To mark the centenary

To mark the centenary of Anzac, I thought I’d re-publish this proposal for a symphonic concert drama that Andrew Schultz and I pitched to several organisations some years ago.

An all-day long symphony of discord rang out, and through it all strode Simpson, walking along next to his donkey, forever singing and whistling as he held on to his passenger, scorning the danger, in sweet defiance of all the explosions, the barking of rifle fire and the harsh machine-gun chatter, clutching on to one small piece of reality, of nature [his donkey], in a mechanised world gone mad all around him.

- Tom Curran, Across the Bar

Proposal for Simpson and His Donkey - Andrew Schultz and Gordon Kalton Williams 

Simpson is Australia’s ‘common soldier’. His story is recounted to unite Australians in a common appreciation of the sacrifices made by our past generations of soldiers. But there are some odd facts that confound the two-dimensional portrait presented to the public – Simpson was English; he was a non-combatant (Field Ambulance), and he decided on using donkeys in the field because, admittedly, they ran out of stretchers on the first day of the landing at Anzac Cove, but donkeys possibly reminded him of summer holidays as a donkey boy on South Shields beach in the UK. In the terror of war Simpson reached back to childhood. So there are richer aspects to the Simpson story than are apparent in the propounding of a national myth – and let’s not forget: Australians invaded Turkey; Kaba Türkçe was spoken in the trenches opposite.

The Sphinx, the iconic landmark at Gallipoli, as seen from the sea where the Anzacs landed on that first day in April 1915.

The sad fact is that Simpson’s heroic deeds were eventually often dragooned to serve chauvinistic ends, and may in fact undermine Simpson’s true heroism, which was, in Inga Clendinnen’s words: ‘staunchly maintaining civilian virtues in the face of war.’

We’d like to explore that full tragedy of his portrayal in another symphonic cantata, following-up Journey to Horseshoe Bend in scale and prospect, this time comprising orchestra and children’s chorus (and possibly soloists). Once again, we would envisage some elements of staging and surtitles.

This proposal came out of Andrew’s idea for a children’s song cycle-cum-opera on Simpson and His Donkey (Sydney Children’s Choir were enthusiastic). Including the SCC would bring up instant opposites: innocence hitting the hard experience of war; metal vs flesh - but also bowdlerisation vs fact. The subject suggests a surprising sonority of war. Simpson died on the morning of the Turkish offensive, 19 May 1915 (in fact, just after!). According to some reports, a band had been heard in the Turkish trenches playing The Turkish March from Beethoven’s Ruins of Athens! It would need to be substantiated but what musical suggestion there is in that!

We’re suggesting a work which traces Simpson’s career both in the three weeks he served on the Gallipoli peninsula and in a public afterlife, framed by the expression of children. We’re saying something about innocence, pressure, spin, good humour, civilian virtues, military juggernauts, great odds. We’ll draw on a variety of sources (including Simpson’s own letters), keeping to a dramatic sequence, though maintaining some of the original idea of a song-cycle. Children’s story-telling may encourage the use of pungent nursery rhymes.

No War Requiem, the emotional complex will consist of close scrutiny of mythmaking, while at the same time telling a tragic tale of a loveable larrikin.  That said, we want a full gamut of emotions: tears through laughter and laughter through tears – and not just for us. ‘Gözyaşlarınızı dindirniz’  (Dry your tears) Atatürk told ANZAC mothers when they visited the battlefield in the 1930s, for their sons now slept in the soil of a friendly country.

Gordon Kalton Williams, ©30 Apr. 08

Red Chamber 2, 紅樓夢

Further to my 20 November 2012 post on The Dream of the Red Chamber, I've come up with a shorter synopsis. I was wondering how short I could get it and still maintain the sense of larger events circling the central love triangle, a sense of mounting sequence, and yet still opportunities for ceremonial ('occasional') music as well as expression of the overriding emotional story. There are elisions that might seem like liberties to those who know the original but I thought I'd make them in the interest of 'integration'.

The Path of the Jade, based on Cao Xueh-Qin’s Dream of the Red Chamber 紅樓夢

Cast:

