Commissioned for the Brodsky Quartet by Julian Burnside AO QC.
First performance by the Brodsky Quartet, William Barton (didgeridoo), Canberra International Music Festival, Fitters' Workshop, Canberra, 30 April 2023
Program note
In the spring and summer of 2019–20, southeastern Australia endured horrific bushfires. They began earlier than usual, lasted for weeks – in some cases months – and affected much of New South Wales and Victoria, as well as parts of Queensland and South Australia. The small town where I live in the NSW Southern Highlands, though threatened, escaped the fires, but when my family returned following an evacuation in early January 2020, we found a place that was eerily still and shrouded in fog and smoke. About the only movement was specks of ash gently falling from the sky. The ending of this single movement string quartet was inspired by that experience.
The title Eden Ablaze refers to the town of Eden on the far south coast of NSW, which was not as lucky as our town, but I also intended it as a metaphor for the Gondwana rainforests of northern NSW and southern Queensland, which burnt in 2019 for the first time ever. Eucalyptus forests are supposed to burn from time to time – it’s how they regenerate – but subtropical rainforests are not. The Gondwana rainforests are a living link with the vegetation of Gondwanaland in the Jurassic age, 180 million years ago. In late 2019, approximately half these forests were burnt. It felt oddly like a loss of innocence, though in truth is was probably more serious than that.
At the start of Handel’s opera Xerxes, King Xerxes I of Persia sings his famous aria ‘Ombra mai fu’ in praise of the shade of trees. This is also the start of my seventh string quartet.
String Quartet No 7: Eden Ablaze was commissioned for the Brodsky Quartet and William Barton by Julian Burnside AO QC. It was composed in January and February 2020.
A.F.
Reviews
The stage was red-lit, evoking those grim days of flames and sulphurous skies. The piece begins with a didgeridoo prelude, played by Barton. The strings play “Ombra mai fu” from Handel’s opera Serse, the Persian king’s aria to a plane tree, grateful for its shade. Slowed down here, it becomes a dirge, an astringent countermelody flickering through Handel’s tune . . .
The music becomes increasingly rough and discordant: pizzicato string plucking, jagged phrases, and fluttering descending figures over a sustained high note almost at the edge of hearing.
The didgeridoo returns at the end as a ghostly presence, puffs and wisps of wind grow in intensity, then the music fades out, quietly. It is a sombre piece, and a moving reflection on loss.
Nick Fuller, Limelight
This was a painterly piece of music that evoked the aftermath of the bushfires more than their raging actuality, with both the trembling strings and the didgeridoo suggesting ash falling to the ground . . .
Helen Musa, City News
. . . a chilling commentary on the horrific bush fires of 2019-2020. Barton created an ominous backdrop before a string was bowed, rejoining the Brodskys after their eerie workout on Handel’s big “tree” aria — Ombra ma fu.
William Dart, NZ Herald
In this evocative composition we hear Barton’s virtuosity in the sounds of the didgeridoo, the buzzing drone and multiphonics painting the story of the fires and the winds that drove them. Particularly moving is the ghostly four-part string lament based on Handel’s Ombra mai fu, an aria in praise of the shade of trees. Ford has woven together magically the hymn-like strings, twittering birds and descending ethereal scales to conjure both the sounds and the emotions around the fires. Eventually the deep choir of the didgeridoo creeps in with pulsing foreboding, the pace increases and the piece fades out with dramatic suddenness.
Elizabeth Kerr, Five Lines
Eden Ablaze, written for these players by Andrew Ford, lamented the bushfires of 2019-20 first through an otherworldly quotation of Handel’s Ombra mai fù – an aria hymning the shade of a tree – then in scurrying spark-like phrases, and finally in sounds evoking stillness and absence.
Erica Jeal, The Guardian