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Item type: Item , Access status: Open Access , George Dreyfus: Quintet, after the Notebook of J.-G. Noverre, for wind instruments (1968) - Vivace(Canberra School of Music, Australian National University, 1968) Composer: George Dreyfus; Davies, John"' ... la premiere et la plus essentielle beaute d'un air de ballet est la convenance, c' est-a-dire le juste rapport que l' air doit avoir avec la chose representee.' So wrote Jean-Georges Noverre, the Gluck of the ballet, the Shakespeare of the dance, a Prometheus among men. It was this eighteenth century ballet master extraordinaire, this choreographer and philosopher of the dance, who rescued ballet from its servile position as a vapid accessory to opera and established it as an independent dramatic entity, who liberated costume and added mime to the rigid five positions of classical ballet, who raised musician and painter to roles of equality in creation of the dance art of the future: the ballet d' action. The noiebooks provide an invaluable insight into the creative processes of this energetic and revolutionary thinker. The notebook No. 3, now in the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, bears the date 'Novembre 1776'. It postdates Noverre's major treatise on the dance Lettres sur la danse et sur les ballets (1760) and was probably compiled during his brief and stormy appointment as 'compositeur et maftre des ballets' at the Academie royale de musique and as Directorof the F etes de Trianon. The notebook contains jottings of melodies - short characteristic pieces with descriptive titles, in which the pruning of excess ornamentation ensures the free flow of rhythm so essential to the dance - and choreographic steps (the pas echappe). Literary allusions in some titles indicate the seriousness of his dramatic intentions as well as his friendship with some of the notable hterary figu es of his time (Voltaire and Marivaux). One detail that has perplexed scholars is in the five figure combination that appears without explanation above melody No. Vi, La Fille D' Auvergne. Whether this is an acrostic for the corps de ballet or some more private symbol - the combination of his safe, perhaps, or the number of his Paris bank account - remains unverified. However, the fact that, in those days of intrigue, he noted such a private message in such a place shows how closely he guarded his creative thoughts in their formative stages. The first thing to be firmly established about the Dreyfus quintet is that it has nothing whatever to do with ballet. Neither is it a mere slavish imitation of the tyle and forms of eighteenth century music. A careful comparison • will show that Dreyfus has treated his source material with considerable freedom, taking here a distinctive rhythmic pattern, there a melodic feature, and making it the basis of an extended, non-balletic development. Even in those movements where Noverre's melodies are used in full they are modified at will to accommodate the composer's own style. In the second movement, for example, Noverre's rising sixth becomes the rising fifth that is so characteristic of Dreyfus' s 6/8 andante melodies. In essence, we have here a cross fertilisation of creative minds that bridges the gap between the eighteenth century and our own. The quintet was written at the invitation of the Sydney Wind Quintet in 1968." -- Kay DreyfusItem type: Item , Access status: Open Access , Ross Edwards: Maninya III (1985) - Movement I(Canberra School of Music, Australian National University, 1985) Composer: Ross Edwards; Davies, John"Maninya III for wind quintet is part of a series of five chrunber works which are characterised by extreme use of repetitive processes. The stylistic and structural aspects of these works may be likened to those of the music of composers such as Steve Reich, Terry Riley, and many others who have been referred to as minimalists. Edwards has nonetheless created a set of compositional procedures which guarantees the individuality of the series and related works. The other works in the series are Maninya / for voice and cello (1981-85), Maninya II for string quartet (1982), Maninya W for clarinet, trombone and marimba (1985-86) andManinya V for voice and piano (1986). The genesis of the Maninya style can be traced to Edwards's reworking of a Madagascan folksong in the central section of Laikan for instrumental sextet (1979). In addition, much of Edwards' s piano concerto (1982) and Marimba Dances (1982) is related to the idiom, as is the more recent Flower Songs (1986-87). Edwards has written in detail of the significance of the title and of the influences he feels have informed the Maninya sytle: In 1986 I completed a series of five instrumental and vocal pieces uncer the generic title Maninya. The title was extracted from the text of the first piece, Maninya I (1981), for voice and cello, in which randomly chosen phonetic units are grouped together to form rhythmic cells. As I proceeded with the series the 'word' maninya, meaningless at first, began to connote, for me at least, certain characteristics of the music I was writing: its chant-like quality, resulting from the subtly varied