Jia Bao-yu (‘Master Bao’), the boy with the jade 

Lin Dai-yu, (‘Miss Lin’) his cousin, destined to be his bride 

Xue Bao-chai (‘Miss Bao’), female cousin to the Jias and Wang Xi-feng 

Jia Zheng, Bao’s father 

Madam Jia, Bao’s mother 

Grandmother Jia, matriarch of them all 

Wang Xi-feng, the family’s female enforcer, a close cousin of the Jias 

Aunt Hsueh, aunt to the younger Jias and Wang Xi-feng 

Hsueh-pan, male cousin to the Jias and Wang Xi-feng

Yu-tcun, a poor young civil servant, distantly related to the Jias 

The Drunk Priest 

Snowflake, a servant girl 

Aroma, a servant girl, Bao’s personal servant 

The Goddess of Disenchantment 

Cousin Qin-shi 

Prologue: In a tavern some distance from the capital Beijing, a poor young civil servant named Yu-tcun meets a failed priest who tells him of Jia Bao-yu (Master Bao), Yu-tcun’s distant relative, who was born with a piece of jade from the Goddess of Heaven’s roof in his mouth. Though the Jia family’s fortune is not what it was (and it is hoped that the heavenly boy  Master Bao will arrest its steady decline),Yu-tcun sees opportunity to exploit his tenuous connections with a still-distinguished family. He and the priest reflect on the skill required to cushion life’s downward plunges.

Act I:

No expense has been spared at the Jia mansion for Cousin Qin-shi’s funeral. Maybe a big funeral, showing proper respect for a relative, will persuade the gods to restore the Jia crops, refill their rivers, and replenish their treasure chests. Daughter-in-law Wang Xi-feng orders Snowflake, a servant-girl, whipped for coming late on this 39^th day of the 49-day ceremonies. Into this scene of punishment arrive other relatives, and Wang Xi-feng is overjoyed to greet her Aunt Hsueh and cousins Bao-chai (Miss Bao) and the oafish Hsueh-pan. The Hsuehs have fallen on hard times and need help. The Jias will entertain them royally, though it means stretching resources.

In their favourite part of the mansion garden, teenage lovers Master Bao and Lin Dai-yu, escape the ceremonies and renew their childhood vows of love (Not much longer, surely, until we’re married). Finding them, Miss Bao wants to see Master Bao’s famous jade. Its poetic inscription matches that on Miss Bao’s amulet. Devastated, Dai-yu knows that the rules of feudalism destine Miss Bao for Master Bao (Not much longer surely until they’re married) and she runs away, tearful.

Attending Wang Xi-feng, servant-girl Aroma says she approves of Snowflake’s whipping. Dependent on the family for her livelihood, Aroma fears lax discipline and decadence. Wang Xi-feng is also relieved to have this servant’s approval of the lavish funeral for Cousin Qin-shi at a time of savage cutbacks to the servants’ rations.

Lin Dai-yu reminds Master Bao that she had come down from Heaven a Crimson Dew Flower grateful to Master Bao for watering her and giving her sentient life. Unable to pacify Miss Lin who sees her dreams of marriage turn to dust, Master Bao turns to Miss Bao for comfort, but she is unsympathetic. A paragon of the old values that guarantee family health and who regards Dai-yu as sickly, Miss Bao asserts the stability of feudal tradition.

Act II

In a dream, the Goddess of Disenchantment teaches her human relative Master Bao, the pleasures of sex which will strengthen him through even a prescribed marriage. Master Bao wants to try these out on Aroma. Believing that she was given to the Jia family for Master Bao’s use, Aroma is compelled to agree but she extracts from him promises to apply himself and work on becoming a fit heir for the mansion. All livelihoods depend on it!

Bao-yu's maid, Qinwen, (Aroma). Public domain. 

Too late! Bao’s father, Jia Zheng, thrashes him for neglecting his duties at a time of declining wealth. Nursing his wounds, Master Bao discards the text he has been set by his masters and finds unexpected comfort, instead, in The Great Text on the Inherent Nature of Things.

As more of the family property is pawned, Grandmother Jia and Master Bao’s parents (Jia Zheng and Madam Jia) worry about the need to restore the family’s former glory, and of the suitability of Lin Dai-yu who has long been considered Master Bao’s destined bride. Wang Xi-feng tells them of Master Bao and Miss Bao’s matching amulets (reported by Aroma) and says she knows how to arrange a more auspicious marriage.

Told of his forthcoming marriage, Master Bao is overjoyed, but Miss Lin is in seclusion, sick behind a closed door, when he comes to visit.

Choosing a date for the wedding, the family learn that their oafish guest Hsueh-pan has been arrested for killing a waiter, but Grandmother Jia assures Hsueh-pan’s cousin, their enforcer Wang Xi-feng, that the new magistrate Yu-tcun can be leaned on. He owes his position to Master Bao’s father, Jia Zheng.

The wedding day can therefore go ahead as scheduled. Master Bao is persuaded not to visit Miss Lin who needs all her strength. The family toasts the prospering of their dynasty. At the close of the sumptuous festivities, Master Bao raises the bride’s veil to discover it’s Miss Bao. News is brought that Lin Dai-yu has died, as Master Bao collapses.

