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It has been quite a while – a couple of decades, to be frank – since I have written poetry for the page, as opposed to libretti or simply lyrics, so it is rather lovely to have a poem published in RABBIT, a prominent Australian literary journal. This issue, number 32, focusses on ‘form’, which is something I love thinking about, and then tie myself in knots trying to make work. But not just work; I want the whole thing to be alive.
The poem is called ‘Astronomical’ and is about how, even (especially?) in the depths of the night, it is possible to be infinite.
Although I thoroughly enjoyed writing the libretto for THE WEIGHT OF LIGHT (commissioned by the Hume Conservatorium in New South Wales, with music by James Humberstone), and there are song lyrics in my new play-in-development, it has been good to worry about how a poem works on the page rather than about how the words might be sung and resonate with an audience hearing them in the context of a performed work.
A poem does not necessarily make a good song lyric, and vice versa.
So I am learning.
In any case, many thanks to guest editors Charmaine Papertalk Green and Stuart Barnes. Thanks also to Melinda Smith for introducing me to the concept of duende, which has changed my writing in so many ways. (If you would like to know more about duende, you may wish to check out this terrific essay by Tracy K Smith.)
If you would like to check out RABBIT 32, just drop a click here.
Over and out.
Bloody hell, I’m about to do something I’ve never done before.
Starting at 2pm tomorrow, I will be spending two weeks straight at The Street Theatre in Canberra undertaking a creative development of my new full-length play with songs, which has the working title THE STORY OF THE OARS.
What does this mean?
Professional actors reading the text as it currently stands. A director and dramaturge analysing every scene, sentence, and word. Body explorations. A music consultant investigating opportunities and challenges. Me passing out from the thrill – and glorious work – of it all.
Due to COVID-19, it will be happening online. Pictured is my set up at home. Complete with angel and (hint of) bull talisman.
Frighteningly, at 5pm (AEST) on Friday 15 May the ‘doors’ will open and you can experience a professional reading of the play. And get to give me and the creative team feedback.
Shit.
Tickets, which are free but limited, can be found here.
I have been through this process before. The song cycle for which I wrote the libretto, THE WEIGHT OF LIGHT, also went through a First Seen creative development. However, because that work was already at a fairly developed stage, it was a much shorter process – 2 days. Also, we already had a full score, by the wonderful James Humberstone. This time around, we’re developing the project in a much more incremental way, aiming to get the text as finished as it can be before we move into the music-collaboration stage. That’s not to say this will be a better process, just a different process for different projects.
So what is THE STORY OF THE OARS actually about?
Summer somewhere on the east coast of Australia, 1987: three teenage brothers drown on a large ephemeral lake. Thirty years later, with the lake now dry, four strangers unburden themselves of the truth. Their lives will never be the same. A play with songs, THE STORY OF THE OARS is about the repercussions of childhood, and how facts have their way of revealing themselves. It’s also an exploration of class, privilege, and the power of place to enchant, repel, and mend.
Of course, massive thanks to the unstoppable folk at The Street Theatre, and Create NSW for supporting an earlier development.
Now, where’s a crate-load of whiskey…
Snowfalls. Orange skies. Face-masks. Raging flames. Ash on the letterbox. Hail the size of apples. Half a billion animals gone. Dead trees. Lives lost. Floods.
It was the Summer from Hell in Australia.
And now the daffodils are coming up. In March. As they say in polite society: what the fuck?
Still, writing manages to happen.
Firstly, I was chuffed to have been asked to write a piece for the special Australian Issue of the CHICAGO QUARTERLY REVIEW, which is now out. I wrote about my childhood in the Blue Mountains, Patrick White, and one of the worst mistakes I’ve ever made.
The opening paragraph:
I stood on the edge of the lane and stared at the black house, at the old concrete water tank, at the lawn stones that might have been foundations. Some minutes later, after deciding that as it was midweek and the house likely a weekender, I took a step, then another— until I was standing in the garden, in the very place where my bedroom had once been. I stretched out my arms as if to touch the missing walls and said, “This is where it happened.”
Such an honour to share the pages with writers such as Claire G Coleman, Michael Mohammed Ahmad, Krissy Kneen, Ali Cobby Eckermann, Behrouz Boochani, Van Badham, David Malouf, Kim Mahood, Simon Cleary, Quinn Eades, and Inga Simpson among many others.
