Image @ Robert MacFarlane. Used with permission.
Music is grown through relationships. One of Halcyon's aims has always been to connect you to the music of our time and the composers who create it. In this post, I would like to focus in on the work of one significant Australian composer, Nigel Butterley, who passed away in February.
Butterley was a masterful composer, drawn to the power of poetry and the human voice, who wrote beautiful and uncompromising vocal work throughout his career. He was also a skilled performer who was involved in presenting new international works to Australian audiences including the first Australian performance of Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire in 1959 (Richard Meale was the conductor). How I would have loved to have seen that.
IN OTHERS WORDS
Admired by composers and students alike, he was an influential voice across several generations. There have been many insightful articles, broadcasts and tributes written about his work and musical legacy. Click on the links below to read more.
Andrew Ford - Nigel Butterley Remembered (ABC, The Music Show podcast)
Vincent Plush - Nigel Butterley has died (Limelight)
Stephen Adams - Vale composer Nigel Butterley, who has died aged 86 (ABC Classic)
Elliott Gyger - Obituary: Composer’s music celebrated opening of Opera House and Captain Cook (Sydney Morning Herald)
Australian Music Centre - Farewell Nigel Butterley (includes links to three earlier articles by Elliott Gyger and Chris Williams: Nigel Butterley at 80 - A Reading and Seven Listenings; Nigel Butterley's music, decade by decade and Nigel Butterley and the Problem that Wasn't)
Jack Carmody - Eulogy delivered at the funeral service
ABC Classic FM has also reposted an old interview he did with Margaret Throsby around his 60th birthday here
FIRST IMPRESSIONS
As a young University student and singer I took part in performances of Butterley's choral work, such as The True Samaritan (recorded with The Contemporary Singers on Tall Poppies' album of Butterley's chamber music, There Came a Wind Like a Bugle) and was drawn to the intricacy and intelligence of his vocal writing, his delight in both text setting and pure sonorities. Each vocal line was satisfying and challenging to engage with - the clever and surprising interplay between voices, which were often woven deftly around each other (even between voices of the same type), the biting close dissonances - his writing shaped my own vocal development as I was starting out on my career path as a freelance singer.
CARMINA
Halcyon's closer relationship with Nigel and his work did not develop until his later years. In July 2005 we collaborated with Ensemble Offsping on a program called Floof!(after Esa-Pekka Salonen's wild piece of the same name), which included Butterley's Carmina: Four Latin Poems of Spring. First performed by Lauris Elms and the New Sydney Wind Quintet in 1968 it was wonderful to work with Nigel on this piece many decades later. We performed it again in September that year as part of New Music Network's Nigel Butterley 70th Birthday Festival which also featured programs by The Song Company and the Seymour Group.
ORPHEI MYSTERIA
With a grant from the Australia Council, Halcyon commissioned Nigel to write Orphei Mysteria and premiered the work in 2008 as part of the B3 program in Halcyon's tenth birthday year. The live performance was recorded and broadcast by ABC Classic. You can listen to this performance as part of ABC Classic FM’s 90 for 90 series here.
We staged it twice more in later years, performing and recording it in 2014 (for Giving Voice and Waves III respectively) and again in Melbourne in 2017 with Inventi Ensemble in A Child of Earth and Heaven.
A substantial and haunting work in seven parts, it features a rich ensemble of mezzo-soprano, soprano, piccolo/flute/alto flute, clarinet/bass clarinet, oboe/cor anglais, guitar, violin, viola and cello. With its delicate and evocative text setting, sensitively shifting sonorities and delicate intermingling of vocal and instrumental phrases (as the colours of one frequently merge into the other), this true ensemble work was a deep joy to study and perform. It was also written with a clear understanding of Halcyon's artistic directors honed abilities as ensemble singers. In performance, the soprano is placed behind the ensemble and only joins with the mezzo soloist at key points in the work - acting rather like a Greek chorus as commentator - and yet the voices are required to sing an intricately intertwined duet, minimally accompanied, which needs to sound to the audience as though it is in tune, well-balanced and completely in sync despite the physical distance. No small feat to achieve but a challenge we embraced.
"Poetry stands behind everything of Nigel Butterley's, vocal or instrumental. But though he has a mastery of images, his music can seem diffident, withholding meaning until second or third hearing. Orphei Mysteria breaks constraint and communicates immediately."
From Graeme Skinner's review of B3 for the Sydney Morning Herald
KINGFISHER
As we approached our 15th birthday, we again spoke to composers we had worked with over the years about writing a work for our Kingfisher project. We were thrilled when Nigel, along with 20 other composers, agreed to celebrate the occasion with us. He wrote a beautifully sparse work for soprano and cello, Nature Changes At the Speed of Life... to text by one of his favourite poets, Kathleen Raine. He was finding writing harder by this point and it took him some months to produce this delicate work. I remember him expressing his frustration several times, as he said that he could hear it all in his head but was finding it more difficult to capture those ideas on the page. Though we did not know it at the time, it turned out to be the last work he completed.
I spent some time last year researching his work in the archives of the National Library where I read transcripts of interviews and information about his early travels, experiences and the development of works. I will conclude with some words Nigel himself wrote in 1969, which still seem to reflect the essence of his work.
"...Music is a means of contact between one person and another. On the one hand I know that my relationships with people play a large part in forming the music I write. I hope that on the other hand my music may evoke some personal response in someone who hears it."
from the Australian Composers Survey No. 1
Vale Nigel.
LISTENING
You can listen to a playlist of all these works and a brief interview we did with him in 2014 for our Kingfisher project here.
You can also listen to the premiere of Orphei Mysteria , as part of ABC Classic FM’s 90 for 90 series here. The program features our B3 concert from 2008 and includes works by Gavin Bryars, George Benjamin and Nigel Butterley performed by Halcyon as well as performances by The Song Company and Nigel Butterley himself.