i

NOMADIC JOURNEYS OF LESBIAN COMPOSERS:

THINKING MY COMPOSITIONAL PROCESSES

ALONGSIDE PAULINE OLIVEROS AND EVE BEGLARIAN

VOLUME 1: EXEGESIS

CHRISTINA GREEN

An exegesis and portfolio of compositions submitted in fulfilment of the

requirements of Doctor of Creative Arts

31 March 2019

HUMANITIES AND COMMUNICATION ARTS, MUSIC

WESTERN SYDNEY UNIVERSITY

ii

Abstract

This portfolio of compositions and exegesis document the development of my compositional

processes, exploring how they interact with the creative work of two lesbian composers,

Pauline Oliveros and Eve Beglarian. Each composer is shown to have her own distinctive

voice. Yet, as I want to suggest, part of that distinctiveness arises from her embodiment of

music as a lesbian. This is not to say that the lesbian can be reduced to a homogenous, static

identity as my contention is that each composer, including myself, takes up the idea of ‘being

a lesbian’ in very different ways. To avoid essentialising the lesbian, I draw on concepts from

the future-oriented philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, and Deleuze with Félix Guattari, to focus

on the connections rather than the meanings made by these composers. I explore the ways in

which they each take up an identity that is fluid and multi-stranded, each travelling on a

nomadic, future-oriented journey that, in a Deleuzian sense, would be conceived as

becomings. It needs to be noted, however, that I do not employ Deleuze’s concepts as a

theorist would. Rather, I take these concepts to inform a way of thinking about composing

and its processes from the practitioner perspective. As well as this connection with Oliveros

and Beglarian, I am interested in the impact of image on my work, exploring how image

interacts with my pre-composition techniques. I also make use of ideas that are drawn from

the lesbian composer/writer Jennifer Rycenga.

Oliveros and Beglarian are lesbian composers from different generations and each has very

different sets of life experiences. Of interest to this project is how we might engage with

sexuality as an aspect of the compositional process. I locate Oliveros’s partnership and

artistic collaborative relationship with Ione (Carole Ione Lewis) as central to the creation of

her lesbian/musical voice. The composer’s focus on women’s issues and on creating works

informed by lesbian/feminist ideas that involve non-specialist participants, such as in her

Sonic Meditations (1974) with the ♀ Ensemble, can also be read as informing this voice.

Beglarian is a younger generation composer than Oliveros. Her move from an

‘Uptown/conservatory’ art music background to a ‘Downtown/experimental’ context went

hand-in-hand with her coming out as a lesbian. I examine works by Beglarian that involve

strands from her lesbian life experiences and themes related to women’s issues. Here,

arguably, I make a new contribution to the literature exploring her works. As a contemporary

of Beglarian, I trace the ways in which strands from her work, and that of Oliveros, have

informed and transformed my own compositional practice. I highlight the meditations and

text scores of Oliveros and their impact on my work, and the inspiration of lesbian content

drawn from the works of Beglarian.

Finally, spirituality is an area that inspires my compositional processes and is an intangible

idea that underpins the work of all three composers.

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Acknowledgement

I am deeply indebted to my supervisors, Associate Professor Sally Macarthur and Dr Clare

Maclean, for their guidance and support throughout my candidature. My thanks go to

Associate Professor Sally Macarthur for introducing me to the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze,

which has enriched my life in many ways, going beyond its role in informing this project. I

want to thank Dr Clare Maclean for her ongoing support to me as a composer moving into a

more professional space throughout this project.

I am deeply indebted to my partner, Jo Smith, for her ongoing support on many levels

through this project, for taking the role of first listener to works-in-progress in many

instances, and for continuing to believe in my abilities.

I want to express my gratitude for the assistance of the late Pauline Oliveros in the interview

she gave me in 2014, and thanks to Oliveros’s artistic collaborator and partner Carole Ione

Lewis (Ione), for her generous assistance in setting up the interview and dealing with the

email correspondence involved. I want to express my thanks also to Eve Beglarian for the

interview she gave me in 2013, for welcoming me at her homes, for her generosity in

answering questions and giving me access to scores and recordings beyond those freely

available on her website, and for taking an interest in me as a composer.

Thanks to my mother, Shirley Green, who has been an ongoing support through the journey,

understanding the magnitude of the work and appreciating highlights such as the Bundanon

residency through her own immersion in Australian visual art and music.

I also want to thank my artistic collaborators in this project – Dr Flossie Peitsch, Catherine

Golden, John Dabron, Allison Balberg, and the performers of the pieces in the folio – Clara

Pitt, Eve Osborn, Jessica Budge, Maria Smith and conductor James Pensini of the Sydney

Youth Orchestras, Jeffrey Gavett, Andy Kozar, Will Lang and Carlos Cordeiro of Loadbang,

Michael Kieran Harvey, Catherine Golden, Daniel Thorpe, the women of OBesa Cantavit and

conductor Dr Dara Blackstone, who also assisted during my 2013 US visit, Kaylie Dunstan,

and the Penrith Symphony Orchestra and conductor Paul Terracini. I have been the

beneficiary of a number of wonderful composition opportunities through my candidature at

Western Sydney University, and want to express huge thanks to Dr Bruce Crossman and Dr

Clare Maclean for their work in setting up the partnership between the Penrith Symphony

Orchestra and Western Sydney University offering the composition commission and prize

which allowed the composition of Land, Sea, Sky, to all staff at Western Sydney University

involved in creating the Noise and Silence composition mentoring project with the Sydney

Youth Orchestras, to those involved in organising the visit of composer Sean Heim, who gave

a masterclass in which I was able to be involved, and to PhD candidate Sean Botha, who

coordinated the Secrets Through a Soundglass project through which I received the

commission to compose Ground Thunder Returns. I also want to express thanks to Dr Sally

Macarthur for her work in organising inspiring visiting keynote speakers and presenters

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including Dr Susan McClary, Dr Robert Walser and Dr Brian Hulse, whose work in

musicology and composition has spoken to me.

Huge thanks to Dr Susan Mowbray and Dr Rachel Westcott of the Thesis Writing Group,

WSU, for their support since July 2016 – our online meetings have sustained me and helped

me through the writing up of the exegesis.

Thanks to Dr Orly Krasner for ongoing interest, support and some read-throughs of drafts of

the exegesis, as well as for her hospitality and assistance on my 2013 interview visit to NYC,

and to Dr Wendy Suiter for her support in the final stages of the writing up process through

her women composers’ gathering in Melbourne.

I am also indebted to the staff at Hangar café for their welcoming attitude and great coffee,

allowing me a ‘smooth space’ in which to work on the exegesis in late 2018/early 2019.

Christina Green, M. Mus. (Hons.), composition

March 2019

v

Statement of Authentication

The work presented in this thesis is, to the best of my knowledge and belief, original except

as acknowledged in the text. I hereby declare that I have not submitted this material, either in

full or in part, for a degree at this or any other institution.

vi

Contents

Volume One: Exegesis

Nomadic Journeys of Lesbian Composers: Thinking My Compositional

Processes Alongside Pauline Oliveros and Eve Beglarian Volume 1 ……….. i

Abstract …………………………………………………………………………………… ii

Acknowledgement ……………………………………………………………………… iii

Statement of Authentication …………………………………………………………. v

Contents …………………………………………………………………………………... vi

Illustrations ……………………………………………………………………………… ix

Musical Examples …………………………………………………………………….. xiv

Chapter 1: Introduction

1.1 The lesbian composer – an exploration ………………………………………… 1

1.2 Development of the project …………………………………………………….. 3

1.3 Queer temporality ………………………………………………………………. 3

1.4 The composition process – weaving the threads ……………………………….. 5

1.5 Two strands of practice-led research …………………………………………… 8

Chapter 2: Works Inspired by Gilles Deleuze

2.1 Deleuze – central terms and concepts ………………………………………….. 9

2.2 Line of Flight (solo ukulele, 2012) …………………………………………….. 19

2.3 Five Journey into Smooth Space Together (wind quintet, 2015) ……………… 26

2.4 Stone (baritone, trumpet in C, trombone, bass clarinet, 2016) ………………… 36

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Chapter 3: Works Drawing Inspiration from Pauline Oliveros

3.1 Background …………………………………………………………………….. 43

3.2 Suite from Sighting Silence, Sounding Image (solo piano, 2012-2013) ……….. 55

3.2.1 Background to the collaboration ……………………………………………... 55

3.2.2 The pieces and the compositional process ………………………………….... 58

3.3 Belonging/Open Field (I of VI) ……………………………………………….... 62

3.4 Pulpit/(Give) Voice (II of VI) ………………………………………………….. 66

3.5 Wisdom/Gate (III of VI) ……………………………………………………….. 70

3.6 Timbre/Walking (IV of VI) …………………………………………………….. 73

3.7 Kyrie/Nothing More Than This (V of VI) ……………………………………… 77

3.8 Spire/Kanzeon! (VI of VI) ……………………………………………………... 79

3.9 Native Language (kalimba/tárogató and other instrument combinations, 2017) . 87

3.9.1 Background …………………………………………………………………... 87

3.9.2 Compositional process ……………………………………………………….. 91

3.10 Ground Thunder Returns (piano and double bass, 2017) …………………….. 98

3.10.1 Background ………………………………………………………………..... 98

3.11 Improvised realisations of text scores by Pauline Oliveros (2014 and 2016) .. 101

3.11.1 In Consideration of the Earth ……………………………………………… 102

3.11.2 Ear Rings …………………………………………………………………... 103

Chapter 4: Works Drawing Inspiration from Eve Beglarian

4.1 Background …………………………………………………………………… 107

4.2 Three Pieces for Women’s Voices, with Two Cellos (1987/1988, revised and

extended 2012) ……………………………………………………………………. 120

4.2.1 Background to composition and the 2012 revision/extension of the pieces …122

4.2.2 Mary, Ground of All Being …………………………………………………. 123

4.2.3 Full Moon …………………………………………………………………… 126

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4.2.4 Earth, our Mother …………………………………………………………… 128

4.3 Eileen’s Vision (percussionist and speaker, 2014-2015) ………………………129

4.3.1 Eileen Myles ………………………………………………………………….129

4.3.2 Background to composition process, connection with percussionist/performer

Kaylie Dunstan ……………………………………………………………………..131

4.4 Nomadic Journeys (alto voice and baritone ukulele, 2015-2016) ……………..135

4.4.1 Nomadic Journeys – poems, background, writing/compositional process ….139

1. The Fallen Angel ………………………………………………………...140

2. On the Tram ……………………………………………………………. 141

3. Irene Warehouse ……………………………………………………….. 142

4. Pilgrimage ……………………………………………………………… 143

5. 40 Part Motet …………………………………………………………... 144

6. MoMAnt ………………………………………………………………… 145

7. Between Worlds ………………………………………………………… 146

8. Officeworks ……………………………………………………………... 147

9. Street Whale ……………………………………………………………. 148

10. Backpack ……………………………………………………………… 149

4.5 Park Slope, Brooklyn (alto voice and ukulele, 2016) ………………………… 152

Chapter 5: Onward and Outward: a Final Work

5.1 Land, Sea, Sky (string orchestra, 2017)……………………………………….. 156

5.1.1 Background …………………………………………………………………. 156

5.1.2 Compositional process ……………………………………………………… 157

5.1.3 Onward and outward – an ‘Externally Facing Artistic Practice’ …………… 162

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Chapter 6: Conclusion

6.1 An ‘Externally Facing Artistic Practice’………………………………………. 166

6.1.1 The lesbian composer and lesbian compositional process ………………….. 172

Reference List …………………………………………………………………………. 176

Appendix A – table 1 – Five Journey into Smooth Space Together………... 193

Appendix B – table 2 – Stone ……………………………………………………..... 197

Appendix C – table 3 – Ground Thunder Returns …..………………………… 199

Appendix D – table 4 – Nomadic Journeys …………………………………....... 201

Appendix E – table 5 – Park Slope, Brooklyn …………………..……………… 206

Appendix F – table 6 – Land, Sea, Sky …………………..……………………..... 207

Appendix G – Manuscript Drafts ………………..……………………………….. 212

Appendix H – Performances 2012-2019 …………………..…………………….. 236

Volume Two: Folio of Works

Nomadic Journeys of Lesbian Composers: Thinking My Compositional Processes Alongside

Pauline Oliveros and Eve Beglarian Volume 2 ……………………………………………… i

DCA Works Folio: music (2012-2017) – scores and notes …………………………………. 1

Scores and audio ........………………………….……………………………………………. 2

Line of Flight – solo ukulele ……………………………………………………………........ 3

Five Journey into Smooth Space Together – wind quintet ………………………………….. 9

Stone – baritone, trumpet in C, trombone and bass clarinet ………………………………... 31

Suite from Sighting Silence, Sounding Image – piano ……………………………………… 36

Native Language – kalimba/tárogató and other instrument combinations …………………. 54

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Ground Thunder Returns – piano and double bass ………………………………………… 60

Improvised realisations of two text scores by Pauline Oliveros: In Consideration of the Earth

and Ear Rings ………………………………………………………………………………. 68

Three Pieces for Women’s Voices, with Two Cellos ……………………………………….. 69

Eileen’s Vision – percussionist and speaker ………………………………………………... 79

Nomadic Journeys – alto voice and baritone ukulele …………………………………......... 87

Park Slope, Brooklyn – alto voice and ukulele …………………………………………… 120

Land, Sea, Sky – string orchestra ………………….………………………………………. 129

Note: Volume Two is not included in the ResearchDirect version of this thesis. Scores are

available either from Wirripang: Home of Australian Composers,

(https://www.australiancomposers.com.au/pages/christina-green), or via

https://www.christinagreen.net/composer.

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Illustrations (Volume 1)

Photo 2.1: The Shoalhaven River at Bundanon, photo by Christina Green …………………22

Photo 2.2: Mural welcoming refugees and asylum seekers at CoHealth, Footscray,

Melbourne, photo by Christina Green ……………………………………………………….36

Photo 2.3: With Jeff Gavett at the National Opera Center/Opera America, May 2016, photo

by Orly Krasner .………………………..…………………………………………………....42

Photo 3.1: YOU AND ME US inspirational reminder board for Sighting Silence, Sounding

Image, photo by Christina Green…………………………………………………………….56

Photo 3.2: Diagrammatic ‘map’ of Deep Listening meditation based on Pauline Oliveros’s

Open Field, picture by Christina Green……………………………………………………...61

Photo 3.3: Belonging, work on canvas by Flossie Peitsch, in progress at Bundanon Arts Trust,

November 2012, photo by Christina Green ………………………………………………….62

Photo 3.4: Pulpit, work created from lino offcuts and wood found objects by Flossie Peitsch,

in progress at Bundanon Arts Trust, November 2012, photo by Christina Green ………......68

Photo 3.5: Wisdom, modular work created from lino offcuts by Flossie Peitsch, at Bundanon

Arts Trust, November 2012, photo by Christina Green ……………………………………..71

Photo 3.6: Timbre, modular work created from lino offcuts by Flossie Peitsch, at Bundanon

Arts Trust, November 2012, photo by Christina Green ……………………………………..74

Photo 3.7: Kyrie, modular work created from lino offcuts by Flossie Peitsch, in progress at

Bundanon Arts Trust, 2012, photo by Christina Green …………………………………......77

Photo 3.8: Spire, modular work created from lino offcuts by Flossie Peitsch, at Bundanon

Arts Trust, November 2012, photo by Christina Green ……………………………………..81

Photo 3.9: Kanzeon statue at Vietnamese Buddhist temple Chua Phuoc Tuong, Richmond,

Melbourne, photo by Christina Green ……………………………………………………….82

Photo 3.10: Kanzeon at Chua Linh Son temple, Reservoir, Melbourne, photo by Christina

Green ……………………………………………………………………………………….. 83

Photo 3.11: Second modular form of Spire by Flossie Peitsch, photo by Flossie Peitsch ..…84

Photo 3.12: Handwritten notes/diagrams for Kanzeon!, picture by Christina Green ………..85

Photo 3.13: Imagined third modular arrangement of Spire, handwritten notes/diagrams –

detail, picture by Christina Green…………………………………………………………….85

Photo 3.14: Native Language kalimba tuning, picture by Christina Green …………………89

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Photo 3.15: Eve Beglarian performing Night Psalm at the Old Stone House, Park Slope,

Brooklyn, still from YouTube video of Beglarian by Dan Joseph …………………….….....90

Photo 3.16: View from the Café Deux Magots at St Germain-des-Prés, photo by Christina

Green ………………………………………………………………………………………...95

Photo 3.17: Rue Foucault, Paris, photo by Jo Smith …………..………..…………………...96

Photo 3.18: At Montmartre, photo by Jo Smith ……..…………………………..…………..96

Photo 3.19: Street art at Montmartre, photo by Christina Green ……………………………97

Photo 3.20: Fairfield Amphitheatre, site for listening/improvising, including tin whistle

realisation of In Consideration of the Earth, photo by Christina Green …………………...103

Photo 4.1: Crossing the Frontier – Movement for the Ordination of Women conference,

Melbourne, 1987, flyer, archives of Christina Green ………………………………………124

Photo 4.2: Crossing the Frontier – Movement for the Ordination of Women conference,

Melbourne, 1987, flyer, archives of Christina Green ……………………………………....125

Photo 4.3: Play It Again Sappho – event including the first performances of Full Moon and

Earth, our Mother – concert flyer, 1990, archives of Christina Green …………………….127

Photo 4.4: Kaylie Dunstan at the marimba, still shot from YouTube video posted by Kaylie

Dunstan ……………………………………………………………………………………..134

Photo 4.5: Close-up of triangle ‘rig’ for Eileen’s Vision devised by Kaylie Dunstan, photo by

Kaylie Dunstan ……………………………………………………………………………..135

Photo 4.6: The building in Graham Street, Islington, that once housed The Fallen Angel,

photo by Ewan Munro ……………..……………………………………………………….141

Photo 4.7: Alone But Not Alone, photo by Christina Green ………………………………..142

Photo 4.8: Mural art by Baby Guerrilla at Irene Warehouse, Brunswick, Melbourne, photo by

Christina Green ……..……………………………………………………………………...143

Photo 4.9: Garden and mural art, Mary and infant Jesus, St Mark’s Episcopal Church (St

Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery) by Duane Stapp, with painter Marlena Relyea, photo by

Christina Green …………………………………………………………………………….144

Photo 4.10: Looking upwards in the Fuentidueña Chapel at The Cloisters, Metropolitan

Museum of Art, NYC, photo by Christina Green ………………………………………….145

Photo 4.11: At MoMA, NYC, photo by Christina Green ....…………………………...…..146

Photo 4.12: Payment for busking at the market, photo by Christina Green ………………..147

Photo 4.13: Officeworks store, Melbourne, photo by Christina Green ………………….....148

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Photo 4.14: Partial view of the Richmond Whale mural by Mike Makatron, Richmond,

Melbourne, photo by Christina Green ……..……………………………………………….149

Photo 4.15: Backpack from c. 1987-1988, photo by Christina Green ……………………..149

Photo 4.16: Playing the baritone ukulele at the Irish and Celtic Music Festival, Yass, 2019,

photo by Jo Smith …………………..…………………..…………..………………………151

Photo 4.17: Outreach card from the Lesbian Herstory Archives, collected November 2013

…………………………….………………………………………………………………...153

Photo 5.1: Pelican Point, taken at Hastings, Mornington Peninsula, Victoria, photo by

Christina Green …………………………………………………………………………….158

* My gratitude and thanks to visual artists Flossie Peitsch, Baby Guerrilla, Duane Stapp (with painter Marlena Reylea) and Mike Makatron, and to Anna Ritman, Communications Specialist – Marketing and Campaigns at CoHealth, Melbourne, for kind permission to use my photos of their visual/street/mural art, and to Flossie Peitsch for kind permission to use one of her photos of her work. The name of artist of the mural at CoHealth Footscray is unknown at this time. My thanks are also expressed to UK blogger/photographer of London pubs Ewan Munro, for kind permission to use his photo of the building in Graham Street, Islington that was once home to the gay bar The Fallen Angel, to Jo Smith and Orly Krasner for kind permission to use their photos, to the Lesbian Herstory Archives, NYC, for kind permission to include an image of their outreach card, and to the MOW Board for kind permission to include images of the 1987 MOW Conference Flyer. Thanks to Kaylie Dunstan for kind permission to use her photo and a still shot from her video, and to Eve Beglarian and Dan Joseph for kind permission to include a still shot from Joseph’s video of Beglarian. Thanks to Christine McCombe and members of the original Play it Again Sappho collective for kind permission to include an image of the Play it Again Sappho concert flyer. Rosemary Dobson's Over the Frontier is included within Photo 4.2 (p. 125) by Arrangement with the Licensor, The Rosemary Dobson Estate, c/- Curtis Brown (Aust) Pty Ltd.All photos are © their respective photographers.

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Musical Examples (Volume 1)

Example 2.1 – Green, Christina, Line of Flight, bars 53-54.………………………………...25

Example 3.1 – Green, Open Field (Suite from Sighting Silence, Sounding Image I), bird call

(transcription by Christina Green) …………………………………………………………...63

Example 3.2 – Green, (Give) Voice (SSSI II), bird call (transcription by Christina Green)…69

Example 3.3 – Green, Gate (SSSI III), bird call (transcription by Christina Green) ………...72

Example 3.4 – Green, Walking (SSSI IV), bird call (transcription by Christina Green ……..75

Example 3.5 – Green, Nothing More Than This (SSSI V), bird call (transcription by Christina

Green ………………………………………………………………………………………...78

Example 3.6 – Green, Kanzeon! (SSSI VI), bird call (transcription by Christina Green) …...83

Example 3.7 – Green, Native Language bars 57-60 …………………………………………93

Example 3.8a – Green, Native Language bars 94-105 …………………………………...93/94

Example 3.8b – Green, Native Language bars 15-26 ……………………………………......94

Example 4.1a – John Dowland, Sleep, Wayward Thoughts bars 1-4*....…………………...137

Example 4.1b – Green, 40 Part Motet (Nomadic Journeys 5) bars 1-4 …………………....137

* Extract from Sleep Wayward Thoughts is reprinted by permission from John Dowland: The

First Book of Ayres (1597, 1600, 1603, 1606, 1613) edited by E H Fellowes, revised by

Thurston Dart, Stainer & Bell, London. Copyright 1920, 1965 Stainer & Bell Ltd, London,

England, www.stainer.co.uk. All rights reserved. My gratitude and thanks to Stainer and Bell

Ltd for their kind permission to include the extract.

1

Chapter 1: Introduction

1.1 The lesbian composer – an exploration

This project comprises a composition folio created in the context of a focus on the

compositional practice of the lesbian composer, and an accompanying exegesis. In a

period prior to the beginning of this project I was caught up with a wide range of

musical styles and genres, including jazz and experimental strands, and in the process

encountered the music of Pauline Oliveros and Eve Beglarian, who I learned were

lesbian composers. Beginning with Queering the Pitch,1 I read books in which

connections were made between music and sexuality. Two chapters that spoke to me

were Suzanne G. Cusick’s ‘On a Lesbian Relationship with Music’ and Jennifer

Rycenga’s ‘Lesbian Compositional Process’.2 I devoured both chapters, but it was

Cusick’s chapter that really took my breath away.3 I resonated with the story she

unfolded, connecting her earliest memories of falling in love with music with her

experience of living/relating as a lesbian and working as a musicologist. In her words, ‘I

needed to understand what relationship, if any, I could suppose to exist between my

being a lesbian and my being a musician, a musicologist.’4

I absorbed this question and began to live with it, applying it to myself as a

lesbian/musician. From Rycenga’s chapter I took an overall notion that there could be

something called a ‘lesbian compositional process’, and on some level I sat with her

ideas, such as her claim that:

1 Philip Brett, Elizabeth Wood and Gary C. Thomas, eds., Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian

Musicology (New York and London: Routledge, 1994). Finding the opening up of thought in the area of

musicology around the intersection of music and sexuality embodied in this book, which I stumbled upon some

time between 2007 and 2009, was a great discovery for me, having moved out of involvement in the art music

and academic sphere in the years just preceding its publication. 2 Suzanne G. Cusick, ‘On a Lesbian Relationship with Music’: a Serious Effort Not to Think Straight’ in Brett,

Wood and Thomas, eds., Queering the Pitch, 67-83; and Jennifer Rycenga, ‘Lesbian Compositional Process:

One Lover-Composer’s Perspective’ in Brett, Wood and Thomas, eds., Queering the Pitch, 275-296. 3 Since reading Cusick’s chapter and re-engaging with musicology as the original major part of this project

which began as a PhD study (moving into DCA form in 2017), I have also learned that I am not alone in having

had my breath taken away by encountering ‘On a Lesbian Relationship with Music’. New York-based

Australian musicologist Emily Wilbourne documents her similar experience in ‘On a Lesbian Relationship with

Musicology: Suzanne G. Cusick, Sound Effects’, Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture, Vol. 19

(2015): 3-14. She writes of how she read the piece ‘in a library, crouched on the floor between the stacks’,

where she had gone in search of Queering the Pitch, which she ‘hadn’t really dared believe … existed’. She

describes her experience of reading Cusick with the words ‘she held up a mirror and claimed to know me’ (3). 4 Cusick, ‘On a Lesbian Relationship with Music, 69.

2

Being a lesbian makes a difference, transforms the thought/action process that is

composition. To make such a claim is not an invitation to an old

essentialism/constructionism debate, but to be in movement beyond static and

deterministic categories.5

I wondered if the idea of a lesbian compositional process was something that I might

embody/explore/realise, already, in some way, and/or in the future.

I began to contemplate a project in which I could take a more experimental approach

than earlier work in which I focused on composition training. I revisited these texts

found in earlier years, feeling that they were significant, and began to shape my project,

proposing a musicological study with composition portfolio.6 The core of the original

focus was the compositional process of the lesbian composer, thinking, exploring and

viewing the lesbian composer through the lens of the philosophy of French 20th

century

philosopher Gilles Deleuze.7 This focus informs the current DCA project in that the

issue of lesbian identity is still a central theme for this work. As with the initial research

motivation, this project is interested in the ‘multiplicity’ of the lesbian composer who,

moving beyond stereotypes, is viewed as ‘more than one thing’ and, by virtue of being

‘doubly minoritarian’,8 as a woman and as a lesbian, as having the capacity to

‘destabilise the norms of the dominant music’– the dominant music being both the

music of male composers and music composed within the dominant heterosexual

paradigm. The lesbian composer is conceived as particular by virtue of the ‘difference’

deriving from her sexuality, and the research sets out to demonstrate that this difference

can be a source of creativity and inspiration in the life and work of the lesbian

composer. In Deleuzian thought, ‘nomadic’ movement refers to the movement of

bodies into and through spaces on which they then have an impact.9 An aim of my work

is to examine ways in which the lesbian composer moves ‘nomadically’ – in the

5 Rycenga, ‘Lesbian Compositional Process’, 275. 6 The original project began in 2012 as a PhD under the title Nomadic Journeys and Queer Temporality in the

Work of Pauline Oliveros, Eve Beglarian and Christina Green: A Musicological Study and Composition

Portfolio, before conversion to a DCA project. 7 Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) worked both solo and in collaboration with psychotherapist, semiotician and

activist Felix Guattari (1930-1992). 8 The term ‘minoritarian’ is well described by Anna Hickey-Moody and Peta Malins who state that it is used by

Deleuze to refer to ‘a mode of being which is minority in nature.’ By contrast, the term ‘majoritarian’ refers to

bodies ‘which are qualitatively dominant.’ In the case of a majoritarian group, the defining term ‘man’ is the

standard term, although the numbers in the group may be fewer than those in the minoritarian group. See Anna

Hickey-Moody and Peta Malins, eds., Deleuzian Encounters: Studies in Contemporary Social Issues

(Houndmills, Basingstoke, and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 21, n. 22. 9 See chapter 2 for a fuller discussion of this term.

3

Deleuzian sense – into and through spaces and contexts, making an impact on them and

transforming them.

1.2 Development of the project

The ideas for my original composition folio began with the plan to compose a work in

collaboration with visual artist Dr Flossie (Florence) Peitsch at Bundanon Arts Trust,

NSW. With a sense that the composition process should extend beyond this one

experience and through the duration of the project, other works were mapped out – the

revision of an earlier work with feminist/queer connections, works conceived around

Deleuzian concepts, and works incorporating inspiration from lesbian life. As the

composition focus overtook the musicology focus in my work, my two lesbian

composer co-participants, Pauline Oliveros and Eve Beglarian, emerged as significant

sources of inspiration for my work on many levels. I observed their abilities as

composers, composer-performers, and as independent artists with skills in promoting

their music, mobilising technology, making skilful use of the internet, and in

succeeding in generating a livelihood from their work, and increasingly got a sense of

what a successful working life as a composer might involve.

1.3 Queer temporality

The idea of ‘queer temporality’, as proposed and explored by queer theorist and writer

Judith Halberstam is also part of the work.10

In In A Queer Time And Place, Halberstam

contends that time is played out differently in the lives of queer people than it is in the

lives of others, referring to this phenomenon as ‘queer time’ or ‘queer temporality’.11

Queer people, Halberstam argues, can disrupt the perceived normality of things like

arranging one’s life around ‘family time’ (the schedules and routines deemed by

mainstream society as most suitable to live by when raising children)12

, the ‘natural’

10 Halberstam is now primarily known as Jack Halberstam, with this name identifying its author on

Halberstam’s most recent book, Gaga Feminism (2012). 11

Judith Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York and

London: New York University Press, 2005), 1. 12 Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place, 153.

4

progression from adolescence into maturity via child bearing/raising13

, accompanied by

a letting go of participation in marginal or subcultural pursuits14

, and quite far-reaching

considerations such as the generally held western notions that long periods of stability

are desirable, and indeed, are an indicator of maturity, in adult life, and that longevity is

to be held as an ideal and striven for at any cost.15

I identify queer temporality as a

factor that is present in my work, which takes inspiration from the composing lives of

similarly queer composers who are discussed in this exegesis, and explored this area

with both Pauline Oliveros and Eve Beglarian in interviews (see below), while

observing its part in enabling my own development as a composer/musician through

layers of creative work and study undertaken in years beyond my original education and

training.

In preparing for my interviews with Pauline Oliveros and Eve Beglarian I explained the

background to the study, including the concept of queer temporality. With Pauline

Oliveros, I observed that I knew she had moved around quite a lot and lived in a lot of

different places, had not had children and so had not had to organise her life around

what Halberstam calls family time. I asked her if she would say that this mobility had

facilitated her composing life. She answered ‘Yes, definitely. I think it’s given me an

advantage.’16

I similarly asked Eve Beglarian if she resonated with any of this, and if

so, would she say that living in a framework outside the norm, in this way, had

facilitated her composing life. Beglarian responded, saying that:

I guess I would have to say that, for me, then, all artists are queer. I mean, the

people I know who have the most non-standard arrangements with the external

world tend to be artists, whether they’re queer, whether they’re heterosexual or

homosexual, to use the old-fashioned terms, it’s sort of far less determinative, in

my experience, of that oppositional relationship to mainstream culture, and I

think that what I’m saying [is that] the lesbian couple with the 2.5 children and

the SUV are indistinguishable from heterosexual Americans, and in that sense I

would have to say that they aren’t queer, and so therefore what I’m confused by

in the question is what’s the distinction between ‘queer’ and artist’ and if those

13

Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place, 162. 14

Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place, 174. 15

Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place, 4–5. 16 Pauline Oliveros, interview with Christina Green, January 21st, 2014, via Skype.

5

two categories are going to be congruent then what do we need the term ‘queer’

for?17

Elsewhere, however, Beglarian has said that her decision to leave behind her work as a

director and producer of audiobooks to focus on her composing and performing work,

and ‘live on beans and rice’ if she wanted to, was made easier by not having a family to

support.18

She, too, has travelled widely as part of her work as a composer/musician,

arguably relatively unhindered by family responsibilities. In response to questions about

strands of lesbian identity and culture and the importance of these in their work,

Oliveros consistently downplayed their place in her work, while Beglarian

acknowledged their presence and contribution in various ways.

1.4 The composition process – weaving the threads

Over a period of time I thought about the interview responses of the two composers and

studied their work, both finding and not finding threads that could be viewed as being

connected with their lives as lesbians. I became increasingly immersed in their actual

music and in what I read about their composition practices and processes. At the same

time, through the appearance of opportunities beyond those originally envisaged for the

composition folio, the composition side of the project expanded. I began to reframe

Oliveros and Beglarian as mentors and fellow travellers, who were further along the

composition path, and found myself sustained by material found in their interviews in

which they shared aspects of their compositional philosophies. I continued to look at

their music from multiple angles, including craft, scope and reach, underpinning

concepts and aesthetics, and the position of their performance strands in the overall

picture of their work, as well as the place of their sexuality in their work and words. All

of these will be discussed in relation to my own music in the thesis, in chapters 2–6,

with the greatest focus on craft, and the area of scope approached in chapter 6,

identifying the multi-layered nature of Beglarian’s creative work as something I want to

aim toward in the future. In allowing them to be sources of inspiration, my starting

point was not to emulate their styles and voices, but rather to connect with Oliveros and

17

Eve Beglarian, interview with Christina Green, November 11th

, 2013, Manhattan. 18

Robert Raines, Composition in the Digital World: Conversations with 21st Century American Composers

(New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 255.

6

Beglarian as a way of further developing my own distinctive musical voice, with an

awareness of my own already formed musical voice and its distinctness from theirs.

From my research on Oliveros, the importance of the meditative listening workshops

that she gave to participants who were not necessarily musically trained emerged. This

work, as well Oliveros’s accordion improvisations and text score works, has inspired

my own work, and my immersion in these strands has ignited a kind of experimental

response in my own music. I was inspired by the way in which participants in

Oliveros’s Deep Listening TM

workshops19

and performers of her works (both text score

and notated) have described experiences of deep reconnection with memory flows and

emotional material, as well as growth and transformation in their capacity to listen and

hear sounds in the environment around them. From this I wanted both to try performing

some of Oliveros’s works myself, and to create works that could have a similar impact,

with at least some offering material for non-specialist players.

