Rebecca Scully premieres Resuscitatîve; other novelties; and a recap
At long last my 2021 solo for contrabass, Resuscitatîve, has been played! And by its co-dedicatee, no less. On 28 April 2024 contrabass players from all over gathered at the Elder Conservatorium for a series of “recitals, presentations, masterclasses, and mass-bass ensembles”, in the course of which my old friend Rebecca Scully gave a concert consisting solely of my piece. Bec shares the dedication of Resuscitatîve with my other bass-playing friend, Miranda Hill, who I understand is planning to record the piece later in the year. At the moment only the score is available, here, but as soon as there is a recorded version that will also appear.
After my cancer operation last year I was rather slow to recover, and during the healing process I embarked on the revision and completion of a work that had been sitting on my shelf since 2011. Originally intended as a solo piano piece, in Platonia is now for bass clarinet and piano and takes its title from Julian Barbour’s extraordinary book The End of Time (which he recently updated in The Janus Point) in which he offers a properly scientific description of Platonia as “a universe … composed of timeless instants[,] in the sense of configurations of matter that do not endure” (wiki). In this view, each timeless instant contains our perception of being in that instant – Barbour calls them time capsules – and our notion of ‘time’ emerges from the sum of all those perceptions …but time does not ‘flow’. 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)
The manuscript version of the entire piece can now be viewed here; this is untransposed, and serves as a placeholder while Andrew Bernard and I prepare the engraved, transposed score. The work was written for my friends Drew Gilchrist and Alex Raineri, bass clarinetist and pianist respectively, who will give the premiere late in 2024 or early 2025.
While composing the last sections of in Platonia another idea presented itself to me, more or less complete. This is unusual for me, normally I brood on and refine ideas for years, even decades. But this one was abrupt; I found a remark in a review of Alan Garner’s novel Treacle Walker that stopped me in my tracks: “It’s a glimpse of a world suffused with magic, of which our own day-to-day experience seems to be a flickering instantiation… ”. While Garner’s novel, for all its brilliance, is predicated on a very British readership (a Beano-like comic is a major plot element), this review catches what is for me a deep, universal insight, that much art, music particularly, offers precisely a sense of vastness of which the quotidian experience is merely a sliver. It is perhaps the same intuition that inclines people like me to wish, futilely, that Platonism were true. At the same moment that the idea of the piece came to me, I realised that it inevitably had to be written for the 17th/18th C harpsichord, an instrument whose timbral world is the epitome of ‘…flickering instantiation…’.
Over a period of six weeks I brought the work into being; Andrew Bernard engraved it; and he made a MIDI realisation. The work can be found here; once a live performance has taken place, that will be made available also. It has a slight kinship with 17th C harpsichord works: the first half can be thought of as a modern analogue to an unmeasured prelude, and the second as a Frescobaldian toccata. The piece is dedicated to Luca Quintavalle; he and I have been discussing my writing a piece for him since before COVID, and I am particularly pleased to have now – unexpectedly – delivered the goods.
Having finished ‘…flickering instantiation…’ I took a moment to pause and take stock. Since the beginning of lockdown in Ballarat, in March 2020, I have written fully sixteen pieces, several on a grand scale. This is, by my standards, fecundity run wild. There’s the already-discussed Resuscitatîve and in Platonia. I wrote luminous and dark integers, two solo vibraphone pieces; ghosts of motion for my old friend Richard Haynes’ clarinet d’amore; I completed the 45’ solo piano work passing bells for Alex Raineri, thus concluding the arch that I began in 2004 with night, and continued in 2019 with day (which won an APRA/AMCOS Award). I wrote the last of an Ordre of small piano pieces, AB7. When ANAM offered commissions to write works for their players I responded with un petit mot crabe-c’est-ma-faute, a piece of exoticism for trombone and percussion. I followed that with yet another enormous piano movement, chronology horizons; a half-hour concerto, again for Richard Haynes’ clarinet d’amore, called solace of articulation; and a solo bassoon piece for the excellent James Aylward, Arcanabula. For Drew Gilchrist’s bass clarinet I wrote the effort to return to the cities of the sane. Somewhere in between, I wrote the piano piece Quiescence for BP for my old friend Bruce Petherick (Hi, Bruce!), and 〈ʀ〉emote for Thomas Giles’ soprano saxophone. This isn’t even all of them: I finished the Sonata de Jager by penning PdeJ3: laminar flow, yet another piano piece. The scores of almost all these works are viewable via my Publications page.
Next I will move onto silence after Rodney Hall, for Daniel Sclafani’s tenor saxophone; vagantes after Helen Waddell, for James Iman, elegiac and expansive, my fourth big piano work this decade; and 10^62 for the redoubtable Thomas Giles’ saxophone orchestra. And that’s just for the rest of 2024 (and, realistically, some of 2025).
So, when someone says to me, what did you do during COVID and after?, I can honestly say, I wrote my arse off.