Ross Edwards: Maninya III (1985) - Movement II

Abstract

"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 Hannan Show more