On Australia Day 2024, my dear friends Michael Duke and David Howie (collective HD Duo) released their latest recording, an all-Australian album for soprano saxophone and piano. In addition to works of composers like the late Peter Sculthorpe, it includes two new works commissioned especially for this album including, I’m thrilled to say, mine. You can listen to their spectacular performance via a streaming link of your choice: Spotify YouTube Music Amazon Music Apple Music.
The Perfumed Calyx was commissioned by HD Duo specifically for this album. Initially the album was a wide mix of Michael and David’s favorite repertoire, including their transcription of Ravel’s Sonatine. As the album’s concept focused, the repertoire became entirely Australian and the Sonatine had to be omitted, so I decided to write a work to take its emotional and psychological space, a work at least in part a reflection on Ravel and his music (literally so in some passages).
Ravel was already on my mind. During the covid lockdowns I read a lot of French poetry, beginning with Apollinaire who died of the 1918 influenza and invented the word surreal. I read all of Aloysius Bertrand’s phantasmagorical Gaspard de la nuit, which had established the prose poem as a genre and inspired one of Ravel’s greatest works. Its imaginative weirdness was just right to transport someone stuck at home. Gaspard tells the night that the world is like a perfumed calyx with stamen for moon and pistils for stars. I was struck by this botanic depiction of the earth that didn’t make sense, but Bertrand’s poetry didn’t make sense and neither did the world during covid. Yet Bertrand’s poetry appeals to the senses rather than makes sense, and I wanted to do the same. There are detonations in the piece. There is a cry. Frustrations that come from forgetting to remember what’s true – that the world is a joy. But all it takes is one candle to extinguish the darkness, wiser minds tell us. And so the music is also full of beauty, sensuality, melody, propagating and flourishing despite it all. Maybe Bertrand makes sense after all. Maybe the world is like a flower, something beautiful that reproduces.
