Marion Newman: Kinanu, text by the composer
Harry Somers: Kuyas, text from Cree narrations.
Harry Freedman: Anerca, text from Inuktitut poems
Peter Sculthorpe: Island Dreaming, text from the people of Torres Strait,
                Maranoa Lullaby, text from the peoples of northern Australia
Jouko Linjama: Viisi Saamelaislaulua, text by Aslak Guttorm
Donna Kelly Eastman: Old Cherokee Woman's Song, text by William Jay Smith
Heitor Villa Lobos: Suite for Voice and Violin, text from the people of the Brazil interior
Maurice Ravel: Chansons Madecasses, text by Evariste-Desire de Parny

This evening's programme is an inescapable instance of cultural "fusion" - some would say "appropriation" - combining creation myths of various cultures (some in translation, and removed from their original social contexts) with modern vocal chamber music which explores texts from those cultures (in the case of the Finnish, Australian, and North American works) or inspired by them (the pieces by Ravel and Villa-Lobos), and occasional melodic and rhythmic elements drawn from the musics of the same cultures. Most of the composers are descendants of "colonizers", but all are clearly concerned with what their transformations of aboriginal culture can make perceptible to a wider audience, and how they can contribute to the awareness of indigenous traditions in their own and other countries. Two pieces, Donna Kelly Eastman's Old Cherokee Woman's Song and the middle movement of Ravel's Chansons madécasses, refer to tragic experiences of colonialism.

The works this evening provide us with a broad survey of the colonial process in the 20th century (and the early 21st), ranging from the culturally detached exoticism and stylised "otherness" of the Ravel (whose texts are already a step removed from the culture they are intended to portray), to the various indigenously-coloured nationalisms of Villa-Lobos, Somers, Freedman, and Sculthorpe. Eastman's Old Cherokee Woman's Song uses a text by a modern Native American poet to confront the consequences of colonialism. Taken together, these pieces give us an overview of the changing attitudes to the relationship between aboriginal and non-aboriginal cultures over the last hundred years, and suggest directions in which this relationship needs to continue to transform itself in the future.



Marion Newman (1972- ) - Kinanu, for voice, flute and piano

The melody of Kinanu began at the cradle of Marion's younger sister Ellen, as Marion sang her to sleep with a tune influenced by the Potlatch melodies of their Kwagiulth heritage. The title means 'baby' in Kwakwala. At the age of eight, Marion first set the song for voice and piano, and won the 1980 Canadian Music Teachers Association award for original composition. When she was ten, she was commissioned by the Victoria Conservatory Children's Choir to re-set the piece for choir and flute, and Kinanu was performed as a part of the choir's repertoire for several years.

In this arrangement, the drumbeat is set by the pace of the heartbeat, which is in keeping with traditional West Coast Aboriginal music. The piano represents the waves that constantly lap the shore and the rocking of the cradle, and the flute is meant to emulate the stirring of the breeze through the evergreens. The Celtic flavour of the flute melody signifies the cultural background of Marion's mother.



Harry Somers (1925-1999) - Kuyas, for voice, flute, and percussion (1967)

Canadian composer Harry Somers was fascinated by languages, and many of his works include words or quotations in a variety of languages from around the world. Kuyas, written originally for the Montreal International Voice Competition of 1967 and later used as the Act III lullaby in Somers' opera Louis Riel, combines a text in Plains Cree with elements of a lament melody collected from the Nass River First Nation in British Columbia. The setting, for voice, flute, and percussion, is highly dramatic: an extended solo incantation, punctuated by drum strokes, greets the sunrise. Next, a rapid and rhythmically complex section with flute and sleighbells invokes the Great Spirit and the spirits of animals, and portrays a hunter's day. At sunset, the solo voice calls once more on the Great Spirit, and soars upward into the song of an eagle; the telling of an ancient story, accompanied by discreet drum strokes, concludes the work.


Harry Freedman (1922- ) - Anerca, for soprano, harp, vibraphone, and piano (1966/1992)

Anerca was commissioned in its original form (for soprano and piano) by the CBC for Lois Marshall in 1966; composer Harry Freedman reworked the accompaniment for harp, vibraphone and piano in the early 1990s. Freedman's experience of the Canadian North during World War II made a strong impression on him, and Anerca is one of several works to be inspired by what Glenn Gould called "the idea of North". The text consists of translations of three poems in Inuktituk collected by Karl Rasmussen; in Inuktituk, Freedman explains in the score, "the word to make poetry is the word to breathe: both are derivatives of anerca, the soul, that which is eternal: the breath of life".

The outer movements convey a vivid sense of the human body and spirit swept along by the forces of nature; both alternate slow, declamatory sections with more active and rhythmically irregular ones. The expansive middle movement is scored for the voice, harp, and vibraphone alone: the text tells of the honour of hospitality. Its irony, in view of the history of relations between the First Nations and Europeans, is left to the listener to discern.


