Choral adventurer Paul Hillier brings Australian music to international attention.
By Melissa Lesnie on Nov 9, 2011, All rights reserved Limelight Magazine
"Ars Nova Copenhagen is a superb group of musicians and their pacing is just right. It's rare for any composer to hear a work of theirs performed to this standard. The music on the album offers huge potential for the expansion of cultural understanding." (Anne Boyd)
In the 1970s, when Australian composer Anne Boyd began exploring
traditional Japanese music as a source of inspiration in her work, her
ideas were met with skepticism and even ridicule. "People were highly
critical and suspicious," she says. "They thought a Japanese influence
would breed weak music - the proper grafting for a young Australian
composer should have been onto European modernism."
But in 1975, during a concert at London's Wigmore Hall, the Eastern flavour in Anne's vocal work As I crossed a bridge of dreams
came as a revelation for one young singer in the audience. "It does
stick in my mind very clearly as a special moment of recognition," Paul
Hillier recalls. "It wasn't exotic or strange or weird, but at the same
time it was definitely fresh and had the sense of coming from somewhere
else."
The English baritone has founded and directed some of the most
celebrated vocal groups to emerge in the past 40 years, including The
Hilliard Ensemble (touring Australia in 2012), Theatre of Voices and Ars
Nova Copenhagen. The ethereal, enigmatic sounds of Boyd's piece always
stayed with him: "It became something I've performed regularly over the
years."
In the piece for wordless a cappella chorus, Boyd looked to what she describes as "the mixture of great sorrow with great beauty" of gagaku
(medieval Japanese court music) to create atmospheric vocal effects.
Not only that; she allowed these textures to soak into her musical
conception of the Australian landscape. "The stark ritualistic quality
of this music belonged to my childhood experience of the outback
landscape around Longreach. Out there, meditation is a natural state of
mind."
Hillier, now based in Denmark, has felt compelled to reach out to
music of the East, and has taken Anne Boyd's piece as his starting point
for "part of a new record with Ars Nova Copenhagen that I hadn't
thought about yet. It planted the seed for the idea of the recording as a
whole." The result is A Bridge of Dreams, a choral album devoted to music written by composers from or inspired by the Pacific Rim. "The title, taken from Anne's work, does
refer to the record as a whole," Hillier explains. "I like the idea of
dreaming and the use of the word ‘Dreaming' in Aboriginal culture, but
also of bridging across these different parts of the world that are
connected by an ocean. I thought it was not a bad title for that!"
"The composers on this disc all have a special relationship to the
indigenous cultures of their areas and to nature," Boyd adds. The album
features American composer Lou Harrison's Mass for St Cecilia's Day
(commissioned by the curious conglomerate of The Saint Cecilia Society
for the Preservation and Restoration of Gregorian Chant and Peking
Opera) and Five Lullabies by New Zealand composer/ethnomusicologist Jack Body.
But perhaps most exciting is the premiere recording of an Australian
work commissioned by Hillier for the 2010 Edinburgh Festival: Ross
Edwards's Sacred Kingfisher Psalms. In performance, Hillier has also embraced "other pieces by Ross, particularly his marvelous Mountain Chant". Rather than reaching out towards Asian influences, Edwards has
blended psalm settings with the names of native birds in the Eora
Aboriginal language. "You couldn't have two more different pieces," says
Hillier, comparing the Australian offerings on A Bridge of Dreams. "The
Ross Edwards work is such an upbeat piece and sometimes very fast;
that's what attracted me to his style. Anne's is very ruminative,
beautiful and very haunting. Both have had a very big impact in
concert."
Boyd is thrilled with the "magical performance" on the CD. "Ars Nova
Copenhagen is a superb group of musicians and their pacing is just
right. It's rare for any composer to hear a work of theirs performed to
this standard. "The music on the album offers huge potential for the expansion of
cultural understanding. I can only hope that it is of some use in
extending opportunities for such connection."
Hillier, who has toured Australia with various vocal groups over the
years, is keen to perform more of this music in its natural habitat. "I
would love to include pieces of Australian music over there. We also
have some very interesting pieces by European composers using Australian
text, for example Pelle-Gudmundsen-Holmgreen's fantastic settings of
Les Murray's poetry. You couldn't get more Australian than that!"
Read the feature on Limelight's website: http://www.limelightmagazine.com.au/Article/279582,bridge-of-dreams-anne-boyd--ross-edwards-on-a-new-cd.aspx