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Turning silence into sound
Composers talk about inspiration
Some
people believe God created heaven
and earth. Others believe the universe exploded
into reality. Creation in the hands of mortals is
easier to explain. Or is it?
AMBER DE NARDI found out when she asked three leading Australian composers
about the forces that inspire them.
Peter Sculthorpe, Miriam Hyde and Nigel Butterley have transformed many blank pages of manuscript into acclaimed works, and while the genres in which they compose differ, they agree on one point: the need to be inspired for a musical idea to burst into life.
Miriam Hyde describes the act of musical creation in her book, Complete ACCORD. "There is something mysterious about conjuring up sounds out of silence and nothingness," she writes. "I love the Italian idiom Mi salta il grillo (literally `to me jumps the cricket': to have a sudden whim or fancy). The cricket may jump to me anywhere: in the garden, in the train, in bed. Initially, it may be brief but potent. It seems to take root, begging to be nurtured."
Sculthorpe, who at 70 has just returned from composition and lecturing engagements in England and the US, is even more explicit about how much his musical creativity feeds on "external forces".
"I totally and always rely on inspiration. I cannot begin to write one note or phrase until a non-musical idea, whether it comes from a place, a person or a feeling, impacts on me," he says.
Sculthorpe's musical sources can often be traced to the untamed and eerie beauty of Kakadu in Australia's north, the Torres Strait Islands and the haunting sounds of Aboriginal rituals.
"If something affects me, it gets into the music and is in turn transferred to my listeners. The Australian landscape and Tasmania have been my most continuous source of inspiration. I have also been affected by the death of friends and loved ones, starting with the death of my father," Sculthorpe explains.
Nigel Butterley quips that he conjures up musical ideas when someone requests work for an actual performance, and when there's a chance of getting paid for it. For him, ideas often seem to come from unexpected sources. " Perhaps a person does it for me, although for the past 10 years British poet Kathleen Raine's work has set my compositions off."
While
the three composers have produced music in different idioms, they all
rely on the bolt which activates the imagination and opens the flood
gates to musical creativity.
This rules out approaching music on a purely intellectual level, as
composers of the baroque and classical periods were inclined to do.
"During this time European music became quite abstract," Sculthorpe
says. "Composers like Mozart and Beethoven were occasionally inspired
by someone or something, but mostly they relied on the impact of their
harmonic structure and development sections to evoke emotion."
This practice would sit very uncomfortably with Sculthorpe, who declares: "I need to write from my heart, and I particularly like to write for special people. I need to know intimately who — the person, the name or the exact place — is at the centre of my composition."
The ideas which trigger Sculthorpe's works sometimes dictate the key structure and how keys relate to one another.
For instance, in the score for the film based on the explorations of Burke and Wills, the low A on the keyboard represents Australia, while Burke is personified by B flat, just a semitone away from A, which creates a dissonant interval struggling for peace.
This
is just the effect Sculthorpe was after because he wanted to expose
Burke's hidden agenda: "He was in search of fame and glory; he
was not concerned with opening up Australia's frontiers for the benefit
and advancement of the settlers." The only way Burke and country
could come to terms was in death, which eventually came in the key of
D.
Miriam
Hyde is also drawn to particular keys and uses their personalities to
evoke an appropriate emotional response from the listener.
In her Study in Blue, White and Gold for example, each colour is represented by a tonality: B Major, C Major and E Major. Hyde elaborates in her book: "The colours [are] related to a Danish embroidery, a white candle (C Major) with a golden flame (E Major) deepening into orange (the excursion into a warmer, flat key) against a deep blue background (B Major)."
While nature is Hyde's most fertile source of inspiration, as is obvious from the titles of many of her works — Reflected Reeds, The Poplar Avenue, Valley of Rocks, Returning Tide at Sunset. She is also inspired by poetry, a motif from another composer or profound feelings.
She explains: "My piano sonata written during the war years (WWII), when my husband Marcus was a prisoner of war in Germany, reflects much of the tension I was feeling. I was not consciously trying to link the music with the war years but your own feelings get into the music, almost subconsciously."
Now
87, Hyde has not composed anything since her husband died five years
ago. "I've simply had no inspiration or desire to write. This does
not worry me. Unless a musical idea comes to me spontaneously, I will
not follow it up. However, when it happens, it flows faster than your
hand can keep up with it and you need to resort to all sorts of abbreviations
on the manuscript, such as you and you alone can decipher."
Nigel
Butterley is the most "difficult to listen to" of the three,
perhaps because at 65 he is also the youngest and slips into the contemporary
idiom more easily. But he too believes a musical idea must come spontaneously.
"Particularly when you're young, composition is absolutely spontaneous.
Even these days I don't go anywhere without a piece of paper and a pencil.
Maybe as you grow older it becomes a case of the more you know, the
harder it becomes," he says.
For
Butterley, composition involves a lot of thinking. "I write words
about the music first, for example if a passage is to be spiky and high-pitched,
or rich and mellow.
"You need to think of what sort of instrument will carry the focal
line, so you have to be acutely aware of the sound of each instrument.
This is why I could never use a computer to hear my music: the sound
is not real. Even when I play chords on the piano, it's the orchestra
I hear, not the piano."
Butterley's musical inspiration springs mostly from the poetry of William Blake, John Donne, Kathleen Raine, Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman.
"But I must stress it's not just poetry which inspires me; poets must also," he says.
He especially admires Raine, whom he describes as "full of beans at the age of 92". Butterley based his work to celebrate Dulcie Holland's 80th birthday on Raine's poem, The Wind Stirs Gently. A much larger work, based on Raine's Spell of Creation, will be premiered in June, peformed by the Sydney Philharmonia.
Butterley enjoys being a composer, particularly the thrill of hearing a piece for the first time, "even if you know you're going to make changes."
Composition is hard work. "Well it is for me and therefore I usually write slowly. It's also very challenging. You're forever thinking one day you're going to write your best work. That keeps you going."
Like Sculthorpe and Hyde, Butterley is stirred by the sonorities of key combinations and associations, even though some of his earlier music tends to be more atonal, more angular and tense.
"But my music has become more mellow, with more feeling for key patterns," he says. "Which means I need to make sure I don't stay in the same key. Music is no longer so atonal that it's almost impossible to remember the tune."
While
he thinks Schoenberg was a little unreasonable to expect people to whistle
his music after the first hearing, in his opinion it's good to have
to listen to a piece of music several times before being able to grasp
it.
"It's more rewarding than knowing everything about a composition
after just one hearing."
Thus, what starts out as an inspired idea may turn into music that may become a source of inspiration for others. Who knows where the act of creation will end? We hardly know where it begins.
ON
THE WEB
Australian Music Centre Composer Biographies http://www.amcoz.com.au/composers/default.asp 
The
above article was published in the
2MBS-FM monthely magazine 'Fine Music' in February 2001.
It is reproduced here courtesy of 2MBS-FM 102.5
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