Philtre (1997)

Donica Tran / Violin

Philtre (1997) for Hardanger fiddle (Norwegian folk fiddle) or retuned violin A philtre is a ‘love potion’. This piece for the Norwegian Hardanger fiddle exploits the instrument’s resonance strings (rather like an Indian sitar) and low-voiced tuning to weave a texture of murmuring resonances. The work can also be played on a standard violin (tuned FCEB).

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Autumn from The Four Seasons (2009)

Alex Raineri / Piano

I spent time at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in January 2007 and was very inspired by the works by Cy Twombly on display, in particular, the massive four-panelled work ‘Quattro Stagioni’. The combination of ecstatic saturated colour, linear calligraphic dynamism and and paint washes veiling poetic commentaries scrawled on canvas, gave me many ideas for a piano cycle in four parts. These ‘seasons’ are seasons of an inner life – they are made up of ‘climates of feeling’ – weather patterns that are sometimes extravagantly baroque in expression or shot through with an elegaic sense of the passage of time opening out to a ceremonial dance: a ‘Sema’ or the Sufi’s meditative whirling dance of union.

Program Notes © Liza Lim

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Inguz (1996)

Dario Scalabrini / Clarinet

Katherine Philp / Cello

Inguz (fertility) dates from 1996 and follows the genetic line of earlier works Kotoand Street of Crocodiles – in fact, the work draws on an unpublished cello study written in preparation for the latter work. The title refers to the Viking rune symbolising fertility, which is associated with “the moon, intuition and the desire for harmonisation in personal relationships”. Inguz is dedicated to the clarinettist Catherine McCorkhill and cellist Chris Lockhart Smith on the occasion of the birth of their daughter Arianne.

Inguz is an intimate study of cello and clarinet sonorities. It explores these instruments’ conforming and contrasting features amid a narrative of alternating mobility and stasis, the product of the passing congruences and divergences of pitch and rhythm. On some occasions the instruments’ timbres are virtually indistinguishable, the one growing out of or intermingling with the other; on others, the contrasts of timbre and register are extreme. Lim conceives of the work as being like the alap of an Indian raga, in which the music functions to tune the instruments and to establish a mood.

Program Note © Malcolm Gillies

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Axis Mundi (2012-13)

Andre Oberleuter / Bassoon

Images came to me in a dream: I saw a dead tree with dessicated bark and as I watched, the cracks and hollows filled with insects and larvae. Birds began feeding and breeding until the whole tree was a singing mass of fluttering creatures.

The symbol of the ‘Axis Mundi’ as a central pole extending between Heaven and Earth can be found in many cultures and religions. One of the best known of these is Yggdrasil, the cosmic tree of Norse mythology, whose roots, trunk and branches connect multiple realms of existence. Similarly, in Siberian shamanic cultures, the world tree represents a kind of ladder between lower, middle and upper worlds. Symbolic representations of the tree in the form of a ceremonial staff, a column of smoke or the vibrations of a drum, act as a ritual axis enabling the shaman to enter into states of non-ordinary reality to communicate with animal spirits and other sources of power.

Alban Wesly visited me in Manchester on 23 March 2012 to demonstrate the bassoon: the instrument is a long wooden tube that doubles back on itself, punctuated by a great number of holes and keys. The keys might be thought of as a quite complex ‘management system’ to resolve a natural out-of-tuneness but it was precisely the irregularities of intonation and colour in the bassoon that attracted my attention. Alban and I found a way of organising sounds which takes an ‘inside out’ view of the instrument: in thinking about each hole as a venting point governing the cycles of vibration inside the instrument, and then subtly changing the interaction of these vibrations by opening and closing parts of the acoustic chamber below the open hole, we arrived at a series of irregular scales. These scales are made up of differently sized microtonal intervals and changing ‘behaviours’. There are tones expressed in distinct timbres from bright to dark to fuzzy, and complex multiphonics ranging from highly dissonant rolling tones and roaring frictions to consonant harmonies. Some of the sounds are highly localised, gloriously emerging from the bell at the top of the bassoon or circulating in quite specific regions of the tube. These sonic ‘knots’ inside the vibrating hollow tube of the instrument form the musical material of Axis Mundi. The breath of the musician travelling the hidden pathways across and through these knots activates the many voices of a ‘singing tree’.

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Winter from The Four Seasons (2009)

Alex Raineri / Piano

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Invisibility (2009)

Katherine Philp / Cello

Invisibility for solo ‘cello is part of Lim’s ongoing investigation into an Australian Aboriginal ‘aesthetics of presence’ in which shimmering effects both reveal and hide the presence of the numinous.

The composer writes, “The ‘invisibility’ of the title of the piece is not about silence, for the work is full of sounds. Rather, I am working with an idea of the invisible or latent forces of the physical set-up of the instrument. What emerges as the instrument is sounded in various increasingly rhythmicized ways is a landscape of unpredictable nicks and ruptures as different layers of action flow across each other.

The composition also works with magnifications of these disruptions by intensifying various paradoxical combinations, e.g. playing a string that is lightly touched at a non-harmonic node so that the string vibrates in highly complex ways producing a multiphonic effect. The string doesn’t settle in any one vibrational zone but flicks or flickers (shimmers) between states so that what results is an unpredictable array of different noises and harmonics.

The two kinds of bow used in the piece offer different possibilities of friction, for instance, the stop/start structure of the serrated bow adds an uneven granular layer of articulation over every sound. Like the cross-hatched designs or dotting effects of Aboriginal art, the bow creates a highly mobile sonic surface through which one can hear the outlines of other kinds of movements and shapes. Moving rapidly between places of relative stability and instability in terms of how the cello is sounded, the piece shows patterns of contraction and expansion, accumulation and dissipation, aligning with forces that are at work within the instrument-performer complex.

Program Notes © Liza Lim

Liza Lim is an Australian composer whose music focusses on collaborative and transcultural practices. Ideas of beauty, ecological connection and ritual transformation are ongoing concerns in her compositional work. Her four operas: The Oresteia (1993), Moon Spirit Feasting (2000), The Navigator (2007) and Tree of Codes (2016), and the major ensemble work Extinction Events and Dawn Chorus (2018) explore themes of desire, memory, and the uncanny. Her genre-crossing percussion ritual/opera Atlas of the Sky (2018), is a work involving community participants that celebrates the emotional power and energy dynamics of crowds.

Liza Lim has received commissions from some of the world’s pre-eminent orchestras and ensembles including the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Bavarian Radio Orchestra, Ensemble Musikfabrik, ELISION, Ensemble Intercontemporain, Ensemble Modern, Klangforum Wien, International Contemporary Ensemble and Arditti String Quartet. She was Resident Composer with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra in 2005 & 2006. Her orchestral cycle Annunciation Triptych (2019-21) is jointly commissioned by the BBCSSO, Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, Westdeutscher Rundfunk and Donaueschinger Musiktage. Other projects include a work for the Sydney Symphony (50 Fanfares project), Sex Magic (2020), for flautist Claire Chase, and quartets for Sigma Projects and JACK Quartet. Her music has been featured at the Spoleto Festival, Miller Theatre New York, Festival d’Automne à Paris, Venice Biennale and at all the major Australian festivals. Lim is Professor of Composition and inaugural Sculthorpe Chair of Australian Music at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. Her music is published by Casa Ricordi Berlin and on CD labels Kairos, Hat Art, HCR and Winter & Winter.