tonality, but in another sense you seemed to be turning away from them by writing music which is so personal and intimate. Or am I looking at two sides of the same coin?

Definitely the same coin representing the two extremes of me. I’m a very introverted person by nature. I love solitude and I prefer intimacy to crowds and noise. I’m happy to spend a lot of time either on my own or with people I know well, who accept that I’m not intentionally being rude if I drift off and abandon their conversation. On the other hand, spending too much time in the precious, hothouse atmosphere of my own skull eventually produces a pretty healthy reaction and I’ll suddenly be clamouring to get out into the fresh air.

Between 1981 and 1986 you wrote a series of five works with the title Maninya, and these point directly to your violin concerto called Maninyas, which dates from 1988. Can you explain the background to this title and the series? 

I’d composed some songs for voice and piano – settings of the Australian poet Michael Dransfield – and now the people who’d commissioned them – the counter tenor Hartley Newnham and the pianist Nicholas Routley – wanted to commission me again. This time, I didn’t feel like writing conventional art songs and, in fact, I’d become interested in the universal practice of chant – music, often liturgical, with much repetition and the potential to alter consciousness.  My own concept of chant was already forming – it was highly rhythmic and influenced by sound patterns produced by insects. So the music was already in my head – but there was one problem – I didn’t have any words to set to music. Finally – because the music was by now very insistent – I just made up nonsense syllables – phonemes – and applied them to the rhythmic cells. They had no meaning, of course, but three of the nonsense syllables – ma-nin-ya – stuck together and formed the word which not only provided the music with a title but was eventually applied to a whole genre of fast, chant-like, music that runs through my entire musical output. Incidentally, my first attempt to compose in this style was for voice and jaws harp – but I eventually decided that the cello was ideal for the kind of accompaniment I had in mind.

This is part of the recording of the revised version of Maninya I, with the countertenor Hartley Newnham and cellist Susan Blake.

Ross Edwards Maninya I (extract) MBS 21 track 5 (start at 1’29, play to c. 5’00 then fade out completely) (= c. 3’30) 

To put things in context, the year after writing Maninya I you wrote the piano concerto, of which we spoke at the start of the program, so it’s very much a child of the Maninya period. How is the “Maninya style” important to your journey as a composer? [r/d]

It allowed me to retain my characteristic obessiveness and introspection without  completely disappearing into the ether. If you listen carefully to the phrase structure of the maninya pieces you might notice that it’s actually quite similar to that of the quiet, austere pieces, like The Tower of Remoteness. In fact, they’re a sort of up-tempo equivalent which might appeal to a wider audience.  So the maninya style allowed me to be – to feel – more or less normal and less likely to be dismissed as some kind of musical hermit who only addressed other hermits. You might say it’s a more palatable version of music which is designed to take you into another space – it’s more open air – and I particularly enjoyed playing with the abstract patterns influenced by birds, frogs, cicadas etc. and making subtle rhythmic shifts and variations. I suppose it began to occur to me that writing music could almost be fun….

One of my favourites in the Maninya series is the third, which is scored for wind quintet. This recording is by the Stellar Wind Quintet.

Ross Edwards Maninya III: 1st mvt CSM:14 track 1 (4’54)

Of course the most public statement of the “Maninya style” is the Maninyas violin concerto, which appeared in 1988. This was a product of the Bicentennial Year but it also seems to be a product of your journey through the 70s and 80s. Something which strikes me about all the “Maninya” works – and especially the concerto – is that ever-present ascending minor seventh – a tone short of an octave. For the non-specialist, the easiest way to describe this interval is to imagine the first two notes of “There’s a place for us” from West Side Story. This minor seventh creates the most amazing feeling of energy, of wanting some sort of resolution either up or down but almost never getting it.

When you came to write this work for Dene Olding, did you fear you might have overused the Maninya style, or was it a natural way to go? 