Act III

Walking through the Grand View Garden, Wang Xi-feng sees the ghost of Cousin Qin-shi, the spitting image of the Goddess of Disenchantment, who tells Wang Xi-feng that her ‘treasured daughter’s funeral’ concealed the fact that she and her father had an incestuous relationship. Snowflake’s sneers aside, Aroma, the loyal servant, assures Wang Xi-feng that the apparition is a tribute to the vigilance with which Wang Xi-feng protects the family. But Wang Xi-feng is terrified by the vision.  

Meanwhile, having pressured Yu-tcun, Master Bao’s father has been accused by the emperor of corruption and ordered to appear at court. Master Bao’s mother and grandmother fearfully despair that the family’s fortunes will never be restored. Wang Xi-feng is in no mood for ‘waterworks’. She brings news that is both good and bad. Miss Bao is pregnant but Master Bao has disappeared. He has left behind his jade. No sooner does she reveal this news than she collapses dead at their feet, as Cousin Qin-shi’s ghost intimated. It is small comfort when the oafish Hsueh-pan returns, having been acquitted by the magistrate Yu-tcun who was paid off.

Travelling through the provinces to a remote governorship (the emperor’s punishment), Master Bao’s Father sees a priest of the Goddess of Heaven who looks like Master Bao, but before he can tell Master Bao about his son, Master Bao disappears. Bao’s Father reflects on the turn of events that has seen him, a former favourite of the emperor, bereft and exiled.

The nation resounds with bells announcing Grandmother Jia’s death. Returning to his village, stripped of rank, an older Yu-tcun meets again the priest he met at the outset of the story. The priest tells Yu-tcun that his latest instalment of the Jia family story is one of guilt punished, virtue rewarded. It would have required a mere nudge to produce a more favourable outcome. Yu-tcun agrees, but corrects the priest’s naivety. He sees the potential for rise and fall concurrently in all things. As they drink, Xue Bao-chai, back in Beijing, nurses her healthy baby. Grandmother Jia lies in her coffin, awaiting sufficient funds for burial. Madam Jia neglects household repairs while Aunt Hsueh dotes on being a grandmother. The Hsuehs have taken to wearing the robes of the mansion’s owners.

Possible doublings, if acted:

Yu-tcun/Bao-yu

The Drunk Priest/ Hsueh-pan

Snowflake, a servant girl/ Father Jia Zheng

Dai-yu/ Goddess of Disenchantment/ Qin-shi

- GKW, April 8 2015
gordonsymphony@gmail.com

Other posts that might be of interest:

My first post on The Dream of the Red Chamber, 20 Nov 2012

and my program note on Tan Dun’s Nu-Shu, 15 Mar 2015

Adams' good name (reprint from 2004)

Having finally seen Nixon in China (in San Diego last weekend), I thought I'd re-publish this article thought it first appeared in Australian concert programs in 2004.

Adams’ Good Name

John Adams. It’s a good solid New England name. An American is likely to think first of John Adams, the second president, George Washington’s successor. But Australians are more likely to have heard of the composer whose works have been increasingly performed in Australia in recent years. We saw the Australian premiere of El Niño, his new ‘take’ on oratorio, at the Adelaide Festival in 2002, in a concert version directed by his regular collaborator Peter Sellars, who had resigned as Festival Director months before. Harmonielehre was presented twice last year by Australian orchestras: by the West Australian Symphony Orchestra and by the Sydney Symphony, who also in November 2003 gave the Australian premiere of Guide to Strange Places, the second of two works by Adams they have co-commissioned. Adams came out for the Australian premiere of Naïve and Sentimental Music in 2000 and the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra performed Adams’ The Wound Dresser in the Metropolis series some seasons ago. Anyone who saw the reaction of a young audience to Harmonielehre in Sydney in 1999 will realise that here is a living composer who can grab an audience like a Beethoven.

It’s kind of funny that Adams should have a profile in Australia. His career is in many respects a very American story. Born in what our friends across the Pacific refer to as ‘back East’, he had the upbringing of a typical east coast liberal Democrat, indeed remembers shaking Candidate Kennedy’s hand during the New Hampshire primaries in 1960. And of course northeastern USA is a kernel of American music, birthplace of Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein, not to mention Charles Ives, whose music Adams honours in 2003’s My Father Knew Charles Ives – along with the music from his grandfather’s dance hall at Lake Winnipesaukee, which he remembers from boyhood.