Peter Sculthorpe (1929- ) - String Quartet No. 13 Island Dreaming (1996)
                                               - Maranoa Lullaby (1996)

Sculthorpe was born in Tasmania, and educated in Melbourne and Oxford. He taught at Yale and Sussex before returning to Australia in 1961, and has been called the "spiritual father" of Australian new music. The inspiration for much of his work is drawn from landscape and from Aboriginal culture; in the case of the String Quartet No. 13, the composer writes

This work is based upon ideas suggested by the musics of the Torres Strait Islands. In these islands, the cultures of aboriginal Australia and Papua New Guinea, as well as Indonesia, are brought together as one; and the mythology is concerned mostly with the sea and with sea-change. The text, sung in its indigenous language, was culled from poetry both modern and archaic.

This work was written for the Brodsky Quartet and Anne Sofie von Otter, and the first performance was given in Paris in 1996. The string parts create an atmosphere in which the vocal line unfolds, underpinned by rolling waves in the lower lines; its expansive lyricism is punctuated by brief "effects", like the crying of gulls.

About Maranoa Lullaby the composer writes

It is one of a number of Aboriginal melodies collected in northern Australia by Dr. H.O. Lethbridge. It was published in Melbourne by Allan & Co. in 1937, with a piano accompaniment by Arthur S. Loam. Since the early forties, I have had a special fondness for this melody. It was inevitable, therefore, that I should make an arrangement of it.


Jouko Linjama (1934- ) - Viisi saamelaislaulua (Five Saami songs) (1971-1972)
Text by Aslak Guttorm

Born in a border area of Finland which is now part of Russia, Linjama is one of Finland's foremost composers of choral and church music, as well as an organist, conductor, and music critic. While his early works were in a "modernist" style influenced by Webern, he subsequently became interested in plainchant and medieval and renaissance polyphony, and his later works represent a fusion of all these influences. Several of his compositions reflect a deep concern with Finnish national identity, and he is also one of the few composers to set texts in S‡mi, the language of the indigenous people of northern Finland, Sweden and Norway, also known as "Lapps". The Viisi saamelaislaulua are an instance of Linjama's preference for "enriched" song accompaniments, using another melody instrument (here the alto flute) in addition to the piano. In the first four songs, the straightforward text rhythms are set against more complex patterns in the instrumental parts; in the final one, all the parts share an undulating figure which is essentially a rhythmicized trill. The vocal part throughout employs leaps of more than an octave - perhaps an echo of the traditional S‡mi singing style known as "joiking".


Donna Kelly Eastman - Old Cherokee Woman's Song (2001)
Text by William Jay Smith

Eastman has had a varied musical career, including performance (keyboard and vocal), directing (choral and chamber ensembles), teaching, and composing and arranging music for a wide variety of forces. Her Old Cherokee Woman's Song, for mezzo-soprano, flute/piccolo, cello, and piano, won the 2002 Miriam Gideon Prize in the Search for New Music, sponsored by the International Alliance for Women in Music. The piece sets a text by William Jay Smith, a former American poet laureate of Choctaw descent, depicting the forced migration of many Native people from the eastern United States to the western frontier regions. The work is unified by the recall and transformation of small melodic units, such as the winding modal figure first set out by the piccolo at the opening of the piece, and the upward leap, followed by a stepwise descent, which sets the opening words of the poem, "They have taken my land, they have taken my home..." at the beginning of the work, and their recapitulation at the end. In between, the middle section of the piece sets forth the nightmare of the migration, and builds to an agonizing climax with the image of the falling sky and the gathering storm.


Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887-1959) - Suite for Voice and Violin (1923)

By 1923, when this piece was written, Villa-Lobos had made several trips into the Brazilian interior, collecting the music of the indigenous, African, and mestizo populations, and while his work shows some influence of the Parisian milieu in which the composition was released, the primary influence on his work throughout his life remained that of the folk music of his own country. The composer told an American critic,

I compose in the folk style, I utilize thematic idioms in my own way, and subject to my own development. An artist must do this. He must select and transmit the material given to him by his own people... I study the history, the country, the speech, the customs, the background of the people. I have always done this, and it is from these sources, spiritual as well as practical, that I have drawn my art.

The first song sets a poem by Maria Andrade, while in the latter two the voice sings meaningless syllables. All three reflect the spirit of the work songs of the peasants of the Brazilian interior, the caboclo.


Maurice Ravel (1875-1937) - Chansons madécasses (1925-1926)
Text by Evariste-Désiré de Parny

Ravel's suite of songs for voice, flute, cello, and piano differs from the other works on this programme in setting texts in an "indigenous" voice from a country very distant from his own; in fact, the poems are by the eighteenth-century Creole poet Evariste-Désiré de Parny, himself something of an onlooker of the society of Madagascar which he depicts. The settings evoke a generalized "savage" exoticism rather than a specific ethnic idiom. The first and last express a languid lyricism, rich in sensual detail, while the second song embodies an ironic anti-colonialism which remains a present and necessary voice in many parts of the world today. The songs were commissioned by Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, and Ravel considered them to be among his most significant works, perhaps because of the new tonal idioms which he explored in them. He also remarked, somewhat enigmatically, "I am quite conscious of the fact that my Chansons madécasses are in no way Schoenbergian, but I do not know whether I should have been able to write them had Schoenberg never written".


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