Sonate en forme de cri

by lylechan on October 7, 2023

Brisbane Music Festival and its artistic director Alex Raineri give the world premiere of my first piano sonata on Sunday 10 December 2023. I’m so grateful to Alex for commissioning it and Creative Australia for supporting the commission and performance. Tickets and concert information are here.

This Piano Sonata is the climax and finale of a multi-movement, multi-forces work called Gravity and Levity on the Sunbreathing Earth. This is the title I’ve given to everything I wrote while the Covid-19 pandemic lasted. It is a procession of music for solo piano, choir, symphony orchestra, saxophone quartet and harp and back to solo piano. The forces and their sections never touch each other, but are quarantined, isolated, yet strung by a tension – a desire – to be together. 

As I’ve written elsewhere on this site, whatever else it has shown, Covid has also shown humanity at its best. We can make proven vaccines in less than a year. It thrills me, and sobers me too because now I know that the last viral crisis that I lived and worked through, the AIDS epidemic, could have been solved this way but wasn’t – 13 vaccines in the first year alone, versus no vaccine at all after 40 years. I was a virologist before I became a musician. I was employed in a virology laboratory performing genomic sequencing during that previous pandemic. I daresay my music must be amongst the very few Covid-era works written by a practicing composer who was also a practicing virologist. 

Most of the sections of Gravity and Levity on the Sunbreathing Earth were written in those bleak days, pre-vaccines. And what I wrote was about memory. Like Ray Bradbury’s rebels memorizing books that were being burned, Gravity and Levity is a commitment to remember music. Not just original music I wrote, but whatever came my way as I was writing it – hymns, bugle tunes, hay-making songs, sonatas. And also original music I accidentally wrote, on account of misremembering. Isn’t that how originality works? You try to reproduce something, but you make mistakes, the reproduction is imperfect, and if it’s imperfect enough, it’s original. Isn’t that how viruses work: it reproduces but the reproductions have imperfections, but if the imperfections are viable, you get a new strain. 

From my experience of the AIDS pandemic I know that a pandemic ends at different times for everyone. To a degree, it is a choice because, at some point after the crisis’ peak, either you decide to let your experience of the pandemic persist, or you decide you are finished with it. At the end of 2021, I decided to write this sonata to mark the break, to hearten from dishearten. 

One of the works this sonata remembers is the Concord Sonata by Charles Ives, who thankfully recovered after infection during the influenza epidemic of 1918-19, the last time the whole world stopped for a virus. 

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Written for 17 instruments, A Walk In The Paradise Garden was commissioned by Artology for its To Country program, which encourages using musical works, with or without words, to acknowledge the Indigenous heritage of Australia. The intention is for these very brief works to be played at the start of a concert as Acknowledgements of Country. This fantastic recording was made by the Australian Youth Orchestra and conductor Thaddeus Huang. Cover image: detail from Séraphine de Senlis, L’arbre du paradis. My gratitude to all.

The music suggests a slow, wafting warmth, thick with the intoxicating ambrosia of earth, plant, sea, a piquancy of airborne fauna, a tanginess of earthbound fauna – suffused by species, the dappled sunlight falls on a figure, half-seen through foliage, walking, giddy in it all.Paradise. I love the multitudinous in the word, that its origin is Persian, that Fraser Island is now K’gari, the Butchulla word, that the Miltonian connotations of loss and the Delian connotations of a village inn all make up the meaning of Paradise. We get the paradise we deserve. This music ultimately pays tribute to the Indigenous Australian management of land and sea estates developed over millennia and recognizes that whatever the solution is to our climate condition, there is no solution that does not incorporate the wisdom of the oldest people on earth.

A Walk In The Paradise Garden was gratefully written in Woolloomoolooo Bay on the land of the Gadigal people. Its layers of the diatonic, pentatonic and dodecatonic are foreign to one another, but here harmonious, a metaphor for things belonging together that don’t start off belonging together. Every time it is performed, the music acknowledges the Indigenous people of the land where the performance takes place, including those outside of Australia where such people permit and welcome it. May they all be Paradises Regained. At the time of writing, geneticists have embarked on a startling journey to de-extinct the thylacine. A making up for the past. We get – we regain – the paradises we deserve.

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The Grave and the Light (from Gravity and Levity on the Sunbreathing Earth)

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Lyle Chan · Gravity and Levity on the Sunbreathing Earth (for orchestra) Update, March 2022: The Sydney Symphony Orchestra and conductor Umberto Clerici have made a marvellous studio recording that will be released soon. Meanwhile, you can hear it using SoundCloud above. On 25 and 26 February 2021, Sydney Symphony Orchestra and conductor Dane Lam […]

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