There was Harvard, and then Adams, the young man, went west. He worked as a storeman and at the San Francisco Conservatory before becoming the San Francisco Symphony’s first New Music Advisor and later Composer-in-Residence, where he worked with Principal Conductor Edo de Waart (later to spend ten years as Chief Conductor and Artistic Director of the Sydney Symphony), who premiered Harmonielehre and even suggested the idea for the choral symphony Harmonium (premiered in Australia under Hiroyuki Iwaki), and who recently gave the Australian premieres of Naïve and Sentimental Music and Guide to Strange Places.

Adams seems to have embraced a particular sort of Californian-ness. In a recent piece, The Dharma at Big Sur, premiered for the opening of Walt Disney Hall in October last year, he links himself with Bay Area luminaries Lou Harrison, Harry Partch and Jack Kerouac. California may not fully account for the spirit of joy in his music – northern California is a world away from the swimming pools and movie stars of southern California – but early on Adams decided he would not go down the serial path which beckoned young graduates in the 1970s. (If you go by statements by fellow minimalist Steve Reich, the example of the Second Viennese School just doesn’t track with the land of Chuck Berry and burgers.) Adams’ teacher at Harvard, however, had been Leon Kirchner, a pupil of the inventor of serialism Arnold Schoenberg (who himself famously ended up in California, playing tennis with Gershwin, while clinging steadfastly to the aesthetics of ‘old Europe’), and it is Schoenberg and Adams’ ambivalence to his legacy that is one of the subjects of Harmonielehre, his great 1985 symphony.

Symphony? Adams is a second-generation minimalist. While most composers disown labels, Adams was proud to own ‘minimalism’ when he spoke to me during pre-concert interviews in Sydney in February 2000; proud even that it was an American invention. And why not? Minimalism, so simple and repetitive as to drive some people loopy, has at least given back to classical music the possibility of audiences being able to follow musical process. But Adams has written few pieces in this quintessential minimalist vein. Shaker Loops (1983) is perhaps the only one regularly played. Here again the title reminds us of Adams’ absorption in American culture; as does his choice of texts. The words of Jack Kerouac do not actually appear in Dharma, but the poetry of Emily Dickinson appears in Harmonium, and The Wound Dresser (1988) uses a text by Walt Whitman set with a straightforwardness of line learnt from American songwriters like Gershwin or Richard Rodgers. On the Elektra/Nonesuch CD this example of Adams at one extreme is coupled very tellingly with one of his most beautifully-detailed minimalistic pieces, Fearful Symmetries.

But what makes Adams ‘second-generation’ is the way he has re-incorporated elements of the European tradition. Harmonielehre gets its title from the textbook on standard harmony that Schoenberg was writing in 1911 at the time of his launch into atonality, precursor of serialism. There are passages in Harmonielehre that remind one of Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night) or the highly chromatic late music of Schoenberg’s mentor, Gustav Mahler. The arrival of Air Force One in the opera Nixon in China, produced at the 1992 Adelaide Festival, sounds like a cross between Phillip Glass and Wagner, complete with a Siegfried’s Sword leitmotif. But deeper than surface references is the re-evoking of cadential functions. Adams’ is not music that circles in a detached Eastern abandonment of time; it builds up tension to be released in massive climaxes. As a conductor, Adams found over the years that while conducting Terry Riley’s In C, arguably the founding piece of Minimalism, his versions starting getting faster and more anxious. The second movement of his Harmonielehre deals with the Anfortas wound, describing a characteristically European psychological state, but it’s possible that Adams was grappling with an Anfortas Wound of contemporary music, how not to be emotionally crippled by a musical tradition that must have an element of intellectual grit. Naïve and Sentimental Music (1997-98) was inspired by Friedrich Schiller’s 1795 essay of the same name, exploring the difference between spontaneous and cultivated expression.

For Adams is engaged. He deplores the term ‘CNN opera’ yet has found mythic resonance in stories we could find on cable. He became interested in writing Nixon in China when librettist Alice Goodman convinced him that it would be done not as parody, but as some sort of 20th-century heroic opera. As it must: the work looks at the one of the great meetings between East and West. He is currently working on Doctor Atomic, another opera, with the same collaborators, on the inventor of the atom bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer. Big subjects. His opera The Death of Klinghoffer, based on the hijacking by Palestinian terrorists of the Achille Lauro, seems to keep on proving the painful relevance of art. It attracted wide criticism during the first Gulf War, when it was felt to show too much sympathy for the Palestinian cause. Projected performances of the extract Three Choruses from Klinghoffer were cancelled by the Boston Symphony Orchestra after 9/11: the husband of one of the members of the chorus had died on Flight 11, and grieving performers could not give voice to some of the words. But at first the cancellation appeared to be a free speech issue, exciting considerable newspaper discussion and outrage.

