bass clarinet and piano (2008-24)

If physicist Julian Barbour is right we all live ‘in Platonia’. Platonia is his name for the stack of moments that constitute the sum total of all existence and time. In Barbour’s view time does not ‘flow’; instead, the space-time block is made up of an infinite number of ‘instants’ – Barbour calls them ‘time-capsules’ – that each contain an entire slice, a cross-section, of the world as it is. Including that micro-moment of our thoughts, which, when taken together with all the other micro-moments, supply us with our sense of time ‘flowing’. Barbour’s 1999 book the End of Time [1] lays out these ideas in a non-technical form. I have no idea if he is right, and neither does Barbour, these things not being readily testable, but it is a very plausible suggestion as to how everything might be constituted. And, I decided when I first – semi-comprehendingly – read the book, well worth writing a piece about. So I have.

To anyone who has an awareness of my works’ titles it will be obvious that I see music as more than just a passive collection of sounds. While I do not believe that music can express or emote, I do believe that it can meaningfully demonstrate and reveal, in the formal sense of those words. That is, I attempt to make my works analogues of forms external to music, either by organising sonic behaviours to resemble those of extra-musical phenomena, or creating musical arguments that are congruent to some other narrative – linear or otherwise – such as one finds in literature, or science, or signing systems; a very Lévi-Straussian intention, that last. So, in in Platonia I initially set out to create a work that manifested the same, complicated, quantum-physical, landscape as Barbour’s Platonia, complete with red-, blue-, and green-mist harmonic fields …only to be defeated by the sheer impossibility of doing this subtle world justice. So I reverted to Plan B: to address the concept of ‘time-capsules’ in structural terms. What this entailed was much more manageable, resulting in something vaguely suite-like, a succession of fully-formed musical vignettes, that each offered a snapshot of a particular existential moment. I started off with a notion – drawn from a strange hypnopompic vision – of Platonia as an infinite night-garden with a fuzzy and unreliable contiguity: a kind of constantly re-organising quilt of tiny locales; this I could do, and in Platonia slowly came into being. I was struck, during the course of writing, of how pareidolic this idea was: imparting local definedness to a few tiny fragments of a much larger, and vaguer, expanse. As it is, the ‘tiny fragments’ have a collected duration of nearly half an hour. I started off with twelve of them, but it became clear as I worked that two of them were in fact different expressions of the same idea, and the piece ended up consisting of eleven ‘time-capsules’. In some ways, eleven is a better number than twelve in that it allows the sixth – starshadow, for piano alone – to be the pivotal section. Despite the lack of clear teleology in the unfolding, the structure is fully prescribed, and cannot be played in differing orders. That concept I will be exploring in my next-but-one piece, vagantes for solo piano.

In Platonia suffered somewhat from being repeatedly tackled and then reshelved. After years of vacillation, the work only really came alive in 2023, when Alex Raineri and Drew Gilchrist came up with the idea of doing the premiere of my 45’ piano arch passing bells (both day and night and a coda, …nox est perpetua una dormienda) together with the Australian premiere of the final iso-étude, the effort to return to the cities of the sane, in a concert at the Brisbane Music Festival, Alex’s astonishing shop window for young musical talent. This was to have taken place in December 2023; we would have spent the two month period beforehand rehearsing and refining the performances. As it was, a cancer diagnosis and my near-immediate surgery threw those plans into complete disarray and we disappointedly postponed this exciting project until late 2024. I suggested, however, that the dissimilarity in size, and lack of common expressive ground between those two pieces made the concert a bit unbalanced, and I proposed that the program be fleshed-out by the addition of a finished in Platonia; the newer bass clarinet and piano instrumentation made it a suitable addition to bridge the gap between passing bells and the effort to return to the cities of the sane.

As the program note says:

“…time itself sometimes employs metaphor…”

from Villa Stellar XXXV, George Barker. Faber, London 1978.

What are we to make of time? Julian Barbour believes that our perception of time as an arrow is an illusion; instead, he has posited a vast metaverse called Platonia, a configuration space that contains every possible permutation of every iota in the cosmos. In this unimaginably large landscape all Nows, conceivable and inconceivable, past and future, co-exist as point instants – ‘reality-slices’. Each is complete with the mind-contents of every sentient being that inhabits them, and this provides the false perception of continuity. He calls these point instants time capsules, and I have borrowed this idea in the form of structurally-related but seemingly unconnected vignettes.

I began in Platonia shortly after moving from the Melbourne suburb of Flemington to near-rural Brown Hill in Ballarat. I was very struck by the contrast of sound levels, particularly once the sun went down, between rowdy Flemington and tranquil Ballarat, although as time went on I became increasingly aware that Brown Hill was not so much quiet as liminally frenetic with wildlife noises, a soundworld that has crept into some of in Platonia’s textures.

After having put it aside to complete more urgent projects, I resumed the score as part of my series of iso-étude pieces, which are the annals of my sequestered creativity during lockdown and after. It was initially intended to be a piano piece, but I belatedly realised that it would work much better with a second, contrasting voice, and recast it as a duo for my friends Drew Gilchrist and Alex Raineri, bass clarinetist and pianist, respectively.

For some reason – where I wrote it? my being an extreme night-owl? – I came to envisage Platonia as a night-garden. The piece consists of eleven time capsules:

I Somnambulantly – II Ruminatively – III Sublunar Stride – IV Arborescent – V Echolalic – VI Starshadow – VII Stridulatory – VIII Platonia – IX Rotating Voids – X Monofilaments – XI Now (is the only moment) [2]

In my musical metaphor the sections are loosely formal structures inhering in a boundless Platonia like pareidolic faces discerned in a cloud.

In some ways, in Platonia is a warning against hubris. The version I set out to write in 2008 turned out to be vastly beyond my capabilities, then or now. Over the succeeding years its ambition diminished, eventually to the point where I could actually come up with a reasonable attempt to manifest its ideas. I tell young composers that a good compositional aim is to tackle something beyond your current skills so as to extend them, but also, that it is wise to choose a project that is realistic. How ironic that I failed to follow my own advice. It will not be clear until in Platonia is performed whether my creative reset entirely worked.

[1] The End of Time, Julian Barbour. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London 1999.

[2] sem n’hak kon, in Romulan, apparently.