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

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] String Quartet No. 16 6 I. Loneliness [4:10] 7 II. Anger [3:58] 8 III. Yearning [5:49] 9 IV. Trauma [4:18] 10 V. Freedom [5:30] String Quartet No. 18 11 I. Prelude [2:04] 12 II. A Land Singing [4:27] 13 III. A Dying Land [7:32] 14 IV. A Lost Land [6:43] 15 V. Postlude [5:20] SCULTHORPE The Complete String Quartets with Didjeridu Complete Program Time: 82:11 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 "I began to lose interest in the comforting vistas that surrounded me in Tasmania. I found myself drawn, more and more, to the harsher landscapes that I’d left behind in mainland Australia. I was drawn to desert and wilderness places that I’d not then visited. Eventually, the Australian landscape became one of the major concerns of my music. I set out to give life to the landscape through the sun, and a human dimension to it through loneliness, resignation and death." PETER SCULTHORPE April 29, 1929 - August 8, 2014 Colin McPhee’s ground-breaking study, Music in Bali (1966), and adding three more numbers to his PETER SCULTHORPE: orchestral Sun Music series, before reworking them into the 45-minute Australian-themed modern dance String Quartets Nos. 12, 14, 16, and 18 with didjeridu 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 of Captain James Cook’s First Landing in Australia he contributed a classical-rock fusion oratorio, Love 200, featuring vocalist Jeannie Little, rock band Tully and the Sydney Symphony. This was followed by his controversial opera, Rites of Passage (1974). He made his first direct reference to an Indigenous Australian chant in Peter Joshua Sculthorpe was born in Launceston, Tasmania, Australia, on 29 April 1929. During his his string orchestra work Port Essington (1977). It launched a lifelong series of works in which he has formative years his parents (mother Edna born in Yorkshire, England, father Joshua third-generation paid tribute to Indigenous Australians and challenged settler Australians to acknowledge and learn from Tasmanian convict stock) were general storekeepers at the nearby rural township of St. Leonards. their traditional culture. 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 Composing music for string ensembles was one of Sculthorpe’s early musical preferences, and his later became one of the diverse sources of inspiration for the mature composer, in works including the string works have often become personal stylistic manifestos. When he completed his String Quartet String Quartet No. 14 recorded here. No. 8 in 1969,inspired by Balinese percussion gamelan --and which he said he had tried “to purge of conventional classical European gestures”--it was greeted at its premiere in London’s Wigmore Hall A capable but not brilliant pianist, he began composing precociously while still at school, winning a by influential reviewer William Mann as “unlike any music I know, and durably compulsive.” And so it place at the Melbourne University’s Conservatorium of Music, at just age 16 in 1946. It was during his proved, when 15 years later, it delivered Sculthorpe a new global audience thanks to the advocacy in five years at college on mainland Victoria that he composed his first four string quartets. On graduating, concert and commercial recordings of the San Francisco-based Kronos Quartet. Recalling Kronos’s he returned to Tasmania and worked in the family sporting-goods business, while composing part-time 1985 recording of the Eighth Quartet, British writer Norman Lebrecht described Sculthorpe’s music as for Launceston amateur theatrical productions. He also composed musicals for small companies in “[t]he most original sound to emerge from Australia since Nellie Melba and the first to show awareness Canberra and Sydney, before winning a postgraduate scholarship in 1958 which took him to Oxford of regional contexts; it established Sculthorpe as musical figurehead for the entire Pacific basin.” And University in England. There he studied with composers Egon Wellesz and Edmund Rubbra, and formed in his inspiring book on 20thcentury music, The Rest is Noise, Alex Ross put Sculthorpe at the head of a a lifelong friendship with musicologist Wilfred Mellers. According to Mellers, it was at Oxford that the list of composers whose work “you can use … to draw a map of the globe.” somewhat homesick young Tasmanian “discovered his true identity, becoming the first composer to make a music distinctively Australian.” Starting in his native Tasmania, Sculthorpe has persistently looked beyond his immediate horizons, geographically and culturally, for musical inspiration. Although his music is most often connected with the His earliest significant work was the Sonatina for Piano, composed in Launceston in 1954, and selected Australian Outback, it has taken him to many other parts of continental and island Australia and beyond, for performance at the 1955 ISCM Festival in Baden-Baden, Germany. Based on a retelling of an into the Pacific Basin--what Felipe Fernández-Armesto has described as “the new Mediterranean.” He Indigenous Australian creation story, the music already contained germs of his mature style, notably the has accordingly won honors both at home and abroad. Notably, in 2002 he was made a life member of use of interlocking ostinatos, harmonic pedals, and hidden drones. It was also his first evocation of the the American Academy of Arts and Letters, joining the poet A. D. Hope, the painter Sidney Nolan and the Australian mainland Outback country. It was followed by a series of four works, all for string instruments, novelist Christina Stead as the only Australians to be so honored. that he entitled Irkanda, an Indigenous word meaning “scrub country.” It was music that he further characterized as belonging to “a remote and lonely place.” Issues of Indigenous and refugee rights and cultural and environmental depredation are common threads running through the music of the later years of his enormously productive composing career, notably in Sculthorpe never completely abandoned what he himself described as the “straightforward … austerely the four string quartets recorded here. Australian” lineaments of his Irkanda style. He used it in Irkanda II (String Quartet No. 5), premiered while he was at Oxford in 1959 (which his tutor Egon Wellesz called the most original work he’d heard in years). Composed back in Tasmania in response to his father’s death in 1961, Irkanda IV is a sombre lament for solo violin and string orchestra. It became his first mature success and won him the attention of Australia’s musical leadership, leading to opera, ballet, symphony and chamber music commissions, Sculthorpe and the didjeridu and a place at the head of a new progressive cohort of young Australian composers that also included Though respectful gestures to Indigenous Australian musical idioms are a defining element of his output, Nigel Butterley, Larry Sitsky, George Dreyfus, and the late Richard Meale. the issue of direct cultural appropriation of Indigenous musical materials by non-Indigenous composers In 1963, he settled permanently on the Australian mainland in Sydney, New South Wales, joining the like Sculthorpe can be a vexed issue. Although the Kronos Quartet had approached him in 1992 staff of the music department of the University of Sydney, where he was to remain for his whole working suggesting the idea of scoring a work for string quartet and didjeridu, he almost certainly never would life. Shortly after the acclaimed Sydney premiere of his String Quartet No. 6 (1964), he consciously have considered adding an actual Indigenous instrument to his scores, were it not that, in 2001 a young began seeking compositional alternatives to inherited European classical idioms, looking to the music Indigenous musician asked him to. That year, William Barton, a 20-year-old didjeridu player belonging to and mythologies of other Pacific Rim cultures – notably Japan and Aztec Mexico – as inspiration for a the traditional Kalkadunga people of Queensland, gave the first public performance of the version of the new series. International recognition came in 1965 when the Sydney Symphony, on its first overseas String Quartet No. 12 recorded here – the first time any Sculthorpe work was heard with added didjeridu. tour, premiered the first of this new series, Sun Music I, in London, and at the same time he was signed Later that year, Barton gave the first performances of Sculthorpe orchestral works with added didjeridu, by the new London-based publisher, Faber Music, which began a lifelong association.

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