Adams has since responded to September 11 with a Pulitzer Prize-winning piece called On the Transmigration of Souls, given its Australian premiere in Sydney earlier this year. It is a disturbing work using for text the mobile phone messages of victims and the words of the ‘Missing’ cards posted at the site. It almost seems to be looking back from the other side of life, and is paradoxically radiant and ethereal – though there is no gliding over the specific last words of the Flight 11 flight attendant: ‘I see water and buildings…’ One can only admire an artist who is prepared to step back into this sort of emotional cauldron. Adams was a risky choice for the New York Philharmonic to commission for this work, given the previous year’s controversy. But also inevitable. As Vincent Plush said in The Australian in January: ‘For some years now, Americans have looked to Adams as a kind of composer laureate, not yet the paterfamilias figure that died with Aaron Copland in 1990, but one of the same stature, nobility of declaration and clarity of purpose.’

Gordon Kalton Williams

Symphony Australia © 2004

For further information I published a more recent interview with John Adams (Traditional Terms) on 5 September 2013.

August Offensive

Continuing my series of program notes:

Andrew Schultz (born 1960)

August Offensive, Op.92

August Offensive had its premiere at the ANZAC Day dawn service at Gallipoli, Turkey on 25 April, 2013. The work was commissioned by the Australian government’s Department of Veterans’ Affairs as a part of the Centenary of Gallipoli Symphony project. The project, directed by Chris Latham, has involved the commissioning of new works by Australian, New Zealand and Turkish composers to eventually form a full-length work for performance in 2015 - the centenary of the ANZAC landing.
- Andrew Schultz

In terms of Australia’s First World War observances the date that stands out is April 25th, the date on which Australian and New Zealand troops (ANZACS) first landed on Turkey’s Gallipoli Peninsula in 1915. But Andrew Schultz’s August Offensive takes its subject matter from events later that year.

By August, Anzacs and other British imperial troops remained dug in to the cliffsides at Gallipoli, British and French troops had a toe-hold on Helles Point on the southern tip of the peninsula. The Turkish Offensive of 19 May had failed to push the Anzacs ‘back into the sea’, and it was decided that the Allies should hazard another push inland. The plan included diversions at Lone Pine and Helles Point and an attack at The Nek (the climax of Peter Weir’s film, Gallipoli). The main force was to take Chunuk Bair (Çonk Bayırı) and Hill 971 and secure the Turkish heights while the British landed reinforcements and began climbing up from Suvla Bay. 

Below the heights. Suvla Bay in the distance, to the north.

Atatürk lookout on the heights

The plan failed dismally. The attacks became unco-ordinated; some troops even got lost in the ravines leading up to the heights. At the Nek within half an hour on 7 August, 234 men lay dead and 138 wounded in ‘an area no longer than a tennis court’. While New Zealanders, with British units, captured Chunuk Bair, the Turks forced the Allies off. First Lord of the Admiralty Churchill had predicted ‘a military episode not inferior in glory to any that the history of war records...’ By 17 August, General Hamilton had to admit that this Offensive had failed. Later in the month there were costly and ultimately fruitless attempts to break out of Suvla, and these were the last major battles of the Gallipoli campaign until the Allied withdrawal in December.

Adelaide-born composer Andrew Schultz has written a number of works expressing horror at war and violence. His 2001 opera, Going into Shadows deals with terrorism. Beach Burial is a choral setting of Kenneth Slessor’s great World War II poem about the makeshift burial of bodies washed ashore after a great sea battle. A lot is wound into August Offensive’s unremitting seven minutes. You might note the sound of the suspended cymbal - dry and crisp ‘like the sound of diggers digging on hard dry ground’. Having read the military history of the events, Schultz was struck by the constant digging that went on during the months on Gallipoli. The piece also begins and ends with a whistle blast - an idea taken from the trench whistles used to signal attack. So the piece is in some ways the battle scene. The technical-minded may hear polymetres but there is violence as well as lament for those events in August 1915 that cost so many young lives. 

Gordon Kalton Williams, © 2015

This note first appeared in a program booklet for a Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra concert on 27 March 2015. Please contact me for permission to reproduce it.

Tan Dun's "Nu Shu"

Continuing my series of program notes:

Tan Dun (born 1957)

Nu Shu: The Secret Songs of Women

Tan Dun is well known to the world for his film scores: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), Hero (2002) and The Banquet (2006). Last year in Melbourne Tan himself conducted his Pipa Concerto and the Triple Resurrection, a work which continues Tan’s interest in the combination of film and music but this time with music prompting the visuals.

