FourthWall Arts CD
1) the effort to return to the cities of the sane (2022) for bass clarinet (12’)
2) in Platonia (2023-4) for bass clarinet and piano (26’)
3) passing bells (2003-20) for piano (50’)
One of the things that has always impressed me about my friend Alex Raineri, beyond his extraordinary musicality and pianism, his ridiculous stamina, and his tendency to repertoire omniscience, is his ambition, not least for his Brisbane Music Festival. For example, he and Drew Gilchrist began a project back in December 2024, to record my three pieces specially written for them in Alex’s musical ‘crib’, FourthWall Arts studio in central Brisbane. This truly mammoth undertaking consists of making both CD and video versions of the three works, which taken together last more than 90 minutes.
The effort to return to the cities of the sane, or as it very quickly got nicknamed for brevity, tetrocos, takes its title from a sentence in Daniel Swift’s book the Bughouse, which treats of the incarceration of Ezra Pound in St. Elizabeth’s Hospital Washington DC – a mental institution. As Swift says of Pound, “this was perhaps the world’s most unorthodox literary salon: convened by a fascist, held in a lunatic asylum…”. To be honest, the more I have read about Pound over the years, and his own output, the more alienated I have become by his poetry, music (yes, three radio operas!), politics, absurd economics, and appalling social and racial views. His aesthetics may have been instrumental in creating the modernist milieu, but he comes over as an unremittingly obnoxious human, and will never be the subject of a work of mine. The fact is, I chose this title almost as a repudiation of Pound; it is descriptive of the other residents of St. Elizabeth’s, the sad circumstances of those who genuinely were mentally unwell, as opposed to Pound’s convenient assumption of ‘lunacy’. The full quote is: “In the cabinets are displays of tableware and china from the old hospital. Beneath the sign ‘Art at St Elizabeth’s’ … are lopsided figurines in glazed clay, a teddy bear, a bus, a sunken house. They are marked ‘favourite places’, ‘favourite animals’ and ‘trusted people’. … the activity of making was held to be curative, and what is celebrated here is not the objects but that activity, long ago, and the effort to return to the cities of the sane.”
In the vernacular, ‘lunacy’ is less an illness and more a mode of being, conceptually irresolvable, incurable. As a result of the implicit tensions in this material, tetrocos is one of my most uncomfortable pieces. It presents a constant oscillation between stability and instability (or, if you wish, ‘sanity’ and ‘madness’), and never ever quite settles on one or the other. The music has a sense of raggedness, a not-quite-under-control quality that masks its – intendedly indiscernible – structural complexity.
By his own admission, this piece was Drew’s first engagement with such a level of modernism. I wrote tetrocos because, having forbidden Drew to perform an old piece of mine that I had no wish to have ‘outed’, I felt that I should compensate him with something specifically his. After offering several ideas, this was the one Drew settled on, and I duly wrote this exercise in unquietude. Over the course of several performances Drew has come closer and closer to nailing the material and mood of the piece, and his performance in Brisbane was a triumph.
Passing bells began life about eighteen months after the terrible events of 9/11. It immediately struck me, watching it all unfold in real-time on TV (is it a curse to be empowered to eavesdrop on history as it happens?), that Western Culture would never be the same, that the drawbridges and portcullises would close, most likely irreversibly. And so it has ensued. A year or so later Daryl Buckley asked me for a piece for Marilyn Nonken to perform in an ELISION concert in 2004. At the time I was re-reading Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror, subtitled ‘the calamitous 14th century’ and, like many of her readers, was struck by the parallels between those disaster-ridden times and our chaotic present(s). A Distant Mirror started life as a book primarily about the Black Death; I noticed a line that said “(T)he passing bells rang all day and all night … because sextons were anxious to obtain their fees while they [still] could.” That urgency of needing to maintain subsistence while all around you crumbled resonated strongly with me, and shaped the way the original passing bells: night piece unfolded.
I returned to the piece in 2019, fully a decade and a half later, and wrote the companion piece, passing bells: day for Alex Raineri, who premiered it at his Brisbane Music Festival later in the same year. There is a recording of this performance viewable on the website tab, and it won the piece the 2020 APRA/AMCOS Work of the Year: Chamber Music Award. However, contemplating these two paired flanks of the work, I realised that the ending of passing bells: night was not final enough for a work on this scale, of this solemnity. What it needed as the end-stop was the final descent into sleep; as Catullus put it …nox est perpetua una dormienda, which Raleigh rendered as ‘The sun may set and rise, But we, contrariwise, Sleep, after our short light, One everlasting night’. I began this final phase of the work at the beginning of 2020. Then in February, sadly, my mother died, and I decided to dedicate the entire passing bells score to her memory. Only days later COVID upended everybody’s life. Sequestered for months in my new house with a constant backdrop of building work, not to mention the chilly absence of mid-winter heating, I tried to forge a music that expressed, or rather, inexpressed, that sense of final descent into oblivion, which I interpreted as a kind of incremental musical amnesia. The grim irony was not lost on me that my completion of the work was facilitated by an enforced, frightening, and open-ended, quarantine on everybody, an echo of the continuous and terrifying jeopardy of the Black Death. So the writing of the work ended under the same conditions that the book it was based on described. Or at least the modern sanitised equivalent.
