Ross Edwards

Saturday 16 August 2003 12:00AM (view full episode)

Composer Ross Edwards discusses his latest piece and his life as a composer.


Andrew Ford: That's the beginning of 'Dawn Mantras', and the composer of the music is Ross Edwards. It's music that was first heard as dawn broke over Sydney Harbour on the 1st January, 2000. And we're listening to it now because we're about to meet Ross Edwards and have a long chat with him. He's got a new piece that's being performed next weekend, called 'Koto Dreaming', and it's part of the Asian Music and Dance Festival which is happening at the Sydney Opera House. The piece includes of course a koto, and a shakuhachi as well as a cor anglais and a cello, and a butoh dancer, so we'll talk to Ross Edwards about that, and much else in a few minutes.


Andrew Ford: The opening moments of a work that as I said was first heard in the opening moments of 2000, 'Dawn Mantras' by Ross Edwards.

Ross Edwards, welcome to The Music Show.

Ross Edwards: Thank you, Andy.

Andrew Ford: Well let's talk about that piece first. You don't get many commissions like that to write for an audience of basically the entire world.

Ross Edwards: No, that's certainly the first and possibly the only time that will ever happen . It was a sort of last minute thing, they said would I like to do it and I said, but what is it? And I finally realised how momentous an occasion it was.

Andrew Ford: I love the idea this can be a last minute thing. It's not as though we didn't know the millennium was coming.

Ross Edwards: Well I think they were trying to work out who they would get as a composer, and there was a lobby group for me, I believe, and I sort of ended up being it. And it was something which I really took to, because I love writing for many different instruments, from different ethnic backgrounds and so on, so I had a shakuhachi, I had a didgeridoo, and they all go together, amazingly well.

Andrew Ford: And a cor anglais, which is I notice becoming one of your favourite instruments.

Ross Edwards: I love the cor anglais, yes. Well there's a great player around, Alexandre Oguey.

Andrew Ford: Now the reason we're listening to this piece now is because it clearly relates to the new piece which is going to be heard next week. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Ross Edwards: Yes, I think the prototype for all these Mantra pieces was a piece called 'Tyalgum Mantras' which was commissioned for the North Coast of New South Wales town of Tyalgum, which I did some years ago, and that seems to be done all over the place. I was at a performance in a Welsh castle by the sea a couple of years ago, so it gets around, and it seems to work in any context. This was at dawn, although it's a night piece. And out of that came the dawn piece, 'Dawn Mantras' which uses much the same instrumentation augmenting it with voices, and this piece I drew upon the same sorts of resources, or the same techniques. It's all underpinned by a drone which in this case is not a didgeridoo, it's a cello, it's John Napier, who's a very fine cellist who can do all sorts of other things and he does in this case. Then it's particularly for a koto, so I wrote it for Satsuki Odamura, and Riley Lee, shakuhachi, they're the two Japanese instruments. There's a butoh dancer, Uniumare, who's a wonderful performer, I've seen her perform; I don't know what she's going to do. It's a kind of dance which has its origins in traditional Japanese theatre, but it's fused with German expressionism, so this could be quite extraordinary. It's also a spontaneous thing which she's creating at the moment in Melbourne, so I don't know how it'll happen. To go with the music, she's got a rough tape of it.

Then there's Alexandre Oguey, the cor anglais player, and who have I left out? I think that's -

Andrew Ford: Not sure that you've left anyone out, no I think you've mentioned everything except for the two percussion players.

Ross Edwards: Well there may or may not be percussion, it's a very minimal part.

Andrew Ford: Oh, I see. Right. What about writing for koto and shakuhachi. These are obviously not Western instruments, they're not instruments which a composer like you was taught to write for in a sense, and they come from a different culture. Do you feel any particular responsibility when it comes to these instruments?