Through my engagement with the work of Beglarian I have arrived at the threshold of a

move into the learning required to begin to incorporate electronic/pre-recorded elements

and live processing in my work. I have been inspired by her works that combine live

performances of notated music scores with pre-recorded/electronic elements. This has

come about in the context of embracing the increasing presence of technology across

contemporary music in general with an accompanying feeling that it is less and less

possible or desirable not to make use of the possibilities it offers for opening up the

new. It is not just my immersion in Eve Beglarian’s music that has triggered this

interest in technology, but a general observation that technology is almost an essential

component of contemporary music performance in the 21st century. It is also

underpinned by the desire to incorporate electronic elements into my work with the

same approach of listening for rightness, fit, and the sense that what I am creating has

the feeling of being in my own realm or voice that has been part of my composition

process since 2006. My immersion in Beglarian’s work has also occasioned a growing

resonance with the Downtown aesthetic in which it emerged (see especially chapter 4),

an aesthetic in which I feel the possibility of locating at least some of my work into the

future. Following my experiences of hearing some of Beglarian’s works at concerts in

19

Deep Listening Workshops are offered by practitioners trained through the Deep Listening Institute founded

by Oliveros, and include work with various practices such as energy exercises, listening exercises, movement

exercises and improvisation. Discussion of experiences amongst participants is also part of the workshop

process (see http://deeplistening.org/site/content/workshops, accessed January 2019).

7

NYC and of having one of the works in this folio performed by NYC quartet Loadbang

I have begun the process of making connections with practitioners/groups involved in

similar aesthetics in Melbourne, including the Melbourne Composers’ League,

Madeleine Flynn and Tim Humphrey, and the Chamber Made Opera

(performance/sound/music) group. These things are discussed in more detail in the

various chapters to follow.

A third lesbian creative practitioner, New York City-based poet Eileen Myles, has also

been a presence in my work, both as the author of one of the texts I have set to music in

one of the folio pieces, and as a thinker and writer about creative practice. Myles’s

stance as an ‘out’ lesbian, her work as a performer of her own poetry, and the sustained

nature of her practice beginning with involvement at poetry nights not dissimilar to the

open mic music nights20

at which I started out, have all been an encouragement to me as

a lesbian artist.

My exegesis thus documents the ‘becoming-other’ – the development and

transformation – in the language of Deleuze (see chapter 2) – of my practice through a

process of ‘walking in the mist’ (to borrow an image from Zen master Eihei Dogen) of

the work and reflections of all three creative practitioners. Throughout this process, I

have been keen both to develop my composition technique and to cultivate a way of

working as a composer that is not about being a distant creator at the centre of the

music I create, but about developing things in a network, a web of connections, with

possibilities for ongoing ‘becoming’ (see chapter 2 for explanations of this and other

terms from Deleuze). I am trying to embrace a process that, in keeping with Deleuze’s

ideals, is not static, but dynamic. Staying active as a performer across various musical

spheres is central in this process for me, and my short instrumental piece, Stonnington

(2013-2017), composed/developed in stages with collaborators with both folk/acoustic

and classical backgrounds is an example of a work written within the time period of this

project that embodies these qualities/ideals. It combines notated parts (ukulele, violin,

accordion) and improvised parts (the keyboard, cello and a second accordion part), and

in the realisation in the YouTube clip, links art/folk sensibilities and

20

An open mic (or open mike) is a live performance event in a venue such as a café, bar, or theatre space at

which performers, often amateurs or beginners, can try out new creative material (e.g. music or poetry) in front

of an audience. Each performer at a music open mic will usually be given a slot of 10-15 minutes or 3-4 songs.

8

professional/amateur musicians, including and welcoming ‘non-specialist’ players as

Oliveros did in her work.21

1.5 Two strands of practice-led research

From the outset, I wanted this project to be a place in which I could develop and grow

as a composer, adding a further layer of practice experience combined with reflexive

thinking, and creating a second body of work within the framework of postgraduate

study and supervision.22

As well as the focus on the work and compositional processes of Oliveros and

Beglarian, I decided at an early point to seek out and make use of articles on

composition, especially in the area of pre-composition techniques, and worked with this

input in tandem with the composition teaching/feedback coming out of the supervision

process. I document the use I made of the ideas found in these articles in the discussion

of the works unfolded in the following pages/chapters, as well as other elements in the

creation of the works – challenges and solutions, musical/practical considerations. I also

drew on material in articles on songwriting for clarification on elements of lyric

structure for the work Nomadic Journeys (see chapter 4), as well as receiving feedback

on the songs in this work from two peer songwriting critique groups.

In a parallel strand, I also worked with ideas found in a number of articles focusing on

‘lesbian composition’ and ‘queer composition’; the way these ideas influenced my

composition process is similarly woven into the discussion of the works that follows.

An important thread in my practice-led research has been the experience of coming into

the art music sphere with the intention to be more visible than previously as a lesbian

composer and to work with ideas and a stance related to that, and the way this has

played out in negotiating the terrain of getting music performed and heard. This thread

is also woven through the following chapters and brought into focus in the conclusion

to the exegesis.

21

Christina Green, and ensemble, Stonnington (2013-2017),

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IbnytR7OMyE&feature=youtu.be (accessed February 2019). I include this

piece in the introduction as an example of the way in which the practice cultivated through this doctoral project

has informed all my work and thinking as a musician, with the works written specifically for the folio discussed

in detail as the focus of chapters 2-5 of the exegesis. 22

The first body of work was the folio created for my Masters in Composition, completed in 2007-2009, at the

University of Melbourne.

9

Chapter 2

Works Inspired by Gilles Deleuze

The works in my folio were composed between 2012 and 2017. My research into the

composition processes of Pauline Oliveros (1932-2016) and Eve Beglarian (1958-) has

been influential on my own compositional process, as I discuss in this and subsequent

chapters. The philosophical thought of Gilles Deleuze, and Deleuze with Felix Guattari,

ideas drawn from the queer theory of Judith Halberstam, and other work from queer

studies and lesbian studies form a framework in which to facilitate a discussion about

the concept of the ever-changing voice of the lesbian composer as observed in the work

of Oliveros, Beglarian and myself (1963-). I have drawn inspiration and ideas for

several of my works from Deleuzian concepts, and a discussion of these works follows

in this chapter. In the first section of this chapter I will introduce a number of Deleuze’s

concepts which have both informed my thinking about the lesbian composer and

become strands of inspiration for the creative works in this project. This will be

followed by a discussion of Line of Flight (2012), Five Journey into Smooth Space

Together (2015) and Stone (2016), including aspects of my compositional process, the

ways in which the ideas from Deleuze have informed the works, and some strands of

connection with Pauline Oliveros and Eve Beglarian.

2.1 Deleuze – central terms and concepts

The philosophy of Deleuze is one of the starting points for my project. It offers

concepts that avoid essentialising sexual identity. In representational thought, the

lesbian is frequently portrayed in stereotypical terms set up on a binary opposition, such

as ‘butch’ versus ‘femme’. However, the dynamic thinking that underpins Deleuzian

philosophy shifts from the idea that sexuality can be reduced to an essentialist

caricature of itself, in which sexuality is equated with sex, to the more liberating idea

that, as a practice, sexuality is creative, productive, and revolutionary. Deleuze is more

10

interested in ‘what a body can do’,1 that is, in what it is capable of doing through the

connections it makes and what affects it produces, than in what a body is or might

mean. Instead of exploring sexuality as a fixed organisation of gender, I am interested

in the idea that sexuality is a practice through which creativity and desire are produced.

The dynamic and transformative dimension of Deleuzian philosophy thus allows me to

conceive of the (lesbian) body as fluid and constantly changing. Deleuze provides a

framework in which to think of the lesbian composer as ‘multiple’, traversing a gamut

of lesbian subjectivities that perform and practice sexuality differently at different times

and in different contexts.

Multiple

The term ‘multiplicity’ has come into my vocabulary through the work of Bronwyn

Davies who writes that: ‘Deleuze struggled to find a way of bringing together this idea

that we are all part of the same Being, and at the same time, that we are multiple and

emergent.’2 In keeping with Deleuzian thought, I have come to use the concept

‘multiple’ to refer to the capacity of a person to be ‘more than one thing’, that is, to

embody multiple identities, which may also come and go throughout the course of a

life, to extend beyond any and all identities, and to be more than its identities or the sum

of its identity. In Deleuzian thought, multiplicity suggests the countless ways in which

human beings might negotiate the world, including the infinite ways in which works of

art might be received and experienced. As I will show, there are multiple and

sometimes unexpected experiences that arise in the everchanging practices and

performances of the lesbian composer.

Becoming, becoming other

Fluidity, ‘becoming’ and movement into the ‘not-yet-known’3 are key ideas in

Deleuze’s philosophy, allowing me to talk about my works in a way that shows them to

1 Christa Albrecht-Crane and Jennifer Daryl Slack, ‘Toward a Pedagogy of Affect’, in Anna Hickey-Moody and

Peta Malins, eds., Deleuzian Encounters: Studies in Contemporary Social Issues. On p. 100, the authors write

that ‘Deleuze and Guattari do not begin with the question ‘What is a body?’ but ‘What can a body do?’ and ‘Of

what affects is a body capable?’. 2 In Jonathan Wyatt, Ken Gale, Susanne Gannon and Bronwyn Davies, Deleuze and Collaborative Writing: An

Immanent Plane of Composition (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., 2011), 2. 3 Wyatt et al, Deleuze and Collaborative Writing, 136.

11

be part of a creative flow that goes beyond the conceptual completion of the works as

fixed, static, finished products. Hickey-Moody and Malins write that becomings ‘take

place when a body connects to another body and in doing so, begins to perceive, move,

think and feel in new ways’.4 According to Cliff Stagoll, becoming in Deleuze’s

conception means ‘becoming different’,5 and is ‘an antidote to what he (i.e., Deleuze)

considers to be the western tradition’s predominant and unjustifiable focus upon being

and identity’6 – becoming is ‘a characteristic of the very production of events’,

7 which

unfold in a continuous stream, ‘unified in their very becoming.’8 Becomings are often

thought of as taking place in ‘assemblages’ (see below), with change proceeding from a

coming together of elements in which ‘one piece … is drawn into the territory of

another piece, changing its value as an element and bringing about a new unity.9

Assemblage

The Deleuzian concept of the ‘assemblage’ might be imagined as a coming together of

bodies and other elements in the moment of their formation. Rather than conceived as

fixed arrangement, an assemblage is an ever-changing formation that is characterised by

dynamic movement. Malins states that ‘the body is a machine that functions with other

machines. These assemblages continuously transform the body, enhancing or

diminishing its operational capacity.’10

Bodies are simultaneously affected while

affecting other bodies, producing an assemblage made up of connections that have the

potential to become other. Assemblages give rise to transformations or becomings

which are always unknowable in advance.11

In Deleuzian thinking, an assemblage is not

pre-formed – it does not already exist as a ready-made template. Assemblages will often

be created through desire, hence they are sometimes conceived as desiring-machines.

An example of this idea can be found in Eve Beglarian’s collaborative project,

4 Hickey-Moody and Malins, eds., Deleuzian Encounters, 6.

5 Cliff Stagoll, ‘Becoming’, in Adrian Parr, ed., The Deleuze Dictionary, 2

nd ed. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh

University Press, 2010), 25. 6 Stagoll, ‘Becoming’, 25. 7 Stagoll, ‘Becoming’, 26.

8 Stagoll, ‘Becoming’, 26.

9 David Heckman, ‘Gotta Catch ‘Em All: Capitalism, the War Machine and the Pokémon Trainer’ (Glossary), in

Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge, Issue 5: Objects and their Subjects (Fall 2002)

(http://www.rhizomes.net/issue5/poke/glossary.html, accessed January 2019). 10

Peta Malins, ‘City Folds: Injecting Drug Use and Urban Space’, in Hickey-Moody and Malins, eds.,

Deleuzian Encounters, 152. 11 Hickey-Moody and Malins, eds., ‘Introduction’, Deleuzian Encounters, 6.

12

Hildegurls Electric Ordo Virtutum, which is an adaptation of a morality play of

Hildegard of Bingen by the ‘Hildegurls’, a group of composer-performers, Lisa

Bielawa, Kitty Brazelton, Eve Beglarian and Elaine Kaplinsky. In this work the music

and ‘presence’ of Hildegard coalesce in the assemblage with the music and sensibilities

of the four Hildegurls who work with the music in transforming ways to create their

own version. In the program notes included with the CD, Beglarian says that:

Musically, theatrically, emotionally, theologically – on every level we are living

with Hildegard, and trying to make her points as powerfully as we can. She

probably wouldn’t approve of the details, but in terms of the urge and the degree

to which we are attempting to honor and embody her ideas, her music, her

sensibility – what’s not to love?”12

Adding to this comment, Kitty Brazelton says that:

I don’t think she’d mind the rock or other elements. I think she’d connect with

the soul of our version. She’d understand that we really have tried to make it as

powerful as we can, speaking today’s musical language. I think she’d look

down from heaven and dig it.13

These ideas speak precisely of the becoming, transformation, desire and connections

involved in the concept of the assemblage. In my early reading about Oliveros and

Beglarian, I was struck by an openness in their work to the new becomings that can take

place through collaborative processes, embodied by each in different ways: Oliveros in

the creation of musical and ‘sonic’ events in which audience members and people not

necessarily trained as musicians can be active participants and have the opportunity to

‘become other’; and Beglarian in her trip down the Mississippi River by kayak,

collecting inspiration and materials from which to produce new compositions, with a

view to returning with a small ensemble and finished works to perform to members of

12

Joe Hannan, ‘Interview with the Hildegurls’, in ‘Hildegurls Bonus pdf’ including bios, libretto, translation and

production notes, from CD Hildegurls Electric Ordo Virtutum, an adaptation of the work of Hildegard of

Bingen (directed by Grethe Barrett Holby, innova Recordings, 2009), 6–7. 13 Hannan, ‘Interview with the Hildegurls’, 7.

13

the communities that inspired them.14

Existing in this river-space, an ‘in-between’ space

– the kind of ‘liminal space in which we can think otherwise…Becoming-other’, as

Davies describes writing space that is ‘away from home’15

– Beglarian invited whoever

amongst her cohort wanted to come and join her for a leg of the trip, thus opening the

door to new ‘assemblages’ from which things (becomings) could happen. Beglarian

documented and shared her journey with a wider audience via a blog on which readers

could also leave comments, multiplying the layers of the assemblage.

In the early stages of the project, I hypothesized that ‘coming out’ events in the lives of

lesbian and gay people might give them a kind of ‘template’ for further ‘becomings’

and a certain fearlessness about stepping towards the ‘not-yet-known’, having done it

once in this life-changing way. This proved difficult to substantiate through the research

and interviews I did in the early part of the project, but a strand of inspiration from the

collaborative processes in the work of the two composers has remained. This is

discussed with specific reference to my work, Suite from Sighting Silence, Sounding

Image in chapter 3.

Difference

Deleuze advances an idea of ‘positive difference’, described with clarity by Hickey-

Moody and Malins who write that:

For Deleuze, difference is, first and foremost, an internal – rather than relational

or external – process. A body is produced through an internal differenciation (as

when cells differentiate) and, over time, continually differs from itself. This

view presents difference as positive and productive, rather than negative and

subtractive; difference is that which produces life itself, and enables the

production of the new.16

It is with this sense of ‘difference’ that I work in relation to the lesbian composer

throughout the study, understanding it as that which engenders life rather than as

14

Kathryn Shattuck, ‘Composer Finds a Muse in the Mississippi’, The New York Times, September 2, 2009,

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/06/arts/music/06shat.html (accessed August 2011). 15

Bronwyn Davies in Wyatt, Gale, Gannon and Davies, Deleuze and Collaborative Writing, 101. 16 Hickey-Moody and Malins, Deleuzian Encounters, 5.

14

reproducing a notion of differing from the norm, thereby implying a lack. An aim

throughout the project has been to show the lesbian composer as particular by virtue of

the ‘difference’ deriving from her sexuality, including the presence of this aspect in her

work rather than avoiding or covering it over, as has often been the case in mainstream

music history. I will also aim to show that this difference can be a source of creativity

and inspiration in her life and work.

Minoritarian

My project offers a view of myself as a composer who creates works in a variety of

assemblages, each of them continuously undergoing transformations and becoming-

other. The works effectively document these processes, and remain open to further

becomings in the future, through wider distribution (for example through publication),

new collaborations, and performances. It also explores the ways in which the new is

produced in relation to my sexuality as a lesbian composer, giving rise to what Deleuze

would suggest is a ‘minoritarian’ voice, a voice that expands the concept of a

normative, masculine voice. The lesbian composer, on the one hand, is viewed as

doubly ‘minoritarian’, through being both female and lesbian. For Deleuze,

‘minoritarian’ applies to people whose ‘mode of being is minority in nature.’17

In

contrast, ‘majoritarian’refers to bodies that are qualitatively dominant,18

and whose

defining term, such as ‘man’, is the standard even if the numbers in the group may be

fewer than those of the minoritarian group.19

On the other hand, the lesbian composer

may be conceived as expanding or subverting the norm. In a Deleuzian view, from the

minoritarian position a person has the power to destabilise the ‘norm’.20

For the lesbian

composer this means that she has the power to destabilise the dominant music with a

disruptive compositional voice. In other words, the dominant music is understood as the

music of male composers21

and the music composed within the dominant heterosexual

paradigm. The potential downsides of being minoritarian include being viewed through

17

Hickey-Moody and Malins, Deleuzian Encounters, 21, n. 22. 18 Hickey-Moody and Malins, Deleuzian Encounters, 21, n. 22. For Deleuze and Guattari, ‘man’ is the standard

and norm in relation to ‘woman’, and is a primary example of the idea of the majoritarian. In their thinking,

‘becoming-woman’ is a primary transformation or form of becoming-other that is required for change. 19

Claire Colebrook, Understanding Deleuze (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2002), xxv. 20 Deleuze favours the minoritarian, as it is the minoritarian that gives rise to difference. 21

Music in the post-serial stream coming out of the 20th

century has also had a majoritarian status, through

being viewed as emerging in a direct line from dominant earlier music such as that of the Romantic and

Classical periods. Pauline Oliveros, Eve Beglarian and I have all cultivated compositional voices that disrupt the

dominant post-serial strand, as well as the male and heterosexual norms, in art music.

15

stereotypes and the difficulties of having one’s work heard and accepted on the same

terms as others in the field, which would allow comparable and ongoing growth. As

Hickey-Moody and Malins write:

modes of evaluation that are shaped by resentment, judgment and negation tend

to reduce and close off bodily possibilities and potentials for change. By

contrast, those which affirm life and its positive capacity for difference, enhance

our range of powers and potentials.22

I show that my multiply-conceived voice as a composer, entangled with my consciously

or legibly lesbian sexuality, has grown as a result of entering different assemblages

involved in this project. These have included a composer-writer assemblage that

comprises Oliveros, Beglarian and, to a lesser extent, the New York City lesbian poet

Eileen Myles,23

as well as the assemblage including visual artist Flossie Peitsch and

others (people and other elements) at the Bundanon Arts Trust. This has resulted in an

increase in ‘affects’ for myself as a lesbian-composer-poet body – perhaps most

importantly, in an increased capacity to be open to the unknown in creative and

collaborative work.

Nomad/nomadic

In Deleuzian thought, the concept of nomad or nomadic is not so much about the idea

of a group of itinerant people being placeless as it is about what happens in the relations

that form between people as they are being composed.24

As Claire Colebrook writes,

nomadic space ‘is not a space with intrinsic properties that then determine relations (in

a way that chess pieces determine how movements might be enacted), but as a space

with extrinsic properties; the space is produced from the movements that then give that

space its peculiar quality.’25

Davies describes the collaborative writing of her group26

as

22

Hickey-Moody and Malins (eds), Deleuzian Encounters, 3. 23 Eileen Myles (b. Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1949) is a writer, poet, performer and teacher who studied at the

University of Massachusetts in Boston, and has been based in New York City since 1974. Myles moved to NYC

to become a poet, and was involved at St Mark’s Poetry Project (located at St Mark’s Church-in-the Bowery,

East Village NYC). Her writing includes poetry, non-fiction and fiction, and her activities as a performer/reader

of her own work have included touring with lesbian performance group Sister Spit (from 1997). 24

Eugene Holland, ‘Nomadicism + Citizenship’, in Adrian Parr, ed., The Deleuze Dictionary 2nd

ed.

(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 188. 25

Claire Colebrook, ‘Nomadicism’, in Adrian Parr, ed., The Deleuze Dictionary, 2nd

ed. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh

University Press, 2010), 187.

16

nomadic ‘in that it documented the flows in-between.’27

She goes on to say that the

‘nomads, together, become their own movements, and in that becoming are co-

implicated in each other, in the earth, the sky, the water. This is what we took from

nomadic writing’.28

In my work in this project, I have looked for ways in which

Oliveros, Beglarian and I move nomadically in the Deleuzian sense in and through

spaces and contexts, how we impact on and transform those contexts, destabilising

norms, and ways in which our lesbian sexualities play a part in our ‘territorialization’ of

the spaces we enter, understanding territorialisation as the way ‘life creates and furthers

itself by forming connections or territories’.29

My perception of Beglarian’s river

journey as embodying nomadic movement through many territories and communities is

mentioned above. In the discussion of my works I show that there have been moments

of destabilisation of the norms in the art music sphere through which I have moved, as

well as in the folk/acoustic music sphere in which I am embedded as a constantly

changing entity in Melbourne.

Striated space, smooth space, holey space

Hickey-Moody and Malins describe ‘smooth’ spaces as ‘those in which movement is

less regulated or controlled, and where bodies can interact – and transform themselves –

in endlessly different ways.’30

Striated spaces, by contrast, are described as ‘those

which are rigidly structure and organised, and which produce particular, limited

movements and relations between bodies.31

They explain that striations in space are not

always undesirable, as they facilitate efficiency in many situations (the example of a

classroom teaching situation is given), but stress the limitations for potential change

(for example, socio-political change) when space is striated – the system that was in

26

The group is referred to as ‘the JKSB assemblage’ – the four co-authors of the book (denoted by first name

initials), who entered into a four-way collaborative writing process. 27

Wyatt et al, Deleuze and Collaborative Writing, 137. On p. 7 the writers speak of ‘mobilis[ing] Deleuzian

thought to provide a means of looking at collaborative writing as performativity, as a means of becoming, each

in the space made possible by the listening presence of the others’ … the ‘space in-between the five of us’. On

133, Davies refers to the space-between as a place in which the writers could ‘open [them]selves to the endless

possibilities of becoming – becoming other to what we were, becoming what we might be in this space’. 28

Wyatt et al, Deleuze and Collaborative Writing, 138. 29

Colebrook, Understanding Deleuze , xxii. 30 Hickey-Moody and Malins, Deleuzian Encounters, 11. The authors reference Gilles Deleuze and Félix

Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (London: Athlone, 1987),

474–500, indicating that the concepts of smooth and striated space were developed by Deleuze with Félix

Guattari. 31 Hickey-Moody and Malins, Deleuzian Encounters, 11.

17

place for reception/processing of refugees in Australia on Manus Island32

is an example

of a striated space. Holey space is described as an ‘under-theorised’ concept by Hickey-

Moody and Malins.33

It is conceived by Deleuze and Guattari as connected

(metaphorically) with tunnelling and underground activity, and a description offered by

by Hélène Frichot designates holey space as ‘composed of passages forged through

smooth nomadic space and striated sedentary space without stopping at either one’.34

Frichot’s exploration of holey space is referenced further in the discussion of my work

Five Journey into Smooth Space Together below. It is the open and transformation-

favouring quality of smooth space that has found a place as a thread in my work, and

this concept is explored further within the discussion of Five Journey, having been

introduced in relation to the linked concepts of striated and holey space here.

Line of flight

According to Davies, the concept of a line of flight, as conceived by Deleuze and

Guattari, is a movement out of the known into the new and unknown or ‘not-yet-

known’.35

A line of flight is a radical movement that opens up something completely

new and unlike what has been before, often with an ongoing trajectory through an

extended period of time. Three major types of line are distinguished by Deleuze and

Guattari. The molar line organises rigidly and hierarchically, the molecular line

organises non-hierarchically and more fluidly, and the line of flight, is a ‘pure

movement of change, which breaks out of one form of organisation and moves towards

another.’36

An example of a line of flight in contemporary music in the twentieth

century is the radical departure from the serial aesthetic into that of tonality heralded by

minimalism. It could be argued that minimalism deterritorialized the aesthetic of the 12-

tone tradition thus creating a flight away from this rigid, academic style of composition.

32

The centre on Manus Island was officially closed on 31/10/2017. 33

Hickey-Moody and Malins, Deleuzian Encounters, 13. 34 Hélène Frichot, ‘Holey Space and the Smooth and Striated Body of the Refugee’, in Hickey-Moody and

Malins (eds), Deleuzian Encounters, 175. 35

Davies in Wyatt et al, Deleuze and Collaborative Writing, 136. 36

Ashley Woodward, ‘Politics Beyond Identity’, in Hickey-Moody and Malins (eds), Deleuzian Encounters,

69–70.

18

Yoko Ono’s decision in 1961 to open her loft in New York’s Lower Manhattan as a

space for music performances,37

with the first series curated by La Monte Young and

Richard Maxfield,38

was important in giving space to avant-garde and minimalist

music. Before 1961, Kyle Gann writes that ‘concerts in New York all happened

uptown, in the Lincoln Center area. Ono’s loft provided a big, open space conducive to

non-traditional modes of performance.’39

This departure, Gann argues, marked the

beginning of the Downtown scene in New York, in which composers position the

cultivation of a personal mode of expression over an attempt to remain within and

further a received compositional lineage, and in which media and materials that do not

carry a strong sense of tradition are favoured.40

The Downtown scene/aesthetic created

a whole different mode of expression in music, bringing in popular music and pastiche

while ‘thumbing its nose’ at the high-brow. This return to something earthy as a

movement away from the serial aesthetic towards a more ‘grass roots’ music, a political

move rejecting and destabilising what was dominant, can be understood as a line of

flight.

From the loft concert series, a new space opened up. It eventually led the way to a

revival of the pre-war American scene in which composers, such as Carl Ruggles

(1876-1971), Henry Cowell (1897-1965), Leo Ornstein (1895-2002) and George

Antheil (1900-1959), had worked for independence from Europe in American

composition,41

but whose efforts were sidelined by a focus on making American

composition a continuation of European tradition, primarily the 12 tone tradition, from

1933 onwards and particularly in the period 1946-1960.42

The Downtown aesthetic is

still thriving in the twenty-first century, although it is not as specifically/exclusively

located in Downtown Manhattan as it once was.43

The new music aesthetic born out of

Ono’s offering of her loft space for concerts has thus been sustained for over 50 years,

growing to involve composers from across many genres and styles. This included a

37

The music presented ranged through minimialist/noise/avant garde. 38

Kyle Gann, ‘Breaking the Chain Letter: An Essay on Downtown Music’, February 2012,

http://www.kylegann.com/downtown.html (accessed May 2013), section 1. 39

Gann, ‘Breaking the Chain Letter’, section1. 40

Gann, ‘Breaking the Chain Letter’, section 2. 41

Gann, ‘Breaking the Chain Letter’, section 2. 42 Gann, ‘Breaking the Chain Letter’, section 2. 43

In ‘Breaking the Chain Letter’, Gann explains that there was an influx of established European composers

including Stravinsky, Krenek, Weill, Bartók, Schoenberg and Hindemith to the US from 1933, when the Nazis

came to power, with a period of intense absorption of continental aesthetics in 1946-1960. The push for the

privileging of serialism came from Milton Babbitt and Roger Sessions (see section 2).

19

strand around John Zorn (1953-), involving free improvisers mostly from jazz

backgrounds, which challenged the dominance of the minimalist brand of Downtown

music in late 1980s, but receded after 1990, becoming just one strand among many in

the Downtown mix.44

Eve Beglarian’s shift in focus from the uptown and academic

composition scene in which she trained to the Downtown New York new/experimental

music scene around 1992 can be understood as a smaller-scale line of flight.45

Her

move from the uptown scene opened a new way forward when things were not flowing

easily for her.46

The Downtown scene enabled her to produce a body of work from that

time to the present that has emerged from the assemblage combining the skills from her

traditional training and the less tradition-bound possibilities of the Downtown scene.

Beglarian’s voice has emerged as one that combines the notated compositional

techniques studied in the university context with skills she acquired through her work as

an audio book producer in electronic composition and recording. Since then, she has

increasingly moved into multi-media work, developing significant collaborations with

video artists.

A discussion of three works composed with inspiration from Deleuzian terms and ideas

follows, with threads relating to ideas from Oliveros and Beglarian also drawn out

along the way.

2.2 Line of Flight (solo ukulele, 2012)

I will now move into the discussion of the works to be unfolded in this chapter, Line of

Flight, Five Journey into Smooth Space Together and Stone. I began playing the ukulele

in 2011, inspired by the work of alternative folk musician Rose Turtle Ertler,47

44

Kyle Gann, ‘Downtown Music and its Misrepresentations’, March 8, 2005,

https://www.kylegann.com/PC050308-DowntownMisrepresentations.html (accessed November 2018). 45

Frank J. Oteri, ‘Eve Beglarian: In Love with Both Sound and Language’, NewMusicBox: the Web Magazine

from the American Music Center, September 11, 2011 – a conversation with Frank J. Oteri, audio and video

recorded and edited by Molly Sheridan, transcribed by Julia Lu, edited by Frank J. Oteri, Molly Sheridan and

John Lydon, http://www.newmusicbox.org/articles/eve-beglarian-in-love-with-both-sound-and-language/

(accessed March 2012), 6, and Elizabeth Hinkle-Turner, Women Composers and Music Technology in the

United States: Crossing the Line (Aldershot, Hants and Burlington, VA: Ashgate, 2006), 146. 46

Oteri, ‘Eve Beglarian: In Love with Both Sound and Language’, 5. 47

Rose Turtle Ertler is an Australian singer-songwriter working with ukulele, banjo and other instruments

including the theremin, who describes the music on her 2006 CD Ladybirds of Crick Creek as ‘wonky folk

ukulele’. While squarely in the singer-songwriter realm, Ertler’s songs are somewhat more multi-layered than a

20

American ukulele virtuoso Jake Shimabukuro and Canadian player and educator James

Hill. Having viewed the ukulele in the past as a limited instrument, and never having

encountered it in the art music realm,48

I found that the ukulele produced a new stream

of musical ideas for me. In the lead-up to my collaborative residency at the Bundanon

Arts Trust, Shoalhaven Region, NSW, which I undertook with visual artist Dr Flossie

Peitsch49

in November 2012, I began composing Line of Flight, an instrumental piece

for solo tenor ukulele, and worked on it further there. In the piece I explored the

potential of the ukulele to trace a line of flight, from my understanding of the line of

flight as a way to access new territory, and to get something new to happen – in this

case, musically. For me, the ukulele offers a different quality and spirit from the guitar,

whose musical territory and sound have become somewhat habituated to our ears.

Taking on board Jake Shimabukuro’s description of the ukulele as an ‘instrument of

peace,’50

I began to view the instrument as having a minoritarian musical voice in

Deleuzian terms, against the majoritarian positioning of the voice of the guitar. I have

consciously aligned with the minor and the different in the ukulele and its voice,

seeking to highlight these in this piece and in the Nomadic Journeys song cycle.51

In

Line of Flight I am bringing the instrument from the folk/acoustic sphere into

contemporary art music with my own jazz/classical fusion voice, creating what I

believe to be a new contribution in the ukulele repertoire, with new affects proceeding

both for myself as a musician, and for listeners.52

At this time it is too soon to trace any

kind of ongoing trajectory opened up by the newness in this move but, given a wider

sharing and audience for the work, my hope is that it may make a contribution to the

broadening of ukulele practice, bringing this instrument into a context in which it is not

usually encountered. In trying to bring the ‘minoritarian’ voice of the ukulele into the

art music sphere, I was conscious of the potential for ‘destabilising’ the dominant music

lot of singer-songwriter material, with a musical fabric combining the ukulele with effects in conjunction with

electronic elements to the fore in her sound, bringing a composed feel to her work. As detailed in the CV on her

website, Ertler brings skills from her fine arts degree in sound/performance/installation to her work (see

http://www.roseturtleertler.com/cv.php, accessed December 2018). 48

For example, the ukulele was not being played alongside the guitar as a classical instrument at the music

faculty, University of Melbourne, where I completed my Masters in composition in 2009. 49

This residency and the work that proceeded from it are discussed in chapter 3. 50

John D. Sutter, ‘Virtuoso: The Ukulele Makes Peace’, CNN International Edition, March 11, 2010,

http://edition.cnn.com/2010/OPINION/03/11/ukulele.jake.shimabukuro/index.html (accessed December 2018). 51 Nomadic Journeys is discussed in chapter 4. 52

A listener/participant at the opening live performance for Belonging on 13/5/16 commented that a classical-

sounding work for ukulele was new to him, with popular music associations much more prominent. My research

so far has located various sources of transcriptions/arrangements of classical pieces for the instrument, but to

date I have not located anything that I would class as a contemporary classical or post-classical composed work.

21

in this realm, i.e. classical/concert instruments and virtuosity. In so doing, I aimed to

create a hybrid art/folk style derived from my own mixed background and emerging

jazz/classical fusion voice. I did not set out consciously to ‘seek the new’ but rather, in

the words of visual artist/practice-as-research scholar Barbara Bolt, was ‘open to what

emerge[d] in the interaction with the materials of practice.’53

In this process, a

combination of traditional notation and a tab staff more common in ‘fingerstyle’

acoustic/folk guitar music emerged as the best way to locate the music on the border of

art/folk, making it accessible to musicians in both areas.

Line of Flight was written at an early point in the process of my immersion in the

compositional practices of Oliveros and Beglarian. The impetus for completing the

piece came from the Bundanon environment – a place in which I was able to listen and

hear afresh, work with a Deep Listening meditation of Pauline Oliveros,54

and live with

a heightened awareness of nature. The piece came together as I became present to the

environment there, especially the Shoalhaven River (see Photo 2.1). In retrospect it

appears to me that my conscious alignment with the minor and the different in the

ukulele and its voice may have had a parallel with Oliveros’s embrace of the accordion

as a minor and ‘queer’ voice in the experimental/art music context which I had begun to

absorb. I began to use the ukulele in improvisation from 2014, paralleling Oliveros’s

use of her similarly portable accordion and other small/non-orchestral instruments such

as conch shell. Eve Beglarian has also made use of portable and unusual instruments

including the kazoo and the cuatro,55

but my knowledge of this post-dates my work on

Line of Flight.

