The iso-études (2020-22)

1. Luminous (vibraphone) (12′) (2020) [score published by Smith Publications, Sharon, VT]
2. Dark integers (vibraphone) (12′) (2020) [score published by Smith Publications, Sharon, VT]
3. ghosts of motion (clarinet d’amore) (11′) (2020)
4. Arcanabula (bassoon) (14′) (2020)
5. in Platonia (bass clarinet and piano) (~25′) (2008–24)
6. Resuscitatîve (contrabass) (12′) (2021)
7. un petit mot crabe-c’est-ma-faute (trombone & untuned percussion) (13′) (2021)
8. chronology horizons (piano) (~32′) (2021)
9. the effort to return to the cities of the sane (bass clarinet) (10′) (2022)

The scores, more detailed notes, and, where available, recordings of these works can be found under their specific links on the Publications page.

iso– in the sense that (a) they were written during the ongoing period of partly voluntary self-isolation during the pandemic in Ballarat; and (b) as in “a combining form meaning equal”.

The iso-études are a series of distantly related works for various instruments and ensembles that I wrote over the period March 2020 to October 2022. Four of them were included in my successful application for an Australia Council Resilience Grant in 2020. They are not, in the Toopian sense, a “cycle”, nor do they possess any grand collective unity beyond being written consecutively and sharing a certain perspective. *

I am using the term étude somewhat loosely here, in that not all are for a single instrument, or presented as an exercise in virtuosity …although all are highly, almost flamboyantly, tricky to execute on their various instruments. (I like flamboyant…) Their étude-ness emerges from my treating the pieces as a kind of open-ended laboratory for exploring subtly different aspects of my compositional language, hence Iso-(a). What makes them Iso-(b) is that, being written very close together they share many elements, from harmony to gestural scope to ambition.

I embarked on this group of works without any idea as to how many of them there would be, or when I would be able to call a halt to the growing list. They were not the only pieces I wrote over the period, but the other ones belonged to different groups – the Sonata de Jager, for one – and are treated of elsewhere. Lockdown was tough for everyone, and I think that some of that angst is reflected in the tone of the music, which is, undeniably, somewhat expressionist, whether as melancholy in ghosts of motion or paroxysm in the effort to return to the cities of the sane. Two of the pieces, despite the collective études title, are extensive; both in Platonia and chronology horizons are universes in themselves. I expect the former to be slightly under half an hour, and the latter slightly over, but until both have been performed those remain estimates.

My original plan was to stick to solo works, as I inevitably get asked to write many of those. Writing for one instrument is a quite particular exercise: that instrument, whatever it is, is required to carry the entire argument and present the detail both at a local and global level. While this is nothing new in the realm of solo piano, it is quite a novel requirement of, say, the vibraphone or contrabass, and – as any composer will attest – hardly a cakewalk for any instrument. But when I was accepted into the ANAM Set group of composers, each writing a work for a specific ANAM performance student, I chose to write for a duo, trombone and percussion; as the work was written under the shadow of COVID it self-identified as an iso-étude. Having let one duo into the group freed me to elaborate the solo piano sketches for in Platonia into a duo for bass clarinet and piano.

As COVID has now – hopefully! – faded into the environment, I can declare this list definitive, and complete. I could have included more works in the group – the solo bass clarinet piece I have planned for Carl Rosman, Sparcle is a litil particular of fire, being one I considered – but adding these later works would have diluted the specificity of the iso-études title.

(1) Luminous came about because Sylvia Smith of Smith Publications contacted me in early 2020 to see if I would like to contribute a piece to her proposed volume celebrating the centenary of the vibraphone, Vibraphone Century. We had previously been in touch over the possibility of writing a solo snaredrum piece; on that occasion I concluded that the snaredrum simply didn’t offer the kind of parametric scope I would require to write something I could live with so ultimately I declined. The vibraphone on the other hand, interested me greatly—I have made extensive use of the vibes in previous works, not least the opening of flux, and a solo work seemed eminently worthwhile. I managed to complete the score by 3 September 2020. Luminous takes its name from a mathematics-related short story by the eminent Australian SF writer Greg Egan, in which the name ‘luminous’ refers to an innovative photonic computer, one that uses light as a medium rather than electrons. This notion, of an internally glimmering computer, made the choice of vibraphone for the piece almost inevitable – what other instrument has so ‘luminous’ a tone? Egan has written several of my all-time favourite stories, and Luminous is one such; another is Permutation City [here on Score Follower]. More detail about Luminous can be found on its page, here.