While writing for the page continues to be my focus, writing for the stage is something I’m doing more and more, even though I never intended to go in this direction. Ah, the twists and turns in the writing life.
So, it was rather exciting to be informed recently that three of my songs from THE WEIGHT OF LIGHT will be performed in November this year at Carnegie Hall’s Recital Hall in New York by international baritone David Wakeham.
To be frank, this is rather special: the song cycle, the score for which was written by the amazing James Humberstone, is about a high-raking Australian soldier who returns from his latest tour of Afghanistan with a dark secret; all he wants to do is heal on his family’s grazing property on the Southern Tablelands – what he doesn’t know is that his family have a dark secret of their own.
To have elements of the work performed in the US? Mind-blowing.
Finally, earlier this month I spent two days at The Street Theatre in Canberra. Three songs from THE WEIGHT OF LIGHT may well be off to New York, but I have a new work for the stage in the very early phase of development i.e. crappy words on bits of paper.
Is it another song cycle? Perhaps it’s more of a play with songs?
Thanks to some lovely funding from Create NSW, I was able to spend two days with Wollongong-based dramaturge Anne-Louise Rentell. Together we talked about big ideas and then we tore the draft into small pieces and started putting it back together.
Not all the words are coming together yet, but here are a few:
A boat, I see
an empty boat blown by the wind
to the shore
of a lake filled to the brim
with life-giving water
that’s no more, like three boys
They drowned, they said,
and I believed them
Is the script in a better shape now? Yes. What’s the next step? Who knows. But I do love being in the creative space, both physically and mentally.
Thanks again to Create NSW for the opportunity, The Street Theatre for hosting these preliminary creative-development sessions, Anne-Louise Rentell for pushing me into some uncomfortable terrain (almost literally), David Sharpe for joining the dots, and Paul Scott-Williams from the Hume Conservatorium, who, by commissioning me all those years ago to write the libretto for what became THE WEIGHT OF LIGHT, sent me in this exciting direction.
Perhaps if humanity survives long enough there might be a new work on the stage before long?
Quite honestly, who knows.
Who knows.
There has been a bit going on this year in my neck of the woods: seeing The Weight of Light have its world premiere in Canberra and then performed in Goulburn and Sydney (plus two other music projects but more on these at a later date) and a final spit and polish of Bodies of Men before it heads into the world in April/May 2019. As always, reading has been the foundation. Stillness and immersion and revelation and depth: there will never be anything like it.
The following is not really a ‘best of’; it’s just a list of work that I have read that has got beneath my skin.
In Terra Nullius, Claire G. Coleman, a writer from Western Australia who identifies with the South Coast Noongar people, reveals the horrors and hypocrisies that underpin contemporary Australia. In a way, perhaps, the novel is speculative fiction, but the scenario is far too present to be ignored, as are the uncomfortable truths it reveals. This is one of the most unique novels I have read in years.
Speaking of unique, a work that I almost literally gobbled up is The Long Take by Robin Robertson. A verse novel, the narrative follows a D-Day veteran as he travels across the US so he can piece his life together. Rather surprisingly The Long Take is as much about urban planning and design as it is about war; there are also evocations of Hollywood. Disintegration appears to be the unifying theme, but this is not a grim read, nor is it inaccessible. Truly remarkable.
With her trademark lyricism, Robyn Cadwallader in Book of Colours brings to life the people and politics behind the making of a fourteenth-century prayer book; the novel is also about the making of art in general. It is fascinating – and highly moving – from first page to last. A beautiful novel in every way.
Also beautiful is Inga Simpson’s Understory, which is a chronicle of the author’s profound attachment to a small patch of Queensland forest. This is much more than a tree-change memoir: it is also about the desire to live a creative life and the need to find and survive love. Very moving.
Two poetry collections especially resonated: Melinda Smith’s Goodbye, Cruel and Kumukanda by Kayo Chingonyi. In the former, Smith once again displays her extraordinary range, moving seemingly effortlessly from the dramatic to the deep historic. In the latter, Chingonyi investigates music, masculinity and racism, in a tone that reads to me as muscular melancholia – it is wonderful. Both collections I have read more than once.