53

Barbara Bolt, ‘The Exegesis and the Shock of the New’, TEXT No. 3 (2004),

http://www.textjournal.com.au/speciss/issue3/bolt.htm (accessed July 2018). 54 See chapter 3, n. 66. 55

Beglarian includes a kazoo solo in her cover version of Lovely Lady, a song by Professor Longhair

(https://evbvd.com/bookofdays/texts/0617/, accessed November 2018). In July/August 2018 I spent a few days

with Beglarian at her invitation, working on recording a demo song accompaniment on her cuatro (the cuatro is

a Venezuelan instrument in the ukulele family).

22

Photo 2.1: the Shoalhaven River at Bundanon. Source: Christina Green

In ‘Lesbian and Gay Music’,56

Brett and Wood position Oliveros’s ‘attachment to the

accordion’ as a possible form of protest connected with internalization of oppression

related to being lesbian/gay. They write that:

Many homosexual musicians combined … internalization of oppression with

some manner of protest, unarticulated though it may have been. The various

mechanisms thus employed are sometimes difficult to decipher, and musicology

has had as yet little experience with their cryptography, but they are arguably

always there.

Oliveros's cultivation of communal ‘deep listening’ and her attachment to the

accordion … or yet other aspects of the art and self-presentation of these men

56

Philip Brett and Elizabeth Wood, ‘Lesbian and Gay Music: the unexpurgated full-length original of the New

Grove II article, Electronic Musicological Review, volume VII, December 2002,

http://www.rem.ufpr.br/_REM/REMv7/Brett_Wood/Brett_and_Wood.html (accessed July 2018).

23

and women [listed] — might be read as signs of both an accommodation to as

well as subversion of the pervasive fact of the closet.57

I resonate with the ‘protest’ element suggested (but have no conscious resonance with

internalization of oppression). To me, Oliveros embodies a maverick spirit and an

‘outsider to the mainstream’ stance that could be seen in her embrace of the accordion

as her primary instrument, and in the particular composer/performer/improviser

package she developed around it. A generational quality in Oliveros’s stance around

visibility and being viewed as a lesbian can be read in the following thoughts from the

the liner notes to a compilation CD which also features a work by Beglarian. Oliveros

says:

For most of my career I have not spoken of sexuality and music. I grew up in a

threatening time for anyone who was not straight. There was always tacit

acceptance of me and my partners by the heterosexual community – a ‘don’t ask

don’t tell’ atmosphere. I of course participated in the perpetuation of this

situation. I thought it not necessary to make my sexual orientation an issue. I

didn’t think it had anything to do with my ability as a composer. I still don’t

think it does. However, it seems important to let other women who might still be

intimidated know that it is possible to be who you are regarding sexuality and

also participate in the larger community of composers. In 1970 I made a

statement publicly that I was a lesbian. It is 27 years later. Times have changed.

There is much more openness. I am glad to see that this is so.58

Like Beglarian, I am of a younger generation than Oliveros, and, by virtue of that, see

myself as being in a different position vis à vis visibility and ‘outness’ as a lesbian.

Internalization of oppression within oneself is very difficult to be completely aware

about – we live in cultures in which there are still strands of homophobia, and also with

the historical memory of times of greater homophobia, even in the urban west.

57

Brett and Wood, ‘Lesbian and Gay Music’, section II, ‘(Homo)sexuality and musicality’. 58

Lesbian American Composers (New York: Composers’ Recordings, Inc., 1998), liner notes (Pauline

Oliveros), 6.

24

Use of instruments that are non-traditional in art music is identified by composer/writer

Kyle Gann as a hallmark of the Downtown aesthetic,59

making it difficult to argue for

such use as a preserve of lesbian composers. That the experimental and Downtown field

can offer an art music context that is workable and welcoming to lesbian composers is

suggested by Beglarian. In a statement in CD liner notes,60

she says:

When it comes to actually trying to talk articulately about being a ‘lesbian

composer,’ the whole business of labelling and identity politics begins to make

me uncomfortable … However, having just downplayed the idea of ‘lesbian

identity’, I need to remind myself that when I was married and nominally

straight, I was also trying to function in the environment of academic music.

And as I entered into serious relationships with women, I also began to ‘come

out’ as a downtown composer, which has been a far more fruitful community for

me as an artist. It’s hard for me to imagine that the two identities, sexual and

artistic, aren’t inextricably intertwined. I’m way happier as a ‘downtown dyke’

than I was as an ‘uptown wife’, so go ahead and call me whatever you like!61

In the context of doing concerts in the more informal downtown spaces, Beglarian also

moved into greater involvement as a performer of her own music, and has described

this as being an important part of her process of coming to maturity as a composer.63

Seeing the workability of the Downtown/experimental/avant-garde scene for Beglarian

and composer/performers Oliveros and Meredith Monk64

has been important for me,

returning to art music after many years away from it, with a focus on working as a

singer-songwriter.65

As a fully notated fingerstyle piece, Line of Flight requires a

playing level beyond beginner on the ukulele, but it is short of virtuosic. It could be

59

See chapter 4, 118. 60 The liner notes of Lesbian American Composers. 61

Lesbian American Composers liner notes (Eve Beglarian), 15. 63

Oteri, ‘Eve Beglarian: In Love with both Sound and Language’, 7. 64

Monk had a partnership of 22 years with choreographer Mieke Van Hoek. She is acknowledged as a lesbian

musician and as an LGBT composer in the Categories list at the foot of the Wikipedia article about her

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meredith_Monk, accessed November 2018), but her sexuality is not the focus of

literature about her and her work. To my knowledge, Monk has not composed works that foreground sexuality,

but her compositions include Mieke’s Melody, based on a tune by van Hoek, which became track 5 on her CD

Impermanence (Munich: ECM Records, 2008). Monk’s work with this tune with hospice patients at Rosetta

Life in the UK is mentioned by Charles T. Downey in ‘Meredith Monk, Impermanence’, IONARTS: Something

Other Than Politics in Washington DC, February 26, 2006 (http://ionarts.blogspot.com/2006/02/meredith-

monk-impermanence.html, accessed November 2018). 65 See chapter 4, 118 for more on this.

25

viewed as a work for non-specialist, though not completely untrained, players,

paralleling some works by Oliveros.66

I would identify a connection with Oliveros’s

aesthetic in this way.

Line of Flight works with the cross tuning of the standard tenor ukulele, a feature that

contributes to the distinctiveness of the instrument’s voice, and which allows easy and

fast execution of repeated notes across more than one string. The sound fabric created is

suggestive of wind chimes, with a gentle flow and meditative feel (see musical example

2.1).

Example 2.1 – Line of Flight, bars 53-54.

I have also associated the idea of ‘line of flight’ in a humorous way with the portability

of the ukulele, which I have enjoyed being able to take as cabin baggage on various

flights in my nomadic journeying through spaces and contexts between 2013 and 2016,

making it the perfect fellow traveller.67

A challenge in composing this work was finding sufficient territory on the instrument to

generate duration. I worked with the opening thematic material (bars 1-8) at three

different pitches, the third adorned by the grace note seen in example 2.1, as steps

toward the continuous variation I value as a composer. An episodic structure is created

as a different idea emerges from the end of each presentation of the main theme. A

variety of textures and register is employed, with changes of time signature also

66

See chapter 3, 91 and elsewhere. 67 Ukuleles accompanied me on composition-related trips to the US in 2013 and 2016 and were used in

recording sessions at Cedar House Sound and Mastering in New Hampshire, with half the songs in Nomadic

Journeys recorded there in May 2016. The ukulele has also been a regular companion on my visits to the

Fairfield amphitheatre in Melbourne, where I have practised listening and improvising in the environment while

working on the compositions for my folio, with inspiration from the Deep Listening work of Pauline Oliveros.

26

creating variety. The use of grace notes in the final return of the A material at bar 53

creates an expansion in the texture on the last iteration, which, with some different

harmonic nuances, helps to create a sense of moving toward the end.

Line of Flight has moved through several contexts, beginning with an informal performance

at the Bundanon Arts Trust in 2012, followed by inclusion in materials sent for The Idea of

North, an exhibition of the work on canvas created by Flossie Peitsch on our Bundanon

residency at Framed Gallery, Darwin, June-July 2013. In 2016 it formed part of Belonging, a

selection of Flossie’s work accompanied by my music at the Uniting Church Centre for

Theology and Ministry in Parkville, Melbourne. In this exhibition, the manner of

collaboration between myself and Flossie shifted from how it had been at Bundanon, where I

composed in response to Flossie’s works, through having arrived at Bundanon later and

having other strands to tie up before I could begin composing.68

This time, Flossie expressed

that she wanted Line of Flight to be included in the exhibition and paired it with Recover, a

quilt piece by herself and her daughter Patience Peitsch.69

Line of Flight was also released on

my double CD Some Days�Life I Can Live (May 2017). The possibility of a commercial

product combining our visual art/music that could include Line of Flight is also under

consideration.

2.3 Five Journey into Smooth Space Together (wind quintet, 2015)

The second piece composed around inspiration from Deleuzian concepts is Five Journey into

Smooth Space Together. This work was written to fulfil my commission from the Sydney

Youth Orchestras as part of Western Sydney University’s Noise and Silence composition

mentoring project, and was performed by a wind quintet from the Sydney Youth Orchestras at

The Playhouse, Kingswood Campus, WSU .70

68

For more detail about the collaborative process behind Suite from Sighting Silence, Sounding Image, see

chapter 3. 69

See https://soundcloud.com/christina-green-composer/line-of-flight (accessed February 2019). A photo of this

work accompanies the track on SoundCloud. 70

The quintet comprised Clara Pitt, flute, Eve Osborn, oboe, Jessica Budge, clarinet, Maria Smith, horn, and

Eve McEwen, bassoon. The performance took place on September 10th, 2015.

27

I composed the work using a ‘program’ including theoretical ideas from Deleuze,71

and from

composer-writer Jennifer Rycenga’s ‘Lesbian Compositional Process: One Lover-

Composer’s Perspective’.72

The writing of the work also included a consideration of, and

attempt to work with, the aesthetic concept of ma.73

Ma is a gap or interval that is central in

Japanese aesthetic theory,74

a ‘between space’ in both the spatial and temporal sense. When

applied to music, sounds are dependent on the space(s) between for their existence, in the

interdependent relationship expressed in the idea ‘form is only emptiness, and emptiness,

form’, from the Heart Sutra, a central text in Buddhism.75

Although I was inspired by

Buddhist reading and images from 2003, and composing works with titles drawn from this

inspiration, Five Journey is the first work in which I have attempted to incorporate an

aesthetic principle from a non-western culture as a structural device, and this coincided with

beginning to draw ideas from the work of Pauline Oliveros,76

who was influenced by Eastern

thought.77

I have become more aware of the role of space/silence/stillness in composed music

as I have trained as a composer since 2007. It can create subtle effects and a musical fabric

that is different from the continuous stream of sound that characterises a lot of the popular

and chord-progression based music with which I worked before 2007.

Ma is also conceived, in a sociological application, as the gap or space (of communication)

between two people, or groups of people, in which understanding takes place.78

This

immediately called to mind a similar idea from my reading of the story of the Deleuze-

informed collaborative writing process undertaken by ‘the JKSB assemblage’.79

Early in the

book, we read that:

71 I created a storyline based on the process of becoming described in Deleuze and Collaborative Writing (Wyatt

et al, see n. 3). 72

See chapter 1, 1–2. 73

As summarised in a statement in the brochure for Noise and Silence, Western Sydney University/SYO, 2015,

the creative frame for the explorations of sound in the project was the Japanese concept of Ma in both its

framing ‘total noise’ aspect and in its ‘silent’ tensions in between the barrages; with freedom to be selective, I

chose to focus on the silence/gap aspect in my piece. 74

Adrian Snodgrass, ‘Ma as Space-Time Interval’, summary of ideas from ‘Thinking Through the Gap’, in

Adrian Snodgrass and Richard Coyne, Interpretations in Architecture: Design as Way of Thinking (Abingdon:

Routledge, 2006, 223–240). This summary was provided by Professor Snodgrass in a booklet, the Franklin

Forum Printed Program, for a forum featuring shakuhachi player Jim Franklin at WSU (then UWS), that took

place on 11/10/2012. 75 Snodgrass, ‘Ma as Space-Time Interval’, 2. 76

Material in Suite from Sighting Silence, Sounding Image was generated from a meditation from Oliveros’s

Deep Listening work (see chapter 3). 77

See chapter 3, 99. 78 Snodgrass, ‘Ma as Space-Time Interval’, 1.

28

Deleuze was a significant presence in our conversations, giving us the conceptual

impulse to enable us to become, at one and the same time, ontologically present to

ourselves and each other, and, at least some of the time, no longer separate identities

with boundaries to be managed and defended.

We constructed out of the flow of conversation among us, a play … with each of us

appearing as a “presence,” and with Deleuze as our fifth “presence.” That play

appears here [in this book] in a modified form as our first plateau: A play on and with

Deleuze and collaborative writing. It mobilises Deleuzian thought to provide a means

of looking at collaborative writing as performativity, as a means of becoming, each in

the space made possible by the listening presence of the others.80

The last part of this passage, with its reference to ‘the space made possible by the listening

presence of the others’, was what connected for me with the concept of ma as the idea of the

gap or space (of communication) between people in which understanding takes place.

To explain the title of my piece, expanding on the material offered in the introductory section

to this chapter, I will clarify that smooth space is a concept mobilised by Deleuze to describe

a place/context/set of conditions in which ‘bodies’ (human and other) can move and

experience with freedom and undergo transformation of a kind that increases their

capacities/affects, becoming or becoming-other. Smooth space is contrasted with two main

other kinds of space – striated space and ‘holey’ space. The difference between striated space

and smooth space is well illustrated by Mark Halsey. Halsey writes of changes at the Great

Australian Bight Marine Park in South Australia, which make it a much more ‘managed’

space than it once was, reducing freedom of movement and experience for whale watchers,

with walking along the cliffs now prohibited and viewing limited to a small viewing platform.

He says that:

Previously, one could follow in slow and reflexive fashion the trajectory of a whale as

it/we moved along the cliff face. Now, however, the encounter occur(s) not only at a

discrete moment in time, but a discrete point in space as well.

79

Jonathan Wyatt, Ken Gale, Susanne Gannon and Bronwyn Davies, who collectively named themselves ‘the

JKSB assemblage’, included Deleuze as an imagined fifth presence in their group, in Wyatt et al, Deleuze and

Collaborative Writing. 80 Wyatt et al, Deleuze and Collaborative Writing, 6–7.

29

A woman told me she thought (the park) was ‘quite good’ but that ‘it was a shame you

couldn’t move along with the whales’.

I think places such as the Great Australian Bight Marine Park need to grant people the

space to become-wave, to become-whale, become-plant, become-horizon, become

cliff-face … striated spaces tend to work against these ways of becoming.81

Holey space sits somewhere between smooth space and striated space in Deleuzian thought,

offering, as described by Hélène Frichot in her chapter in Deleuzian Encounters ‘Holey Space

and the Smooth and Striated Body of the Refugee’, the possibility of temporary respite’.82

Frichot also describes holey space as ‘a way out, a qualitative increase in power for the body

in question’.83

Striated space, clearly, is space in which freedom of movement of ‘bodies’ is

curtailed, minimised, managed, etc. – in which only a limited range of movement is laid out

as possible for the bodies in question. The image of what is possible for a bowling ball

thrown down a bowling alley track 84

is a useful one for imagining striated space. In our

world at the moment, the limitations on the movement of human bodies across borders as

millions of people flee countries and situations, become refugees and attempt to arrive at

other spaces and enter them safely, are a vivid example of experiences of striated space.

Two further passages from Deleuze and Collaborative Writing particularly stayed with me

and informed my writing of Five Journey into Smooth Space Together. In the first, Davies

says that:

‘In keeping our separate voices we have not sought to solidify ourselves into subjects

or subjectivities, but the reverse, to open ourselves to the endless possibilities of

becoming—becoming other to what we were, becoming what we might be in this

space’.85

81

Mark Halsey, ‘What can the (Full) body of an Eco-Tourist Do?’, chapter 9 in Hickey-Moody and Malins,

eds., Deleuzian Encounters. These becomings, as Halsey describes, drawing on Deleuzian thought, are about

becoming part of a milieu, rather than simply being an observer of it, in a subject-subject rather than a subject-

object relationship. This is a good example of parallels between Deleuzian philosophy and Buddhist thought. 82

Frichot, ‘Holey Space’, 175. 83

Frichot, ‘Holey Space’. 177. 84

I acknowledge my partner Jo Smith for this user-friendly image. 85 Wyatt et al, Deleuze and Collaborative Writing, 133.

30

In the second, she says that:

In freeing oneself of the burden of lying at the centre of an ego-bound existence, this

way of thinking frees oneself of oneself; one is released from narcissism and paranoia

into a radical relationality, into the spaces in-between, the intensities and flows of

Being’.86

Deleuze values a relationality that maintains individual difference but focuses on what is

shared. This is encapsulated in his concept of the ‘One-All’. Wyatt et al write that:

Deleuze struggled to find a way of bringing together this idea that we are all part of

the same Being, and at the same time, that we are multiple and emergent. In opposing

binary thought and categorisation, he was not interested in making us all the same, but

in finding how to think the multiple singularities within what he called the One-All:

“A single and same voice for the whole thousand-voiced multiple, a single and same

Ocean for all the drops, a single clamour of Being for all beings”.87

I made a connection between this Deleuzian idea of multiple singularities within the ‘One-

All’ and ideas advanced by Rycenga as she talks about her compositional process and her

process of working with musicians who are performing her music. Rycenga is speaking from

a position of being grounded in radical feminist thought, drawing on Sarah Hoagland’s

concept of autokeonony. She defines this as:

a self who is both separate and related, a self which is neither autonomous nor

dissolved: a self in community who is one among many … She does not merge with

others, nor does she estrange herself; she interacts with others in situations.88

Although there is a difference between the ways of thinking of Deleuze and

Rycenga/Hoagland regarding the place of individual subjectivity, and Deleuze is also dealing

with non-human as well as human ‘bodies’, there is a strong parallel in Hoagland/Rycenga’s

86

Wyatt et al, Deleuze and Collaborative Writing, 135. 87

Wyatt et al., Deleuze and Collaborative Writing, 2. The authors cite Deleuze, Difference and Repetition,

trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 304. 88 Rycenga, ‘Lesbian Compositional Process’, 280.

31

‘neither autonomous nor dissolved’ self and the Deleuzian conception of the individual voices

within the ‘One-All’.

Noticing that the group of instruments I had chosen to write for and the group of participants

in the JKSB ensemble were both 5 in number, I wondered if I could use the work as a ‘space

between’ (5 participants), referencing but taking a different take on the space-between idea

embedded in ma, in which ‘becomings’ could take place (in a composed rather than

improvised musical way).

In Five Journey into Smooth Space Together I paralleled the five instrumental voices in the

wind quintet with the 4 + 1 members of the JKSB assemblage. Giving the horn a different

kind of voice – imagining it as the voice of Deleuze and taking the voices through

explorations in solo, duo and ensemble sections in similar fashion to the processes undertaken

by the JKSB assemblage, I wanted the voices to have (in the musical terrain, and as Wyatt et

al. would put it) ‘a means of becoming, each in the space made possible by the listening

presence of the others’.89

I wanted to depict a trajectory from greater individuality/less

connectedness to less individuality/greater connectedness and enunciation as a kind of mini

‘One-All’. The title of the work references, with a touch of humour, the titles of Enid

Blyton’s Famous Five books, which are often about going to places.

As well as connecting with ma as a concept in the area of interaction/relating between people,

I wanted to embed it in the music in another sense mentioned in ‘Ma as Space-Time Interval’,

that of a pause to allow the awareness of the listener to grasp the whole, or at least, what has

just happened. This felt especially important in the context of this work with its foray into a

more atonal language than I have mostly used – it seemed that the denser contrapuntal

sections needed moments of silence, space, between them, to allow the listener to absorb

them. Ma is seen in the work in the arresting full-textured punctuating chords separated by

rests that appear several times, creating intervals in which the denser atonal contrapuntal

sections can be absorbed and are set in relief. It is also present in a different kind of space that

emerges in the sparser sections.

89 Wyatt et al, Deleuze and Collaborative Writing, 7.

32

A summary of the work is given in table form in Appendix A. Throughout the piece I aim for

contrast and balance between the different textures, as they follow the conceptual narrative,

with some decisions made on the basis of musical/compositional taste and craft within the

framework of the conceptual narrative.90

Referencing the table and the score, in the hocket-

inspired texture (bars 75-83), and also in the choice of a chamber ensemble of ‘like’

instruments in this work I am able to locate a small strand of connection and resonance of Eve

Beglarian in this work, though the musical language here is very different from hers. Threads

of influence from medieval music in both Beglarian’s and my work, and my admiration for

some of her textures, are discussed in chapter four, especially in the context of my work

Three Pieces for Women’s Voices, with Two Cellos (1987/1988-2012),91

while the connection

around writing for chamber groups of like instruments is also seen in Stone, whose discussion

follows in the next section of this chapter, and further in chapter four.92

Referencing the table, and in summary, the ‘neither autonomous nor dissolved’ state,

requiring effort to attain and sustain – in which each voice/being/body has to sustain both its

own enunciation and its commitment to relationality with the others, seems to me to be

amongst the highest that beings/bodies can attain, and it is the core idea that I am trying to

convey in the piece.93

The possibility of realising such a concept in a musical work is a core

reason to me to want to continue composing. My hope is that Five Journey into Smooth Space

Together, as a research-informed piece of creative work, together with my writings about it,

can, through becoming part of new assemblages in the future (for example through

publication and further performances), convey this core idea to wider audiences and play a

part in wider becomings.

My opportunity to write this piece came through an invitation to step into an assemblage

including the Asian Pacific aesthetic focus embracing Asian concepts such as ma that has

been cultivated in the practice-lead research area at Western Sydney University, feeding into

90

See chapter 3, 58/n. 64. 91 See chapter 4, 106, 111, 122. 92

See chapter 4, 119/n. 52. 93

My view of this concept is in part informed by my work as a music therapist trained in the Nordoff-Robbins

approach (Nordoff-Robbins Music Therapy Centre, London, 1993-1994) using the Nordoff-Robbins Rating

Scales, a tool for assessing client responses and for planning the next steps in the work. In the rating scales,

referenced in course materials drawn from Paul Nordoff and Clive Robbins’s Creative Music Therapy: A Guide

to Fostering Clinical Musicianship (New York: John Day, 1977) the highest level a client can reach in the

Levels of Participation area of the Child/Therapist Relationship in Musical Activity scale, level 10, is given the

description ‘Establishment of functional independence in the social coactivity of the group’.

33

composition, improvisation and performance. As a result of embracing ma as a lens through

which to compose alongside the Deleuzian lens and my own compositional voice and

aesthetic, my affects as a composer have been increased. I learned more about applying a

concept in this way, and about composing with a greater awareness of space/silence,

employing it here mostly as a ‘space between’ in which the listener can process and absorb

musical events. Eve Beglarian has said:

The more tools you have, the more flexibility you have in figuring out what you need

to do, what you want to do, what needs to happen. I put it in the passive because to me

that’s very much how it feels. It’s not up to me what needs to happen; what needs to

happen is up to the piece, and the more technique I have to bring to bear on letting the

piece be what it needs to be, the better the piece is.94

My experiment with a more atonal language than my usual predominantly tonal voice,

accompanied by the exploration of ma in this piece, was very much of this order – allowing

the piece to suggest what it needed, and working with technique to achieve a good result.

This practice-led research process effectively built on the experience of setting up my work in

Suite from Sighting Silence, Sounding Image (2012-2013) through using Pauline Oliveros’s

Open Field (1980) Deep Listening Meditation as an aesthetic tool and way to gather some of

the material for the work.95

My sense is that there were some mutual benefits in the

composer/SYO/WSU assemblage, with my work bringing its own musical world and

different background/theoretical framework (Deleuze, Rycenga) into the group of works

created for the SYO, many of which had more substantial connections with the Asian-Pacific

aesthetic.96

The brief for writing the work included an invitation to include a visual element. I

accompanied the work with a slide show which I operated in real time, without rehearsal with

the group, at the Playhouse performance, and joining the performers in this way was also part

of the assemblage experience, with a certain amount of unknowability of the outcome in

advance. This was a new skill for me, and I would happily explore this strand further, but

94 Raines, Composition in the Digital World: Conversations with 21

st Century American Composers (New York:

Oxford University Press, 2015), 256. 95

See chapter 3 for a discussion of this work and its composition process. 96

I believe it offered a particular window on the way working with conceptual material can shape a musical

work.

34

would seek a more interactive collaboration with instrumental performers than was on offer in

this context if attempting it again. I acknowledge inspiration from Eve Beglarian’s

performance work here, having observed her driving the live processing from her laptop in

YouTube videos, and witnessed the inclusion of video in a live performance.97

My slideshow consisted of my own photos of street art from around Melbourne’s inner

suburbs as well as selected photos from London and New York City. I have been noticing and

taking photos of street art since 2005, beginning in Montreal, and have noticed that my

interest has increased in recent years while working on my doctorate, an intense journey in

which I have often been working alone. As I have worked with the Deleuzian concept of the

nomadic – nomadic movement through spaces and contexts, I have experienced a connection

with the work of street artists, finding it speaking to me of their nomadic journeys, their

finding of ‘spaces-between’ in the urban landscape. I love looking up and seeing an

expression in a ‘space-between’ such as a brick wall – the paste-up images of Melbourne

artist Baby Guerrilla, and whose work adorns such spaces in Footscray, Newport, and

Brunswick, are full of movement. Baby Guerrilla describes the characters as ‘sometimes

flying, sometimes falling’, and this to me is a description of the Deleuzian ‘line of flight’ in

all its uncertainty – a journey into becoming, whose outcome is unknown, for the line may be

one of ascent or of descent. Seeing a street art image is, to me, somewhat akin to hearing a

‘mindfulness bell’ in Buddhism – a bell that is rung as a reminder to maintain mindfulness on

retreat, and connects for me with ma in the sense of a pause to allow the awareness of the

viewer/listener to grasp the whole. Seeing a street art image tells me that both this artist and I

are voices within the One-All … and with that reminder, it’s hard to feel alone for very long.

I chose images to reflect the character of the voices in my piece, to echo the individual, duo

and group textures, and to resonate with the movement that enlivens and drives the work. One

image from Brunswick, by Melbourne artist Kaff-eine, of multiple faces painted on a garage

door, spilling down onto the pavement, spoke to me of the multiple singularities in the ‘One-

All’ of Deleuze; I sought and received kind permissions from Kaff-eine and Baby Guerrilla

97

November 21, 1963: The Day Before, a concert of works connected in some way with this date, the day before

the assassination of president John F. Kennedy, including Eve Beglarian’s Light Up Your Face, a work about

the murder of Medgar Evers with text by Eudora Welty and visuals by Bradley Wester and Matt Petty, at

Symphony Space/Leonard Nimoy Thalia multi-use theatre, November 8, 2013. Before the SYO group’s

performance of Five Journey my work with visual elements had included the use of photographs of the visual

art of Flossie Peitsch (see discussions of Line of Flight and Suite from Sighting Silence, Sounding Image), and

the composition of music to go with a video created by video artist Josephine Telfer (Cosmos, 2010), and

incorporated into the video by her.

35

to use my photos of their images in the cover art for Some Days�Life I Can Live.

Permissions are required to use photos that foreground street art, and this would need to be

done for me to make any further use of the slideshow. So far I have received permission to

use one photo in connection with Five Journey into Smooth Space Together (see Photo 2.2).

In the area of trying to open future becomings for the Five Journey into Smooth Space

Together, I plan to contact the London New Wind Ensemble, a group who played an earlier

piece for winds that I composed in 2007, Thread for wind quartet, perhaps for a performance

at a future London New Wind Festival. I have experienced the efficiency of the assemblage

comprising publication98

and an online avenue for purchasing scores in conjunction with

having a composer profile on the Australian Music Centre’s website, leading in 2016 to

Queensland contemporary music and dance ensemble Collusion accessing my 2008 work

Free! for string orchestra, matching both their available ensemble and the thematic focus of a

performance they were working towards. In the immediate, I am grateful to the SYO for

permission to post the recording of Five Journey into Smooth Space Together on my

SoundCloud page, and to CoHealth Melbourne for permission to accompany the track with

the photo of the mural art depicting a group of five people on a door at their Footscray

premises, with the caption ‘refugees and asylum seekers Welcome’ (Photo 2.2). This

exuberant image somehow embodies the spirit of the Deleuzian becoming in the piece, with

echoes of leaps into the unknown, lines of flight, holey space and transformation-in-relation

all present in it.

98

I hope that publication through Wirripang: Home of Australian Composers will make the work accessible to

others who might be seeking new music for wind quintet.

36

Photo 2.2 – Mural welcoming refugees and asylum seekers at CoHealth, Footscray,

Melbourne, artist’s name unknown. Source: Christina Green

2.4 Stone (baritone, trumpet in C, trombone, bass clarinet, 2016)

I first came across Stone, a poem by Serbian-American poet Charles Simic (1938-), around

2008.99

The vivid imagery in the poem captured my imagination, and I began to picture it as

the text for a choral piece. I approached the publisher George Braziller in 2008 and was

granted permission to set the poem,100

but did not follow up on my idea until 2012. As I read

Deleuze-related material I was reminded of the poem, and now began to see in Stone an

invitation to ‘be’ a stone in a way that moves beyond subject and object separateness, for

example in the first two lines – ‘Go inside a stone/That would be my way, and in the last line

of the first stanza – ‘I am happy to be a stone’. I felt this could be expressed in Deleuzian

99

The poem appeared in Simic’s first book of poetry, What the Grass Says (Santa Cruz: kayak, 1967). 100 In an email from Maxwell Heller, permissions director, dated 4/10/2008.

37

terms as ‘becoming-stone’. I resonated with the focus on becoming a stone,101

going beyond

ideas of stone as symbol (Deleuze wants to move beyond symbolism and ‘representation’ and

to focus on the question ‘what can a body do’ rather than on identity102

) and moving into the

territory of the stone as a physical presence in the world and its connectedness as such with

other life. I saw a connection between this and Rycenga’s focus on physicality/materiality and

non-duality in ‘Lesbian Compositional Process’. Within a discussion noting the fixed formats

and written artefacts underpinning the historic Western art music definition of composition,

Rycenga offers a definition of composition that is more welcoming to the subjectivities and

input of performers and is more like a set of guidelines that ‘facilitates interactions with

musical materials … (that) encourages everyone – composers, performers, listeners – to

participate in the materiality of music itself rather than to have music depend on external

systems of validation’.103

Her view is ‘that music is alive in the network of connectivity in

which it participates’, and that ‘Our ability to conceptualize such possibilities is blocked by

dualism and binary thinking’.104

From late 2013 a new idea for the composition of this work appeared when I heard NYC-

based quartet Loadbang, comprising Jeffrey Gavett (baritone), Andy Kozar (trumpet), Will

Lang (trombone) and Carlos Cordeiro (bass clarinet) perform music by Eve Beglarian and

others at Roulette in Brooklyn, NYC, on November 10th. This was a first-hand experience of

new music performed in the New York Downtown scene, and also a chance to meet

Beglarian before our interview the following day. I resonated with the sonic effect of a group

of ‘like’ instruments, described by the group as ‘lung-powered’105

– particularly with the

contemporary combination of wind/brass and voice,106

and enjoyed hearing what Beglarian

was able to do with their sound across several works.107

As well as being captivated by

Loadbang’s sound and aesthetic, I appreciated the high levels of technical accomplishment

amongst the group. I was particularly impressed by the range of colours in Gavett’s voice,

and by his technical facility, and at some point also learned of his ability with overtone

singing, which, as ideas developed, I began to imagine complementing some of the imagery

101 In this thinking I was following a similar line to that of Mark Halsey in his becoming-whale idea (see page

29/n. 81 above). 102

See n. 1 above. 103

Rycenga, ‘Lesbian Compositional Process’, 278. 104 Rycenga, ‘Lesbian Compositional Process’, 278. 105

‘About Loadbang’, https://www.loadbang.com/about.html (accessed November 2018). 106

See chapter 4, 119. 107

The works performed were Island of the Sirens (2011), Light Up Your Face (2013) and Did He Promise You

Tomorrow? (2011).

38

in Stone. On return to Australia I approached Loadbang and they agreed to perform a work by

me, funded by my research funds, with a performance date of May 2nd

2016 in a concert of

premieres.108

The process of writing the piece for Loadbang was interactive and one of the most successful

in the course of writing for the folio. I was in email contact with three of the four musicians,

discussing minute specifics of the harmonics/overtones available with Gavett, the possibilities

for clarinet multiphonics with Cordeiro, and the mechanics of the project with Kozar. While

not seeking to write a set of instructions with the open-endedness and flexibility of the model

envisioned by Rycenga, I was certainly working with some of her ideals – ‘writing with

specific women and men in mind and working with their creative input’, and ‘valu(ing) the

subjectivity of … musicians in as many ways as possible’.109

I also met with the group to

workshop the piece before the Manhattan performance, and on this occasion felt a good

connection with the four musicians, that there was a mutual openness to refinements with

which both they and I would be happy.

Stone is one of three works composed for the folio in which I worked with a text by a writer

other than myself. This felt different for me than it did in earlier years as an undergraduate

composer starting out and working in a more traditional composition field, and following

many years of working almost exclusively with my own lyrics as a singer-songwriter. Some

of what I felt in this process is well expressed by Brooklyn-based ‘art songwriter’ Corey

Dargel. Dargel asks:

Have the composer and singer done the poet a favor by framing her or his poem with

original music which the poem inspired, and by introducing the poem to an audience

of music lovers who might not have discovered it on their own? Maybe…but now no

one in the audience can read the poem, not for a while anyway, without remembering

the music that goes with it.110

108 I initiated this approach after finding that I as a non-US resident I was ineligible to enter the group’s yearly

commission competition, which offered, with a touch of humour, a sum of $433 (referencing John Cage’s 4'33"

for any instrument or combination of instruments ,of 1952) as well as a performance of the winning entry. 109

Rycenga, ‘Lesbian Compositional Process’, 277. 110

Corey Dargel, ‘More Song, Less (Art)ifice: The New Breed of Art Song’, NewMusicBox: the Web Magazine

from the American Music Center, February 22nd

2006, https://nmbx.newmusicusa.org/More-Song-Less-Artifice-

The-New-Breed-of-Art-Song/ (accessed January 2018).

