|
BARRY
CONYNGHAM - AN APPRECIATION
At fifty, Barry Conyngham has been a major figure in Australia music for over
two decades as composer, teacher and more recently, administrator. Turning from jazz to classical music in the
mid-1960s, Conyngham found an early mentor in Peter Sculthorpe, who encouraged
all his students to explore the musics of Australia's near neighbors. In 1970 Conyngham travelled to Japan on a Churchill
Fellowship, where, as well as having produced the score for Horizon (a film shown in the Australian
pavilion at Expo 70) he commenced studies with Toru Takemitsu. Two of Conyngham's
most significant early works date from this time: Water...Footsteps...Time..., and the concerto for amplified violin
and four string orchestras, Ice Carving.
The latter work, inspired by seeing the
traditional carving of monumental ice sculptures in the Imperial Gardens in Tokyo,
demonstrates many of the concerns with which Conyngham's subsequent music has
had an ongoing engagement: The notion of extending the expressive range available
to a soloist through unusual means of sound production and the use of amplification,
which has its counterpart in a work like Monuments,
where the soloist plays both piano and DX7 synthesiser; an interest in the music
of non -European traditions, particularly Japan, which we can also see in a work
like Basho, written for Jane Manning;
the exploration of the concerto as a vehicle for dramatising isolation, which
is also relevant to many of Conyngham's music theatre works; and the idea of the
interaction between human perception and the 'natural' world.
One of Conyngham's most consistent preoccupations has been with the creation of
an Australian idiom, but this has never meant a rejection of other musical ideas,
but rather an open‑minded synthesis of influences varying from the traditional
Japanese to lush sound worlds of recent European music, such as that of the late
Witold Lutoslawski. Thus, much of Conyngham's
orchestral music eschews traditional techniques of musical development in favor
of a more gestural approach, where gestures are frequently allowed an incandescent
dissolution achieved through allowing a progressive degree of freedom for the
individual performers.
A large part of modern Australia's quest for a musical identity has been concerned
with a response to our various natural landscapes. Many of Conyngham's works have such explicit references, such as
the concerto for violin,piano and orchestra Southern Cross (1981) or Waterways
for viola and orchestra (1990). Indeed,
some earlier works deal with even more ephemeral natural phenomena - pieces like
Sky (1975), or Snowflake (1973), where musical relationships (including those of
the soloist's four keyboard instruments) are developed through structural analogy
with snowflake formation.
A particularly personal slant on the landscape issue, though, is Conyngham's pervasive
interest in the relationship of the human to the natural world. This is a major
motive in the early music theatre work Edward
John Eyre about the great explorer, but it is no less important to the creation
of a work like Monuments (1989), where
each of the three movements forms a meditation on a pair of formations, one natural
and one constructed like Uluru and the Sydney Opera House, or Ice Carving, generated by the idea of
the hand shaping the ice. Conyngham's
score for the dance piece Vast, written to celebrate the Australian bicentenary,
likewise moves from the sea floor, through
the landscape to the cities. Isolation
is inevitable in a continent as large and sparsely populated as this, but Conyngham's
essential humanism extends equally to the ways in which isolation can occur within
a community. The Apology of Bony Anderson is a profoundly moving examination of
unaccommodated man in the form of a brutalised convict chained to a rock in Sydney
Harbor, and the full scale opera Fly,
commissioned by the Victoria State Opera for the opening season of the State Theatre
in 1984, explores the isolation and misunderstanding of the visionary inventor
Lawrence Hargrave within his own family and society.
Countering isolation with synthesis is perhaps behind Conyngham's major contributions
to music beyond his own composition. As
an advocate for the profession he has held important posts such as chairman of
the Music Board of the Australia Council. He has taken active roles in music education as Reader at Melbourne
University's Music Faculty, Chair of Creative Arts at Wollongong University, and
now in a unique appointment for a creative artist, as Vice-Chancellor of Southern
Cross University. My experience of Conyngham as a composition teacher was of a
person who treated students as colleagues, who clearly valued one's ideas, and
whose criticisms were also considered, and offered with a mixture of care and
diffidence. When I first met his wife,
Deborah, she asked if Conyngham had ever finished a sentence in my presence. The answer was (and I think remains) 'no', but
it says something about the endearing energy of one of Australia's major musicians.
|