Perspectives Concert 1:
Stars, Atoms, and Strange Songs
Friday 10 May 2024
Adelaide Town Hall
6.00 – 6.45pm
Pre-Concert Talk
Meet the composers Anne Cawrse and Glyn Lehmann
7.30pm Concert
Stars, Atoms, and Strange Songs
featuring new works by composers Glyn Lehmann and Anne Cawrse.
The songs of Samuel Barber and Ned Rorem depict vignettes of human experience before Glyn Lehmann’s new composition, As The Universe Expands, contemplates our unfolding human lives within the vast and ever-expanding universe.
After the interval, diverse artistic voices of women composers and poets provide new perspectives. In She Who Knows Strange Songs, Anne Cawrse the words of four female poets chosen for their honest and non-stereotypical perspectives on who a woman might be before the concert concludes with the unique compositional voices of Lili Boulanger and South Australia’s Miriam Hyde.
Program
Samuel Barber:
Rain has fallen
Solitary Hotel
Sure on this shining night
Performed by Pelham Andrews and Penelope Cashman
Ned Rorem:
To a Young Girl
Early in the morning
Ferry me across the water
Performed by Pelham Andrews and Penelope Cashman
Glyn Lehmann:
As The Universe Expands
Performed by Pelham Andrews, Penelope Cashman and Celia Craig
INTERVAL
Anne Cawrse:
Komak
She Who Knows Strange Songs
Performed by Cheryl Pickering, Helen Ayers and Thomas Marlin
Lili Boulanger:
Nocturne for solo violin and piano
Performed by Helen Ayers and Michael Ierace
Miriam Hyde:
Fantasy Trio
Performed by Tarrawatta Trio: Celia Craig, Thomas Marlin and Michael Ierace
Please note: a previous version of this concert program incorrectly included Barber’s “Strings in the Earth and Air”. This has been updated.
-
Composer Anne Cawrse is inspired by stories, art, nuance, and the fragility of the human condition. Her music has been described as “finely crafted… profoundly telling” (Limelight, 2020) and “skilfully conceived and undeniably beautiful” (In Daily, 2023). Based in Adelaide, South Australia, she composes for orchestral, band, choral, and chamber groups, as well as solo instruments and voice. Her music blends soaring, lyrical melodies, dexterous rhythmic interplay and an unpredictably colourful harmonic palette. She is particularly fond of discovering the expressive musical potential hidden within the words of female writers.
Cawrse completed her PhD in Composition in 2008 at the University of Adelaide, studying primarily with Graeme Koehne. Her skill in text setting has made her the most commissioned composer of the award-winning Adelaide Chamber Singers, and a revered art song composer. Her first opera, Innocence, was developed with Singular Productions and State Opera South Australia. Cawrse is also highly sought after as an orchestral and chamber music composer, with significant commissions from the Melbourne and Adelaide Symphony Orchestras, the Australian Chamber Orchestra, the Australian String Quartet, the Benaud Trio, Seraphim Trio, Lyrebird Trio, Sharon and Slava Grigoryan, Claire Edwardes, Celia Craig, the Australian Vocal Ensemble, Bowerbird Collective, Arcadia Winds, and the Adelaide Wind Orchestra.
Cawrse was a finalist across two ‘Work of the Year’ categories in the 2022 Art Music Awards, having won both Chamber Work of the Year for A Room of Her Own and the South Australian Luminary Award in 2021. Other accolades include the 2021 Albert H Maggs Award, a 2022 Prelude Composer Residency, and finalist for the Paul Lowin Orchestral Prize in 2022 for her Cor Anglais Concerto The Rest Is Silence. In 2023 she was a finalist in the Australian Women in Music Awards. In 2021, 2022 and 2024 she curated She Speaks for the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra; a festival which celebrates the lives and music of female composers today and throughout history.
Anne Cawrse is a casual lecturer at the Elder Conservatorium of Music, University of Adelaide.
www.annecawrse.com
-
A song cycle for Mezzo-Soprano, Violin and Cello
By Anne Cawrse (2024)
Commissioned by Chamber Music Adelaide and the City of Adelaide as part of the Perspectives Commissions Cultural Strategic Partnership.
Premiered by Cheryl Pickering (Mezzo-Soprano), Helen Ayres (Violin) and Thomas Marlin (Cello), Adelaide Town Hall, May 10th, 2024.
