FRONTING ETERNITY

Gordon Kerry (b. 1961)

FRONTING ETERNITY (2005)

Cantata on three poems of Vincent Buckley

Autumn Landscape –

Winter Gales –

Summer flows over…

As this work was commissioned by a Melbourne based organisation, I thought it appropriate to use the work of a Melbourne based poet, and Vincent Buckley (1925–88) was an important voice in Australian literature both as a professor at the University of Melbourne and through his poetry. Much of Vincent Buckley’s mature work was very Melbourne-specific: The Golden Builders for instance resoundingly maps the streets of inner city Carlton, but the three early poems I have chosen to set evoke three seasons in rural Victoria. (Buckley was born at Romsey in the Macedon Ranges, while I live in the north east of the state.) These were attractive for their language and imagery – especially the economy with which Buckley uses key words in each poem – and also for their use, not common in modern verse, of ‘we’ and ‘our’ which make them appropriate for a large choir. Dealing with the traditional elements of fire, air, earth and water the poems invite us to consider human activity in a broader context; Fronting Eternity struck me as an ideal title for a work which would share the stage with two Requiems!

Autumn Landscape begins with an image of what used to be a common sight – the ‘burning off’ of leaves in autumn. What I liked about it was the way in which the everyday starts to acquire numinous characteristics: there is sweetness ‘more sweet than honey-cells’, birdsong, the angle of the rake, the sound of wheels take the poet somewhere else until he conjures (if only negatively) the mythic ‘hero in the striding mist’.

I’ve tried to make the music shimmer and glint: string trills are overlaid with fragmentary motives from woodwind and percussion, while the choral parts move to and from a bright E major tonality.

1. AUTUMN LANDSCAPE

See the flame balancing in the leaves

the old man piles, until they cloud and choke

under the musty top, where the green crisps

to blackness. There the air-channels stop

their running light. Above is sweetness lodged

in dens of smoke more sweet than honey-cells.

And from all distant quarters how the bird

gathers its song! and how the rake

leans crazily to the wall, and passing wheels

clamp sound to fire – the sparks that wince from stone

as though my hand had ambushed their flame:

Dark cells I touch, beyond the bounds of breath.

A flame, flames, balancing in dark leaves,

like water that goes straitly on stone.

No more. No hero in the striding mist

of smoke, or sweetness; but the stony land

is burning, burning in this chestnut tree

you gaze on. Breast of stone. A destined land.

If the mythic is only negatively evoked in Autumn Landscape, Winter Gales is much more up front: the wind that ‘pistons close to the earth’ is ‘a very siege of Jericho’ (and that of course means trumpets!). The music, like the wind, is simple and strong, occasionally breaking words into separate syllables by the constant, but irregular pounding of C minor and its dominant chord. Other orchestral textures serve to evoke the tree’s rustling and the poor dead chicken gets its moment of mock heroic respect. Incidentally, I finished this part of the score on a day in Fenruary 2005 when Melbourne had its highest ever recorded day of rain, and snow fell on the alps not so far from where I live making us scurry around to find dry fire wood. It was just like the poem!

WINTER GALES

Each winter pistons closer to the earth.

The last, I swear, a very siege of Jericho:

when winds came eerily over the paddocks, kilting

haystacks into fury, and the barns

were filled with sound like a tree’s rustling, and

everything thrust roots more grimly into the frozen ground.

Fences and cattle groaned, but stood foursquare; and in the yard

a chicken lay stone dead, cold on its side,

and water ruffled or frosted in the puddles.

O winds, winds, lay siege to this cold house,

where souls hide sickening behind grey panes.

Winter is bare of silences. And through the leaves

our walnuts find their dark. A season when the hearts

of women shrink, and men go before the wind

as the figtrees do, or the pines; for nothing here has walls

to hold the escaping, dark, continuous wind.

Summer can of course be no less devastating in Australia as the recent drought and bushfires showed. Buckley imitates the desiccation of summer by the alternation of long and short rhyming lines – it’s as if it’s too hard to make a second line as long as the first. The music responds with a fragmented texture, and the thin line of high violins in unison. And yet for all that we dry up and burn out the oceans and stars move to their own majestic rhythm, ‘fronting eternity’ which I have tried to depict in a rolling passage of simple counterpoint with colourful scoring. The events of Boxing Day 2004 gave the image of oceans hammering ‘the drawn, great slope of continents’ an unimagined horrific new meaning, but the image is sublime.

3 SUMMER FLOWS OVER…

Summer flows over the great sleeve of sand.

Harshly the land

sinks to its nerveless entropy, beneath

the shuddering breath

that sucks up men and valleys. In a day,

rivers are baked brown clay:

and suddenly we are old, with the age of heat

that shrivels hands and feet.

Tempers are dry as grass in the dull glare

that shakes the air;

yet, northward, the oceans under Capricorn

hammer the drawn,

great slope of continents – until our eyes

leap years without surprise

to glimpse the undaunted wheel of stars, the sea

fronting eternity.