39

And in a similar vein, he says:

there are plenty of poets for whom the setting of poetry to music is anathema. They

don’t write poems to have them set to music, and they are understandably wary of

allowing another artist (with whom they have no personal relationship) to translate

their work into a foreign medium. Composers who set other people’s poetry have a

responsibility to consider how (much) they wish to respect or disregard its autonomy.

This is not a small consideration.111

In composing Stone I was aware of the stature of Charles Simic as a poet, his generosity in

giving me permission to set the poem through his publisher, and of the privilege involved in

setting such a well-known and loved poem. I was also aware of wanting to write alongside

the poem, in a way that could be seen as paralleling Rycenga’s description of herself as a

‘composer with music’, implying ‘an attempt to think with or think along with music,112

or, in

Gavin Carfoot’s words referencing Deleuze’s position on music, alongside music,113

rather

than to think about music in the abstract or at a distance.

I wanted some of the musical and tonal effects including overtone singing, groups of

short/sharply accented brass notes, and bass clarinet multiphonics, to be part of the setting,

aligning the ‘physicality’ of these musical attributes with the physical feel of the text. In this

exploration of sound ‘effects’ available to the voice and instruments I have reflected a small

influence of Pauline Oliveros in this work, picking up on the sound world of her Sound

Patterns (1961), a choral work composed entirely of noises and sounds. Oliveros has not been

my model for text setting, but I can somehow imagine her going inside the stone herself and

bouncing some of her improvised sounds off the ‘inner walls’, as she has done in various

cisterns with her Deep Listening Band.114

Following Deleuze, I think of my setting of the poem as just one of the developments that

may happen with Stone, viewing Stone as a ‘becoming-poem’ in the same way as I am

111

Dargel, ‘More Song’. 112 Rycenga, ‘Lesbian Compositional Process’, 280. 113

Gavin Carfoot, ‘Deleuze and Music: A Creative Approach to the Study of Music,’ University of Queensland,

2004 (Master’s thesis), 3. 114

See Deep Listening Band - Cistern Chapel Chance Chants (excerpt),

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_brDA7a7lE (accessed December 2018) for an example of this work.

40

encouraged by Deleuze and by Rycenga to view my own works as ‘becoming-works’. A

summary of the musical features and word painting in Stone is given in Appendix B.

In another article Dargel says that:

Some composers believe that they can “interpret” a poem by setting it to music. They

assume that the reader/listener must be guided through the poem and directed toward a

certain emotional response in order to appreciate the words. This approach follows an

established, Euro-centric hierarchy, in which the composer assumes the role of

superior, all-knowing creator, and subjects the audience to his or her will.115

I have used word painting in my setting, but not with a view to eliciting or guiding listeners

toward any particular emotional response. My main hope in writing this work was not to

create a ‘definitive’ presentation of the text, introducing it to others in a way that dictates

anything at all or excludes other presentations, but to offer one reflection on it, a reflection

that could perhaps play a part in giving listeners a space in which to ‘think alongside’ the

poem in a different way. Along the way, I have absorbed some ideas from Eve Beglarian

about ways of working with text in composition. In an interview with Michael Harren,

Beglarian says:

Part of the text thing for me is that I love songs and I listen to songs all the time but

I’m not necessarily that interested all the time in writing something that comes off as a

conventional song and so the spoken word thing is a way of being able to have text

and deal with stories or with verbal ideas that doesn’t seem like ‘this is a song and it

should be compared to all the other songs you’ve always heard or already heard in

your life. I think I’m really attracted to the musicality of the spoken voice, again not in

the ways that are being explored at the moment in pop music necessarily, but

sometimes in those ways … [a] more sort of nuanced sense of what you can do with

language, spoken language, you know.116

115

Corey Dargel, ‘How Do You Approach Putting Music To Words?’, NewMusicBox: the Web Magazine from

the American Music Center, February 1, 2002, https://nmbx.newmusicusa.org/how-do-you-approach-putting-

music-to-words-corey-dargel/ (accessed January 2018). 116

Interview with Michael Harren on Mikeypod – (MP0B62 I Composer Eve Beglarian I 206-339-6682, August

10th

, 2006, http://mikeypod.com/2006/08/10/mpob62-composer-eve-beglarian-206-339-6682/, accessed June

2018).

41

For me, Beglarian’s works in which a text/poem is set non-melodically as spoken word within

a composed musical fabric offer a kind of middle way for text, presenting it in a way that is

somehow less ‘superior and all-knowing’ (in the words of Dargel) and more in a realm of

‘thinking along with’ or ‘thinking alongside’ the text, as a composer, to borrow from Rycenga

and Carfoot. Hearing a spoken word work by Beglarian gives me a welcome introduction to

the poem she has chosen, but my listening leaves me with a sense of the poem as an entity

and of a musical world also existing in its own right, and my mind may return to either one

separately at any time. Informed by these expressions of Beglarian’s, I have worked with text

in several different ways across this project.117

Happy to have created a setting that sits

between composition and song and which is successful in its attempt to offer just one

reflection on the text, I am not closed to setting texts by others, but want to continue

experimenting with bringing my own lyrics to art song (see the discussion of Nomadic

Journeys in chapter 4), and to work more closely with writers who are interested in being

more directly part of an assemblage that produces works than the minimal connection with

poet Charles Simic involved in this setting of Stone. I also plan to go further with non-

melodic text setting, building on my work in Eileen’s Vision (see the discussion of this work

in chapter 4).

An important part of this project for me was being part of an assemblage including Charles

Simic’s Stone, Loadbang and its connections with the New York Downtown scene and the

opportunity to have my work performed by them there, and the chance to ‘become what I

might be … in this space’.118

My hope is ultimately to submit my work for publication,

pending hearing back from the publisher of the poem with the necessary permission. The

recording is available for public listening on my SoundCloud page,119

and this link was used

by Australian online music program Making Waves, in their Vocal Waves playlist, September

2017,120

getting the work out to a wider audience. Eve Beglarian’s online presentation of her

works with accompanying text/images/video makes them available for online consumption in

a way that (speaking for myself at least) draws the listener/reader/viewer back to her website

117 See chapter 4, 112. 118

Wyatt et al, Deleuze and Collaborative Writing, 133. 119

See https://soundcloud.com/christina-green-composer/stone (accessed February 2019). 120

See https://makingwavesnewmusic.com/2017/09/01/vocal-waves-september-2017/ (accessed February

2019).

42

for more, and documents her own becoming as a composer.121

I am currently working on my

own presentation system online, an enjoyable work in progress.122

Photo 2.3 – with Jeff Gavett at The National Opera Center/Opera America, May 2016.

Source: Orly Krasner

121

See https://evbvd.com/ (accessed February 2019). 122

See https://soundcloud.com/christina-green-composer. I have found SoundCloud to be a great home for

recordings of my works, offering space for both visual and text elements with tracks uploaded, and the page is

linked on my website https://www.christinagreen.net/.

43

Chapter 3

Works Drawing Inspiration from Pauline Oliveros

This chapter focuses on five works inspired by my study of the work of Pauline

Oliveros (1932-2016) – Suite from Sighting Silence, Sounding Image (2012-2013),

Native Language (2017), Ground Thunder Returns (2017), and two improvised

realisations of text scores by Oliveros, In Consideration of the Earth and Ear Rings.

3.1 Background

In 2007, Oliveros and her partner Carole Ione Lewis1 performed electronic works at a

concert in the Liquid Architecture 8 Festival at the North Melbourne Town Hall which I

attended. I found the sound world created by Oliveros and Ione immersive and

beautiful. In subsequent listening I was captivated by the sound worlds that Oliveros

created, in Pea(ce) Soup (performed live at Liquid Architecture 8) which combined the

sound of peas landing in a metal bowl with other sounds, and the accordion and

vocalisations of Horse Sings From Cloud. 2 Oliveros’s Echoes From the Moon (1987)

was my introduction to the strand of Oliveros’s work with musical/sonic events in

which audience members and people who are not necessarily trained as musicians can

participate in the performance.3 Aspects of this work chimed with the Deleuzian

concepts with which I was working. In Echoes Oliveros uses her compositional practice

to facilitate opportunities for participants to become-other in Deleuzian terms, giving

them the chance to ‘talk to’ the moon – to send short vocal phrases to it – and hear these

reflected back from the moon’s surface via a ham radio rig with antennae large enough

to receive the returning signals.4

1 Carole Ione Lewis is often known as ‘Ione’, for example in the context of her creative work and collaborations

with Pauline Oliveros, and on her website, http://www.ionedreams.us/. I will refer to her as Ione in the text to

follow. 2 This realisation of Horse Sings From Cloud (1977) is on the CD Pauline Oliveros: Accordion and Voice

(Groveland, Mass., Important Records, 2006), one of two CDs I purchased from Oliveros at the 2007 concert. 3 Pauline Oliveros, Echoes From the Moon: Notes, www.deeplistening.org/pauline/writings/moon.html,

(1/01/2002, accessed c. 2007). 4 Oliveros, Echoes. The returned sounds were shifted downward slightly in pitch due to a Doppler effect caused

by the motion of the moon relative to the earth. Oliveros explained that the idea for Echoes had come from

44

Documentation of several realisations of Echoes is minimal, and includes technical

instructions for Yagi antennae, descriptions of receiving an echo, of instruments used,

and in one case the music and text performed by Oliveros and Ione. The 1999

performance at the Hofe-Fest in St Polten, Austria included music (Oliveros’s

accordion playing) and text provided by poet, author and playwright/director Ione,5 – an

extra layer of content and meaning was added through this contribution of a text to be

spoken to the moon, designed to help the audience direct their voices to it.6 In this

installation I recognised that Oliveros had created a smooth space7 – a space/context

relatively free from regulation and hindrance, in which participants could work in the

realm of the imagination and direct experience, enlarging their sense of being able to

connect with bodies beyond the earth.8

Oliveros’s work has provided inspiration on several levels. The sound world created by

Oliveros in her improvised solo accordion playing was unlike any other I had heard in

art music. It resonated with ambient and meditation music I had enjoyed, but it also

conveyed a greater underlying cohesion and a thread of compositional thought, giving

shape and direction, with a sense of arrival and completion at the end of the c. 22-

minute piece. The possibility of a composed music with strong links to improvisation

was present in this music for me, and this has been with me as I have developed my

compositional voice since 2007, and more consciously in this project, informed by wide

reading about Oliveros. What spoke to me from Echoes was the focus on what

participants would get out of the experience, and on the privileging of the imagination

in the process. The inclusion of the poetic contribution by Ione in a later performance

makes Echoes a work in an ongoing process of becoming, rather than being static and

unchanging, and is also an early example of collaborative work between Pauline and

Ione as partners.9

watching the first moon landing in 1969 by US astronauts on television, saying: ‘I thought that it would be

interesting and poetic for people to experience an installation where they could send the sound of their voices to

the moon and hear the echo come back to earth. They would be vocal astronauts’. 5 See n. 1 regarding the use of the name ‘Ione’ to refer to Carole Ione Lewis.

6 Oliveros, Echoes.

7 See chapter 2, 16 and onward.

8 Christina Green, ‘Nomadic Lesbian Composition in the Work of Pauline Oliveros, Meredith Monk, Eve

Beglarian and Christina Green: A Musicological Study and Composition Portfolio,’ UWS PhD proposal, 2011,

3 and 5. 9 See chapter 4, 117 and note 46 for a reference to creative work by Oliveros in the context of an earlier lesbian

relationship.

45

During my interview on January 21st, 2014 with Oliveros,

10 the composer made it clear

that it was not her wish to foreground her identity as a lesbian. When I asked her if her

life experience as a lesbian was something she felt had shaped her creative work, and if

so, how it had done so, Oliveros responded by referring to the work of Martha

Mockus,11

saying that:

Well, I don’t really tend to think of it that way. You know, I just am who I am

… and you know, I kinda resist labels and categories as much as possible.

Martha Mockus is reading my work in her way … it’s very much her vision.

She spoke of having grown up in a rough time in Houston, Texas, when there was

danger involved in being different, and then said that:

It’s not out of fear, I think, that I resist the label [of lesbian] but I just feel that I

really am who I am through many different aspects of experience in my life, you

know. Music was very important to me, and what I pursued, and when I was

sixteen I understood that I wanted to be a composer, and said so.

In this way, Oliveros asserted her identity as a composer as primary. But when I asked

her if there were any works that she had written that had been inspired by her

relationship with Ione, Ione chimed in from the background and said ‘Yes, yes! She

says yes, all of ‘em’. Oliveros continued, saying

I think the relationship with Ione has been a very wonderful dynamic and very

stabilising and exciting in all kinds of ways and when we first got together we

began to work on a major theatre piece, which was Nzjinga the Queen King12

and I mean of course we’ve done four or five pieces of that stature, that nature,

you know, big opera-like things, and a lot of that work is certainly inspiring, and

she’s an inspiring person, and we’re very different, but the differences seem to

10 This interview took place via Skype. 11

Martha Mockus, Sounding Out: Pauline Oliveros and Lesbian Musicality (New York: Routledge, 2008). 12

Nzinga the Queen-King, about 16th

/17th

century Angolan queen Ana Nzinga, was premiered at the Brooklyn

Academy of Music as part of the Next Wave Festival in December 1993 (see Pauline Oliveros, ‘Cues,’ The

Musical Quarterly, Vol. 77, No. 3, Autumn 1993, 379).

46

work together really well, so it’s a larger, more over-arching kind of experience

perhaps than those earlier works that Martha identified in that way.13

Horse Sings from Cloud (1977, accordion and voice), which began its life as Rose

Mountain Slow Runner (1975) and was subsequently renamed The Pathways of the

Grandmothers (1978, in honour of Oliveros’s maternal grandmother Pauline V.

Gribben) is an example. Mockus describes the development of this work in the context

of changes in Oliveros’s personal life at the time, connecting Rose Mountain Slow

Runner with Oliveros’s relationship with performance artist Linda Montano. She reads

it as an expression of lesbian desire in which she hears ‘the musical eroticism of a

butch-femme dynamic’ particularly in Oliveros’s vocal production, which she

characterises as ‘butch vocality’.14

The Wanderer (1982) is a second work read by

Mockus as a musical expression created by Oliveros in the context of a lesbian

relationship, in this case, with dancer Deborah Hay, saying ‘To me, The Wanderer

sounds out a musical valentine to Deborah Hay’.15

In her explorations of the works,

Mockus draws on archival material including letters, citing a letter written by Oliveros

to Hay in which Oliveros speaks of a ‘secret relationship’ (apparently in response to a

letter from Hay to herself, also mentioned), and writes: ‘Well, I’ll play it on my

accordion. And I won’t tell anyone what’s informing the piece’.16

Throughout my research on Oliveros’s works and reading of writings by and about

her,17

I have held these ‘lesbian readings’ of Oliveros’s works by Mockus18

alongside

13

Mockus, Sounding Out, 91–112. 14

Mockus, Sounding Out, 108. 15 Mockus, Sounding Out, 114. 16

Mockus, Sounding Out, 113. In n. 46 Mockus gives the source of the ‘early October’ letter from Hay to

Oliveros as Box 11 of the Oliveros Archive in the New York Public Library. The letter from Oliveros to Hay is

acknowledged as a ‘draft of a letter from Oliveros to Hay, October 20th

, 1982 in n. 47. 17 In the interview I asked Oliveros about a number of her pieces with witty and quirky titles, such as Saxual

Orientation (from the Anthology of Text Scores, see n. 140), Is There An Accordion In Your Closet (from The

Roots of the Moment, 1998), and Sex Change, The Gender of Now – There But Not There (from the Anthology of

Text Scores), saying that I wondered if she was bringing something from her experience of the lesbian/gay/queer

life into those titles. She replied that she wasn’t thinking of it necessarily in that way, but that it could be read

that way although it was not necessarily her intent. ‘But I do enjoy twisting things’, she said. 18

I also include here Mockus’s reading of Oliveros’s Time Perspectives (1960) as a ‘sonic portrait of her lesbian

household’ with her partner of that time, Laurel Johnson (see chapter 4, 117). A final ‘lesbian reading’ by

Mockus that I want to note is her connection of the prose poem accompanying Horse Sings from Cloud (see this

chapter, 72) with Deborah Hay, who believed she had been ‘given’ a name, ‘Dancing Breath’, while doing a

movement practice. Mockus argues that Oliveros wrote the poem for Hay, having found it, with an opening line

‘To dancing breath’, written on the page of a catalog containing a brief autobiographical essay by Hay

explaining how she received this name (see Sounding Out, 111–112).

47

the stance Oliveros took in our interview in a kind of tension, but essentially choosing

an acceptance of her position as expressed in the interview I did with her in 2014. I

have chosen to work with things as Oliveros clearly wanted them to be viewed at this

time in her life, however she may have viewed them at earlier times.19

In our interview,

Oliveros stopped short of validating the readings of Mockus of her earlier works as

informed by the stuff of lesbian relationships, but in the introduction to Sounding Out,

Mockus acknowledges Oliveros’s generosity with time and support, trust with many

details of her personal life and the granting of access to her archives in San Diego and

New York,20

making it difficult to simply disregard the connections she has traced. It is

fair to say that her view of Oliveros as embodying lesbian musicality as a

composer/performer has accompanied my journey in this project, but that I have sought

to build my own picture in light of Oliveros’s responses to my questions. Oliveros made

public statements to the effect that she was a lesbian,21

but mostly did not choose to

take up a vocal stance for lesbian visibility, or foreground strands of inspiration from

lesbian culture, for example texts by lesbian writers, in her compositions. Even her

1966 electronic work, Participle Dangling in Honor of Gertrude Stein, created at the

University of Toronto with a 20-channel loop machine invented by Hugh Le Caine

known at the time as the Special Purpose Tape Recorder, is described by Oliveros as

referencing Gertrude Stein’s use of repetition in her writing, with no reference to Stein

as a lesbian artist, though it seems difficult to believe that Oliveros would not have had

a sense of Stein as a lesbian.22

In keeping with the main drive of her work, Oliveros’s

19

In Sounding Out, Mockus makes a strong case that Oliveros’s Sonic Meditations (1971-1974) were developed

in a lesbian/feminist context (they were workshopped by the ♀ Ensemble, a group of lesbian and heterosexual

women around Oliveros) and underpinned by an approach to music informed by lesbian/feminist ideas. In her

discussion she references the work of Jennifer Rycenga in ‘The Uncovering of Ontology in Music: Speculative

and Conceptual Feminist Music’ (Repercussions Volume 3, No. 1, Spring 1994, 22-46). In this article, Rycenga

offers a list of things that could be seen as shared by music and feminism – these are non-dualism, non-

hierarchic structure, acknowledging the importance of material reality, listening and giving attention to the

voices of women, dialogic nature and respect for the agency and limitations of others, and argues that in the

Sonic Meditations Oliveros ‘observes all of these by ‘rethinking the function, purposes, power and physical

realities of music’ (44–45). 20

Mockus, Sounding Out, vii. The introduction is titled ‘Incantation’. 21 See chapter 2, 23/n. 58. I believe that a generational quality comes across in Oliveros’s stance around

visibility and being viewed as a lesbian in this statement. 22

Oliveros, Pauline, ‘Participle Dangling in Honor of Gertrude Stein: Composing with Hugh Le Caine’s Special

Purpose Tape Recorder at UTEMS in 1966,’ https://econtact.ca/17_2/oliveros_lecaine.html (accessed November

2018). In this article drawing on a session at the 2014 Toronto International Electroacoustic Symposium (TIES)

moderated by Gayle Young, Oliveros describes her use of a recording of the words “but is it music?” as the

participle that she ‘wanted to dangle’, and saying that she wanted to honor Stein ‘because she also had

opposition to her art such as: “Why do you repeat things over and over again?” You can ask the minimalists that

too, in painting and music – so that’s the way it goes.’ In neither this discussion with Young, nor in one with

48

focus in Participle Dangling is on sound, and she picks up on a core style element in

Stein’s writing, repetition, translating it into a musical context. It has been significant to

me to see Oliveros at work in her ongoing collaboration with Ione, to whom she was

married in 2005 in Montréal.23

In this long-term relationship the composer brought

together her personal and artistic lives, and her life as a lesbian was very visible in this

way.

From my interview with Oliveros and from my exploration of her works, what comes

across is a desire to operate as ‘ordinary’, and with her composer identity to the fore; a

desire to explore the difference inherent in living as a lesbian, from a place of

philosophical or political motivation, is not conveyed to me. Oliveros’s contribution to

the compilation CD Lesbian American Composers was Poem of Change (1992).24

The

spoken text in this work consists of questions such as ‘is sexism real?’, and ‘is racism

real?’, and between the questions, short phrases centred around the word ‘change’ – e.g.

‘change the same thing’, ‘change the other thing’, etc. Although she could have done

so, Oliveros did not include any question or focus on heterosexism in the text of this

work, written by herself. I asked Oliveros about her choice of this work for inclusion on

the CD in our interview, and she stressed that she did not name the album, and chose

Poem because she ‘needed something that could apply to the situation without being

just that’. This response indicates again that making a statement about being a

lesbian/difference is secondary to her imperative that it be about music first and

foremost.

Along with Participle Dangling, Poem is one of several works in Oliveros’s output that

highlight or reference women and/or women’s issues in some way. Another is

Quintuplets Playpen (2001), written as Oliveros’s contribution to a group of works

commissioned by pianist Sarah Cahill from seven women composers to celebrate the

centennial of composer and folklorist Ruth Crawford (later Crawford Seeger) (1901-

1953). Regarded as the first great modernist woman composer, she stopped composing

Mockus in which Participle Dangling is mentioned (Sounding Out, 157) does Oliveros make any connection

with Stein as a lesbian writer. An audio link is included in the article. 23

Mockus, Sounding Out, 145. In this conversation with Mockus, Oliveros also says that she and Ione met in

1985 or 1986. 24

See n. 21.

49

in 1932 ahead of the birth of her first child the following year.25

In this work, Oliveros

took a similar compositional approach to that in Participle Dangling, focusing on the

creation of a sound world, and, as one of the older generation of

composers writing for the project, ‘went more for music like Crawford’s own’. Rather

than her ‘usual meditative style’ she wrote ‘an abstract constructivist piece … in

five-against-two rhythms, an attempt to match the idiom she was writing in the year

Crawford died.’26

Her work is effectively a homage to Seeger which, along with those

by the other six women composers commissioned by Cahill, created a tribute

underpinned by a sense of anger at the truncation of Seeger’s career for child-raising.27

Another work in which Oliveros set out to highlight women’s issues is To Valerie

Solanas and Marilyn Monroe in Recognition of their Desperation (1970). By way of

introduction to this work, Oliveros said:

The women's movement was surfacing and I felt the need to express my

resonance with this energy. Marilyn Monroe had taken her own life. Valerie

Solanas had attempted to take the life of Andy Warhol. Both women seemed to

be desperate and caught in the traps of inequality: Monroe needed to be

recognized for her talent as an actress. Solanas wished to be supported for her

own creative work.28

In conversation with Mockus, Oliveros describes her connection with Solanas’s self-

published, radical feminist SCUM Manifesto (1967), her reading of which catalysed To

Valerie Solanas and Marilyn Monroe. She describes Solanas as ‘a street kid, a street

feminist’,29

bringing consciousness of class that could perhaps have resonated with her

own sense of class, expressed in her thoughts about her adoption of the accordion as her

primary instrument – ‘For me the accordion is a symbol of the outsider. Accordion

25

Kyle Gann, ‘Composer Interrupted: Sarah Cahill Unleashes an Angry Stream of Ruth Crawford Homages’,

The Village Voice (Music), December 25th

, 2001, https://www.villagevoice.com/2001/12/25/composer-

interrupted/ (accessed January 2019). Seeger’s first child was Mike Seeger, who became a folksinger. For more

detail and background to the work composed by Eve Beglarian for the same commission/event, see chapter 4,

107/n. 7. 26

Gann, ‘Composer Interrupted’. 27

Gann, ‘Composer Interrupted’. 28 Pauline Oliveros, quoted in ‘Pauline Oliveros: To Valerie Solanas and Marilyn Monroe in Recognition of

their Desperation (Lp), notes and review to the 2011 Roaratorio release of the work (1970 and 1977

performances), Soundohm, https://www.soundohm.com/product/to-valerie-solanas-and-marilyn-monroe-in-

recognition-of-lp/pid/16299/ (accessed January 2019). 29 Mockus, Sounding Out, 155.

50

music is associated with the working class and has no place in the establishment

musical organizations representing the Western musical canon’,30

as well as her

descriptions of her childhood in a somewhat non-traditional household in which her

mother and grandmother were the breadwinners, generating income through

instrumental teaching.31

Oliveros was interested in the structure of community

described by Solanas in the Manifesto, and based the ‘deep structure’ of her piece on it,

describing it in the conversation with Mockus as follows:

Everybody had the same part. There were rules about how to be part of that

musical community in the piece so that each person could express themselves,

in terms of the pitches, and the way they used the pitches within the three parts

of the piece. If anyone became dominant, then the rest of the group would come

up and absorb that dominance back into the texture of the piece. So that was me

expressing at the deep structure what the SCUM Manifesto meant. From there,

you know, I went on to do Sonic Meditations and many other pieces, but it was

really out of that understanding of both community and the individual – which

was in her manifesto – that became the principle, or the philosophy, of the music

I began to write.32

This description resonates with the approach I used in Five Journey into Smooth Space

Together, bringing philosophical strands from Deleuze and Rycenga, tracing ‘a

trajectory from greater individuality/less connectedness to less individuality and greater

connectedness and enunciation.’33

Although I did not recall reading about Oliveros’s

process in To Valerie Solanas and Marilyn Monroe in my work on Five Journey, there

is a chance that I had absorbed this and perhaps drew on it unconsciously. It seems fair

to make a connection between the focus on women’s lives and issues in these works of

Oliveros and the focus on women she had as a lesbian. Valerie Solanas is noted as

having come out as a lesbian in the 1950s,34

and this creates a reference point to a

30 Pauline Oliveros, ‘The Accordion (& The Outsider),’ in Sounding the Margins: Collected Writings 1992-2009

(Kingston, NY: Deep Listening Publications, 2010), 159. 31

Mockus, Sounding Out, 12. 32

Mockus, Sounding Out, 155. 33 See chapter 2, 31. 34

Joyce Chen, ‘Valerie Solanas: 5 Things To Know About Lena Dunham’s ‘American Horror Story’

Character’, Rolling Stone, September 19th

, 2017, https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/valerie-

solanas-5-things-to-know-about-lena-dunhams-american-horror-story-character-253318/ (accessed January

2019).

51

lesbian life paralleling the one to Gertrude Stein in Participle Dangling. To Valerie

Solanas and Marilyn Monroe is (to the best of my knowledge) an instrumental work

without text.35

The performance instructions include the following:

Oliveros’s composition asks the performers to choose five pitches each and to

play very long tones, modulated or unmodulated. In the middle section of the

piece the performers are invited to imitate each other‘s pitches and modulations.

The cues in this piece are given collectively through light – a red section is

followed by a yellow and a blue section, and there are two additional cues given

by strobe light.36

Offering a mini analysis of the work’s process, film installation artists Pauline Boudry

and Renate Lorentz, who worked with To Valerie Solanas and Marilyn Monroe,37

write:

The piece To Valerie Solanas and Marilyn Monroe in Recognition of their

Desperation values the unpredictable and unknowable possibilities that might be

activated by not specifying pitches and rhythms. Nothing is known in advance

of making the music. The instructions are chosen in order to insist on ‘a

continuous circulation of power’ (Oliveros) between listening and sounding – a

give and take that requires, as Oliveros says, an unusual attention to the

relationship between oneself and others.38

The not-knowing in advance of the music making chimes with the transformations

coming out of the Deleuzian assemblage, ‘always unknowable in advance’.39

The

‘continuous circulation of power’ mentioned here calls to mind the following, from

Suzanne Cusick:

35 The notes and review to the Roaratorio release (see n. 28) describe the 1970 performance as by a 14-piece

ensemble, and the 1977 performance as by a 43-piece orchestra. 36

Pauline Boudry/Renate Lorenz, ‘To Valerie Solanas and Marilyn Monroe in Recognition of their

Desperation,’ Installation with Super 16mm film / HD, 18 min., 2013 (performance by Rachel Aggs, Peaches,

Catriona Shaw, Verity Susman, Ginger Brooks Takahashi and William Wheeler), notes, https://www.boudry-

lorenz.de/to-valerie/ (accessed January 2019). 37

See n. 28. 38

Boudry/Lorentz, ‘To Valerie Solanas and Marilyn Monroe’. 39 See chapter 2, 11–12/n. 11.

52

Is there a lesbian, as I’ve defined her, in all this love? For me, yes: for when I

play the fourth variation, a great deal of my pleasure derives from the jumbling

of who’s on top – am I playing “Vom Himmel hoch” or is she playing me? In all

performances that give me joy, the answer is unclear – we are both on top, both

on our backs, both wholly ourselves and wholly mingled with each other. Power

circulates freely across porous boundaries; the categories player and played,

lover and beloved, dissolve.40

Cusick’s philosophy post-dates Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto and Oliveros’s To Valerie

Solanas and Marilyn Monroe, but it is interesting that as a musician thinking music

through the lens of her experience as a lesbian she arrives at similar ideas about power.

A power-sharing model is upheld by Oliveros in collaborative improvisational work.

Her connections with other women composers and improvisers grew, especially in the

1990s.41

Reflecting in 2004, she writes:

Improvising with women brings about a feeling of kinship, collaboration and co-

operative listening. The music is about inclusion rather than exclusion. There is

less emphasis on technical mastery and more concern for sounds weaving into

shared textures. I feel that I have been heard and included in consciousness as a

collaborator, rather than regarded as an intrusive competitor.42

In the midst of her discussion of women improvisers and gender questions in women’s

improvisation, Oliveros makes a rare direct mention of her sexuality, saying:

Because of my sexual orientation, men sensed that they could be my friend but

not my lover. Perhaps not participating in a stereotypical relationship was a

relief for my male friends. If you play your part in a stereotypical role, you lose

your original voice.43

40

Cusick, ‘On a Lesbian Relationship with Music’, 78. 41 Oliveros, Sounding the Margins, 137. 42

Pauline Oliveros, ‘Harmonic Anatomy: Women in Improvisation,’ in Sounding the Margins, 137. This

chapter features the words of several of Oliveros’s women improviser-collaborators – including trombonist

Monique Buzzarté, drummer Susie Ibarra, violinist India Cooke and pianist Dana Reason. 43 Oliveros, ‘Harmonic Anatomy’, 147.

53

In this statement, Oliveros’s focus is on the quality of interaction rather than on

identity/identification (a somewhat Deleuzian touch, acknowledging the possibility of

choice and fluidity), and skilfully acknowledges that both women and men participate

in the maintenance of limiting stereotypes. Oliveros has also expressed thoughts about

the still marginalised position of women’s art music, further evidence of her focus on

women’s issues. She writes:

It is not enough for women to buy into art music – no matter how attractive it is

– and only become accomplished in the technique and forms created and taught

by men. The musical heroine of the new millennium must discover her own

inner voice and seek out her own path in music. She must avoid participating in

the competitive and cutthroat careerism that often goes with her field.44

Oliveros has also offered suggestions for performers, music teachers, professors,

journalists, musicologists, interested listeners, patrons and composers for changing the

situation for women’s art music – the suggestion to composers is to give priority to

community over career building. She also urges composers to think about the value of

the technique and form they have learned in relation to the expression of what they

identify as their own voice in music, and to ask how they would like their music to

function in their community and in the world.45

During her career, Oliveros moved

from being marginal and unestablished as a composer to being a respected elder in the

new music field. I have drawn on Oliveros’s compositional practice, ideas and

philosophy in my work, holding an awareness that she identified and lived as a lesbian

across a long life, but observing that most of her works do not outwardly or specifically

reference lesbian life and culture. This is not to say that I would not find it more

culture-affirming and politically adventurous if Oliveros had been willing in later years

(and in our interview) to acknowledge that a period of lesbian/feminist consciousness

had been an integral part of her journey as a composer – I would – but the change in her

stance on this can be viewed as a way in which she is ‘ multiple’ as a lesbian composer,

traversing a gamut of lesbian positions that perform and practice sexuality differently at

different times and in different contexts,46

having gone through a process of becoming.

44

Pauline Oliveros, ‘Breaking the Silence’, in Sounding the Margins, 17. 45

Oliveros, ‘Breaking the Silence’, 20–21. 46 See chapter 2, 10.

54

I observed throughout our interview that Oliveros wanted to foreground a narrative of

having found her own way. She took a similar stance in relation to her meditative work,

which she spoke of having ‘introduc(ed) in the 70s, actually from my own point of

view, and my own perspective because I wasn’t involved with any traditional

meditation practice or anything like that.’47

Oliveros remained engaged with alternative

forms, including the long/extended/improvised open forms of works such as Rose Moon

(1984), viewed by Madsen as approaching feminine musical form.48

The primary

posture underpinning Oliveros’s meditative work is that of listening, a posture

privileging receptiveness over assertion of one’s own voice, and I believe it is in this

strand of her work that Oliveros offered a paradigm shift within the new music/art

music sphere, and that this was the area in which she operated outside of the

(male/hetero) norm. The text scores that feature strongly in her later work locate much

of the choice about the surface content of the works with performers, also placing

Oliveros in a different relation to her work than many composers, even of new music,

although she retains a kind of ‘architect’ role. But I also observe that as she became

more established as a composer, skilfully adopting new resources offered by the

internet and technology, Oliveros could be viewed as increasingly business-focused, a

purveyor of listening/meditative experiences in a marketplace in which her Deep

Listening Foundation gained a foothold, operating in a mode that was more majoritarian

and male norm-aligned than the one she started out with in the lesbian feminist ♀

Ensemble of the 1970s in which she developed her Sonic Meditations.

