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- Ross Edwards
Reflections (1985)
- Wise Music G. Schirmer Australia Pty Ltd (World)
- bdr.suspcym.tam.cwb.gong.glock.mba.vib.wdblck.templebloc.sndblck/pf
- 11 min
Programme Note
Reflections is a delicate, trance-like meditation on intimate minutiae gleaned from the sound environment of Central Eastern Australia. Dominant among these are strands of insect sounds, whose quirkily overlapping patterns and irregular periodicity have for many years captivated the composer’s imagination and played an essential role in his search for a transcendental language outside the rhetoric of Western Art Music.
The texture and sonority of Reflections result from interplay between keyboard percussion and piano, the piano sonorities often tempered by simultaneously struck ideophones such as cowbell, gongs and tam-tam. The work is characteristic of Edwards’ so-called Sacred Series, a body of instrumental works mainly composed in the 1970s, which include the piano pieces Kumari and Etymalong, and The Tower of Remoteness, for clarinet and piano, and which have been described as contemplation objects in sound.
Reflections was commissioned by the Synergy Percussion Ensemble, which first performed it in the Sydney Opera House on July 7 1985.
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Reviews
Indisputably, Ross Edwards is now Australia’s most renowned and revered composer. Fifteen months short of his 80th birthday, Edwards has developed his own distinctive musical sonology; almost instantaneously, a listener can declare, “Oh, this must be Ross!” Few other composers can claim that sense of immediate identification. Such was the case with a percussion quartet he wrote for Synergy, which they premiered in 1985 and performed on international tours, to considerable acclaim. Now entitled Reflections, this nine-minute gem recalls the several years Edwards lived in the idyllic coastal village of Pearl Beach, barely a 90-minute drive north of Sydney. It contains the full vocabulary of Edwards’ language – insect drones, bird calls and other nature sounds – which were to blossom in the rhythmic vitality of the Maninyas series.