The ascending minor 7^th and descending 3^rd is actually from a verticalized pentatonic scale and in my mind it has no connection with Western harmony. I was quite surprised when people began to point out the obvious associations. For me, it’s become highly symbolic – it’s an optimistic gesture – of hope.

I’d started Dene’s violin concerto and I’d come quite a long way with it when I realised it wasn’t going to work and I had no time to begin again. The logical thing to do at that point, of course, was to panic, which is just what I did. And out of that adrenaline rush came the very fortunate decision to make the piece out of some already existing material – I chose parts of Maninya I and Maninya V. It shouldn’t have worked, but it did – I was very lucky. The vocal  line seemed to convert quite naturally into a flamboyant instrumental one and it’s amazing how different a solo cello part sounds when it’s remade for full orchestra.

The feeling of dance is unavoidable in this concerto, starting slowly and eventually working up to a frenzy of ecstatic movement. Is dance a “real” part of your life, by which I mean do you actually dance? Or is it more a theoretical concept? 

One of the great disappointments of Helen’s life is that while she loves dancing, I seem to have two left feet. Even when I point out that Beethoven couldn’t dance either, but he wrote the 7^th Symphony and some wonderful scherzo movements it doesn’t seem to console her. What I seem to do is dance inwardly – the music inevitably comes out dancing – and a lot of it gets

choreographed – Maninyas especially – all over the world. I hardly ever perform my music either – I just don’t have the right temperament (or the technique, especially these days), but as I conceive it I quite vividly imagine it being performed – almost as if I’m the performer. And that, combined with sudden urges to dance ineptly around the room – and also sing – a horrible experience for other people in the house – all this makes composition a pretty draining experience and somehow a very physical one – I’m involved at every level.

Ross Edwards Maninyas: 1st mvt (extract) ABC 438 610-2 track 1 (first 5’50 then fade out completely)

I remember asking Nigel Westlake a similar question to this and I’d be interested to hear your perspective on it: when you write something with as long and illustrious a pedigree as “a concerto”, are you at all conscious of the fact that Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Rachmaninov, Stravinsky and all the others wrote concertos? Does history weigh heavily in such revered forms or is it totally irrelevant? 

I was surprised when people started to commission me to write concertos in the 1980s. I considered the concerto to be an obsolete form – and in the years after the Second World War concertos were either not written or they were called something else because you didn’t want to be considered unfashionable. Then composers started to get bored with being fashionable and they started to make a comeback. I find that in writing for traditional forms – concerto, symphony, piano trio etc., I don’t think too much about what’s gone before because that way a natural evolution will occur. I remember when I wrote my Piano Trio in 1998 people asked me what were my models. In fact it never occurred to me to look at models – I just wrote, trusting my intuition ad the knowledge I’d instinctively absorbed over the years. If I’d dragged out Schubert or whoever, it wouldn’t have helped. I just thought: this is me here and now and what comes out is me relating to my own  sense of time and place and to my own community. I think that’s how tradition gets renewed – you can extend it without being a slave to it.

Now not all the Maninya works in your catalogue have that word in their titles. I’m thinking specifically of Flower Songs, which comes right in between Maninya V and the violin concerto. There’s something about hearing this musical vocabulary sung by human voices which makes it – to my ears anyway – more demonstrably hypnotic and meditative. The dance element seems more powerful too in some way, but that’s a purely subjective response. There’s a great quote by Jonathan Mills about your approach to texts which I assume you agree with because it’s in the program note on your website. He describes your approach to texts as being “averse to texts that are philosophical, psychological, dramatic or descriptive (and) only interested in ones that allow (you) to invoke some kind of timeless spirituality…”.

I’m reminded here of Philip Glass’ approach to words. Can you tell us about the texts you’ve set in the Flower Songs?

Once again, when I got the commission from the Sydney Chamber Choir I was stuck for a text. The music was surging in. I could hear it and feel its texture – its ethos. Clearly, whatever extra-musical force may have been generating it was non-verbal. It felt like a sort of incantation with much insistent repetition – a buzzing of bees, the drone of cicadas – it was full of life and very detailed activity.

