Update: Dec 2011
Farwell My Good I. Forever was recorded by Acacia Ensemble for ABC Classic FM radio in December 2011. I was asked to provide a program note for the on-air announcements so I wrote this:
Farwell My Good I. Forever was composed across 2006-7, and it’s my farewell to a part of myself, to a mask I was wearing. I had built myself an enormous, successful career as one of the leading classical music arts administrators in the country, working with any and all the best artists I wanted and winning awards for it. The mask said I was living the dream life – whereas the truth was that I had become what the great creativity teacher Julia Cameron calls a ‘shadow artist’ – someone who secretly wants to be an artist but instead lives in the shadow of actual practising artists.
André Berthiaume wrote, ‘We all wear masks, and the time comes when we cannot remove them without removing some of our own skin.’ I had come to that point, where I had to confront the fact that I was doing no one, not myself and certainly not the musicians and audiences who love music, any favours by pretending I wasn’t a talented composer. I was. The reason people are afraid of their talent is both mysterious and understandable. Marianne Williamson sums it up wonderfully: “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. … There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you…. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.”
Writing my massive and lengthy String Quartet, which includes Farwell My Good I. Forever, was how I proved to myself that I was meant to write great, glorious music. Like all goodbyes Farwell is also a recognition of new things, amongst them my acceptance that the most profound contribution I could make to music was actually writing it.
The title comes from a Christopher Tye viol consort work, from which I quote its closing 2 bars. I’ve retained the title’s unstandardized spelling, but it would be modernized as “Farewell, my good one, forever”.
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September 2010:
I’ve sat down many times to write program notes for this excerpt from String Quartet and each time I fail to finish.
Nonetheless, I’ve decided to post something now. The trigger for this ‘placeholder’ was a lovely encounter last weekend at the Sydney Chamber Music Festival with members of a vivacious new string quartet called Acacia who, after hearing my piano pieces, enquired if I had a string quartet they could play at a concert in November. I promised them I would show them Farwell My Good I. Forever. As there’s no recording of it, I’m posting an electronic performance here for them to peruse.
[Update: I’m honored that the new string quartet Acacia will perform it twice, 21 and 28 November 2010 in Hunters Hill and Allambie Heights, Sydney. Event details are in this open Facebook page.]
[Further update: At the 21 Nov performance, the work was encored – I thank the audience for wanting to hear it again and the Acacia quartet for playing it twice in one concert!]
When program notes aren’t easy to write, I know it’s simply that my conscious mind has not caught up with what my unconscious already knows. Think of the observation “Whereof one cannot speak, one cannot think”; often misattributed to Wittgenstein, it reads like a useful paraphrase of his “Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen” (” Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”). Sometimes our reasons and motivations are known to us only by our feelings; we have a hunch that something is the right thing to do, but we can’t say why. It doesn’t matter as long as we act on our intuition. The great psychiatrist and hypnotist Milton Erickson believed that people’s woes arise because they are out of rapport with their unconscious mind and act in contradiction to it.
Farwell My Good I. Forever was composed across 2006-7, and it’s my farewell to a part of myself, a mask that served me for a long time but also held me back from being a composer. When people hear the word ‘mask’, they immediately think of something false. But the mask isn’t the falsehood. The mask is often completely the truth, just not the complete truth. It’s the act of using a mask that is the falsehood in the sense that what’s on display are only the convenient parts of what’s true. Like all goodbyes Farwell is also a recognition of new things, amongst them my acceptance that the most sincere and therefore the most profound contribution I could make to music was actually writing it. The title comes from a Christopher Tye viol consort work, from which I quote its closing 2 bars. The quote stands in strong relief to the primary polyphony which was inspired by Tye’s Saint Markan contemporaries like Andrea Gabrieli. I’ve retained the title’s unstandardized spelling, but it would be modernized as “Farewell, my good one, forever”.
If there’s a performance of it in November, I’ll be posting details of it on this blog.
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it is so beautiful Lyle looking forwards to the performance! x lisa
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