BY CUTCOMMON
Jenny Duck-Chong and Elliott Gyger first met at university.
Jenny would go on to forge an impressive career as a mezzo-soprano, mentor, and artistic director of Halcyon, an Australian arts initiative that brings vocal chamber music to the fore. Elliott (pictured above) would become a leader in Australian composition, and share his knowledge as a conductor, writer, and educator with a passion for new music. But the two artists made a conscious effort to ensure their paths would cross, and for decades some of their best work has come from collaboration.
This December, Halcyon will present the world premiere of Elliott’s Paul Lowin Song Cycle Prize-winning composition Autobiochemistry. It’s the seventh piece Elliott has composed for Halcyon. It’s also his fourth work to make it to the Paul Lowin prize shortlist, and the second to win.
Jenny and Elliott chat with CutCommon about the value of maintaining connections over the course of an arts career, and how their latest project Autobiochemistry is coming together ahead of the 8 December performance.
This upcoming premiere will be the seventh Elliott Gyger composition for Halcyon; four of those pieces were shortlisted for the Paul Lowin Song Cycle Prize, and two have won! Why do you feel this has been such a hugely successful collaborative relationship?
ELLIOTT: I think the core of our collaboration is our shared fascination with words, and delight in the ways that music can illuminate them.
In addition to our collaborations on new works, we’ve also worked together on the First Stones program for young composers, where our shared vision of what it means to set text came through loud and clear, from complementary performer and composer viewpoints. It’s very gratifying to have had that recognised several times by the Paul Lowin judges – although I’d note that Halcyon’s success there extends to works by numerous other composers as well!
JENNY: We have also known each other for a very long time. Working together over many years means we have had time to get to know and understand the strengths, idiosyncrasies, and capacities of each other’s work. And each new piece builds upon this knowledge.
Composers and performers have been sparking each other in this way for centuries – and collaborations between all manner of artist often provide particular focus in the creation of new work – but the Lowin Prize is a wonderful acknowledgement.
I always wanted to become a ‘muse’ to composers and influence their compositional outcomes. After seven personalised pieces, I think I may have achieved my aim! But more importantly, I feel an equal in our collaborations, and that is a gift for a performer.
You’ve worked together for several decades, having first met at university. How would you describe the bonds that are formed between music students, and how important it is to nurture those early relationships over the course of one’s career in the music industry?
J: I can’t speak for anyone else, but I will say that the relationships made at university can be extremely important, with fellow students but also with tutors and teachers. Learning from each other is a lifelong skill. We really never quite know what our future will bring – artistic careers are rarely linear trajectories! A conversation could turn into a job, an idea into a commission, a ‘one day’ piece will find its place in a program.
Building connections has always been at the heart of Halcyon, too – between the hundreds of players we have worked with in the ensemble, with academic institutions, with libraries, publishers, and with composers as well as artists in other fields. We are far richer for these interactions, and they can help to shape our own paths.
What are some of the lessons you have learnt in working together over this time, each having grown personally and professionally but always brought back to each other through music?
E: The music I wrote in my 20s and early 30s was divided between complex and demanding instrumental pieces on the one hand, and choral pieces — most written for amateur singers — in a much more straightforward idiom on the other.
In my first work for Halcyon, From the hungry waiting country (2006), with Halcyon’s highly skilled singers to write for, I was able to integrate these two halves of my output, and write music which treated voices and instruments on a much more equal footing. This piece also rekindled my interest in Australian texts and subject matter, at the end of a decade living overseas. In both respects, it paved the way for many subsequent projects, from small-scale vocal chamber music to opera.
The other key thing I’ve learnt is how much easier it is to write for singers I know well – none more so than Jenny, whose voice I can imagine singing every line I write for her as I compose it. At this point, that has become a crucial factor in how I choose texts and shape ideas.
J: One lesson for me is that getting to know a composer’s language comes with delving deeper. Score reading is at the heart of our musical training, and I have made a close study of hundreds, if not thousands, of different scores in my life. But when you spend time assimilating all the tiny details in the score of one composer, it does two things: it helps you to better take this practice into every score you approach, and it helps you refine your understanding of the particular. I now can ‘read’ Elliott’s compositional language clearly. As I see his work on the page, I am confident I know what his intent is; what each articulation or dynamic is doing to shape the way I deliver the words. And because it is clear to me, I am prepared to invest the time it takes to execute it and make it my own.
So tell us a bit about Autobiochemistry. The work has 13 movements, and each is named after a chemical element. How do these elements inspire sound?
E: The real inspiration here is not so much the elements themselves, but Tricia Dearborn’s marvellous poems, which take each element as a springboard into human experience, whether general or particular.
Elements such as hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, and iron have key biochemical functions, made personal and relatable in such forms as tears, alcohol, breath, and blood. Others enter our daily lives via technology: silicon in a computer chip, silver in photography, tungsten in a light bulb filament, iridium in a fountain pen nib. Still others become metaphors for aspects of human nature: the violent reactiveness of sodium, the incorruptibility of gold.
Every poem creates its own miniature intimate world, which is a joy to respond to in musical terms. It was this intimate quality that led me to choose them for a project with just one voice and one instrument –the cello.
How do you feel this music bridges the fields of art and science?
E: Tricia’s words aptly and accurately capture the poetry of science – the wonder evoked by the sheer strangeness of the world. She also succeeds in making poetry out of routine laboratory work: in measuring out samples (in Calcium) or cataloguing types of reactions (in Lead), opportunities for personal reflection and growth.
