Forbidden Colours

476 3220 GERARD BROPHY forbidden colours TASMANIAN SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA Almost every Australian composer born literature, made Sculthorpe (vernacular) and between the end of the First World War and the Meale (international) obvious first generation end of the baby-boomer generation owes even leaders. The upheavals of 1968, and the social their most modest reputation to a half-truth: that revolution that followed in their wake, helped it was only in the early 1960s that our post- convince their students that their Australian colonial music culture caught up with the world identity should derive from looking both inward and produced its first distinctive national school and outward. But to Brophy in the next Gerard Brophy b. 1953 of composers. In press columns, and in his generation, the first to grow up in a multicultural 1967 book Australia’s Music: Themes of a New globalising environment, such a self-conscious 1 The Republic of Dreams 8’32 Society, Roger Covell gave culturally literate pursuit of Australianness came to seem not only Genevieve Lang harp, Philip South darabukka Australians their first reliable list of composers creatively irrelevant, but a failure of imagination. worth following, most of them contemporary. For Brophy, what would once have been Mantras [14’36] And what Donald Peart dubbed ‘The Australian described as a ‘cosmopolitan’ outlook comes 2 Mantra I 3’42 Avant-garde’ owed as much to frustrations of naturally to a contemporary Australian artist. 3 Mantra II 3’10 journalists, academics and conductors with the 4 Mantra III 7’44 deadening local cult of ‘musical cobwebs’ as it Born into an ‘ordinary Anglo-Irish family’ in did to the talents of the new movement’s Sydney’s eastern suburbs, Brophy grew up in 5 Maracatú 11’11 anointed leaders, Peter Sculthorpe, Richard country Coonamble. Later back in Sydney, he underwent what he described as an 6 Forbidden Colours 9’18 Meale, Nigel Butterley and Larry Sitsky. Yet what started out as a blatant case of cultural ‘increasingly musical adolescence’. Only at the 7 Le Réveil de l’ange 20’25 engineering took on a natural momentum of its relatively ripe age of 22 (‘dangerously late’, as Lisa Moore piano own with the arrival in the 1970s of a second Andrew Ford put it) did his studies of classical generation, students of the first, including Anne guitar turn serious, though just as important to Total Playing Time 64’02 Boyd, Ross Edwards, Martin Wesley-Smith and his musical education were the free tickets he frequently received, as a lowly clerk in the Gore Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra Barry Conyngham. By the time an exponentially larger third generation burst onto the scene in the Hill TV studios, to ABC orchestral concerts and Kenneth Young conductor 1980s – Gerard Brophy prominent among them – recitals, including revelatory performances by Dobbs Franks conductor 7 Australian composition had become a confident Alicia de Larrocha, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Jorge and steadily growing enterprise, which by now Bolet and Mstislav Rostropovich. After attending had acquired not only a past, but what promised a composition course given by Mauricio Kagel in to be a bright and increasingly diverse future. Europe in 1977, Brophy entered the Sydney Conservatorium where he was one of the few Sixties oppositional identities, vernacular or Australians lucky enough to study composition international, inherited from visual arts and with Don Banks. But the most decisive 2 3 influence during his student years was Richard will’. Brophy looks back on his time with resembling a focused program on his music. His and soft-core porn continues to be a theme in Toop, whose profound engagement with Donatoni as his apprenticeship, and like a good compositions take their form, as he explains it, Spiked Heels: A Carmen Fantasy (1992) and European modernism mentored Brophy, and apprentice, he buckled under. Learning to meet through ‘a process of evolution of their Sheer Nylon Dances (2000) for violin, cello and fellow students Michael Smetanin and Riccardo his master’s strict expectations taught him ‘that materials, rather than of development’. Likewise, ‘fetishised piano’. By the late 1980s, Brophy had Formosa, through their infatuation with the you can write a piece using any idea; that such extra-musical meaning as he intentionally developed a marked preference for arresting Italian avant-garde, and formed them into a anything can be your basic material; and that it communicates derives from a web of references monosyllabic titles, like CharM, Chrome, Flesh, recognised ‘school’ at what Gordon Kerry has wasn’t the material’s fault if it turned out to be a rather than from a continuous narrative. Titles are Glint, Glove and Head. His worklist into the labelled the ‘pointy end’ of 1980s new music, bad piece, it was more likely your fault, because usually an important key. That of Salammbô 1990s can read a little like an artificially variously described (or derided, by their stylistic you hadn’t invented properly with what you’d (1980) for orchestra may directly recall the blood- extended Jeff Koons adolescent fantasy. Yet the opposites) as ‘Late High Modernists’, been given.’ lust and hedonistic imagery of Flaubert’s novel, music behind such intentionally shocking titles ‘Complexicists’ or – the badge perhaps best but listeners might also remember that it is the as Trash, Trip, Tweak and Twist is typically worth wearing – ‘Maximalists’. But performance, as much as the act of writing, name of the fictional opera in the novel and film thoughtful, brilliantly formed and faceted, from has always been a key to Brophy’s personal Personally, Brophy found his formative Citizen Kane. Similarly, Orfeo (1984) for strings, its shattering hardest edges, to (as Lyn Williams approach to composition, and stylish and influences in Sylvano Bussotti’s highly written after a friend was killed in a freak has written) episodes of ‘spiritual accomplished performers tend to inspire him sexualised multi-media works, Salvatore accident, is not the conventional elegy one might transcendence... ethereal textures which more than do other composers; in the case of Sciarrino’s sensual explorations of extreme expect, but a confronting meditation on the split- operate at the limits of audibility’. two works on this disc, pianist Lisa Moore and second succession of emotions – from furious instrumental virtuosity, and Franco Donatoni’s Le Réveil de l’ange (1987) for piano and harpist Marshall McGuire. Contact with his struggle to calm acceptance – of a person facing rigorous crystalline complexity. His 1982 chamber orchestra is the last work of what Brazilian guitar teacher Turibio Santos led to his sudden death, just as Orpheus might have graduation work, tracing its musical lineage from Brophy now considers to be his early period. interest in the Candoblé ritual that inspired Exú, experienced facing violent death at the hands Sciarrino’s Caprices (and before them, A single-movement concerto for Lisa Moore, and Brazil’s traditional music was the inspiration of the Maenads. Paganini’s), was a single-movement violin a well-known advocate of some of the most for Maracatú. Balinese gamelan musicians, concerto of dazzling complexity, bordering at Contemplation of the erotic is the source of an difficult contemporary Australian piano music, its Senegalese drummers and timbila players from times on sensual overload. That rigour/rationality almost Baroque sensual beauty in scores like subject matter is miraculous transformation. The Mozambique have since influenced his were destined to become less important in his Breathless (1983) – Donatoni’s favourite Brophy title ‘Awakening of the Angel’ is borrowed from compositional aesthetic profoundly, his scores music than sensuality/irrationality was already work – for an ensemble of three flutes and another Molinier painting, again a paradoxical by preference keeping as much of the implicit in the work’s title, Exú, named after an piano that recalls the texture of a Monteverdi emanation of the artist’s erotic fishnets-and- performers’ traditional music intact as possible. Orixa of Brazilian Candoblé: the deity of fate, madrigal. (Elsewhere Brophy reused the garters world. Yet the title also intentionally messenger of death, and lord of chaos. Not Except in his relatively few texted works, like Monteverdi title Chiome d’oro.) Senso: dopo recalls the birds and angels of Messiaen, whose surprisingly, perhaps, when Brophy joined the early Flesh (1987), the opera The Temptation skin d’armourdo (1982) is named after a example stands behind the music of the piano’s Donatoni’s composition class in Italy late in of St Antony (on a libretto by Martin Buzacott, blatantly erotic painting by Pierre Molinier, and first entries. Then there is a further reference to 1982, his teacher pilloried Exú in front of all his after Flaubert) or the recent Verlaine Songs the exploration (and even celebration) of the the awakening of a homeless man sleeping classmates as being ‘full of capriciousness and (2006), Brophy seldom imposes anything much-contested yet ill-defined conjunction of art rough in Berlin in Wim Wenders’ 1987 film 4 5 Wings of Desire (subtitled The Awakening of an present, slow tempi were rarely encountered in the Australian Ballet’s 2008 season. This is also Whispers (1984). But in contrast to his Angel ). The opening’s high-pitched wind and bell my music. Furthermore such a deliberate focus the case in Maracatú (2003), an orchestral piece exuberant celebration of the gradually sounds, scurrying strings

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