Spirit Ground (2010)

For orchestra with solo violin

As I composed Spirit Ground, I thought of it as an overture to the West Australian Symphony Orchestra’s 2011 concert season. It seemed fitting that as well as providing a showpiece for both orchestra and soloist, I should try to make it radiant, exuberant and above all, about Australia.

In choosing the title, I wanted to describe the relationship between a comparatively youthful, ‘progressive’ northern culture with an increasingly tenuous sky-oriented spirituality, and an ancient, profoundly animistic indigenous one, whose wisdom had always been derived from its close and intricate spiritual association with the land. It also implied, in my imagination, the possibility of a healing process through which these opposites, which are audibly denoted close to the surface of the music, might gradually come together.

The work opens with what sounds like a preparation for some kind of ritual: insistent dance-chant rhythms pound over earth-based drones. There are interjections by the sound of crickets and the air is full of joyous birdsong. As the music unfolds, fragments of, and allusions to, an Ave Maria plainchant which I’ve come to associate with the universal Earth Mother may be discernable. There are also easily identifiable melodic references to the music of South East Asian cultures which retain spiritual connections to the earth. At the heart of the work is a group of episodes which draw freely on material from the ‘Agnus Dei’ of my Mass of the Dreaming (2009), whose peace motive becomes intertwined with melodic references to the Earth Mother chant.

Spirit Ground was commissioned for the West Australian Symphony Orchestra by Geoff Stearn. The world premiere performance was conducted by Paul Daniel in the Perth Concert Hall on Friday 11 March 2011. Margaret Blades was the solo violinist.

Ross Edwards