The complete passing bells, at 50 minutes, is one of my three largest-scale piano works, making a loose trilogy with the Piano Sonata (2015-6: 100’) and vagantes (2024-5: 50’). As a result of the rather unique genesis of the piece, its music is dominated by an alternation of febrile turbulence, solemn intoning of (my version of) ‘plainchant’, flurries both distraught and delusive, and constantly humming bell sounds. Alex’s performance, in 2024, of the entire passing bells brought home to me what a freight of anxiety the piece carries: its impact on me was momentous. I cannot remark on the quality of the music, but the piece tells its own story with a directness unusual in my output. I am very grateful to Alex for this revelatory account, and seeing it released on CD will be a major landmark.
The combination of these three particular pieces is not arbitrary. I had already written the effort to return to the cities of the sane and passing bells when Alex announced that he and Drew were intending to play the two pieces together in a concert. I immediately saw that this would be an interesting but seriously asymmetric – lopsided – and rather focusless, program, just tying the two pieces together happenstancely – the only connection between the two works that I could see was their respective melancholies. The solution, I suggested, was for me to write a third piece that married the other two both musically and, if possible, thematically: a work for bass clarinet and piano, sitting somewhere vaguely between madness and plague …and hopefully lightening the tone somewhat. Not the simplest of asks.
That ‘somewhere’ turned out to be ‘everywhere’, in the form of temporal physics, specifically Julian Barbour’s ‘time capsule’ model of the cosmos as a vast static configuration space; what he calls a Platonia. In his book the End of Time Barbour offers an explanation of Time in which everything – the total cosmos, beginning to end – is a single object, constituted of an infinity of what he calls ‘time capsules’, each a slice of that single object, each a kind of instantaneous cross-section of reality containing everything that inheres in that sliver, including our consciousness. But of course it is contradictory to talk about ‘instantaneous’, as the whole character of this model is without time; time is a perception embodied in the structure of the cosmic whole, a constituent. Our sense of time ‘passing’ is just an emergent feature of this embodiment. And besides, as Relativity makes clear, the notion of an instantaneous ‘now’ across the entire universe is meaningless.
At the time I wrote In Platonia, however, I was recovering from a major operation, and not in the mood for tightly technical composition. Instead, I imagined Platonia as a dreamed experience, a noctuary, only unified by being present in the mind of some e(x)ternal being …the Grand Simulator, maybe. In a drawer, I had the residue of an older piece, one that had never quite cohered, and it struck me that I could rework this into an exercise in dream logic whereby its lack of unity became a virtue. Of course, in the process of realisation all kinds of cogency crept in – a piece without a ‘web of resemblances’ would not be a piece of mine – providing the listener with plenty of aural context, but the basic feux-follet fantasy of the music remained (or so it seems to me, at least).
The eventuating score turned out to be one of my most involved, with massively difficult material for both players. Not least because the other primary influence that I decided to bring to in Platonia was Free Jazz, especially of the late ‘60s variety. Most of my ensemble works are at least covertly coloured by my fondness for this underrated music (which I have discussed in more detail elsewhere), but in in Platonia it is foregrounded, particularly in the bass clarinet writing. Compared to tetrocos the clarinet material is less polarised, more directly lyrical, but there is still an obsessive busyness, an unwillingness to hold back, and a blurty gesturality that is, I think, characteristic of that ‘60s music. A horror vacui, that, if I’m honest, probably stems from my state of fairly permanent anxiety …like everyone else, these days, I daresay.
Heard in sequence, I find there is a very pleasing sense of growth as the three pieces unfold. I did not purposefully write them to constitute a perceptual arc, but to my ear there is a sense of cogency in their continuous argument – admittedly, most likely through the simple factor of Alex and Drew’s native musicality. I certainly did my best to make the bass clarinet writing in tetrocos and in Platonia as different as I could, reflecting the pieces’ different sensibilities, and the piano writing in in Platonia and passing bells likewise. There is also an almost directional character to the way the textures thin across the three pieces, from the initial hyperbolic intensity of tetrocos to the despairing emptiness of …nox…; a progressive calming that contributes to a sense of affective and intellectual development across the trilogy. Only time will tell if anyone else concurs, of course.
At this stage, with the recordings ‘in the bag’, we are searching for a label. This could take some time, so don’t expect to see CD announced in the near future – although you never know. I will blog again as soon as anything definite transpires.
Postscript: Alex mentioned to me the other day that he is planning to perform the complete passing bells in Berlin later in the year, a really exciting prospect. More on that at a future date.