The tensions of making sacred art in a secular world

This talk was given as part of the Barbara Blackman Lecture during the Canberra International Music Festival, 18 May 2014

Chris has asked me to talk about “the tensions of making sacred art in a secular world.” I don’t have the scholarly credentials to do this, but I can draw on my experience as a composer living and working in Australia and relating to the world from an Australian perspective. The actual divide between sacred and secular is, I think, rather fuzzy. I take sacred to mean imbued with the power of otherness, which is to be respected though not understood. For most of the human race all our activities – working, eating etc. – have been charged with the sacred rather than seen as merely physiological. I think our capacity to respond to the sacred is still intact, but we’ve been taught to feel uneasy about it. One of the functions of art must surely be to restore our confident awareness and participation.

It’s often claimed that the great social upheavals of the first half of the 20th century, having shattered values and traditions already drained by the European Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment, had initiated a period of disenchantment followed by a virile new secular aesthetic which set about clearing away what Pierre Boulez called the “dust and crap”. It’s not surprising that many young European composers of the post-war generation, having witnessed the destruction at first hand, felt a need to turn away from traditions that seemed stale – that had seemingly let them down – and strike out bravely into the unknown in search of sanity. But in their zeal to create a better world, their new broom often swept away potent cultural icons that simply needed remodelling and refreshing.

As an undergraduate music student I had a fortunate dual existence. A sound training in the European musical tradition was supplemented during university vacations by working for Peter Sculthorpe, who, having begun to explore our neighbouring musical cultures in South East Asia, came to the conclusion that their relevance to us had been obscured by our focus on Europe. When I went to study in Europe in the early 1970s, high modernism in music was on the wane, and there was much speculation about music’s role in society – particularly so-called Art Music. Working against this was a blinkered orthodoxy dedicated to preserving hard core modernism. This I found soul destroying and although I learnt a lot, it was in many ways a dispiriting time for me.

I returned to Australia disoriented and with a severe case of composer’s block. Then, in 1977, I went with my wife and our infant son to live in a coastal village north of Sydney next to a National Park. In one sense this was sheer lunacy because I was teaching three very full days at the Sydney Conservatorium and since the train service was hopeless, I wore out a volkswagen going to and from work. But the time I spent walking in the national park was my salvation. My creativity had dried up and the music I once loved had lost its allure and begun to sound sterile – a depressing situation, but I decided to use it constructively. I did this by temporarily abandoning Western music altogether and turning my attention to the sounds of the natural environment in a contemplative way – that’s to say by non-selectively absorbing them at a level of consciousness below that of the everyday with its automatic tendency to process and label. This had the effect of putting me back in touch with the mysteriousness of the world at first hand, and the shapes and patterns I subconsciously absorbed and distilled from nature – which I regarded as the source of music – gradually found their way into an embryonic musical language in which I recognized my own authentic voice emerging.

This language was stark, austere and skeletal, and for a time I felt loath to flesh it out, but gradually I came to accept that it had the strength and tensility to support other material while retaining its

essential purity. I saw how musical structures associated in my mind with their origin in nature – which defined a specific place and created an attachment to it – could be related to the wider world by annexing universal cultural symbols to coexist with and reinforce my own personal ones. To give examples of the personal ones: rhythmic interplay – or counterpoint – in my music often recalls the intersecting voices of insects and frogs, with their mysterious periodicity which often seemed to me to be on the verge of communicating something profound; and drones – or pedals – which I associated with the cicada chorus and its unpredictable starts and stops. Perhaps the ultimate cultural source of drones is the didjeridu, and I’ve often collaborated with didjeridu players, especially William Barton. There’s never been any question of my actually composing for didjeridu. I do my thing and William does his – superbly – and it never ceases to astonish me how well our respective forms of earth-based music can reinforce one another – as in last night’s performance of my Symphony.

A further processing of rhythmic patterns drawn from nature gave rise to a distinctive form of celebratory dance-chant known as maninya, which keeps bursting out of my music, often unsummoned by me – at least at a conscious level. Personal symbols can suggest different things at different times – and I’m careful not to define them too closely and risk diminishing their potency – but allusions to the mysteriousness of the present moment, the timelessness of eternity, closeness to the earth etc. keep cropping up in various ways and forms. Similarly, birdsong – real or imagined – can suggest wildness, freshness, joy etc. I rarely imitate actual birdsong, although more than once I’ve played a melodic fragment on the piano while composing and heard it repeated by a bird outside. I get spooked by this – in a good way: I’m left wondering who’s imitating whom. And then, of course I feel a bit silly. One thing I should make clear is that most of the time my symbolic images and allusions occur spontaneously: they’re not constructs – they’re more like archetypes and I don’t plan them, they just appear.