repetition of material within a narrow range oflimitations, its static harmonic basis; the general liveliness of its tempi; and so on. The evolution of this 'maninya style' may have been influenced by my sub-conscious absorption of a variety of non-western musics. My exposure to African mbira music, for example, may to some extent be responsible for the characteristic terseness and angularity of the melodic shapes, while the manner in which these are woven together sometimes recalls the texture of Indonesian gamelan music. Some listeners have detected Japanese, Indian and Indonesian scales; others have considered the repetitive processes to be similar to those used to induce heightened awareness in much of the world's functional religious music, e.g. Australian Aboriginal chant, Moroccan Sufi music etc. Farmore important an influence than any music, however, was the natural environment, a timeless continuum from which much of the structural material was distilled. For more than a decade I have found the ecstatic and mysteri us sound-tapestry of the insect chorus in the heat of the Australian summer to be a particularly fertile source of inspiration, and this is manifest in the somewhat quirkish periodicily of my earlier music. Althoug in recent works its presence is felt at a more abstract level, it remains the supreme generative force behind everything I write. A possible influence upon Maninya I is Sculthorpe's The Song of Tailitnama (1974), in its original version for voice, six cellos and percussion, which uses a phoneticised text from the central Australian Aranda language as well as a repetitive texture derived from a Groote Eylandt song. Maninya III is in two movements, the first quicker than the second. In a modal sense the first seems to centre on D minor, and the second on C minor. Although the composer denies the suggestion that the music is chordal, the textures created in the Maninya style appear to outline basic chord progressions (see Figure 92). These excerpts are typical of the handling of tonality throughout the series, although it is perhaps better to describe their textures as being modal in construction. Even if Edwards does not think of the music as being harmonic, it is difficult for the listener trained in the Western tradition not to hear it as continuous variations on simple chord progressions. This perception, however, should not obscure the principal compositional interest of the series which, on a micro-structural level, lies in the contrapuntal interplay of short motivic fragments. These fragments are generally subjected to repetitive processes and are not intended to be heard collectively in a linear sense as melody. Even so, it would be difficult to deny the existence of a strong lyrical quality in some parts of the series·, notably Mdninya II for string quartet. As with the sacred series of works, represented in this series of recordings by Etymalong and Reflections, Edwards employs an intricate scheme of repetition and variation on a macro-structural level. Table 1 is intended to expose in detail the extent of the repetitive nature of the organisation of the first movement of Maninya III. 21 Table 2 deals with the second movement. Maninya III is mostly divided into clearly defined sections of eight bars or less (four and five bar sections are common). Within these sections there is invariably repetition and/or close variation of patterns as short as one bar. The opening sixty bars of the work, for example, contain only seven truly unique one-bar patterns. These are organised in a variety of linear combinations. Repetition on a more expansive scale is less prominent. In the first movement, a large segment of fifty-four bars appears thrice (bars 61-114, bars 115-68 and bars 249-302) and there are a few other segments of twelve and sixteen bars which are repeated. In the second movement, one large segment of sixty-four bars is repeated (bars 14-77 and bars 115-78) but the largest repeated segment besides this is of eight bars length and most are of four. Although the Maninya style involves an insistent pulse which is maintained throughout regardless of metrical changes, the patterns of repetition seem as unpredictable as those in the sacred music series. The composer seems to have transferred his concept of planned randomness to this quicker idiom. Although he claims that the Maninya style involves a musical abstraction of the sounds of the bush rather than an attempt to portray them realistically, the music does seem to capture an impression of the arbitrarily intersecting and interlocking rhythms of an incessant insect chorus." -- Michael HannanItem type: Item , Access status: Open Access , Larry Sitsky: The Fourteen Days of Bardo Thodol: Sonata No. 2 (1979) - the Dawning of the Wrathful Deities(Canberra School of Music, Australian National University, 1979) Composer: Larry Sitsky; Davies, John"I have had the great pleasure of being associated with David Cubbin on both a personal and a professional level, and this work is in homage to him as a mu ician and friend. The notion of writing a second flute sonata had been with me for a number of years, and mentally it had been very thoroughly worked out, so