Good morning. Many thanks for joining this in conversation event with the eminent Australian composer and Boyd and his very kind of giving
her time to discussing her life and music and head of a performance of her string quartette no to play on the water,
which we performed later this year by The Kreutzer Quartette, along alongside a network of my own.
As part of the Humanises cultural programme funded project Pixilate to the River.
So a bit about and Boyd, Professor Boyd is one of Australia's most distinguished composers and music educators.
Her undergraduate studies when the Department of Music at the University of Sydney,
where Peter Sculthorpe was her earliest and most influential composition teacher.
The award of a Commonwealth scholarship enabled her to undertake a P.H. Dean composition at
the University of Utah were her supervisors were Wilfred Mathers and Bennett brands in 1990.
What became the first Australian and the first woman to be appointed professor of music at the University of Sydney?
Before this, she was the foundation head of Department of Music at the University of Hong Kong and taught at the University of Sussex.
The hallmarks of her musical star style are its transparency,
gentleness and delicacy attributes which reflect her long involvement with Asian traditions, especially those of Japan and Indonesia.
To sow the seeds of her music,
our meditations on a Chinese character and crossing a bridge of dreams for support was honoured with an AM and an Order of Australia in 1996,
an honorary doctorate from the University of York in 2003.
The Distinguished Service Services to Australian Music Award at the APRA AMC Classical Music
Awards in 2005 and the 2014 Sauterne at HIND'S Award for Services to Music in Australia.
So as a means of introduction to ends means, if I felt we might listen to an excerpt from her choral piece as I crossed a Bridge of Dreams.
So just as a jumping off point, I just want to pick up one of the things that was in your biography,
and that is one of the most defining features of your music throughout your whole career, and that is your connexion with Asian culture in the music.
And I'm just wondering if you could maybe speak a bit about how you first came into contact with these Asian influences
and how they started creeping into your work and subsequently becoming one of the one of the defining features of its.
Thanks, Thomas. Yeah, it was. I've always thought of Australia as Australasia, situated as it is geographically much closer to Asia than to Europe.
And in a way, that influence had the gun in my life much before I was conscious of it.
As a small child, I grew up on a remote, very large outback sheep station and one of the one of the features of the area in
which I played as a child down down a mostly dry creek bed was an old Chinese garden.
There was an old stone wall Chinese garden in which vegetables, which were probably autumn 30 or 40 years.
Why I was just self seeded grew and my cousin and I was the same age.
I used to had some wonderful, imaginative play, playful adventures around that garden.
So right away, long before I became conscious of Asia as a possible source of musical inspiration,
there was that day because of the connexion between the Chinese immigration in Australia and, of course, Australia itself in its two vesicle location.
So history and geography coming together with my own childhood.
And then when I went to the University of Sydney, I hadn't I hadn't had a really strong cultural experience of Europe in any sense.
News, even musically, of course, a lot of the music I played was of European origin.
But it's the Australian thing was much stronger, the impact of landscape.
And when I went to university and my lessons began with Peter Sculthorpe, who was a very close lifelong friend and mentor and teacher,
he encouraged us to look to Australia as a source and Rasiah as a source of inspiration rather than to Europe.
And that kind of culture was actually broke out in Sydney at that time between the modernists who avowed
European characteristics and influence as being more international and in a way almost more objective,
more befitting modernist ideals. And Peter, who said, no, no, no, no, no, we should be talking to these wonderful ancient cultures,
the civilisations of Asia, as a source of inspiration.
It was really through Peter's teaching that I started to investigate in a serious sense, the old traditions of Asian cultures, particularly of Japan.
And it was because I was a flute player and a melodist, not a humanist, because I've never really had much piano study.
So I thought about music as melody, as sound versus tambourines and the sort of sounds I'm in.
But my teachers writing about this just the other day, my flute teacher put an enormous influence on producing a beautiful sound, a beautiful sound.
So we would spend hours playing single notes and trying to make them into the most wonderful coloured sounds that one could produce.
So I was naturally set up, but I heard they took to absorb the temporal aspects of Asian music because that is more important in Asian culture,
particularly in in repertory style. The traditional Jeckle Archie Japanese bamboo flute Temba is more important than probably anything else.
So so that I was just a just naturally it was a natural marriage.
But like with my own musical notes, I just then sort of slipped into it.
And then when I first heard Japanese Gunga Koo, which is a court orchestra of Japan,
I thought, wow, this is the actually the music of the outback landscape of Australia.
And no other music I'd ever heard befitted that kind of vastness and austerity and vibrancy and spiritual strengths
of landscape in the way this strange or strangely curious music that I've hearing from such an ancient culture.