I’ve mentioned that the structure – the scaffolding – that supports these symbols is increasingly called upon to play host to new ones I’ve borrowed from a variety of cultures, religions and mythologies. My own idiosyncratic maninya chant, originating in the natural environment of south eastern Australia, has been progressively coloured and inflected with material from South East Asia. It may also coexist with strands of European plainchant, often tempered by my own rhythmic and metrical quirks. Earth Mothers figure prominently: the Virgin Mary and her Asian counterparts such as the female bodhisattva Guan-Yin have become, for me, important symbols which are inseparable from the world ecological crisis in their role as nurturers and protectors of living things.

It seems to me, then, that as long as there’s a supporting structure relating to a context or locus that you feel you can trust, you can be wildly eclectic and still remain true to yourself. This really appeals to me and I’ve been going for it in a big way. Tomorrow I return to Sydney to resume work on a double concerto for alto saxophone, percussion and orchestra, provisionally titled Frog and Star Ritual. I’ve tried this title out on a few friends and had mixed reactions: it’s intended, I think, to suggest a cosmic unity embracing earth and sky. I have a lot still to compose, but I thought I’d give you a progress report as an example of how I go about putting things together, and an indication of the scope of my cultural borrowings, as well as their sheer wackiness. You’ll see that I’ve come a long way from secularized abstraction.

The music begins with the percussionist performing a highly rhythmic solo on the doumbek – an Egyptian drum shaped like an hour glass and played with the hands. He’s dressed in animal skins and his role is that of a shaman who performs a ritual of renewal by playing the universe into existence. (I haven’t broken this news to the performer yet and his reaction will be interesting). Around him, the universe slowly begins to take shape accompanied by drone-like material I’ve pinched from my own Fourth Symphony, Star Chant, which I conceived in the Simpson Desert, and which sets for large chorus and orchestra, a text by my friend the astronomer Fred Watson. In the symphony, by the way, this takes the form of a sort of ritualistic chanting of the names of stars and constellations in both Western and Aboriginal culture taken from European mythology and the Dreamtime stories of many different indigenous peoples. Gradually, small organisms begin to chirp and twitter, culminating in a seething mass of shrill, pulsating voices, all clamouring for recognition. The shaman now acts decisively to create cosmic order. He initiates a pounding ritual dance for the full orchestra based on his opening drum solo and in celebration of his creation. The dance yields abruptly to the healing sound of flowing water. The lights go down in preparation for a ceremony of cleansing and renewal and the Earth Mother in a white robe, appears with her saxophone. Accompanied by South East Asian bells and gongs she begins to play a slowly evolving melodic line, derived from plainchant relating to the Virgin Mary and becoming increasingly sinuous until it turns into a complex outpouring that resembles the warbling of magpies. The marimba now takes over from the bells and gongs to begin an introspective dialogue between the two soloists accompanied by the strings. I’ll be interested to find out where this is going to lead, and the fact that I don’t know creates an irresistible allure for me to keep going.

Well, that’s where I’ve got to so far. I know it sounds a bit over the top, but to me it’s more meaningful – and certainly more fun – than the alternative of presenting a concerto in the conventional manner. I want to give myself, the performers and the audience an opportunity to participate in the age-old sacred dimension of art. The secular western concert hall, only a few centuries old, can be seen as an aberration, as can the segregated western art music it houses. That’s not a criticism of either, but I think it’s important to remember that the world’s music has been traditionally and universally associated with the other art forms, particularly dance – and that collectively they have the power to help us confront the unknown with due respect and awe. The phenomenon of desacralization, of taking things at surface value and overlooking or suppressing our awareness of their inherent mystery is, I believe, a fairly recent one which is not sustainable. I also feel instinctively that we’re living in a time where more and more people are longing for a sense of renewal, and the return of some kind of cosmic spring which will help us view nature with a cleansed perception. These are the things that motivate my music.