When composer and choreographer meet for the first time

BY STEPHANIE ESLAKE

A composer may be familiar with her own musical language. But what happens when you throw a choreographer into the mix, and have to write music that communicates more than sound alone?

This is the challenge that Claire Farrell has just overcome. For the first time, this emerging Tasmanian composer met up with a choreographer to create a new 20-minute, five-movement work for dance.

The theme was lithium, which became the name of the piece. But rather than freely interpreting this element in her own way, Claire worked closely with choreographer Jaala Jensen from DRILL to generate a work that would complement the human body’s movement in dance.

The Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra has teamed up with local youth dance company DRILL to generate this new music and dance project NEON, which also involves budding young composers Jonathan Dieckfoss and Rhys Gray (who got the chance to compose pieces about two more chemical elements).

Claire chats about how she was assigned two inspirations for her music: the element lithium, and the talented collaborative partner Jaala Jensen.

So what’s NEON all about, and how does your theme of lithium fit into the big picture?

NEON is the name of DRILL’s 2019 major season, which aims to explore the chemical elements of our universe through the relationships between dance, music, and science. Lithium was chosen by the choreographers as one of the three elements that would be represented in NEON, with the other two being carbon and krypton.

As stated on DRILL’s website, ‘NEON will be a free-roaming experience, with audiences given the choice of how to watch and listen to the three works, which are performed simultaneously on loop’. For me, this meant that my piece, titled Lithium, had to fit into this unique performance format. It will be heard through headphones while the audience watches the dancers, who might be overlapping with dancers performing the other works, and I imagined that the effect might be like all the elements coexisting as they do in the real world.

With this in mind, both Jaala and I responded very emotionally to lithium’s powerful chemical capabilities and its everyday uses in medicine.

What was it like working with Jaala to develop your ideas?

Working with Jaala was a great learning experience for both her and myself, as she had never worked with a composer before and I had never worked with a choreographer.

Jaala is based in Melbourne, so our collaboration happened over emails and phone calls. Often, we would send each other a big email with score/choreography updates, and then we’d discuss the finer details over the phone.

Despite our different creative languages, we were very much on the same wavelength with the way we expressed our ideas as ‘moods’. So when Jaala explained that she wanted something to sound ‘dark, low and lingering’, I felt very comfortable translating that into music.

Through collaboration, how did you work together and make compromises to achieve a singular artistic vision? 

The whole collaboration process went very smoothly and, other than some excellent suggestions about additional percussion, Jaala was happy that my artistic vision matched hers as Lithium began to develop.

An interesting challenge for me personally was in responding to the sample tracks which Jaala gave me to help communicate her intentions for the music. Jaala made it very clear that the sample tracks shouldn’t govern my creative process, but it was a good experience for me to be able to listen to a piece of music and understand Jaala’s thought process behind choosing it, before beginning my own work, which ended up making use of completely different musical styles and concepts.

You’ve written 20 minutes across five movements. Talk us through how this music unravels (and what each movement sounds like!).

Writing 20 minutes of music was a daunting prospect initially but, through careful planning, it all came together very effectively!

I chose the instrumentation of piccolo, flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, two French horns, trumpet, trombone, bass trombone, tuba, and percussion after our planning session; and the five movements are named for the moods which Jaala described to me.

The first, Dark, low, lingering, is just that: ominous in sound, predominantly low in register, with interweaving, lingering melodic passages that occur mainly in the bassoon. The deep rumble of low brass and bass drum, eeriness of bowed vibraphone, and effects like key clicks and wind sounds serve to evoke the potential dangers and unpredictability of the element lithium.

The following two movements were inspired by videos of Jaala’s choreographic ideas, which show a cluster of dancers very gradually moving over one and other to create an overall circular motion, and then dancers running around and moving very erratically. With lithium’s uses in the treatment of bipolar disorder in mind, these movements draw upon the deep lows and manic highs associated with it. Beginning with solo clarinet to establish the feeling of wistful sadness, Ethereal, circular, melancholic is a transient journey through arpeggiated vibraphone and woodwind lines, strong melodic statements, and dramatic brass.

