Name: MMTCP Practicum Audio Files: Question & Answer Period by Red Lizard
Duration: 21 min 9 s
Description: Question & Answer Period @ 00:00 to 20:05

Question & Answer Period @ 00:00 to 20:05

MMTCP Practicum Audio Files: Question & Answer Period

Blitz (2011)
for orchestra, chorus and pre-recorded voices

Performed by Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, conducted by Marko Letonja

The voices you will hear in Blitz are those of elderly men and women who were children in Liverpool, Berlin and Hamburg during World War II. After London, the port of Liverpool was the most heavily bombed British city, more than 4,000 people dying there during the course of the war, mostly in December 1940 and May 1941. In Hamburg, during three nights of Allied bombing in July 1943, approximately 45,000 people died. There was similar loss of life in Berlin.

Though the impulse to compose this piece of music came, initially, from a desire to share the childhood stories of my parents and their friends in Liverpool during the war, and to juxtapose these with accounts from Germany, the music itself took over quite quickly. This is a piece of music, not a documentary. And yet in several senses this music relates rather strongly to the stories being told.

There is, for example, the music of the voices themselves. Although the recorded interviews were edited for content, in the context of the orchestra I treated them as solo instruments. In some cases, I composed conversations between a voice and an instrument, such as the duet between my mother and a trombone that begins about five and a half minutes into the piece ('Most people where we lived had Anderson shelters').

Blitz also contains two important musical quotations. The first consists of the opening bars of Bruch's Violin Concerto in G minor, various transformations of that falling three-note melodic figure permeating the piece – in fact the theme is already being transformed before it is heard in its original form. And why the Bruch? Well the slow-motion falling figure struck me as a useful musical symbol for dropping bombs, but also, more prosaically, from 1880 to 1883, the German composer was chief conductor of the Liverpool Philharmonic Society.

The second quote is the great Lutheran chorale, Vom Himmel hoch which Bach used so memorably as the basis for his set of canonic variations. At the point in Blitz at which the English voices give way to German voices, I needed something momentous to happen. I was attempting to find a musical equivalent of the firebombing of Hamburg, though of course supposing it were even possible, such music would be too awful to listen to. But what, I wondered, if I were to produce a great peal of C major at this point, lighting up the musical sky, not with horror, but with something awful in the true sense – music that is full of awe. So you will hear three statements of the hymn tune, played simultaneously at different speeds in a kind of ecstatic cacophony.

Blitz was commissioned by the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra with assistance from the Sidney Myer Fund. It is dedicated to the people whose voices you hear during its course. They are, in order of appearance, Ken and Pat Wilson, Alec and Marjorie Ford (my parents), Hansjuergen Enz, Ursula Ezimora and Edith Bauermeister.

© A.F

Blitz for orchestra, chorus and recorded voices

The last words, poems, diary entries and letters of Goethe, Henry Ward Beecher, Alban Berg, Robert Louis Stevenson, Robert Falcon Scott, Adelaide Crapsey, Chidiock Tichbourne, Sappho, Dorothy Porter, Maurice Chevalier, Emily Bronte, Emily Dickinson, Sullivan Ballou, Florenz Ziegfeld, Virginia Woolf and Noel Coward, and Fish Lamb's death from Cloudstreet by Tim Winton.
Read program note and text here: http://www.andrewford.net.au/xlastwords.htm


Last Words (2013)

Sally Walker (flute)

Once upon a time there were two brothers (2013)
for solo flute (and speaking voice)

Words by the composer, based on Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm's story 'The Singing Bone'
Commissioned for Sally Walker under the terms of the Albert H Maggs Prize (2012)
First performance by Sally Walker
Melbourne International Arts Festival, Collins St Baptist Church, Melbourne, 21 October 2013

Once upon a time there were two brothers (2013)

Orchestra of the Australian National Academy of Music, conducted by Brett Dean

Rauha (2009)
for wind and brass, percussion, keyboards and double basses

For centuries, the magnificent rapids on the Vuoksi river at Imatra in south-eastern Finland drew visitors from all over the world. Russian Tsars came from Catherine the Great to Nicholas II. So did Pedro the Magnanimous, Emperor of Brazil. In 1903 a large hotel was built next to the rapids, and three years later Igor and Katerina Stravinsky had their honeymoon there.

Today it is only possible to experience the rapids for 20 minutes on a summer's evening, for in 1929 the river was dammed for hydroelectricity. This was a major national event. An Imatra Symphony was requested from Sibelius, though it came to nothing, and foreign dignitaries travelled to attend the damming. The new dam was an emblem of progress to the Finnish people. But after the rapids ran dry, a terrible silence fell. Where once there had been a constant roaring torrent, now birds began to sing. The price of Imatra's progress was a tense, never-ending peace. 'Rauha', is the Finnish word for peace.

One summer's evening in 2008 I spent 20 minutes beside the rushing waters. The noise is hugely impressive, almost overwhelming, and I wondered how it must have felt when it was abruptly taken away, especially if you had lived next to it all your life. This piece is the result of my wondering.

Rauha is scored for three flutes (two doubling piccolo), two oboes, two clarinets (one doubling bass), two bassoons (one doubling contra); also pairs of horns and trumpets, an array of clanging percussion (bell plates and cowbells prominent), a piano that turns into an out-of-tune honky-tonk piano then a harmonium, and double basses. It was commissioned by the Australian National Academy of Music and composed between September and December 2009.

Rauha (2009)

Every Sunday since the end of World War II, musicians journeyed to Washington Square Park to sing folk-songs. Until one Sunday—after the City of New York denied the musicians a singing permit—they decided to protest instead. What resulted was a violent confrontation with authority.

12: 3,000 Beatniks Riot in Village

LISTEN LOVE IT LINK ME AND YES I SEEK INSPIRATION THROUGH FRIENDS

NIRVANA / I SEEK INSPIRATION THROUGH FRIENDS

Read about this mix here: http://www.self-titledmag.com/2012/11/30/needle-exchange-115-an-exclusive-live-mix-by-deadbeat/

MMTCP Practicum Audio Files: Question & Answer Period

Red Lizard

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