Much more so. I mean, I love mediaeval European music, too,
but it didn't have anything like the same relevance because there was no white civilisation, so to speak.
We connected to. And I suppose that that that's very interesting.
EAA talk about the Asian influences representing your surroundings and your place at the time.
And it must have been very interesting then going from Australia to the UK to deal at York and spend time then subsequently as a lecturer at Sussex.
And how did did you bring that sort of.
Timbrell philosophy with you in the annual studies and the music you were writing in the U.K., or was there some sort of shift,
again as a result of your surroundings and the place that that gave you a different source of direction?
Yes, yes. Inevitably, inevitably, there was a shift and it was the first year I was at New York.
And I was so in such a degree of culture shock, I could hardly write it all out.
And I mean, I was my antennae were sort of going in all directions and then being stifled
because I couldn't really connect to some of the things that are around me. The old traditions of mediaeval town of York.
And the kindest the the spiritual aspects of York itself.
I loved the Moors because the Moors, I could get out onto the moors.
And once you get the sense of uninterrupted landscape, that was familiar to me, but everything was different.
The light was so different. I remember being in York and really not seeing the sun for months on end and thinking, oh, no.
I wanted to turn tail and head back to Australia because it wasn't I wasn't prepared to throw away a
wonderful scholarship to get the extraordinary opportunity to deepen and strengthen my work as a composer.
I bet Europe was wonderful because York, under the very visionary,
its very visionary Professor Wilfred Mellors was a he he really encouraged to think of world music, not just European music, but world music.
And I mean, he he used to get some delightful lectures on this kind of o origins of music, really.
He'd talk about Eskimos breathing into each other's mouths and and making peculiar sounds.
And he said he was very excited by what he thought of very politically incorrect now as primitive music and these primitive music make.
So he was. And he also he'd been a great influence on my teacher, Peter Sculthorpe, by Principal DHV also.
And he'd always encourage me to call Peter your son, man, your son then because so so Wolf was.
And Peter had encouraged us always to be ourselves musically, to find our own voice, to find our own voice and to always give expression to ourselves.
And that inevitably reflected the place, the place that we we related to.
For me, that was always Australia.
So even at York, when I starting to learn about European conventions and so on, that it was still this Australian place that that grabbed me.
And the main work I wrote early on in my early days, it was in fact based on Japanese cockapoo.
And that was very, very well received by Wilfred and Bernard Ren's, who was my teacher then.
And Bernard was a fabulous inspiration because Bernard had studied Luciano Berio.
And he he talks a lot about the Berio way of going about crosscutting musical structures
and sounds and the relationship between back and semiotics and linguistics and so on.
And that fitted quite comfortably into those sorts of sounds I was beginning to create at the time.
And that grew out of, I suppose, essentially Asian traditions. Japan on the one hand and probably Bali as the other nine.
Asian sort of been right from the other. So it wasn't easy.
I had to grow into myself. I had to find my voice and grow into it.
And that's what you will really help me to do.
So, yes, of course, European, modern, European, modernist in influences were impacting me a lot, but it was still the Australian voice.
That was my true my true sense of home. If you like identity as a composer.
Yeah. I think that that comes across very clearly in your second quartette, which will hear some excerpts of a little bit later.
But I just was wanting to keep that thread of place running.
And, you know, you feel more. You say you've got your voice. By the time that you've left your you went to Sussex with the second quartette.
But then a bit later, you took up the position in Hong Kong.
Now, this is perhaps, you know, a step in the other direction in going to the UK.
We're now in Asia. You can sort of maybe absorb even more Asian culture and find a way to put that in the music.
But then you've also got to balance this teaching position that you had.
So I guess similar question to before.
Did did being in Hong Kong have an impact on your musical language or even on your own sort of teaching style in any way?
Oh, of course.
I mean, I was able to have a lot to look to to do with the Chinese orchestra in Hong Kong, which in Hong Kong was a wonderful melting plot,
melting point for east and West coming together because being a British territory still at the time, we didn't use the word colony then.
It was always territory because in the years I was there, a decade, I was there in the 1980s.
Hong Kong was growing into a cultural force in its own right. And it was very exciting to be there as its own cultural institutions are being founded.
And we have to play a part of that. And in some things, because I set the music department at the University of Hong Kong.
They wanted it was a English speaking university and they wanted a kind of English oriented curriculum.
So my my curriculum there was largely based on the models that you would have found in the British universities,
small, small music departments in British universities. That was that fitted comfortably into humanities studies.
And that was the kind of the properties I would establish there. So so European music was still my main focus.
