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Distant Shore, A
Diver's Lament
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Diver's Lament
Diver’s Lament is a fourteen minute work scored for large orchestra.
The piece is fast throughout but has two main sections that are linked
by a passage for four Peking Opera Gongs. The first section is an ebullient
passage in which a calling figure for horns, percussion and keyboard instruments
is alternated with rising modal phrases in the brass; the second and longer
section unfolds from a series of rhythmically active hymn-like passages
in the strings which evolve over slow bass harmonies with bass drum and
gong pulses.
Initially the name Diver’s Lament had come about as the working
title for a music theatre piece which has not eventuated. My eye had been
caught by a tragic incident in which four Australian commercial divers
in a decompression chamber on board a ship during a typhoon in the South
China Sea were swept into the enormously deep sea below whilst still in
the decompression chamber. As in my first opera Black River, the elements
of human isolation, containment, cutural alienation and racial conflict
attracted me to the idea of a piece in which the set could become a shuddering
musical instrument as the world is consumed with deep, all pervading and
uncontainable water.
Synchronicity played its part a few years later when I came across a song
by Paul Bowia recorded by Jeremy Beckett in Badu in the Torres Strait
in 1960. The song is a ‘Diver’s Lament’ about pearl
divers taken from their South Seas home; it has a text which Beckett has
published in a translation from the Mabuiag language,
Mother , was it for this that you cut my umbilical cord, that
I should spend my life out here on the sea?
I am a castaway, the seabirds my only companions.
Alas, this is a bad life out here on the sea.
We have been sad like this a long time, floating on the water like gulls.
Our homes, where our fathers,
mothers and sisters stay,
are far away on the horizon,
while we set our feet in a
place that is alien to us.
The music of the song would seem to be typical of the Torres Strait. Eceletic
yet unique, the song has passages in thirds, antiphonal hymn-like structures,
modal sources from indigenous music of the region and the use of found
instruments (in this case a memorable accompaniment played on tobacco
tin). In one early draft of my Diver’s Lament, melodic passages
from Bowia’s song had been quoted yet their anachronistic presence
seemed musically at odds with the piece’s symphonic structure. In
another draft a mnemonic version for percussion of the original song text’s
speech rhythms had been employed; yet again, that draft was largely rejected
surviving only partially in some of the material that underlies the passages
for gongs and cymbals and which perhaps recalls the tobacco tin solo.
Maybe there is residue of meaning left from these sources. I see the first
section as a rapturous invocation of the surface of the sea and the second
as an enthralled contemplation of what lies under.
Diver’s Lament was commissioned by Eva Griffith for the Sydney Symphony
Orchestra in memory of Heinz Harant. The work was composed with the assistance
of the Hazel Hincks Fellowship at Villa Montalvo Centre for the Arts,
USA in November–December 1995.
Purchasing Links
Buy, borrow or hire scores, parts and recordings from
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