Broken, stuck reloading provides a complete contrast. Everything is fast, chaotic, repetitive, and the texture sounds as though it wants to all come together – which is almost does – but keeps breaking apart. The whole movement is constructed from the intervals of a minor second, perfect fourth, followed by another minor second, which are then transposed, retrograded, and developed.

The fourth and fifth movements, Eerie, strange, lost and Contrasting, unsettled, explosive, segue seamlessly into one another, and consist of similar thematic material, with the latter exploring material from all of the movements. The instruments battle for attention, symbolising the sub-atomic processes that make up lithium and facilitate its reactive capabilities.

The piece ends (spoiler alert!) with a huge crescendo and triple-forte cluster-chord representative of lithium’s violent reaction with water, which dies away with a piccolo ringing out and the rumble of the bass drum fading away.

As a composer, what are some of the ways you need to alter your ordinary process of composition in order to fit in the additional artform of dance? 

Every project is different, and your compositional process depends on your brief. NEON is an experimental production that plays with a very involved audience-dancer relationship, and our brief was to create five separate movements that communicate individual ideas and yet still contribute to the overall work.

Each movement was required to have a 15-30 second ‘transition’ period composed onto the end of it, and the movements might be heard in any order – or at least, that was the initial idea. It was eventually agreed to give a fixed position to the first and fifth movements in order to facilitate stating important thematic material and creating a definitive ‘ending’, which didn’t have a transition section.

Because the middle movements may be switched around for the performance, I had to alter how I thought about their roles as movements and as individual pieces. They are self-contained, and explore and develop their own material, although they’re also linked to material stated in the first movement.

What has choreography taught you about things like rhythm and melody?

Due to the timeline of the project and when the TSO would be recording the pieces, I composed Lithium before Jaala officially choreographed it. I had to get the piece done by the start of January, and now it’s recorded Jaala will begin to fully choreograph it in preparation for the performance later this year. Because of this, I didn’t have to fit my composition around a strict rhythm, although I did keep in mind that the dancers would have to be able to count and to recognise important melodic and rhythmic moments in the piece as reference points.

I believe that the experience would have been completely different if I had to compose the music to exact dance steps, and that is challenge I would love to undertake in the future!

What was the biggest thing you learnt through this project about your own abilities as a composer?

I learnt that I am capable of writing 20 minutes of music within a strict time-period. And that’s 20 minutes that I am proud of.

I think, for many composers, self-belief can be a real struggle, and one that can have a big impact on the way we compose and how motivated we feel about writing music. Throughout the project, I got to put my knowledge and creativity to the test and, through this, I learnt to believe in myself and my abilities — not to mention learning a thousand things along the way about how to work with choreographers, write for professional orchestral musicians, work in a recording studio, and about all the behind-the-scenes work that goes into organising big collaborations like this one between the TSO and DRILL!

What opportunities do you feel this collaboration has afforded you for your future career?

This project has been very career-affirming and, as I’m a third-year composition student at the University of Tasmania and hope to progress to honours and further study, having a 20-minute work under my belt will be valuable for my portfolio.

I am also incredibly excited about the fact that my work will be heard by such a broad audience when DRILL presents NEON! This will be an opportunity for people from outside the music scene to hear what I do and realise the potential for inter-disciplinary collaborations.

I’ve had a wonderful time meeting and working with new people throughout this exciting project, and I would love to collaborate with TSO and DRILL, and with dance companies, again in the future.

What advice would you give other composers thinking about writing music for dance?

My advice would be to approach the project with enthusiasm, open-mindedness, and with respect for the differences in our creative artforms.

The dancers and choreographers may not necessarily understand everything about musical language and how to compose a large-scale musical work, but they have their own invaluable insights into the ways in which physical movements respond to sound. Therefore, it’s important to think beyond just what your work sounds like, and to be aware that audiences will be watching as well as listening, and use this as an opportunity to showcase the sonic potential of orchestral instruments external to the concert hall!

Each project is unique, and your experience writing for dance may be completely different to mine. Enjoy that experience, and relish the process of sharing your knowledge and uniting our artforms.

Check in with the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra website to keep up to date on a live performance of NEON in 2019!

Images supplied. Credit: Joseph Shrimpton.