My most effective decisions are often spontaneous ones – and in this case, I just took a book off the shelf – Alec Blomberry’s ‘What Wildflower is That?’ – and I selected the scientific names in Latin or Greek of a number of wildflowers from South Eastern New South Wales. Not at random – I looked at the colour plates too – and I carefully chose names of flowers or flowering bushes that I thought would sound effective vocally – that had phonetic qualities that I could manipulate into rhythmic cells and just play with. There was no need to be concerned about elucidating subtle shades of meaning for the listener – the text was an inseparable component of the music. As I composed, the music seemed to glow with a kind of efflorescence that may not have been there had I used a text listing the names of, say, motorbikes. I can’t be sure of that – it’s an interesting speculation I suppose, but as Jonathan observes, I’m averse to that kind of thing.

Flower Songs consists of two movements, the first of which is in the familiar fast Maninya style with the chant and the eternal seventh. I want to play here the yang to that yin, the slower second movement. It’s sung by The Song Company, conducted by Roland Peelman.

Ross Edwards Flower Songs: 2nd mvt (extract) TP 051 track 2 (first 3’00 then fade out completely)

In writing about your next major work, the nocturne for percussion and orchestra called Yarrageh, you start by asking a fascinating question: “What happens in a concert hall designed for the performance of European art music when the lights are turned low and the music is mostly very quiet and still, with no feeling of movement towards climaxes or, indeed, of going anywhere in particular?”

Do you have an answer to that? 

It was partly a rhetorical question. I mean, I thought I knew the answer, but I wanted to stage a practical demonstration of the effect quiescent, contemplative music can have when it’s presented in an appropriate atmosphere. I was actually quite surprised when the Sydney Symphony took my lighting instructions seriously. These days I ask for that sort of thing all the time – I think it’s pretty much expected of me. What I’d hoped would happen with Yarrageh was that the listeners’ attention would be focussed on the present moment, as in meditation.  A lot of people responded well to that – they clearly understood what I was getting at and they seemed to want to participate. Other people couldn’t come to terms with the static quality of the music. They felt it should be going somewhere, as a narrative, with a goal and a perceptible shape, as in Western symphonic music of the last few centuries. That sort of thing had ceased to interest me – I was much more curious about the function of music as a healing agent, for example, and as an invoker of the numinous, the mysterious, as in much non Western and early Western music. I wanted to transform the concert hall into a magic space where ancient ritual could be enacted and essential connections be re-established and shared – the sort of things that were forgotten when the conductor and soloist got elevated so grotesquely over the last century. And then later, composers retreated into ivory towers and lost most of their audience. And now, of course, we’ve got insanely hyped up marketing combined with ticket prices that hardly anyone can afford, and the phenomenon of highly trained orchestral musicians providing backing for pop groups to get bottoms onto expensive seats. I think there’s a lot of misuse of music happening – but, much as I’m enjoying  this little gripe, I’m ultimately optimistic about the future – music’s been around as long as human beings and I think we value it too highly not to look after it and use it for the betterment of humankind.

Yarrageh dates from 1989, one year after the Maninyas violin concerto, yet so soon the “Maninyas style” seems to be completely absent. What happened? 

I mentioned before that it’s more a difference of tempo than of structural methods. I suspect that if you were to play some of some sections of Maninyas at half speed, it wouldn’t sound all that dissimilar to Yarrageh. Apart from that though, I think I was exhausted by all that explosive enthusiasm and I was ready to retreat under my shell again – a sort of musical hibernation. Certainly, Maninyas is as full of daylight as Yarrageh, which I subtitled Nocturne, is of darkness – not, to me, sinister or forbidding darkness – it’s more of a refuge. People who write theses about me always point out that this  dualism between darkness and light, or as they’re often termed, my sacred and maninya styles, is an essential characteristic of my work. These days the two extremes often coexist within one composition. Maybe this means that in middle age I’ve started to become a whole person. That’d be a big improvement…

This is part of the recording of Yarrageh which features the percussionist Ian Cleworth, for whom it was composed.

