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12 Variations
After Nina
Attack
Barren Grounds
Black River
Calling Music
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Christmas Song
Cloud Burning
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Distant Shore, A
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Duo Variations
Ekstasis
Endling
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Falling Man
From Fire Co..
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I Am Black
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Lines Drawn Fr..
little tree
"Mephisto"
Night Flight
Once upon a time
Piano Sonata
Quicksilver Ser ..
Respiro/Simple ..
Sea Call
Sea-Change
Septet No.2
Shadow's Dance
Silk Canons
Silken Weave
Sleepers Wake
Sonata Sopra..
Sonatina
Song of Songs
Southern Ocean
Stick Dance II
Stick Dance III
The meaning of...
Tonic Continent
Wiegenlied
Wild flower
Willow Bend
Winter Ground
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Calling Music
(Contrafactum I: "Soave sia il vento")
The dead are buried in us. We dream them as they dreamed us and woke and
found us flesh. Their bones rise through us. These are your eyes: you
will see a new world through them....
[David Malouf, "Elegy: The Absences"]
Surely everyone has at some time heard a distant voice caught on the wind
- calling and disembodied, full of yearning. Perhaps you heard something
as simple as a mother calling to a child or more mysterious like a distant
call of 'coo-ee' through a eucalypt forest.
Calling Music was composed in 1991-92 for The Hunter Orchestra with financial
assistance from an Australia Council Composer Fellowship. The work is
dedicated to Roland Peelman, the orchestra's musical director.
The beautiful trio, "Soave sia il vento," from Mozart's opera,
Cosi fan tutte, forms a starting - or rather, an ending - point for Calling
Music. The text of that short piece is as follows: "Gentle be the
breeze, calm be the waves, and every element smile in favour on their
wish." My piece makes a number of references to that tender part
of the opera and the earlier cries of farewell: "Addio! Addio! Addio!."
A Contrafactum is a composition in which the original text is replaced
by a new one; in this case the music is borrowed but without the voices
- creating an absence or a gap.
... You knew about absences. I am learning slowly how much space they
occupy in any house I move to, any page - the white spaces no ink flows
into, the black ones no breath flows out of, mouths. ...
[David Malouf, "Elegy: The Absences," First Things Last (University
of Queensland Press: 1980).]
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