To my surprise I enjoyed creating Luminous even more than I expected, and as I was writing another possible vibraphone piece suggested itself to me, one that used a similar vocabulary but in a distinctively different way. I was aware that Egan had written a ‘sequel’ to the Luminous story, set in the same world, called Dark integers, and it seemed appropriate to me to name this new piece after that subsequent story. Once Luminous and (3) ghosts of motion were written I launched directly into (2) Dark integers and this second piece was finished by 12 October 2020.

One day, late in 2020, my old friend the clarinetist Richard Haynes rang me from his home in Switzerland and asked if I would be interested in writing a work for his newly developed modern clarinet d’amore. As my second favourite instrumental family (after the flutes, of course!) I am always open to writing for all sizes of clarinet, but this was a new situation, writing for an instrument I’d never actually heard. Richard described the clarinet d’amore and its sound in some detail and I felt that I could imagine the ineffable otherness of its sound well enough to engage with the project. I decided that, rather than utilise the suite of extended techniques that characterise modern clarinet music, I would focus on the ur-sound of the clarinet d’amore, given that all of us would be hearing it for the first time. The result was (3) ghosts of motion.

I also intended the work as a small homage to my old friend Robert Schuck. I had included a Tombeau in his memory in my 2014-5 Piano Sonata, but I had also long wanted to write a final clarinet piece as if for Bob. He was a pioneer owner of a basset clarinet in B♭; the clarinet d’amore is a form of basset clarinet; it seemed apropos that this piece be dedicated to his memory—a final farewell.

The score was finished on 17 September 2020. Richard played ghosts of motion in Bern mere hours before Switzerland locked-down in December 2020 and subsequently recorded it for CD. The happy experience of working on the work with him led us to consider a more concertante work for the clarinet d’amore, with an ensemble of flute(s), bassoon, trumpet(s), percussion, piano, and string trio, which I duly wrote between October 2022 and May 2023. This larger work is called solace of articulation, and the score can be viewed here. A performance is not scheduled …yet.

My colleague and webmeister Andrew Bernard made the decision to engrave ghosts of motion using Lilypond, and that score can be viewed here; I think this was the last work he created in Lilypond, all subsequent engravure was done using his newly-acquired Dorico. Richard Haynes has released a CD, also titled ghosts of motion, on the Cubus label. To buy a copy please contact him via his website: https://richardehaynes.com.

Now, a mea culpa. I have, over decades, protested that I was not fond of the bassoon. Until, that is, James Aylward visited my studio and played my oboe piece ‘e/meth on his lovely instrument. The sound was much more sumptuous and expressive than I had been prepared for, to the extent that I immediately started to ponder a new solo bassoon piece. For me it is a sine qua non that the piece one writes be congruent with the character of the instrument one writes it for, and I patiently waited for an idea to strike me that was suitable for bassoon. Which turned out to be (4) Arcanabula. This was a neologism that I came up with by analogy with incunabula and imagined meaning “the earliest stages or first traces in the development” of some concealed symbolic meaning. Of course, my very first step was to search online for prior usage and to my amusement the word turned out to have a very specific meaning in the world of gaming: a wizard’s spellbook. (Never mind the confused fake Latin… I treat the word as a collective plural, not a feminine singular). The wizard connection stuck with me, and I started to see the bassoon as a wizard’s staff, or rod, a sophisticated and puissant ceremonial adjunct that doubled as a musical instrument. So far, so playful. The slightly whimsical tone did not hinder me from writing a very structured, if rhapsodic work. After the enforced 12-noteyness of the vibes pieces, and the relative austerity of ghosts of motion, it was a real pleasure to be able to dig deep into the toolbox of microtonality and provoke some really sonorous multiphonic playing from James. I completed it on 28 November 2020.

Immediately after finishing Arcanabula I pulled out the sketches of an older work, in Platonia for solo piano, with a view to reworking them as a bass clarinet and piano duo. However, almost as soon as I had started (5) in Platonia I heard from the great Melbourne bassist Miranda Hill that it was time to begin her new solo contrabass piece (6) Resuscitatîve. Resuscitatîve came about after some rather desultory chat with Miranda a year or two earlier about my writing a piece for her. At that early stage I had no definite ideas for a work for contrabass beyond the sense that I did not want to write anything that resembled Theraps or the Trittico per G.S. A few months later, while comparing notes with my composer colleague David Murray, he remarked that he was planning to write a bass piece. My immediate response was “best of luck” …but in that same instant a mental drawer opened itself and sitting inside I found a fully-formed idea for a contrabass piece of my own, and even the title, Resuscitatîve. It happens like that sometimes—a work presents itself as a fait accompli – all that remains to be done is all the work.

