Gerard Brophy: Hydra (1981)
Date
1981
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Composer: Gerard Brophy
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Canberra School of Music, Australian National University
Abstract
"Hydra was written for the percussion ensemble Synergy. In an earlier version of the work composed in 1980, Hydra had provided an accompaniment to a mimed theatre piece for the Entr'acte Theatre Company. The work is dedicated to two of its members, Pierre Thibaudeau and Elisabeth Burke. Their production took as its theme the four elements: earth, air, water and fire. In ancient and medieval cosmology these four elements were thought to be the four vital constituentsoftheuniverse. The title Hydra is possibly a reference to the third of the elements, water. Yet the word has other specific meanings including a persistent evil, and a water serpent. Formally, Hydra consists of three quite distinct portions. The firt section, which is predominantly loud, extendes to bar 127. Its end is marked by long silence. The section that follows is mostly slow and quiet and without the vigorous motor rhythms and energy of the initial section. Towards the end of the second part, a section of aleatoric writing occurs in which the players are given some scope for improvisation around specified pitches and in predetermined instrumental groupings. The short concluding section returns to the more aggressive character of the opening. To a large extent, the deployment of percussion instruments aligns with the various sections mentioned above. In the first section, skin drums (bongos and tom-toms) predominate, whilst in the second part, tuned and untuned percussion is used. The sonority of this section is characterised by sustained tremolandi on the marimba, which are played by two of the three percussionists. The final section returns to untuned instruments and, at the end, features woodblocks. Many of the work's musical ideas are characterised by particular instrumental sounds; for example, the marimba is given soft, harmonic textures and the skin drums typically play with loud, brief attacks. The establishment of connections, between form and instrumental choice and between instrumental use and specific musical ideas, is to some extent reminiscent of Varese's writing for percussion in Ionisation. In that work, one of the primary determinants of form is the use of families of percussion instruments (for example, skin or wooden instruments). It is -reasonable to sup~ pose that in both Hydra and Ionisation this concept of sonority as an aspect of form relates to the problems of writing for percussion instruments. With pitched sounds removed from the centre of attention the element of timbre often becomes paramount in percussion works. Hydra features a number of striking and dramatic gestures. This dramatic quality is, at least in part, a result of the work's theatrical origins. The quality of drama in the work is suggested by features such as the sudden alternation of loud sounds with silence and by the rhetorical nature of the ideas in the work. It opens and ends, for example, with a single, loud, short attack on untuned percussion, followed by an extended silence. This idea reappears quite frequently. Yet such strongly marked ideas are not solely theatrical in origin. The influence of a composer such as Xenakis is to some extent apparent. Xenakis's 1975 solo percussion piece Psappha is a work which employs aggressive motor rhythms and isolated loud figures and in many ways has set a standard for more recent percussion works. The rhetorical and ritualised qualities of some neo-romantic works (for example, the music of Busotti or Serocki) are also suggested in Hydra. Nevertheless, these features are also present in the nature of mime (for which the music was originally written), where physical actions sometimes need to be overstated to be clearly communicated. Likewise, mime is often shaped through the use of tableaux, such blocks or panels of activity finding a clear parallel in the structure of Hydra. Hydra was commissioned by the Sydney CorporealMime Theatre with the assistance of the Theatre Board of the Australia Council." -- Andrew Schultz
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Classical Music
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Sound recording
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