But there was all this strong sense of the Chinese tradition particularly welling up through
what we're able to teach that one of my most exciting appointments was a Hong Kong composer,
Dunning Lan,
who had worked a lot with the Chinese Orchestra of Hong Kong and had it fashioned works that had a kind of a or a hole inside Takamatsu light strings.
But is a strong Chinese colour. Yet were notated work notated in a European school sense?
Because remember, the school is still a contested thing in China.
At the time they had their own way of taking music. So yeah, no, absolutely.
I'm to be right. And then today in some Chinese as well, to learn to speak somehow some sort of Cantonese and and read some characters and so on.
That was very, very important because that took me more into Asian culture,
into the heart of Asian culture in a way I've never had that experience before, I guess,
because having friends who a lot of my closest friends were Chinese people,
but there were a westernised Chinese people because Hong Kong was a very westernised point of China.
So when you say with the Hong Kong department is very much modelled after the, you know, the Western small media department.
And so does this mean that you got a chance to, you know, teach any courses or modules on Asian or world music?
Always. Sorry. Yes. Yeah. Or was it more, um, you know, because perhaps lots of smaller departments in, for example,
the can I know you mentioned that you had some sort of lean towards the occasional musicology work,
but was it something that they wanted to shy away from, say, we wasn't included in the curriculum, or was it a bit more open?
And, you know, you got to people could explore whatever they liked? Well, it was a basic curriculum in the sense that these youngsters wanted.
I mean, that needed to be it needed to be a European school based curriculum.
In the 1980s. So, I mean, for example, one of my dearest colleagues was Nicholas Cook, as you know, became professor of music eventually at Cambridge.
And Nick had just written his book on the musical analysis.
And we we sort of built a curriculum that was a very modern curriculum in that sense.
But it was a very analytical. But it looked it had looked at it,
I would say European music as a model for something more so that it was
possible for students to take electives in China's music or other Asian musics.
But I wouldn't honestly say that it was a large part of our curriculum over the other side on the mainland.
Not on the island itself of Hong Kong, but on the mainland of the Kowloon.
There was a Chinese university and the Chinese university had a much stronger sense of teaching Chinese music.
And so we had to be a little bit different. We had to be and we had to offer something different.
And it tended to be to be more European. Yes, that makes sense.
So just bridging back to your return to Sydney University's professor links me on to the documentary facing the music, which I watched this week.
It was made in 2001. And it's something really unique.
It's it's something that you've never thought a documentary would be made about, basically the sort of.
Politics of a music department. I know it frames the songs.
It's a more wider thing about university budgets and economics.
But I'm just wondering if you could. I don't know. Maybe just talk a bit about the experiences of the documentary.
You know what it's like to actually make it. And also just reflect also on, you know, the demands that will be made being made of you at the time.
And maybe how they changed, I guess, after after the cameras were turned off in the years following those.
Yeah. Well, it was it was remarkable, actually. The actual year the documentary was shot was nineteen ninety nine memory.
Of the previous millennium. And it was a time when economic rationalism was impacting Australian universities very strongly.
There'd been lots of amalgamations of higher educational institutions.
And so the type what we call case, which is technical and further education colleges were being turned into universities and the
conservatorium was picked on as as an institution that should merge with University of Sydney.
What I had become I'd come back as professor of the Academic Department of Music in the Faculty of Arts in the university,
and we had a completely different agenda to the Conservatorium. So there was a lot of difficulty in the university.
Didn't get it. The university didn't understand why we could have two Bachelor of Music degrees with entirely different focuses and contents.
And when we were research oriented and we wanted to treat research as a means of of
teaching and learning in our small department at the Conservatorium was executive,
it was a place where people learnt to play and in a way that that one learns to do things in a Tayfun.
They didn't get asked at all at first. So there was such a lot of conflict and difficulty when I arrived in that post.
And it didn't really that was well, that was nine years before the documentary was shot.
We survived, but we were not encouraged by the university to make new appointments.
And I did have a staff of which many, many of whom were reaching retirement age and they weren't replaced.
So I was being wound down on my department was being wound down.
In the meantime, the conservatorium was breathing down our necks, so to speak, and still not understanding why we should be different.
The university decided the only way they could forces was really just to starve us out.
And the crisis, a crisis came.
We used to ask students studied performance, but they studied outside the department and the lessons were funded independently by the university.
And they suddenly decided that they'd cut off that source of funding, which meant that our students would no longer have their lessons funded.
And this was this was the crisis that I inherited at the start of nineteen ninety nine.
And that was when the documentary, the documentary makers walked into my office.
Well, the dean of the faculty then decided this would be outrageous. They couldn't possibly show the university the bad light.
Nothing was funny. So the funding was instantly restored and the document said, oh no.
