Ross Edwards (composer)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Ross Edwards, composer, born Sydney, December 23, 1943. Ross Edwards, Australian composer, received his early musical education at the Sydney Conservatorium, completing his Master of Music degree at The University of Adelaide and graduating as Doctor of Music from The University of Sydney. His teachers have included Peter Sculthorpe, for whom he later worked as an assistant, Richard Meale, Sandor Veress and Peter Maxwell Davies, with whom he studied in Adelaide and again in London in the early 1970s. Returning to Australia, he held teaching positions at The University of Sydney and the Sydney Conservatorium before becoming a freelance composer in 1980. Among many awards he considers two Keating Fellowships received in the 1990s to have been crucial to his development. He is based in Sydney, where he lives with his wife, Helen, spending as much time as possible working in his studio in the Blue Mountains, west of the city.

Intensely aware from an early age of his vocation as a composer, Edwards has largely followed his own path, eschewing isms and trends and depending on the music to speak for itself. Through his distinctive sound world he has sought to reconnect music with elemental forces and restore such qualities as ritual, spontaneity and the impulse to dance, considering it his responsibility as a composer ‘to make the most effective use of one of the planet’s most potent forces to communicate widely and vividly and at the highest possible artistic level’. His music, whose global significance is recognized and which is widely performed, is at the same time deeply connected to its roots in Australia, whose cultural diversity it celebrates, and from whose natural environment it draws many of its characteristic shapes and patterns, notably birdsong and the mysterious drones of summer insects. Edwards’s interest in the healing power of music is reflected in a body of contemplative works inspired by the Australian landscape.

Ross Edwards’ output includes symphonies, concertos, chamber and vocal music, children’s music, film scores, opera and music for dance. Works designed for the concert hall sometimes require special lighting, movement, costume and visual accompaniment. A notable example is his much acclaimed oboe concerto Bird Spirit Dreaming (2002), commissioned for the Sydney Symphony and the Australian virtuoso oboist Diana Doherty who, following its U.S. premiere with the New York Philharmonic, has performed it many times around the world.

Costume and lighting are also required in The Heart of Night, an austere symphonic ritual composed for the shakuhachi Grand Master Riley Lee and the Melbourne Symphony. Edwards has also notably collaborated with astronomers. His epic choral Fourth Symphony – Star Chant, has a text by Fred Watson which pays tribute to Aboriginal culture by linking the conventional names of stars and constellations of the southern night sky with their equivalents from the Dreamtime stories of many different indigenous peoples. The work, premiered at the 2002 Adelaide Festival, is accompanied by images on a large screen by deep space photographer David Malin.

Much of Edwards’ music commissioned for the concert hall has attracted choreography by virtue of its irresistible kinesic qualities. A good example is his violin concerto, Maninyas (1988), the work by which he became known internationally as an orchestral composer. Choreographers such as Stanton Welch, Chrissie Parrot and Nicolo Fonte have turned it into ballets and it has become established in the dance music repertoire. Maninyas is representative of a genre of Edwards’ music which became known in the 1970s as his ‘maninya style’, in stark contrast to his ‘sacred style’, so named because of its calm austerity. The ‘sacred style’ was born in the early 1970s, a crucial time for Edwards which began with a period of involuntary silence, the result of his having rejected European modernism and his recognition of the need to evolve a new language of his own. The years spent living at Pearl Beach, a coastal village north of Sydney, were to determine the course his music would take. In his own words ‘the summer days were swathed in the drones of cicadas with their mysteriously abrupt starts and stops and, at evening, the insects would start up. I was entranced by the insect chorus because it seemed on the verge of conveying some profound, yet ultimately elusive message. All the temporal relationships in my music – the relative lengths of phrases and sections – have been influenced by these ancient voices, whose near symmetries and inconsistently varied repetitions often seem close to our inherited musical syntax. I don’t doubt that over the millennia such voices have generated much of the world’s music and it’s not hard to detect their presence in various surviving folk and religious traditions.’

The body of ‘sacred’ music, which Edwards has described as ‘musical contemplation objects’, became progressively more refined until, in the early 1980s, a spectacular reaction occurred. Living at Pearl Beach, he recalled, had put him directly in touch with the natural world – a permanent legacy which gave direction and meaning to his life and work. His obsessive distillation of the intimate sounds of the bush and the consequent attenuation of his own musical voice – which had by now generated considerable interest both in Australia and overseas – suddenly underwent what appeared to be an abrupt volte face. In what Edwards later described as a moment of sheer revelation, ‘the outside world seemed to burst in on me and I suddenly became aware that I had the extraordinary privilege of living in a paradise of sun-blessed ocean and joyously shrieking parrots gyrating in the warm air, and that this ecstasy simply had to be transmitted through music’.