As others have said, Andrew Sean Greer’s Less is a surprisingly light read for a Pulitzer Prize-winner. It is a warm and accessible read, but it is ultimately a deeply yearning hymn to modern love in a global world. Although often hilarious, Less is also a broken-hearted novel and deserves to be read until the end for its full impact to be experienced.
A second heartbreaking novel from this year, though it is also brain- and soul-breaking, is Taboo by Kim Scott. Another writer of Noongar decent, Scott has created a deeply affecting story about race relations in Australia. In spare but lyrical – at times literally magical – prose, Scott writes about the layers of this country’s history that are far too often glossed over to tell a more appealing but largely false narrative. Taboo is powerful and very necessary.
I also thoroughly enjoyed The Life to Come by Michelle de Kretser and, though it took me a long time (years) to get to it, The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers, as well as On Patriotism by Paul Daley and No Country Woman: A memoir of not belonging by Zoya Patel.
Much of this year was dedicated to reading gay fiction, which I wrote about for Meanjin. I also loved All Being Equal from Griffith Review, because it includes a suite of novellas that explore the contemporary gay experience, and because the stories are deeply moving.
Finally, I was lucky enough to read advance copies of two wonderfully adventurous novels that will be released in 2019: The Artist’s Portrait by Julie Keys, which in a memorably unflinching voice reveals the complex and often fraught nature of creative identity; and Karen Viggers’ The Orchardist’s Daughter – told in the author’s typically unaffected prose, the novel explores the web of relationships and competing viewpoints that exist in and around a Tasmanian forest. Here’s hoping both novels will be much discussed and find a broad audience.
Paul Scott-Williams (Goulburn Regional Conservatorium), Caroline Stacey (The Street Theatre, Canberra), and your old mate – 13 November 2018
It was wonderful to zip down the Hume Highway earlier this week to see THE WEIGHT OF LIGHT pick up a 2018 Canberra Critics Circle Award.
Congratulations to all involved in our song cycle: Paul Scott-Williams at the Goulburn Regional Conservatorium, which commissioned the work; Caroline Stacey at The Street Theatre for the powerful direction and so much more; James Humberstone for the extraordinary score; and exemplary performers Michael Lampard and Alan Hicks.
Big thanks to Katy Mutton for the exquisitely evocative art work (as commissioned by The Street Theatre) that was used to market the work.
Last but by no means least, thank you to everyone who came to one of the shows – there is nothing like an audience, and an audience’s response.
Might this be the official end of this project? Hard to tell. But perhaps it might be nice to leave with the words to the last song in the cycle:
FROM HERE
From here
I mend
From here
there is a bend
in the river
From here
there will be
the sea-hawk and the shore
and the red-belly black snake
in the rocks
so stand with me
stand with me now
From here
we mend
From here
we mend
From here
we mend
together
Composer James Humberstone (left), baritone Michael Lampard (right) and myself post-show. Image credit: Anne Casey
Oh, massive thanks to all those who came out to see THE WEIGHT OF LIGHT in Sydney last week – it’s hugely appreciated and I’m most grateful. Thanks also to those who have been saying nice things and sending me messages. It means the world to me.
Really.
As mentioned in previous Homesong diary entries, it’s a nerve-wracking experience writing for the stage, partly because it’s so exposing – for all concerned, no doubt – and partly because it’s hard to know how an audience will respond. Indeed, in the weeks before a show, there’s a lot of worrying about whether or not people will come along at all. So, another thank you: to those who helped spread the word through social media or email – every effort was valuable and valued.
In the lead up to the Sydney shows, James wrote a wonderfully illuminating piece for Limelight Magazine about how he approached composing the music.
In the end we had good audiences, in terms of numbers and responses. We had some terrifically lively foyer conversations afterwards, and longer chats over beer and wine!
Some kind and generous folk put notes up on social media. This, from award-winning Australian poet Anne Casey, was especially appreciated:
THE WEIGHT OF LIGHT is spellbinding, spine-tingling, heartbreaking and gloriously uplifting. Extraordinary performance by operatic baritone Michael Lampard and pianist Alan Hicks. This was a stunningly moving, beautiful, haunting and inventive production from the very first breath to the last.