that when I finally sat down at my desk to capture the work on paper, the process took only a matter of days. The Tibetan Book of the Dead has fascinated me for a long time, and the vivid descriptions therein of the Karmic visions, plus the expressed notion of the liberation of the soul via sound gave me the poetic basis of the work, which then naturally fell into the two movements, the first being 'The Dawning of the Peaceful Deities' and the sec-ond The-Dawning ·of the Wrathful Deities'. On a more practical level, I made a study of Tibetan Buddhist chant, and this contributed some of the musical basis of the work. The chant is heard in its purest form at the very beginning and the very end of the sonata. It was with some sense of shock that I realised that twenty years had gone by since I wrote my first sonata for solo flute; this new sonata is testimony to what changes have occurred since in my musical thinking as well as in those elements that have remained constant. One of the latter is my love for the flute and for its continued development as an instrument encompassing those facets of the human psyche that fascinate me the most. The work was commissioned for the National Flute Competition of 1979 and my brief was to write a piece which would be challenging musically as well as incorporating new techniques for playing the flute. Certainly the use of new devices could lead to a gimmicky piece with little or no musical merit; I sought to avoid such dangers by fairly tight control of the structure. At first hearing it is the novelty of the sound that probably seizes attention. The sounds can be summarised as follows: (a) Extensive use of portamento. These graphically notated 'sliding' tones were initially inspired by studying and listening to authentic Buddhist chant. The microtonal 'wailing' of the men's voices ( even if an accidental by-product of the singing) evoked in me a powerful emotional response. (b) Multiphonics. This relatively new technique, now becoming more and more part of the everyday arsenal of the flute player, requires knowledge of special fingering as well as a different feel to the embouchure. The resultant 'chords' are not equally balanced: some notes are louder than others. The score encourages the player to assist certain notes by humming them simultaneously with blowing. Although multiphonics appear in many flute pieces as 'effects' (interruptions to a 'normal' way of playing), in this work multi phonics are an absolutely essential feature. Lengthy phrases composed exclusively of multiphonics make their appearance. It should perhaps be stated that the multiphonics feature microtonal intervals, and thus their musical shapes are closely allied to the microtonal :;!ides of the portamento sections. (c) Playing and singing simultaneously. This is usually employed on the same note. Beats almost ine\ 1tably result, since the blown note and the sung note will not be at precisely the same pitch. The idea of such beats was also inspired by hearing the massed voices of the Buddhist monks. ometimes the player is asked to sing notes differing in pitch from the blown note. (d) Percussive tapping.of.the flute keys. Once.again, the impulse for this effect came from hearing woodblocks accompanying the Buddhist chant. Here, however, the tapping assumes an importance beyond accompanying, and creates a rhythmic pattern and an additive contrasting colour of some significance. Most often, the tapping is used with a particular note, to give it a sharper attack. Sometimes, however, the tapping is independent and occurs while a note is held; or else it is used to create notes not normally on the instrument (tongue blocked key slap). Both the chant and the multiphonic sections are slow, so it was imperative that fast, free wheeling, rhapsodic sections be introduced for the sake of variety. The chant sections are characterised by the reiteration of one note as a kind of tonal centre; the key tapping also emphasises the notion of repetition of one pitch. It seemed natural for the rhapsodic sections to feature fast repeated notes as a central device, thus giving cohesion. These fast rhapsodic sections also have an intervallic cohesive structure of their own, but it would be pointless to elaborate on this without a score. Ifwe iabel the slow,portamento sections as Chants, the multiphonic sections as Chorales, and the fast sections as Rhapsodies, the following structure emerges over the two movement span of the sonata: (a) First movement: The Dawning of the Peaceful Deities Chant I, Chorale I, Chant II, Rhapsody I, Chant ID, Rhapsody II, Chorale II (b) Second movement: The Dawning of the Wrathful Deities Chorale ill, Rhapsody III, Chant IV, Rhapsody IV, Chorale IV, Rhapsody V, Chorale V, Chant V It is quite clear that there are five sections of each type. Chants I and V are closely related, giving a feeling of return to the starting point. The Rhapsodies gradually evolve throughout the sonata, and so Rhapsody V is he longest and most elaborate. In the centre of the work, Chorales II and ID are the longest; in fact, Chorale ID is a kind of continuation of Chorale II. The Chorales also have their own growth pattern, tending to get louder with each appearance. Chants II, III and IV are evolutions of Chant I, using ornamental figures and octave displacements as departure points from the basic Chant of the opening." -- Larry SitskyItem type: Item , Access status: Open Access , George Dreyfus: Quintet, after the Notebook of J.