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WEAVING LIGHT –
NIGEL BUTTERLEY AT SIXTY
As a teenage musician and incipient composer in the 1970s, I grew up with the
axiom that Australian music had only established a 'contemporary' aesthetic
in the early 1960s. Furthermore, the
orthodoxy went, this was largely the
result of a handful of composers (now the senior figures in the profession)
of whom one of the most important was Nigel Butterley. Axioms are by definition simple, and
orthodoxies are inevitably the target of revisionism (if not heresy), but its
is true to say that Butterley has been a central figure in contemporary music
in this country since his rise to prominence in the sixties. The composer of Laudes (1963), who represented Australia at the Paris Rostrum in
1967 continues to embody a tradition of metaphysical, musical speculation
without which our culture would be much the poorer, even though such concerns
are less fashionable than others we meet in the general discourse about
contemporary music.
Back in the seventies, the principal source of new music for a lad growing up
in the 'burbs was the wireless, and those heady days included the arrival of
FM radio. It was through this medium
that I first heard any Butterley, and by chance it was two works which could
not have been better chosen to demonstrate the breadth of the composer's
musical utterance. The first was In the Head the Fire (incidentally,
the first piece for which Butterley was formally commissioned); the second
was First Day Covers.
In the Head the Fire is a 'musical collage' for radio, commissioned in
1966 by the ABC to be entered in the Italia Prize - which it subsequently won
(ahead of Berio's Laborintus II). With technology which these days seems
practically steam-driven, Butterley produced a work of enormous power. Originally in mono, the work was remastered for a stereo
recording in the early seventies,and in this form was ideal for broadcast on
newfangled FM radio. This piece, like
so much of Butterley's subsequent work, explores various ideas of mysticism,
and to that end the composer assembled texts from sources as diverse as the
Dead Sea Scrolls, ancient Irish mystical poetry (from which the title is
taken), the Mass, and passages in Hebrew, Latin and Greek. The texts are sung and spoken, the
instrumental parts include orchestral woodwind and brass, recorders, piano,
organ, percussion and the shofar, a
ram's-horn trumpet associated with Jewish ritual. Through manipulation of some hundred individual recordings, the
component parts are layered and woven into a dramatic arch form of a half
hour's duration.
While In the Head the Fire
impressed my adolescent sensibilities with its visionary qualities, First Day Covers was a salutary
reminder that new music can be funny.
The work, subtitled 'A Philharmonic Philatelia' was a collaboration
between Butterley and Mrs (now Dame) Edna Everage instigated by John Hopkins
for the Prom Concerts at the Sydney Town Hall. The wicked wit of the work is evident everywhere: Mrs Everage's
poem about the funnel-web spiders which 'dance in St Ives and prance in
Pymble' is answered by a piece of post-Webernian pointillism; the great white
shark is represented by a conflation of Schubert's 'Trout' with a tuba
playing 'What shall we do with the drunken sailor'; the golden sands and
'lots of golden teeth' of Surfers' Paradise is evoked by a humorous burlesque
of the Sun Music genre of
Butterley's contemporary, Peter Sculthorpe.
The humorous side of Butterley's personality is less prominent, publicly at
least, than the mystical or metaphysical: the former more likely to emerge in
conversation than in music. As I came to know more of his music of the
subsequent years, it was the latter element which dominated. The orchestral Meditations of Thomas Traherne of 1968, for instance, reflects an
interest in the metaphysical tradition of English poetry which drove the
twenty year old Butterley to write his Six
Blake Songs in 1956, and which is in evidence in his use of lines from
Henry Vaughan as a superscript for his First String Quartet. Not surprisingly, Butterley has found
himself drawn to a poets like Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman on a number of
occasions. His Sometimes with one I love, for speaker, soprano, baritone and
mixed ensemble sets poetry and prose of Whitman, as does his other
radiophonic work, Watershore, but
the influence is equally to be felt in a number of purely instrumental
pieces. The Second String Quartet is
headed by lines from Leaves of Grass,
and the solo piano piece, Uttering Joyous
Leaves (written as a test piece for the Sydney International Piano
Competition) takes its title from Whitman.
