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Bergmann Edition: Both 13 pages

Review by Chris Dumigan – AllClassicalGuitar

All guitar teachers I am sure have come across the pupil who turns around and doesn’t want to play easy Sor, or any of the 19th Century material that is easy enough for them to actually try. Yes, there are a small number of other material that you can try , and I’ve done used them myself over the years, but here comes Roland Chadwick with 20 easy , but interesting, melodic and rhythmically diverse pieces , that should keep any of your pupils happy , who don’t want to play Sor.

As the Preface states, your pupils probably won’t like all of them, as indeed the player that Roland Chadwick wrote them all for, didn’t, but there is enough variety here to satisfy any disgruntled pupil you might have!

The greater majority of them are in two voices (The odd one is a three voices piece in a few small places), fifth fret top A is as far as the material stretches to, and the keys are very friendly without too many excursions into multiple sharps and/or flats. Indeed quite a few of the pieces have a lovely modal quality to them, and sound like a folk song that you haven’t heard before.

I definitely intend to show them any pupils who might appreciate them, and I think there are a vast number of teachers out there who might also consider doing the same

Chris Dumigan

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Roland Chadwick

Bergmann Edition: 9 pages

www.bergmann-edition.com

When Roland came to Manchester to play for the MGC back in May 1999, he provided us with a concert of entirely his own material, and it was a fascinating evening, so I was extremely interested to see this latest publication from him.

This is a study in the truest sense of the word, as it requires considerable technical expertise to cope with its constant flow of notes. If, like me you were initially wondering how the title related to this piece, I can say that it has nothing to do with 22/7, so ( thank goodness) there are no alternate bars of 22/4 , and 7/4 time , which is what I was imagining when I saw the title. No, it is a play on words and has to do with the constant flow , throughout the piece of a continuous group of semi – quavers on the same note, in tremolo form, which are to be played alternately with the thumb , and the index finger, (pi!)

The Vivace marking of 135 crotchets a minute and the semiquavers that run through the entire 121 bars of the piece tells you that this is no easy ride. What Chadwick has done here is every few bars, he introduces a different idea, sometimes a mode, sometimes a particular way of playing, (Quasi Chromatic, etc), but always the melody that is prominent is underpinned by this repeated note pattern. Everything is very carefully notated so that nothing can be misconstrued. So you begin with 11 bars of Mixolydian pi, followed by a semi tonal crunch of A, and Ab hammered against the repeated G, marked Quasi Chromatic pi. Then after a repeat of the Mixolydian pi the Lydian Dominant pi enters, followed by a Chromatic pi, and enigmatic pi and a Phrygian pi, and so on. The speed and the repeated pattern never let up for a second, until the final 7 bars when a Meno Mosso enters with a widely spread arpeggiated pattern , a large bare 5th G chord, and a final pizzicato bottom G staccato quaver to finish.

The dedicatee Detlev Bork has done a fine rendition of it on YouTube which is probably the place to start for any of you interested in finding what this piece entails in more detail, but suffice it to say that it is far from easy, and it most certainly tests the player’s abilities in alternating the thumb and the first finger, as you will be playing that pattern for approximately 4 minutes. Altogether this is a highly individual piece that is well worth your attention!

Chris Dumigan 13th May 2021

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I’ve always been a little uncomfortable with that notion – celebrating his death – perhaps we were celebrating the end of his life – no, that’s not it either – in any case, the number 150 years was as good an excuse as any to put on a series of concerts and to my delight, the Italian Cultural Institute, Sydney agreed to sponsor and finance these concerts.

I’d had dealings with Paganini before. Circa 1987 a student of mine won the Sydney Guitar Competition Junior Section with a delightful Sonata by Niccolò Paganini and later, Jack Glatzer, the American virtuoso who was touring Australia needed a guitarist to accompany him in his program of Paganini violin Sonatas. My name was put forward and although the pieces were light and certainly the guitar wasn’t over employed, there was something charming, attractive and a little insane about these pieces and slowly I was drawn into Paganini’s devilish web.

Niccolò Paganini, was an Italian. He was born in Genova in 1782 and was buried in Parma in 1896 which was a little late because he actually died in 1840. The church refused to bury him because of his alleged association with the Devil. I was touring Europe in 1988 and I took the opportunity to visit Genova and made contact with the Institute of Paganini Studies which was run by a English man who had lived so long in Italy that his mastery of the Italian language had coloured his native English accent in the strangest way and although he was as dusty as the huge number of books, scores and records that lay around his rooms, he was incredibly generous with information, recordings and scores and he directed me to the Genova Townhall where I would find Paganini’s Guarneri Violin.

