Australian Music Centre | Breaking sound barriers

Voyage à la terre de l'enchantement or 'Journey to the Land of Enchantment' was commissioned by Julian Burnside AO QC, dedicated to my wife Katija Farac-Pertout, and especially composed for Australian ensemble Plexus, featuring violinist Monica Curro, clarinettist Philip Arkinstall, and pianist Stefan Cassomenos. The title is a borrowing from Journey to the Land Of... Enchantment - the third album by Detroit, Michigan-based R&B group Enchantment, which following its 1979 release went on to chart at number twenty-five on the R&B albums chart. The work serves as an exploration of the musical implications of combinatoriality as an organizational determinant and adopts the novel harmonic concept of 'adjacent intervals' from American minimalist composer and music theorist (also former student of Morton Feldman) Tom Johnson, eloquently presented in his publication Other Harmony: Beyond Tonal and Atonal (2014). Philosophically, the 'voyage' attempts to embody the life cycle (in relation to Erik Erikson's [1959] theory of eight distinct stages of psychosocial development) and the pursuit of happiness (as defined in the 'Declaration of Independence' presented to the US Congress on July 4, 1776 stating the following: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness") - a raison d'être characterized by the individual's inner journey and capacity to maintain psychological and physical well-being, as well as the more general aspect of humankind's eternal search for truth, love and understanding - a universal truth, a moral truth (or what Stefan Molyneux terms as a 'universally preferable behaviour').