Australian Music Centre | Breaking sound barriers

Work Overview

This work was inspired by a painting, Karratha Country, by the late Australian artist, Fred Williams (1927-1982): https://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/explore/collection/work/69554/. Painted a year before his death, it is part of a larger group of paintings, the 'Pilbara Series', which depicts an archetypal part of the vast Australian interior, the Pilbara desert in Western Australia. With its dry, red earth and imposing rocky escarpments, the landscape is both elemental and brilliantly colourful:

The landscape of the Australian interior is rich in meaning, memory, and dreaming. The Indigenous population of the Pilbara, and their own artworks, has existed for 30,000 to 40,000 years; the name for the Pilbara region derives from the Indigenous bilybara, meaning "dry" in the languages of the Nyamal and Banyjima people. And the Pilbara's escarpments contain the world's oldest surface rocks, some more than three billion years old. For all people, including non-indigenous people like myself, the idea of 'the interior' may be filtered through other layers of cultural and personal memory, leading to the question; what do wild places and deserts mean for us?

On a two-dimensional level, the painting has a clear structure; the sky fills the top half of the painting, and the two mountain ranges vie for our attention in a horizontal band across the middle. The darker bottom half of the painting acts as a counterweight to this. But the painting also strongly suggests to me a narrative in time and space; this is a journey from the foreground (a wide, arid landscape), through the middle ground (a steep, perhaps forbidding and almost anthropomorphic mountain), and finally arriving at the background (a second mountain range but this time in a brilliant but suffused pink). This 'interior' journey traverses each of these tableau in turn, and the arrival at the distant mountains appears, to a weary traveller, as a kind of nirvana or utopia. Though my orchestral work is not directly programmatic in this respect, this painting has always drawn me into this imaginary journey 'through a landscape'.

Work Details

Year: 2020

Instrumentation: 3 Flutes (3rd doubling Piccolo), 3 oboes (3rd doubling cor anglais), 3 clarinets in B flat (3rd doubling E flat clarinet), 3 bassoons (3rd doubling contrabassoon), 4 horns in F, 3 trumpets in C, 2 tenor trombones, 1 bass trombone, tuba, timpani, percussion (3 players), harp, 1 keyboard player doubling grand piano/celesta, strings.

Duration: 15 min.

Difficulty: Advanced

Commission note: Commissioned by the University of Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and its Director, Richard Davis.