The Perfumed Calyx

by lylechan on February 9, 2024

On Australia Day 2024, my dear friends Michael Duke and David Howie (collective HD Duo) released their latest recording, an all-Australian album for soprano saxophone and piano. In addition to works of composers like the late Peter Sculthorpe, it includes two new works commissioned especially for this album including, I’m thrilled to say, mine. You can listen to their spectacular performance via a streaming link of your choice: Spotify YouTube Music Amazon Music Apple Music.

The Perfumed Calyx was commissioned by HD Duo specifically for this album. Initially the album was a wide mix of Michael and David’s favorite repertoire, including their transcription of Ravel’s Sonatine. As the album’s concept focused, the repertoire became entirely Australian and the Sonatine had to be omitted, so I decided to write a work to take its emotional and psychological space, a work at least in part a reflection on Ravel and his music (literally so in some passages).

Ravel was already on my mind. During the covid lockdowns I read a lot of French poetry, beginning with Apollinaire who died of the 1918 influenza and invented the word surreal. I read all of Aloysius Bertrand’s phantasmagorical Gaspard de la nuit, which had established the prose poem as a genre and inspired one of Ravel’s greatest works. Its imaginative weirdness was just right to transport someone stuck at home. Gaspard tells the night that the world is like a perfumed calyx with stamen for moon and pistils for stars. I was struck by this botanic depiction of the earth that didn’t make sense, but Bertrand’s poetry didn’t make sense and neither did the world during covid. Yet Bertrand’s poetry appeals to the senses rather than makes sense, and I wanted to do the same. There are detonations in the piece. There is a cry. Frustrations that come from forgetting to remember what’s true – that the world is a joy. But all it takes is one candle to extinguish the darkness, wiser minds tell us. And so the music is also full of beauty, sensuality, melody, propagating and flourishing despite it all. Maybe Bertrand makes sense after all. Maybe the world is like a flower, something beautiful that reproduces.

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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.

Update, 23 March 2024: the following is a video of the world premiere, in which Jonathan Henderson (flute) and Nicole Greentree (viola) join Alex and give this simply superlative performance.

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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A Walk In The Paradise Garden (Acknowledgment of Country)

October 19, 2022

A Walk In The Paradise Garden by Lyle Chan 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 […]

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

January 22, 2021

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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Automne, malade (“Autumn, sick”) from Gravity and Levity on the Sunbreathng Earth

March 25, 2020

Photo: aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt (CVN 71). Offical U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Anthony J. Rivera. Update, January 2021: More than a year after it was written, Automne malade will be premiered with two performances at the Canberra International Music Festival in May. My deep gratitude to Roland Peelman, festival […]

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Sydney Symphony Orchestra – 50 Fanfares

February 21, 2020

Update, April 2020: Due to Covid-19, the performances in August by Sydney Symphony Orchestra of this work have been cancelled and a new set of dates will be announced as soon as possible. I am so thrilled and humbled to be one of the 50 composers commissioned by Sydney Symphony Orchestra in its ambitious 50 […]

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Pantun (for piano and dancer)

October 26, 2019

Commissioned by Brisbane Music Festival for its program bloodpaths. Friday 29th November, & Sunday 1st December, Alex Raineri (piano) and Katina Olsen (dancer). Born in Malaysia, I am yet somehow more literate in things French than Malay. I adore the exquisite pantoums made by Maurice Ravel and Charles Baudelaire – but I also know a third world poetic […]

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Lasseter’s Diary

August 1, 2019

At Extended Play 2019, The Australian Voices will perform “Poisoned Today”, an excerpt from a major work they’re commissioning from me. In 2005-6, the State Library of NSW exhibited the last diary of enigmatic prospector Harold Lasseter, who infamously died trying to re-locate a gold reef he believed he once found in the Central Australian […]

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Virelai (2019) for String Quartet

July 1, 2019

Every year, I give a new piece to my dear friends the Acacia Quartet, and I am always moved by their playing of it, and how they surprise me in finding things I didn’t know were there. This year, I wanted them to have something unlike the complex pieces I usually give them. This time, […]

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Carnival of the Chinese Animals

February 11, 2019

During this Lunar New Year season, the fantastic Southern Cross Soloists will premiere my quirky new work Carnival of the Chinese Animals See event details here or in my calendar. This 20-min piece for narrator and large chamber ensemble was commissioned by the venerable Southern Cross Soloists for their opening concerts in this, their 24th year. The […]

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