Nature (2019)

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Program note

I generally put words to music because I want to share them. I want people to hear a poem or some other piece of writing that has moved or amused or delighted or disturbed me. In the case of Nature, Jen Hadfield’s ‘Nigh-No-Place’ was the catalyst. As soon as I read her list of outlandish (mostly real) place names and the repeated invitation to visit them with her, it struck me there must be a musical work there somewhere. Shortly after, Jenny Duck-Chong and Sally Walker requested a song for voice and flute for a Halcyon concert and I thought of this poem. This became the start of Nature.

The few places I knew in Hadfield’s poem were rural – Muker, for instance, in the Yorkshire Dales – and I took the others to be equally off the beaten path, so when further texts began to add themselves to Hadfield’s words, they were also about nature. And as new texts were added, so were instruments. The final text to suggest itself was Maija Kontinnen’s ‘Rati riti ralla’, a poem about frost, known in song form to all Finnish children and for many years sung by my wife to our daughter, though not, as here, in alternating bars of 7/8 and 8/8 with interpolated tabla solos.

Nature was composed for four ensembles – Haga Duo and friends in Stockholm, Halcyon in Sydney, Lina Andonovska and Crash Ensemble in Dublin, and Elisabeth Holmertz and Poul Høxbro in Oslo, work on the piece supported by the Australia Council for the Arts, the Australian government’s arts funding and advisory body. The first performance was given by Karin Lovelius, with Haga Duo, Mattias Roderick (cello) and Suranjana Ghosh (tabla/percussion) at Norrtullskyrkan in Söderhamn, Sweden on 5 September 2019. Halcyon performed the piece in Sydney the following month.

A.F.

Texts

Nigh-No-Place

I will meet you at Pity Me Wood.
I will meet you at Up-To-No-Good.
I will meet you at Stank, Shank and Stye.
I will meet you at Blowfly.
I will meet you at Low Spying How.
I will meet you at Salt Pie.
I will meet you at Coppertop.
I will meet you at Scandale Bottom.
I will meet you at Crackpot Moor.
I will meet you at Muker.
I will meet you at Dirty Piece.
I will meet you at Booze, Alberta.
I will meet you at Bloody Vale.
I will meet you at Hunger Hill.

I will bring you to New Invention.
I will bring you to Lucky Seven.
I will bring you from Shivery Man.
I will bring you to The Lion and Lamb.
I will bring you to the North Light.
I will bring you to Quiet-The-Night.
I will bring you to Hush.
I will bring you to Hungry Hushes.
I will bring you to Grace, Alberta.
I will bring you to Nigh-No-Place.
I will meet you at Two O’Clock Creek.
Will you go with me?

— Jen Hadfield


The Moor

It was like a church to me.
I entered it on soft foot,
Breath held like a cap in the hand.
It was quiet.
What God there was made himself felt,
Not listened to, in clean colours
That brought a moistening of the eye,
In a movement of the wind over grass.
There were no prayers said. But stillness
Of the heart’s passions — that was praise
Enough; and the mind’s cession
Of its kingdom. I walked on,
Simple and poor, while the air crumbled
And broke on me generously as bread.

— R.S Thomas


The River

A step taken, and all the world’s before me.
The night’s so clear

stars hang in the low branches,
small fires riding through the waves of a thin atmosphere,

islands parting tides as meteors burn the air.
Oysters powder to chalk in my hands.

A flying fox swims by and an early
memory unfolds: rocks

on the shoreline milling the star-fire.
Its fragments fall into place, the heavens

revealing themselves
as my roots trail

deep nets between channel and
shoal, gathering in

the Milky Way, Gemini –
I look all about, I search all around me.

There’s a gale in my hair as the mountains move in.
I drift over lakes, through surf breaks

and valleys, entangled of trees –
unseemly? On the edge or place inverted

from Ocean starts another place,
its own place –

a step back and my love’s before me,
the memory ash – we face each other alone now,

we turn in the rushing tide again and again to each other,
here between swamp flower and star

to let love go forth to the world’s end
to set our lives at the centre

though the tide turns the river back on itself
and at its mouth, Ocean.

— Robert Adamson



Night Pictures I

The night has settled with dew, and there is a fat candle of moon,
            And so the land is shapely. Muscular eucalypts and tussock

Rise from the paddocks, and the surface of the dam distils
            The blank complexity of the galaxy into something like a miracle.

A frog breathes in the reeds near the dank waterline, regurgitating air
            Into sound. Even if I went looking, I would not find it.

The night owns everything – including us. It indulges our dreams.
            It is cold here, but I can see the stars where the chemicals

Now chilling my throat were kilned. When I was born, those elements
            Stole into my lungs, and took possession of me, heart and soul.

— Maria Takolander

Midvinter                                            Midwinter

Ett blått sken                                       A blue light
strömmar ut från mina kläder. streams out of my clothes.
Midvinter.                                           Midwinter.
Klirrande tamburiner av is.                Ringing tambourines of ice.
Jag sluter ögonen.                               I close my eyes.
Det finns en ljudlös värld                   There is a silent world,
det finns en spricka                             there is a crack
där döda                                              where the dead
smugglas över gränsen.                     are smuggled over the border.

— Tomas Tranströmer                         — Robin Robertson

Rati riti ralla

Rati riti ralla,
tuli talvi halla.
Kuuraparta tuiskutukka,

lumiviitta harmaasukka.
Rati riti ralla,
sellainen on halla.

Rati riti ralla.
Mistä tuli halla?
Tuolta Pohjan tuntureilta,
Lapin lasten laitumilta.
Rati riti ralla,
sieltä tuli halla.

Rati riti ralla,
mitä teki halla?
Puhui metsät puhtahiksi,
jäät ja järvet kantaviksi.
Rati riti ralla,
sitä teki halla.

Rati riti ralla,
hyvin teki halla:
saapi lapset lasketella,
luistella ja lauleskella.
Rati riti ralla,
kiitoksia halla!

— Maija Konttinen

Thaw

Over the land freckled with snow half-thawed
The speculating rooks at their nests cawed
And saw from elm-tops, delicate as flowers of grass,
What we below could not see, Winter pass.

— Edward Thomas


The Lake Isle of Innisfree

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee;
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

— W.B. Yeats