Since I’d posted a video from this year’s Sydney Chamber Music Festival, I thought I’d post one made last year as well.
Last year, the Festival premiered ‘Wachsein ist andersvo’, then the latest passage from my Voices and Instruments.
I wrote it between June and August 2009. I was at a particular juncture in my acknowledgment of my spiritual growth and my – I’ll even use a word that’s slightly uncomfortable for me – mysticism. In the one year leading up to writing “Wachsein ist andersvo”, I had made the acquaintance of Steve Pavlina and Amir Zoghi and realised I was rejoining a journey I had begun but cut short as a teenager. Now after a hiatus of some twenty years, I was picking up where I left off. As a teenager, my discovery of quantum mechanics led me to my own brand of a nondualistic philosophy or ‘oneness’, for which I had no proper word but nevertheless I knew there was a message in the fact that everything in the universe was comprised of the same thing – elementary particles. Trees and me and cockroaches and George Lucas and Exxon and every thing were all made of these bosons and fermions, and for me there was only one explanation for this otherwise unnecessary simplicity, this brazen efficiency. Physicists postulate that there is an energy that cannot be created or destroyed, but always was. Mystics believe in a consciousness that cannot be created or limited, but always was. Theologians believe in a god that always was, neither created nor limited. Could it be everyone was talking about the same thing? To me, the answer was resoundingly yes.
One of my childhood heroes was Erwin Schrödinger, of the famous cat-in-a-box thought experiment. More than other physicists, this pioneer of quantum mechanics recognised that the new physics provided rational support for the longstanding assertions of eastern mysticism, such as Hindu Vedanta – that everything is one energy. Like the Vedantists he admired, Schrödinger called it ‘consciousness’. He said, “Consciousness is a singular of which the plural is unknown; that there is only one thing and that what seems to be a plurality is merely a series of different aspects of this one thing, produced by a deception … the plurality of sensitive beings is mere appearance (maya); in reality they are all only aspects of the one being.”
In choosing the text for what became “Wachsein ist andersvo”, I was intuitively drawn to German sources. I have no explanation for this, because I speak no German (all I have is good word-recognition). But Schrödinger was German, and he studied with the philosopher Schopenhauer prior to becoming a physicist. The 19th century German philosophers’ embrace of a monistic philosophy – again, ‘oneness’ – influenced Mahler, Jung, and Rilke amongst a great many others.
I paid attention to other little clues in myself. Nursery rhymes have always, always fascinated me. Since they were the first things I learned to read and sing, it would be a witticism rather than a truism to say I don’t recall a life before nursery rhymes. But my fascination persisted into adolescence and adulthood. As a teenager, I searched out and purchasing the Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes, a dense book by Iona and Peter Opie with scholarly analyses of sources and meanings that I devoured. I remember watching, as an 11-year old, a storyline in a British science-fiction television series called Sapphire and Steel (starring David McCallum and Joanna Lumley before they both became stupendously famous) in which I learned the purported origins of Ring a ring o’ roses in the bubonic plague, of Goosey, goosey gander in Cromwell’s army searching to kill unbelievers (people who wouldn’t say their prayers), and so on. There’s a lot of truth to the quip about fairy tales and nursery rhymes being horror stories to prepare children for newspapers….
There’s at least one fairy tale that contains a nursery rhyme, at least in its operatic version by composer Engelbert Humperdinck. It’s the tale of Hänsel and Gretel. When the distressed children, abandoned in the woods, lay down to sleep, they offer up a prayer for their safety during the night, asking angels to guard their head, sides, front and back and feet. It’s both a prayer and nursery rhyme, and exists in many languages and dates from as early as the 14th century.
I decided to set the earliest known version of this rhyme, which had been found in Johannes Agricola’s collection of proverbs (1529).
Then Hänsel and Gretel themselves led me directly to Rainer Maria Rilke because I remembered that a woman named Gretel was the subject of Rilke’s ‘Requiem’ in his The Book of Images. I set several lines from it, lines that I knew came from Rilke’s own awakening to the same truths that Schrodinger learned: reality is maya, a dream, an illusion, and true awakening is elsewhere.
Also from Rilke, I chose the closing verse from his magical ‘I live my life in ever-widening circles’ in his The Book of Hours. The poet asks, am I a falcon, a storm or a great song? Both mystic philosophers and quantum physicists would agree on Rilke’s unspoken answer – that ‘I’ am all of them.
Ich will heint schlafen gehen
Zwölf engel sollen mit mir gehen
Zwen zur haupten
Zwen zur seiten
Zwen zur Füssen
[Zwen die mich decken] THIS LINE NOT SET
Zwen die mich wecken
Zwen die mich weisen
Zu dem himlischen paradeise.
I will go to sleep
Twelve angels will go with me
Two at my head
Two at my sides
Two at my feet
[Two to cover me] THIS LINE NOT SET
Two when I wake
Two to carry me
To the heavenly paradise.
in: Agricola, Sibenhundert und funfftzig Deutscher Sprüchwörter
Leben hat Sinn nur, verbunden mit vielen
Kreisen des weithin wachsenden Raumes,
Leben ist so nur der Traum eines Traumes
Aber Wachsein ist anderswo.
Life has meaning only joined with many
circles of increasing space,
life is only the dream of a dream,
but awakening is elsewhere.
From: Rilke, ‘Requiem’, Das Buch der Bilder
Ich kreise um Gott, den uralten Turm,
und ich kreise jahrtausendelang;
und ich weiß noch nicht: bin ich ein Falke, ein Sturm
oder ein großer Gesang.
I circle around God, around the ancient tower.
I’ve been circling for thousands of years
and I still don’t know: am I a falcon,
a storm, or a great song?
From: Rilke, Ich lebe mein Leben in wachsenden Ringen’, Das Stunden-Buch
I scored the work for soprano and six instruments – flute, clarinet in A, guitar, violin, viola, cello – being the sum of (nearly) all instruments playing that evening; the piece was designed to bring the performers together as one in the final work in the Festival’s program.
As for the music that came through me and was my privilege to compose – it couldn’t help but have a German accent.