-G. Noverre, for wind instruments (1968) - Allegretto(Canberra School of Music, Australian National University, 1968) Composer: George Dreyfus; Davies, John"' ... la premiere et la plus essentielle beaute d'un air de ballet est la convenance, c' est-a-dire le juste rapport que l' air doit avoir avec la chose representee.' So wrote Jean-Georges Noverre, the Gluck of the ballet, the Shakespeare of the dance, a Prometheus among men. It was this eighteenth century ballet master extraordinaire, this choreographer and philosopher of the dance, who rescued ballet from its servile position as a vapid accessory to opera and established it as an independent dramatic entity, who liberated costume and added mime to the rigid five positions of classical ballet, who raised musician and painter to roles of equality in creation of the dance art of the future: the ballet d' action. The noiebooks provide an invaluable insight into the creative processes of this energetic and revolutionary thinker. The notebook No. 3, now in the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, bears the date 'Novembre 1776'. It postdates Noverre's major treatise on the dance Lettres sur la danse et sur les ballets (1760) and was probably compiled during his brief and stormy appointment as 'compositeur et maftre des ballets' at the Academie royale de musique and as Directorof the F etes de Trianon. The notebook contains jottings of melodies - short characteristic pieces with descriptive titles, in which the pruning of excess ornamentation ensures the free flow of rhythm so essential to the dance - and choreographic steps (the pas echappe). Literary allusions in some titles indicate the seriousness of his dramatic intentions as well as his friendship with some of the notable hterary figu es of his time (Voltaire and Marivaux). One detail that has perplexed scholars is in the five figure combination that appears without explanation above melody No. Vi, La Fille D' Auvergne. Whether this is an acrostic for the corps de ballet or some more private symbol - the combination of his safe, perhaps, or the number of his Paris bank account - remains unverified. However, the fact that, in those days of intrigue, he noted such a private message in such a place shows how closely he guarded his creative thoughts in their formative stages. The first thing to be firmly established about the Dreyfus quintet is that it has nothing whatever to do with ballet. Neither is it a mere slavish imitation of the tyle and forms of eighteenth century music. A careful comparison • will show that Dreyfus has treated his source material with considerable freedom, taking here a distinctive rhythmic pattern, there a melodic feature, and making it the basis of an extended, non-balletic development. Even in those movements where Noverre's melodies are used in full they are modified at will to accommodate the composer's own style. In the second movement, for example, Noverre's rising sixth becomes the rising fifth that is so characteristic of Dreyfus' s 6/8 andante melodies. In essence, we have here a cross fertilisation of creative minds that bridges the gap between the eighteenth century and our own. The quintet was written at the invitation of the Sydney Wind Quintet in 1968." -- Kay DreyfusItem type: Item , Access status: Open Access , Ross Edwards: Maninya III (1985) - Movement II(Canberra School of Music, Australian National University, 1985) Composer: Ross Edwards; Davies, John"Maninya III for wind quintet is part of a series of five chrunber works which are characterised by extreme use of repetitive processes. The stylistic and structural aspects of these works may be likened to those of the music of composers such as Steve Reich, Terry Riley, and many others who have been referred to as minimalists. Edwards has nonetheless created a set of compositional procedures which guarantees the individuality of the series and related works. The other works in the series are Maninya / for voice and cello (1981-85), Maninya II for string quartet (1982), Maninya W for clarinet, trombone and marimba (1985-86) andManinya V for voice and piano (1986). The genesis of the Maninya style can be traced to Edwards's reworking of a Madagascan folksong in the central section of Laikan for instrumental sextet (1979). In addition, much of Edwards' s piano concerto (1982) and Marimba Dances (1982) is related to the idiom, as is the more recent Flower Songs (1986-87). Edwards has written in detail of the significance of the title and of the influences he feels have informed the Maninya sytle: In 1986 I completed a series of five instrumental and vocal pieces uncer the generic title Maninya. The title was extracted from the text of the first piece, Maninya I (1981), for voice and cello, in which randomly chosen phonetic units are grouped together to form rhythmic cells. As I proceeded with the series the 'word' maninya, meaningless at first, began