Resonate Magazine | Australian Music Centre

Image: Daniel Pini  

It was sometime around 1980 that my then high school music teacher revealed to my class the existence of a living Australian composer. That composers existed in Australia was definitely new information. The piece of music was one of Peter Sculthorpe's iconic 1960s orchestral tone poems, Sun Music III. It's the one where the early-Gorecki starkness of Sun Music I and Sun Music IV was leavened with interludes of a gentler tropical sun drawing on Balinese gamelan sonorities and textures.

I was incredibly excited to be hearing music for orchestra that actually spoke, not only from my time, but from my place - to the intensity of the Australian sun - to our geography here just beyond the south-eastern edge of Asia, on the edge of the Pacific Ocean - while still very much connected to and engaged with the world of Western classical music, with its post-war and more recent developments.

From that first encounter unfolded a whole landscape of Australian composing voices and works that excited my imagination and curiosity. The ferment of divergent nationalist, modernist, traditionalist, and non-western orientations making it abundantly clear that there were many ways to compose concert music in Australia.

Now, over four decades later, in a musical world of immeasurably increasing diversity, and many more living Australian composers, how to talk about this landscape in a way that could possibly communicate that diversity and at the same time the genuine excitement I continue to feel as that landscape continuously unfolds revealing new voices and possibilities.

Daniel Pini's collection of five very individual Australian solo cello works provides both a rich and sufficiently focused place to begin.

There's something about solo cello music that suggests to me introspection and solitude. Which makes me curious among other things to hear the different ways each composer deals with this solitary voice, this possible aloneness.

Victoria Pham puts the solo cello in the company of memories. Memories of a very specific experience of an archeological excavation at a site in northern Sri Lanka.

Pham is very much an interdiscplinary artist of the new millenium. Her work as a concert composer, writer and installation artist made alongside and interwoven with her work as a sonic archeaologist and evolutionary biologist. The narrative of her Red Earth, White Clay links these worlds of concert music and scientific research, the implied attention to the activity of excavation and what's under the earth enriched by her attention to the sounds, people and atmospheres of the surrounding environment at different times of day.

The work opens with a lovely languidly romantic upward glissando, the space around the notes hanging with the atmosphere of a foggy morning walk. What follows feels like a series of distinct scenes, filling in the musical space with qualities and activities, insistent single notes suggesting perhaps the presence of mosquitoes, or the sound of the drill, pulsing broken chords bringing with them echoes of Baroque industry. Untill the music recedes once more leaving behind the moist, heavy atmosphere at the close of the day.

Brett Dean fills the intimate solitude of the solo cello situation with invention. Beginning with the cello very much alone in an empty space, his Eleven Oblique Strategies progressively fill that space with the magician's kaleidoscope of instrumental techniques and textures paying tribute to the inventiveness of that wizard of the recording studio Brian Eno, whose Oblique Strategies card pack gives Dean's work its name.

The reference to Eno calls to mind the improvised experimentalism of Dean's early hands-on studio works when he was developing his composing voice while also playing in the viola section of the Berlin Philharmonic. It's a a thread that persists in the electro-acoustic elements of some of his large-scale scored works alongside the better known international award-winning composer, conductor and string-player at home in the mainstream of contemporary European classical music.

Magician that he is, Dean's 11 colourfully contrasting small movements are not simply a shopping list of possibilities, but are woven into a satisfying dramatic whole, the performer following a narrative throughline of changing energies glued more firmly together by a thematic idea that reappears, the last time in a movement of echoes giving ghostly reprise to several other earlier scenes. It's the work of Dean the operatic dramatist and orchestral story-teller. Of the trickster keeping solitude and death at bay by weaving shapes in the air.

Deborah Cheetham Fraillon's brief work Permit Me speaks directly to the emotions involved in the experience of solitude and isolation. To the emotional impact of the long Melbourne COVID lockdowns of 2020 and 2021 on the composer's psyche.