Ross Edwards: Well they've become pretty much universal because they've been propagated so fiercely by the players, they want them to go all over the world. Now it's not as if it's any more just belonging to Japan I think. So Riley Lee, I first wrote for him years ago, I've written several pieces now, and he gave me a bit of a lesson on it. I didn't want to get too hung up on what you can and can't do, and I often find when I'm writing for a new instrument, that the player will say 'Look, we'll sort it out later, don't make too many fingering charts and things like that.' So I took him at his word and I found it is just writing for a bamboo flute, and it can do all sorts of things that Western instruments can do, but it does them rather differently, it's got a different sort of flavour. With the koto, I was pretty scared, because I'd never written for it before and I had an hour's lesson from Satsuki, I just went out to her place and she showed me the ropes as it were. Once again I didn't want to know too much, but we devised a tuning system, that was very important for this instrument to know how it's tuned, because I didn't want her to have to retune during the performance. What it is incidentally, is a large sort of zither with 13 strings, and she sits in front of it and plays it, and you can move the tuning pegs to change the pitch.

Andrew Ford: Is there a sort of standard koto tuning then?

Ross Edwards: Well yes there scales you can tune it to, but I picked one, or I made one, with Satsuki, which was not standard, it's a bit different. It sounds a bit Japanese but it can also be other things. And so I went home and wrote the difficult parts of the piece, the easier parts I'd already done and she said, Yes, they're OK providing I modify this slightly or do that, which she did, and I said OK. But then I went and wrote a dance in a rather fast tempo and we were both very relieved when she found she could play it, this palpable feeling of relief with both of us I think.

Andrew Ford: It's an interesting area isn't it, how expert a composer should become in an instrument. The instrument that I find most terrifying of all still is the guitar.

Ross Edwards: Me too.

Andrew Ford: Well I talked to John Williams about this and he told me what he had told you, which is actually more or less what Riley Lee told you about writing for the shakuhachi, which is just write the stuff and we'll worry about the practicalities.

Ross Edwards: Don't exceed the range.

Andrew Ford: Well yes, of course.

Ross Edwards: Yes, well I found the guitar much harder to write for, possibly because I felt that I should have known how to write for guitar. Well, for koto I've got an excuse, not being Japanese. I put a lot into writing for the guitar and I still would find it difficult to do.

Andrew Ford: Yes, it is, there's something tremendously daunting about where those fingers go.

Ross Edwards: Are you going to be writing full time?

Andrew Ford: No. Not in the foreseeable future.

Ross Edwards: It's a wonderful instrument.

Andrew Ford: Far too scary. I can't believe you're going to be 60 this year.

Ross Edwards: Neither can I, it's ridiculous, isn't it?

Andrew Ford: It is. But can we go back to when you were a young chap. When did you know you wanted to be a composer?

Ross Edwards: I was 13, and it hit me very hard and I was dead scared, I have to say, because it's an absurd thing to want to be, especially in those days. Today if a young person announced to his or her parents that they wanted to be a composer, I mean I don't think anyone would be pleased about it, but there wouldn't be a reaction of horror. 'How will you earn a living?' although it's a very good question to ask.

Andrew Ford: It's still a relevant question.

Ross Edwards: But people do it, and they can go to universities and conservatoria and get trained, and they can emerge with degrees. People do PhDs in it now, and then I don't know quite what you do. There are outlets; you can go and say Well I'm a composer, and you may not do what you want to do, but you can do something. You don't get paid much, we know this.

Andrew Ford: No, but it's funny isn't it, that you can go and do the training and it's not like training to be an accountant or a lawyer where you then end up in a job, in a sense there is no job at the end of your training as a composer, you are a fully qualified composer but so what? You could sit at home and wait for the phone to ring for the rest of your life.

Ross Edwards: Or you can as I did, as you did, you can get jobs in universities or conservatoriums, and that can be a bit soul-destroying because you're expected to just teach the whole time rather than have this balance between practising your art and propagating it.

Andrew Ford: And there's also if you accept the fact that there is essentially no job as a composer, then to go from studying to being a teacher where you train more composers for whom there will be no jobs, it becomes a kind of -

Ross Edwards: Yes, you do feel kind of - yes, I think so.

Andrew Ford: So what did you do about it then Ross, at the age of 13?

Ross Edwards: Well actually I panicked, then I sort of pulled myself together and thought, Well, I had learnt piano when I was very young, but I said Well I don't want to go on with this, and my parents said, Well there's no reason I'm sure why you should. And when this happened, then I had a lot of catching up to do. So I took myself to the Conservatorium, I used to just study theory, I practiced, I did everything, I neglected my schoolwork like mad, which caused great concern. Somehow I struggled through and ended up at Sydney University doing music in arts. But I found that there was no possibility of my really getting into composition, which is what I wanted to do. So I left.