The Townhall was closed for renovations. Everything gets renovated in Italy. Italy itself is in a constant state of renovation but despite this, the buildings continue to look as old as they actually are. I banged on the door being careful not to be the cause of any further renovation work and the door opened. In my remedial Italian I explained about the Paganini Project and immediately the gentleman took me through a maze of corridors and halls until we stood in front of the magnificent and oversized glass case that contained Paganini’s Guarneri Violin.

It’s an amazing thing to be in the presence of and instrument like that. I remember recording with Barriemore Barlow in his studio and in the corner was an old Hammond Organ he told me was used by Jethro Tull and played by John Evan on the Thick as a Brick album. I was in Frank Zappa’s studio after he died, and my host pointed out the Fender Stratocaster that Jimi Hendrix had given Frank. And then in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in the musical instrument room, I came across the Ramirez and Hauser guitars owned by Andres Segovia. I almost fell to my knees. On Paganini’s Guarneri Violin would have been the DNA of the great maestro. Molecular indeed but certainly a brush with fame.

Paganini violin parts are not for the faint of heart. I needed a real virtuoso, and Wilfred Lehmann was recommended. I didn’t know it at the time, but Wilfred Lehmann is one of the towering figures of the Australian classical music scene. Virtuoso Violinist, Conductor, and celebrated Composer but I was warned though that although Wilfred was a great virtuoso he was a little like Aristotle in the mode of Monty Python.

Next I found the Danish maestro, Georg Pedersen to take the cello seat. One of my fondest memories of Georg is the moment we first went through the Moses Variations which he’d arranged for Cello and at the end he absentmindedly waved his bow about and said “You know, I think I prefer the guitar as an accompaniment instrument to the piano. The piano, it’s too, heavy. The guitar makes everything easy”

And finally, I met the great German Viola player, Hartmut Lindemann. This name too came with a warning as Hartmut was considered to be a tricky character on good days and a cranky old German on the others. It wasn’t true. Hartmut and I got along like a house on fire. He was the one who wanted to rehearse. A lot. And the results were truly fantastic, and I still consider him a dear friend.

Other members of the Paganini Project were Alex Todicescu on Violin and Marc Bonetti, the last student of Jacqueline du Pre.

This is what we ended up with.

The time was the end of the 1980’s and in the world of ‘serious music’ and particularly in Australia, Atonality and his brothers Horrible and God-Awful still held sway but I’d never been convinced by this trio of musical terrorists. Nope! I like a good tune, a wonderful melody, I am a romantic and Paganini is full of romance but there were those who asked me: “But, is Paganini really a ‘great’ composer?”

And that remains a thorny issue but I’m not sure that it’s a completely relevant question. I don’t think Paganini’s project (his, not mine) was to be a ‘great’ composer. In fact, it’s unlikely any composer actually went for that title. The term ‘great composer’ is always an epithet bestowed posthumously by someone who stands in a position of supposed authority, a critic, a musicologist, who really likes that composer’s music and thinks it’s just really great.

Paganini’s project was to break open the technical boundaries of the Violin and he over-achieved that in his Opus No. 1, the 24 Caprices and indeed, the 24^th Caprice remains one of the all-time popular classics from any period and has drawn what are agreed to be ‘great’ composers to write their own variations on Paganini’s simply but robust little tune.

And that’s the point about Paganini’s compositions, well the good ones. They are robust and stand the test of time and even if you look at them through the lens of Atonality and his brothers Horrible and God-Awful you’re still stuck with “damn, he could write a good tune!”

So, did he have enough technique and creativity as a composer to keep up with these newfound violin techniques of his? Well yes he did inside of the best that was available to Italian composers of his age. Did he try to break harmonic boundaries? Certainly no, but those weren’t the boundaries he was trying to expand. What he did was make the Violin worthy of a position take the main voice in Concertos by Beethoven, Brahms, Tchaikovsky through to Stravinsky.

Listen to those concertos and your listening to Paganini’s legacy.

And finally, guitarists complain that Paganini’s guitar parts are too easy but surely this is part of his genius insofar as he was able write guitaristically and logically for the instrument without tearing the guitarist inside out the way modern guitar composers like me sometimes do.