Born in Hunan province, young Tan grew up in a world where modern China intersected with indigenous traditions (shamans could communicate with the past and the present, with leaves and stones). After working as a rice planter during the Cultural Revolution and then in the Beijing Opera, Tan went to Beijing Conservatory and from there to New York City where he studied composition at Columbia University with Chou Wen-Chung a student of Edgard Varèse. Now based in New York, Tan is perhaps the most successful exponent of bringing non-Western cultures into orchestral music. This partly reflects his personal biography, and is partly due to his broad concept of counterpoint as reaching beyond sound to encompass the working together (or meshing together) of sound and image, West and East, nature and culture, past and future. Nu Shu is a case in point.

Nu Shu: The Secret Songs of Women originates in Tan’s discovery several years back that in the village of Shang Gan Tang [Shangjiangxh] in his home province there are women who have had their own means of communication since the 13th century AD. ‘Nu Shu’ means ‘women’s writing’. Advice, messages, instructional tales, life-lessons have been passed down in song form and in a distinct form of writing from mother to daughter and sister to sister these past 800 years. Nicknames for the script include ‘mosquito legs’ writing’ to distinguish it from the square shapes of Hanzi, traditional Chinese writing. Tan prefers its other moniker, ‘music note writing’. The language has been the province of women only (often written on intimate items, such as fans), but is now under threat. Gao Yinxian, described by Tan as the most important woman in Nu Shu village, died some years ago, and Tan Dun promised the villagers that he would create an orchestral piece which helps position the language in the future.

It would be better not to think of Tan’s Nu Shu as an anthropological record. His response to the Nu Shu culture is more poetic, but in creating this work, filming and recording the songs, Tan developed a vast archive that might assist in preserving the culture, an aim he regards among his highest. It is somewhat ironic that a man has finally stepped into this role.

The work sees an orchestral frame around traditional nu shu songs sung on film by women of the village (including He Jinghua, Pu Lijuan, Zhou Huijuan, He Yanxin, Jiang Shinu, Hu Xin, Mo Cuifeng, and Hu Meiyue) Tan’s use of film is true to his concept of counterpoint, in this instance incorporating a counterpoint of time. The ‘archival’ footage denotes nu shu’s past; the orchestra its future. Tan gave considerable thought to the medium which should serve as the bridge between these two dimensions and settled on harp as being the most feminine instrument and one bearing likeness to a nu shu written character. At Nu Shu’s first performance the harp solo was played by Elizabeth Hainen, principal harpist of the Philadelphia Orchestra, which commissioned the work along with Tokyo’s NHK Orchestra and Europe’s Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Amsterdam.

Nu Shu has a very poetic structure which could be considered under the themes of women, weeping, rivers and song. Tan sees the work in six parts (Prologue - Mother’s Story (parts 2, 3 and 4) - Nu Shu Village (part 5) - Sisters’ Intimacy (parts 6, 7 and 8) - Daughter’s Story (parts 9, 10, 11 and 12) and Epilogue (part 13)).

Gordon Kalton Williams, © 2014

This note first appeared in a program booklet for the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra’s Chinese New Year concert, 28 February 2015. Please contact me for permission to reproduce it.

Readers may also be interested in my proposed synopsis for an adaptation of the Chinese classic, The Dream of the Red Chamber, posted 20 November 2012 and the my briefer synopsis posted 12 April 2015.

The Woman on our $100 Note - an appreciation of Melba

Melba by Henry Walter Barnett

In an age when so many Australians are world famous it’s hard for Australians to understand just how famous Nellie Melba was during the 25 years either side of the turn of the 20th century. As her biographer Ann Blainey says, ‘In an era when no woman was prime minister, chief justice, or head of a great church or financial house...Melba was - apart from a few queens and empresses - perhaps the best-known woman in the world.’

Born Helen Mitchell in 1861 in Melbourne, Melba assumed her stage-name from the home town which was, in the year of her birth, a wooden shanty-town in a far-off corner of the Empire. Her career, however, took her to the world’s great opera houses and, via recordings and pioneering broadcasts, to people all over the world. She was on familiar terms with royalty.

The story of Melba’s discovery is often recounted. After receiving some grounding in vocal technique from Pietro Cecchi who taught above Allan’s in Collins Street, she auditioned for Mathilde Marchesi in Paris who, legend has it, ran from the room to get her husband saying, ‘I have found a star.’ Thereafter Marchesi coached Melba in the bel canto style, making her one of its greatest exponents.

Melba achieved her fame principally in the French and Italian repertoire. Tonight’s excerpts are taken from two of her greatest roles, Marguerite in Gounod’s Faust and Ophélie in Ambroise Thomas’s Hamlet. Few parts were written for her. Saint-Saëns created the title role for her in his 1904 one-act opera Hélène. Melba believed that Madam Butterfly was created for her though she never sang it, but Puccini did coach her as Mìmì in La bohème, which she sang in the Royal Opera’s first in-house production and at the Monte Carlo premiere paired with Caruso.