After encountering Echoes I read Oliveros’s Deep Listening pieces49

and decided to use

meditation, amongst other tools, to draw inspiration and raw material from the

environment at the Bundanon Arts Trust, NSW, for the work that I would produce on

the residency planned with my visual art collaborator Dr Flossie Peitsch, in November

2012.50

I also drew on Oliveros’s text scores in improvisational practice in the years

47 Mention of Oliveros’s study of tai chi with Al Chung Liang Hung in 1968 or 1969 is made by Mockus in

Sounding Out (157). Oliveros acknowledges here, in interview with Mockus, that through this study she

‘learned about synchronising the breath with movement and translated it to playing the accordion’. 48

Pamela Madsen, ‘Toward A Feminine Form In Music: Pauline Oliveros’s Rose Moon’, Contemporary Music

Forum Volumes 5-6, 1993-94, 5–14. 49

Pauline Oliveros, Deep Listening: A Composer’s Sound Practice (New York: iUniverse, Inc., 2005). 50

Christina Green, UWS Confirmation of Candidature Document - Nomadic Journeys and Queer Temporality in

the Work of Pauline Oliveros, Eve Beglarian and Christina Green: A Musicological Study and Composition

Portfolio, October 2012.

55

following the Bundanon residency, and a discussion of this work and its significance for

my practice follows the commentary on the three composed works.

3.2 Suite from Sighting Silence, Sounding Image (solo piano, 2012-2013)

Pieces I, II, III and V of Suite from Sighting Silence, Sounding Image were composed

while on collaborative residency with visual artist Dr Flossie Peitsch at the Bundanon

Arts Trust, West Cambewarra, Shoalhaven region, NSW between the 5th

and 23rd

of

November 2012, while pieces IV and VI were composed in July-September 2013 with

reference to the photos of the related visual art works and other materials generated

while at Bundanon.

3.2.1 Background to the collaboration

In our proposal, Peitsch and I outlined our desire to create collaboratively in a way that

would combine sight/visual elements and listening/sound to attain a multifaceted,

enriched artistic outcome greater than either of the component parts.51

We proposed

that, through walks and meditation, we would draw inspiration and raw material from

Bundanon itself as ‘place’, bringing together the ideas of mindfulness (a Buddhist term

for centered awareness) and ‘country’ in the Australian Aboriginal sense, as found in

the writing of Susan Murphy, Roshi, a teacher of the Melbourne Zen Group and Zen

Open Circle, Sydney. Murphy references the idea of ‘quiet country’, a term used by a

senior Aboriginal man, Daly Pulkarra, and writes, from her Buddhist perspective, that

‘Quiet country is like awareness tended by mindfulness; it is country entered into and

cared for by a modest and profound sense of connectedness and reciprocity.’52

From my

reading of Murphy and work with her as a Zen teacher, I wrote this part of our proposal,

and went to Bundanon with the intention of cultivating a connection with the country

51

Green, Confirmation of Candidature Document, Appendix 1 (43–44). 52 Susan Murphy, Upside-Down Zen: A Direct Path into Reality (South Melbourne: Lothian Books, 2004), 112.

56

there, from which creative work could proceed, but also for its own sake, mindful of the

importance of practice done for its own sake in the Zen tradition.53

Peitsch and I proposed that daily we would ‘listen to image and see sound’ as an

essential part of our collaborative process, and spend time jointly reflecting on our

work.54

Our intention of exploring the intersection of self and other in collaboration in

this work was encapsulated in a piece of board with cut-out letters forming the words

YOU AND ME US, that was made by Peitsch as an inspirational reminder that stood

against the wall in her studio during our time at Bundanon (see Photo 3.1).

Photo 3.1: YOU AND ME US inspirational reminder board for Sighting Silence,

Sounding Image collaborative art/music residency at Bundanon Arts Trust, November

2012. Source: Christina Green

53

The idea of practice with ‘no gaining ideas’ is present in the dharma talks and lectures of Shunryu Suzuki

Roshi, for example in the lecture of April 13th, 1967 – see http://suzukiroshi.sfzc.org/dharma-talks/tag/gaining-

idea/ (accessed March 2018). The balance between elements when a spiritual practice informs creative work is

an ongoing negotiation. It is difficult to avoid all ‘gaining ideas’ – for example, I needed to try to bring a work

out of my time at Bundanon if possible. I am working with the idea that cultivating an awareness of inter-

relatedness with environment - to consciously be in relationship with it - is a way of working to harmonise with

the Buddhist precept of ‘not taking the not-given’. My goal for a work like Suite from Sighting Silence,

Sounding Image would in the first instance be to share the understandings embedded in it with others, with the

outcome of its winning the Western Sydney University Student Composition Prize for 2014 an unsought bonus. 54 Green, Confirmation of Candidature Document, 43.

57

We approached the residency with openness to becoming-other55

through immersion in

the environment at Bundanon and in the worlds of each other’s artistic modalities, while

working within our own – with openness to ‘becoming what we might be in this

space.’56

As part of our immersion in each other’s artistic modality, Peitsch listened to

music as she worked – to one of my CDs and to a Canadian band, Great Lake

Swimmers, whose music has a focus on human connection with the natural world. in

both a corporeal and incorporeal “sense of” and “in relation to” the spirituality of

place’.57

I, in turn, looked at reproductions of paintings by Arthur Boyd in the

introductory materials provided in the Writers’ Cottage,58

spent time in Boyd’s studio

on the property, and browsed Peitsch’s Art and Soul, a coffee table-style book featuring

a selection of her art and a set of essays.59

I had collaborated with visual artists in

previous projects,60

but the residency with Peitsch took me into a new area through

engaging in joint reflection on collaborative practice.

The two of us met while in residence at the Banff Centre, Banff, Alberta, Canada, in the

winter of 2009, and established a connection and an interest in each other's work,

getting to know each other's artistic philosophies over several conversations. Shared

interests and concerns – such as feminism and questions of belonging in lands in which

we are not indigenous (and for Flossie, being a Canadian immigrant in Australia) –

emerged. As we talked, the idea of a joint residency at some point in the future occurred

to us.

We concluded our Bundanon proposal as follows:

Respecting the strong ‘sense of belonging to a place’ related by native peoples

around the world we are keen to research our own belonging. Though neither of

55 See chapter 2, 10 and onward. 56

Wyatt et al, Deleuze and Collaborative Writing, 133. 57

Green, Confirmation of Candidature Document, 43. 58

The Writers’ Cottage was my allocated dwelling at Bundanon. 59 Claire Frances Renkin and Flossie Peitsch, Art and Soul (Melbourne: Macmillan Art Publishing, 2006). 60

Cosmos (video/music work with Dr Josephine Telfer, 2010) and Love and Friendship: An Evening of

Women’s Songs and Poetry, which took place alongside an exhibition of women’s art, The Love Show, at

the Women’s Gallery in Brunswick St., Fitzroy, coordinated and directed by myself in the Melbourne Fringe

Festival, 1991. I worked with Josephine (Josie) Telfer in the period immediately following my Masters in

composition, while she was completing her doctoral work at VCAM. Our collaboration involved the reflection

necessary to complete the work successfully (considerations of combining music and video) but was not

underpinned by a reflection on joint process, and I was not involved in the research on creative block that

formed part of Telfer’s doctoral work.

58

us is indigenous to our respective countries, we feel an ongoing connection to

each other’s country of origin. We would like the chance, via the collaboration

process and, if accepted, the experience of being In Residency at Bundanon, to

delve more deeply – via our combined art practices – into the land we love,

where we both now live and work.61

I identify several strands of ‘becoming’ that emerged for me from the assemblage62

that

grew at Bundanon. I was able to the return to producing steadily as a composer again, a

mode I had not been able to access easily for a long while. I was also able to grow in

my capacity to work in collaboration and to share work with others, culminating in the

decision to give a preview/performance at the Homestead on the property, which was

attended by other residents and staff, following an artist talk by Peitsch. Peitsch was

able to connect with aspects in composition she had not known much about and make

connections with them in her own arts practice. She noticed common ground between

the two modalities, for example, that it is possible to work with a ‘palette’ of musical

colours through my use of chords to create the first piece in the suite (see discussion of

Belonging/Open Field below) – and so her range of ‘affects’ was increased – she began

to perceive differently.

3.2.2 The pieces and the compositional process

Before beginning to compose I read an article about pre-composition63

to re-orient

myself for what would be my most substantial composition project for several years,

and to expand my knowledge of the area of composition pre-planning. I came away

with useable ideas including a two-line summary:

Planning + rule-making = pre-composition

Rule manipulation + taste + craft = composing64

61

Green, Confirmation of Candidature Document, 44. 62

See chapter 2, 11 and onward. 63

Veronika Krausas, ‘Some Thoughts about Pre-composition’, Context 29 & 30 (2005). 69–73. 64 Krausas, ‘Some Thoughts’, 71.

59

and six steps outlined by graphic artist Scott McCloud and quoted by Krausas as steps

that McCloud ‘feels any artwork in any medium will follow’65

-

idea/purpose, form, idiom, structure, craft and surface.

These summaries were a good starting point, and helped me to plan and produce a

musically successful work from complex pre-planned elements and musical decisions.

As I have indicated, an important component of my pre-compositional phase for the

pieces was working with the Deep Listening piece Open Field (1980) by Pauline

Oliveros, in which Oliveros states that:

When a sight, sound, movement or place attracts your attention during your

daily life, consider that moment an “art experience”. Find a way to record an

impression of this momentary “art experience” using any appropriate means or

media. Share these experiences with each other and make them available to

others.66

I created and used a diagrammatic map to record my listening (see Photo 3.2); it

includes descriptions of sounds that I heard, including the transcribed rhythm of a bird

call, and a passing thought (‘glad the car radio is gone’). I discovered in my research

following this time that many of Oliveros’s text scores call on the improviser to work

with memories/thoughts67

in this way. The diagrammatic map served as the initial way

to record the sights, sounds and movements, with the suite of six pieces emerging as a

more developed form in which these ‘art experiences’ (combined with other layers of

content) were recorded and could be made available to others. Audio recordings

accompanied by photos of the art pieces, were uploaded to SoundCloud, constituting a

further sharing.68

65

Krausas, ‘Some Thoughts’, 70. The author cites Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics: the Invisible Art

(Northampton, MA: Kitchen Sink Press, 1993), 170–171. 66

Oliveros, Deep Listening, 46. 67

Jann Pasler, ‘Postmodernism, narrativity and the art of memory’, in Contemporary Music Review, Vol. 7

(1993), 3–32. In this article Pasler advances the concept of the ‘memory palace’ to describe and explore works

by Pauline Oliveros. On page 26 she suggests that a sense of ‘the positive value of memory and contemplation

of the past’ informs Oliveros’s works. 68

Links for Open Field, (Give) Voice, Nothing More Than This and Kanzeon! can be found at

https://soundcloud.com/christina-green-composer. These links were made available for preview in advance of

the Belonging installation at the Centre for Theology and Ministry, Parkville, Melbourne, May-July 2016,

60

In this and other similar listening meditations I heard and notated quite a number of bird

calls, more than I would need in order to embed one in each of six pieces, and made

selections based on taste and craft considerations, completing the last two pieces

successfully post-residency from the remaining unallocated bird calls in my notebook.

The birds and their calls, as an element from the realm of the non-human other, seemed

to resonate for me with the Deleuzian idea of ‘bodies’ – an umbrella term for human

and non-human beings.69

In the listening meditation, which has the potential to induce

in the meditator a non-dual state (in which a sense of a separate self is reduced), there

was a greater sense of connection with the natural world, particularly when I focused on

listening for bird calls, that chimed for me with the Deleuzian idea of ‘becoming-

animal’70

– to some extent, I was able to imagine myself into the mode of being of a

bird, with a different sense of location in the world and in the ‘One-All’,71

homing in on

a sense of enunciating in a less intention-driven way than the way in which I usually

view my utterances as a composer/musician, but one which constitutes having a voice

nonetheless.

As well as the immersion in Arthur Boyd’s work I worked with photos of Peitsch’s

visual art pieces-in-progress from my camera sitting on top of the piano, and, for a time,

a selection of colourful leaves, dried flowers and other materials from the surrounding

bush displayed on a storage box lid, passed on to me by Peitsch after she had made use

of it at the outset of her work. My approach with these colour sources was to orient

myself to qualities of feeling/emotion evoked in relation to them – and to try to allow

these to come through in the music. This is a very subjective process with connections

to the synaesthesia phenomenon which I have experienced since early years, in which

colours align with notes and chords in my inner ear and imagination. I approach this

experience as only one of many factors that are in the picture as I compose, not placing

it above craft and skill in my process.

which included these and two other pieces chosen by Flossie from my output to go alongside two other art

pieces. Gate and Walking were performed by Michael Kieran Harvey at Western Sydney University’s Creativity

Unlimited Festival in September 2016; the recordings are not currently posted for public listening, pending

securing permission from the performer to do so. 69

See chapter 2, 10 and onward. 70

On page 6 of Deleuzian Encounters, Hickey-Moody and Malins write: ‘These becomings do not involve an

imitation, nor do they involve a transformation from one thing to another (e.g., person to horse), but rather

constitute a zone of transformation within which bodily capacities – and modes of perception – are combined

(producing, for example, a horson or personhorse)

. A becoming-horse, would involve beginning to perceive the

world – and to have the same limitations and powers of acting in the world – as a horse. 71 See chapter 2, 30.

61

In the following commentary the headings are organised as visual art title/music title.

Photo 3.2: Diagrammatic ‘map’ of Deep Listening meditation based on Pauline

Oliveros’s Open Field (1980). Source: Christina Green

62

3.3 Belonging/Open Field (I of VI)

Belonging was originally conceived as 28 + 1 canvases by Peitsch, but later she found

she had counted incorrectly – she missed a couple of numbers in her numbering of the

canvases, and there are 26 in total, but I worked from her original numbers in my

parallel piece, Open Field. The multi-canvas work was laid out on the floor by Peitsch

for most of our time at Bundanon (see Photo 3.3). I was able to watch it go through

multiple becomings as Peitsch added new colour ideas and texture, and to feel I was

living with the work as part of our environment/assemblage. In Belonging, Peitsch set

out to explore the gradual dissolution of her Canadian identity, experienced in the

course of living and working for some twenty years in Australia, by merging North

American motifs such as the pine tree with the palette of colours drawn from the

Australian natural environment. I responded on an emotional level to this layer in the

work, partly because it resonated for me with the experience of a loosening of my own

sense of national identity through living for seven years in the UK in the 1990s. I tried

to convey something of the feeling of this (for me) mixed experience in the thoughtful,

perhaps elegaic quality that is part of my intended musical mood in Open Field.

Photo 3.3: Belonging, work on canvas by Flossie Peitsch, in progress at Bundanon Arts

Trust, November 2012. Source: Christina Green

63

The birdsong incorporated in the piece –

Example 3.1 – Bird call – Open Field, Suite from Sighting Silence, Sounding Image I

occurs at the following pitches: B (bars 1-18), Eb (bars 19-29), G (bars 30-41), B (bars

46-57).

This sequence of pitches is incorporated in the piece via inclusion in the chords across

four presentations. The ‘rule’ regarding the incorporation of the pitches was that they

just had to be somewhere in the chord, not exclusively as the bass note or root note,

making greater variety of chords possible (‘rule manipulation + taste + craft =

composing’).

Working with the ‘28+1’ canvases (in the original conception) of Belonging,

construction around a sequence of 28+1 different chords, in the arrangement 7+7, +1,

7+7, was my intention for Open Field; but as with Peitsch’s miscount, I also ended up

with a couple of deviations from my original intention. My rule was that a chord would

be defined as ‘different’ through varying by even one note from another chord, or by

virtue of being in a different inversion from a previous appearance. The piece has an

overall ABA form: A (bars 1-27)/B (bars 28-45)/A (bars 46-57). Musical considerations

took over at some point in the piece, and there are a number of inconsistencies, for

example in the pencil draft, chord 13 is denoted as a ‘different’ chord but is exactly the

same as chord 11. Looking at the piece it is just possible to read the right number of

chords, but my chord counting seems to have stopped at chord 20/bar 41 in the draft, at

the point where the incorporation of the bird call (third presentation) is complete (my

focus was clearly on this), and a dovetailed transition idea around the draft chords 19

and 20 achieves the shift back into the opening melody.

64

A summary follows, accompanied by Photo 3.3 above:

• bars 1-27 – chords 1 – 14 (shown in draft score in boxes).72

Bars 1-8 are treated

as an extended section based around the chord (denoted as chord 1) of Bm11,

with the pedal B-D figure underpinning till the end of bar 7, B underpinning bar

8 and passing chords appearing over this bass line (bars 5-6 Em6/7, bar 8

Em11). Chords 2, 3 and 4 (bars 9-10, 11-12, 13-14) are similar but not as

extended, built around pedal notes and passing colourings.

• bars 28-29 – the ‘+1’ chord (not included in the numbering of the other chords)

• bars 30-41 – chords 15-21 (calling the last chord in bar 41 chord 21) this is the

end of the (3rd

) group of 7, with a dovetailing that situates bar 41 as the pivot bar

again – the following 4 bars (transition/turnaround material) containing chords

22-28 (the 4th

group of 7, not numbered, counting main chords/ignoring passing

A, top line, bar 42).

• bars 42-35 – transition back to A section

As well as the connection with Oliveros’s meditation and the bird call, Open Field

brings together other layers – the image of the open field which I looked out on from

my desk in the Writers’ Cottage, and a verse from Rumi – 'Out beyond ideas of

wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. I'll meet you there'73

– which was evoked

for me by the collaborative process and journey with Peitsch. There was a sense of

‘open field’ as a metaphor for the open space we went to and which opened up at

Bundanon for our collaboration. This was our second meeting in an away-from-home

space, a smooth space in Deleuzian terms, and ‘a liminal space in which we can think

other-wise … Becoming-other’74

which supported our work and allowed us to produce

something quite unusual.

We set out with the intention of creating parallel sets of works which could be

successfully presented either together or separately, and we achieved that, with various

72

Not included in ResearchDirect version of this thesis; please visit https://www.christinagreen.net/composer

for information regarding availability of scores and recordings. 73

Jalal ad-Din Rumi, Rumi: The Book of Love: Poems of Ecstasy and Longing, translation and commentary by

Coleman Barks (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2005), 123. The poem is Soul, Heart, and Body One

Morning. 74 Davies, Deleuze and Collaborative Writing, 101.

65

presentations of art/music both together and separately taking place, from the artist talk

and preview performance at Bundanon onwards and still unfolding.75

At the initial

presentation I had a sense of the importance of sharing work, even while still in

progress, with others, especially others engaged in the same residency context and

connected with the Bundanon environment. I wanted others to be able to be involved

and to get something from our work, even though this was not an opportunity for active

participation from the audience in the same way as the audience at Oliveros’s Echoes

from the Moon. I was aware that there were beneficial effects for those present, with

resident performance poet Candy Royalle expressing that from hearing my performance

she felt empowered to share her own work in progress the following day.76

Since this

experience I have tried to continue to develop a focus on how people will benefit from

my artistic work, and I am in an ongoing process of thinking about ways to open things

up, at least in some pieces, for participation by others, embracing the model offered by

Oliveros.

In conversation, Peitsch told me that she thought it could be difficult to find contexts in

the visual art world for presentation of our joint work, due to the preoccupation in the

visual art world with its own medium. There were several unsuccessful attempts before

the door opened at the Centre for Theology and Ministry, where Artfull Faith

coordinator Christina Rowntree saw potential in our work as a joint expression and was

willing to accommodate the challenges of incorporating the music into the presentation.

In getting this to happen, we were able to bring what was essentially a work speaking

75

Belonging was shown, accompanied by Open Field, at Framed Gallery, Darwin, June/July 2013. At the

Belonging installation (May-July 2016) the Belonging canvases were shown in conjunction with the four related

piano pieces presented via powerpoint and in live performance. Pulpit and Kyrie (also from the residency, with

their related piano pieces (Give) Voice) and Nothing More Than This, and two other visual art works, Recover

and Arkmode, paired with Line of Flight and another instrumental piece, Reel, were also via powerpoint and live

performance. Kanzeon! was performed apart from its parallel visual art piece Spire by myself at a Sacred Stage

house concert in Melbourne in 2014, and Gate and Walking were performed in concert by Michael Kieran-

Harvey at WSU’s Creativity Unlimited festival in September 2016. My recordings of Open Field, (Give) Voice,

Nothing More Than This and Kanzeon! were included on the Melbourne Composers’ League’s triple CD

Melbourne Composers' League - Celebrating Twenty Years, launched in Melbourne in November 2017.

Another showing of Pulpit (whose parallel music piece is (Give) Voice)) is taking place at Maroondah Access

Gallery, Melbourne in March-May 2018, as part of a new exhibition by Flossie Peitsch, WOODEN IT BE

LOVELY: Building well-being, unaccompanied by music this time. A video combining the art and music is

currently in progress. 76

Following our meeting at Bundanon I maintained a connection with Royalle through Facebook until she

passed away in June 2018 at the age of 37 after living with ovarian cancer. I still feel both privileged to have

met her, a lesbian artist with Lebanese/Palestinian heritage and so multiply minoritarian, and moved that even as

a well-established performer she could be empowered by the work of another artist in this way.

66

with a ‘minoritarian’ voice into a place where it could be heard and accepted, resulting

in an increase in affects for both ourselves and others.77

3.4 Pulpit/(Give) Voice (II of VI)

Peitsch’s Pulpit was constructed from pieces of wood-grained linoleum and wooden

found objects – a cabinet given to her by her husband to use however she wanted (she

deconstructed it) and chunks kept from the back of canvases, made of wood or other

material that are not generally kept or used. She conceived the work as a tribute to her

father in Canada, who worked with wood. The title Pulpit references Pulpit Rock, a

natural feature at Bundanon, and Arthur Boyd’s work – the rock featured in many of

Boyd’s paintings. The original version of the work included a panel with the word

‘YOU’ on it (see Photo 3.1). Peitsch’s intention here was that this is about God as other

– ‘you’, the ‘essential other’, also related in her mind to the Hebrew word Yahweh.

Take the Christian images (of God) out and ‘what’s left?’ she asked, answering

‘Creation, like this wood’. In the catalogue of her 2018 exhibition WOODEN IT BE

LOVELY: Building Well-Being, Peitsch described the work as ‘suggesting a sacred

place or podium from which to speak truth about one’s life journey’.78

For me, the idea of a pulpit is all about having a voice and a place to which one can

bring it but conceived somewhat differently from the dedicated ‘sacred place’ idea

embodied in the Christian ‘pulpit’ idea. The idea of ‘give voice’ came from several

remembered strands. Writing about the Buddhist idea of the non-separateness of beings

(which is paralleled by Deleuze’s ‘One-All’), Zen teacher Reb Anderson says:

There is in your heart and in everything about you an authority, an authority

given to you by all things.79

He also says:

77

See chapter 2, 15 and onward. 78 Flossie Peitsch, catalogue for WOODEN IT BE LOVELY: Building Well-Being, solo exhibition of work

featuring wood as primary material in sculptures, 19 March-11 May 2018 at Maroondah Access Gallery,

Ringwood, Melbourne, 3. 79

Reb Anderson, Warm Smiles from Cold Mountains: Dharma Talks on Zen Meditation (Berkeley, CA:

Rodmell Press, 1999), 148.

67

Can you imagine a world where nothing appears by itself, where everything

comes up by the kindness of everything? Everything comes up with the support

of everything, and everything that comes up supports everything. Only this can

be called ultimate practice.80

For me this spoke of how each being is given its 'voice' by all other beings/things. It’s

about having a confident voice to speak and put out our art. Zen teacher Shunryu

Suzuki Roshi, mentioned earlier in this chapter, puts it this way:

The text [the Sandokai]81

says, “All the objects of the senses interact and yet do

not.” Although things are interrelated, everyone – every being – can be the boss.

Each one of us can be a boss because we are so closely related … Each one of

us is the boss of the whole world. And when you have this understanding, you

will realize that things are interrelated, yet they are also independent. There is

nothing to compare. You are just you.82

A third remembered strand came from As Kingfishers Catch Fire, a poem by Gerard

Manly Hopkins (1844-1889), handwritten at the bottom of page 1 of the pencil draft –

‘What I do is me: for that I came’.83

I decided on the arrangement (Give) Voice (with

brackets around the ‘give’) to try to convey a sense of both feeling that the voice is

‘given’ by all beings (as in first quote from Anderson above) and that the voice inheres,

belongs to the being already, as is more the case in the passages from Suzuki and

Hopkins. If anything, I believe it inheres, is already there, but just has to be asserted –

and perhaps it is this asserting of the voice that is the permission one feels, from all

beings, when in ‘right relation’ to the whole. For Anderson, this is about the difference

between doing things from one’s own willpower and doing things not as a ‘single thing’

but as one who is realising all beings - ‘In the world where there is not a single thing,

you can just be yourself. You can just be yourself when yourself is not a single thing.’84

And from Suzuki: ‘The more you practice zazen, the more you will be able to accept

80

Anderson, Warm Smiles, 152. 81

My clarification. 82

Shunryu Suzuki, Branching Streams Flow in the Darkness: Zen Talks on the Sandokai (Berkley: University of

California Press, 1999), 65/66. The Sandokai is a Zen text by Sekito Kisen (Shitou Xiqian in Chinese), 700-790,

which ‘explores dichotomies such as one and many, light and dark, sameness and difference’ (page 15). 83

International Hopkins Association, As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies dráw fláme;,

https://hopkinspoetry.com/poem/as-kingfishers-catch-fire/ (accessed October 2019). 84 Anderson, Warm Smiles, 155.

68

something as your own, whatever it is.’85

There is a resonance between this Buddhist

understanding and the Deleuzian concept of the One-All, in which (as I have described

in chapter 2) there is a value on a relationality that maintains individual difference but

focuses on what is shared.86

Photo 3.4: Pulpit, work created from lino offcuts and wood found objects by Flossie

Peitsch, in progress at Bundanon Arts Trust, November 2012. Source: Christina Green

85 Suzuki, Branching Streams, 65. 86

See chapter 2, 30.

69

The birdsong incorporated in the piece –

Example 3.2 – Bird call – (Give) Voice, Suite from Sighting Silence, Sounding Image II

This is the repeated note call heard in listening meditation (see Photo 3.2 – ‘battershot

bird call’).

I began to plan my piece by ‘reading’ Pulpit from bottom to top, noting the number and

shapes of the pieces in each layer. From this, I arrived at the plan for a musical

framework, delineating some parameters, as follows:

Give Voice – piece to go with Pulpit (main tonal centre F)

• (section 1) – 4 bars of 7/4 matching the 7 pieces of layer 1

• (section 2) – 4 bars of 7/4 matching the 7 pieces of layer 2

• (section 3) – 4 bars of 7/4 matching the 7 pieces of layer 3

• (section 4) – 4 bars of 5/4 matching the 5 pieces of layer 4

• (section 5) – 4 bars of 5/4 matching the 5 pieces of layer 5

• (section 6) – 1 bar of 5/4 – one long held note to match the 1 panel (with an

extra embellishment)

The four pieces forming the central column (cabinet, drawer, ‘YOU’ panel, quadrant

panel with 4 triangles) – were the source of the number 4 – 4 bars for each layer (except

section 6) – I questioned whether I should change this and make it 4 bars of 1/4 for

70

consistency, but opted to keep what I wrote in the pencil draft, following the ‘rule

manipulation + taste + craft = composing’ maxim.

A scheme of key areas was used, moving up from F in major 3rd

increments and ending

with F:

• layers 1-3 (12 bars, the 7/4 section) – tonal centre F

• layer 4 (4 bars, 5/4) – tonal centre A

• layer 5 (4 bars, 5/4) – tonal centre Db

• layer 6 (currently 1 bar, 5/4) – tonal centre F

These tonal areas were chosen for their resonance in my sensibility with the colours and

textures of the wood and wood-grained linoleum in Pulpit.

During our time at Bundanon, Peitsch and I shared thoughts about our spirituality, hers

a Lutheran faith/practice, and mine the Soto Zen practice and reading in which I

became involved from around 2005. I am aware that what I shared of my Buddhist

understandings spoke to her, and that she absorbed things from it, while I in turn

absorbed things from her Christian faith-informed philosophy. As Pulpit progressed,

she took out the ‘YOU’ panel, leaving a space where it had been,87

and my recollection

is that this was a reflection of having taken on something of the Buddhist focus on ‘all

beings’ and its lack of a God concept like the Christian one. I chose to leave (Give)

Voice as written, with the ‘YOU’ panel incorporated in the layout, partly for reasons of

taste and craft, and partly to retain something that I had absorbed from Peitsch. It is in

small ways like this that the becoming-other that we both underwent in our assemblage

at Bundanon is documented.

3.5 Wisdom/Gate88

(III of VI)

Peitsch’s Wisdom is a modular, wall-mounted piece that was arranged in a three

rows/three columns configuration at the time of composition of the accompanying piece

87

The work remains in this version in its most recent showing in WOODEN IT BE LOVELY. 88 Pronounced ‘gah-tay’.

71

Gate. Each panel is adorned with four triangle-shaped pieces in diagonally colour-

matched pairs. The spaces between the diamond-shaped panels draw the eye and seem

at least as important to me as the panels themselves, with a suggestion that another

diamond-shaped panel could be visualised as fitting in each (see Photo 3.5).

My immediate connection with Wisdom was to recall the Sanskrit words ‘prajñā’ and

‘gate’ from the Heart Sutra, a central text in Mahayana Buddhism:

So know that the Bodhisattva, holding to nothing whatever

But dwelling in prajna wisdom, is freed of delusive hindrance,

Rid of the fear bred by it, and reaches clearest nirvana.89

Photo 3.5: Wisdom, modular work created from lino offcuts by Flossie Peitsch, at

Bundanon Arts Trust, November 2012. Source: Christina Green

89

Excerpt from the Prajna Paramita Hridaya – Heart of Perfect Wisdom (Heart Sutra), Toronto Zen Centre,

http://torontozen.org/chants_sutras.html#PP (accessed October 2019).

72

The sutra concludes with the following mantra, about attaining wisdom, nirvana, going

‘beyond’:

Gate, gate

paragate

parasamgate

bodhi, svaha.90

The birdsong incorporated in the piece –

Example 3.3 – Bird call – Gate, Suite from Sighting Silence, Sounding Image III

I ‘read’ Wisdom as 3+2+3+2+3 (panels/spaces between/panels/spaces between/panels)

four times, moving in an imaginary fashion from top to bottom and bottom to top

horizontally, and then from left to right and right to left vertically, and wrote the piece

accordingly as 4x13 bars – 52 bars. The number 4, from the four mini-panels within

each main diamond panel, is employed as a rhythmic feature in the form of the groups

of four semiquavers that dominate the left hand part. With some local repetitions, there

is a fairly consistent stream of changing harmony (as an intentional feature), in my

mind creating a sense of onward movement to connect with the multiple iterations of

‘going beyond’ in the mantra.

90

There are many translations of the mantra. One given by Richard Hayes of McGill University is ‘Oh

awakening that has gone, gone, gone to the further shore, gone completely to the further shore’, in ‘The Mantra

at the End of the Heart Sutra’, http://www2.kenyon.edu/Depts/Religion/Fac/Adler/Reln260/Heartmantra.htm,

accessed April 2018.

73

Gate – piece to go with Wisdom

• (section 1) bars 1-13

• (section 2) bars 14-26

• (section 3) bars 27-39 melody from section 1 returns, differently harmonised

• (section 4) bars 40-52 – from bar 40 the dominant semiquaver left hand figure

begins to break down and thin out; this combined with previously used melodic and

rhythmic fragments in the right hand creates movement towards a culminating

stacked chord held by the pedal, which could perhaps be described as having an

ethereal quality and arriving at a different place, in keeping with the overall theme

of ‘going beyond’. I feel that something of the musical mood of the In Paradisum

movement of Fauré’s Requiem is referenced in this piece, couched in my own

musical language and syntax, and underpinned by my own ideas and associations.

Michael Kieran-Harvey’s performance of the piece91

captures the intended quality

beautifully.

3.6 Timbre/Walking (IV of VI)

Timbre is a piece in which the move into musical thinking (thinking in the other’s

modality) by Peitsch is particularly evident. This work took inspiration from the

musical term which became its title, and Peitsch connected this with a selection of

pieces of lino offcut from a larger group brought with her to Bundanon, making the

selection with a view to exploring a range of colours which fell for her within a

‘bandwidth’ of shade/colour. The tonal range (in the visual sense) in Timbre, coupled

with the panel shapes and their surface detail and the angular/off-kilter arrangement

combine to make this one of the most beautiful pieces in the set for me, and it was rich

to work with.

91 See n. 68.

74

Photo 3.6: Timbre, modular work created from lino offcuts by Flossie Peitsch, at

Bundanon Arts Trust, November 2012. Source: Christina Green

The primary image I connected with Timbre was one of myself walking along a stony,

uneven road, inspired by the shapes and their arrangements and the palette of dusty,

earthy and somehow particularly Australian colours employed by Peitsch. I tried to

reflect and capture this in the swing feel which includes some twos against, or

contrasted with, threes. There was a stony path at Bundanon going up past the

musicians’ cottage, an uphill path leading into the bush and going to an amphitheatre.

Away from Bundanon, working from photos to write this piece from December 2012 –

May 2013, a memory image of walking along this rocky path arose for me, and from

that, a larger resonance with the whole doctoral path at that time … not a path of

comfort, exactly, and perhaps a little rocky, but one I was walking and making progress

on nonetheless. A connection with Buddhist walking meditation was also present,

especially group walking meditations such as those led by Vietnamese Buddhist writer

75

and monk Thich Nhat Hanh, and a walking meditation in the same vein in which

Pauline Oliveros leads a group of students, viewed on YouTube.92

In this piece, as in others, I worked with numerical/extra-musical elements from

Peitsch’s form/structure. The number 14 (the number of main panels in the piece)

suggested the form of my piece, a 14-bar blues. The 14-bar form of the blues is a less

common variant of the traditional 12-bar form, and I welcomed the effect of a slight

‘hiccup’ or irregularity created by the extra bars and extension of the V chord in the

form to go with the quality of ‘unevenness’ perceived in Timbre that I was trying to

reflect in Walking.