Oh no. This documentary is if we want conflict, this is suddenly out.
The very reason for our documentary has disappeared. What I need to worried is, of course,
there were plenty of other things happening in the course of that year to do with with funding cuts and staff retrenchments.
And I for the first time, my life got in really heavily engaged with the union, the academic union.
And we we had protests and we fought.
And of course, really what the documentary realised was about was the impact of economic rationalism.
And that wasn't something that stopped the minute university policy was was changed.
It was something was ongoing. It was really had powerful momentum and no one had ever known.
David documented it in in in that way before. So it was a pioneering study and it was after that year was over.
We were all amazed by how much it actually happened in the course of the year.
Well, then there was a year of editing, which nothing much happened except I got terribly sick because, I mean,
the conflict got had got too much for me and I had a bit of a breakdown and and kind of withdrew into myself for a while.
And then and then the documentary was released and it it encouraged a wonderful donation to the Department of Funds in the race to set ourselves up.
Is. Stronger position for five years. And and so that was a wonderful outcome, and so they had just what could have been a tragic story in a way.
Yes. I've turned on the Pivot, this wonderful documentary, and we had new life was was breaking into music and the Panthers.
And then there was a change of Dean in the Conservatorium.
And the new dean was much more sympathetic and understood the difference between ourselves and then sells it.
And we then started to talk in a material way back how we might unite.
And eventually we did. And it's been a pretty on the whole, pretty happy, not completely happy, nothing ever even spent.
It's been a fairly productive and good outcome.
And I think students on the whole have benefited, set in lots of ways.
So, yeah. Yeah. So that's the outcome. That's what flowed out as we were getting back to the second string quartette.
I'm thinking today how much that line drawing of the play on the water by Paul Clay.
Look at that. Philosophically, it kind of tells the same story.
Yeah, they Bergey and conflicts in the middle and all Shotton Mrs and then out the other side,
although I like to think actually that drawing as forces that were flowing in from that side and then also the other side and leaving in the middle.
So it's more a more cynical and not anymore nothing linear study at all.
And I think philosophically, that's very interesting as well. Yes.
The idea of convergence rather than just sort of.
Yeah. Very interesting. That's a nice bridge.
On to talking a little bit about the quartette that hopefully will get created permitting will be redone later this year.
So one of the interesting things I think about this piece written, I think in your first year as a lecturer at Sussex.
Right. Is to me this wonderful synthesis of what I would consider having, you know, being educated the way I am,
this modernist extended technique with these very modal and, you know, harmonious sound worlds.
And I think that it's very unique. But I would assume you don't see it that way at all.
You don't see it as some sort of extended technique,
drawing on the tradition of what was happening in the 70s and people like and Paretsky and, you know, all this sort of thing.
I'm assuming that it actually your sound in the piece comes from a completely different place.
So that's unless I'm mistaken. Oh, yes and no.
I mean, I was I had my my Pinteresque.
He was filtered through, again, Peter Sculthorpe, my teachers, some music series in which he had some music.
Sometimes I think Sloops 1960, 68.
I think some years the song, the first that sung using one vote for.
And that was he was he was again doing that sort of penned risky thing.
No rhythm. Well, no comedy. There was rhythm. No, no, no, no melody.
No traditional harmony in any Western sense, using lots of quarter tones and sound clustered and that sort into it.
And he again, his his vision was different.
That was to create the sense of the deceptive centralistic, which was, of course, the seminal influence on my musical thinking as well.
And so so in a way, there was there was I wouldn't say that Andy Gretzky sound world was outside.
Nothing ever is. I mean, I can even listening now, with hindsight, fans let nearly 50 years later I can hear him.
It's a Bartok even in that piece. Yeah. And I never would be absolutely dishonest to say that I hadn't studied and loved the bond of string quartettes
and that they'd influenced the way I thought music was quite important ways early on because again,
there was a focus from folk sources. Yeah. And Bartok too was so intent on his own musical voice.
But you see that the impact of modernism was originality.
You know, you had the that's how it impacted me anyway.
I felt and the way I think we were taught when Peter encouraged us to say you were one
must find one's individual voice and your individual voices is a very complex thing.
And everything you've ever heard or been influenced by will be a constituent and that you like.
Can you relate or you dislike and you don't like to eventually forms into what we can think of us as an individual composer voice.
And I suppose that was what I was bringing from the Yawkey experience.
Got wonderful opportunities that we've met has created through that great young composers to write music for three years as a day.
Phil was a way of easy finding, finding oneself, finding one's voice.
And that was what I brought to Sussex when I first arrived there in 1973.