What happens from here?
Another rest. There’s talk of the show heading into regional NSW, which, after all, was the original intention of the Goulburn Regional Conservatorium who commissioned the work; there’s also the possibility of a run in Melbourne, perhaps next year.
Personally, I’m looking forward to preparing for (i.e. worrying about) my novel BODIES OF MEN, which is forthcoming from Hachette Australia in 2019.
Thanks again for all the interest and support.
It’s gold. And it’s a balm.
Michael Lampard performing as The Soldier and accompanist Alan Hicks at the Canberra premiere in March 2018, The Street Theatre (Image credit: Shelly Higgs/The Street Theatre)
Book launches make me want to vomit.
My own book launches.
Of course, it is wonderful to have a crowd of people help celebrate your new book, but it’s also stressful. Will the speakers be entertaining? Will I make a fool of myself? Yes, launches make me feel sick; or, at the least, make me want to head for the hills.
Which is why, at the world premiere of The Weight of Light, a song cycle, in Canberra earlier this year, it was surprising to feel positively calm in the foyer before the performance: I drank mineral water, I chatted, I gave and received embraces, and all the while I was relaxed and happy. But then – but then! – the bells rang and the audience entered the theatre and as the lights went down I could feel my heart making bone-shaking explosions. How was the audience going to respond? Was the work inherently problematic? And why had I been so naïve to think I could produce a text to be sung?
Boom! went the thing in my chest…
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Keep reading at ArtsHub, which published this piece on 23 July 2018. Thanks to Richard Watts.
Composer James Humberstone during the creative development sessions at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, December 2017. (Image: Ryley Gillen)
When I first met James Humberstone, over dinner in 2015, he looked like a guitarist in Radiohead: joggers, funky trousers, coloured T-shirt, and a cardigan that looked like something a soccer player would wear in the garden. With his English accent (he was born in London and migrated to Australia in 1997) and a brain full of opinions, which range from veganism to marriage equality, James is terrific company. In terms of music, I remember us that night chatting about Malcolm Williamson, the Australian composer who was also the Master of the Queen’s Music from 1975 until his death in 2003, but also the stratospheric English rock band Muse. James has an irreverent sense of humour, with political conservatives coming off second best.
With the Sydney shows for THE WEIGHT OF LIGHT just around the corner – Friday 27 July, to be precise – James and I had a chat about our influences, and, after all these years, what we think is at the core of our song cycle.
NIGEL
In terms of music, who inspires you?
JAMES
Howard Skempton (image credit: Clive Barda)
The biggest influence on my own composition has been Howard Skempton, the English post-experimental composer. I remember the first time I heard his Lento, at the age of 16, I was struck by a music that was timeless in more than one way. Timeless because it was obviously new, but seemed ancient, too. And timeless because structurally it felt like the piece didn’t go from A to B to C, but instead just occupied the time for which it lasted.
At university I was able to find more of his music, and loved it equally. I wrote my undergraduate thesis on Howard’s music over 20 years ago and was lucky enough to study with him privately for a short time before migrating to Australia.
In Australia, the biggest influence on me has been Anne Boyd, who was my supervisor during my Masters in composition, but also influenced me through the study of her own work, as I engraved it as she wrote it over a few years, and as a friend. I knew I wanted to be an academic-composer early on, but it was Anne who made me sure of it.
Of course, I’m inspired by many other composers and performers. In the last decade I’ve drawn on so many of J S Bach’s ideas, which are still so radical even today. I think Beethoven was probably the greatest composer to live, and don’t ever try to emulate him. As a young teenage composer I was inspired by Prokofiev, Stravinsky, Shostakovich and Britten, and still often revisit their scores to see how they achieved the amazing sounds that they did, especially orchestrally. While I’d describe myself as a (post-)experimentalist (though if Cage didn’t like that label, why would I?), I’m one of the few who loves the music of both minimalists and the serialists/complexists. In fact, there isn’t much music that I don’t like, although to me the stuff that’s truly inspiring is the music you don’t ‘get’ the first time and hear new things in every time you listen.
I’ve listed traditional western art music composers there, but I must also say that last qualification applies to all of the genres I listen to. The greats include Radiohead and Björk, but there are many writing such interesting music in all fields now – I’m listening to hip-hop, punk and EDM just as much as I am to any art music composer. It’s a feast.
