A particular kind of aloneness

My six year old daughter was singing in the kitchen today and I told her what a good singer she was.  She asked “Did you sing as well as me when you were six?” And the answer is, I don’t know, and I no longer have anyone to ask.

I’m not sure whether you can really refer to yourself as becoming an ‘orphan’ once you are a grown up.   I’m very grown up, almost middle-aged by some people’s reckoning, but I still feel the particular impact of knowing that both my parents are now dead.  Although I have a half brother and sister from my father’s first marriage, they are a generation older than me and I did not live with them when I was growing up – I grew up as an only child.  And that is what makes me feel this newly conferred ‘orphanhood’ more acutely.  In a way I feel as though I have been severed from my childhood.  If I can’t remember something that happened when I was four, now there is no one else who can.  I relied on my mother’s recollections of my childhood, particularly for the years before about the age of 4.  Now that she is gone there is no longer a reliable witness to my childhood.  I know this comes to all of us but I think having young children makes me feel this absence more keenly.  What was I like at 4?  Is my 4 year-old similar or different to me at the same age?  If my 6 year old pulls a certain face, there is no longer any one to say - “you look just like your mother when she was your age”.  I’m not going to wallow in self-pity about my ‘orphanhood’ because in the scheme of things it is really not so significant. We all lose our parents eventually - some of us sooner than others.  At least I had one parent who lived to see me a happy adult and mother of my own children. But still, I think this particular type of aloneness will take a bit of getting used to.

A Birthday

Today would have been my mother’s 85^th birthday.   This time last year I had no thought that she would not be around for her next birthday.  I just assumed that there would be at least another couple of birthdays, although I’m not sure my mother was so convinced.

After some one much loved dies, I think it is the ticking over of that first year and the passing of ‘special’ days that can be most difficult to bear:  the first Christmas without them, the first New Year, the day of their birth and the day of their death.  I managed to cope quite well with Christmas and New Year: I steeled myself and held it together.  But over the last week or so I have been feeling an increasing sense of dread, the welling up of grief and a dissolving of my carefully maintained composure. 

The last two nights I have gone to bed and cried, missing my mother, wishing that she could have been around for a couple more years, wondering if there was anything we could have done to hold on to her for a bit longer.  All of these things are of course part of any grieving but it was her birthday that was my undoing.  Last night I tormented myself thinking about her last birthday and whether she had any inkling that it would be her last.  I went back and read my diary for this time last year and was relieved to recall that we were all there for her birthday – that she had her two cherished grand-daughters pottering around her house for a couple of days; I’m pretty sure we got a cake to celebrate.  So it wasn’t such a bad last birthday.  There was some consolation in that at least.  But I still miss my mother and although 84 and a half years was a pretty good run, I still feel the loss and the unfairness of losing someone who still had a bit of living left to do.

What was it all about?

I thought it was about time I revisited why I started this blog and what it was supposed to be about.  “A blog about creating things and the spaces between creating things”.  And herein lies the reason why my posts have been so few and far between.  I’m not creating things and the spaces in between seem to be jam packed with other, not so interesting, stuff.  I’m not finding those moments for reflection and refocusing and recharging.  What I AM finding is full-on child-focused summer holiday blur, following on from hellish year of great sadness and stress and business.  There was a brief period of energized activity between busy hell year and school holidays when I got the garage door replaced, a new skylight and attic put in and the garden brought under some semblance of control.  I could perhaps have spent that energy and time on starting a new piece or doing yoga but I chose to try and bring some outward signs of order to our physical space.  The garage door was so that we could put a CAR in the garage – what an amazing concept – instead of all the junk that we have been ‘storing’ in there. And that necessitated a bit of a purge of no longer used things thanks to our local freecyle group. The attic was because we were rapidly running out of storage space, particularly after taking possession of many of my mother’s things – furniture, papers, photos etc.  The skylight was to brighten a gloomy kitchen.  So all of these things have actually helped make me feel a bit better about the space I am in.  I am feeling less swamped and oppressed by stuff.  I feel slightly more in control.  And that is important to me. I find it hard to work in chaos, surrounded by boxes and no longer used things.  So although I really don’t have very much to report in the way of ‘creating’ things or inspiration in the spaces between, at least I am in a slightly better place than I was before.  So, as I get closer to the end of summer holiday craziness, approaching the start of what looks like a dog’s breakfast of a year, I shall take a deep breath and brace myself. And I will keep trying to find those spaces, between and otherwise, where I can do the things that I really need to do.

Something in The Age

Photo by Wayne Taylor

Thanks to Kathy Evans for the lovely piece in The Age today - a follow up to the premiere performances of EPIC by the Australian Chamber Choir.  

A Performance... of my new work

The Australian Chamber Choir are performing my new work, Epic, this Sunday in Melbourne.

