Peter Sculthorpe’S Pieces with Stephen Kent (Didjeridu) Is Both One of the Most Unusual and Fulfilling

1 CD 1 1 String Quartet No. 12 “From Ubirr” [12:22] String Quartet No. 14 “Quamby” 2 I. Prelude [3:24] 3 II. In the Valley [3:49] 4 III. On High Hills [4:45] 5 IV. At Quamby Bluff [8:00] CD 2 String Quartet No. 16 1 *(6) I. Loneliness [4:10] 2 *(7) II. Anger [3:58] 3 *(8) III. Yearning [5:49] 4 *(9) IV. Trauma [4:18] 5 *(10) V. Freedom [5:30] String Quartet No. 18 6 *(11) I. Prelude [2:04] 7 *(12) II. A Land Singing [4:27] 8 *(13) III. A Dying Land [7:32] 9 *(14) IV. A Lost Land [6:43] 6 *(15) V. Postlude [5:20] Complete Program Time: 82:11 SCULTHORPE The Complete String Quartets with Didjeridu 1 *(Blu-ray™ Tracks) 2 Amongst the amazing artistic collaborations that Del Sol has had in our 22-years of music making, playing Peter Sculthorpe’s pieces with Stephen Kent (didjeridu) is both one of the most unusual and fulfilling. The breathtaking power and beauty of Peter’s music is enhanced by the juxtaposition of these contrasting wooden instruments and traditions - the ones delicately carved by master craftsmen in Europe and the other naturally hollowed out by termites in Australia. Stephen’s artistry envelops us in sonorities that border between the earth and the divine. These sonic waves lift the entire quartet, even changing the role of the cello from harmonic ground to the floor of an airship. We take flight together. We have journeyed to places dark and wondrous during the process of learning these masterworks and hope you will join us there now. -Charlton Lee, Violist PETER SCULTHORPE: String Quartets Nos. 12, 14, 16, and 18 with didjeridu Peter Joshua Sculthorpe was born in Launceston, Tasmania, Australia, on 29 April 1929. During his formative years his parents (mother Edna born in Yorkshire, England, father Joshua third-generation Tasmanian convict stock) were general storekeepers at the nearby rural township of St. Leonards. Cocooned in this small close-knit community from the worst effects of the international Great Depression, Sculthorpe enjoyed what he recalled was a solitary but otherwise idyllic childhood. The Tasmanian north later became one of the diverse sources of inspiration for the mature composer, in works including the String Quartet No. 14 recorded here. A capable but not brilliant pianist, he began composing precociously while still at school, winning a place at the Melbourne University’s Conservatorium of Music, at just age 16 in 1946. It was during his five years at college on mainland Victoria that he composed his first four string quartets. On graduating, he returned to Tasmania and worked in the family sporting-goods business, while composing part-time for Launceston amateur theatrical productions. He also composed musicals for small companies in Canberra and Sydney, before winning a postgraduate scholarship in 1958 3 4 which took him to Oxford University in England. There he studied with composers Egon Wellesz He spent 1966 in the USA as a visiting fellow at Yale, finding a major new source of inspiration in and Edmund Rubbra, and formed a lifelong friendship with musicologist Wilfred Mellers. According Colin McPhee’s ground-breaking study, Music in Bali (1966), and adding three more numbers to his to Mellers, it was at Oxford that the somewhat homesick young Tasmanian “discovered his true orchestral Sun Music series, before reworking them into the 45-minute Australian-themed modern identity, becoming the first composer to make a music distinctively Australian.” dance symphony, Sun Music, performed over 100 times by the Australian Ballet around Australia and on tour in North America. A year after the Australian premiere of Hair, for the 1970 Bicentenary His earliest significant work was the Sonatina for Piano, composed in Launceston in 1954, and of Captain James Cook’s First Landing in Australia he contributed a classical-rock fusion oratorio, selected for performance at the 1955 ISCM Festival in Baden-Baden, Germany. Based on a retelling Love 200, featuring vocalist Jeannie Little, rock band Tully and the Sydney Symphony. This was of an Indigenous Australian creation story, the music already contained germs of his mature style, followed by his controversial opera, Rites of Passage (1974). He made his first direct reference to notably the use of interlocking ostinatos, harmonic pedals, and hidden drones. It was also his first an Indigenous Australian chant in his string orchestra work Port Essington (1977). It launched a evocation of the Australian mainland Outback country. It was followed by a series of four works, lifelong series of works in which he has paid tribute to Indigenous Australians and challenged settler all for string instruments, that he entitled Irkanda, an Indigenous word meaning “scrub country.” It Australians to acknowledge and learn from their traditional culture. was music that he further characterized as belonging to “a remote and lonely place.” Composing music for string ensembles was one of Sculthorpe’s early musical preferences, and Sculthorpe never completely abandoned