What about your musical inspirations?
NIGEL
My musical life started with Kate Bush and The Cure and has progressed (maybe?) from there. Bands that continue to resonate are The Smiths, Sonic Youth, My Bloody Valentine, Red House Painters, Frightened Rabbit, and The Go! Team, as well as artists such as Nina Simone, PJ Harvey, Peaches, and DJ Shadow. I went through a huge dance-music stage – series by Global Underground and Renaissance – and I still enjoy the more intricate side of that kind of music e.g. Burial, Kiasmos, and Jon Hopkins. After getting into some wonderful post-rock – primarily Sigur Ros, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, and Explosions in the Sky – I’ve been immersing myself in more minimal music; I’ve always loved Philip Glass, Michael Nyman, and Arvo Pärt, but more recently I’ve been listening to Dustin O’Halloran, Jóhann Jóhannsson (rest his soul), and Max Richter – I love his re-scoring of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons as well as Three Worlds, his score for a ballet based on the novels of Virginia Woolf. Nils Frahm’s All Melody is that newest album that I adore, as well as Singularity by Jon Hopkins.
I could go on…
Tell me about the literature that has interested you?
JAMES
I’m a complete lightweight, but not because I want to be. I have a job that involves reading thousands of words every day, and while I do find reading for research extremely pleasurable (I won’t say the same for marking university assignments, but they are an essential part of the education process, so I try not to complain), I have little energy left for reading for pleasure, so tend to read page-turners.
Margaret Atwood
Rather like my choice of films and TV series, my tired brain enjoys science fiction as Philip K Dick described it (anything where reality has changed a little bit – not necessarily with spaceships and laser guns!). I’m a huge Phillip Pullman fan, and really want his permission to create an opera trilogy of the Dark Materials books (I’ve asked; his agent says no), just reread Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale after the excellent new TV adaptation, and have been enjoying reading Tolkien and Rowling to my kids.
That may not sound very inspiring for a composer, but I should point out that when one works with words, as I have in my two largest recent projects, The Weight of Light and Odysseus: Live, I’m constantly inspired by the texts that I’m setting. One begins with the words, their emotion, their structure, their intent, the narrative, and everything is planned around that. I’ve been incredibly lucky to work with some amazing writers, and have never had to set a ‘dud’ text yet. I imagine that it would result in a piece of music that wasn’t much cop, either.
Over to you: what’s the literature that inspires?
NIGEL
I love the Russans, especially Chekhov and Tolstoy. More often than not I’m stunned by JM Coetzee. Brokeback Mountain by Annie Proulx is one of the most extraordinary pieces of literature I know, as is Holding the Man by Timothy Conigrave. Tim Winton’s Cloudstreet and The Riders were an early influence, and I’ve also found much inspiration in Helen Garner, as well as Patrick White and Randolph Stow. Of course, there’s Hemingway – what a perfect piece of writing is The Old Man in the Sea. Other authors who regularly inspire are Aminatta Forna, Kazuo Ishiguro, Colm Tóibín, Evelyn Waugh, Michelle de Kretser, Alan Hollinghurst, Anne Enright, Evelyn Waugh, Christos Tsiolkas, and EM Forster. In terms of poetry, for me it’s Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, ee cumings, Philip Larkin, and Dorothy Porter. Recent novels that knocked me for a six: Solar Bones by Mike McCormack and Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders, both of which are thrillingly, bravely experimental – but with heart.
To finish, in terms of THE WEIGHT OF LIGHT I’ve been thinking that, at its core, the work is about the pressure nations put on individuals to do near impossible things, but the unpredictable chances we get to heal and make new.
What do you think the work is about at its core?
JAMES
Humanity, or the human spirit if you prefer, pulling us through.
Whether we live in Australia, where most of us live in the top levels of wealth in the whole world, or in poor countries where the majority struggle to survive, or in war zones, where it might not matter how wealthy or poor you are, but whether you can save your life and the lives of your family — we all have stories of adversity that we have survived. Most adults have lost someone very close to them. Many of us, even in this country, have struggled with questions of our identity or against forces and misassumptions out of our control. Perhaps just thinking back on those things is enough to make us cry, or break down again.