I’m incredibly grateful to Niccolò. Without his wonderful music I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to perform with such great string players to such full houses.

I do wish he’d stuck to the guitar though. Think of the boundaries he might have knocked down in 24 easy steps. But then, is that simply a caprice?

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Jan seemed intelligent, urbane, and focused on something important. A person with a vision has great difficulty in putting that vision into words. You have to make the vision manifest, real in the world and then people can say: “Oh! That’s what you saw”

Jan and I became Facebook friends and over time he became an object of fascination for me because whenever he advertised a new performance, he seems to be playing a different guitar. How many guitars does he have? I feel too embarrassed to ask but he’s clearly obsessed with the instrument to the point where if one is good, 100 must be better.

As a performer I always found Jan trustworthy. When he plays you know you’re in safe hands. His technique is good but his sound, despite all of those guitars, is his own and speaks poetry at every turn.

So why am I writing about a fellow composer and guitarist?

Because of this.

This is the most extraordinary reading of William Walton’s Bagatelle No.1 I’ve ever heard. It’s well thought out surely. Jan is clearly a man of deep intelligence. But it’s played with a love and a passion that comes from the soul. And don’t be mistaken, this is no mere Bagatelle. This piece is a philosophical and technical mountain many have attempted but Jan Depreter climbs that mountain, plants his flag in its summit and declares “I am King of the Mountain!”

I wrote to Jan immediately I heard this and asked if it was recorded direct to camera and, it was. Turns out he got off the plane at LAX (Los Angeles), went straight to the studio and recorded 12 or 13 pieces (he can’t remember how many) with 2 takes each to meet the needs of the camera man. The takes were edited together later but for all intents and purposes, this is a live, on the spot, jet lagged, more coffee please, performance. When he recorded the Walton, he was on 4.30 am Belgium time.

The only sadness is that William Walton did not get to hear this performance. I can see the old man skipping around the room shouting: “Yes! That’s what I saw! This is the vision and now it’s revealed!”

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What follows began as a demonstration for my students of what I think music is. Later it became a video kindly produced by Michael van Koetsveld. Some excerpts of that video are retained here for demonstration purposes without which, these ideas make no sense. I had improvised straight to camera to make that video and it became apparent to me that I hadn’t quite nailed it. So, I developed what I had done into a script and my friend, Andrew Keeping, a fellow musician and wonderful movie maker agreed to remake the movie. And then Covid came and Boris Johnson closed England. Andrew and I may make the movie one day but some of my friends encouraged me to include it on my Blog Page.

So here it is with words to read and videos to watch. Please feel free to argue any of the points I’ve made in person (with appropriate social distancing) by email or better still, on Facebook.

What IS this thing called Music?

I’ve been a composer and a guitarist for 50 years, and at the age of 63, after dedicating every waking hour of my life to the writing, recording and performance of music, I’ve got a question.

What IS music?

What IS it? What IS it I’ve been doing all this time? What IS it I’ve been so dedicated to, so passionate about, so obsessed with?

What IS music?

You’d have thought I’d some idea of what it was I was getting involved with.

The world goes strangely silent when I ask this question. We grasp for all sorts of explanations of what it might be, but the question morphs subtly into some version of “What is music for?” or “What does music mean to us?” or “Why does music matter?” or “Why does it form the very fabric of our culture? All human cultures.”

You could try saying: “It IS an experience.” Well yes it is, but that describes our experience of it and the experience is the end result of listening to it, to music, but this doesn’t satisfy the question “What IS music, in and of itself that generates that experience?”

So, we’re back to: What IS music?

Let’s look at a painting. We know what a painting is. A painting is a visual representation of something we’ve seen or remembered or imagined on a canvas. That’s a painting and we know what it is.

Sculpture. Sculpture is a visual representation of something we’ve seen or remembered or imagined and we know what it is. It’s a sculpture.

Architecture. We know what architecture is. Architecture is about building buildings like the one you’re probably sitting in and a hammer? I know what a hammer is. A hammer is a tool you bang nails in with and therefore build building like this which might be decorated with paintings and sculptures and fabrics and furniture. I know what these things are, and I know why we need them.

But what IS music? And again, the world goes strangely silent.

There doesn’t seem to be a ready ‘off the shelf answer’ to that particular question.

