Resonate Magazine | Australian Music Centre

Image: Nigel Butterley performing ‘Sonatas and Interludes’ by John Cage, in Bundanoon.  
© Unknown photographer, photo supplied by Tom Kennedy.

On May 13 this year, the composer Nigel Butterley (1935-2022) would have turned 90. Whatever you personally believe about what happens after life - we enter nature, we endure through love and the acts of love we've done on earth, or we pass through to some kind of spiritual 'beyond' - Nigel Butterley's artistic world gives voice to those deepest convictions about the big questions of being. His vision was vast, and it was as caring as it was careful, just as he was.

Having already written my own, partial and personal, introductory guide to Nigel's music for Nigel's 80th birthday, I decided to do something a little different this time. I have invited a number of performers and composers who have had relationships with Nigel's music or Nigel himself, to offer their thoughts, selecting particular pieces or memories to mark the occasion.

Composer and broadcaster Stephen Adams, still remembers hearing Nigel's music for the first time, on an LP - possibly at the AMC itself. Of Meditations of Thomas Traherne (1968), written by Nigel upon receiving the Albert Maggs Award, Stephen said:

"…Hearing it for the first time was such an incredible ecstatic experience!

I remember being enthralled by the richness of the musical colours of the piece, and its sense of shifting eddies and surges of darkness and light. The light most strikingly evoked by those sudden bursts of a children's recorder chorus.

… how wonderfully strange and fresh that sound world felt bursting into the orchestral sound world, very much as if a door had suddenly opened in the heavens, letting in a sudden powerful shift of light.

Meditations is a piece I still love, and have fond memories also of playing it to my children 30 years later and seeing them experience a similar sense of wonder on hearing it."

About the starkly contrasting Explorations (1970), "perhaps Butterley's boldest and most confronting achievement" (Gyger 2015, p.87), fellow composer and broadcaster, Andrew Ford, has a similarly enduring recollection:

"I find there's often something compelling about Nigel's music, something (it's hard to say what) that grabs my attention and won't let go. The first time I experienced this phenomenon would have been 40 years ago, shortly after I arrived in Australia. I was driving in Sydney when Explorations came on the radio. I missed the introductory announcement but was immediately grabbed by the music. Reaching my destination, I sat in the car on a suburban street until it was over and I learnt what it was. It's a vivid memory."

_{[Photo by Tom Kennedy of a photo by Noreen Butterley]}

Performer, artistic director, and educator, Jenny Duck-Chong says that Nigel was a "musician's musician" who possessed a "deft understated command of his forces in every work" she experienced, a music "full of subtle nuances, shades and timbres", that showed "a deep appreciation of the voice and its ability to shape music with both colour and meaning."

Amidst many years of involvement with Nigel's music - including Halcyon's commissioning what would become Nigel's final completed work Nature Changes at the Speed of Life (2014) - Duck-Chong remembers Orphei Mysteria (2008), another Halcyon commission, as "utterly beautiful, austere and mellifluous":

"... Even now I can vividly hear certain sections of the piece, where he drew together the sonorities of voice and ensemble so expressively, evoking the drama of the text."

The work was, however, not without technical challenges:

"…Thankfully we had been singing together for almost two decades at this point and knew each other so well we could pull this off (even as we exited to either side of the stage in the epilogue with our backs to each other). This ritualistic exit, as we departed into stillness, was, as so much of Nigel's music, captivating in its unassuming simplicity. But there was nothing simple in its inspiration or execution. It was finely wrought craft."

Two other exceptional performers, Stephanie McCallum and Zubin Kanga, single out Nigel's solo piano piece Uttering Joyous Leaves - one of many pieces Nigel dedicated to his partner Tom - for special mention:

"I have a great affection for Nigel's piano piece, Uttering Joyous Leaves (1981), and feel it was one of the best ones to emerge from the Sydney Piano competition commissions over the decades. I included it in a very well-received recital in Wigmore Hall as a London premiere in, I think, 1986 before moving back to Australia. I have also had many students enjoy learning it for student recitals. The piece remains unique in quality of texture, rhythmic structure and upward floating intensity, and the prefatory poetic reference is inspirational." - Stephanie McCallum

"A career highlight for me was performing as part of Nigel Butterley's 80th Birthday Concert in 2015. The concert featured a new piano concerto by Elliott Gyger, From Joyous Leaves, which I performed with Arcko Symphonic Ensemble and conductor Tim Phillips. The concerto featured many different references and tributes to Nigel, including the gradual introduction of prepared piano sounds (referencing Nigel's Australian premiere performances of John Cage's Sonatas and Interludes) as well as musical references to his solo piano work, Uttering Joyous Leaves.

