piano (2004/2020)

for Alex Raineri

and

in memory of Audrey Dench, died 19 January 2020

In the pre-modern age, the bell was tolled at a person’s passing, the “passing bell” … it was usually the heaviest tenor-bell that was thus rung. Altogether, a mediaeval city was clamorous with the ringing of bells of all kinds … There were regular and long-standing customs in the ringing, a kind of language, to tell people who were passing … for an hour on the tenor for a man, on the fourth [bell] for a woman, on the first [bell] for a child. Other customs: often nine strokes for a man, six for a woman, followed by the number of the dead person’s age. – adapted from A.L Rowse, 1971

The passing bells rang all day and all night… – Barbara Tuchman, A Distant Mirror

The mottoes on old bells, other than those which were dictated by the reverential feeling of the Middle Ages, comprise instances of vanity, ignorance, and silliness, such as would hardly be expected in these matters. Sometimes a kind of moral aphorism is attempted, with more or less success. … One, very short, bids us to “Embrace trew musick”. – Catholic World: Bell Gossip

My job is to make meaning. To make meaning in a meaningless world. Ceremonies don’t just fall from the sky, we make them all up. – Grayson Perry

nobis cum semel occidit brevis lux, nox est perpetua una dormienda – Catullus 5

'The sun may set and rise, But we, contrariwise, Sleep, after our short light, One everlasting night'. – Sir Walter Raleigh, after Catullus 5

passing bells is a composite work, linking the Middle Ages with our times. Over about 50 minutes it ostensibly covers twenty-four hours in the cyclic rhythm of mediaeval life, from midnight through to midnight ...perhaps someone’s last twenty-four hours. The opening section, Vigils, is intended to recall the quiet intensity of the Great Silence of overnight monastic Prayer Watches: the Religious earnestly craving communion with their god. That supernature is fictitious makes this yearning all the more pitiable – nothing was ever going to come of their prayer. The futility of the Vigils leads directly into day, structured, with liberties, following the seven Prayer Hours, or Offices, of the mediaeval day, from Lauds at Dawn to Compline in the evening. Bells obsessively toll throughout the busy day, expressive of the permanent anxiety of coexistence with the Black Death while still pursuing as normal a life as possible. Whereas day intersperses the bells with the frantic pursuit of the everyday, the following night section presents them in a landscape of enfolding silence, amidst the terrible vacant umbra of the mediaeval overnight hours. While writing night I imagined a solitary traveller wandering through the darkness, gradually being numbed by the desolation and cold, hearing the bells ringing long before encountering the barely-illuminated churches. As Barbara Tuchman reminds us, “the passing bells rang all day and all night...” The work ends with an extended postscript, titled after Catullus: ...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'. After the frigid dark night of the soul, this is the long sleep of oblivion: the music loses definition and gradually descends into stygian emptiness …with a final moment of ‘near-death-experience’ clarity.

Of course, there are already innumerable piano works that reference bell sounds, making my intention to add yet another to the repertoire a quixotic endeavour. I tend not to be interested in concrete imagery – you do not find much of the picturesque in my work. So the Bells in passing bells are metaphorical, the bell-like behaviours memetic in their generality. Not irrelevantly, there is a homage to Orwell in the score: “…the clocks were striking thirteen”.

For all the commentary, the work is primarily an abstract mosaic of stitched-together material, and even the bell-sound provenance and Gregorian chant borrowings are subsumed into a carefully-controlled integrated architecture. The work is structured as a myriad of tiny capsules of experience (well, 122), some fleeting and lightweight and others of more moment – like life in general. If they cohere, it is because each cell belongs to just one of a set of affective threads: seven in day and seven in night. How you listen to it will depend on your preference: for narrative or for structural logic. ...Or both, of course.

I started passing bells in 2004, when the events of 9/11 still hung heavily on us all. Seeing it all unfold live on TV I immediately felt that in that moment Western values were terminated, it was a cusp in history where nothing would ever be the same again. Since then an almost daily litany of atrocities has tended to blunt our sense of outrage; like so many of us, I am constantly saddened by our brutal, indifferent, and nihilistic times. As a composer I feel impotent in the face of this grim world; clearly passing bells is an expression of that pessimism, albeit hopefully a resilient one. As the artist Grayson Perry once observed: “My job is to make meaning. To make meaning in a meaningless world”. The final work on the piece was done in 2020 during the first lockdown under the COVID-19 ‘plague’ – an eerily apposite bookending – and as I worked on the closing pages of the piece I heard the sad news that my mother, Audrey Dench, had died aged 96, and the work is now dedicated to her memory. Over December and January 2024-5 I fine-tuned the score for Alex Raineri to record, in the full glare of nascent Trumpism.

passing bells is therefore a single work, despite consisting of two contrasting episodes, day and night. These two segments are sufficiently distinctive, however, and have such different moods, that I decided to allow them to also be performable separately, to facilitate concert programming. There are scores for the day and night movements under separate tabs. Performance of the entire arch is, nonetheless, preferable.

Historically, the passing bells: night section of this work was written for Marilyn Nonken to perform in 2004, at the request of Daryl Buckley, artistic director of ELISION. Alex Raineri asked that I finish passing bells: day for his December 2019 Brisbane Music Festival closing concert, a request I was pleased to satisfy, and the work is now also dedicated to him. passing bells: day won the 2020 APRA/AMCOS Art Music Award for Work of the Year: Chamber Music, I’m sure largely as a result of Alex’s compelling 2019 performance, which can be watched on the Recordings tab. Subsequently, I drew together the entire arch of the passing bells structure and completed the score in 2020. After some delays Alex gave the première of this complete version of passing bells at the Brisbane Music Festival in December 2024, and recorded the definitive score in January 2025. I now declare the whole project fulfilled.