Intensity of Light

By Constantine Koukias
Pre-Recorded Tape Engineer – Evert de Cock

Epirus is the rugged mountainous northwest region of ancient Greece. The end of the Balkan wars and World War I left the region divided between southern Albania and North Western Greece. The word Epirus itself derives from the Greek and means ‘terra firma’ as opposed to Corfu and the Ionian islands. Vasilliki Koukias, the mother of the composer, was born and raised in Epirus Greece and passed away in 2007   Two recordings of Vasiliki’s singing became the basis of this new work: a lament (mirolóyia) and a shepherd’s song (skaros). Recorded in Hobart, Tasmania in 2000 the recorded voice relays ancient roots from Epirus, transformed again in the composer’s new home in Amsterdam.

For piano and recorded voice

On New Year’s Day 1915 at 10 am in Broken Hill, 1200 miners and families scrambled on board 40 open Iron ore carriages fitted with benches and set off to Silverton for what was supposed to be a picnic.

About 3 miles out of town, parallel with a graveyard, the picnic train was attacked by two former cameleers (“Afghans”) from the North East “Ghan town” of Broken Hill. Their names were Mullah Abdullah and Badsha Mahommed Gool. The two men, flying a home-made Turkish flag (neither of them were Turkish), used the horse-drawn ice-cream cart from which to launch their offensive. Australia was rife with pro-British war fever and anti Turkish and German sentiment; the two ex-cameleers clearly felt they were in the wrong place and on the wrong side, so they joined together to start their own war. Knowing how it would end they both wrote suicide letters.

This composition is a musical transcription of those suicide letters.

I have used a pitch to MIDI program to convert the original Urdu suicide letters into notation, then re-worked the material to make it playable on piano – keeping the rhythms, pitches, and delivery of the Urdu as much as possible in tact. The left hand performs Badsha Mahommed Gool’s text, and the right hand in the piano score performs the words of Mullah Abdullah. Mahommed Gool’s suicide letter is more a proclamation of intent, and Mullah Abdullah’s letter (as you might expect) is more in the expression of a prayer.

For solo piano

Damp Antiquary is inspired by the idea of the instrument as somehow ‘haunted’, where past musical memories manifest on the instrument of their own accord. The colonial song Bygone Days tune is re-harmonized according to harmonic overtones and sub-tones, like the resonances around the pitches of the tune are emerging like ‘ghosts’. The ‘above/below’ image is also referencing the up/down movement of the camel and its hump.

The piece is permeated with the feeling of nostalgia, and the ‘depressive state’ Quignard speaks of is not really emotionally ‘depressive’, but I take it to mean an image of a mental ‘pushing down’ (like that of a key on a piano), into a consciousness of the past, of the before. There should be a trance-like, hypnotic effect from the music, as if it is ‘conjuring’ something out of the piano’s memory.

Silent Piano evokes the sadness and melancholy of the now muted Telegraph Station piano, and its own memories of past times. A piano’s life is lived through its beauty of sound and the people it inspires through its music making. The Telegraph Station piano now lives silently behind a locked glass door, and the people who played it no longer exist. It is deemed too old and fragile to be played any longer, so it remains deserted forever, in a place full of ghosts.

For solo colonial or grand piano

Station Chains explores the sonorities of the now aged first piano to arrive at the Alice Springs Telegraph Station. It’s old strings reminded me of the chains that First Nations people were so often chained together by the neck with.

Painting the picture of the cross-cultural strife the piano arrived into we hear sounds reminiscent of many yidaki (didgeridoo) playing simultaneously sometimes burning our ears violently while at other times reminiscent of a sacred fire. Other sections in the piece are biting awkward dances built of juxtaposed and re-sculpted indigenous rock/folk tunes representing the pain of colonisation as it continues. These sections surround a slow lament for the Arrente culture and people and The First Nation Mparntwe, also known as Alice Springs, so much of which has been lost, while also questioning the culture, the piano and the people that have supplanted it. The volatility of the old Telegraph Station piano is symbolic of the destabilisation of the time of its arrival. The 1880’s were a time of war in Central Australia as the original First Nations inhabitants were cleared from their land. ‘Station Chains’ solemnly remembers this part of the Frontier Wars.

For grand piano, two ebows and AM radios
By Cat Hope (AUS)

The Fourth Estate is a societal, political or institutional force whose influence is not officially recognised, and is a term often used to refer to the press. Its original use relates to the three estates of the realm: clergy, nobility and commoners. Australia in particular has seen just how powerful ‘unofficail’ voices can be, through monopolisation of the media, editorialised media reporting and political bias. The Fourth Estate is a work that compares the sonoric qualities of the piano with those of small electronic devices that extend and contrast with it. Small voices that have, the ability to change everything. As the Fourth Estate is thought to be an element of society ‘outside’ official recognition, here the electronics attempt to pull the piano into a different sound world outside its usual realm.

For piano and pre-recorded electronics

The Intensity of Light aims to capture a sense of the unique beauty, and light of the South Australian landscape, particularly in the mid-north and Flinders Ranges.  The work was influenced by an archival recording of an interview with Hans Heysen from 1960, where he describes his approach and work.

Despite being almost 60 years ago, many of his statements are quite prophetic; the most poignant for me being “we’re forgetting the sky”. Vivid skies, sunsets like fire, deep purple evenings in the heat of summer, and rich blacks of the night punctuated by the milky way are re-imagined through the work, coalescing with a sense of the colonial within the landscape and lament for the loss of appreciation of simple pleasures through the pace of modern life.

Professor of Music, Head of School, Zelman Cowen School of Music, Arts, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia

Cat Hope’s music is conceptually driven, using mostly graphic scores, acoustic /electronic combinations and new score reading technologies. It often features aleatoric elements, drone, noise, glissandi and an ongoing fascination with low frequency sound. Her composed music ranges from works for laptop duet to orchestra, with a focus on chamber works, and in 2013 she was awarded a Churchill Fellowship to develop her work, as well as Civitella Ranieri (Italy) and Visby International Composers residency (Sweden) fellowships. Her practice explores the physicality of sound in different media, and has been discussed in books such as Loading the Silence (Kouvaris, 2013), Women of Note (Appleby, 2012), Sounding Postmodernism (Bennett, 2011) as well as periodicals such as The Wire, Limelight and Neu Zeitschrift Fur Musik Shaft.

Her works have been recorded for Australian, German and Austrian national radio, and her work has been awarded a range of prizes including the APRA|AMC Award for Excellence in Experimental Music in 2011, 2014 and the Peggy Glanville Hicks composer residency in 2014. She has founded a number of groups, most recently Decibel new music ensemble, noise improv duo Candied Limbs, the Abe Sada and Australian Bass Orchestra bass projects. She has also founded and written pop songs for Gata Negra (1999-2006).

cathope.com