For Orchestra

As an earnest young man I provided the following program note:

I composed Mountain Village in a Clearing Mist in 1973, shortly after my return to Australia after three years’ study in Europe. It was first performed at the 1974 Adelaide Festival of the Arts by the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra conducted by Patrick Thomas.

In this work I began to explore a musical language both technically and aesthetically in complete contrast with that of my earlier work.

The stylistic leap from fierce complexity to extreme quietude was foreshadowed some years earlier in Monos II, a dense, compact and rather savage piano piece which I wrote in 1970. At a certain point, quite unjustifiably in terms of its overall design, the piece dissolves abruptly into a sort of limbo and ends with a flippant gesture. I remember that in obeying my impulse to ‘destroy’ several months’ work in this way I experienced a great sense of release; perhaps I was unconsciously expressing the waning of my belief in the musical idiom I’d grown up with. At any rate, I came soon afterwards to the conclusion that my music was too dense and claustrophobic and that it needed more space to breathe.

My search for a new language led me to the opposite extreme with the composition of Mountain Village in a Clearing Mist, a calm and deliberately understated piece in which sounds and silences are counterpoised. It has no apparent direction, nor any sense of climax or resolution: the concept of music as psychological drama – as structured time – is quite foreign to its aesthetic and it ends as inexplicably as it begins. Someone once suggested that this piece, and several others which I composed later, are concerned primarily with intensifying the listener’s perception of the ‘eternal now’ and that they should perhaps be regarded more as contemplation objects than works of art in the post-Renaissance Western sense. If this is so – and it seems a valid opinion to me – I’d like to suggest that the ideal state of mind for the listener is one of calm intensity with attention focussed on each detail as it occurs, instead of projecting the mind back and forth in an attempt to perceive structural connections.

I borrowed the work’s title from a thirteenth century painting by Yu-Chien, a Chinese Zen monk, in whose ability to reveal the essence of nature with the utmost economy of means I recognised the goal towards which I’d been working. I should emphasise, though, that despite the implication of the title, there is no attempt to be descriptive or impressionistic. In fact, I chose the title after the score was completed.