The details are...

Sunday October 23, 2011 at 3.00pm
 at Our Lady of Mount Carmel,
216 Richardson St, Middle Park (Melways 2K: C10)

with Baroque strings and chamber organ

Peter Ilyitch Tchaikovsky - Legend "The crown of Roses"
Heinrich Schütz - Saul, for 14 voices, 2 violins and continuo
Josquin des Prez - Missa Pange lingua
Johann Sebastian Bach - Motet for double choir "Komm Jesu, komm"
Christine McCombe - Epic (2011)
Giovanni Battista Pergolesi - Magnificat for choir, soloists, strings and continuo

The Poetics of Silence

I teach a course at RMIT that focuses on sound and time and space.  This week we spent some time looking at the idea of SILENCE.  I have to say that Silence is one of my favourite subjects – so overlooked and underrated, particularly in music.  Each week I set a reading to discuss in seminar – this week it was Thomas Clifton’s ‘The Poetics of Musical Silence’, published in The Musical Quarterly in 1976.  Although the essay is very clearly focused on the roles of silence in traditional Western Art music, the ideas developed can easily be applied to any kind of music or sound art.  Clifton sets out to discuss different qualities and types of silence and the effects these have on the listener’s perception.  He opens by comparing the study of musical silence to “deliberately studying the spaces between trees in a forest”: from the outset this essay has so many connections with my own work and preoccupations.  And the subject area clearly found a lot of resonance with the students – most could directly relate Clifton’s analyses of musical silence to music that the listened to.  For anyone interested in the poetics of silence, this paper is well worth reading, but I’ll attempt to outline some of the ideas he presents.  Clifton’s work seems to give physical form to silence – he describes “hard-edged silence” where there is sharp contrast between sound and silence.  In other instances the boundary between sound and silence is almost imperceptible.  In his description of ‘Silences in Motion’ he outlines a kind of silence where sound “disappears below the threshold of audibility” but is still present, just out of hearing, until the sounds re-emerge above the hearing threshold once more.  He explores the idea of “Silences in Registral Space” – the idea that the sound space covers the whole range of audible frequencies, or register, and that sounds can drop out of a particular register, leaving a kind of sonic void that seems to wait to be filled.  One of the main points that Clifton makes is that one of the strongest effects of silence is to heighten our perception and awareness.  The introduction of silence makes us listen more intently, waiting for the return of sound.  The dramatic nature of this perceptual focus is clear in the use of silence to surprise – sudden silence, or to increase expectation – the tension of waiting for the next sound.  His essay also reflects on the nature of ‘ending’ – the quality of the final silence.  Silence can be approached by a gradual emptying out of the registral  space, a gradual disengaging from the composition: “the piece itself becomes absent”.  This type of prepared ending allows us to accept that the piece is indeed coming to an end and that the silence that will follow is final.   We had an interesting discussion about the impact of abrupt or unexpected endings in music – that these types of endings can be quite disturbing, unsettling and in some cases quite shocking.  I was reminded of a friend who always insisted on ‘fading out’ any music that was playing on the stereo before he left the room – he would NEVER just press ‘stop’, so extreme was his reaction to any unprepared ending.   The nature of ending is something that relates to so many aspects of our lives, and as is so often the case, music can act as a kind of sonic analog for things other than music.  Clifton takes this to its extreme when he draws a parallel between musical ending and Heidegger’s phenomenological description of death.  Clifton invites us to “consider the way music presents the essence of dying.”  A musical ending is in effect a disengaging with the possibility of further ‘relationships’.  The piece becomes ‘absent’.  “When silence intervenes… the piece itself passes over into nothingness.”  Such a powerful and beautiful way to think about the nature of ending, musical or otherwise.

Musical Chairs Anyone?

Yesterday I spent a very pleasant couple of hours 'speed dating'.  Not the conventional meat-market-show-us-your-wares type of speed dating, but a much more refined and creatively rewarding version. Chamber Made Opera and the Victorian Writers' Centre have just run a week long Librettists Workshop, part of which was a lunchtime 'speed dating' session where writers could meet composers, discuss ideas (briefly) and make connections. I sat in a comfortable chair by the window and talked to writers about their work and told them a little bit about mine.  There was food, drink, interesting company and a clearly defined structure to make sure that writers got to talk to composers (and vice versa) for at least a couple of minutes. And in between the hard work there was time to chat to everyone else, other composers and performers and old friends.  I'm sure I will follow up a couple of the writers I met, as even in such a short space of time, various strands of common ground emerged.  Possibilities start to present themselves, seeds of ideas are planted and I am reminded that I am part of a community and not just a solitary composer sitting at my desk.

Mr Price's Food Store, North Melbourne