to connote, for me at least, certain characteristics of the music I was writing: its chant-like quality, resulting from the subtly varied repetition of material within a narrow range oflimitations, its static harmonic basis; the general liveliness of its tempi; and so on. The evolution of this 'maninya style' may have been influenced by my sub-conscious absorption of a variety of non-western musics. My exposure to African mbira music, for example, may to some extent be responsible for the characteristic terseness and angularity of the melodic shapes, while the manner in which these are woven together sometimes recalls the texture of Indonesian gamelan music. Some listeners have detected Japanese, Indian and Indonesian scales; others have considered the repetitive processes to be similar to those used to induce heightened awareness in much of the world's functional religious music, e.g. Australian Aboriginal chant, Moroccan Sufi music etc. Farmore important an influence than any music, however, was the natural environment, a timeless continuum from which much of the structural material was distilled. For more than a decade I have found the ecstatic and mysteri us sound-tapestry of the insect chorus in the heat of the Australian summer to be a particularly fertile source of inspiration, and this is manifest in the somewhat quirkish periodicily of my earlier music. Althoug in recent works its presence is felt at a more abstract level, it remains the supreme generative force behind everything I write. A possible influence upon Maninya I is Sculthorpe's The Song of Tailitnama (1974), in its original version for voice, six cellos and percussion, which uses a phoneticised text from the central Australian Aranda language as well as a repetitive texture derived from a Groote Eylandt song. Maninya III is in two movements, the first quicker than the second. In a modal sense the first seems to centre on D minor, and the second on C minor. Although the composer denies the suggestion that the music is chordal, the textures created in the Maninya style appear to outline basic chord progressions (see Figure 92). These excerpts are typical of the handling of tonality throughout the series, although it is perhaps better to describe their textures as being modal in construction. Even if Edwards does not think of the music as being harmonic, it is difficult for the listener trained in the Western tradition not to hear it as continuous variations on simple chord progressions. This perception, however, should not obscure the principal compositional interest of the series which, on a micro-structural level, lies in the contrapuntal interplay of short motivic fragments. These fragments are generally subjected to repetitive processes and are not intended to be heard collectively in a linear sense as melody. Even so, it would be difficult to deny the existence of a strong lyrical quality in some parts of the series·, notably Mdninya II for string quartet. As with the sacred series of works, represented in this series of recordings by Etymalong and Reflections, Edwards employs an intricate scheme of repetition and variation on a macro-structural level. Table 1 is intended to expose in detail the extent of the repetitive nature of the organisation of the first movement of Maninya III. 21 Table 2 deals with the second movement. Maninya III is mostly divided into clearly defined sections of eight bars or less (four and five bar sections are common). Within these sections there is invariably repetition and/or close variation of patterns as short as one bar. The opening sixty bars of the work, for example, contain only seven truly unique one-bar patterns. These are organised in a variety of linear combinations. Repetition on a more expansive scale is less prominent. In the first movement, a large segment of fifty-four bars appears thrice (bars 61-114, bars 115-68 and bars 249-302) and there are a few other segments of twelve and sixteen bars which are repeated. In the second movement, one large segment of sixty-four bars is repeated (bars 14-77 and bars 115-78) but the largest repeated segment besides this is of eight bars length and most are of four. Although the Maninya style involves an insistent pulse which is maintained throughout regardless of metrical changes, the patterns of repetition seem as unpredictable as those in the sacred music series. The composer seems to have transferred his concept of planned randomness to this quicker idiom. Although he claims that the Maninya style involves a musical abstraction of the sounds of the bush rather than an attempt to portray them realistically, the music does seem to capture an impression of the arbitrarily intersecting and interlocking rhythms of an incessant insect chorus." -- Michael HannanItem type: Item , Access status: Open Access , George Dreyfus: Quintet, after the Notebook of J.