Recital Hall West Sydney Conservatorium of Music
Sunday 30 May 2010 3pm
Diamond Quills derives its title and the movement titles (Diamond Quills, Fidget Wheels, and Black Thumb-balls) from Kenneth Slessor’s (1901-1971) poem, Five Bells (1939). This is the second time that I have visited this poem, with the previous chamber sextet, Between Five Bells written in 1996, performed by the New Music Ensemble of Sweelinck Conservatory, conducted by Harry Sparnaay at Beurs van Berlage at the Gaudeamus Festival in Amsterdam.
The entire poem occurs in the time-lapse memory “between five bells”, that is the fragments of memory, reminiscence, nostalgia and atmospheric memento mori triggered by the sound of five nautical ship’s bells tolling out the time. This composition is a study of time, death and the harbour (Sydney Harbour).
The narrator remembers the bobbing buoys and reflected lights coruscating on the nocturnal harbour, the sounds and images evoked by Sydney Harbour. He also describes the “diamond quills and mackerel-backs” of the glittering dancing waves. This image evokes the lively, fluid, ephemeral, translucent, brilliant and oblivious (to death) continuum of nature and the harbour, the constantly oscillating effervescent waves that is encapsulated in the elegant, filigree, flowing first movement.
I looked out my window in the dark
At waves with diamond quills and combs of light
That arched their mackerel-backs and smacked the sand
The second movement conveys the rhythmic, meticulous, almost paranoid, precise yet idiosyncratic metronome of time that the drowned, lackadaisical subject of the poem refused to be entrapped and constrained by, juxtaposing the ethereal quality of memory, a warped time that transcends clocks, momentum, humdrum and decorum. The dancing piano counterpointing the mechanistic clockwork motifs and occasional lurching melodies of the bass clarinet seek to elude temporal shackles. One perceives the character’s sardonic, skeptical condescension towards conventions of temporal organisation.
Time that is moved by little fidget wheels
Is not my time, the flood that does not flow.
The third movement is a dark, sinister, intense and evocative ferocious fervour that is juxtaposed with wild and other-worldly cries and the distress of the drowning sinking man the poet imagines, switching over from the disarray and panic of the human experience into the “longer dream” and timeless, otherworldly fluidity of the sea as the narrator relives his drowning below its dark surface and permanent disconnection. It evokes a violent, turbulent struggle, floating off into the sublime eventually, concluding with the tolling of the five bells, closing the glimpse of the memory.
The tide goes over, the waves ride over you
And let their shadows down like shining hair,
But they are Water; and the sea-pinks bend
Like lilies in your teeth, but they are Weed;
And you are only part of an Idea.
I felt the wet push its black thumb-balls in,
The night you died, I felt your eardrums crack,
And the short agony, the longer dream,
The Nothing that was neither long nor short;
But I was bound, and could not go that way,
But I was blind, and could not feel your hand.
If I could find an answer, could only find
Your meaning, or could say why you were here
Who now are gone, what purpose gave you breath
Or seized it back, might I not hear your voice?
Death and the harbour featured significantly in my life at the end of 2009 when I was composing this piece.
Excerpts from Kenneth Slessor (1994 edition) ‘Slessor Selected Poems’ published by Harper Collins, ISBN 9780207182983 and also available on www.poemhunter.com/poem/five-bells (retrieved 22/03/10). The Selected Poems includes various other poems relating to death such as Slessor’s famous Beach Burial, and to time, e.g. Out of Time.
Special thanks to Ros Dunlop and Charisma Ensemble for courageously undertaking to perform this piece before it was written, and for the opportunity to write for three of my favourite instruments.
Kirsty Beilharz