Ross Edwards Yarrageh – Nocturne for Percussion and Orchestra (extract) ABC 438 610-2 track 5 (start at 7’47, play to 9’49) (= 2’02)

I guess my earlier question about the weight of history when writing a concerto is equally relevant when taking on the task of writing a symphony. Your first symphony – Da pacem Domine – appeared in 1991 and it’s unremittingly sad. It’s also a work I included – with some apprehension I might add – in an earlier Keys To Music program on minimalism, because here it seems to me you have found a way forward to large-scale structures with the simplest of raw material. The work’s in a single movement lasting about half an hour and yet it’s based on very simple, repetitive ideas which seem to provide an emotional release that’s as important to the grieving person as crying. Could you tell us a little about the circumstances of its composition? 

It was a difficult time for me. I had some very serious family problems to contend with. The First Gulf War was beginning and I was convinced it would escalate. Then, as I was in the middle of composing the piece, I learnt that Stuart Challender, the Sydney Symphony’s Chief Conductor was dying of Aids. Stuart would certainly have performed and also recorded the Symphony, which I dedicated to his memory. Starting to conceive the piece was incredibly intense – the most intense experience I’ve ever had. I used to walk up and down all night with this huge structure evolving in my head – I nearly went out of my mind. The relentless ostinato that persists through the piece was fortissimo when I conceived it and it felt like a pile-driver. Later, all that massive energy became compressed, but somehow it’s still there, contained,

like in a seed, just waiting to burst out. In the middle of composing the piece I moved with my family to the Blue Mountains west of Sydney and we lived there for a year. When I’d unpacked and got back to work on the score, I found that the tempo had slowed down quite perceptively. It must’ve had something to do with being in the mountains. It’s an incredibly sombre

piece, full of foreboding, and I’m afraid there’s no resolution at the end.  When I was composing it I played it on the piano to a friend who just burst into tears – I had to stop – and I’ve noticed it has a similar effect on people in the concert hall. I suppose you could say it’s cathartic – I certainly managed to unload a lot of personal grief I was feeling at the time. The excellent new recording by Richard Mills and the Adelaide Symphony, on which it’s coupled with the first recording of Star Chant, my Fourth Symphony, brings out its beauty as well as its sadness. When I listened to that I realised it’s not all doom and gloom – the sun comes out sometimes.

I get the impression of your music – and the music of the first symphony in particular – as being “organic”; growing naturally out of what has gone before, a bit like late Sibelius. Are notions like sonata form or rondo form in your thinking at all in your symphonic writing? Or are we talking about a totally different approach to the organisation of musical ideas? 

As a student I was trained in the old forms, but I don’t think in terms of them anymore -which isn’t to say that there aren’t some parallels. The maninya pieces, for example, can have elements of classical variation form and especially rondo. I’ve also noticed in recent years that Western counterpoint, especially canon, is increasingly part of the fabric of the music – and I’ve occasionally used pre-Bach polyphonic devices in pieces like my string octet, Veni Creator Spiritus and my recent Clarinet Concerto. But these are rarely planned and you’re  absolutely right when you say that growth is organic. I can vaguely feel the overall shape of something I’m writing but its internal workings are a mystery. I’ve learnt to trust my intuitive judgement and my curiosity about where it’s going to take me is the most compelling thing about composition.

Ross Edwards Symphony no 1 (Da pacem Domine) (fade up to be audible from around 4’20 – perhaps under the answer to above question – fade out around 7’25) Track 1 of ABC Classics 476 6161 – Richard Mills conducting the ASO.

It’s impossible to get the full impact of that work from hearing just a few minutes of it; I’d encourage anyone not familiar with it to seek out a recording and get to experience the work over its full time span.

