texts and translations

“I call only to God Amor, and Our Lady, and Death…”
Claudio Monteverdi’s music, and Elliott Carter’s in the less distant past, form a background to three works – solo, ensemble and choral-poetic – by the Australian Carl Vine in this second Astra concert for his fiftieth year. Themes of time and mortality are reflected in the Vine pieces, and the programme extends to a kind of elegy for two other composers important for those last fifty years, the American Lou Harrison and the Italian Luciano Berio, both of whom died during the last year.

Words, religious and secular, were a vehicle for a new passionate musical expression in Monteverdi (1567–1643). His later madrigals carve successive segments of a poem into individual rhythms and gestures, and these are then combined and superimposed to form a kind of choral theatre with voices and instruments. Elliott Carter (b.1908) was part of the modern rediscovery of Monteverdi through his Paris teacher Nadia Boulanger, and is much influenced by the Monteverdi idea of simultaneous dramatic expressions for the “auditory scenarios” of his own music. Even his solo I Write on the Wind treats the flute as a source of different musical streams running at the same time, using the extremes of its range to “suggest the paradoxical nature of Petrarch’s poem”. Carter was in turn a major influence on Carl Vine’s technique and development. A musical continuity in Vine’s works unfolds across overlaid rhythmic patterns of different speeds and characters.

Lou Harrison (1917–2003) reportedly began his Mass (to St Anthony) in a San Francisco tram, after hearing of the outbreak of World War II. The combination of modal chanting and percussion, including brake drum and car springs, is typical of the interests which later led him towards Javanese gamelan as a source of composition. A student of both Henry Cowell and Schoenberg in California, Harrison played a central part in the American experimental music tradition, inventing new percussion, exploring non-western modes and tunings, at all times emphasising melodic creation, which he described as “the audience’s take-home pay”.

Luciano Berio (1925–2003), whose death occurred almost exactly a year ago on May 26, influenced a generation through his sensuous approach to contemporary sound. His music fuses instrumental brilliance with performance-theatre in a wide variety of ways. The thirteen Sequenzas have become classic solo works for different instruments, in which extreme agility and virtuosity from the player rises to meet the instrument as a source of pure sound. Sequenza VIII treats the solo violin in the tradition of Bach’s Chaconne as a vehicle for multiple layers of musical expression. Two adjacent notes – A and B – create a kind of continuous passacaglia, each developing its own zones of activity and fantastical episodes before the piece finally comes to rest on the A-sharp/ B-flat that lies between. The miniature Duetti for two violins are taken from a set of 30 pedagogical pieces, each dedicated in its title to a musician. The Magnificat is an early work, described by Berio as emerging out of the ignorance imposed by Fascist Italy into the musical world long created by Bartok, Stravinsky and others.

“A day, a night, an hour…”
Like the first Piano Sonata heard at last Sunday’s concert, two of today’s works by Carl Vine had their premieres at Astra concerts. Elegy was first performed in one of the regular guest appearances of the ensemble Flederman at the North Melbourne Town Hall, and shows the rich but accessible style of ensemble music that Vine had developed with that group, a continuous play of polyrhythms across the unusual instrumentation of flute cello, trombone, percussion and keyboard. Vine has described the piece’s biographical origins: “Elegy was written for and is dedicated to Peter Harthoorn, a friend who died without warning in early 1985. The work is cast in a single movement with the following four sections : (i) reaction, (ii) reflection, (iii) rhythmic explosion, (iv) elegy proper. The ‘reaction’ is my own response to the news of Peter's death. The ‘reflection’ is in part a resumé of Peter's character and life, leading to the cathartic ‘explosion’ of both death and its acceptance.”

Love Song was written for trombonist Simone de Haan and premiered by him at the 1986 Astra concert in the Dome Reading room of the State Library. The intense focus on the solo performer, and on the lyrical qualities of the trombone throughout its range, is balanced by the accompanying tape, scored precisely in several rhythmic layers like an enlarged organ part. Far from being solipsistic, the trombonist’s solo song passes through a series of episodes with other polyphonic voices. The climactic final phase at the highest reaches of the instrument suggests a whole ‘social’ energy of dancing figures around the solo line.

In After Campion, composed for the choir of the Sydney Philharmonia, poetry and choral sound are set into an environment of two pianos in a constant crossplay of melodies and harmonies. Thomas Campion (1567-1620), a direct contemporary of Monteverdi, was both composer and poet, described by T.S. Eliot as “except for Shakespeare, the most accomplished master of rhymed lyric of his time.” Four of his poems are here treated in a ‘contrapuntal’ way, dispersed among the eight-part choir and three-voice solo consort. One poem, “What If a Day” runs through the length of the work, sardonic in character with sexual and metaphysical puns, while three others are inserted as various kinds of commentary. The first of these, “Oft Have I Sighed”, reveals some of the original music by Campion. Elsewhere, Vine’s tunes and harmonies suggest a range of modal characters, from distant and more recent pasts, to create a playing field of “mirth and mourning”.

–JMcC