Desmond Tutu Address

On 26th November 1999 Archbishop Desmond Tutu was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Laws from the University of Sydney before receiving the Sydney Peace Prize that evening.

For this joyous and auspicious occasion, Ross Edwards was commissioned by the clarinettist Frank Celata and Professor Stuart Rees, Director of the Sydney Peace Foundation, to adapt the Madegascan Song from Edwards’ sextet, Laikan (1979), for the Sydney Soloists to perform at the ceremony. Ross’ wife Helen Edwards made the inspired suggestion that, since the music strongly implies dance, there should naturally be a dancer. The talented young Australian choreographer Paulina Quinteros was engaged, and the dance she created for Rebecca Taylor was a source of great and evident delight for Archbishop and Mrs Tutu and the audience, and of some (also evident) consternation for the senior academics.

Here is the text of Ross Edwards’ introduction to the performance:

Your Grace, Ladies and Gentlemen,

No celebration would be complete without music, and the Sydney Soloists from the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and I feel immensely privileged to be playing our part today in honouring Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

We’ve chosen to play some music I composed exactly twenty years ago, which seemed appropriate to this occasion for two reasons. The first is that it includes an arrangement I couldn’t resist making, back in 1979, of a joyous Madegascan folksong, echoes of which can be heard in much of my subsequent music. The second is that it signals my awakening to a simple truth, self- evident to the peoples of Africa, but sometimes overlooked by the concert hall dominated culture of Europe over the last few hundred years: that music and movement are fundamentally inseparable, that music inevitably requires some kind of physical participation, and that dance is its natural concomitant.

I’ve extracted and slightly modified for the occasion two movements from my instrumental sextet Laikan, composed in 1979. Whenever I tell people that laikan is an Old Gothic word I have a feeling that they don’t quite believe me, perhaps because I’ve acquired a reputation for making up words when I can’t find ones that fit. I’d like to assure you, however – not that it greatly matters – that the word laikan is definitely Old Gothic, on the authority of Johan Huizinga, the eminent Dutch cultural historian who, in his study of the play element in culture, Homo Ludens, defines it as “leaping”. And this is readily extended, as it has been, to the flickering of flames, rhythmical movement and, ultimately, dance.

I hope you’ll enjoy these two brief extracts from Laikan and that you’ll find them relevant to this occasion. A sinuous, richly decorated clarinet solo against a drone-like string accompaniment gives way to the dancing Madegascan Song. The dancer is Rebecca Taylor and the choreographer Paulina Quinteros.

Thank you.