Photo: aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt (CVN 71). Offical U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Anthony J. Rivera.
Update, January 2021: More than a year after it was written, Automne malade will be premiered with two performances at the Canberra International Music Festival in May. My deep gratitude to Roland Peelman, festival director and of course to The Australian Voices.
Update, October 2020: Automne, malade, still unperformed, now forms part of a multi-movement, multi-forces work-in-progress called Gravity and Levity on the Sunbreathing Earth, which is the name of everything I write while the Covid-19 pandemic lasts.
We are in autumn, and we are sick. Automne, malade was composed because of Covid-19 and one day – when it is safe to do so – it will be performed.
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Automne, malade was inspired by two uncannily connected stories.
In 1898 during the Spanish-American War, future US president Theodore Roosevelt was a Colonel in Cuba, his unit in the grips of a yellow fever and malaria outbreak. He wrote a pleading letter for his soldiers to be sent home so as to avoid infection and death. The letter was leaked and published by a newspaper, adding public pressure to a reluctant army headquarters in Washington to bring the troops home.
In 2020 on the aircraft carrier coincidentally named USS Theodore Roosevelt, Captain Brett Crozier also wrote a letter pleading for his sailors to be taken off the ship immediately, as Covid-19 was onboard and the forced close quarters was amplifying its spread. The letter leaked to the media, adding public pressure to navy headquarters. The letter successfully got the majority of sailors off the ship, though not before the 4000-plus crew registered 678 infections and one death; the navy relieved Brett Crozier of duty for his letter, and he has since acquired covid himself.
Facts and figures are up-to-date at the time of writing, 20 April 2020 but this is a situation in progress. Automne, malade is, regrettably, current affairs.
To tell these stories, what should the music sound like? If there is one composer’s music that reputedly caused illness, it is Wagner’s: contemporaries believed it frayed the nervous system with overstimulation. Two conductors, Felix Mottl and Joseph Keilberth, died during exactly the same moment of Act II while conducting Tristan und Isolde. Even Nietzsche wrote, “Is Wagner actually a man? Is he not rather a disease?” I ask the question, will reversing Wagner’s music reverse ill and cause health?
The Australian Voices are possibly the first performing group to organize a substantial suite of works responding to the current Covid-19 pandemic, even though we don’t know when they can be performed. I’m so touched to be included amongst the 22 composers of the project and by the faith the singers and Gordon Hamilton have in me. We’ve worked together once before when they performed an excerpt of my Lasseter Diary, a work-in-progress. They want works that will endure beyond the current crisis and asked that we meditate on the theme of ‘Far and Near’, obviously brought to mind by the physical distancing guidelines (and now laws) to curtail spread of SARS-Cov-2.
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