Poetry Please

Now all through my life as a composer people have asked me; “What are you saying with your music?” or “What are you trying to express through your music?” I ponder the question. I wait for an answer to come. But again, the world goes strangely silent and I draw a blank. I look at them and say stupidly; “I don’t know what I’m saying.”

If I knew what I was actually, concretely trying to say, I’d be a poet or an author or a journalist. I’d write it down or I’d paint it or sculpt it because I’d know exactly what it was I’m trying to say and exactly what it is I’m trying to achieve.

But that simply doesn’t happen with music.

I spend, sometimes years writing a piece of music, and when it’s done I’ll have my ideas of what it might be about, but my audience will always have a completely different interpretation and all I can say is, “really? I hadn’t seen that”. The music, framed by their life experience says something unique to them. And no one is right about this. There’s no correct interpretation. We’ve all had an experience of what the music says to us at that particular moment and every interpretation is valid.

As a wise man said: “Talking about music is like dancing about architecture.”

And still the music I write seems to express something which apparently important to me and it seems to say something to people who hear it.

So, what IS music that it has such expressive and emotional power?

Life in a Garret

All the musicians I know are really intelligent people. They’re really clever. Really smart. They’ve really got it all together and they could have made fortunes as Lawyers, Doctors, Bankers, any of those professions and yet, they were called on to become musicians. They had no choice. I had no choice but to be a musician, a composer.

And they answer that call:

1. Not knowing what music actually is.
2. Not realising, or just willing to take the hit, that music isn’t going to pay them a lot of money.
3. Never knowing if their efforts amount to all that much anyway.

We all end up being jobbing musicians, we end up playing pubs, we end up teaching, but we wouldn’t do anything else. It’s the only thing we want to do. At least as a teacher I’ve got a guitar in my hand all day.

So, what IS music?

Well, Technically it’s …

Well, part of the answer to this questions is just staring us in the face every time we play music.

So, we’re doing two things here. Playing notes of different pitches, high or low and we’re dividing up time. We’re dividing time up the same way we’d divide an apple or saw up a plank of wood into long or short cuts or slice a loaf of bread into either thick or thin slices.

In music, we’re dividing actual time up into shorter or longer slices.

Human Time

So, where did our ability to divide time up into slices come from?

Experiments done by scientists in Kyoto showed that chimpanzees swayed, danced, and even clapped in time, to rhythmic stimulus.

Jump to 3.57 in this video.

Human babies, soon after they learn to walk start to dance to the music and we all quite rightly, gasp in amazement at how clever and musical our children are but these Japanese experiments showed, given the evolutionary link between chimpanzees and homo sapiens, that our nervous systems are geared up to respond to small and regular divisions of time, and that gearing seems to have translated itself into what we know as a musical beat.

And there’s a thing we must observe at this point. Human beings have a heightened and incredibly sophisticated consciousness of time and in this heightened consciousness of time, which for the purposes of this discussion I’ll call Human Time, we can see the future. That is to say we are conscious of a thing called the future and the music we make seems to reach for this future and journeys there until it arrives at the conclusion that musicians call home.

So, we can say music is sound, noise, notes, or silence – Shaped by Time.

The Temporal Structure Trick

Let me prove that to you. I’m going to play you a tune that you’ve known from a very early age. You’ve known this all your life and I want to see if see if you can recognise it.

Do you know what it is?

Any ideas?

No?

But you’ve known this since you were this high and you will sing it to your first child. This has always been part of your life, it is a part of the fabric of your culture, it’s this tune:

Now in my experience, if your one of the people who actually got it you’re the one in twenty. Most people don’t get that it’s Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.

What I’ve done is played the correct notes but stripped them of their usual temporal or time relationships and it’s these temporal relationships that provide the glue the notes need to become what we know as music.

So, I think we can say that music, at a technical level, is sound, noise, notes, or silence – Shaped by Time.

And that’s a good explanation – that tells you what music is – well it tells you how it’s technically put together but wait on, there’s something missing.

There’s Something Missing

That dry, technical explanation offers an insight into what some of the component parts of music are, but it doesn’t tell you why music can make you cry. Those lines and squiggles don’t tell you why music can make you happy, excited, exhilarated. They don’t tell you why you can feel love or passion or fear or sorrow or frenzy when you listen to piece of music. It doesn’t tell you why music speaks to all of our emotions. It doesn’t tell us why it affects our emotions at all.

So WHY does music do that to us? What is it doing? Where does that come from? I think the answer to that question lies a long time ago. To get to that answer we have to go back 200,000 years.