An interest in the numinous was something with which Butterley grew up,
having been brought up Anglican, and remaining a practising member of that
church until 1969. A significant
number of works up until that time are choral settings of specifically
religious texts. His withdrawal from organised religion, however, did not
mean a waning interest in metaphysics as a number of recent works explicitly
attest. Moreover, much of Butterley's
work throughout the 1970s and 1980s explores notions of reality beyond the
immediately apprehended physical world.
This, in a sense, is behind a fairly abstract work like Explorations for piano and orchestra
written for the celebrations of the Captain Cook Bicentenary in 1970, where
the notion of exploring becomes part of the process of composition, or Fire in the heavens (1973) for
orchestra, which takes its title from a Christopher Brennan poem.
It is also a major concern behind Butterley's opera Lawrence Hargrave Flying Alone, which the Sydney Symphony
Orchestra will present later this year in honor of the composer's sixtieth
birthday. You may remember Hargrave
from the days when twenty dollar notes were made of paper - an inventor,
explorer and scientist whose designs for heavier-than-air flying machines
were crucial, though unacknowledged, steps in the development of
aviation. Butterley first became
interested in Hargrave when he saw a sculpture by Tasmanian artist Peter
Taylor depicting Hargrave passing through a solid wooden door (the piece is
now in the composer's collection) as a metaphor for the transcendent vision
which Hargrave held. Butterley and
his librettist James McDonald developed the idea of Hargrave as visionary
into a kind of 'miracle play' - that is, a series of self-contained scenes,
each of which demonstrates an aspect of Hargrave's character: as a hero in a
shipwreck, as a brilliant inventor, as an explorer who sees the destructive
potential of exploration.
Significantly, the work makes use of a motto from Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner: 'He
prayeth well who loveth well/ Both man and bird and beast./ He prayeth best
who loveth best/ All creatures great and small.' It is of course tempting to see Hargrave the visionary as a
kind of cipher for Butterley the composer, particularly in the single-minded
way in which each has been prepared to follow a very personal vision, alone.
Butterley's own experience and sense of the numinous often fuels his creative
process. The history of the work
which signals the beginning of his maturity as a composer is a case in point. Laudes, for mixed instrumental octet,
was composed in 1963 at the invitation (these were the days before composers
could expect to be paid for their work) of Professor Donald Peart for the
Adelaide Festival. Butterley had just
returned from a year's study in London with Priaulx Rainier, and had gathered
strong impressions of four European churches which formed the basis for the
work. The slow movement of his Goldengrove
for string orchestra was written at a time of great stress. Butterley was travelling by train to visit
his companion of many years, Tom Kennedy (a rock musician and audio engineer,
and the dedicatee of Butterley's Third String Quartet) who had been seriously
injured in an accident, when the whole movement came into his mind.
For some years now Butterley has had a strong interest in the poetry and
critical writings of British poet Kathleen Raine. Raine is of the generation which produced poets like Auden,
Spender and MacNeice, though unlike them she has continued a tradition of
metaphysical thought which was eschewed by many of her contemporaries. A number of Butterley's recent works are
directly inspired by Raine's writings and ideas: the orchestral work From Sorrowing Earth, and the
orchestral song cycle The Woven Light,
(which received its first performances in 1994) crystallizes recurrent themes
of loss and transcendent reality.
Common to these works is a musical idiom of great breadth and
generosity. Having just completed his
Fourth String Quartet for Musica Viva's fiftieth anniversary, Butterley is
currently engaged on a commission for the celebration of the Newcastle
Bicentenary - the composer taught at the Newcastle Conservatorium for many
years. The work will be for soprano
and baritone soloists, semi-chorus, chorus and orchestra, and Butterley
envisages using more of Kathleen Raine's poetry as the textual kernel of the
piece. He also wants to use some of
the poetry of Hildegarde von Bingen, and has of late been re-reading Blake,
Hopkins, the biblical Wisdom literature and even the ancient Ugaritic Book of Ba'al.
The flying alone continues.
GORDON KERRY
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