The idea was one of those incongruities that suggest potential for something emergent; in this case the collision of the words resuscitate, as in CPR, and recitative, as in, well, “a style of delivery (much used in operas, oratorios, and cantatas) in which a singer is allowed to adopt the rhythms and delivery of ordinary speech,” (Wiki). Or, as I expressed it to myself when I got around to setting it down: Combine the inégalité of recitative with the sense of a slowing, fading, pulse …and back. I’m not naturally inclined to write for string instruments, let alone for contrabass, so it took a fair amount of careful preparation and research before I felt able to embark on what ended up being in effect a ‘symphonic poem for solo bass’.

A few years prior I had embarked on a thorough rewrite of my 1984-5 string quartet strangeness at the suggestion of string instrument expert Rebecca Scully. I had, for decades, planned to actualise the original concept of the work from the ‘80s, that of a huge, continent-like, single movement, and Bec encouraged me to finally see this idea through. That work is now known simply as my String Quartet and is more-or-less complete (I’ve put off the final tweaking and proofing until someone shows an interest in playing it) at around 65′; the score can be viewed here. Bec is, at heart, a contrabass player, and gave Resuscitatîve its premiere at the Adelaide Bass Day event in April 2024; she deservedly shares the dedication with Miranda.

Ironically, though, having started on Resuscitatîve my plans were immediately upended, once again, when I was informed that I had been selected to be one of the 67 composers constituting the ANAM Set. The Australian National Academy of Music came up with the idea of pairing a single Australian composer with each of their 67 students, all advanced instrumental performers preparing for lives as orchestral professionals. The 67 composers are collectively known as The ANAM Set. The upshot of being chosen was that I was required to immediately write a new work for the instrument I had nominated, trombone, with a backdrop of untuned percussion. I have always had a great affection for flute and trombone, I suppose at least in part for their closeness to the human voice, but also because of the subtle unmediated physicality of their sound production—no intervening reeds or valves. I have already written at some length about the resulting piece, (7) un petit mot crabe-c’est-ma-faute, accompanied by images, score(s), and recording, here.

After the intense experience of writing un petit mot crabe-c’est-ma-faute I picked up Resuscitatîve again, and managed to complete the work fairly swiftly, finishing it in August 2021 – a mere month after the crabe. These were all works that had durations of about 10-15’; the exception, in Platonia, nonetheless consists of eleven 2-3’ sections. The sweep of producing all these works distanced me from my plan to continue in Platonia, and, although I had done a substantial amount of work on it, I felt rather detached from its soundworld and felt I needed yet more time to adequately sort through my ideas for the work. It really only 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 [Catullus]) together with the Australian premiere of the final iso-étude, (9) the effort to return to the cities of the sane (see below) 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, my cancer diagnosis and 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.

Post-surgery, I decided that my recuperation project would be finishing in Platonia. I began this process in November 2023, and the process continued right through to completion in May 2024, at which point Andrew Bernard took the score over and engraved it as a transposed score. The manuscript and engravure can be found, eventually to be accompanied by a recording, here.

But back to 2021. Having revived in Platonia …and shelved it again, I felt it was time to revert to my preferred scale, 20 plus minutes. I began a new piano work, (8) chronology horizons, in September 2021, with a view to entering it in a competition for new piano works to be played during the Sydney Piano Competition. I abandoned that plan fairly promptly as it became clear the work was clearly going to pan out much too big for the entry requirement. Acknowledging this led me to fashion a much more interesting piece than I might have written. Just to be clear, as I understand it a chronology horizon is a putative zone, in black holes and time-machines, where an eddy forms between two contrary closed time-like curves. It is a zone where causality is undefined. I’m sure Andrew will correct me, good mathematician and physicist that he is, but I can only make manifest such ideas to the extent that I understand them; the piece is my limited vision of a temporally-ambiguous arc.

Chronology Horizons may be long by the standards of the early 19th C études by composers like Czerny, Thalberg, and Chopin, but is of a piece with my favourites, the Alkan Op.39 Twelve Études in All the Minor Keys. The Alkan set contains both the Solo Symphony, and the Solo Concerto, which has a 30’ opening movement, one of the greatest – and most remorseless – of all piano works. It’s immodest, I know, but I think of Alkan’s Concerto’s First Movement and chronology horizons as being fairly comparable works, in much the same way that I see my 100’ Piano Sonata as being cut from similar cloth to the marvellous Transcendental Études of Lyapunov. I normally resist the temptation to map my pieces onto existing works, but in both these cases the connection was deliberate. Chronology horizons is an Étude in several senses; it employs extremes of pianistic technique that few players will be equipped to take on; it plays with our sense of time, and teleology, and coherence; and it juxtaposes music of almost banal simplicity with massively complex textures, confronting the player with serious challenges of what one might call equilibrium. It pullulates with loops, some literal, some varied, some concealed. It is also at heart an apocalyptic statement, containing as it does not one but two complete annihilations of musical space: great whirling evocations of the temporal vortex that might be found around a cosmic string – an essential ingredient in almost all time-machines. Not for nothing does the little, final, envoi moment present the (palindromic!) Let us sleep now melody from the War Requiem. Reharmonised, of course.