It's an affecting work, Fraillon's cello singing with an almost human voice. The piece resonates both with the more widely shared experience of COVID isolation, and with the trauma of the memories of restrictions and structural oppression imposed on generations of her Indigenous forbears.

The musical voice infused with that same bel canto that underpins her large scale dramatic works through which Fraillon has reached the hearts and minds of a broad audience of Australian classical music with Indigenous stories. Waking us up to the living reality of struggle and tragedy in the lives of generations of First Nations Australians.

In Liza Lim's work Invisibility, the solo cello is brought up so close to us that the surrounding environment disappears. As is often the case with Lim, the music seems at once intensely physical and intensely metaphysical. Fusing the incantatory power and beatific noise of ritual Chinese theatre and the post-diatonic visceral virtuosity of western new complexicist and contemporary improv musics. (A subtler, more complex fusion of the aesthetics and musical techniques of east and west than the musical exoticism practiced by some white Australian composers of earlier generations.)

Lim's Invisibility presents the clearest phenomenological expression of Daniel Pini's album's title - 'BEING'. I find myself in the singular presence and existential heat, breath and turmoil of an 'other', the cellist disappearing into the intensity of this conjured presence. Yet for the cellist, this is also a kind of duet. The cello a creature very much separately alive in its resistances and unpredictable responses to the cellist's playing. Its 'cello-ness' made strange through the uneven tensions of the string tunings and the use of Lim's 'guiro' bow, creating an unpredictable oscillation between the usual horse-hair friction and the slithering sounds of wood against string. It's a soundworld imbued with the Indigenous Australian aesthetic of 'shimmer' that Lim was exposed to and came to value through the First Nations artists she found herself living alongside and working with when she moved to Brisbane in the mid 1990s.

Carl Vine's Inner World brings together the sophisticated neo-romantic concert composer and pianist with the Vine who won a prize for a home-made tape composition when he was just sixteen. (And was once rumoured to have given up composing to devote himself to work as a computer programmer!)

Described as 'solo cello with CD accompaniment', the music begins in the traditional heartland of romantic cello aloneness. But after a minute and a half we're surprised by the sudden appearance of a host of fellow cellos and cello-derived sounds conjuring a whole landscape of electronic, orchestral and ensemble colleagues, along with a thoroughly post-modern cornucopia of musical styles. The cellist is not alone. Or so it sounds.

And yet all these sounds we're hearing are from the original soloist David Pereira's cello. Vine's conceit is to imagine this landscaspe of pre-recorded and treated cello as a revelation of the solitary cellist's rich inner life. A solitary musician who perhaps need never feel alone when swept up in the company of a wealth of imaginary companions, a world of music that is full of both excitement and comfort, joy and sadness, ending triumphant in a musical fireworks display.

With approximately 96% of all Australians either immigrants or the descendants of immigrants - people connected to near or distant relatives in most parts of the globe - and the other 4%, our First Nations people, moved off their Country in large numbers by this overwhelming land grab, and forced to come to some kind of accomodation with the overwhelming influx of foreigners - we are almost all people in various stages of learning to be at home in a new place. A situation that requires a willingness to invent and to improvise. A taken-for granted hybridity as cultures cross-pollinate and old ways adapt to new circumstances.

Is that something you can hear in the music? I think I can.

Australian classical music, while a descendant of the European tradition in both its heritage and contemporary manifestations (many of the world's great orchestras and new music ensembles have Australian musicians among their ranks) is a music shaped by cultural and aesthetic ideas from many other traditions. And increasingly, genuine engagement with Indigenous Australian artists and cultural perspectives, deepened by the emergence of strong First Nations musical voices.

And then, there's the landscape and its all-revealing bright sun. I often think I'm hearing a certain distinctive sense of space. A certain unhurriedness. A directness of address. Even a willingness to be 'simple' in the service of clarity.

To what extent is that born out by this collection of Australian solo cello works?

That is for you, dear listener, to decide.

This article was commissioned by Daniel Pini as part of his BEING album project. This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through Music Australia and Creative Australia, its arts funding and advisory body

BEING is published by Move Records and is available for purchase via the AMC Shop.