-G. Noverre, for wind instruments (1968) - Largo(Canberra School of Music, Australian National University, 1968) Composer: George Dreyfus; Davies, John"' ... la premiere et la plus essentielle beaute d'un air de ballet est la convenance, c' est-a-dire le juste rapport que l' air doit avoir avec la chose representee.' So wrote Jean-Georges Noverre, the Gluck of the ballet, the Shakespeare of the dance, a Prometheus among men. It was this eighteenth century ballet master extraordinaire, this choreographer and philosopher of the dance, who rescued ballet from its servile position as a vapid accessory to opera and established it as an independent dramatic entity, who liberated costume and added mime to the rigid five positions of classical ballet, who raised musician and painter to roles of equality in creation of the dance art of the future: the ballet d' action. The noiebooks provide an invaluable insight into the creative processes of this energetic and revolutionary thinker. The notebook No. 3, now in the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, bears the date 'Novembre 1776'. It postdates Noverre's major treatise on the dance Lettres sur la danse et sur les ballets (1760) and was probably compiled during his brief and stormy appointment as 'compositeur et maftre des ballets' at the Academie royale de musique and as Directorof the F etes de Trianon. The notebook contains jottings of melodies - short characteristic pieces with descriptive titles, in which the pruning of excess ornamentation ensures the free flow of rhythm so essential to the dance - and choreographic steps (the pas echappe). Literary allusions in some titles indicate the seriousness of his dramatic intentions as well as his friendship with some of the notable hterary figu es of his time (Voltaire and Marivaux). One detail that has perplexed scholars is in the five figure combination that appears without explanation above melody No. Vi, La Fille D' Auvergne. Whether this is an acrostic for the corps de ballet or some more private symbol - the combination of his safe, perhaps, or the number of his Paris bank account - remains unverified. However, the fact that, in those days of intrigue, he noted such a private message in such a place shows how closely he guarded his creative thoughts in their formative stages. The first thing to be firmly established about the Dreyfus quintet is that it has nothing whatever to do with ballet. Neither is it a mere slavish imitation of the tyle and forms of eighteenth century music. A careful comparison • will show that Dreyfus has treated his source material with considerable freedom, taking here a distinctive rhythmic pattern, there a melodic feature, and making it the basis of an extended, non-balletic development. Even in those movements where Noverre's melodies are used in full they are modified at will to accommodate the composer's own style. In the second movement, for example, Noverre's rising sixth becomes the rising fifth that is so characteristic of Dreyfus' s 6/8 andante melodies. In essence, we have here a cross fertilisation of creative minds that bridges the gap between the eighteenth century and our own. The quintet was written at the invitation of the Sydney Wind Quintet in 1968." -- Kay DreyfusItem type: Item , Access status: Open Access , George Dreyfus: Quintet, after the Notebook of J.-G. Noverre, for wind instruments (1968) - Andante(Canberra School of Music, Australian National University, 1968) Composer: George Dreyfus; Davies, John"' ... la premiere et la plus essentielle beaute d'un air de ballet est la convenance, c' est-a-dire le juste rapport que l' air doit avoir avec la chose representee.' So wrote Jean-Georges Noverre, the Gluck of the ballet, the Shakespeare of the dance, a Prometheus among men. It was this eighteenth century ballet master extraordinaire, this choreographer and philosopher of the dance, who rescued ballet from its servile position as a vapid accessory to opera and established it as an independent dramatic entity, who liberated costume and added mime to the rigid five positions of classical ballet, who raised musician and painter to roles of equality in creation of the dance art of the future: the ballet d' action. The noiebooks provide an invaluable insight into the creative processes of this energetic and revolutionary thinker. The notebook No. 3, now in the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, bears the date 'Novembre 1776'. It postdates Noverre's major treatise on the dance Lettres sur la danse et sur les ballets (1760) and was probably compiled during his brief and stormy appointment as 'compositeur et maftre des ballets' at the Academie royale de musique and as Directorof the F etes de Trianon. The notebook contains jottings of melodies - short characteristic pieces with descriptive titles, in which the pruning of excess ornamentation ensures the free flow of rhythm so essential to the dance - and choreographic steps (the pas echappe). Literary allusions in some titles indicate the seriousness of his dramatic intentions as well as his friendship with some of the notable hterary figu es of his time (Voltaire and Marivaux). One detail that has perplexed scholars is in the five figure combination that appears without explanation above melody No. Vi, La Fille D' Auvergne. Whether this is an acrostic for the corps de ballet or some more private symbol - the combination of his safe, perhaps, or the number of his Paris bank account - remains unverified. However, the fact that, in those