Unlike all the other iso-etudes, chronology horizons was not requested by anyone; I wrote it solely for my own satisfaction, a rare occurrence. I have not gone out of my way to promote it; consequently no pianist has taken on its daunting challenges. In order to give at least a provisional sense of its flavour Andrew Bernard has produced a MIDI rendering – what I refer to as the ‘self-driving-car’ version – which can be found as a tab on the work’s page, but we have left it a little rough around the edges so as not to suggest that this is in any way an authentic realisation. Come on pianists! Step up!

Immediately after chronology horizons was complete, I passed it on to Andrew to engrave, and embarked on a six-month stint writing a concerto for my old friend Richard Haynes’ clarinet d’amore, for which I had already penned ghosts of motion above. This newer work, being scored for flute, bassoon, soprano trombone (astonishing instrument!), piano, percussion, and string trio, was far too extensive to find a home in the iso-études, and so I omit discussion of it here. The score is, nonetheless, available for scrutiny on its page.

As I was drawing chronology horizons to a close, I received an email from the young Australian clarinetist Drew Gilchrist enquiring whether I minded him playing my prehistoric basset clarinet work Time (1981) on his bass clarinet. As it happened, I minded a lot, not just because of the piece’s extreme age but also because I have always felt it was better suited to the thinner tone of higher clarinets, basset horn or clarinet d’amore or whatever. Not wishing to discourage Drew, I volunteered to write him a new piece, and offered a couple of options. He selected the title (9) the effort to return to the cities of the sane, which I had excerpted from a book In the Bughouse by Daniel Swift, about the old rogue Ezra Pound’s time in the Chestnut Ward at Saint Elizabeth Hospital for the insane outside Washington DC. The quote from which the title is extracted does not directly pertain to Pound himself, fortunately; it says:

“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 addition to the touchingly melancholic air of desperation in this quote there is also the suggestion of a structure, a movement to and from ‘sanity’, at least as it was thought of in the 1950s. For the purposes of generating the piece, I equated the notion of ‘sanity’ with ‘rigour’ and the piece became a dialectic of ‘coherence’ and ‘incoherence’. Thus, the intent in the effort to return to the cities of the sane is to effect a sense of barely-controlled precipitousness, where the player is taken on an unpredictable wild ride that is quite intentionally discursive for the audience – Drew remarked that, after the premiere, “a few people … couldn’t grasp the overarching form” – with a wilful refusal to conform to narrative logic.

With the effort to return to the cities of the sane I drew the iso-études to a close, with the future completion of in Platonia as a pending final page. The lockdowns had ended, COVID was slowly receding, and we all felt safe to emerge. The claustrophobic feel that pervaded our lives for a couple of years was dissipating, and it struck me that the character of my works would thenceforth be more outwardly-turned, more expansive. After this final work I moved on to a quite different challenge, the chamber concerto solace of articulation mentioned above, which I spent fully seven months bringing into being.

A further work deserves mention, one that I considered but rejected for inclusion in the iso-études: the solo soprano saxophone piece ⟨ʀ⟩emote that I wrote for Thomas Giles in September 2023, in the anxious three weeks between my cancer diagnosis and the actual surgery. It makes an interesting pair with the effort to return to the cities of the sane. The pieces have at least two shared gestural features beyond both being for solo single-reed instrument: they involve a very rapid churn of expressivity, and are both highly rigorous. The effort to return to the cities of the sane turns its rigorousness to the end of creating a sense of imbalance, a flickering between coherence and incoherence; ⟨ʀ⟩emote, by contrast, while mercurial, is never digressive; its trajectory is (at least, intendedly) clear and intelligible. I felt, ultimately, that the limpid optimism of ⟨ʀ⟩emote had no place in the inward subjectivity of the iso-études.

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* The option exists to perform them as a sequence, although there is no (obvious) common thread running through all the pieces. If this were to happen it is unnecessary to perform them in the written order. In fact it would be better to separate the two vibraphone works, maybe using them to separate the three clarinet works.