It was still that business of finding one's voice, but finding one's voice through purging, purging, influence,
trying to purge influence, trying to get inside the very heart of one's psyche and of one's almost unconscious mind.
And that was stripping away, stripping away, meditating, taking taking all everything away.
And that was when I discovered the work of poor clay. And I read some of his pedagogical sketchbook.
Was a very important source of the three of learning, of learning.
And that was something that writer Bernie Grand. True, sir.
Berio had encouraged us to think like that. If you read a pedagogical skip sketchbook or Clay, I don't know if you ever have.
I knew it was it was for a young composer. It's really worth reading from because it it it it's really a composition.
You can use it as a composition tract.
And if you relate a lot of what he says to notation and it a deep level to thinking about musical form, musical structure, it's very, very rich.
And that was another force that was impacting.
So that when I came to write the first the second string quartette it, all those forces would work.
So a lot of the notation in the work is relates, in fact,
to that wonderful line drawing that you so kindly find and find the picture of me for this sum, for this interview.
If you look at the way that that's structured and then you take a look at the school pages of your second with it,
you'll see there are very strong links. And even in the these structural shapes of the outer movements,
they move into a central spiral, just like in that screen and then move out on the other side.
But I never thought in a linear way. I always thought in the cyclical way of moving to a central point of the centre.
And course, that was also a metaphor, I suppose, a musical metaphor for a kind of exploration of self and of consciousness.
And you could say, well, look, it's kind of modernism in a way,
but it's in the stripping away of all the preconceptions of the things that you've learnt.
You you're you're taking things out. It's also variation.
It's very much like the way the Japanese calligraphers work of eliminating everything that was unnecessary from their work.
And so you're just left with a central shapes, a central for a central sound.
And that was what really was at the heart of that work.
And that was that was what I was beginning to discover in in in this this new phase of finding my voice in a way,
I think those years that the years of 1973 to 1976, which included works like Uncle NOM's or Ghost as it leads the bill for Roger Wood.
Now, that's an interesting part of the whole story, but that that came straight after the second string quartette.
The second string quartette was a kind of point of crisis musically, emotionally, in all sorts of ways.
And in setting up this department at Sussex and discovering amongst students the string quartette.
So, of course, I wanted to write for them, but I also wanted to write for them in a way that would encourage them to think in
similar ways about their own musical selves of their own way they could develop.
And I was thrilled with how quickly those young musicians took to that way of thinking.
And they actually did a jolly good job with a performance, which surprised me enormously because they weren't highly skilled performers,
but they just took to the work and they made it their own and gave a wonderful foremans of it in Australia house later that year for little.
That view was in June or July. Some of that year. So, yeah, that was that was very exciting.
I think to be interesting now, to just listen to a couple of the movement full of the string quartette,
just to give a sense of how varied the pieces within itself and maybe to elucidate some of the ideas that we've tried to to.
Did you say music movement for a movement and movement for the openings of bass?
We've got. Oh, good, good, good, good. Because it really does.
They're quite different. I mean that the fit. Yes.
That that the first the first movement is is that is very much like the line drawing of clay at the fourth movement
is that reflects rice pounding music to some extent that I'd heard early and that I related to children's games.
But there's another whole story related. What are you going to be?
I'll make an educated easy. I think I'll stop talking. Did you hear that, Nancy?
Is the fourth movement, I think. Coming next.
So he has very, very contrasting, as you can hear.
And I think just to maybe bridges slightly out of this this little parts of the discussion at the end of the programme.
Note for the second quarter you describe.
Hold on. I've got it here. You describe about your music as ritual rather than an expression.
And this is something that, you know, you're right. This is from 1973. So I'm wondering if you could just elaborate a bit on that.
I mean, I think that it's to an extent kind of clear when we think about the the Asian influence,
perhaps in a different function of music in different cultures. But I'm just wondering if you could elaborate even further, the house.
Isn't it interesting?
I mean, I was just as you were speaking there, just thinking, I suppose it was all part of that purging process of trying to put emotion out of music.
Atami music.
I mean, I am a very emotional person and I was trying to just purge that away so that the sounds themselves could be themselves in their own world.
And in that way, and it was for me it was quite a strong meditative process where I would meditate my way into the sounds,
into the sound world in which I was becoming engaged.
But the sounds would lead me.
I wouldn't leave the sounds, the seconds would lead me, and they would begin to shape themselves in relation to each other.
And it was that process of meditating. And so for me, always.
And it still is, unless I'm being silly. And just having a bit of fun with bench setting, with music, I don't like to composing, actually silly.
But every now and then I do. I just witnessed the decide down the psychologist.
I think, you know, but, um. But no. I mean the real out of composing is when you take yourself into that space that is.