The Rift Valley

We Have the Raw Materials

So, music is in fact notes and sound shaped by time, but the question is; Where do those sounds, those raw materials, the musical ore which was which was dug out of our humanity and smelted in the fires of historical and human time originate?

Those sounds were with us and were an integral part of us from the very beginning of our existence on this planet. They were always a part of us, and they are a part us of still.

Now it’s very difficult to prove this because if you listen to history, it’s really quiet. The first recording of music is dated April 9, 1860, only 160 years ago and is of a woman singing the French folk song, “Claire de la lune” so that’s not much help.

But we’ve got some other clues. There is a flute that’s between 40 and 50 thousand years old been found in Germany and it’s a perfectly serviceable flute and flutes have got to come after, and in response to, singing.

And if you go to the Congo and listen to the Pigmies singing, they have a particularly beautiful singing voice and particularly beautiful songs and closer to my own patch, the Aboriginal culture. Now the Aboriginal culture’s music is incredibly dense and incredibly itself and has existed for at least 40 thousand years.

So, music has been with us for a very, very long time. In fact, David Attenborough said; “that every culture on the planet has music would indicate that music is part of our humanity”.

To be human is to be musical.

A Little History

So, what happened next? Music notation – our ability to write music down for all musicians to read and perform – emerges in a cuneiform tablet in Babylonia (today’s Iraq), in about 1400 BC. And it turns out the Greeks wrote music down, followed by the Byzantine’s and then as the 14^th century came along in Europe, we started writing music down and then, something wonderful happened. We discovered we could write music for not just one musician but 2 or 4 or 20 or 200 distinct parts or instruments and that’s when things got way more complex. Before we started writing music down it had to be very simple because it had to be passed on by ear or by demonstration but not now. Now you can write for a hundred musicians playing something entirely different from each other and so you end up with Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Berlioz, Mahler, Debussy, Stravinsky, Gershwin, The Beatles, Ed Sheeran, Adele, Nickelback.

Oh well, that’s the way it went.

Deep Time

But it doesn’t start in 1400 BC in Babylon and it doesn’t start 200,000 years ago in the Rift Valley. All of this begs the question; Where did we, Homo Sapiens get these sounds, these raw materials from?

On Darwin’s Evolutionary Tree, our closest relatives, the Chimpanzees and Bonobos split with human beings and we all went our separate ways, between 4 and 7 million years ago.

Now go and listen to some recordings of Chimpanzees and Bonobos. They’re making exactly the same sorts of sounds.

This is a YouTube video of a Bonobo having its tummy tickled and yes, you guessed it, the Bonobo is giggling just like a human baby.

The Chimpanzee and Bonobo sounds are not as complex as the sounds we can make but they are similar, they’re the root of the sounds that we’re making.

Now, chimpanzees and Bonobos had been around a long time, up to 18 million years and their ancestors, and that also means our ancestors, known as Proto-Primates emerge between 55 and 65 million years ago. These sounds that are so expressive and so integral to our very existence and survival have been with us and our near and distant ancestors in the same way as arms, legs, eyesight, hearing and digestion and the whole complete piece of kit that you and I are, for near on 65 million years.

In fact, the incredibly complex piece of kit that you are is not complete or even functional without the ability to make these complex series of sounds.

And just because we lost our fur doesn’t indicate that we lost the means of generating those sounds. On the contrary. We became more sophisticated in the use of those sounds. The repertoire of cries, shouts and growls only seems to have grown.

And it doesn’t end there because those sounds, those cries, shouts, groans and growls that are the raw materials of our self-expression are still in use by us now, in their original form. They’re in fact, our first emotional response to almost anything that happens to us or those around us.

The Monkey Inside

So, What IS Music?

So, What IS music?

Music is the evolutionary result of the cry of a chimpanzee, the laugh of a Bonobo, the shout of an Orangutan given up to us, homo sapiens as our primal form of communication and self-expression, which through historical time, shaped by human time and modified by the miraculous intellect we have been gifted with, results in the music we call, sublime.

And it’s not too big a leap to suggest that it took between 55 and 65 million years of evolution of sound to eventually arrive at Bach and all of the other composers who wrote the music that shaped the world.

Music is the most fundamental, most primal, most complex form of communication and self-expression you and I have. It is at the core of our humanity. It is the marrow of our being. It is written into the DNA of our existence.

We are not human without this brain. We are not human without music.