Andrew Ford: But you were with Peter Sculthorpe, were you not?

Ross Edwards: No, that was before Peter came - Peter arrived at the end of the year when I was just thinking Well this is not for me. And he tried to, well Ann Boyd sort of grabbed him and said You've got to talk this bloke out of leaving, and Peter did try, but my mind was made up. So I went and got a job, here at the ABC being a dispatch assistant, and I thought I'm going to save up lots of money and get out of Australia.

Andrew Ford: Working at the ABC?

Ross Edwards: Yes, working at the ABC. Well I deluded myself of course. But finally I did go back. Peter Maxwell-Davies got me a scholarship to go to Adelaide University, I was very lucky. He said 'You've got to have a degree, for God's sake, this is ridiculous.' And when he said it and Peter Sculthorpe had said it, I realised that this romantic notion of being an unqualified sort of person, just going in and writing music somewhere, in another part of the world where it was possible, was not on. So I did finish my degree and ended up studying overseas and then I came back and got a job at Sydney University.

Andrew Ford: In the end I wonder whether one's training as a composer is that much more useful than training as a teacher, because I know a lot of people who did teaching diplomas, and it's all well and good, but when you actually first stand up in front of a classroom full of children, the training that you've done is completely theoretical, you've got to get on and deal with those children, and is it, do you think, a bit the same, training as a composer. I mean it's all very well going and studying orchestration and whatnot, and I daresay one retains stuff, but when you have to write a piece of music, you're on your own, aren't you?

Ross Edwards: You are, and then you've got to get it performed. I mean outlets for performance are very difficult. I found that when I was a student, I had very formal training. In the '60s we were expected to analyse things in great depth and it was all very theoretical and you would get performances but they were not the sort of performances that would generate much outside interest.

Andrew Ford: You mean outside the university department?

Ross Edwards: Outside the university, and a few loyal supporters who would come along and sit through. But in my case, and a few of my colleagues and even though I was in Adelaide, I would come back to Sydney in my holidays and work for Peter Sculthorpe, I was actually an apprentice. So I got on the one hand this very formal training, and then the practicalities in the long vacation where I'd go and live there and I would do everything like copying music, and just basic things round the house, answering the phone, being a secretary and so on. Fobbing people off, because you had to, in order for him to get the sustained concentration, and that was really an apprenticeship, and that is very important too, and that's something that has been neglected, although I notice now that people are taking it seriously.

Andrew Ford: Yes, it's interesting isn't it. I think it was neglected because it was thought for a time that we have to let student composers really be themselves, and if they are as it were, working for an older composer, then there was so much influence, but as you say, in the end you need to know how to live, how to behave, how to work as a composer, and the best way to find that out is to watch somebody doing it.

Ross Edwards: And how to absorb influence, as I did, certainly from Peter, and Richard Meale and others, and be able to still be yourself, to absorb it into your own work and then not be a slave to the information you've got from other people. So that's something that you have to overcome I think, if you're going to be a composer.

Andrew Ford: Ross, the business of influence, it's sort of tied up also with finding your own voice, isn't it as a composer? You have to know in a sense, which things that influence you are really relevant to you, because you can be influenced by everything if you're not careful.

Ross Edwards: That's right, and I think it's important when you're young that you are. In fact I don't do much teaching now, but if I do, I would say to students as I did before, You should be listening to everything, non-Western music, all cultures; what is the importance of the music in other cultures? What is it doing, what's its rationale, what's its function? Do you like it? And so on. And I always say, or I used to say, You should be absorbing stuff that you really love, that means something to you, that if nobody else is home, what would you put on the CD player? And I think that's very important to really relate to something and then want to write, not to be influenced by that rather than feeling that I have to do this because it's politically correct, or my teacher said, or whatever. And there's a certain amount of exercises one has to do, that in forming your own style that's up to you I think. And then you go and say Help me with this. That seems to me to be healthy kind of teaching.

Andrew Ford: Yes, so that every time that you see the student then, it's because the student needs something.

Ross Edwards: That's right, yes, not to know at 2.30 on Tuesday afternoon or something like that, empty-handed.

Andrew Ford: Exactly. Almost always, in my experience. Let's listen to some more music. I've got the beginning of 'Yarrageh', well I've got all of it in the CD player, but we're going to listen to the beginning. Tell us about this piece. This is kind of an important piece for you I think, isn't it?