A wave from, in a way, away from self, and it connects to a kind of universality.
So it's like a form of prayer. It's it's. And that is part of the spiritual strength of music and of sound.
When you think about it, you know, sound in the Indian sense is the essence of the ancient Indian, Vedas and so on is the essence of the universe.
You think of that? No, the old all sound from which all things come.
And I suppose that was a person who was a spiritual process.
So in that sense, once you became engaged in it, the Psalms lead you right and you lead the sounds, then it is.
It's a journey away from self. Into a universe which in which much takes place on it.
You know, listening to the some of the opening of that fourth movement,
particularly got now birdlike is one could almost be in a in a dense jungle somewhere.
But then I don't want equally. One could be somewhere out in the cosmos with a myriad of star shapes forming and
shaping and shaping in all sorts of ways with human consciousness is an intruder.
But nevertheless, these things impact upon us. And that's really, I think, where that idea of ritual in my music comes from.
The way I play with the idea is it's a kind of ritual play. You know, if you then go back and think in a Christian sense, the playing with the rosary,
the rosary beads around and around and around the rosary you go.
That's a very ancient mediaeval idea. Before, of course, the awful renaissance,
when we became Viniar and for progress became the big thing and a goal orientation and all that because life was short and the human impact was,
I suppose, much more limited. So, yeah, no. So in that sense, it's it's a kind of it's kind of a ritual.
A ritual. Yes. Yes.
It's really interesting to me that I mean, when if we didn't have that know, great explanation you've just given and one sees your music as ritual.
It's funny to see a contemporaneous piece like Ranglin, which was written quite close to the second quartette from right.
In the six years or six. I mean, that is it seems to inhabit a completely different sort of sound world,
an atmosphere that really does ring true to that idea of whom it's meditation.
And I'm just wondering actually, if we can we can hear an excerpt of that play by Roger Woodward, who I believe it was written for.
It was. Was. It's just very interesting to compare the two pieces in both of them as being ritual,
where it's clear that it's something that can be very much on the surface and allude to a lot of those.
This idea of repetition and focus and meditation, or it can be something that is more personal to you.
This idea of stripping away and purging. I think it's very, very interesting to compare the two.
And it's it's not so often. I can't think of huge examples.
And I didn't necessarily like this myself, but to write such contrasting pieces in very close proximity.
And I'm just wondering what's Anthem was written for? Because I know that the string quartette was for a student Quartette Sussex.
But what was the commission from Roger for?
Was it just a concert piece or. It worked.
It grew out. It grew out of another work which came straight after the second string quartette.
I mean, just let's get the línea, remember? Talk about stripping things away.
Well, in our home, I almost reached the heart. It's it's it's it's it's oneness.
It's a piece about oneness. And I've taken everything in the central early.
Yeah. All the all the business is gone. It's gone. And what is what can be more essential than the colour of an octave.
And a very limited scale in which an octave travels around.
It really is a very if you take just a fragment of the second string quartette and slow it right down in time and repeat it in industry,
then you have Anglo. But it took me two years to get there.
And the process was through another work straight after the second string quartette.
Roger had been pestering me to write a piece for himself, two harps and five percussionists,
which he wanted to do in the opening season of the Sydney Opera House at the end of that year.
Well, I'm not a pianist and I was very I'm very uncomfortable writing to the piano.
I never know how to do it. And and I just couldn't write the piece.
And eventually Roger got exasperated because blessing he had faith that I would eventually turn something up for him.
And he said, look. And he said, I've programmed the work. You can't let me down.
None's was, I think, a few couple of weeks before 10 days before he was due to fly down to Sydney.
He said, we'll just write me one chord just on an empty piece of paper,
just write one chord, sign it, and I'll play it with all the love in the world.
And I know he meant it. So I. I was then living in Brighton and I took a half bottle, half empty bottle,
fortunately was maybe only a third full of scotch sitting on the table of us living,
grabbed a scotch bottle, dashed into the university, into my office and struck myself in the room.
Is it right? I'm not coming out until I've written this piece. And so the Scotch bottle and I, I'd each other off and I did the system.
But anyway, I thought the only were only instrument ahead in the room was a little clavier,
tiny little clavichord like the ones you know and used at the end of his feet and.
Well that's not going to help. It's not a piano. But then suddenly it's again stripping things away, going into this so meditational space.
I heard the sound of a gong, a deep gong, just one gong. And I thought, my goodness, that's the sound of the beginning of the universe.
And that was that set in motion. I had just blank sheets of paper and a ruling device.
I'm not seeing those mechanical rules that Stravinsky used to use.
Well, a friend of mine, Bill Carter, had had found one for me in Germany and had given it to me until I had this
brooding stage device and and just a empty sketchbook like Clay might have had.
