476 7627 PETER SCULTHORPE quamby TASMANIAN SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA Perhaps no other composer has consciously II. The Mexican sun is a thematic concept in the attempted to make Australian orchestral music Sun Music series. so truly Australian as Peter Sculthorpe, who first Sculthorpe has lived in Sydney since being came to public attention with the String Quartet offered a lectureship at the University of Sydney No. 6, commissioned by Musica Viva Australia in in 1963 (at the time of his retirement a few 1964. Sculthorpe cemented his reputation with years ago, he held a personal chair as Professor the Sun Music series for orchestra, which could be said to have been inspired by a pictorial view in Musical Composition). He was born in Peter Sculthorpe b. 1929 of Australia as a sun-baked landscape. In all there Launceston, Tasmania, and has resided in the were four Sun Musics, and in 1968 even a ballet UK and US, with visiting professorships at the 1 Cello Dreaming 18’07 based on the same music. Irkanda IV, an earlier University of Sussex and Yale. However, he has Sue-Ellen Paulsen cello work (1961), signalled an interest in Aboriginal said that Northern Australia is the landscape that he has come to love most on earth, a love Quamby [21’20] culture, though at this stage it was reflected expressed in pieces he has written since the 2 Prelude 3’15 purely in titles. Irkanda suggested a sense of 1980s, such as Kakadu (1988) and Jabiru 3 In the Valley 5’23 loneliness and desolation, even of an insignificant Dreaming (1990-94). 4 From High Hills 4’59 figure dwarfed by the overwhelming landscape. 5 At Quamby Bluff 7’43 Sculthorpe, like his distinguished Australian Melodies from Arnhem Land and Groote Eylandt have been used in Sculthorpe’s works, notably 6 predecessor Percy Grainger, looked beyond Nourlangie 21’19 Djilile (Whistling Duck on a Billabong) which was European models for his music. The whole of Karin Schaupp guitar used to complement a theme and set of the Pacific Rim was his musical hinterland at a variations expressive of alienated European 7 Music for Bali 3’56 time when the post-serialism of the Darmstadt culture in Port Essington (1977). Indeed, School held sway in Europe. In 1968, the abbot Sculthorpe is apt to use similar material (having Total Playing Time 64’46 of a monastery in Japan introduced Sculthorpe representational significance) across a number to saibara music, the influence of which of works, contributing to his highly recognisable Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra surfaced in the 1979 orchestral work Mangrove, style. Other fingerprints include Penderecki-like Richard Mills conductor a work which Roger Covell describes in the New string clusters, string harmonic glissandi Groves Dictionary of Music and Musicians as imitating bird cries, and melodies (be they celebrating ‘the rich fecundity of mangrove tidal derived from saibara tunes, Aboriginal strains or flats at a time when these trees were looked on Gregorian plainchant) in high relief, all contained as untidy impediments to clean-limbed tourist within highly audible contrasting forms. development’. Balinese gamelan had been Sculthorpe has credited his characteristic quoted in parts of Sun Music III and Sun Music interval of a falling semitone, evident also in 2 3 Aboriginal chant, to the ‘Abschied’ (Farewell) always been of great significance to Sculthorpe. because of my concern about the possibility of last movement, At Quamby Bluff, is the longest, from Mahler’s Song of the Earth. There is Steven Isserlis, who gave the world premiere of an end to paradise. These feelings, however, are and the music here is questioning and restless. certainly an elegiac tone to much of his music, Cello Dreaming in 1998, struck by the erased at the close of the work. Following a short hymn-like section, however, even a tone of Mahlerian regret in Memento composer’s use of the notation piuttosto lontano there is some resolution at the close. mori (1993), a warning of death for the planet (‘somewhat distant’), stopped mid-rehearsal and Quamby was originally Sculthorpe’s String inspired by environmental despoliation of Easter exclaimed, ‘I’ve just realised that you and Quartet No. 14; the version for chamber orchestra After I completed Quamby, I realised that the Island in the southern Pacific. Sculthorpe’s Beethoven are the only composers ever to use was created in 2000. Interviewed by Robin outer movements contain suggestions of discovery that the astronomer Kepler regarded the word piuttosto!’ Sculthorpe’s delight in Hughes for the Australian Biography Project in Beethoven’s motto theme, ‘Muss es sein?’, the oscillation of the semitone A flat-G as the recounting this event is almost palpable. 1998, soon after the composition of the quartet ‘Must it be?’ I was unaware of this while writing sound of planet Earth has provided him with a Similarly, he was profoundly moved to realise version, Sculthorpe described the piece as ‘the the work, but clearly such a question was on my musical signifier of ecological concerns which that the Stradivarius on which Isserlis performed string quartet that I would have written in mind at the time. Tasmania as a Tasmanian before I was really have been an increasing theme in his work. the work had once been the property of the Tasmanian roots notwithstanding, Sculthorpe exposed to Asian music and Aboriginal music … legendary cellist Emanuel Feuermann, who had has found a spiritual home in northern Australia’s Sculthorpe has written numerous orchestral In other words, a Tasmanian string quartet.’ bequeathed it to his good friend Aldo Parisot – Kakadu region. It comes as a surprise to many works and 15 string quartets, but few stage who, more than thirty years earlier, had When I was very young, my father told me a to learn that when Sculthorpe wrote the piece works apart from the aforementioned ballet performed many of Sculthorpe’s early pieces on story about Quamby Bluff, a rather forbidding Kakadu, he had never actually been to the place: created from his work, and the TV opera Quiros. that same instrument. The ‘ritual’ Rites of Passage (1976) made use of mountainous outcrop in the highlands of the work was commissioned by an American the Kepler notes, and also of a combination of Cello Dreaming draws its inspiration from northern Tasmania. There, according to legend, anaesthesiologist as a 60th birthday present for Latin and Central Australian Arrernte texts. It Australia’s so-called Top End. There, along the colonial government soldiers once drove a tribe his wife. ‘When I finally visited Kakadu,’ could be said that recent works signal a re- coastline, Aboriginal cultures mingle with those of Aborigines to the bluff’s edge. The Aborigines Sculthorpe later wrote, ‘it wasn’t at all as I’d engagement with European traditions. The 2001 of the Torres Strait, Papua New Guinea and, had the choice of being shot, or jumping. They imagined it. I’d seen a number of photographs, orchestral work New Norcia was inspired by the to a slightly lesser extent, Indonesia. Cello chose the latter, and as they jumped they cried but none conveyed the spirit of its landscape. musical traditions established at that West Dreaming reflects this. out, ‘Quamby! Quamby!’ meaning ‘Save me! Also, it was much more serene than I’d Australian monastery by Dom Rosendo Salvado, Save me!’ It was perhaps inevitable that my imagined. I felt that I really belonged there, a and is based on the plainchant Psalmus 150. The music is based upon two ideas, both first thoughts about this incident and this place strange feeling, perhaps, for a Tasmanian.’ The Plainchant is also used extensively in his most stated by the soloist. Heard at the outset, the would find their way into a piece of music. guitar concerto Nourlangie (1989) is one of recent work, Requiem (2004). first idea is an adaptation of an Indigenous several works inspired by the ancient beauty of lullaby. The second idea, dominating the central The Prelude presents most of the material upon the region. In this work, says guitarist John Beethoven Variations, premiered by the West section, is a downward-falling motif, of the kind which the music is based. Throughout, the Williams, the work’s dedicatee, Sculthorpe Australian Symphony Orchestra in December known as a ‘tumbling strain’. In the course of falling tritone is especially important. Heard at ‘takes advantage of the guitar’s more universal 2003, is based on the ‘Ode to Joy’ of the work, references are also made to birdsong, the very outset, it dominates the sombre sound qualities – the time and space between Beethoven, a composer for whom Sculthorpe to the drone of the didjeridu and to the second movement, In the Valley. By way of its plucked notes, and the resonances within the had previously shown little sympathy. figurations of the Balinese gamelan. If there are contrast, From High Hills is calmly lyrical, its instrument – in contrast to the more European, Nevertheless, the resonances of history have feelings of regret in some of the music, this is melody actually conceived in my schooldays. The notably Spanish, tradition of developing 4 5 idiomatic note patterns with less focus on the second of my pieces to be influenced by the Sue-Ellen Paulsen concerto The Great Memory, which was inner beauty of the sound itself.’ sun-laden music of tropical Bali,’ says Sculthorpe. composed especially for her. She has also Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra’s Principal Cello From Tabuh Tabuhan, for strings and percussion, featured as soloist with the Tasmanian In 1989 I made my first visit to Kakadu National Sue-Ellen Paulsen studied in Vienna with André was commissioned by the then Australian Symphony Orchestra in CD recordings of Park, in the north of Australia.