Two excerpts from ‘Harp and Wind Quintet’

These two pieces are being premiered by my dear friends, the New Sydney Wind Quintet, in their little tour through country New South Wales in June and July 2010 (see here for details). I’m planning to post audio and video of those performances afterward, but meanwhile, here are the program notes. [Update 13 September 2010: the audio posted below is in fact from a fantastic studio recording made by the New Sydney Wind Quintet, for commercial release very soon.]

Like all my pieces, Harp and Wind Quintet is a single-movement open-form work. I constantly add passages, so it’s a perpetual work-in-progress. Currently it’s just under 1 hour long, but I have a feeling it’ll bloom to the length of my longest works, Solo Piano and String Quartet, each of which is over 3 hours in duration.

‘Passage [Untitled, Jan 2010]’  from Harp and Wind Quintet

Passage [Untitled, Jan 2010] is my eager surrender to the spirit of Carl Stalling, the brilliant composer behind the classic cartoon shows Looney ‘Toons and Merrie Melodies. If you close your eyes during a Bugs Bunny film and simply listen, you hear an extraordinary piece of music. Firstly, it’s some of the happiest sounds that musical notes could ever make. And from a technical perspective, this zippy, maniacal music handled old issues like form and tonality with new aplomb. It used atonality to make people laugh, of all things.

I’ve no doubt one reason I was drawn like a magnet to Stalling was his intense use of quotation. The act of quotation is central to my music, my way of honouring the grand total of music that’s passed ahead of me. If ever I convey a new musical vista, it’s only because a dwarf is allowed on the shoulders of giants (“Nos esse quasi nanos, gigantium humeris incidents” is Bernard of Chateris’ more poetic way of putting it.)

Like Charles Ives, another of my musical heroes, Stalling would not compose without using someone else’s music as a starting point. Not only that, but he’d compulsively use his favorite songs again and again. He was teased for this predictability; the cartoonists would deliberately draw a woman with a red dress knowing Stalling would not resist quoting the Wrubel/Dixon song “The Lady in Red”. And yet the creation of cliché was integral to Stalling’s style. The engulfing power of this cliché is what allows someone like me to conjure his sound world instantly but without imitating him; in Passage, I haven’t actually used any quotes from Stalling or his favorite songs. I’ve just used that pat sensibility.

But what I couldn’t resist was the musical style of the Roaring Twenties – I love the era F. Scott Fitzgerald called ‘The Jazz Age’ and so must Stalling have, because it was songs of this time that he returned to most often, even in his post World War II films. I round off Passage [Untitled, Jan 2010] with a pumping big tune that bears a laconic resemblance to Gershwin, and I was overjoyed to notice this as I wrote it.

I’ve scored this Passage for woodwind quintet and it forms part of Harp and Wind Quintet. I’ve discovered to my own amusement that Harp and Wind Quintet often expresses a part of me that is playful and likes to laugh. The creative spirit in anyone is a child and likes to play. Children like crayons and toys and take delight in new things. Adults would like crayons and toys but never give themselves permission; adults often find fear in new things. I think you can like Bugs Bunny at any age.

‘Calcium Light Night’ from Harp and Wind Quintet

One night last November as I was falling asleep, a tune drifted to mind. I managed to grasp it sufficiently before I lost consciousness. I love that moment just before sleep takes over. I used not to understand it, this dreamlike waking state where your mind is like a screen onto which seemingly random projections are made. But as I continue to deepen my study and practice of neurolinguistics and hypnosis, I have learned to enjoy and indeed capitalise on the different available states of consciousness. The moment before sleep is a state called hypnagogia, a type of trance. Trance is a powerful state of consciousness where your unconscious mind is free to express itself while the conscious mind is occupied with something else (in this case, falling asleep). Many artists and scientists have credited their ideas or problem-solving to the hypnagogic trance. Friedrich Kekulé arrived at the ring structure of benzene while in one, seeing a snake bite its tail. I like the German word for what one sees – Halfschlafbilder, or “half-asleep pictures”.

My hypnagogic cognitions (as they’re formally called) in that brief yet immeasurable flash that November night were these – I heard an original tune, I saw myself during the American Civil War, I heard another tune (one I didn’t compose, ‘O Shenandoah’) and I found myself wondering what Abraham Lincoln would do.

Hypnagogic cognitions come from our unconscious. Whatever’s occupied our unconscious comes to the fore, as in dreams. I knew the symbolism held in my cognitions. I had been thinking about leadership – to be precise, my leadership roles in two areas: classical music, where increasingly I am leading as a composer, and the personal and corporate development field, where increasingly I am leading as a professional coach.

I share a birthday with Lincoln, a fact that would be inconsequential except I had been reminded of it so often in childhood that, in my consciousness, the figure of Lincoln is permanently associated with the notion of inspiring leadership. The Civil War was a parts-conflict within myself – part of me thought it was possible to be a leading composer as well as a leading coach; part of me thought I had to choose, that if I were a leader in one field, I would have to be a small player in the other.

When I sat down to write Calcium Light Night, I wasn’t surprised to find that my tune and the folk-tune could be played simultaneously. In fact, they made a wondrous effect together. The result was literally a harmonious coexistence. The message from my unconscious was clear: I didn’t have to choose. My life’s purpose includes not just being a composer and a coach, but being a leader in the fields of composition and coaching. What this means exactly is beyond my ability to see at the moment, but I’m sure it will be revealed to me in due course.

The title of the piece comes from Charles Ives. Titles, really, are rather incidental in my pieces. I’d say the word ‘piece’ is possibly more appropriate to my compositional form than to any other composer’s, since in my case the pieces literally are pieces of a larger whole. It is rather arbitrary how I enclose a section with parentheses to give it a name. Calcium Light Night is the name of an Ives piece from his college days. It depicts a rowdy ritual where two fraternities vie for new pledges, marching between rooms carrying a brilliant lime (ie. calcium) light glowing red or green. This has nothing to do with my piece. Or I just may have seen a lime light on that Civil War field next to Lincoln and the cannons.

Tagged as: Abraham Lincoln, Bugs Bunny, Carl Stalling, Charles Ives, composer, hypnagogia, hypnosis, life coach, neurolinguistic programming, New Sydney Wind Quintet, NLP, Shenandoah