This apocalypse, coming as it did when orthodox modernism was fighting doggedly for survival, ensured critical disapproval throughout the following decade. The most spectacular reaction was to a performance of his Piano Concerto at the London Proms in 1988. Seemingly undeterred, Edwards persevered with his extraverted maninya series, whose genesis he describes as follows. ‘The ‘word’ maninya is taken from a nonsense poem I once constructed arbitrarily from syllables – or phonemes – when I couldn’t find a suitable text for the vocal music I urgently wanted to write’. Sometimes erroneously assumed to be of Aboriginal origin, the word maninya gradually came to mean dance-chant, or more specifically, Australian dance-chant. Edwards claims that ‘it has the essential characteristics of most chants from around the world except that it follows insect rather than speech rhythms, and instead of being concerned with elucidating a text it points directly to the unfathomable mystery of existence’.

The strongly individual style of the maninya pieces (sometimes misleadingly associated with the minimalist movement) evolved, according to Edwards, as a result of his subconscious absorption of a variety of non-western music, especially that which uses repetitive processes to heighten awareness (e.g., the present-centeredness of Sufi ritual music). His main influence, however, has been the ‘sound tapestry’ of the natural environment, ‘a timeless continuum from which much of the structural material was distilled’ and which remains ‘the supreme generative force behind everything I write.’ The essential maninya style, which has persisted and evolved to the present day, is characterized by animated tempi, terse, angular melodic shapes, buoyant rhythm, irregular meter and periodicity, static harmony built on drones, varied repetition, constantly changing textures within a unified framework and frequent cultural and environmental references (plainsong, birdsong, South-East Asian scales etc.). Notable examples include the first of the two Flower Songs (1986), the finale of Maninyas (1988), the overture White Ghost Dancing (1999), the finale of Bird Spirit Dreaming (2002) and the central chorus of Mountain Chant (2003).

The early contemplative works, examples of which are The Tower of Remoteness (1978), for clarinet and piano, and Yarrageh (1989), for solo percussion and orchestra, although commissioned and designed for the concert hall, strongly imply a life and function outside it. In the 1990s, Edwards began a new series of contemplative works which have the word mantra in their titles, whose flexibility allows them to be freely adapted to a diversity of requirements. Tyalgum Mantras (1999), originally scored for shakuhachi, didjeridu and percussion, has been presented in many different ways, frequently in the open air and with vastly expanded instrumental forces. Its potential as an aid to meditation has also been recognized and exploited as has, increasingly, much of Edwards’ other music, notably in association with the Lifeflow Meditation Centre, Adelaide. The most celebrated of Edwards’ mantra pieces is Dawn Mantras, which was telecast to the world at the dawn of the new millennium from the Sydney Opera House. This work, which captivated an audience of billions, expresses hope for peace and renewal in a sequence of unforgettable images culminating with a young girl singing solo from the topmost of the building’s famous sails, accompanied by mixed choirs and a culturally diverse instrumental ensemble.

Since the early 1990s, the extremes of Ross Edwards’ music have been progressively reconciled. This process, which began with the pairing of contrasting movements within the same work, e.g., Prelude and Dragonfly Dance (1991) for percussion quartet, and Chorale and Ecstatic Dance (1992) for strings, has by now achieved a degree of integration of the disparate components of his language that would have once seemed unimaginable. The monolithic textures of the works of the 70s and 80s have become much more sophisticated, especially in the recent symphonies, culminating in the fifth – The Promised Land and the string quartet Sparks and Auras (both 2006). There is a much higher degree of variety and complexity, with fluctuating tempi, western counterpoint, tightly controlled western style development, atmospheric digression and an abundance of recurring symbolism – often highly personal - from diverse sources. An example is the frequent references to one of the Christian Mary chants which Edwards associates with the universal Earth Mother and the survival of life on the planet. (Notwithstanding the often intense spirituality of his music, he claims no conventional religious affiliations). Fragments of this chant are frequently to be found embedded in or floating delicately above textures rich in cultural allusion and the interplay of material distilled from the natural world. (Edwards has described his textures as ‘kaleidoscopic’, likening the associations and interdependencies of the material to the behaviour of organisms within an ecosystem).

What is remarkable about Ross Edwards’ music of the last decade is that both its essential purport and ethos remain unaffected by – are indeed reinforced by - its growth in complexity. Edwards’ work, for all its rich and varied underlying symbolism, has always had a directness about it and a readily, sometimes startlingly approachable surface. His stated intention of capturing and focusing the listener’s attention at first hearing in the hope that deeper involvement will follow, may help explain his recourse to theatrical devices in the concert hall, but it is also in line with his aim of helping restore music’s age-old function as an agent of ritual and healing.

Ross Edwards’ main publisher is Ricordi London www.ricordi.co.uk His music is represented in North America by Boosey & Hawkes www.boosey.com/bmg There are also a number of titles with Universal Edition www.universaledition.com For a catalogue of works, recordings and program notes, see the Ross Edwards website www.rossedwards.com from which, under the heading Resources, extensive critical commentaries on his work by Philip Cooney, Paul Stanhope and others may be downloaded. A further resource is the Australian Music Centre www.amcoz.com.au from which scores and recordings may be purchased.