DREAMS
David Joseph
Move Records MD 3479
If you try to find traces of Australian composer David Joseph‘s current activity, you’re pretty much pursuing a lost cause. As far as I can tell, he’s not writing or publishing anything but is living his life as a lawyer in Nunn St., Benalla, and what music is coming out in his name is already-achieved material. Such is the case with this current CD from Move Records. It comprises four works, all of them choreographic exercises although I believe that only one of them has actually been danced.
Further to this retrospective feature, all of the scores come from a limited period in Joseph’s compositional life. The oldest comes first: The Dream, written in 1986 for the Adelaide Chamber Orchestra and here performed at a live concert by that body (now defunct?) conducted by a long-time conductor for all seasons, John Hopkins who passed from us in 2013. Next is The Haunting, which was commissioned in 1992 by Paul Sacher for his Collegium Musicum Zurich, putting Joseph among a very distinguished company in having such a relationship to the Swiss billionaire. And just in time, too: this body was disbanded, after more than a half-century of activity, in that same year. This track is performed by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra under the Anglo-Australian musician Roger Smalley (who also left us, in August 2015) and was recorded live at the Malthouse Theatre.
The Memory was commissioned in 1994 by one-time Song Company director Roland Peelman for the Newcastle-based Hunter Orchestra which I believe has disappeared from that region. This track also comes from a live performance given, I assume, in 1995. Finally, we hear Two Ballet Scenes that Joseph wrote for the Queensland Ballet in 1994, taking their source from Maeterlinck’s Pelleas et Melisande play. First comes By the Fountain, a scene where the lovers converse for the first time and Melisande loses her marriage ring when it drops into a well (not a fountain in the play or in Debussy’s opera). Then we hear the Act 3 scene where Melisande is combing her hair and, in one unforgettable orchestral gesture from the Debussy score, lets it drop from the window.
These two excerpts are performed by a body called the Broadstock Orchestra which I cannot trace at all. It might be connected to Brenton Broadstock, the former Melbourne University academic and composer; it might be an ad hoc body named in his honour. At all events, these live performances have no named conductor, no venue information and, for that matter, could have come from either 1995 or 1996 – the CD leaflet is unsure. Which makes me think we’re fortunate to have these tapes re-mastered before any further details lapse from living memory.
As for the music itself, most of it is complex, if not severely so to the point of impenetrability. But that’s to be expected in works that deal with the subconscious and its perception (or lack of it). The Dream opens with some phantasmagoric skittering wind passages that settle down to a long unison melody for strings and low woodwind, then high strings stand alone in fluent chordal progressions. But the atmosphere turns menacing and unsettled. Slow chords, wavering string duplets, isolated percussion notes all alternate to suggest instability, if not an outright threat.
Some patterns enjoy repetition; others come out of nowhere and disappear: repeated trumpets, a falling filled-in third for woodwind, wisps for strings followed by an Augures printaniers-style chugging, trumpets in the ascendant for a happy Turangalila-reminiscent moment, and much use of 2nds, livened up by some inaccurate brass chording. A central passage of frenetic activity is followed by shards of intersecting motion before a general pause and we move to a more placid stretch of sustained notes and trills. Then a kind of reversion to the opening takes place with broad strokes from the upper strings and a plethora of trills, notably from the brass.
The piece has its moments of nightmare juxtaposed with emotional plain-sailing, although the latter usually devolves into frenetic action very quickly. Even the final sound-planes and broad melodic strophes lead to an unsteady resting point of three chords that are slightly splayed in this performance. As a whole canvas, the work succeeds in depicting a sonority-rich landscape where an awful lot happens, while the dream it depicts presents as both disturbing and disturbed.
As expected, The Haunting bears a strong resemblance to The Dream but is a work with stronger definition in terms of rhythm and interwoven timbres. The block chords that dominate the opening pages completely, later the furious rushing scales from Joseph’s woodwind en masse, and a vehement bass underpinning all produce an accumulating tension that follows the earlier work’s narrative pattern – which, it seems to me, is based on spasmodic activity, prescient pauses and an instrumental stridency where blocks collide without yielding space, like the string body’s whirling pattern being cut across by trumpet-led brass chord-expectorations, over a sustained timpani roll.
Inevitably, you are impressed by the suitability of this score as a film accompaniment, probably for a graphic slasher movie. Joseph doesn’t put any limits on his aggression which continues for some time with downward rapid scales from strings and woodwind cut through by strident brass in repetitive two/three-chord punctuation, while every so often the smoky colour of a vibraphone cuts through. You get a sort of let-up at two-thirds of the way through, although what really happens is that the metre slows and the notes get longer. But dissonance is king in this series of short oases as Joseph moves into a planar model where you have time to appreciate the instrumental structure of his sustained, intensely strident chords, especially the chain of 27 that precede his final, soft farewell to this unnerving process – one that is expertly accomplished by Smalley and the MSO.
The composer views the third work in this triptych, The Memory, as the most abstract of them but it strikes me as being rooted in something closer to the everyday than its companions. It’s still hard to make links or connections between its constitutional elements although I think the task would be easier in studying this score, if you had the ability and inclination. For one thing, it proceeds in a series of aphorisms, brief outbursts separated by silences that make the content apprehensible. In fact, it’s only at about the three-quarter point that you come across a sustained utterance.
The other characteristic is its pace which, because of the general pauses, impresses because it gives the mind time to absorb. As well, Joseph suggests the everyday intentionally, even if you have to enter into a kind of modern-day Impressionist ambience; you can hear birds, traffic, crowds, although I think he’s stretching it by proposing clouds as a musico-pictorial effect – but then I never believed in the efficacy of Debussy’s nocturne. So, it’s odd: the composer pushing the immaterial character of this work that is suggestive – admittedly, only in part, and perhaps, only to me – of our real lives.
The two Pelleas et Melisande pieces serve as flavoursome vignettes to finish, the first flute-dominated at its opening while the Window scene is led by the strings into an irregular song-like lyric which eventually sounds out clearly, emerging as lucidly as it’s going to get toward the piece’s end. The performance from the Broadstock body is eloquent and clear-cut, the ensemble coping with some hefty post-flute solo writing in the fountain/well scene where the content moves from picturesque to a substantial commentary on humans attempting to interact in the Belgian dramatist’s labyrinthine emotional field.
Joseph’s voice has been one of the more interesting to hear in the Australian musical world over the last thirty years and this collection of works for reduced orchestral forces sets his individuality in high relief, particularly when the CD’s major orchestral offerings are set alongside the vapid effusions we have become accustomed to hearing (and tolerating) from writers with no knowledge of or background in the historical practices of their art. He might be mystifying in his intentions, startling in his ferocity of utterance, and inviting his listeners on a confrontational path, but Joseph maintains his focus and holds your attention across the span of these well-resurrected scores.
O'Connell the Music 