It seems that once you’d started on the path of being a symphonist there was no stopping you, and the journey so far (in late 2007) seems to be going from the individual to the universal. The first symphony reflected personal, solitary emotions. The second symphony (Earth Spirit Songs) appeared in the late 90s, and it juxtaposes ancient Christian ritual with a sense of the Australian landscape. The third (Mater Magna) was written for the 2001 Melbourne Festival and it focuses on what one might call the concept of the “eternal feminine”. The fourth (Star Chant) was premiered in 2002 and it looks up from the earth to the stars. If Mahler’s symphonies try to encapsulate an entire world, are yours trying to bring to our minds the sense of the whole universe?

My recent Fifth Symphony is no exception. It’s called The Promised Land and it’s a meditation on the future of Australia with universal implications. All these pieces are personal voyages of discovery which I like to think might be of interest to other people as well. Stravinsky said he composed ‘for himself and the hypothetical other’. I’ve become a bit more broad based than that – I think it’s me and a hypothetical community – perhaps an idealised community. My symphonies are written very much from an Australian perspective rather than a notion of global homogeneity. They explore the universe starting with a strong sense of the local – the known – and particularly the earth. They transcend political divisions and they accommodate techniques and ideas – personalised symbols, mythologies – from diverse places and often remote times. Drones, various forms of chant, dance, theatre, ritual, contemplation – ancient techniques, modern ones – I’m always surprising myself because I can’t predict where a new work will lead me or what it might include. And I like to work like that.

Can you see yourself writing a symphony with no textual or extra-musical associations? Or is the symphony a means to expressing other ends for you? 

I can’t imagine myself ever writing purely abstract music because my whole musical language bristles with symbolic content – there’s hardly a shape or a gesture that doesn’t mean something or imply something. I haven’t consciously constructed it like that – it’s grown over the years – I suppose you could say organically, like a musical structure.  And it’s got progressively richer over the years. If there’s a danger of it becoming overblown, I suppose a good dose of abstraction would be in order, but I can’t see that happening!

Ross Edwards Symphony no 4 (Star Chant) (extract) ABC 476 6161 track 2 (fade up to be audible from gong stroke at 11’05, fade out after 13’00)

You’ve always been involved in such a wide variety of projects, Ross. I’m thinking about film music (you wrote some of the tracks used in Paradise Road in 1997), and music for all sorts of different ensembles. There are piano works, choral works and so much else. I’m wondering, do you write much from your own impulses or do you thrive best when given a commission?

Many years ago I was foolhardy enough to give up a secure academic position and become a freelance composer. I’ve never regretted this because I’ve got so much more work done that I consider to be worthwhile – although it’s landed me in some pretty precarious financial situations. Of course, freelance composers depend on whatever commissions come their way, so the trick is to try and find some congruity between our own impulses and the terms of the commission. I’ve usually managed to do that – and I can honestly say that I’ve been enthusiastic about all the very many commissions I’ve fulfilled over the years – even the ones that may not have seemed very enticing when I accepted them.  The Fourth Symphony, Star Chant, which we just heard a bit of, was a labour of love from the beginning because it grew out of discussions with my friend Fred Watson, who’s the astronomer in charge of the Aglo–Australian Observatory – and my collaboration with Fred and the photographer David Malin led me into the night sky where I couldn’t have ventured alone. In that case – and this sometimes happens – we knew what we wanted to do and it was a matter of finding someone to foot the bill. It eventually got commissioned by the Adelaide Festival.