To be without self-expression, to be without communication, is to be silent, is to be mute.  

But the evidence suggests that human beings have so much to express through intellect, writing, dance, painting, sculpture, through music. In fact, you cannot shut us up.

But music is at the core of it. It is the fundamental and most profound set of sounds we have, and those sounds go back millions of years and they are still with us today, we express ourselves through those sounds and those sounds shaped by time constitute the core of our humanity.

Music Education

There is a debate raging among educators about the importance Music Education in schools. Commitment to, and funding for music education is slowly bleeding from our educational institutions and it’s not too much to say that if this trend continues, our schools will fall silent.

The National Plan for Music Education (NPME) was published by the government in 2011 and has been declared by all involved groups consulted by the Musician’s Union as mostly, a failure.

And Music is a core subject within the national curriculum! If a National Plan for Maths or English or Science Education was seen as a failure there would be a national outcry.

The only compulsory subjects in English schools, from the age of 14 onwards are: English, Maths, Science – fair enough, Religious Education and Physical Education.

Music Education stops at exactly the moment a child develops the cognitive ability to actually understand what they are hearing or indeed, what they are playing.

And you might argue that music isn’t adding anything to the economy of the UK, but you’d be wrong! The UK music industry grew by 2% in 2017 to contribute a record £4.5 billion to the economy and it’s increasing. And yet successive governments have thrown as many spanners in the path of the development and growth of music as they can find in their political toolkits. Remember the “2 in a bar rule”? This rule said that a publican could have 2 musicians playing in the bar and he didn’t have to have a license. Now he does and you guessed it, pub music, the place where most musicians cut their teeth, is dying.

Ancient Greeks, the founders of our western thought knew that music was an integral part of a human being’s development. You had to be athletic, you had to be literate, you had to be scientific, you had to be mathematical and, you had to have a musical education. In this way the Greeks created a complete human being. And it was those people that created the modern world.

If we allow music education to slowly die in our schools we will be allowing something to die in our children. We will rob them of the nub, the essential core, the source, the original wellspring of their self-expression.

Take away heat – you’ll be cold

Take away light – you’ll live in darkness

Take away PE = you’ll be a sloth

Take away history – you are without context

Take away language – you are mute

Take away maths – you don’t know how many apples you have

Take away science – you live in a cave

Take away music – Screen cuts to black for 30 seconds

The post What IS Music? appeared first on Roland Chadwick.

The fundamental ideas for the pieces that would become Song and Dance No. 2 came to me during that exciting period when the swell of anticipation of a new adventure reaches its peak and preparations for the big tour are underway, but it was in Italy and Mexico where those fragments turned a corner to became true souvenirs of one of the most magical times of my life.

In Mexico I was to represent Australia in the annual Festival Cervantino in the city of Guanajuato in 2 concerts that had been scheduled on consecutive days in a wonderful room that could have been purpose built for a Classical Guitar concert but was in fact, a very old Spanish Chapel. I’d arrived in Mexico City and a few days later I was on the bus to Guanajuato, some 5 hours north accompanied by an Argentinian Tango band and an Austrian Women’s Choir. An hour out of Mexico City the bus broke down and there we were, an Austrian Women’s Choir, an Argentinian Tango Band, an Australian Classical Guitarist and a bewildered bus driver on the side of this Mexican freeway, surrounded by cactus, awaiting delivery from this hot and dusty abandonment. What had gone wrong? It turned out we were out of fuel. The petrol had been siphoned off by thieves while the bus had been waiting for us to leave the hotel. Eventually a Petrol Tanker came alongside and very kindly put the tiger back in our tank and we were off again.

My first concert was on the next afternoon and the jet lag had me awake at 4.00 am and with nothing else to do, I practiced. A lot. The old chapel was full of sunshine and very enthusiastic Mexicans who were in the company of the Australian Ambassador and the Austrian Woman’s Choir. The concert was a great success and I felt very pleased with myself and after the concert, the Austrian Women’s Choir presented me with a miniature but perfectly formed guitar complete with mother of pearl inlays. 

After my second concert I became a tourist and that night my interpreter and I got tickets to see the Tango Band from the bus. It shames me to admit that I can’t remember their names but their music haunts me still. The exciting music was as it should be, exciting but the sad, melancholic music simply cut through to the soul. I had never experienced anything quite like this. To be so unashamedly raw and honest on stage. To speak publicly through music of such intense pain and heartache was for me a liberation. And so, the Song from Song and Dance No. 2 is this Aussie boy’s attempt at reaching the depth I saw on stage that night in Guanajuato.