1. In My Mind
(text by Denise Levertov)
2. Achilles’ Apple
(text Sappho)
3. Opal
(text Amy Lowell)
4. Prophecy
(text Elinor Wylie)
She Who Knows Strange Songs is a song-cycle for mezzo-soprano, violin and cello. The four songs are setting of poems by four different female poets: three early twentieth-century American poets, and the ancient Greek poet Sappho. The words were chosen for their honest and non-stereotypical perspectives on who a woman might be, how she might act, who she might love, and how she might choose to show up in the world. Our protagonist sits outside of expected societal norms, opting for truth over kindness, and solitude over conventionality.
The texts were selected by Cheryl Pickering, in consultation with Anne, for a new work she is creating based on the life of Julie D’Aubigny. A seventeenth century singer and swordswoman known for her unconventional approach to life, D’Aubigny is a fascinating historical role model for women seeking to live unconstrained by social conventions and expectations. These four songs will eventually find their place within the full production. In addition, they have been crafted into this song cycle which stands independently as a provocation to the tension between social expectations and individual choice.
-
Glyn Lehmann is a South Australian composer, songwriter and music arranger with over 40 years experience writing music for television, theatre, orchestra and choir.
In 2019 he won the Australian National Choral Association Composition Competition with his song Giant of the Forest. Another song, I Am The Earth, was performed at the Queen’s Platinum Jubliee Pageant in 2022 by a 400 voice children’s choir at the gates of Buckingham Palace. This song has been performed by many thousands of children worldwide and currently has five million views on YouTube.
Glyn has composed well over a hundred songs for children’s choirs including numerous commissioned works for the iconic South Australian Primary Schools Music Festival and the Western Australian Massed Choir Festival. In 2012 he established the SongLibrary website, making his songs available to a global audience of teachers and choir trainers.
The Adelaide Symphony Orchestra have performed Glyn’s works Space Race (2019), with Young Adelaide Voices, and In This Place (2022) both with lyrics by Phil Cummings, and The Wisdom of Trees (2023) for string orchestra and piano.
Glyn’s theatre work includes music for Art by Yasmina Reza, Scenes from an Execution by Howard Barker and Maestro by Peter Goldsworthy for the State Theatre Company of South Australia, the musical Kookookachoo for Patch Theatre and Afternoon of the Elves and Cat for Windmill Theatre.
Glyn has composed soundtracks for multiple TV series and documentaries for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. The feature-length documentary ‘I Told You I was Ill – The Life and Legacy of Spike Milligan’ premiered at the Adelaide Film Festival (2009) featuring his music.
He is currently developing an album of music for meditation scored for string orchestra, piano, harp, French horn and choir.
-
In 2006 author Kurt Vonnegut wrote to a group of high school students:
Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what’s inside you, to make your soul grow.
To ‘experience becoming’ is a wonderful expression of what it is to be human.
Richard Feynman, a theoretical physicist, wrote that we are:
atoms with consciousness…
matter with curiosity…
I…a universe of atoms…
an atom in the universe.Cosmologist Carl Sagan suggests that as conscious beings ‘We are a way for the universe to know itself’.
This work is a meditation on the connection between the endless expansion of the universe and the ‘becoming’ of a life, from its first breath to its last.
I. Prelude
II. As the universe expands
III. AtomsAtoms scattering
Atoms gathering
Becoming
IV. A single breathWith a breath
A single breath
A beating heart
Becoming
With a breath
The universe expands
Within a life
Becoming`
V. In wonderA world within a grain of sand
Held in the palm of a child’s hand
In wonder
As one
(adapted from William Blake’s Auguries of Innocence, 1803)
VI. Create!Atoms gathering
Awakened by wonder
To paint to play
To sculpt to sing
To dance to draw
To write to make
Create!
A world within
VII. Still, becomingWith a breath
A final breath
A silent heart
Still, becoming
Atoms scattering
Atoms gathering
As the universe expands
Reflecting on my mother’s slowly fading final years after a full and energetic life, these words, by Alan Lightman from his novel Mr g, ring true:And the individual atoms, cycled through her body and then cycled through wind and water and soil, cycled through generations and generations of living creatures and minds, will repeat and connect and make a whole out of parts.
Released from their temporary confinement, her atoms slowly spread out and diffused through the atmosphere.
A final breath.
A silent heart.
Still becoming.
Glyn Lehmann
Dedicated to my mum, Eileen