The birdsong incorporated in this piece –

Example 3.4 – Bird call – Walking, Suite from Sighting Silence, Sounding Image IV

I read and made notes on Timbre, noting the two layers and arrangements of the larger

and smaller panels. The compositional process that grew out of this is as follows:

Walking – piece to go with Timbre (blues in E minor)

• To create a piece of sufficient length, the 14-bar blues structure has been

employed three times – 42 bars + 1 to end

92 KQED Spark: Pauline Oliveros, act II virtuoso listener, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQ2W42bOQxY

(KQED San Francisco, 2012) (accessed April 2013). The short segment showing Oliveros leading students in

walking meditation starts around 7:21. My own connection with walking meditation predates my knowledge of

Oliveros’s connection with it, and has been located in a wider Buddhist life/practice. It is an area of common

ground that is good to find shared with Oliveros, adding to my sense of connection with her and her work.

76

• The visual feature of the four mini-panels within each larger/main panel has

been interpreted as 4 main beats (standard in blues), in 12/8 time

• (section 1) bars 1-14 – going through the 14 panels forwards (left to right, row

1, row 2). The visual feature of the four tiny panels within some of the mini-

panels has been incorporated as an extra rhythmic feature, a group of 4 quavers,

either in the time of the three that constitute a beat in 12/8, or spread

out/ordinary duration quavers, strictly in this section

• (section 2) bars 15-28 – going through the 14 panels backwards (right to left,

row 2, row 1, but reading the four mini-panels in each main panel from left to

right and top row/bottom row as in section 1. Some use of the four-quaver

figures in relation to the four tiny panels, a bit less strictly than in section 1

• (section 3) bars 29-43 – these 14 (+1) bars were composed sticking to the chord

sequence but more freely with relation to rhythmic features, starting with a

reference in bar 29 to the four-quaver figure in the last beat, as at bar 1 section

1, but using different notes. The aim was to make the third time through

different from the 1st and 2

nd, with a merge into the start that is hardly

noticeable. I wanted it to be less ornate than the 2nd

time through but more

ornate than the first iteration (so an asymmetrical form), seeking continuous

variation through various means, for example, by placing chords on different

quavers within the bars from previous times through.

Moving far out harmonically from the standard blues realm in a couple of places, then

back into the more usual territory was a compositional advance for me in this piece, at

times seeming to reflect the wide-ranging process and journey involved in doctoral

study. The use of different harmonic details and shadings across the repetitions is also

connected in my mind with the practice of walking the path more than once and

noticing different things on different walks, a kind of mindfulness that is valued in

Buddhist meditation. The birdsong is used in both the original form as I heard it, and in

inversion, to create the combination of motivic interrelatedness and variation that I have

come to value. Michael Kieran Harvey’s performance of the piece foregrounds the

harmonic variation and detail and includes some beautiful, delicate touches on the bird

call motif.

77

3.7 Kyrie/Nothing More Than This (V of VI)

Peitsch’s Kyrie was inspired by the traditional Christian prayer ‘Lord have mercy,

Christ have mercy, Lord have mercy’.93

Reflecting on the work, she told me that the

black and white combination in the top two panels was a symbol of infinity, an

‘opening’, for her. As I looked at Kyrie it spoke firstly of a prayer ascending, because of

a feeling of an upward trajectory in the overall shape, with the opening in Peitsch’s

conception perhaps acting to channel this prayer ‘up’ to God in the Christian view.

Photo 3.7: Kyrie, modular work created from lino offcuts by Flossie Peitsch, in progress

at Bundanon Arts Trust, 2012. Source: Christina Green

Looking at Kyrie through my own lens I saw an explosion of joy, especially embodied

in the increased colour range in this work. I saw something not supplicatory, but dance-

like, and wanted, in response, to create a kind of prayer that was a dance, picking up on

the energy and lightness that Kyrie conveyed to me.

93 ‘Kyrie eleison, Christe eleison, Kyrie eleison’ is the transliteration from Greek.

78

I chose a folk feel to celebrate the French Canadian music that I have loved for many

years, and to pick up on the Canadian connection that Peitsch and I share, having met in

Banff on the residency there.

The title Nothing More Than This comes from a section of the Heart Sutra in which

Buddha is speaking to his disciple Shariputra:

Oh Shariputra, form is only void,

Void is all form; there is, then, nothing more than this,

For what is form is void and what is void is form … 94

In the Buddhist view, a concept of impermanence and the arising and passing away of

forms is present, rather than a concept of God as one overseeing being to pray to, and is

accompanied by a sense of largeness – the ‘infinity’ idea is here, in the continuous

replenishment of forms/beings from sunyata, the void that is full – of everything. The

radical equality of beings is implied95

– ‘this’ is the dance, and everything, all that is, is

included in it.

The birdsong incorporated in this piece –

Example 3.5 – Bird call – Nothing More Than This, Suite from Sighting Silence,

Sounding Image V

94

Peggy Teresa Nancy Kennett (Houn Jiyu Kennett). trans., The Liturgy of the Order of Buddhist

Contemplatives for the Laity (Mt Shasta, CA: Shasta Abbey Press, 1990), 73. 95

My understanding of the equality of all things/beings has come through a range of reading of Buddhist texts.

In the introduction to Branching Streams Flow in the Darkness (see n. 82), Michael Wenger writes that a Daoist

text predating the Sandokai ‘shows the influence of the Huayen or Flower Garland school of Buddhism …

which teaches the equality of all things and the dependence of all things on one another (page 15). The same

idea is embodied in the quotes from Reb Anderson and Shunryu Suzuki (see 67/n. 80 and n. 82) above.

79

I read Kyrie from bottom to top, and from this I created the plan for the musical

framework:

Nothing More Than This – piece to go with Kyrie (tonal centre C)

• (section 1) – 7 bars, matching the 7 panels of layer 1

• (section 2) – 5 bars, matching the 5 panels of layer 2

• (section 3) – 3 bars, matching the 3 panels of layer 3

• (section 4) – 3 bars, matching the 3 panels of layer 4

• (section 5) – 1 bar, matching the 1 panel of layer 5

• (section 6) – 1 bar, matching the 1 panel of layer 6, + 13 bars, the return of the A

material starting at bar 21

The overall modality is mixolydian on C (B is flat), and there is no scheme of

modulations or intentional progression through tonal areas as in (Give) Voice and Gate.

The changes in time signature were based on compositional taste/craft considerations,

as part of the overall feel of dance/movement, and were not related to any specific

visual elements in Kyrie. The return of the A material is similarly based on the rule

manipulation/taste/craft consideration, with octave transposition for variation, to

augment the return and help propel the piece to its conclusion. The threefold form of the

Kyrie/Christe/Kyrie text can be seen as being mirrored in the ABA structure (bars 1-13,

bars 14-20, bars 21-33 – based on melodic/thematic content), though this was an

afterthought.

3.8 Spire/Kanzeon! (VI of VI)

Peitsch’s Spire was conceived as a modular work arranged in the column shape in

Photo 3.8 below. It also later appeared in other arrangements. Of Spire, Peitsch wrote:

The tallest part of the traditional gothic church building is its ‘spire’. This

dominating structure thrusts powerfully skyward, attempting to authoritively

(sic) pierce God’s domain for the cause of humankind. I pair the strong verticals

80

with a void panel. It signifies that man’s portentous attempts to reach God, are

in fact to be pitied in the face of the immensity of ‘God’s’ terrain.96

I did not have access to this statement at the time of composing Kanzeon!,97

but

certainly understood the intention to reference the traditional church spire, and took

from the original column-shaped form of Spire a standing, upright quality that I

immediately associated with the bodhisattva of compassion, Kuan Yin,98

known as

Kanzeon in Japanese. My mental image of Kanzeon came from statues at local

Vietnamese Buddhist temples (see Photos 3.9 and 3.10).

I wanted to capture the upright, dignified quality, but also a softness – a softer quality

than that of the church ‘spire’ and striving-fuelled attempts to reach God. Bodhisattvas

are viewed as representing and embodying various qualities, to which a practitioner can

aspire, working to cultivate and embody these. Kanzeon embodies a receptive quality,

as she is traditionally said to hear the cries of all beings. There is a resonance between

this and my Deep Listening meditations resulting in hearing and working with the

sounds of birds in the environment at Bundanon.

96

Flossie Peitsch, notes on Spire in Peitsch/Green: A Bundanon Residency Collaboration – Belonging,

catalogue to the exhibition at the Centre for Theology and Ministry, Parkville, May 13th – July 11th 2016., 17.

The catalogue combines notes by Peitsch, myself and theologian Neal Nuske. 97

The inclusion of an exclamation mark after the title Kanzeon! is taken from the English translation of Enmei

Jikku Kannon Gyo, the Ten Verse Kannon Sutra of Timeless Life, in Zen Open Circle Sutras, the sutra book of

Sydney-based Zen Open Circle, Second Edition April 2017, 9, http://zenopencircle.org.au/wp-

content/uploads/2017/04/ZOC-Sutras-2017.pdf, accessed April 2018. 98

Kuan Yin or Guan Yin, short for Kuan-shi Yin, is the Chinese name for this bodhisattva. A bodhisattva is, in

Mahayana Buddhism, a being who could reach nirvana but chooses to delay doing so in order to remain to help

suffering beings.

81

Photo 3.8: Spire, modular work created from lino offcuts by Flossie Peitsch, at

Bundanon Arts Trust, November 2012. Source: Christina Green

82

Photo 3.9: Kanzeon statue at Vietnamese Buddhist temple Chua Phuoc Tuong,

Richmond, Melbourne. Source: Christina Green

83

Photo 3.10: Kanzeon at Chua Linh Son temple, Reservoir, Melbourne.

Source: Christina Green

The birdsong incorporated in this piece –

Example 3.6 – Bird call – Kanzeon!, Suite from Sighting Silence, Sounding Image VI

84

I read Spire as follows:

• 6 panels (ascending) + 6 panels (descending) (first modular presentation/column

form), then

• 3 rows of 2 panels (second modular form – see Photo 3.11) (left to right,

ascending then descending in reverse order),

Photo 3.11: second modular form of Spire by Flossie Peitsch. Source: Flossie

Peitsch

and then

• 2 rows of 3 panels (an imagined third arrangement) (left to right, ascending then

descending in reverse order) and 6 panels (column form, descending then

ascending).

The details on the various panels are reflected in the music through both rhythmic

devices and melodic contour elements.

85

Handwritten notes show some of these workings including the specific numbering of

the panels in diagrams:

Photo 3.12: Handwritten notes/diagrams for Kanzeon! based on reading of Spire.

Source: Christina Green

Photo 3.13: Imagined third modular arrangement of Spire, handwritten notes/diagrams -

detail. Source: Christina Green

86

From this reading, I created the following layout:

Kanzeon! – piece to go with Spire

• A/1 – bars 1-6,99

panels 1-6

• A/2 – bars 7-12, panels 6-1

• B/3 – bars 13-18, panels 1,4,2,5,3,6 (reading the second layout of panels, three

rows of 2, from bottom to top, left to right)

• B/4 – bars 19-24, panels 6,3,5,2,4,1 (reverse of above)

• C/5 – bars 25-30 (reading a third permutation of the panels derived by myself as

the next logical permutation following on from Peitsch’s two – two rows of

three panels/three columns of two) – ‘shuffling’ the three panels with the five-

strips detail to the bottom row)

• C/6 – bars 31-36

• A1/7 – bars 37-42 (recasts material from A/2, ending with a rhythmic push back

into the opening idea of the piece –)

• A1/8 – bars 43-48 (restatement of A/1 – bars 1-6 – with augmentation through

octave doubling of melody in left hand

The treatment of the panels in this way amounts to a ‘serialisation’, and unexpectedly

fulfils a desire I had to revisit serial techniques in some way, finding a new approach

with a strand not much explored since undergraduate composition projects. The

composition reflects various details – the five strips in panels 1, 3 and 5 (read as

Down/Up/Down/Up/Down, U/D/U/DU, D/U/D/U/D), the seven sections of panel 4, the

four parts in panel 2, the all-black density of panel 6, and includes the bird calls in

various ways.

The Sighting Silence, Sounding Image collaborative residency at Bundanon Arts Trust

produced the linked but also independent works that Peitsch and I envisioned. I believe

the works fulfilled our original goal of moving away from mono-sensorial art outcomes

and combining sight/sound to attain a multifaceted, enriched outcome greater than

99

The bar numbers here refer to the bar numbers in the pencil draft. The process of notation into the Finale

score involved translation of the draft into a stream of changing time signatures and resulted in a changed layout

of bars that does not correspond exactly to the original draft form.

87

either part. Our hope that the process would also connect us with a sense of the

‘spirituality of place’ was also fulfilled – I feel an ongoing sense of connection with the

environment at Bundanon and hope to return there at some point.100

This connection

was forged for me through the original work of opening to the sound world there

through the Open Field Deep Listening piece of Pauline Oliveros, as well as my

conscious opening to and absorption of colour and visual elements. My awareness of

the tonal aspect of colour has remained enhanced by the experience, and could be

described as becoming-other in the Deleuzian sense – as an increase in affects through

being part of this multi-stranded assemblage.

3.9 Native Language (kalimba/tárogató and other instrument combinations,

2017)

3.9.1 Background

The original idea for this work came from a Deep Listening piece by Pauline Oliveros,

A Series of Mini Pieces (1992).101

One of the instructions in this piece/text score is:

Always speak your native language (determine what that is).102

My first attempt to work with this instruction was in a solo improvisation at an outdoor

event in February 2017, coordinated by Melbourne composer Jacqui Rutten as part of

her Sacred Stage endeavour.103

The improvisation also drew on Pauline's Open Field

meditation (see above) in which Oliveros talks about taking a moment from life and

100

Green, Confirmation of Candidature Document, 43. 101 Oliveros, Deep Listening, 42. 102

Oliveros, Deep Listening, 42, Principle 2. A Series of Mini Pieces is in the Deep Listening Pieces section of

the book, following a section on Deep Listening Practice. This instruction is given in a context including

meditation – ‘throughout the semester, these pieces are done in connection with meditations. The performances

are a series of examples’. I was presenting this piece in the meditational context created by Melbourne

composer/performer Jacqui Rutten at one of her outdoor music events (see http://www.sacredstage.com.au ).

From my reading of Oliveros’s work, I felt comfortable taking my own approach and extracting this second of

three instructions for use as the basis for my performance, which would function as one example. 103 Composer/performer Jacqui Rutten and I met around 2007 through our involvement in a performance staged

by the Brunswick Composing Women’s Group at the Boite, a venue for acoustic music across a range of genres

in North Fitzroy, Melbourne. I have now taken part in many music events coordinated by Rutten – both

‘Improvisations as Nature’ events in outdoor locations and Sacred Stage concerts at the home of the composer in

Melbourne’s Dandenong Ranges.

88

creating an art event from it, finding a way to share it with others. With the intention

that the improvisation would be an offering in the present moment to the participant

group, I improvised on the instrument tuned to a blues scale, choosing this as my

‘native language’ on the basis of improvisations with it over many years. Blues is a

language I keep returning to, finding new ways to work within it.104

I hoped for a sound

world ranging through tonal and atonal combinations (this is what emerged as I

experimented with the tuning before the event). In the improvisation on the day,

however, I found the result mixed and suffering from the loss of the groove/beat usually

present in blues, and less successful than the song I also performed, which worked as an

art event shared with others without needing to be ‘experimental’.

I gave thought to the outcome of the performance – the audience loved the reading of

the text score with which I began the offering, but musically the improvisation was

unsatisfactory.

‘Principles prevail. What are those principles?’

Oliveros’s question in her text score prompted me to ask: Was it enough to use the

kalimba in a semi-aleatoric way, tuned to a scale that had worked well enough for a

written-out solo, but which had resulted in music that lacked inner coherence and

musical logic? Perhaps a better result was possible, but I doubted that I would be able to

achieve it in this way.

Through an unexpected reconnection with a UK musician friend I decided to recast the

native language idea as a notated work for kalimba and tárogató, returning to the modal

tuning I have mostly used on the kalimba (see Photo 3.14) and thinking of this as my

native language.105

104

I began playing blues around 1989 and into the early 1990s, taking lessons on guitar and harmonica with

Gerard Holmgren (guitar) and Kaz Dalla Rosa (harmonica). I incorporated a kalimba solo using a blues tuning

in At Spider House, a punk/folk song on my CD of 2004, Mindless Fun. In Walking (see discussion of piece IV

of Suite from Sighting Silence, Sounding Image, above) I worked with an expanded blues language and a fusion

of this language with classical piano gestures and elements. 105

This tuning was the basis of my Two Little Dogs for kalimba, loop pedal and tin whistle in D, or three

kalimbas and tin whistle in D, 2009 (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqwbnKdK5K0).

89

Photo 3.14: Native Language kalimba tuning. Source: Christina Green

I wanted to write something for my friend, a pianist who took up the tárogató as part of

his midlife exploration of Jewish identity, and felt the native language idea was present

in his resonance with the tárogató, with which he enjoys playing Jewish and eastern

folk music. My initial plan was to use technology to work across distance, but as the

piece was reaching completion, it became clear that the mooted collaboration was not

going to go ahead, and I regrouped to make the work realizable in more than one way,

in keeping with Eve Beglarian’s approach – on her website, Eve indicates that she is

very open to different arrangements of her pieces.106

Pauline Oliveros’s work also

leaves room for multiple realizations – many of her text scores are for players of

unspecified instruments. I have now arranged the kalimba part for piano, and aim to

106

For example, in the notes on her website to Play Nice (version accessed 9/17, no longer current), Beglarian

wrote: ‘Play Nice was written for harpist Elizabeth Panzer, but it can also be played on toy piano by one (or

two) people. If you want to play it on some other instrument, I’m likely to be fine with that.’ Another work, The

Flood, was (9/17) described as being ‘for flexible instrumentation’ – in the current version of the notes,

Beglarian writes: ‘I’m open to you arranging it for your ensemble; let me know what you have in mind.’

https://evbvd.com/blog/pub/flood/?sf_action=get_data&sf_data=all&sf_paged=2, accessed March 2018.

Beglarian also happily agreed to a request I made some time ago to rearrange one of her pieces, Armon, for

performance with ukulele and voice (email correspondence, 13/5/14 and 3/6/14).

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perform the piece with a collaborator107

at a future Melbourne Composers’ League

Elbow Room concert.108

A longer-term goal is to produce a recording of the kalimba

part that can be performed live using Ableton Live and a Novation Launchpad,109

drawing in this on inspiration from Eve Beglarian110

(see Photo 3.15).

Photo 3.15: Eve Beglarian performing Night Psalm at the Old Stone House, Park Slope,

Brooklyn, as part of Musical Ecologies, January 24th

, 2013. Source: Dan Joseph/Eve

Beglarian111

107

Alternative instrumentations, for example marimba or vibraphone substituting kalimba, and violin, alto

saxophone or cor anglais substituting tárogató, are suggested in the work’s program note. 108 The Elbow Room concerts of the Melbourne Composers’ League take place a couple of times a year in the

band room at Northcote’s Wesley Anne, a converted church, and in the Barn Gallery at Montsalvat Artist

Colony in Eltham, Melbourne. The space at Wesley Anne offers a suitable ambience for Downtown-style

performances, and the program usually includes works with electronic elements, while the Barn Gallery at

Montsalvat favours more traditional chamber/concert works. 109

An initial recording using sounds available on Logic computer program, played on keyboard, has been made

for this folio submission – see https://soundcloud.com/christina-green-composer/native-language. 110

Eve’s performance of her work Night Psalm using Novation launch pad (see

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIV6i0Dgtws, accessed 11/17) was my introduction to the Launchpad, and I

am struck by its aesthetic beauty and the seamless incorporation into a Downtown art music context that

Beglarian achieves in this performance. I am aware of wanting to find my own way with technology, and also

that I am a latecomer to it. I first heard performances enhanced by Ableton Live on residency at the Banff

Centre in 2009 (for example Pidgoyomon by Canadian artist/residents Terri Hron and Catherine Thompson),

and have retained the desire to move into this area of composition/performance since that time, wanting

particularly to use it to enhance the acoustic instruments I play, as Hron and Thompson did with recorders and

kora in their show at Banff’s Royston Recital Hall, 8/3/2009. 111 Dan Joseph, video clips from the Musical Ecologies series at the Old Stone House in Park Slope, Brooklyn,

New York City, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIV6i0Dgtws, accessed December 2018. I acknowledge

both Joseph and Beglarian for their kind permission to use a still shot from the video/performance.

91

The French section titles – chanson (bars 1 – 37), divertissement (bars 38 – 59),

moment de jeu (bars 60 – 81) and chanson reconstruite (bars 82 – 127/end), flowed

from supervision feedback received on the piece in which a passage in the tárogató was

described as a 'flight of fancy', sparking the idea of ‘moment de jeu’. From this, the

other titles proceeded easily, following my reconnection with reading and speaking

French on a visit to Paris in October 2017.112

The song-like A/A1 section feels

reminiscent of some French styles to me, and invited the title ‘chanson’.

3.9.2 Compositional process

Native Language emerged as a more purely musical form not propelled by a story line,

‘program’, visual component or the setting of a text, and based more on an exploration

of the instruments involved, around a primary melody which came to be thought of as a

‘song without words’. I sought to achieve musical variety with limited means – initially,

the limited tárogató skills of my friend, and the limits to dynamic and tempo range

possible on the kalimba.113

As mentioned above, writing for non-specialist and

untrained players is a strand of Pauline Oliveros’s work. Of Oliveros’s Sonic

Meditations (1974), Martha Mockus writes:

The Sonic Meditations challenge many of the conventions of western art music

on several levels. First, the invitation to “untrained” musicians to take part

upsets the traditional separation between “expert” and “amateur” in western

music … training is not required whatsoever for participation in Oliveros’s

Sonic Meditations; all members of the group are equally valuable and necessary.

Furthermore, the sounds that are made will not meet normative expectations of

virtuosity, and this is a desired effect.114

112

It was significant to me to be able to visit the city where Deleuze was based. I was not able to visit Deleuze’s

birthplace, but enjoyed seeing memorials to other French philosophers (see Photos 3.16 and 3.17). 113

These limits were a combination of what is inherent in the instrument and the limits of my playing capacities.

I worked with the possibility of enhancement through processing with Ableton Live in my mind. At the point

when the thread of the proposed collaboration seemed to be disappearing, I began to feel free to move into more

technically demanding writing for the tárogató, glad to be able to work with an increased upper register and

chromatic palette. 114 Mockus, Sounding Out, 43.

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Something of this approach of Oliveros’s is embodied in Native Language. I began with

the desire to write a new piece for my friend to play that could perhaps be a step in the

expansion of his capacities with the instrument (an increase in affects through entering

into an assemblage with me as we reconnected). He had said: ‘It is the best way for me

to express myself using my breath, because the sound is so meaningful to me’115

–

embracing this new instrument without a teacher and beginning to play it in public,

alongside his much higher-level public piano performing. In taking this step, I felt that

my friend had opened himself to new becoming through embracing non-specialist

playing as an avenue for a different kind of expression than that of his more studied

piano playing. In her work, as seen in the discussion of Echoes from the Moon,

Oliveros’s aim was to give all participants space in which to experience sound and

music-making. Through her meditations and text score works she also invited

participants to work with sound in connection with evoked memories, as described by

composer/scholar Pamela Madsen in ‘Toward a Feminine Form in Music: Pauline

Oliveros’s Rose Moon’.116

Like Ione providing words, as poet, for the audience

participants at the 1999 staging of Echoes from the Moon, I wanted to offer this piece as

a vehicle for my friend’s exploration of cultural identity and also as a way in which our

connection could move into a new musical context, in which I could also operate as a

non-specialist/minimally trained participant.117

I wrote for the kalimba using my own form of ‘deep listening’, exploring the terrain of

the instrument to find a selection of useable tonal centres and two-note combinations

possible in relation to its particular key layout (see Photo 3.14), arriving at some

unusual progressions this way and thinking of this as part of the ‘native language’

115

Personal email from Elie Fruchter-Murray, April 25th

, 2017. 116

Madsen, ‘Toward A Feminine Form In Music.’ On pages 7–8, Madsen writes about her experience in a

meditation led by Magrit Schenker, a student of Oliveros, in which Oliveros participated, saying that: ‘She

(Schenker) asked us all to close our eyes. (Immediately my new-age defense-alarms went off, and I only half

closed my eyes.) Then she asked us to remember a person who had influenced our lives positively (more

defensive scepticism), and, from this position of positive energy, to listen deeply within ourselves and make a

sound from this place. (I hear only analytical chatter within myself). Then the sound hit me. (I was astounded by

the energy that swept over me, as voices emerged from the audience surrounding me). I found myself

remembering my grandmother, by then mute with Alzheimer’s disease, who would listen for hours to me as a

child playing the piano and would dance and sing. I began to sing her voice and found myself uncontrollably

physically moved. All critical thought was stripped away as I became immersed in the moment, listening to the

sound from within me. The entire room buzzed with reverberating sonic energy. The meditation crescendo-ed

then ended spontaneously. It was over but I was changed. What was this music, and why was I – a highly

educated scholar of the most advanced, complex music – so moved?’

117 My original hope was to record the kalimba part and send it to the UK, where my friend would be able to

work with it and ultimately add the tárogató part.

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available from the instrument and this tuning. Throughout, I was looking for texture118

and counterpoint between the two instruments, at times mentally recalling the craft

embodied in Bach’s two-part inventions and welcoming features that appear in those

pieces, such as slightly unusual and dissonant harmonies created by the independent

voice-leading. An important moment in the development of the piece was a suggestion

received in supervision to make further use of the ‘flight of fancy’ chromatic passage in

the tárogató in bars 58-59 (see example 3.7).

Example 3.7 – Native Language, bars 57-60.

Using this idea effectively reworked the A section and helped (along with the

reallocation and adjustment of the two melodic lines between the two instruments in

bars 1-16119

) to create the A1 – ‘chanson reconstruite’ – section (see bars 97, 103 in

example 3.8a, and beyond), achieving both motivic tightness and variety across the

work.

118

A focus on texture, in particular, maintaining a mindfulness of the trajectory of texture through a work, with

a view to not losing texture once established, has been a feature of the composition supervision I have received

from Dr Clare Maclean, and an area of development for me as a composer through this doctoral work. 119

Some nice variations proceeded from this recasting of the material, as not all notes were available on the

kalimba at higher register, providing the impetus to rework rather than just copy/transpose without changes.

This craft/aesthetic value was given to me in tuition during my Masters’ years.

94

Example 3.8a – Native Language bars 94-105 (bars 97 and 103 show the motif worked

into the tárogató melodic line, varying the presentation from the first appearance at bars

16/22) – see example 3.8b.

Example 3.8b – Native Language bars 15-26.

The final section (bars 120-end) required considerable crafting to achieve a satisfying

and effective ending. In my mind the piece now evokes some of the imagery that I hold

from my Paris trip, including the joy of sharing this experience with my partner of over

20 years, Jo Smith.120

For me this is part of its process of becoming, and connects with

Pasler’s ‘memory palace’ idea describing works of Oliveros.121

At Montmartre I sang a

120 See chapter 4, 117–118, for more on Smith’s place in my life as a creative musician. Smith has been an

occasional instrumentalist in performances of my works and a constant presence in a way that aligns for me with

the ongoing presence of Ione in Oliveros’s life. We share interests in feminism, literature, music and French

language/culture. 121 See n. 67.

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couple of songs122

on the steps near the funicular railway that ascends and descends the

hill,123

bringing a musical offering into this space as a ‘nomad … passionately and

artistically engaged in everyday life, the culture of the material world and those living

in it’,124

and connecting with the voices of others who had left utterances in the form of

street art images (see Photo 3.16).

Photo 3.16: View from the Café Deux Magots at St Germain-des-Prés, celebrated for its

historical connection with literary and intellectual figures (on previous page). Source:

Christina Green

122

One of the songs was Officeworks from the Nomadic Journeys cycle; a video link is included in the

commentary on that work in Chapter 4. 123 Playing in outdoor locations is part of an ongoing practice related to ideas absorbed from Pauline Oliveros,

and will be discussed in a section to follow, including commentary on performances/realisations of two of

Oliveros’s text scores. 124

Elizabeth Gould, ‘Women Working in Music Education: the War Machine,’ Philosophy of Music Education

Review, Volume 17, Number 2, Fall 2009, 133–134.

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Photo 3.17: Rue Foucault, Paris. Source: Jo Smith

Photo 3.18: At Montmartre. Source: Jo Smith

97

Photo 3.19: Street art at Montmartre. Source: Christina Green

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3.10 Ground Thunder Returns (piano and double bass, 2017)125

3.10.1 Background

This work for piano and double bass was composed as part of Secrets Through a

Soundglass, a project involving several composers126

curated by Western Sydney

University PhD candidate Sean Botha. Botha created the project to generate research

data through the composition and performance of several works for string instruments

(with double bass and piano amongst the options), with composers bringing a particular

focus on texture to the composition process. The works would be analysed as part of

Botha’s research, focusing on the textural features through the lens of

spectromorphology.127

Composers were asked to keep a diary about the creative processes involved in writing

the works, and in mine I observed a process of listening more intently for texture in

music from March 2017 as I worked on the mixing and mastering of my double CD. I

treated Native Language as a study in some ways for Ground Thunder Returns,

particularly in the focus on texture between the two instruments. I also explored a range

of textures in Land, Sea, Sky,128

working from a visual source and program derived

from it. Ground Thunder Returns was originally inspired by writing from several

sources about I Ching hexagram 24, Fu/Return, but following the successful completion

of Land, Sea, Sky I created a more detailed program mapping out a multi-section work

with varied textures.

I encountered hexagram 24, Fu/Return, through reading as part of a Buddhist retreat. In

the text I read this description:

125 The audio for Ground Thunder Returns (performed by Dan Thorpe and Catherine Golden) is linked at

https://soundcloud.com/christina-green-composer/ground-thunder-returns/s-vXKt4. The video of the

performance by Catherine Golden and myself is at https://youtu.be/Pki6n1nVgJU. 126

The composers were Felicity Wilcox, Peggy Polias, Dan Thorpe, Catherine Golden and myself. The works,

for various combinations of violin, viola, cello, double bass and piano, were performed on February 24th, 2018

at the Joan Sutherland Centre, Penrith, NSW), in the Secrets Through a Soundglass concert (see

https://www.bluemts.com.au/news/secrets-through-a-soundglass-at-the-joan/ (accessed October 2019). 127

See https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Hanli_Botha (accessed October 2019). 128 This work, completed before Ground Thunder Returns in November 2017, is discussed in chapter 5.

99

Five yin lines above and one yang line below – the hexagram known as ‘Ground

Thunder Returns’ – corresponds seasonally to the winter solstice. It is perhaps

this Chuang Tzu refers to when he speaks of ‘the True Person breathing from his

heels.129

As I prepared for the Secrets Through a Soundglass project, this text and the evocative

hexagram title came back to me, and with further research on hexagram 24, ideas began

to flow. I recalled reading that Pauline Oliveros also has a piece that was inspired by an

I Ching hexagram, The Wanderer (1982),130

and an analysis by Martha Mockus131

describing how the piece was based on the hexagram, including a scale Oliveros

derived from the hexagram by reading the yin (broken) lines as half steps/semitones and

the yang (unbroken) lines as whole steps/tones.132

Happy about this resonance with

Oliveros’s aesthetic, I proceeded in my own way compositionally, preferring not to

revisit The Wanderer on CD or delve back into the analysis for any kind of guidance.

Returning later to Mockus’s analysis, and noting how Oliveros’s scale133

and two

contrasting sections134

were derived from the hexagram, I saw parallels with Oliveros in

the area of working with ‘nonmusical elements’135

drawn from some similar areas –

Eastern thought, Buddhism, occasional Native American texts/poems. Indeed, it was the

discovery of some of these things in Oliveros’s music, and her work to bring a

meditative focus into her music and into music-making experiences created for and with

others, that helped to kindle my interest in studying her work, along with the knowledge

that she identified as a lesbian.

129

Hakuin Ekaku, Wild Ivy: the Spiritual Autobiography of Zen Master Hakuin, trans. Norman Waddell (Boston

and London: Shambhala Publications, 2001), 97. 130

On pages 114–115 of Sounding Out, Mockus states that Oliveros’s The Wanderer is informed by hexagram

56, Lu/The Wanderer, and that hexagram 56 is made up of two trigrams, ‘Keeping Still, Mountain’ and ‘The

Clinging, Fire’. In her n. 49 Mockus refers to the album cover’s mention of hexagram 53, ‘Development,

Gradual Progress’, which she contends may be an error (though it establishes a hexagram connection with the

work). I have been unable to sight this album cover, but it seems clear from Mockus’s n. 48 that this is the

original 1984 release of The Wanderer (Lovely Music, 1984, VR 1902), and I have worked ‘alongside’ (see

chapter 2, 39) Mockus’s analysis of The Wanderer around hexagram 56, Lu/The Wanderer, finding it plausible. 131 Mockus, Sounding Out, 113–115. 132

Mockus, Sounding Out, 114. The reading of the scale that underpins the work as being derived from

hexagram 56 (and its two trigrams) may be Mockus’s. 133

The scale is mentioned in the liner notes of the CD, Pauline Oliveros: The Wanderer (Groveland, Mass.:

Important Records, 2007). Mockus observes that the pitches are incorrectly given in these notes as B C# D D# E

F# G#, and that what she hears is B D D# E F# G# A, with B as a strong tonic, and I am in agreement with her. 134

Song and Dance, to reflect the two trigrams that form the hexagram (see n. 130 and n. 132 above). 135

Timothy Taylor, ‘The Gendered Construction of the Musical Self’, The Musical Quarterly, Vol. 77, No. 3,

Autumn 1993, 389.

100

There are similarities and differences in the way Oliveros and I use found material to

create works. A desire to reflect the feeling/emotional quality/texture of non-musical

elements is present in my work, for example in the pieces of the Bundanon suite, in a

similar way to what Mockus sees in The Wanderer (for example, connecting musical

features such as slow tempo, long sustained tones and thick chords created by multiple

accordions with the ‘Keeping Still, Mountain’ trigram reading of Song).136

I have used

elements of my found material to create musical structures, for example, embedding

numerical features drawn from the visual art works of Flossie Peitsch in the rhythmic

and harmonic parameters of the music, as well as in the time signatures and layout of

bars in some places. It has mostly been my preference to allow the musical language of

a piece to emerge without conscious attempts to direct it by means of the creation of

scales/ pitch sets derived in some way from the found material inspiring the work.