You know, just maybe sketchbook. So I started to draw my graphic sounds and symbols.
And sure enough, one day and one night later, I moved to my office and as it leaves, the bill was written.
Phew. That's how I said it after budget, just in time for him to take on the plane.
He was thrilled with it. Absolutely delighted.
And once more, it uses some of the ideas, but stripping away from the second string quartette and then the next piece, he loved that so much.
He said, now I want a piece for solo piano. And I said, well, I'm going to have the same problem.
He said, well, I've got the same solution. Just write one chord and again, once more.
Couldn't do it. I couldn't do it. I couldn't do it. And then I was sitting at my desk and I know I was living in Sussex in outside the Neelu.
It's actually in the in the east east Hosai. It was the village I think I say at the top.
And I went to my desk and I sat down. There was an open score of diseases in Marsh Alemu.
He saw that wonderful slow night. I don't remember that indeed.
It was the second that there was something about that rising second grabbed my attention.
I thought, right. Here we go. And then I looked at some of the wonderful Grace notes.
And on the other side of the desk was and it just happened, really just happened to be open at a piece of a who attend Endako of the Japanese court.
I have wonderful, wonderful transcriptions of it. And it was those two things between those two things that the the peace unclogged once more.
It was written in the space of about four hours.
Anybody listens to other words, it sounds like that is not much in there, but there is a huge about behind.
It was more Roger received the school with absolute delight, Joy, and we amended it and he made it.
He wanted it to be longer. And the original version was a much shorter one.
He wanted it longer and he wanted the sections extended notes only to.
It's true that the piece was about one, this was about Jouni wasn't about emotional expression.
You either get it and you shift into the space and it takes you into an into your own world as of knowing or run.
But I'm becoming this or whatever. And and it was fine to lengthen it and to make it the OCD sound on for longer and then a little bit.
And at the end when they all trip out again. So, yeah, that was that was wonderful.
But I, I have written pieces that uncle like,
but I've never really written an uncle in the sense of it being the absolute centre in the way that piece was.
I doubt that I could ever do it again.
So yeah, if we if we had to move, move on and and away from that, eventually the piece moves out of there, of course, is space.
You started this. The view is as I cross the Bridge of Dreams, and that was looking in sense to the other side of the desk so they could score.
That's a good place, I think, to move on to some questions, if there are any.
You just have a look. So we've got one here question from Caroline on YouTube.
She says. And I'm in awe of your achievements as a flute player. I performed your goldfish in Summer Rain, and it speaks to so many people.
What inspired you to change from performer to composer? Oh, gosh, I just wasn't a good enough performer.
I think that's it. And also composition love I loved.
I loved composing. I always have composed. From the time I was a tiny girl, even though I didn't really know what I was doing much,
I started off composing, writing graphic music, drawing music as a small child.
Now, that's not really knowing what I was doing, but I was enjoying what I was doing.
And so at Tecumseh's, you've always been a strong force.
I went on I spent one year as a professional flautist day with the Australian Ballet Orchestra.
And honest, I didn't really enjoy the experience very much.
And I thought, oh, I did write some music while I was in the orchestra, but it didn't didn't grab me, didn't it?
Didn't feel like it was enough. Somehow I went back to university and completed my honours year and and then academic study became important as well.
And there simply wasn't time to I kept claimable. But it dropped into it wasn't anymore.
The foreground and the being the foreground of my life and forth and love.
And it always will be in some aspects. But it's not Dropbox and there wasn't really time to go on practising.
So an academic work and kind of composing, particularly Fonkoze them, became the priority.
And it just wasn't possible to do those. We've actually kind of just given a follow up.
But actually, this is a nice bridge to something we were just talking about before this interview about your composition plans for the future.
And I thought it would be interesting if you might talk a little bit about your upcoming opera,
which, you know, all things are permitted, should be premiering in September this year.
Oh, wonderful, yes.
Well covered permitting, let's hope it was due to be before or some last year, last September in the Desert Song Festival in Alice Springs,
which again, it's a it's a desert town in the heart of Australia, in the centre of Australia.
And the work the opera has, it centres around a character, a local character, a woman called Ollie Think,
who was actually born in Tasmania and educating in not spotlight in Sydney, actually at the University of Sydney and Anthropology.
But she went out and she worked. She was also a painter. I think some ways her first love was painting the desert wildflowers.
And in the course of her life, she found herself in Alice Springs, were working firstly with the IRA and the people,
and then later with the robbery, a neighbouring community, Aboriginal Aboriginal community.
And she set up this botanical garden. And we're going to do the the opera in the garden where she lived.