Ross Edwards: It was the culmination of the very meditative pieces I was writing in the 1970s, late '70s and '80s. It was a commission by the Sydney Symphony for Ian Cleeworth, and I think Ian's Japanese background and what he's doing now certainly -

Andrew Ford: With Taikoz....

Ross Edwards: With Taikoz, yes, influenced the kind of piece I wanted to write. I thought well he can play anything, he's a wonderful player. I didn't want to write a big splashy piece, I wanted to write something that somehow encapsulated the ideas that I'd been having. I'd been drawing my material somehow from the environment. There were sort of birdsongs, there was insect sounds and patterns and so on. All of this seemed to me to be a distillation of a very, very complex process that goes on in the natural environment. I wanted to bring it into the concert hall as a sort of an aid to meditation. It sounds a bit New Age, I know, but that's the sort of piece I wanted to do, and I wanted to have it performed in almost darkness with very subtle lighting, so that the audience would be perhaps mesmerised by it, to go under, and have a very different kind of listening experience, and this is something that I've been experimenting with again recently, because I think the idea of just sitting inert in a concert hall trying not to rustle your program or cough, is not really the way to listen to music, and it's only a very recent phenomenon in the Western world that this kind of thing has been, well, fostered, because concert halls are quite new. So anyway I wrote a piece which these ideas of mine, I wanted to put them into practice, and it had a very mixed reaction I must say. Some people got the message and other people thought What's going on? That was inevitable of course.

Andrew Ford: Yes. Well now that our listeners know how to listen to Yarroge, let's listen to the beginning of 'Yarrageh'.


Andrew Ford: Well that's the opening minutes of 'Yarrageh'. I'm tempted to call it a percussion concerto but concerto doesn't really seem like the right word, Ross.

Ross Edwards: Percussion meditation perhaps.

Andrew Ford: It's kind of an extreme piece, isn't it? And yet it seems to me on the one hand to be very personal, there's that chord that the piano plays, now how many Ross Edwards pieces does that chord feature in?

Ross Edwards: Quite a few because I found in the late '70s when I was trying to write music again, I hadn't been able to, I just rejected everything earlier. It's a very alarming point in my life for a few years, I couldn't write music, and I think I had rejected systems, Western music in general, I just opened my mind to the environment, and to music of other cultures. I just got sick of it, it all became stale. And I then tried to find what sounds, what particles I could reassemble to make music out of, and I found very few. I've since added in a much more personal language, because before that of course I was just aping the conventions, albeit in a fairly personal way. I think if you look at those earlier pieces they're me, they're very neurotic. And I wanted to calm down, I wanted to gradually find another language.

Andrew Ford: And where did you find this chord?

Ross Edwards: I don't know. Probably at the piano like a million others, and saying, That's it!

Andrew Ford: You knew you liked that one.

Ross Edwards: Yes, and when I'd assembled these few particles, I was able to make music out of them. I suppose you'd call it minimal, but I wasn't thinking in terms of any composition or movement, it's just that I wanted to get right back to essentials.

Andrew Ford: Well exactly, it sounds as though you went back from the ground up, as it were, you built your own language.

Ross Edwards: Yes.

Andrew Ford: So as I said, it's extreme and it's personal, but it's also something which you want very much I think to connect with listeners. You spoke about the meditative nature of that piece and you've said that you want your music at any rate, to be a positive and regenerative force. Benjamin Britten once said that he wanted his music to be useful, is it part and parcel of the same thing, do you think?

Ross Edwards: I feel exactly the same as that, and Hindemith too, of course, but perhaps in a slightly different way. I think a composer should be part of a healthy community. This ivory tower stuff just - I know people are forced into that, perhaps, but if a composer's going to take his or her place in society, it should be a comment, a reflection of that society, contributing to it in some way, and as an Australian composer, I feel that I should be writing for other Australians first, and then they can take it, I hope, all over the world. But it's got to emanate from somewhere, and be a product of something that I'm experiencing. And so from that point of view, yes, very much like that. I'm not trying to write Australian music, but then I do realise I live in a very multicultural society and so when I'd built this minimal language, I started to quite, I suppose subconsciously, superimpose all sorts of things on it, and having rejected European music, that started to flow back, but on my terms, you know, that's when I started to use plainsong, I might use textures of a gamelan orchestra, a scale from here, from there, snatches of birdsong, frog sounds, all sorts of things, all mixed up together, so it's the ultimate eclecticism, and yet it sort of sounded like me, for better or worse. It's totally eccentric, I realise that, but then in a way that's the way our society is, it's bits of everything, and you don't want to force it into a mould, or I don't think that's right. You allow these things to coexist and gradually make some sense.