Yet most of us get up. And get on. And when we see someone who can’t, or at least not yet, we help them. Or, at least, the best of us do.
In THE WEIGHT OF LIGHT a series of devastating events shake our soldier to the core, all over one short weekend. He is down, he is down again, he is hurt, hurt, hurt, and breaking. Yet he gets up. We endure and express so much pain, but we get up. And when we can’t, we ‘cry out for help’, and hopefully our family and our friends are there for us. I hope in this Trumpian, post-Brexit, keep-out-the-boat-people time that we live in, that the tide might change, soon, as we remember our humanity and find a little more compassion and love for those around us – or far away – who are hurting.
Michael Lampard as The Soldier, at the world premiere of THE WEIGHT OF LIGHT, Canberra, The Street Theatre, Canberra, 2018. (Image credit: Shelly Higgs)
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THE WEIGHT OF LIGHT: Friday 27 July 2018, 1pm and 7.30pm. Venue: Music Workshop, Sydney Conservatorium of Music. Featuring Michael Lampard as The Soldier. Pianist: Alan Hicks. Direction: Caroline Stacey. Tickets ($25/$15) available here.
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THE WEIGHT OF LIGHT was commissioned by the Goulburn Regional Conservatorium and developed by The Street Theatre in Canberra.
One minute, so it seems, I’m a moody youth meeting friends on the steps of the Sydney Town Hall before heading to various record shops to buy new albums from The Cure, The Clash, and The Smiths. The next (i.e. 35 years later), THE WEIGHT OF LIGHT, the song cycle I’ve written with James Humberstone, is about to be performed at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music.
YIKES.
Sydney is the place of my birth, childhood, and teenage years. I left at the age of 18 to have independent adventures, first in Canberra and then Perth; there was some time spent travelling overseas, and then another stint in Canberra; before, in 2010, I headed into the wilds of regional New South Wales. It’s all been wonderful (well, it’s all been an experience!), and throughout has been reading, writing, and music.
There have been two other constants, if I’m entirely honest: a quest for love; and a never-ending questioning of what it means to be a man.
Now I think about it, there’s been something else: an ongoing concern about Australia, this apparently happy, lucky country, this country with a conflicted, complicated soul, this country which has done terrible things both at home and abroad to achieve its aims, and continues to do terrible things.
THE WEIGHT OF LIGHT brings all these themes together. No wonder composer James Humberstone, when he first read the libretto, said, ‘Woah, this is intense.’
And he’s right.
Though there’s no point making art about big issues such as love and war if there isn’t a sense of hope, if we can’t heal from this. There’s definitely hope in THE WEIGHT OF LIGHT. Beauty even.
But best I don’t go on. All I really wanted to say is that if you’re in Sydney on Friday 27 July, it’d be terrific to see you at one of the two performances. Baritone Michael Lampard is extraordinary as The Soldier, and accompanist Alan Hicks is an orchestra with ten fingers.
Tickets ($25/$15) are available here. A brief, teaser video can be found here.
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THE WEIGHT OF LIGHT was commissioned by the Goulburn Regional Conservatorium and developed by The Street Theatre in Canberra.
A short diary entry today.
What’s been happening with THE WEIGHT OF LIGHT? Quite honestly, the creative team has been taking a bit of a break; well, from this project anyway. Not for any reason other than we spent four years working on this song cycle, and getting it ready for the stage was an extraordinary build-up of months and weeks and days and hours and minutes, and then to experience the audience reaction and read the reviews – it was exhilarating, but also exhausting. And utterly wonderful.
A central online place for THE WEIGHT OF LIGHT
Only two real developments.
Firstly, thanks to the technical wizardry of James Humberstone, who not only creates such beautiful and haunting music can build websites, we now have an online depository for THE WEIGHT OF LIGHT.
Secondly the next performance is confirmed, which should read performances, both on Friday 27 July, at 1pm and 7.30pm, at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. We’re thrilled that the performers will be the same: baritone Michael Lampard as ‘the soldier’ with Alan Hicks as accompanist.
If you happen to be in or near Sydney on 27 July, it’d be terrific to see you.
Under the counter or a flutter in the dovecote 