Laments to loss
[ The University of Melbourne Voice Vol. 5, No. 3
8 June - 12 July 2009 ]
Part of a special performance for the Festival of Ideas, two contemporary compositions are musical reflections on the effects of climate change on landscape, oceans and community. By Katherine Smith.
The story of devastation on Easter Island has inspired a composition, Easter Island, that offers a bleak but cautionary tale to contemporary society, poised as it is on the edge of environmental collapse unless urgent action is taken.
Head of Composition at the University of Melbourne’s School of Music (Parkville), Dr Stuart Greenbaum says the fate of Easter Island is being read in contemporary society as a metaphor for the state of the entire planet.
“Imaginative thinkers about society – people like scientist and author Jared Diamond for instance – are conceptualising and writing about world events in ways that are very stimulating for artists. His tale of Easter Island was especially resonant for me.”
Dr Greenbaum says he learned from reading Diamond that Easter Island was settled by Polynesians around AD800, but found itself in a state of social and environmental devastation only 1000 years later.
In his composers’ analysis of the piece, he writes that Easter Island’s society rose and fell, without outside intervention, due to deforestation and the resultant strain on the food supply.
“By the early 18th century the society was in a state of collapse and cannibalism, the population having dwindled to around twenty per cent of its estimated peak.”
Now all that remains are the giant stone statues that still line the coast, with elongated heads mostly facing inward.
Dr Greenbaum says the 20-minute piece of music was commissioned by the Australia Ensemble in 2007, and is written for flute, supported by bass clarinet, piano, and string quartet of two violins, viola and cello.
Creating a piece based on concepts external to the music is not always straightforward, and certainly not scientific, he explains.
“Music is an abstract language, and the conscious mind is not always a willing partner in bringing it to life.”
The piece was conceived when, while he was out walking one day, a “speculative image of Easter Islanders rolling giant slabs of stone over logs from quarry to shoreline came to mind.”
“Immense effort must have been required to move all that stone. The statues have a powerful and enigmatic presence and were apparently central to (the islanders’) culture yet also connected to what was undermining the sustainability of their environment.
Structurally the piece is of nine sections, with plaintive solo flute prelude and postlude, which Dr Greenbaum says “perhaps represent the voice of the island, before and after the presence of human inhabitants”.
The other sections form a kind of narrative outlining the rise and fall of an isolated society, and evoke the dramatic stone figures which are the dominant feature known to us of Easter Island society.
If Easter Island’s fate is a fable about societal degeneration based on a failure to recognise the link between human survival and good stewardship of the natural world, Elliott Gyger’s work From the Hungry Waiting Country takes a different tack. His piece draws on growing cultural awareness of the Australian environment’s fragility – and “savage beauty” – and the need for politicians and the wider community to respond to its crises with courage and power.
Dr Gyger, who is a lecturer in Composition at the Faculty of the VCA and Music, says stories in the media of looming water crises in Australia from 2004 onward grabbed his attention and stirred his creativity.
Although he says he has seldom written pieces with explicit reference to current events, he felt these reports seemed to demand some sort of response.
The libretto for From the Hungry Waiting Country draws on a number of 20th century Australian poems in English, and extracts from ancient Near Eastern religious texts in a variety of languages.
“These seemingly disparate strands of the libretto are linked by the striking use of Biblical imagery in the Australian poetry, and by the common theme of water in the desert, often as an image for divine grace,” Dr Gyger says of his composition.
“Some listeners may find the harsh moral logic of the texts uncomfortable; surely few Australians consider the drought, or other environmental challenges we face, as the handiwork of a vengeful God.
“Nonetheless there is a profoundly ethical dimension to the emerging ecological crises – an increasing awareness that they are the consequences of our own actions, in more direct ways than could have been imagined 2000 years ago.”
From the Hungry Waiting Country and Easter Island will be performed for the Festival of Ideas on Tuesday 16 June at 5.30pm. Free admission: Register at: www.ideas.unimelb.edu.au. From the Hungry Waiting Country will be performed by Halcyon, a Sydney ensemble specialising in new chamber music with voices featuring Alison Morgan, Belinda Montgomery, Jenny Duck-Chong and Jo Burton, with harpist Genevieve Lang. Performing Easter Island will be Mardi McSullea, Head of Woodwind, School of Music (Parkville) (flute), with Grania Burke (bass clarinet), Jennifer McNamara (piano) and the Silo String Quartet.
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