It's quite extraordinary, actually. We did a little preview the year before last.
And you could feel her ghostly presence in the garden at the time we performed in this.
One of the mainstays of the opera is this wonderful Aboriginal Women's Choir.
Very, very strong group of women singers who come from numbers of communities around Alice Springs and in Alice Springs itself,
that mainly from communities, they come together, they've toured internationally, and their mainstay of their repertory are well, on the one hand,
Lutheran chorales that the missionaries had brought out to Australia a couple of hundred years.
Well over a hundred. Not a couple hundred years, but hundred thirty four years prior.
They still perform these regularly and they've made them their own.
They sing them in their own languages, either islander or picking out.
And those are the two main languages that they sing in.
And then on the other hand, that African Freedom songs, because then director Martha Stewart is an African man.
Who was it? You went to London with a bit of a minister priest in in London.
And he's an extraordinary man, worked with bikie gangs and all sorts of, you know, sort of low socio economic groups, repressed minorities.
And he found itself in Australia married to a banker. A woman is ADA, Australian painter.
And they found themselves in Alice Springs. Oh, this is about a couple of decades ago.
And they had he founded this choir. And so we're coming together in this work.
We're going to do it in the in the garden itself, in the open air, which is the garden itself becomes the character to me.
It's wonderful because it brings together that extraordinary spirituality of landscape.
And, of course, the Aboriginal people in the miss and culture of the area bring all that to life.
They they bring the landscape to life through their stories in a very strong spiritual sense.
And if you're privileged enough for them to share some of those stories with you, it's it's electrifying.
It's quite extraordinary. So that's what I'm looking forward to at the end of this year, hopefully come to this.
One more question in here, which I suppose we can ask sort of generally as well.
It is do you still take on composition students and to expand that to.
Do you still teach or have you now just moved into composing?
Yeah, I never really liked teaching much in the composition teaching composition.
So I think it's such an individual pursuit that I think you sort of almost have to find your own way.
I'm not sure how much you can be taught as composers.
Yeah. You encouraged. Yes. And mentored. Yes.
Helped to understand the music that you love in a deeper sense.
Yes. Helping you to see what you're actually creating on the page when perhaps you can't see yourself.
Yes. A more experienced musician can do that. But can you teach someone to be a composer?
I don't think so. I think you're born a composer. You are a composer or you're not a composer.
And I'm not sure that any amount of teaching can really change that in terms of once one's mantle, one's destiny, so to speak.
So, yeah, I know the answer to that is a very occasionally if a student would ask me to help and would actually read some scores to my home.
I'll be very happy to sit down and work with them. I've done that several times since I've retired,
but I don't take on composition in any teaching in any formal sense and certainly not in any financial sense, because I just think it's too much.
It's, you know, how can you teach something spiritual? It's spiritual.
You know, it's how can I trust Jesus throughout the moneylenders in the temple?
You can't do that. Yes, I think I've got well, I guess a follow up just for me, the last question.
We'll have time for is having you just setting. How do you teach something spiritual?
Well, if I were to ask the question, how did you teach something spiritual for all those years?
How did you how did you approach something which you feel is quite intangible?
Always through putting the student and the student voice first, trying to get them to find what was within themselves,
what they what they liked musically, what they didn't like musically. There was this process that I'd lived through myself.
I suppose it was of course, I'm indebted to my mentors, to people like that, of course, Peter primarily.
But also to Wilfred to grands. And to the many influences.
And some of the Asian musicians are Takamatsu, Morton Feldman, Harrison Birtwistle.
All people who had an important mentoring and influence and inspirational effect on my development as an artist.
If I can help a young person by providing a little source of something like that, well, I'm very happy to do that.
But essentially, it's finding the voice within within oneself and encouraging it coming out.
It's a very sensitive process and it's a process where you open yourself to a
great deal of potential urt but it's a process you have to be brave enough to,
to go through. And if one is has the courage, you will find the song, you will find your sound and how you connect to all that is around you.
At least that's what I feel. And that's a really great place to just bring this to a close.
But there's actually just one quick question there. But this ties in with when your quartette will be performed.
We're just waiting for restrictions in the UK to ease, obviously, but it will be recorded and then Lifestream to a later date.
I can't really speculate when that will be because the situation in the UK is very,
I guess, volatile, but it should hopefully be in the first half of this year.
That's my hope anyway. And there'll be plenty of announcements to go along with it.
But anyway, I just want to give a massive thank you. And this has been really, really interesting.
And it's been a real pleasure to see you. So thank you. It's been a delight, Tom, so thank you so much for having me.
That's exploration. Going back across Britain, me half offered half a century of musical developed.