days of intrigue, he noted such a private message in such a place shows how closely he guarded his creative thoughts in their formative stages. The first thing to be firmly established about the Dreyfus quintet is that it has nothing whatever to do with ballet. Neither is it a mere slavish imitation of the tyle and forms of eighteenth century music. A careful comparison • will show that Dreyfus has treated his source material with considerable freedom, taking here a distinctive rhythmic pattern, there a melodic feature, and making it the basis of an extended, non-balletic development. Even in those movements where Noverre's melodies are used in full they are modified at will to accommodate the composer's own style. In the second movement, for example, Noverre's rising sixth becomes the rising fifth that is so characteristic of Dreyfus' s 6/8 andante melodies. In essence, we have here a cross fertilisation of creative minds that bridges the gap between the eighteenth century and our own. The quintet was written at the invitation of the Sydney Wind Quintet in 1968." -- Kay DreyfusItem type: Item , Access status: Open Access , George Dreyfus: Quintet, after the Notebook of J.-G. Noverre, for wind instruments (1968) - Allegro(Canberra School of Music, Australian National University, 1968) Composer: George Dreyfus; Davies, John"' ... la premiere et la plus essentielle beaute d'un air de ballet est la convenance, c' est-a-dire le juste rapport que l' air doit avoir avec la chose representee.' So wrote Jean-Georges Noverre, the Gluck of the ballet, the Shakespeare of the dance, a Prometheus among men. It was this eighteenth century ballet master extraordinaire, this choreographer and philosopher of the dance, who rescued ballet from its servile position as a vapid accessory to opera and established it as an independent dramatic entity, who liberated costume and added mime to the rigid five positions of classical ballet, who raised musician and painter to roles of equality in creation of the dance art of the future: the ballet d' action. The noiebooks provide an invaluable insight into the creative processes of this energetic and revolutionary thinker. The notebook No. 3, now in the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, bears the date 'Novembre 1776'. It postdates Noverre's major treatise on the dance Lettres sur la danse et sur les ballets (1760) and was probably compiled during his brief and stormy appointment as 'compositeur et maftre des ballets' at the Academie royale de musique and as Directorof the F etes de Trianon. The notebook contains jottings of melodies - short characteristic pieces with descriptive titles, in which the pruning of excess ornamentation ensures the free flow of rhythm so essential to the dance - and choreographic steps (the pas echappe). Literary allusions in some titles indicate the seriousness of his dramatic intentions as well as his friendship with some of the notable hterary figu es of his time (Voltaire and Marivaux). One detail that has perplexed scholars is in the five figure combination that appears without explanation above melody No. Vi, La Fille D' Auvergne. Whether this is an acrostic for the corps de ballet or some more private symbol - the combination of his safe, perhaps, or the number of his Paris bank account - remains unverified. However, the fact that, in those days of intrigue, he noted such a private message in such a place shows how closely he guarded his creative thoughts in their formative stages. The first thing to be firmly established about the Dreyfus quintet is that it has nothing whatever to do with ballet. Neither is it a mere slavish imitation of the tyle and forms of eighteenth century music. A careful comparison • will show that Dreyfus has treated his source material with considerable freedom, taking here a distinctive rhythmic pattern, there a melodic feature, and making it the basis of an extended, non-balletic development. Even in those movements where Noverre's melodies are used in full they are modified at will to accommodate the composer's own style. In the second movement, for example, Noverre's rising sixth becomes the rising fifth that is so characteristic of Dreyfus' s 6/8 andante melodies. In essence, we have here a cross fertilisation of creative minds that bridges the gap between the eighteenth century and our own. The quintet was written at the invitation of the Sydney Wind Quintet in 1968." -- Kay DreyfusItem type: Item , Access status: Open Access , Larry Sitsky: The Fourteen Days of Bardo Thodol: Sonata No. 2 (1979) - The Dawning of the Peaceful Deities(Canberra School of Music, Australian National University, 1979) Composer: Larry Sitsky; Davies, John"I have had the great pleasure of being associated with David Cubbin on both a personal and a professional level, and this work is in homage to him as a mu ician and friend. The notion of writing a second flute sonata had been with me for a number of years, and mentally it had been very thoroughly worked out, so that when I finally sat down at my desk to capture the work on paper, the process took only a matter of days. The Tibetan Book of the Dead has fascinated me for a long time, and the vivid