Native Language comes close to having a pre-decided pitch set, with the chosen

kalimba tuning creating the modality of the piece and dictating the pitches available on

that instrument, but with a broader/chromatic palette deployed with flexibility,

according to craft and taste considerations, in the tárogató part. Open Field from Suite

from Sighting Silence, Sounding Image embeds a pitch set derived from its incorporated

bird call flexibly, within a jazz/classical harmonic language, but not as ‘integrally’ as

the way Oliveros uses her pitch set in The Wanderer.

In Ground Thunder Returns I also worked with this jazz/classical fusion language,

seeking to use elements such as articulation, accentuation and harmonics on the double

bass to create textural variety that could benefit the research project. The creation of the

more detailed program from story elements from writings about hexagram 24 parallels

my way of working in Five Journey into Smooth Space Together, without a found

image (as in Suite from Sighting Silence, Sounding Image or Land, Sea, Sky). Themes of

return of energy and flow, of progress and freedom of action, and of a cycle in which

refinement at a higher level can occur, are encapsulated in the hexagram, with a final

comment – 'it is beneficial to have somewhere to go'.137

Moving through episodes

working with different textures as requested in the original brief, reflecting a range of

136

Mockus, Sounding Out, 115. Again, I find Mockus’s reading plausible and supportive of a connection

between the music and the ‘Keeping Still, Mountain’ trigram which is part of hexagram 56, The Wanderer, for

which the work is titled (see also n. 130 and n. 132 above). 137

Detailed information and many readings of hexagram 24, Return, with a diagram, can be found at Michael

Servetus’s The Gnostic Book of Changes: 24 – Return, http://www.jamesdekorne.com/GBCh/hex24.htm

(accessed November 2017). Descriptive phrases from this article are referenced in the text in Appendix C.

101

states and feelings, I referenced a wide range of styles with a view to unfolding a sense

of journey through many states and periods of musical interest. I hoped to convey a

mid-life feel with some revisiting of earlier times, and to achieve a gathering together of

threads with the piece ending on a return to the opening idea. This return, sitting

comfortably within my 21st century compositional voice, is presented with greater

stability, strength and confidence than on its first appearance, reinforced musically to

reflect the inner gains from the journey made in the piece. The sections of the piece and

their correspondence to the themes of the hexagram are summarised in Appendix C.

In the process of rehearsal and performance in February 2018 some changes were made

to the score by Catherine Golden and Dan Thorpe as part of their interpretation of the

work, and I incorporated these, valuing the input of the performers, in keeping with the

approach of Jennifer Rycenga.138

Unable to take the role of pianist at the first

performance, I organised the second performance of the piece with Catherine Golden at

the Melbourne Composers’ League Elbow Room concert on September 30th

2018 at the

Barn Gallery at Montsalvat, Eltham, Melbourne. I valued the opportunity to grow in a

duo performance at this level, which was new to me, having mostly performed solo on

piano. The journey of this work has involved multiple becomings, and I envisage

further development including a possible arrangement for cello and piano – the volume

of the cello could be a better balance to the piano.139

Amplification of the double bass is

another potential option, and I am also interested in experimenting with live processing

effects on the double bass.

3.11 Improvised realisations of text scores by Pauline Oliveros (2014 and

2016)

During the course of this project, while maintaining an ongoing practice of listening and

improvising in natural settings, especially at Melbourne’s Fairfield Amphitheatre on the

Yarra River, I have created three public performance realisations of text scores by

Pauline Oliveros. The first of these, the improvisation based on the ‘native language’

138

See chapter 2, 37, 38/n. 109. 139

This would be in response to a suggestion from Dr Clare Maclean following hearing the second

performance/recording of the work.

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idea from A Series of Mini Pieces (1992) has been discussed above; discussion of the

second and third follows.

3.11.1 In Consideration of the Earth

I performed In Consideration of the Earth (1998)140

for solo brass or wind instrument

on a brass tin whistle at an Improvisations as Nature gathering staged by Jacqui

Rutten141

in January 2014; this was chronologically my first experience of performing

one of Oliveros’s works as an improviser and a chance to experience the effect the

realisation would have on others, in other words, what might flow from the

assemblage142

created. The instructions ask the improviser to:

Listen in all directions.

Turn and play only to the North (interacting with sounds perceived or

imagined).143

Following this, the East, South, West and Center are worked with in the same way.

While performing I experienced an easy flow of associations, memories etc. as I

performed, chiming with the ‘memory palace’ idea.144

Fragments of poetry moved

through my mind, and I was aware both of responding to sounds and of leaving some

sounds unresponded to in favour of working with inner material. I sustained a sense of

my own body moving in space throughout the performance, and also maintained an

awareness of other participants around me. In one direction I moved into a diatonic

melody that seemed to fit with that direction and moment. In another I interacted

through the tin whistle with the barking of a nearby dog, and this created a humorous

connection with the listener/participants. I was aware that all sounds that arose

belonged in the piece, a welcome change from many musical environments, but one

that would take time to adjust to and convey to audiences unfamiliar with this kind of

approach. I sensed that people wanted a way of participating beyond listening, and plan

140 Pauline Oliveros, Anthology of Text Scores (Kingston, NY: Deep Listening Publications, 2013), 31. 141

See n. 103. 142

See chapter 2, 11. 143

Oliveros, Anthology of Text Scores, 31. 144 See n. 67.

103

to experiment with a set-up that invites joining in, going beyond the specific

instructions of Oliveros in the text score in a way that I feel sure she would be happy

about.

3.11.2 Ear Rings

I coordinated an improvised performance of Oliveros’s Ear Rings145

with Catherine

Golden (bass recorder and double bass), John Dabron (violin) and Allison Balberg

(viola da gamba) at Western Sydney University in September 2016.146

Ear Rings is

designated by Oliveros as ‘for four players’ and moves through a process of creating

musical episodes (rings) in pairs/smaller combos and finally coming together as a

group. I was the fourth player in the group, with soprano recorder and baritone ukulele,

and also led the piece, orchestrating the transitions between pairs/combinations (which

had been worked out in advance) and bringing the piece to a close. Golden and I pre-

planned a loosely modal/medieval-music inspired opening. The group had a chance for

a brief trial/rehearsal, having already received instructions and an agreed order for the

player combinations. It was of interest to me that a modal idiom worked well, and I

realised that I had had a bias toward feeling that atonality would be more the language

for this kind of improvisation. The job of coordinating was more difficult than

anticipated, and I would welcome the chance to be part of an ongoing improvisation

group and to develop the listening and awareness that are pivotal to this kind of work.147

I feel that this would enhance and support all my musical endeavours, and I am making

connections with experimental musicians in Melbourne with whom I hope to develop

this strand in the future.

145 Oliveros, Anthology of Text Scores, 106. 146

Creativity Unlimited Festival, Kingswood Campus, WSU, 2/9/16. Golden, Dabron and Balberg are members

of the North Sydney Strings Ensemble. 147

The performance of Ear Rings can be listened to at https://soundcloud.com/christina-green-

composer/christina-green-catherine-golden-john-dabron-and-allison-balberg.

104

Photo 3.20: Fairfield Amphitheatre, site for listening/improvising including a tin whistle

realisation of Oliveros’s In Consideration of the Earth in 2014. Source: Christina Green

A prose poem written by Oliveros in 1984 called Horse Sings From Cloud,148

written to

express her growing understanding of Horse,149

includes the following:

Listen

Dancing breath

Listen

Long Sound

...

No Change

When Desire

To Change

Change When

No Desire

To Change150

When I first read this I was struck by the composer’s connection of the

music/performance with her actual perceptions and moment-to-moment awareness. In

this piece the composer’s internal stream of moment-to-moment awareness is mobilised

148 Included in the notes on CD The Wanderer. 149

Oliveros, The Wanderer, back cover. 150

Horse Sings From Cloud is also laid out as a text score (with the date 1975) by Oliveros in the Anthology of

Text Scores (164–167; see n. 140) as follows: Sustain one or more tones or sounds until any desire to change the

tone(s) or sound(s) subsides. When there is no desire to change the tone(s) or sound(s), then change.

105

as the catalyst for change and progression, effectively generating its form from a

different kind of listening. A different kind of listening is high on the list of the things I

have gained from my immersion in the work of Pauline Oliveros, and I want to

conclude this chapter with my own poem,151

written in response to my experience of

performing In Consideration of the Earth at the Fairfield Amphitheatre.

On Performing Pauline Oliveros’s “In Consideration of the Earth”

© Christina Green, 2014.

They’re playing my song!

From the sonic centre spot

tin whistle becomes

present, part of the One-All,

directionally guided.152

The different listening that I have embraced through working with the ideas and materials of

Pauline Oliveros now permeates all my performing – even when playing a song I have

performed hundreds of times I now have an awareness that I am ‘composing’ the sound(ing)

of this particular song in this particular space/time as a unique event. This awareness and

approach are aligned with the Deleuzian view of music as being in a process of becoming

through the performance dimension, summarised in Marianne Kielian-Gilbert’s assertion that

‘the shift is from construing music as a text – as a passive bearer of qualities – to re-activating

and engaging music in differentiating temporal processes and affiliations’.153

151

The tanka is a poem form in the haiku family, comprising five lines and a syllable pattern 5,7,5,7,7. 152 The poem was written in September 2014. See chapter 2, 30 and on, for references to the Deleuzian term

‘One-All’. 153

Marianne Kielian-Gilbert, ‘Music and the Difference in Becoming’, in Hulse and Nesbitt, eds., Sounding the

Virtual: Gilles Deleuze and the Theory and Philosophy of Music (Farnham, Surrey, and Burlington, VT:

Ashgate, 2010), 200.

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Chapter 4

Works Drawing Inspiration from Eve Beglarian

This chapter focuses on four folio works, Three Pieces for Women’s Voices, with Two

Cellos (1987/1988, revised and extended 2012), Eileen’s Vision (2014-2015), Nomadic

Journeys (2015-2016), and Park Slope, Brooklyn (2016). In the composition of these

works I drew, in various ways, on inspiration from my study of the work of Eve

Beglarian. Beglarian has inspired my work both through her visibility as a lesbian in art

music, and as a 20th

/21st century composer who synthesises many musical strands.

These include inspiration from medieval music and other art music, elements from

popular music, and electronic/pre-recorded sound and multi-media resources such as

photos and video. Beglarian has developed a unique voice over a period of

compositional practice dating from around 1980.1 Her works weave musical and non-

musical content together in a sophisticated way, presenting texts and stories about a

wide range of subjects. My compositional process throughout the duration of this

project has been continuously energised by my ongoing discovery of Beglarian’s works,

drawing particular inspiration from those with subject matter relating to lesbian life, and

from others whose compositional craft has struck me as skilful and fresh, offering

potential new ways forward, to be explored in the context of my own practice within

my own voice. Various expressions about art-making that Beglarian has shared in print

materials and in the interview I conducted with her in November 2013 have also

informed my thinking and work. The background to my encounters with Beglarian’s

work is unfolded in the next section, preceding the discussion of my four works which

draw on inspiration from Beglarian.

1 The first work listed in the Selected Compositions list on Beglarian’s site dates from 1980 (see

https://evbvd.com/newsnotes/evbworks.html, accessed October 2018).

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4.1 Background

My introduction to the work of Eve Beglarian came through Jamie Crofts, a gay

composer and pianist based in Brighton UK who performed two of my piano works at

Brighton Pride in 2008 and included some of Beglarian’s work in the same program.

The concert, featuring works by lesbian and gay composers, was entitled I Play the

Body Electric.2 I responded to a call for scores put out by Crofts in the Competitions

and Opportunities section of the website of Women In Music UK,3 in which he

expressed a particular need for responses from lesbian composers who were willing to

be identified as such in a concert that he was organising. Crofts had difficulty finding

enough lesbian composers to balance the program,4 welcomed my expression of

interest,5 and included Count the Stars (2007) and Triptych (2008) in the concert.

Interested in learning more, I began to look at Eve Beglarian’s work in detail via her

website.6 I found works touching on women’s lives and issues such as Fireside (2001), which

sets a poem by composer and folklorist Ruth Crawford Seeger,7 works connected with lesbian

life/culture such as the incidental music on the spoken word CD Dream Cum Go Down,

produced with performance poet Juliana Luecking,8 and works connected with journey and

2 I Play the Body Electric took place on July 31, 2008, at Friends’ Meeting House, Ship Street, Brighton,

featuring Jamie Crofts on piano and including works by Dame Ethel Smyth, David Hoyle, Jamie Crofts, John

Cage, Lou Harrison, Samuel Barber, Francis Poulenc, Peter Maxwell Davies, Edward Carpenter, Gertrude Stein,

Antony, Cecile Chaminade, Eve Beglarian and Christina Green. 3 Women in Music UK, http://www.womeninmusic.org.uk/compsandops.asp, accessed April 2018.

4 Mike Cobley, ‘I Play the Body Electric: Lesbian and Gay Composers Lead the Way during Pride Week’, The

Brighton Magazine, June 11th

, 2008,

http://magazine.brighton.co.uk/index.aspx?SEC_ID=1&CAT_ID=21&ART_ID=2632 accessed April 2018. In

the article, Crofts is quoted as saying: ‘I've spent a year searching for lesbian composers and I've had a limited

response. I've contacted composers individually. I've asked my musician contacts to ask friends to be involved.

I've put out a call for works through the organisation Women In Music. Through Women In Music I managed to

get in touch with Christina Green. The search was worthwhile for her contribution alone.’ 5 In the program note for Triptych, Crofts states: ‘Christina Green was the first to respond to my call for

compositions by lesbian composers.’ The work by Eve Beglarian was Spherical Music (1985/1998). 6 Beglarian’s website is at https://www.evbvd.com (accessed January 2019 and regularly from c. 2011).

7 This piece was one of the seven commissioned by pianist Sarah Cahill from American women composers for a

concert in 2001to mark the centennial of Ruth Crawford Seeger (1901-1953), who stopped composing the year

before giving birth to her first child in 1932, and produced only one more work before her death (see Kyle

Gann, ‘Composer, Interrupted’) . Crawford wrote Fireside Fancies when she was thirteen, and in it speaks of

her ‘wishes and hopes’ of becoming a poet, novelist and musician, but also of the dying away of these hopes as

the fire at which she is sitting burns low. Beglarian’s setting is a spoken word rendering over a piano part whose

harmony ‘is a response to Crawford Seeger’s fifth prelude’ (program note in score of Fireside, No 1101,

Beglarian, Eve, https://evbvd.com/fireside/1101%20fireside%score.pdf, accessed May 2018, no longer online).

For more detail, and background to the work composed by Pauline Oliveros for the same commission/event, see

chapter 3, 48–49/n. 25–27. 8 Juliana Luecking and Eve Beglarian, Dream Cum Go Down (Olympia: Kill Rock Stars, 1995).

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travel – specifically, works created through Beglarian’s movement through spaces and

contexts, appearing to me as nomadic movement in the Deleuzian sense9 – in which she made

an impact on these spaces/contexts and was also transformed in the process. The group of

works Beglarian composed in response to her experiences on a trip down the Mississippi

River by kayak in 2009, collectively referred to as The River Project, is an example. In her

striking range of focus in subject matter and sources of inspiration, as well as gradual

movement into new creative territories over time, Beglarian’s work as a composer shows a

trajectory of increasing complexity, identified by her in a statement of gratitude for the

Robert Rauschenberg Award, which she received in 2015. Beglarian says that the award:

had an incalculable impact not only on my life and work this year, [and it] has planted

seeds that I believe will be bearing fruit for years to come... In a way, this unexpected

gift was destabilizing. It opened up space for me to try new things, see the world

differently. I started writing words for performance, something I have not taken

seriously before now. I began making visual art projects, something I had never even

considered doing... The work I have made this year is only the inchoate beginning of a

new direction in my work and in my life. I hope to be able to share the fruits of these

explorations for years to come.10

In our interview, Beglarian acknowledged that there was a definite shift in her life at the point

where she split from her husband and came out, and that from then on ‘she was identified in

the world as a lesbian to whatever degree that was’.11

Beglarian offered her thoughts about

identity/identities including her own, saying:

I think all of us are a complex of minority and majority identities, and I think that the

minority identity is really important the moment that identity is under siege. When

that identity isn’t under siege you can take it for granted, you can let it go. So, as an

Armenian person, my Armenian-ness is certainly part of who I am, but I don’t regard

myself as a professional Armenian, unless that identity is for some reason under siege,

and the same is true of my lesbian identity. Of course I’m a lesbian, I will gladly and

9 See chapter 1, 2–3. 10

Eve Beglarian, Composer, Performer, statement of thanks to the Foundation for Contemporary Arts for the

gift of the Robert Rauschenberg Award, 2015, https://www.foundationforcontemporaryarts.org/recipients/eve-

beglarian (accessed May 2018). 11 Eve Beglarian, interview with Christina Green, 11th November, 2013, Manhattan.

109

with pride assert that, or accept that identity, but I’m not going to assert it some

intense way unless it’s under siege, and I think it’s important to make that statement,

because here we are doing something about lesbian identity.12

In these words, Beglarian asserts a complex identity with multiple strands – ‘multiple’ in the

Deleuzian language used in previous chapters. Her sexuality is part of the picture in her life

and work – as are her various strands of heritage – Armenian, Irish, American. Beglarian

manifests or ‘performs’ her sexuality differently at different times and in different contexts,

as unfolded in the discussion below – in some works and composition-related activities, such

as her appearances on podcasts produced by queer composer/performer Michael Harren,13

it

is foregrounded, while in others the focus is on other subjects and content. Viewed through a

Deleuzian lens, the lesbian identity originally established when she came out (and moved

musically from the Uptown context to the Downtown one)14

can be seen to move from being

to becoming, as continuing on a path of ongoing differing from itself,15

in a progression in

Beglarian’s music. At first, Beglarian incorporates it through working with texts by others,

for example texts by lesbian writers Gertrude Stein and Jeanette Winterson (to be unfolded

below), and later, beginning to explore her own voice and words, she moves into creating

texts of her own which become part of works in which strands of her life as a lesbian are the

subject matter (see the discussion of On the Battlefield below).16

Another layer of

12 Beglarian, interview with Christina Green. 13

An occasional musical connection for Eve Beglarian is Brooklyn-based queer composer and performer

Michael Harren, who has produced his podcast MikeyPod since July 2005. Beglarian appeared on the show in

August 2006 (MP0B62 I Composer Eve Beglarian I 206-339-6682, http://mikeypod.com/2006/08/10/mpob62-

composer-eve-beglarian-206-339-6682/, accessed June 2018), and was also part of the 11-year anniversary

episode (episode 212, July 4th

2016, http://mikeypod.com/2016/07/04/mikeypod-212-mikeypod-live-queerly-

festival/, accessed May 2018), which was also the first live episode, recorded at the Kraine Theater in

Manhattan as part of the Queerly Festival 2016. In the latter she was one of a group of queer artists and

presented four songs (2015-2016) all themed around women in some way, including Farther From the Heart,

with text by bisexual poet/playwright Jane Bowles (see also note 28, this chapter). In the 2006 interview

Beglarian talks with Harren about sexuality and music, and the show ends with a play of her electroacoustic

work Written on the Body, based on a text by British lesbian writer Jeanette Winterson (discussed below).

Another musical involvement in which sexuality is foregrounded is Beglarian’s work with pianist Kathleen

Supové in their duo twisted tutu (which first performed in1995 and continued till c.2000). The duo’s artistic

credo, stated on its (erstwhile) website www.twitstedtutu.com, was: “to be and to remain at the forefront of

physicality, spirituality, and sexuality in music making … we believe that these elements are lacking in today’s

New Music scene and that, using the highest artistic means, they can be exploited to capture and captivate a

whole new audience. Breaking the boundaries between high and popular culture and between old and new is

also central to our work.” The duo’s 1999 CD Play Nice (oodiscs) includes Written on the Body and Boy

Toy/Toy Boy, which Beglarian describes in the liner notes as having been written ‘in reaction to a triple header

of boy music at the Knitting Factory’ – the Knitting Factory being a Manhattan venue featuring experimental

music (1987-2009/2009 – present). 14

See chapter 2, 19/n. 46. 15

See chapter 2, 13/n.16. 16 See this chapter, 111.

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development/becoming is the composer’s move in later years (around 2013-2014) into an

ongoing artistic collaboration with her partner at the time, Ruthie Stephens.17

An early project connected with Beglarian’s life as a lesbian is the CD Dream Cum Go Down

(2005).18

Beglarian says that her work with Juliana Luecking, whose recorded interviews

with lesbians at various locations including San Francisco, the Michigan Womyn’s Music

Festival, London and New York19

form the core of Dream Cum Go Down, was, she thought,

‘the closest to being in a queer scene that I was, and that would have been the mid 90s’, and

that ‘(I)t felt … a little bit cross-cultural, because of course I’m not really part of that scene,

I’m much more part of the experimental music thing, which is different.’20

The CD liner

notes of Dream Cum Go Down state that all proceeds garnered from authors’ rights, plus ten

percent of the CD’s profits, will be donated to lesbian community health projects. In this

work, Beglarian contributed incidental music on just two tracks/interviews, but did the digital

audio editing, and with Luecking was responsible for the sound design.

Preciosilla (1992) is a more substantial musical work which speaks through bringing a poem

by Gertrude Stein, a high-profile literary lesbian from an earlier time, into view in

contemporary times (the 1990s) – referencing popular music to make a new statement that

sits historically in the tradition of American classical/composed music alongside Virgil

Thompson’s very different interpretation of the same poem of 1927, a piece of its time. Both

Dream Cum Go Down and Preciosilla serve to make lesbians visible in the contemporary art

music world and beyond, with Beglarian moving nomadically from her own Downtown/art

music sphere through the terrain opened for her by the connection with Luecking, whom she

met ‘at the first lesbian wedding (she) ever went to’,21

impacting on that terrain and being

impacted by it.22

17

See chapter 6, 169. Some links to work by Beglarian and Stephens are included on the web page

https://evbvd.com/descent/ (accessed January 2019). 18

See this chapter, 107/n.8. 19

The Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival was an international music event that took place annually from 1976-

2015 inclusive (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_music, accessed February 2019). The spelling

‘womyn’ is a feminist adaptation of ‘women’ designed to avoid ending the word with ‘men’. The interviews

focus on experiences of sex spoken about by the participants in relation to a set of three interview questions. 20

Beglarian, interview with Christina Green. 21

Beglarian, interview with Christina Green. 22 See the discussion of my work Park Slope, Brooklyn, later in this chapter, for more on this.

111

Much of the music associated with the Women’s music scene23

is singer-songwriter and

popular music; Dream Cum Go Down offers something different through Beglarian’s

contribution of incidental composed music. The context effectively showcases one of

Beglarian’s trademarks, a combination of spoken word and composed music rather than

melodic text setting. Beglarian acknowledged that she had learned from Luecking, saying that

working with her was:

in a way an education ‘cos she had a real sensitivity to the privacy issues, the politics

of art-making, in a way that I found really impressive, and that woke me up to things

that I hadn’t really thought about. I don’t generally make pieces from documentary

material in the present, most of the things I do are engaging with things where the

people are dead, so it doesn’t really come up, and her way of navigating those waters,

of making art out of other people’s selfhood in a way that honours them and gives

them space to be who they are and doesn’t lay a trip on them that they’re not

comfortable with … she was very sensitive to that and I was very impressed by that.24

Interestingly, in the years since our interview, Beglarian has begun to produce some pieces

that do reference living people, for example Stroking Strumpy (2017), in which text from the

satirical and politically-motivated 14th

century work The Roman de Fauvel is combined, in a

way somewhat reminiscent of medieval music techniques, with a much more recent text, My

Country, ‘Tis of Thee,25

to create a critique and expression of resistance to Donald Trump.

Another piece, On the Battlefield (2015), whose spoken word content, recorded in her own

voice, unfolds some of her feelings about a broken relationship with a woman lover, brings

Beglarian strangely close to the confessional terrain of relationship-focused singer-songwriter

material, and is an example of her experimentation with writing ‘words for performance’,

supported by the Robert Rauschenberg Award .26

23

Women’s Music emerged as a genre connected with second-wave feminism, gathering momentum in the

1970s in the US, centred around a number of lesbian singer-songwriters including Chris Williamson, African-

American women performers such as vocal group Sweet Honey in the Rock, and activist artists such as Holly

Near and Pat Humphries (see this chapter, n. 19). An Australian artist connected with the movement is

Melbourne-based lesbian singer-songwriter Judy Small. 24 Beglarian, interview with Christina Green. 25

Lyrics by Samuel Francis Smith, 1831 (see https://evbvd.com/bookofdays/texts/0120/, accessed February

2019). 26

Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Robert Rauschenberg Award, 2015,

https://www.foundationforcontemporaryarts.org/recipients/eve-beglarian.

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In response to a question by poet Linda Norton, Beglarian expressed her thoughts about lyric

writing and about how she decides to work with a particular poem, saying:

I think I end up choosing particular poems because I feel like they are expressing my

thoughts, or thoughts I can make mine in some way. I'm a thief and a magpie. I think

the core influence on how I think about text is the 60s and 70s American singer-

songwriter tradition: Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Nina Simone, all the usual suspects. If

I could write great lyrics myself, I'd probably do it.27

Another recent work for which Beglarian wrote her own text is What Justice Looks Like

(2016), about Esther Hobart Morris, the first female judge in the United States; in this work

Beglarian returns to her more familiar territory of material about historical figures.28

As I

have read about Beglarian’s work with text I have been inspired both to experiment with non-

melodic text setting and to continue to cultivate my own lyric writing, moving into the

creation of Nomadic Journeys (2015-2016), a cycle of hybrid folk/art songs based on short

poems written as part of a practice I began in 2007. This grew from my involvement in Zen

practice and began with writing haiku, gradually moving into other short forms including

tanka and triolet, and working as a separate strand from lyric writing for acoustic/folk songs.

My poetry practice has also been boosted through this doctoral study by my exploration of

the work of NYC lesbian poet Eileen Myles, whose poem Eileen’s Vision29

was my choice

for a non-melodic rendering that has become one of the works in the folio. These strands and

works are discussed later in this chapter.

A strand of legible content/references to lesbian life in Beglarian’s works is something she

has returned to regularly across her years of activity, effectively embedding it in the fabric of

her output. Beglarian also has a work with a text by Eileen Myles, Cave (2001), as well as

27

The Herb Alpert Award in the Arts: Eve Beglarian, 2017 (email exchange between Linda Norton and Eve

Beglarian in two chapters), https://herbalpertawards.org/artist/beglarian-chapter-two, accessed May 2018.

Beglarian worked Norton’s poem Landscaping for Privacy in a non-melodic ‘setting’ for her duo Twisted Tutu

in 1995. 28

Hobart Morris was made a Justice of the Peace in 1870 in the territory of Wyoming, which in 1869 was the

first state/territory in the US to give women the right to vote. Beglarian shares this background in her

presentation in the podcast hosted by Michael Harren (4/7/16), MikeyPod 212 | MikeyPod Live at The Queerly

Festival! (see n. 13) and in the notes in the score of the work (see

https://evbvd.com/justice/materials/WhatJusticeLooksLikeScore.pdf, accessed May 2018). 29 Eileen Myles, School of Fish (Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1997), 52–54.

113

one based on a text by British lesbian author Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body (1999).

I asked Beglarian what had attracted her in Myles’s poem, and she said:

Ah well, I was on an Eileen Myles jag at the time – I can’t remember who introduced

me to her poetry – I don’t know how I found her – I’d be interested to know how I

found her, and so I was reading a lot of her work at the time, and when I found that

chunk it really, again, spoke to my condition. I’m not sure – unlike the Gertrude Stein

and the Written on the Body I’m not sure that I experienced that as a specifically

lesbian worldview or mindset or, or I wouldn’t say that I experienced it that way, I

just felt like it was giving voice to where I was at that time, and so I set it.

Beglarian’s response to a similar question about Preciosilla was different. When I asked her

if this work was written partly out of a desire to work with the material of another lesbian

artist, she said

Absolutely, and it was a love song written for my lover at the time who was Hispanic,

and so in a funny way the sort of slightly Hispanic, ‘Preciosilla-ness’ was the hook

that brought that particular [poem] to the fore for me, so yeah. It’s a love poem, it’s a

sex poem actually, and the way I did the music was everything is, you know, corny

love songs, corny Latin music love songs all threaded together so you know,

definitely – a hundred percent, yes.

The voice of Stein in the text is inventively located in a place that is not where one might first

look for it – in the rhythm section, delivered as spoken word. This strategy/technique also

helps position Beglarian’s voice as that of a late 20th

century and early 21st century composer,

offering a very different take on the poem from the 1927 setting by Virgil Thomson (from 24

Songs for High Voice and Piano),30

where the text is conventionally foregrounded in a

melodic vocal setting. In the 2001 program note Beglarian states: ‘the flutist's melody has

quotes from pop love songs and other familiar music embedded in musical stream-of-

consciousness writing that attempts to emulate Gertrude's handling of text. The piece is

30

See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Z3lSMuIE74 (accessed February 2019) for a performance of this by

Alison Gibbons.

114

dedicated to Mary Rodriguez.’31

Interestingly, Beglarian was able to move into a direct

experience of performing popular music through her connection with Rodriguez, who invited

her to join the band in which she played bass, Que, in 1989.32

Playing keyboard in the band,

Beglarian describes her experience of moving into this different musical territory as ‘kind of

like intercultural collaboration’33

– her music is impacted in the transaction, with popular

music elements finding their way in, though she remains within an art music/composition

framework. Seeing this mix in Beglarian’s work has given me a sense of validation around

the mix of style elements in my own, and of my own journeys into popular music.

I also asked Beglarian about Written on the Body,34

with which I resonated through having

read Jeanette Winterson’s 1992 book of the same name close to the time of publication. In

this work, too, Beglarian acknowledged having been drawn to the text partly through her

lesbian subjectivity and a desire to work with the material of another lesbian artist. She said:

I mean, for me, reading that book, at the time I was in love with a married woman – I

was, you know, in this incredibly passionate affair with this married woman, and so

for me that novel spoke to my condition. I mean, it wasn’t just, oh wow that’s a really

great book, it was that book is about me, in some profound way, and so … definitely I

was aware of working with, collaborating from a distance with another lesbian artist,

for sure, and another lesbian sensibility, yeah.35

In this electroacoustic work without any live performance/notated elements there is a slow

build of sonic fabric composed of spoken word, shortwave sound recording and other musical

material including phrases of text and syllables/sounds sung by Beglarian, unfolding over a

duration of 12:15. The thing that is most striking to me is the presence of layers of sound,

with different elements moving from background to foreground at different times, which for

31

See ‘ONE-TWO-THREE-GO! Concert #2, Sunday, October 21st , 2002 at 4:30 pm: Margaret Lancaster,

Interdisciplinary Solo Flute,’ http://www.strangemusic.com/main_events_123_02.htm (accessed February

2019). 32

Michael Dellaira, ‘Overstepping’ Interview with Eve Beglarian,

http://www.michaeldellaira.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/Overstepping.pdf (accessed May 2013,

no longer online, and https://www.21st-centurymusic.com/ML210208.pdf, accessed January 2019), 4. 33 Dellaria,‘Overstepping’ Interview, 4. 34

Written on the Body can be listened to at its link in Beglarian’s Book of Days,

https://evbvd.com/bookofdays/texts/0426/ (accessed January 2019), where the text is also provided. 35

Beglarian, interview with Christina Green. Beglarian has also referred to this in less detail in several of her

Book of Days subscriber email newsletters when including a link to the work as an offering for listening.

115

me reflect the idea of body as ‘palimpsest’ in Winterson’s text, and the imagery embedded in

the core of the text selected by Beglarian, and from which the book’s title is drawn:

Written on the body is a secret code only visible in certain lights: the accumulations

of a lifetime gather there.36

Beglarian highlights the first half of this sentence through multiple repetitions in a sung

phrase; the words ‘only visible in certain lights’ are slightly obscured aurally, requiring, for

me at least, repeated listening to make out – ‘lights’ is only just audible as a pitchless whisper

at the end of the sung phrase. I am still moved each time I listen to this work and experience

its sensuous quality and the way the electroacoustic sound fabric conveys the text and brings

it to the listener. It is for me completely successful in the terms Beglarian has described as

part of her aim as a composer:

When I start working with texts, I’m really working in response to a text that I’ve

fallen for. I feel like my job is to make that text available to others in a way that it

might not be if I didn’t do whatever I’m doing.37

Although I read and was moved by Winterson’s book, my experience of it has been

augmented by Beglarian’s composition. Listening to the piece has expanded my sense of

what can be achieved in composition, but I am also aware that creating an electroacoustic

work of this sort is currently outside my own abilities, and want to begin the journey of

developing this area as a composer, which would involve a lot more than just learning to use

Ableton Live. Beglarian’s goal of making a text available to others in a way that it might not

be without her musical contribution is one I have absorbed through my immersion in her

work, seeking to preserve (as I believe she does) a sense of the text (particularly the text of

another writer) as still being a self-standing entity.38

My experience is that a less melodic or

song-like treatment of a text does leave it more free-standing and not feeling ‘less’, when

returned to and read without the music. I feel more comfortable making melodic settings of

texts written by myself than by others, aware that once made into a song, I virtually never

return to a text I have written with complete disconnection from the music I have added.

36

From Beglarian’s Book of Days (entry for 26th

April), https://evbvd.com/bookofdays/texts/0426/ (see n. 34). 37

Oteri, ‘Eve Beglarian: In Love with both Sound and Language.’ 38 See chapter 2, 40–-41.

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A fourth work I asked Beglarian about was Wolf Chaser (1998). It is this work that has

spoken to me the most as a work written in the context of a lesbian relationship.

