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Ghosts of Reason – Symphony No. 2 (2008)
Ghosts of Reason – Symphony No. 2 is a one-movement work of about 18 minutes duration. The piece was commissioned for the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra as the Schueler Composition Award for 2008. This award was established through the generosity of Mr Norman Schueler and Mrs Carol Schueler, in honour of Mrs Gogo Schueler.
What I have in mind is the way that musical forms, like landscapes, can seem to be haunted by past inhabitants. I feel this applies to Australia a lot. I remember as a child growing up in Western Victoria, an abandoned place where I used to go to play. It had been a house years before and was just broken building bits with foundations but no walls now plus a fantastic wattle grove - cold but beautiful in winter. The sense of being somewhere remote but lived in before was palpable and that's even without thinking about the Aboriginal history before that. Musical forms are like this to me - for an Australian composer, Beethoven and Schubert seem to be wandering the Simpson Desert at times.
I am also interested to extend the idea of burnt ochre sonorities that were potent for me with the use of Aboriginal voices in my works, Black River and Journey to Horseshoe Bend. Namely, the kind of nasal and slightly strident tone colours that contrast with a Western, 'Italianate' roundness of tone. That was something I was trying to get at in the sound world of the recent orchestral work, Endling, and in the large-scale vocal work, Song of Songs. Ghosts of Reason is for large orchestra but I have focused on the double reeds (oboes, cor anglais and bassoons), sizzle cymbals and muted brass to try and achieve this kind of distinctive reedy timbre. Vibraphone, marimba, harp and strings provide a warm backdrop and as in much of my music, musical structure and logic is largely generated by harmony.
Starting out on the piece I had in mind the aspiration to create a prolonged sense of yearning mixed with silence and space but balanced by a sustained, rolling and uplifting climax. As Dante put it in the Divine Comedy, "And so we came forth and once again beheld the stars."
I wrote the piece over the last six months immediately after the opera The Children's Bach. The piece was sketched out whilst I was in residence at the Banff Centre for the Arts in Canada in a tranquil snowbound studio and then completed on the coast south of Sydney where stillness is often replaced by invariably brutal, winter Southerlies.
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