Syracuse lies on the east coast of Sicily and has been at various times owned by the Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Christians and of course, the Italians. Syracuse can lay claim to influences from almost every part of the Mediterranean and those influences are there to be seen in the city’s extraordinary architecture.

I spent 6 weeks there performing around Sicily and stayed with my host, the great Italian Guitarist, Nello Alessi. You cannot be in Syracuse for six weeks and not be affected by it. It’s like immersing yourself in a bath of virgin olive oil pressed from the olives harvested in the hills behind Syracuse by maidens with coffee tanned thighs. As you emerge from the bath, the olive oil sticks to your skin and works its way into your body. It owns you for a while and while it owned me I wrote Fantasia Syracusana, the dance from Song and Dance No. 2. Its influences are Mediterranean from Spain to Sicily, Toledo to Turkey but the memory that lingers is the exquisite Black Ink Pasta Nello’s mother prepared for our lunch one day as we gazed out over the deep azure of the Mediterranean Sea.

The score for Song and Dance No. 2 is available from Bergmann Edition

My CD which includes Song and Dance No. 2 is also available from Bergman Edition

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And I’ve noticed that most of the things I worried about didn’t happen, and that the things that did happen, I hadn’t worried about.

And so, I have a question.

Should I worry more, or should I worry less?

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Hysterical Penguins was premiered at the Sydney Opera House by Christine Draeger, the great Australian virtuoso and over time I have had the pleasure of seeing the great American Violinist, Jack Glatzer and the Principal Flautist of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra perform Hysterical Penguins in some quite plush settings.

Hysterical Penguins has been included in the Australian AMEB Diploma Exam Syllabus and I quite often receive emails from young flautists who are brave enough to tackle what is really a quite difficult piece. Here is an example and I hope my responses may shed light on the origins and intentions of this work.

Gabby writes:

“I understand you dedicated this piece to Christine Draeger, and I was wondering if you have a personal relationship with her, or if this was perhaps a commissioned piece specifically for her?”

During the 1980’s I worked as a classical guitarist in a Flute/Violin, Guitar, Cello Trio known as the Bennelong Players. The trio was a function band really, but we did do some radio and television appearances. As a member of that trio I had the opportunity to perform with some of the most outstanding Flautists of that time including Rosamund Plummer and Christine Draeger. Christine and I formed a duo we rather pompously called Serata Musicale and performed and recorded quite extensively around Australia. Some of our recordings are available on YouTube. At one time during our association, Christine asked me to write a Flute solo. I thought this was a good idea and set to work. Christine was working with what was known then as The Seymour Group, an ensemble dedicated to the performance of uber modern classical music, and as a result of this and some incredibly hard practice she had become an incredible virtuoso able to cope with even the most difficult dots. In fact I’m sure she could actually sight read flies on a wall. In these circumstances I really had to stretch myself and come up with something that challenged Christine and the Flute. 

“What inspired you to compose this piece? When I play Beastie, I envision a sea lion watching a penguin planning its attack, followed by a big chase (??) Are you trying to tell a similar story here or am I completely off? I feel that the two movements work well together to provide a comical response and portrays the penguin’s ‘hysteria’ very effectively!”

I was having an exceedingly difficult time coming up with a title for this piece. In a conversation with Christine, I told her about these difficulties and asked what she thought, and she said in that fay, far off way she has; “birds” with a suitably Australian elevated terminus. The music I had sketched so far had no relationship to that colourful and romantic idea of birds we might imagine and eventually my imagination settled on the idea of penguins. Well they are birds aren’t they?! The music for the first movement was ominous and the second movement is quite flighty. I think at this point a documentary by David Attenborough comes to mind where some Orcas, or Killer Whales are stalking a colony of Penguins so yes, in the first movement there is trouble in the shape of the Beastie and the second movement is the fleeing of Hysterical Penguins.

“Who or what are you influenced by when you compose?”

Well, in this situation the parameters were Christine’s awesome technique, the musical environment of the time which is to say a snobby modernistic environment (try writing a tune in that environment!) After that I can only say in the words of Neil Young, “I follow the music, man.”Do your compositions represent current events or experiences in your life?

Sometimes yes. Sometimes no. I have been composing for some 50 years now and it’s always different because I’m always going for something different.

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