descriptions therein of the Karmic visions, plus the expressed notion of the liberation of the soul via sound gave me the poetic basis of the work, which then naturally fell into the two movements, the first being 'The Dawning of the Peaceful Deities' and the sec-ond The-Dawning ·of the Wrathful Deities'. On a more practical level, I made a study of Tibetan Buddhist chant, and this contributed some of the musical basis of the work. The chant is heard in its purest form at the very beginning and the very end of the sonata. It was with some sense of shock that I realised that twenty years had gone by since I wrote my first sonata for solo flute; this new sonata is testimony to what changes have occurred since in my musical thinking as well as in those elements that have remained constant. One of the latter is my love for the flute and for its continued development as an instrument encompassing those facets of the human psyche that fascinate me the most. The work was commissioned for the National Flute Competition of 1979 and my brief was to write a piece which would be challenging musically as well as incorporating new techniques for playing the flute. Certainly the use of new devices could lead to a gimmicky piece with little or no musical merit; I sought to avoid such dangers by fairly tight control of the structure. At first hearing it is the novelty of the sound that probably seizes attention. The sounds can be summarised as follows: (a) Extensive use of portamento. These graphically notated 'sliding' tones were initially inspired by studying and listening to authentic Buddhist chant. The microtonal 'wailing' of the men's voices ( even if an accidental by-product of the singing) evoked in me a powerful emotional response. (b) Multiphonics. This relatively new technique, now becoming more and more part of the everyday arsenal of the flute player, requires knowledge of special fingering as well as a different feel to the embouchure. The resultant 'chords' are not equally balanced: some notes are louder than others. The score encourages the player to assist certain notes by humming them simultaneously with blowing. Although multiphonics appear in many flute pieces as 'effects' (interruptions to a 'normal' way of playing), in this work multi phonics are an absolutely essential feature. Lengthy phrases composed exclusively of multiphonics make their appearance. It should perhaps be stated that the multiphonics feature microtonal intervals, and thus their musical shapes are closely allied to the microtonal :;!ides of the portamento sections. (c) Playing and singing simultaneously. This is usually employed on the same note. Beats almost ine\ 1tably result, since the blown note and the sung note will not be at precisely the same pitch. The idea of such beats was also inspired by hearing the massed voices of the Buddhist monks. ometimes the player is asked to sing notes differing in pitch from the blown note. (d) Percussive tapping.of.the flute keys. Once.again, the impulse for this effect came from hearing woodblocks accompanying the Buddhist chant. Here, however, the tapping assumes an importance beyond accompanying, and creates a rhythmic pattern and an additive contrasting colour of some significance. Most often, the tapping is used with a particular note, to give it a sharper attack. Sometimes, however, the tapping is independent and occurs while a note is held; or else it is used to create notes not normally on the instrument (tongue blocked key slap). Both the chant and the multiphonic sections are slow, so it was imperative that fast, free wheeling, rhapsodic sections be introduced for the sake of variety. The chant sections are characterised by the reiteration of one note as a kind of tonal centre; the key tapping also emphasises the notion of repetition of one pitch. It seemed natural for the rhapsodic sections to feature fast repeated notes as a central device, thus giving cohesion. These fast rhapsodic sections also have an intervallic cohesive structure of their own, but it would be pointless to elaborate on this without a score. Ifwe iabel the slow,portamento sections as Chants, the multiphonic sections as Chorales, and the fast sections as Rhapsodies, the following structure emerges over the two movement span of the sonata: (a) First movement: The Dawning of the Peaceful Deities Chant I, Chorale I, Chant II, Rhapsody I, Chant ID, Rhapsody II, Chorale II (b) Second movement: The Dawning of the Wrathful Deities Chorale ill, Rhapsody III, Chant IV, Rhapsody IV, Chorale IV, Rhapsody V, Chorale V, Chant V It is quite clear that there are five sections of each type. Chants I and V are closely related, giving a feeling of return to the starting point. The Rhapsodies gradually evolve throughout the sonata, and so Rhapsody V is he longest and most elaborate. In the centre of the work, Chorales II and ID are the longest; in fact, Chorale ID is a kind of continuation of Chorale II. The Chorales also have their own growth pattern, tending to get louder with each appearance. Chants II, III and IV are evolutions of Chant I, using ornamental figures and octave displacements as departure points from the basic Chant of the opening." -- Larry Sitsky