what he himself described as the “straightforward … his string works have often become personal stylistic manifestos. When he completed his String austerely Australian” lineaments of his Irkanda style. He used it in Irkanda II (String Quartet No. Quartet No. 8 in 1969,inspired by Balinese percussion gamelan --and which he said he had tried 5), premiered while he was at Oxford in 1959 (which his tutor Egon Wellesz called the most original “to purge of conventional classical European gestures”--it was greeted at its premiere in London’s work he’d heard in years). Composed back in Tasmania in response to his father’s death in 1961, Wigmore Hall by influential reviewer William Mann as “unlike any music I know, and durably Irkanda IV is a sombre lament for solo violin and string orchestra. It became his first mature compulsive.” And so it proved, when 15 years later, it delivered Sculthorpe a new global audience success and won him the attention of Australia’s musical leadership, leading to opera, ballet, thanks to the advocacy in concert and commercial recordings of the San Francisco-based Kronos symphony and chamber music commissions, and a place at the head of a new progressive cohort Quartet. Recalling Kronos’s 1985 recording of the Eighth Quartet, British writer Norman Lebrecht of young Australian composers that also included Nigel Butterley, Larry Sitsky, George Dreyfus, described Sculthorpe’s music as “[t]he most original sound to emerge from Australia since Nellie and the late Richard Meale. Melba and the first to show awareness of regional contexts; it established Sculthorpe as musical In 1963, he settled permanently on the Australian mainland in Sydney, New South Wales, joining figurehead for the entire Pacific basin.” And in his inspiring book on 20thcentury music, The Rest is Noise, Alex Ross put Sculthorpe at the head of a list of composers whose work “you can use … the staff of the music department of the University of Sydney, where he was to remain for his whole to draw a map of the globe.” working life. Shortly after the acclaimed Sydney premiere of his String Quartet No. 6 (1964), he consciously began seeking compositional alternatives to inherited European classical idioms, Starting in his native Tasmania, Sculthorpe has persistently looked beyond his immediate horizons, looking to the music and mythologies of other Pacific Rim cultures – notably Japan and Aztec geographically and culturally, for musical inspiration. Although his music is most often connected Mexico – as inspiration for a new series. International recognition came in 1965 when the Sydney with the Australian Outback, it has taken him to many other parts of continental and island Australia Symphony, on its first overseas tour, premiered the first of this new series, Sun Music I, in London, and beyond, into the Pacific Basin--what Felipe Fernández-Armesto has described as “the new and at the same time he was signed by the new London-based publisher, Faber Music, which began Mediterranean.” He has accordingly won honors both at home and abroad. Notably, in 2002 he a lifelong association. Signalling his new aesthetic direction, he was quoted in a feature article in the was made a life member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, joining the poet A. D. Hope, London Times: “Europe is the past; Australian, Indonesia, the South Pacific, the future.” the painter Sidney Nolan and the novelist Christina Stead as the only Australians to be so honored. 5 6 Issues of Indigenous and refugee rights and cultural and environmental depredation are common Sculthorpe’s added parts for didjeridu typically require two or more instruments, each with a threads running through the music of the later years of his enormously productive composing fundamental drone of a fixed pitch. Where the didjeridu plays with the strings, the parts are precisely career, notably in the four string quartets recorded here. coordinated. However, apart from drone notes, it would be impractical, if not impossible, to notate many of the more complex overblown didjeridu sounds conventionally. Many of these, derived Sculthorpe and the didjeridu from traditional practice, are imitations of natural sounds (animal growls, bird calls) or dance Though respectful gestures to Indigenous Australian musical idioms are a defining element of his movements (kangaroo hop). Some of these characteristic sounds Sculthorpe cues verbally. Other output, the issue of direct cultural appropriation of Indigenous musical materials by non-Indigenous semi-improvised, cadenza-like solo passages are also indicated verbally, to be added especially composers like Sculthorpe can be a vexed issue. Although the Kronos Quartet had approached him between sections or movements of the string-quartet originals. in 1992 suggesting the idea of scoring a work for string quartet and didjeridu, he almost certainly never would have considered adding an actual Indigenous instrument to his scores, were it not that, in 2001 a young Indigenous musician asked him to.

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