We must depend on recordings to get our own impressions of Melba’s singing. Unfortunately recording techniques earlier in her career gave only intermittent sense of the ‘starlike brilliance’ of her tone that critics like W.J. Henderson spoke of. Her farewell concert at Covent Garden in June 1926 was captured by a new electrical method she wished had been around at the beginning of her career but there, finally, you can get a sense of the richness contemporaries praised, although by this stage the 65 year-old was concentrating on roles that favoured her middle range.

It’s in the written word that we can still get a sense of ‘Melbamania’, the mass clamouring that would greet her on trips across America in her own railway car or to remote towns of Australia. Some might have derided her as a snob (‘Sing em “muck”,’ she is supposed to have said when Clara Butt asked for advice on her Australian repertoire), but she also made sure she visited out-of-the-way places. Were these concerts inspired by memories of Mackay in Queensland where she lived as a young woman?

Melba retained a great love of Australia. Bringing opera to Australia as part of the Melba-Williamson seasons she saw as patriotic acts. Her autobiography Melodies and Memories (though probably ghost-written by Beverly Nichols) gives some indication of her deepest longings. It begins with a description of the ‘long white road’ leading out from Melbourne toward the ‘great Australian Bush’ and the township of Lilydale, where she had built Coombe Cottage, her final ‘home sweet home’ (to cite one of her favourite encores). Melba died in Sydney in 1931. Her memoir goes on to say that in Lilydale when she was a child ‘there were no firm white roads over which motors speed by from a vast city, no telephones straggling through burnt-up branches of the gum trees...’ Knowing that, it’s astonishing how far she went in the wider world.

Gordon Kalton Williams, ©2014

This article first appeared in a program booklet published by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra

The Pop of Vox: the rise of voice

courtesy: Gondwana Choirs

March 2012: I was visiting the Savannah Arts Academy, a specialist high school on Washington Avenue in that small Atlantic coast city. Artists from Sherrill Milnes’ VOICExperience had just finished a demonstration of operatic arias and duets. ‘Who would like to thank our visitors?’ asked the teacher. Up jumped four teenage boys and launched into....No, you probably didn’t guess it: barbershop quartets. David Starkey, General Director of Asheville Lyric Opera, was standing next to me. ‘There’s a real resurgence of a cappella going on in America at the moment,’ he said, ‘especially among young men.’

‘Resurgence’ is kind of an understatement, I was soon to discover. The growth in the area of what you’d specifically call a cappella is nothing less than amazing. There are new groups and new a cappella festivals being announced, it seems, each week. ‘VoiceJam, a new contemporary a cappella competition & festival coming to Northwest Arkansas April 10-11, 2015’, says an ad in a recent issue of one of the a cappella magazines. And if we broaden out the definition of choral singing to include choirs of all kinds, not limiting ourselves to young men, the growth is phenomenal and international. It takes in Asia and Africa. Last year, Britain’s Stylist magazine reported that '[t]he number of 30-something women adding chorister to their CV has grown sharply over the last couple of years....new choir groups are springing up at a startling rate....[there are] now more than 25,000 choirs in the UK.' The reasons given by the Stylist’s interviewees for ensemble singing ranged from ‘I would be far more stressed if I didn’t sing’ to ‘My job isn’t creative. So I love the challenge...’

‘There is indeed a huge choral movement here now in Australia, mostly at an amateur level’ says Lyn Williams, Artistic Director and Founder of Australia’s youthful Gondwana Choirs, when I contact her. ‘Having said that, I have just accepted hundreds of young people for our national Choral School in January. The young men thing is also catching on around the world. It was led here in Australia by Birralee Blokes. In the UK there are groups like Only Boys Aloud.’

Living in America though, I’m aware of a particularly American slant to this recent history. America has had a long tradition of unaccompanied, or sparsely accompanied, singing. There was the debate over Regular Singing back in the early 18th century. Reformers like Massachusetts’ Cotton Mather (credited with encouraging the use of ‘spectral evidence’ in the Salem witch trials) wanted to get rid of the irregular rhythms, unremittingly loud volume and necessarily extreme slow tempos you have when the lines of a hymn are given out one by one to a non-reading congregation. It was ‘indecent’ said his fellow puritans and, thus, the proponents of ‘Regular Singing’ won out. But the great American symphonist Charles Ives (1874-1954) idealised the degree of heterophonic individuality you got from amateur singers and he quoted from composers of this and later eras in works such as his Fourth Symphony, which makes use of the hymn, ‘Watchman’, by Savannah church musician, Lowell Mason. Of course, American vocal music has also been enlivened from another direction when you have the vocal traditions of African-Americans infusing Gospel, which has kept alive the element of rhythm in American concerted singing for more than two centuries.