I decided to have the music emulate each element directly by using its electron shell structure to organise pitch material…Oxygen’s eight electrons are arranged in two shells of two and six electrons; the cello begins by oscillating between two notes, later expanding to a six-note collection before returning to the original two notes at the end.
…Important for the music’s response to the science in the poetry is its exploration of sonic and gestural metaphors. The unique role of carbon in the chemistry of life is celebrated in a patterned cello pizzicato dance, imitating the permutation of four basic components in a strand of DNA. Sodium’s volatility inspired the most virtuosic and extroverted song in the cycle, with extravagant vocal melismas alongside sparkling cello tremolos and harmonics. Silver, in which a photograph triggers a reflection on the elusive and unreliable qualities of memory, is set over a not-quite-exactly repeated cello bass line.
J: Interestingly, the topic appealed to me not only because of the wonderful texts of Tricia Dearborn, but also because my mother was a biochemist and those images of scientific precision rang in my memory, too. So for me it was also a serendipitous intersection of life and art that gives me an even stronger connection to the work.
Alongside this world premiere, the program features an Australian premiere — The Tongue and the Heart from 2008. What moved you so much that you decided to bring this work to local audiences for the first time?
J: Nicola LeFanu is an eminent United Kingdom composer whose work I have known for some time. It’s one of those relationships I was talking about. We met quite a number of years ago in Sydney when she was here promoting the work of her husband, composer David Lumsdaine. We worked out we had a number of common acquaintances, including composers that she had taught at York University and that I had performed.
Later I met up with her in the UK. This is when I was first introduced to The Tongue and the Heart as we were looking through scores together. I liked the brevity and universality of the poetry, but though it interested me immediately I knew it would have to wait until I might have a soprano and a cello to hand, as Halcyon’s line-up changes to suit the project with no fixed players apart from myself.
There is an elegance to her vocal writing and a clarity of line and idea that I am drawn to. I performed her Songs for Jane in 2020, and we had earlier performed a short vocal trio, but this will be the most substantial piece Halcyon will have presented. The ensemble was perfect for this program, and a short song cycle on lyrics by the same poet seemed to share resonance with Elliott’s more lengthy work.
I love sharing the rare works we find by international composers alongside newly written Australian material. It gives us a chance to see work written here in a new light as we reflect on the similarities and difference of experience and expression. And it gives Australian audiences a chance to hear something that they will probably not just stumble upon for themselves. Years of trawling websites, catalogues, and libraries have turned up some extraordinary works, only a fraction of which ever make it into a program.
You also premiered Madeleine Isaksson’s work Blad över blad in 2019, and you’ll perform it again this December. Why are you revisiting it so soon, and what are the qualities you love in this piece?
J: This is another story of serendipity. After travelling to Scandinavia, I found Madeleine’s work via her own website where she shared scores of some of her works. When I saw this piece – for two voices and cello – I was intrigued. When I decided to program it in 2019, I contacted her to discover that, though it was composed in 2000, it had never been performed. It was a piece she had composed purely for herself. So through this chance discovery we gave the world premiere almost 20 years after it was conceived. It was not a piece written especially for us, and yet it felt as though it could have been.
In Blad över blad/Feuille sur feuille, the two voices often work as textural elements with the cello having the most distinctive and florid ‘voice’ of the three. We are all scored in a very similar range with shifting dynamics so that different parts come to the fore and recede incrementally, creating a continually shifting soundscape. The bilingual texts created by the composer, who was born in Sweden but lives in France, are superimposed on each other and the voices move between them in long sustained lines. Text is less immediately intelligible, the interplay of sound and colour is more fundamental.
As a singer, being so closely entwined with both another voice and an instrument is one of the experiences that led me to specialise in this repertoire. Every line is independent, and yet the high technical accomplishment needed to bring off the interplay of parts and the tension that comes when pitches ‘rub against’ each other takes great precision, nerve, and a really good ear. But the end result is a work of great subtlety.
We also had such positive responses to the first performance that we wanted to give the audience another opportunity to hear this delicate work.
Before we go, how do you hope Autobiochemistry will further benefit your relationship together, after so much collaboration?
J: We have both benefited from a long friendship and working partnership, which has helped equip composers in their vocal writing and has produced works that have been deemed excellent, have brought much satisfaction to us both in their creation and to audiences in performance and recording, and which have helped shape our musical lives. That seems like plenty to have achieved together! But who knows what might come next?
E: At the same time, the wonderful thing about a creative partnership of this kind is that every piece is different, with new collaborators and fresh nuances. The premiere of Autobiochemistry brings together two performers familiar to me but who have never collaborated before – Jenny and Melbourne cellist Rosanne Hunt – as well as poet Tricia Dearborn, new to all of us. Every project is like a new intersection point in an ever-widening network of connections.
See Halcyon artistic director and mezzo-soprano Jenny Duck-Chong perform with soprano Jane Sheldon and Rosanne Hunt in Autobiochemistry, 7pm December 8 in Summer Hill Church. The program includes the world premiere of Elliott Gyger’s Autobiochemistry and the Australian premiere of Nicola LeFanu’s The Tongue and the Heart, along with Madeleine Isaksson’s Blad över blad.
Images supplied. Featured image and Jenny at First Stones captured by Liz Duck-Chong; headshot above by Michael Chetham.