I also performed Nigel's Uttering Joyous Leaves at this concert, and this was such an extraordinary piece to perform and interpret. Full of contrasting colours, from effervescent passagework, to sparkling crystalline chords, to dark, skipping basslines, the work was a joy to play. It's a high point of the Australian piano repertoire, and a work I continue to recommend to pianists." - Zubin Kanga

Timothy Phillips described the same concert as one of his "proudest moments as a musician":

"… a spectacular concert that featured In the Head the Fire, a new commission of Elliott Gyger's: From Joyous Leaves and Nigel's monumental From Sorrowing Earth. Already in the early stages of Alzheimers Nigel was perplexed when taking his bow that the orchestra was playing happy birthday to him. I wish his music could be heard more frequently and by a wider audience as Nigel, a true gentleman, was one of our most original and unique voices."

Timothy developed "a deep appreciation" for Nigel's music over the years and was also "proud to say a deep and mutually respectful friendship" with Nigel and his partner Tom. When returning to Australia in the early 2000s, "possessed by a vision that Australians should be performing and programming Australian classical music", Phillips said Nigel's music was high on his list and the group he founded, Arcko Symphonic Ensemble, includes a number of additional works of Nigel's amongst their repertoire: The Canticle of David, Laudes, Forest I and II , and Three Whitman Songs.

_{[Photo by Tom Kennedy]}

Conductor Bryan Griffiths notes how audiences respond to his programming and championing of one of Nigel's lesser known works, Pentad (1968):

"Since completing a critical edition of Pentad in 2017, it has always been received with warmth and fascination wherever I've directed the work in performance, even-or perhaps because-its modernist abstractions challenge received ideas of what the wind band can be."

Griffiths still recalls "the first thrill" of discovering the manuscript of Pentad on the shelves of the Sydney Conservatorium library, "an autographed masterpiece of modernist music for wind and brass shelved humbly among the general catalogue, composed by one of our greatest."

Written in 1968, the same year as Meditations of Thomas Traherne, Elliott Gyger describes the music of Pentad as "bold, abstract and ritualistic, as far removed as possible from Meditations of Thomas Traherne's numinous mystery" (Gyger 2015, p.97).

Elliott Gyger's book on Nigel's music (Gyger 2015) is an invaluable resource, balancing rigorous analysis with contextual and poetic insight. Reflecting, a decade after its publication, Elliot had this to say:

"Writing about Butterley's music has brought me into close contact with pretty much everything he wrote, but the pieces which I know most deeply are unsurprisingly those which I have performed, as a choral singer. With Sydney group the Contemporary Singers, I sang Flower in the crannied wall - a luminous short motet, with plainchant-derived diatonic clusters supporting an elegant melodic line passed from voice to voice - and the virtuosic Emily Dickinson cycle There Came a Wind Like a Bugle, written for the Song Company. These two pieces taught me an enormous amount about composing for unaccompanied voices; at the time there was little if anything in the Australian choral repertoire to match their level of textural invention. They are also beautiful, succinct and flexible responses to striking poetry, with an unerring sense for apt word-setting, and interestingly almost no text repetition.

Similar qualities were to reappear a few years later, on a much grander scale, in the wonderful choral-orchestral Spell of Creation - a work which I can claim to know in more detail than any other Butterley work simply by virtue of having typeset it, and preparing the parts and piano reduction for the premiere. Spell of Creation tackles profound themes of faith and doubt: the former via mystical religious texts from diverse traditions, and the latter in the poetry of Kathleen Raine, which was so central to Butterley's later music. The score encompasses extremes of complexity and transparency, including ecstatic Hildegard settings tossed back and forth between antiphonal choirs of voices and brass, orchestral textures of shimmering beauty under deeply moving solos for soprano and baritone, and an ending of riddling mystery. Singing in the premiere performance in 2001 was an incredibly rewarding experience, hearing the masterly imagination of every moment contribute to a compelling overall vision. Described by Sydney Morning Herald critic Peter McCallum as 'possibly the most important choral work yet written in this country', Spell of Creation has yet to receive a second performance."

I'm particularly pleased to have invited others to share their thoughts for this article because it not only created a reflection of the music that I simply could not have made alone, but the process also reminded me of the unique pleasure of mentioning Nigel to those who knew him or knew of him. You immediately feel the generosity Nigel put into the world, returned.

Nigel's close friend, the composer and teacher Robert Smallwood sums this up perfectly:

"Even so many years later I still recall the pleasure of meeting Nigel for the first time. The surprise was that such wonderfully assured writing came from someone so genuinely modest. I did not imagine then that our meeting would lead to a lifelong friendship of more than 40 years. 

…I last saw Nigel in January 2022 in a nursing home in Stanmore, not far from his home. Dementia had taken his memory from him. Although he could not remember me, he enjoyed telling the staff that I was his lifelong friend. His musical memory was still powerful, as he sang and recalled Rachmaninoff preludes. 

…Nigel's music favours intricate, even elusive gestures. It invites listeners to join, examine and penetrate. It does not present its ideas overtly or simply. The listener is rewarded upon repeated listening as its depth and layers unfold and reveal themselves." 

Those revelations continue, and endure.

[Photo by Tom Kennedy]

References

Gyger, E. (2015). The Music of Nigel Butterley. Melbourne: Wildbird Music.