I emerge, calm, from a compline service featuring Gregorian Chant at St. James’ in the City on Wilshire Boulevard and marvel at the connection with European traditions in the midst of America’s second-busiest city and the glaring neon of Los Angeles’ Koreatown. But I’m also aware that the rise in contemporary a cappella has a lot to do with its ability to incorporate contemporary pop. Ever since Deke Sharon was inspired by actor John Cusack’s use of a boom box in 1989’s Say Anything and discovered a way to get voices to mimic instruments and percussion, a cappella has had a wide-open repertoire. Contemporary college a cappella has become much more than an extension of the glee clubs that arose on American universities in the 1860s.

And it has become very cool. ‘This is, like, a thing now?’ says Beca (Anna Kendrick) in Universal Studio’s Pitch Perfect, the 2012 musical film about college a cappella competitions. Beca’s Barden Bellas (an all-girl group) will eventually go voice-to-voice against the all-boy Treblemakers at the national collegiate a cappella championships (Hanna Mae Lee will be the Bellas' human beatbox). Sure the film is fiction, but it’s based on Mickey Rapkin’s book of the same name, a non-fiction account of real inter-college musical rivalries, rivalries which have swelled to phenomenal levels since the mid-1990s, aided also by reality TV shows like Sing-Off and of course, series like Glee. Is it dorky, still?  Maybe, but cool people are involved. Mayim Bialik, Dr Amy Farrah Fowler on Big Bang Theory, started a Jewish a cappella group when she was studying to be a real scientist at UCLA. Thousands of people from all walks of life all over the world take part in Eric Whitacre’s virtual choirs on YouTube; the credits last as long as the musical numbers. And since we’ve moved beyond contemporary a cappella once again, Jimmy Fallon, host of NBC’s The Tonight Show, has his own barbershop quartet.

For young American men, singing has admittedly become - almost equal with football - the best way to pick up girls. ‘I suspect the strength of the Australian movement is as much about community as it is about music,’ says Lyn Williams. ‘The various successful and influential televised programs based on choirs both here and in the UK ( with Gareth Malone) have been centered on choirs as a vehicle for positive social change: Jonathan Welch’s Choir of Hard Knocks [involving homeless and disadvanted people from Melbourne]  and the Outback Choir [Michelle Leonard’s children’s choir, the subject of a documentary screened by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation on 20 November about a children’s choir in the most isolated and disadvataged region of New South Wales, "where sport is king and music education is non-existent"]. Many other choirs have formed in their shadow,’ continues Williams, ‘so people join community choirs because it simply feels good to sing and belong to community. There are also groups such as Kwaya who sing together and then go to Uganda and work with disadvantaged children.’

What significance does any of this ‘flowering’ have for orchestras? Conductor Richard Gill recently told Radio 774’s Red Symons that singing, rather than learning an instrument, was the best way to introduce children to music: ‘If you give them a basis of singing from the beginning, and they learn their musical literacy through singing, then going to the instrument is far less problematic,’ he said. ‘There are many ex-Gondwana and obviously Sydney Children’s Choir choristers who are now working as professional musicians or studying to do so.’ says Williams, who conducts both. ‘Orchestras around the country including the Sydney Symphony Orchestra and Australian Chamber Orchestra have ex-Gondwana choristers in their ranks.’

What I couldn’t find out, however, was whether there’s any research on the number of choral participants who also subscribe to orchestras; if they’ve migrated to orchestral attendance from choir; if ‘migration’ has increased as choral singing has become spectacularly popular.

It’s something to look deeper into, I guess, because I’d wonder why not. Here is a potted history of orchestral music as I understand it. Harmony is the principal element of music for the period which provides the bulk of the orchestral repertoire. Harmony dominated until Wagner, Debussy and Schoenberg pushed its expressive possibilities to an unsustainable limit. Then Stravinsky turned our attention to rhythm. (Stravinsky went on in the direction of The Rite of Spring, not Zvezdoliki, you might say) After that, the most popular music of the 20th century could often be played with three chords; percussion was king.

But here in modern choral singing are people negotiating the acute dissonances in Eric Whitacre’s music. Here are young guys, like The Tonight Show’s Jimmy Fallon, abiding by the rules of ‘circle-of-fifths resolutions’ as specified by the Barbershop Harmony Society. There must be a way to bring all these lovers of harmony to the orchestral concert hall.

Gordon Kalton Williams, © 2014

This article first appeared in the Dec 2014 edition of The Podium, published by Symphony Services International (Sydney, Australia).