Andrew Ford: Do you in fact, I say 'you', I mean 'one'. Does one make one's music useful, does one write for the community best by actually being yourself?

Ross Edwards: I think so, yes. I stopped trying to be someone else, I tried desperately for years, because I thought that was rather important, but now I accept myself, I accept my music and people either relate to it or they don't, it's as simple as that. I think it was Stravinsky who said he wrote for himself and the hypothetical other, which seems to make sense, you've got to start with yourself. OK if somebody wants something for a particular purpose, of course I take that very seriously, but I do it as myself.

Andrew Ford: Well if you don't please yourself first, then there's no reason why anybody else should be pleased.

Ross Edwards: Exactly.

Andrew Ford: Because you're actually offering some sort of fate, aren't you?

Ross Edwards: Exactly, yes. And I think particularly I find that a lot of my music is now played by young people. Originally it was very difficult, but then they always take to it, if somebody good plays it and it comes out on a CD and off they go, and I'm very, very pleased about that.

Andrew Ford: It reminds me, it's interesting that you mention Stravinsky, it reminds me you music, very often of Stravinsky in one particular way, which is that on the page it looks quite complicated, rhythmically especially, and yet when it's played very well, it seems tremendously natural, and it just flows.

Ross Edwards: I have the most awful trouble getting it down sometimes. Sometimes it will come out, but my criterion I suppose is that it's got to sound as though I just did it, like that, it's got to sound absolutely natural, and somebody's got to play it the same way. So that it engages you immediately. You can go to all sorts of depths if you can find them later, but this initial impact is very important. But I'm sweating over things and changing little details, and rubbing them out and going and doing something else and coming back to it, you know.

Andrew Ford: I think a lot of listeners would be surprised because the music doesn't sound like that ever, it sounds very spontaneous but in fact the scores are incredibly detailed, but almost finickity.

Ross Edwards: Yes, and people playing it will often, if they don't know my music, they'll look at it and think Oh, that's all right, and they panic at the last minute, because they've left it. But certainly there's much more detail embedded in the score than would appear.

Andrew Ford: This actually brings us rather neatly to the subject of revision, because I suppose your most famous piece in many ways, is the piano concerto of 1982.

Ross Edwards: Notorious.

Andrew Ford: Well indeed, notorious as well. And you are currently revising this work, and before we talk about the revision, perhaps we could talk about 1982. There's a program note that you wrote at the time which I love and which I enjoy quoting to you, where you say, 'This is an absolutely one-off, I'm never going to write a piece like this again.' So obviously you didn't realise at the time the import of this piece.

Ross Edwards: I remember writing that on a bus.

Andrew Ford: The program note, not the piano concerto.

Ross Edwards: No, no, no. And I just found myself saying that; I don't know whether I believed it at the time, but because I was bit shocked I think. This came pouring out, it was something that I knew had been in my mind somewhere, lurking in the background, but when these extraordinary impulses which were quite shocking at the time I think, although I loved doing it, I embraced it fully, and I thought I'm going to get into real trouble for this but I don't care. I thought Well you know, I'll do it just this once, and maybe I'll go back to being sensible and normal. I think it was really an excuse, I was just making an excuse for it.

Andrew Ford: Let's listen to the final movement, at least as it was.

Ross Edwards: As it was. It's now different.

Andrew Ford: As it was in 1982.


Andrew Ford: That was the finale of Ross Edwards' Piano Concerto that we just heard, or at least that's what it used to sound like, because you were saying Ross, that you've just revised it.

Ross Edwards: I have, yes, I've enlarged it, and the proportions are now better. Listeners may notice that it all seems to be building up to something grand, and then it falls away, and that's been the problem with the piece all along, that movement. I wrote it in the space of three weeks because I was given a deadline that turned out not to be real, and it's been great to have this opportunity to remake it.


Andrew Ford
Penny Lomax / Maureen Cooney