In 2002, the same year as the premiere of the fourth symphony, your oboe concerto, Bird Spirit Dreaming for Diana Doherty appeared. There’s no denying that this is one of your best-known and most successful works if audience reactions are anything to go by. For those who haven’t experienced this work live it might be useful to explain that this isn’t presented like an ordinary concerto… 

I’d intended to write an ordinary concerto, but since Diana’s no ordinary mortal and she’s game to try anything, it made sense to extend the traditional role of soloist – you know, polite applause and then stationery on the podium in a gorgeous frock – I just thought no – and I was egged on by my wife Helen, who was also adamant that Diana should have a special costume – which, in the end, was a leotard and bare feet. We’d both noticed how physical Diana is when she plays – even in the orchestra. She clearly would like to dance and move around – and when Helen and I suggested that I write this into her part, she was totally enthusiastic and wanted to play percussion as well! Then I decided there should be special lighting and I wanted to write a part for her husband, Alexandre Oguey, who’s a wonderful English Horn player. And so she walks into the orchestra at a certain point and plays a Love Duet with Alexandre. And so on – one idea led to another and we got all completely carried away. We got advice about movement and dance from the choreographer Paulina Quinteros and sparks were really flying – it was a very exciting and creative time.  We just hoped to God the Sydney Symphony administration would go along with all our excesses and not try to bring us back down to earth. Fortunately they bought the whole package – as did Lorin Maazel, who conducted the first performances – first in Sydney, and later New York. After that, Diana performed it all over the world and I must say no-one’s ever baulked at the ballet or lighting design or any of the theatrics. Of course, Alexandre couldn’t be there for most of the Love Duets, so Diana’s had to have “affairs” – sometimes lesbian ones – with other English Horn players – and I notice the piece has just been played in Cardiff by a male soloist – David Cowley. I assume he did a straight concert version…but who knows?…it’s the kind of piece that invites other dimensions….

There is such a wide spectrum of influences in this work: birdsong, drones, Hebrew cantillation, Asian scales, insect and frog noises… and there’s a hint of the things which you’ve made your own: the “Maninya style”, dance, ecstatic outbursts. It sounds like you had fun writing it but it was probably incredibly hard work! 

I’m afraid I always find writing music incredibly hard work – and that piece was no exception – but I still loved doing it. The very important thing, I think, is that it shouldn’t come across to the audience as having been a chore. It should sound like you were having fun – that you tossed it off like Mozart while he was playing skittles, or whatever it was he used to amuse himself with. I’d particularly like to acknowledge the generosity of Andrew and Renata Kaldor, who commissioned it – and who actually came to hear the New York Philharmonic’s performance. It’s much easier to have fun when you’re not worrying about money!

This recording of course features Diana Doherty as the soloist.

Ross Edwards Oboe Concerto (extract) ABC 476 7173 track 1 (start at 12’42, play to end) (= 5’10)

I have in my mind as I hear the end of that piece the vision of Diana Doherty with her oboe held high and the audience holding its breath for a second because it looks like she’s going to hurl it into the air! After that the audience just goes wild…

Ross if you had to try to summarise what you see your role in world as being – what you want your composing to achieve – would it be possible to put into words? [r/d]

I wouldn’t want to define a role too clearly because I try to remain open to new possibilities. From the time I was very young I was deeply aware that composing music was my vocation and I felt a huge responsibility to do it as well as I could – but I instinctively never tried to map out a course of events or project ahead – I didn’t follow a ‘career path’, as they say, because I had a strong feeling that if I was to do anything really worthwhile I’d do it later in life.  I hope I’m right about that – and of course, if I am, I should be starting to do my best work around about now. A few principles governing the way I think  how music might be used have emerged over the years and stuck with me. These have been more or less universally applied in a wide diversity of cultures throughout the ages and they include such things as contemplating the unknown, communing with the divine, healing the sick, promoting a sense of wholeness through natural association with the other arts – an obvious one is dance – also yoga, I suppose – and, generally, helping to break down the detachment – the insularity – that music has experienced in its role as ‘Art Music’, confined to the concert hall – which is, after all, a recent Western phenomenon which has no place in other cultures.

But I don’t feel comfortable spouting all this pompous stuff, so I’ll just sum up by saying that over the years I’ve developed instincts I feel I can trust and I intend to follow them and see where they lead me in the future.

It’s been an absolute joy and privilege to have you share your insights and thoughts with us Ross. Thank you so much for being here; I hope your future works continue to take us all on incredible journeys.

 

20 September 2007