Beglarian is identified on her website as a lesbian composer through her inclusion of the 1998

compilation CD Lesbian American Composers39

in a list of CDs on which her music is

represented.40

Wolf Chaser (for amplified and processed violin, wolf chaser, optional

percussion and electronics41

) is Beglarian’s piece on the CD. The work arose in the context of

Beglarian’s relationship with Robin Lorentz, the violinist for whom she wrote it, and places

as central the sound that can be made by a wolf chaser (or ‘wolf scare’), a tool originating in

Inuit and Native American cultures, similar in design to the Australian Aboriginal bullroarer,

made of whale bone and used for scaring wolves, particularly in the context of whaling, in the

Arctic. The wolf chaser was given to Beglarian by Lorentz, and Beglarian responded to the

sound by embedding it in her piece, while Lorentz in turn responded by using an altered

tuning which she designed to create a sympathetic fit between the violin and the sound of the

wolf chaser. Elizabeth Hinkle-Turner cites a program note from an unspecified performance

of the work in 2001, in which Beglarian states that the piece ‘embodied the best aspects of

her then relationship with Lorentz: it was scary, it was going someplace unknown, and it was

‘always listening for the magic as if our lives depended upon it.’42

Hinkle-Turner proposes

that ‘on a deeper level it becomes a meditation upon the gift given by one woman to another

in a relationship and its meaning to them both.’43

This working with elements drawn from the fabric of lesbian relational life demonstrates for

me how the ‘difference’ under consideration can be a source of creativity and inspiration in

the life and work of the lesbian composer. In Sounding Out: Pauline Oliveros and Lesbian

Musicality, Martha Mockus explores this area in relation to Pauline Oliveros, and sees

reflections of Oliveros’s lesbian life in her music. In the opening chapter, ‘Intonation’, she

says:

39

CRI, 1998 (see chapter 2, 23/n. 58). 40 See https://evbvd.com/listeners/ (accessed May 2018). In her notes here, Belgarian says: YES, the cover is

cheesy, and I wish such compilations weren't really necessary, but just a couple of months ago, a young lesbian

composer told me it meant a lot to find this CD when she was coming up, so I'm glad I participated... Through

this and other avenues such as interviews that are accessible online and the CD liner notes of Lesbian American

Composers, Beglarian has maintained an ‘out’ stance as a lesbian since at least 1998. 41

+ newly added - optional video, 1995, 2004 (see

https://evbvd.com/wolfchaser/materials/1068bWolfChaser.pdf, accessed April 2013). 42

Hinkle-Turner, Women Composers, 148 and 204/n. 38. 43 Hinkle-Turner, Women Composers, 148.

117

My approach to conceptualizing the relationship between sexuality and composition

explores how lesbian subjectivity functions for Oliveros as a productive source of

energy, ideas, creativity and possibility.44

Mockus thus positions Oliveros’s ‘difference’ as ‘positive and productive’ in Deleuzian

terms,45

and I contend that lesbian subjectivity functions for Eve Beglarian as ‘a productive

source of energy, ideas, creativity and possibility’ across the works discussed above, and

others in her output. In Oliveros’s early electronic work Time Perspectives (1960), Mockus

highlights a feature that functions in a similar way to the wolf chaser in Beglarian’s piece.

She speaks of the inclusion of the sound of two women laughing in Oliveros’s early non-

notated work – the two women are Oliveros and Laurel Johnson, a visual artist and

percussionist, Oliveros’s partner at that time. Mockus says:

including Johnson’s laughter in this piece inspires a more complex notion of

improvisation, one that recognizes the shared space of musical innovation and lesbian

domesticity, and the dynamic relationship between them. In this sense, Time

Perspectives is Oliveros’s sonic portrait of her lesbian household, the improvised life

of two lesbian artists in all its homespun quirkiness.46

In my own creative life and output I can locate similar things. The gift of a pair of drums by

my partner Jo Smith, through which I might be able to relax and enjoy something new as a

musician, was the first in a chain of events that led me back into composition from my focus

on songwriting and music therapy at that time. I developed skills in drumming,47

and from

that moved into the composition of world music-flavoured instrumental pieces built around

drum rhythms. A further, unquantifiable area in which Smith is present in an ongoing way is

as the first audience for much of what I write. Although none of the works in this project was

directly inspired by any strand from our shared life, Native Language has become connected

with the experiences of our joint trip to Paris.48

Following my exposure to the works of

44 Mockus, Sounding Out, 9. 45

See Chapter 2, 13/n. 16. 46

Mockus, Sounding Out, 20. Mockus observes that, in contrast to many lesbians of the time whose social life

was focused around lesbian bars, Oliveros was not greatly interested in bars, clubs or lesbian groups. ‘It was

home life with Johnson’, she says, ‘that nourished and supported her as a musician and composer … For

Oliveros, her lesbian home with Johnson was a space of boundless creativity and innovation.’ 47

Partly through attending the Ontario Womyn’s Drum Camp in 2005. 48

See chapter 3, 94. I am also indebted to Smith for her help in the acquisition of professional quality guitars

and the piano on which I have composed since my Masters years.

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Beglarian and Oliveros, and the inspiration I have received from them as lesbian composers, I

remain open to creating work in the future that draws on material/artefacts/stories drawn from

my relationship with Smith, as I did in a work predating this folio, Two Little Dogs.49

In summary, I feel that Beglarian’s inclusion of texts and references from lesbian writers, as

well as the positioning of the wolf chaser as central in the creation of her work of that name,

introduces in a powerful and sophisticated, if somewhat subversive and understated way,

flows that could be said to destabilise the ‘norms’ of the dominant music, that is, the music of

male composers and music composed within the dominant heterosexual paradigm in the art

music sphere. Being exposed to these works as compositions as well as receiving them as

vehicles of text/content related to lesbians and lesbian life has expanded my knowledge of

late 20th

and early 21st century art music. Beglarian’s work was my introduction to the

Downtown scene and its aesthetic, and this has opened a whole new musical world for me,

allowing me to see a viable space in the art music sphere in which to position my own work.

I resonate with many of the elements listed by Kyle Gann as hallmarks of the Downtown

aesthetic, including moving away from traditional musical forms, ‘attract[ion] to media and

materials that don't carry a strong sense of tradition’, ‘borrowing of rhythms and instruments

from other cultures, combining elements into new hybrid musics’ and a move away from

complete notation of all elements of the music, leaving some things to be developed in

rehearsal.50

I also feel a connection with the free improvisation and experimental jazz strands

in Downtown music. At the same time I am aware of significant areas in the field in which I

am unskilled, particularly regarding inclusion of electronic sound elements in music/live

performance.51

The beauty in Wolf Chaser is for me particularly located in the combination

of live performance and pre-recorded elements, the latter embedding the composer’s voice in

every performance of the work. I am keenly aware that I do not want to replicate Beglarian’s

stylistic voice, but am focused on continuing to cultivate the voice that has been emerging for

me with a fusion of jazz and classical musical language elements, and forays into the post-

minimalist area, since around 2007.

49

See chapter 3, 88/n. 105. The two dogs were a Maltese Shih Tzu and a Silky Terrier, who became family. 50

Kyle Gann, ‘Breaking the Chain Letter’, section 2. 51 See my discussion of Native Language in chapter 3.

119

Like Beglarian, I am involved both in writing for ensembles in which I am performing, and

for other ensembles. Like her, I am not working in more traditional forms like sonata or

symphony, and am more interested in new and unusual instrumental combinations than some

of the older/traditional ones (piano trio, for example). I share Beglarian’s taste for writing for

groups of ‘same’ instruments,52

moving through projects for some more traditional ones such

as wind quartet, wind quintet and string orchestra to the 2016 project with Loadbang,53

who

describe themselves as ‘lung-powered’. This common quality unites their disparate

brass/woodwind /vocal combo, and they successfully present as a unique ensemble

underpinned by classical training and skill. In my own acoustic/folk performance practice I

have enjoyed using effects pedals, and will continue to work with these elements, bringing

them into the composition area. I aim eventually to graft electronic elements into my

compositional skillset in a way that preserves the connection with live sound/tone production

that I carry from my acoustic/folk/jazz background, embraces some of the textural

possibilities that speak to me in Beglarian’s work, and finds a way to make these elements

part of the voice I already have.

Aware of Beglarian’s work with materials and stories from the past to make a statement in

the present, I want to create works that will stem from new engagement with the world

including new and wider reading, building on but going beyond the areas I have focused on

so far. I will seek to follow my own well-established intuitive process to locate the sense of

rightness that I look for in subject matter, allowing the becoming that is possible for me

having been in this space with Beglarian and Oliveros, extending my own unique voice rather

than replicating theirs.

Seeing the work of an artist as substantial as Beglarian and its inclusion, across decades,

of works featuring material drawn from her life as a lesbian, has been a huge source of

validation and inspiration to me as a lesbian composer who also wants to make this

visible as one of multiple strands in her work. How helpful it would have been to me if,

at an earlier stage, I had been able to connect with the work of a composer like

Beglarian. Encountering Beglarian’s choral pieces Lullaby (2002) and Armon (2005),

both for women’s voices, as well as the Crawford-Seeger-inspired piano work Fireside,

52

As well as works for Loadbang, Beglarian has written many pieces for trombone quartet The Guidonian

Hand. 53 See my discussion of Stone in chapter 2.

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made me want to consolidate my own output, picking up the threads of compositions I

wrote in years immediately following my undergraduate degree.54

I began to

incorporate texts and material I found as I absorbed feminist influences and came out as

a lesbian in 1986. Revising this early work and rendering it performable in the 21st

century became important to me, and I felt encouraged to do this as I connected with

Beglarian’s work, and also with the Deleuzian idea of becoming – seeing the possibility

of revision and new performances as a ‘becoming-work’ that is part of a flow of

movement and change, not static and unchanging. In the discussion of this and three

other works to follow, I highlight the strands drawn from my life as a lesbian, and show

how lesbian subjectivity functions for me too as ‘a productive source of energy, ideas,

creativity and possibility’.

4.2 Three Pieces for Women’s Voices, with Two Cellos (1987/1988, revised

and extended 2012)

In the first few months of this doctoral project I focused on revising and extending a set

of pieces for women’s voices written in 1987 and 1988. The three pieces, Mary,

Ground of All Being (1987, text by Hildegard of Bingen, for soprano/s and two cellos),

Full Moon (1988, text by Mechtild of Magdeburg, for SSSAAA women's chorus) and

Earth, our Mother (1987, text by anonymous Pawnee author, for SSA women's

chorus),55

are now combined under the title Three Pieces for Women’s Voices, with Two

Cellos. Beglarian’s choral pieces Armon (2005) and Lullaby (2002), a setting of A

Lullaby by American poet Janet Loxley Lewis, a poem centred on Mary the mother of

54

Bachelor of Music (Hons.), University of Melbourne, 1982-1985. Following the degree, I moved into the

folk/acoustic singer-songwriter field through making a connection with the work of various lesbian and feminist

singer-songwriters around 1988/1989. 55

The texts/translations of Mary, Ground of All Being and Full Moon were set, and are used in the score (not

included in the ResearchDirect version of this thesis) by kind permission of Inner Traditions/Bear and

Company, www.innertraditions.com, publishers of Meditations With Hildegard of Bingen by Gabriele Uhlein

(Santa Fe, NM: Bear and Co., 1983), and Meditations With Mechtild of Magdeburg by Sue Woodruff (Santa Fe,

NM: Bear and Co., 1982), from which the texts were sourced. The text of Earth, our mother, which I sourced

from Monica Furlong's Women Pray: Voices through the Ages, from Many Faiths, Cultures, and Traditions

(Woodstock, VT.: Skylight Paths Publishing, 2001, 2004), is Pawnee: The Birth of Dawn, from the Hako from

The Magic World: American Indian Songs and Poems, selected and edited by William Brandon, first published

by Morrow of New York in 1971and republished by Ohio University Press in 1992. Brandon's work is a literary

adaptation of Alice C. Fletcher’s The Hako: A Pawnee Ceremony (Washington: Washington Government

Printing Office, 1904). My use of the text is by kind permission of Ohio University Press.

121

Jesus,56

provided inspiration in this process. Beglarian positioned Lullaby in a project

begun in 2004, Re-thinking Mary, partly inspired by her reading of Marina Warner’s

book about the cult of the Virgin Mary, Alone of All Her Sex (1976). On a page in her

website about the project, she wrote:

I am embarking on a new project called Re-thinking Mary. The plan is to put

together a show, most likely performed in a club or a concert hall rather than a

church, devoted to exploring the history of and possible present resonances for

the multiple metaphors she embodies. The performing forces will be primarily

voices and electronics, and possibly some acoustic instruments as well.57

Reading this and listening to Lullaby, I felt reaffirmation around the value of my pieces,

especially Mary, Ground of All Being, and of my decision to revise, extend and make

them available in the present. The simple but elegant texture and beautiful modal

sound-world of Lullaby make it one of my favourites amongst Beglarian’s works58

– the

texture and sound-world of Mary, Ground of All Being are in a similar territory. The

piece has a freshness to my ears, helping to build my sense that composed works in the

art music sphere can have an ongoing life, travelling with us from the past into the

future, continuing to be given new life in performance. I was also excited as I noted that

Beglarian had planned an alternative and secular performance context for her piece,

paralleling the non-traditional performance contexts in which my three pieces were

launched (discussed below).

I wrote my three pieces while involved in a house-based urban Christian women’s

community in inner Melbourne, chosen as a place to live out the political/spiritual

stance into which I moved through coming out as a lesbian in 1986. In the original

proposal for this doctoral project59

I suggested that ‘coming out’ events in the lives of

lesbian and gay people could be looked at as a Deleuzian line of flight taken (often) in

earlier life, that can unexpectedly launch a person into a minoritarian position in the

56

The poem is online at https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/55310/a-lullaby-

56d236c3065aa (accessed October 2018), where a note indicates that it originally appeared in the December

1938 issue of Poetry magazine. 57

See https://evbvd.com/rethinkingmary/index.html, accessed October 2018. 58

A demo of Lullaby can be heard at https://evbvd.com/bookofdays/texts/1225/index.html (accessed October

2018). 59 Christina Green, UWS PhD proposal, 2011, 1.

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world. After this experience the person’s relationship to the world is changed; the

experience may give the person a kind of ‘template’ for further ‘becomings’, and a

certain fearlessness about stepping towards the ‘not-yet-known’, 60 having done it once

already. I argued that from this minoritarian position a person has, in the Deleuzian

view, a power to destabilise the ‘norm’, as already discussed. It is, unfortunately,

possible to come out as lesbian/gay but subsequently to move back into a stance that is

closed rather than open, allowing oneself to become fixed in an identity that does not

grow and change. My coming out, however, was not a once-only step, but an ongoing

process, and it was much more focused on an ‘opening’ – to reality, life, multiple ways

of being, openness rather than closed-ness – than on a sense of having taken on a

‘fixed’ identity.61

While living in the community and writing the pieces, the way of life

of the Beguines,62

the Christian lay religious group that flourished in the 13th and 14th

centuries in the Low Countries, and of which Mechtild was a part, was a strand of

inspiration. Musically I drew inspiration from the sound world of medieval music,

which I studied at honours level in 1985.

4.2.1 Background to composition and the 2012 revision/extension of the pieces

As I thought about these three pieces and their feminist underpinnings in the light of my

study of the works of Eve Beglarian, the possibility of bringing my now more

developed composition skills to older works to improve them occurred to me, knowing

that this is something many composers do. The process of reinvesting these pieces and

the texts on which they are based with value, acknowledging that the work of

mystic/writer/composer Hildegard of Bingen and mystic/social reformer Mechtild of

Magdeburg still speaks and matters to me, was a rewarding one, and felt like

‘composing my life’ in the sense described by artist and researcher Victoria Moon

Joyce, who writes:

60

Wyatt et al, Deleuze and Collaborative Writing, 135. 61

Green, Confirmation of Candidature Document, 13. 62

The Beguines lived together in a religious context but without formal vows, doing ordinary work as well as

engaging in prayer and activities such as caring for the poor and sick.

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To compose is not only to produce a work for its own sake, but it is to actively

participate in the practice of composing one’s own life63

… I suggest that we

queers perform ourselves and our compositions differently in the world: initially

from a desire to assert difference as counterpoint to what is “same”, and then

from a desire to express a self that is complex and always a work in progress.64

It seemed important to try to take these pieces to wider audiences, beyond their first

outing in a context of women’s spirituality,65

and in a concert which featured other

women composers and performers.66

Joyce’s article brought out the queerness of the

Beguines’ lives, and I realised more fully that the writing of the medieval Christian

women mystics had inspired me because it seemed like an expression emerging from

their lived ‘difference’ in the chosen, counter-cultural communities they inhabited, at

the time when I was living in my similar urban community. The three pieces were

composed when, as a young lesbian coming from a music background in which lesbians

were not visible, I was beginning to seek ways to perform myself differently in the

world, and the revision of the work later in life effectively attests to a desire to ‘express

a self that is complex and a work in progress’, as Joyce puts it.

4.2.2 Mary, Ground of All Being

This piece was given its first performance by Miranda Brockman and Alice Garner

(cellos) and myself (voice), at Crossing the Frontier, the third National Conference of

the Movement for the Ordination of Women (MOW) in the Anglican church held at

Ormond College, University of Melbourne, in August 1987.67

This was one of my first

compositions featuring cello, and the first in which I was able to work in conjunction

with the performers. The inspiration to write it stemmed, in similar fashion to

63

Victoria Moon Joyce, ‘What’s So Queer About Composing? Exploring Attali’s Concept of Composition from

a Queer Perspective’, Popular Music and Society: Fall 1997; 21, 3, 35-59, 43. 64

Joyce, ‘What’s So Queer About Composing?’, 51. 65

Crossing the Frontier – Conference of the Movement for the Ordination of Women, Ormond College,

Melbourne, August 14-16, 1987. 66 Play It Again Sappho: Written By Women, Performed By Women, a Concert of Music and Poetry, Melba Hall,

Faculty of Music, University of Melbourne, May 23, 1990. 67

The performance was captured in Gillian Coote’s documentary about the struggle for women’s ordination in

the Anglican Church in Australia, The Fully Ordained Meat Pie (Film Australia: 1988/National Film and Sound

Archive of Australia, 2011).

124

Beglarian’s Wolf Chaser, from a relationship, in this case my relationship, at that time,

with Brockman. The second cello part was added when Garner became interested in

being part of the performance. I credit Beglarian’s openness in the trail of

documentation she left about the context in which Wolf Chaser was composed for the

encouragement (across time and space) to put this piece in its context now.

Photo 4.1 – Crossing the Frontier – Movement for the Ordination of Women

conference, Melbourne, 1987, flyer (program and title page). Source: Christina Green

125

Photo 4.2 – Crossing the Frontier – Movement for the Ordination of Women

conference, Melbourne, 1987, flyer (notes including reference to music coordination by

Christina Green). Source: Christina Green

Following revision, the piece was performed as the first in the completed set in April

2014 by the women of OBesa Cantavit, under the direction of Dr Dara Blackstone, at

the United Church of Stonington, Connecticut, as part of a concert celebrating ten

126

women composers of the 21st century. A second performance at which I was able to be

present and give a spoken introduction was given by the group at the same venue in

June that year.

4.2.3 Full Moon

Full Moon was composed in 1988 and given its first performance by a group of singers

including myself at Play It Again Sappho, a concert featuring women’s music and

poetry given at Melba Hall, University of Melbourne in May 1990. My idea was for the

performance to include a spoken word fragment from a poem by 20th century

American/lesbian poet Adrienne Rich about Marie Curie, positioning it between the

musical and poetic offerings in the concert, and pointing up a parallel between the

political outlook of the Beguines of the 13th and 14th centuries, and 20th century

feminists. I chose the fragment from Rich’s Power (1974) to juxtapose with the words

of Mechtild on the basis that both texts are statements about women declaring their

power.68

The poem addresses Curie’s illness and death from radiation sickness, and

ends -

She died a famous woman denying

her wounds

denying

her wounds came from the same source as her power69

68

Play It Again Sappho concert program, 5 (archival materials of Christina Green). 69

Adrienne Rich, The Dream of a Common Language: Poems 1974-1977 (New York: Norton and Co., 1978,

paperback reissue 2013), 3.

127

Photo 4.3 – Play It Again Sappho – event including the first performances of Full Moon

and Earth, our Mother – concert flyer, 1990. Source: Christina Green

128

In the 2014 performances the original text by Mechtild was used as the spoken piece

over the wordless middle section. I reworked this section musically, exchanging the

original simple sustained notes/chords for a more developed, hocket-inspired texture.

The resulting effect, a movement-filled musical texture sitting beneath a spoken word

presentation of text, has a pleasing resonance for me with some of Eve Beglarian’s

textures, for example in Testy Pony (2010, discussed in more detail below), although I

had not heard Testy Pony at the time of reworking. The piece was performed as the

second in the set in the 2014 performances.

4.2.4 Earth, our Mother

Earth, our Mother was composed in 1987 and given its first performance at Play It

Again Sappho, along with Full Moon. It is the most substantially revised of the three

pieces. Adding two cellos to this piece was part of the 2012 revision/extension of the

work, as was the addition of a bridge-like section, made possible by the discovery, in an

internet search, of an extra stanza of text that was not part of the version of the Pawnee

prayer that I accessed in 1987.70

The section at bars 25-30 is wordless, the singers

vocalising on ‘ah’, and this has a pleasing resonance for me with Beglarian’s Armon

(2005) for five-part female chorus (in Armon the syllables can be chosen by the

performers). Like the other two texts, the text of this piece also still resonated as much

in 2012 as it had done earlier, when it was one of the first texts I encountered from

earth-based spiritual traditions. The piece was presented as the third in the set in the

2014 performances. Publication of Three Pieces is planned as the culmination of the

reworkings, making the work available for others to perform.

70

Diane Walker, Contemplative Photography, http://woodenhue.blogspot.com.au/2011/09/earth-our-

mother.html (accessed February 2019). On Walker’s blog, the poem is referenced as being from Furlong’s

Women Pray (see this chapter, n. 55).

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4.3 Eileen’s Vision (percussionist and speaker, 2014-2015)

4.3.1 Eileen Myles

My collection of articles about Myles goes back to 2002, and in it there is an article by

Michelle Tea, an edgy lesbian writer with whom Myles collaborated in the San

Francisco-based lesbian-feminist performance group Sister Spit. Myles describes Sister

Spit as ‘a lesbian spoken word tour’,71

and experienced a great connection with these

younger lesbians as the group moved through ‘30 cities in 28 days, sleeping on the floor

in anarchist bookstores and tattooed girls’ apartments’.72

She sums up by saying ‘I just

had to wait to be young.’73

Tea mentions Myles in her article, ‘Explain’,74

describing

her as one of her favourite writers. Tea recounts:

I sat with Eileen Myles at a coffee shop on Valencia and she told me that

Charles Bukowski gave her permission to write. He just claimed it, his terrain

… Why not him. A poet. Why not Eileen.75

Tea speaks of the voice of ‘the other’, ‘telling the part that got left out, the truth.’

Revisiting these words, I feel there are echoes/reverberations in my own path – that

Myles, as well as Beglarian, has empowered me to bring work stemming from lesbian

life to the fore. As mentioned in chapter 2, I have viewed Myles as part of the

assemblage, including Oliveros and Beglarian, into which I have entered in this doctoral

project, resulting in an increase in affects/capacities as a lesbian composer/poet,76

a

71 Eileen Myles, ‘My Intergeneration: For Lesbians, Age Counts Less Than Attitude’, Village Voice, June 27,

2000, http://www.villagevoice.com/2000-06-20/news/myintergeneration/, accessed 4/9/2012 (no longer

available online, address incomplete?). 72

Myles, ‘My Intergeneration.’ 73 Myles, ‘My Intergeneration.’ 74

Michelle Tea, ‘Explain’, Narrativity (San Francisco State University), Issue 1,

https://www.sfsu.edu/~newlit/narrativity/issue_one/tea.html, accessed May 2018 and July 2002. 75

Tea, ‘Explain.’ 76 See chapter 2, 15/n. 23. The poetry aspect will be discussed in the commentary on Nomadic Journeys below.

The poem included in chapter 3 (105/n. 152) is one of many written within the candidature period of this

doctoral work. Poetry opened up for me as a separate pursuit from song lyric writing in 2007, when I began to

write haiku through my connection with the Melbourne Zen Group. Two of my haiku were published in the

Melbourne Zen Group’s newsletter, Vast and Ordinary News, December 2007/October 2008 editions.

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becoming-other through ‘walking in the mist’ (to borrow an image from Zen master

Eihei Dogen)77

of the work of all three.

Following my introduction to Myles’s work through Tea, I went further, reading

Eileen’s Vision, a poem from School of Fish,78

online. As I mapped out works to

compose for this doctoral project, I recalled that Eileen’s Vision incorporates a specific

reference to lesbian life, in amongst many poems by Myles that do not, and felt that this

chimed with my central idea that there is not just one way to be a lesbian, in this case

for the lesbian poet, that both the lesbian composer and poet are ‘multiple’.

Myles has talked quite a lot about the place of poetry as a practice in life. She explains

how she has come to think of poetry as a practice, as distinct from a career or a

vocation, saying:

… if you call it a practice then it starts to be of a whole different order, which I

think really helps. Because poetry really helps. I mean, in a life. I mean, one of

the reasons I write poetry is to mark my existence. And it’s exciting and it’s

drab and it’s melancholic and it’s dirty – it’s a lot of different things, it’s what

my life continues to be.79

This has been helpful to me as an artistic practitioner. Myles, combining being

positioned as an ‘out’ and legible lesbian and being an established poet with roots in the

‘beat’ ethos of Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, has cultivated her craft as a serious

practitioner. Returning to Myles’s work has reinforced my aspiration to a similar

combination of legibility and credibility in my practice and craft as a

composer/performer.

Eileen’s Vision is the first text with an outwardly lesbian reference that I have set as a

composer. I felt encouraged to do this partly through my encounter with the works of

77

‘When you walk in the mist, you get wet’ – quoted in Natalie Goldberg, ‘Dogen: Can There Be a World

Beyond Words?’, Upaya Zen Center/Upaya’s Blog, February 16, 2012, https://www.upaya.org/2012/02/dogen-

can-there-be-a-world-beyond-words-natalie-goldberg/ (accessed March 2015). 78

See n. 29. The book also includes an essay entitled ‘The Lesbian Poet.’ 79

Michelle Albert, ‘Naropa University Summer Writing Program 1998: Interview with Eileen Myles’,

http://www.naropa.edu/swp/myles.html (accessed 20/7/02).

131

Eve Beglarian that include lesbian references/content, but my plan to set Eileen’s Vision

predated my discovery of Beglarian’s setting of Myles’s Cave.80

Eileen’s Vision is only my second attempt at working with spoken word, the first

having been the Full Moon performance experiment including the spoken fragment

from Adrienne Rich’s Power discussed above. My desire to try my hand at a spoken

word setting in this piece was inspired by more than one work of Eve Beglarian that

includes a spoken word element, including the beautiful Testy Pony (2010, text by

Zachary Romburg). The feeling of surface complexity resulting from the combination

of layers – streams of spoken word, live cello/other instrument81

and pre-recorded

material – appeals to me in this piece, and I wanted to aim for something of this quality

but within my own musical language, as well as the less ‘embedded’ feel of a non-

melodic setting of text described above.82

4.3.2 Background to composition process, connection with percussionist/performer

Kaylie Dunstan

Early in 2013 I responded to a call for scores issued by Sydney percussionist Claire

Edwardes, and the idea of setting Myles’s poem for percussion soloist came to me at

this time. I described the poem to Edwardes and she referred me to her student Kaylie

Dunstan, who she thought might have a greater interest in the project. Dunstan was

undertaking a research masters combining percussion performance and a thesis focusing

on percussion theatre. I discussed the project with Dunstan and she was willing to work

in a collaborative process.

80

I established permission from Myles to set Eileen’s Vision in an email exchange in 2012-2013, and I

acknowledge Myles’s enthusiasm and generosity in giving this permission, as well as agreeing in 2016 to the

eventual publication of the poem in print form within a music score, and for the recording of the work to be

broadcast on ABC radio. 81

The score of Testy Pony is labelled as being for cello, narrator and pre-recorded track, but the notes indicate

that viola, trombone, bass clarinet and perhaps other instruments can be substituted for cello

(https://evbvd.com/testypony/materials/TestyPonyCompiled.pdf (accessed May 2018). A beautiful performance

by Beglarian as narrator with violinist Mary Rowell can be viewed at

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQVDanqG6ns (accessed February 2019). 82 See this chapter, 115/n. 38.

132

In April 2014 I attended Dunstan’s debut recital as a percussionist, Table for Two, at the

Sydney Conservatorium.83

She performed a range of works including notated works,

works combining notated and pre-recorded elements, and an improvisational piece done

collaboratively with an artist in the US using live video streaming, and from this I was

able to start imagining the work I might write for her to perform.

Dunstan’s recital showcased her capacity to play percussion instruments and speak at

the same time. My composition was guided by notes from Dunstan on the marimba’s

two-mallet interval possibilities, and I was prepared for her to play and speak, or to

have a separate speaker (myself or someone else) if the percussion part required her full

attention. I wrote the piece around Dunstan’s interest in works for percussion and voice,

and for 'actor percussionist'. At the outset there was a notion that an improvised element

might be included in this work (possibly in the cadenza-like section, bars 41-46 in the

score), but over time Dunstan expressed that this was not her preference, as

improvisation is a less developed area for her.

In my setting I tried to respond to something of the post-punk aesthetic of Myles’s

work, noting the occasional choice of Myles to have punk/rock power chord-driven

improvised electric guitar accompaniment behind her live performances.84

I chose a

harmonic texture combining perfect 5ths and some dissonance to pick up on the

earthy/gritty feel of this. The work makes use of triangle punctuation figures, with the +

(cross) and o (circle) symbols denoting muted and open sounds.85

This is an idea

borrowed from my experience of the ritual reading of sutras in the Soto Zen tradition

(as a Zen practitioner from 2005), in which important moments/images in the text are

highlighted with strokes on large and small gongs; open and muted sounds are also

used. The sounds are used to announce the appearance, in Myles’s poem, of ‘The Lady’

(the poem centres around the author noticing a stain on her bathtub cover which is

reminiscent of Mary, who is referred to as ‘The Lady’), and also accompany subsequent

mentions of her. I am also referencing Myles's journey, which has things in common

with my own, moving from a received Catholic faith in her case (in my case, an Anglo-

83

Table for Two, Sunday 27th

April 2014, Recital Hall East, Sydney Conservatorium, sponsored by the New

Music Network. 84

See Iceland Song, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPEWOISUjrA (accessed January 2019), in which

Myles is giving a live reading at a basement-style poetry event with electric guitar backing of this kind. 85

My use of the figures transforms the idea from the Zen sutra convention in various details, presenting it in a

stylised way on the triangle.

133

Catholic one) to an engagement with Buddhist practice in later life. In a recent

interview86

Myles said ‘Once a Catholic lets the water out of the tub there’s a Buddhist

sitting there. I think.’ Brian Teare suggests that ‘Buddhism is a spiritual practice that

perhaps has renewed Myles’ dedication to examining the present moment through an

awareness of the mind in language.’87

Myles’s connection with the moment and writing

about reality is part of what I resonate with in her work, and I have tried to bring a

similar focus in writing my short poems, to be discussed in the commentary on

Nomadic Journeys to follow.

The image near the end of Eileen’s Vision of the ‘half-scraped lesbian invisibility

sticker’ embodies both visibility and invisibility/imperceptibility, and the richness of

this image has grown for me over time. I composed with an awareness of the aural

effect of the decay in percussion sounds, and thoughts about the silences/spaces in the

texture in which the performance and sound energy continue to reverberate. I tried to

create music with textural range, spaciousness (especially allowing the voice/text to

come to the fore), flexibility of tempo and Zen-inspired moments of focus to amplify

Eileen Myles’s text, with its quality of in-the-moment/real life immediacy.

To manage the movement between marimba and triangle, Dunstan conceived a gadget

(see Photo 4.5) to bring the triangle very close to the marimba. Hitting the (red) handle

swings the beater up to hit the triangle, giving a metal-on-metal sound. Dunstan’s

performance of Eileen’s Vision at her Percussion Theatre recital on February 26th

2016

at the Sydney Conservatorium was theatrical and virtuosic, and the work felt well-

placed amongst the others she had chosen.89

The performance was narrated by an MC,

Jim Coyle. In the introduction for Eileen’s Vision I noticed that Myles was described as

a ‘legendary poet’, replacing my reference to her as a lesbian poet in the notes I

provided. As a Masters recital being assessed, the focus of the concert was very much

86

Stacy Szymaszek, ‘An Interview With Eileen Myles’, Rattapallax, February 23rd, 2014,

http://rattapallax.tumblr.com/post/79686164812/an-interview-with-eileen-myles-by-stacy (accessed 23/9/2014). 87 Brian Teare, ‘Everything Moves Close: New Poems by Eileen Myles’, LA Review of Books, August 24th,

2012, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/everything-moves-close-new-poems-by-eileen-myles/#! (accessed

May 2018). 89

These were Pierre Jodlowski’s Time and Money, Robert Constable’s Dies Irae, and Richard David Hames’s

Quête (1984), a ‘ritual for a perambulatory percussionist’ inspired by the mummers of folk tradition and ending

with a stylised collection of money (‘quête’ means the collection of money as payment for street musicians) (see

the Percussion Theatre concert program and Australian Music Centre event page

https://www.australianmusiccentre.com.au/event/percussion-theatre, with a link to the score at

https://www.australianmusiccentre.com.au/work/hames-richard-david-quete, accessed May 2018).

134

on the performer and her capacities, but it was a little disappointing to have the notes

‘curated’ in this way (this background will be included in the program note in the score

for publication). However, in writing and achieving a public performance of the piece

through a performer who is becoming known in the Australian ‘new music’ scene I

have taken a step towards making my voice as a lesbian composer audible in it. It is

fantastic to have been able to bring Myles’s text, which has artistic and cultural

significance for me, into the art music sphere – perhaps, as Eve Beglarian has expressed

it, making it ‘available to others in a way that it might not be if I didn’t do whatever I’m

doing’.90

Through this performance, I feel that I as a composer have moved

nomadically through a space in which the lesbian composer is not usually visible,

making an impact and also being impacted by the experience. I am also delighted that

Dunstan has now given a second performance of the work at a contemporary music

workshop/concert in Marrickville, Sydney, in November 2018, taking it to a wider

audience.

Photo 4.4 – Kaylie Dunstan at the marimba (Source: YouTube video)91

–

performing Eileen’s Vision at her recital Percussion Theatre, Sydney Conservatorium

of Music, Friday 26th

February 2016. Source: Kaylie Dunstan

90

See this chapter, 115/n. 37. 91

Percussion Theatre – Kaylie Dunstan – Eileen’s Vision, Christina Green,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVo4zF0RjJw (accessed May 2018).

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Photo 4.5 – Close-up of triangle ‘rig’ for Eileen’s Vision devised by Kaylie Dunstan.

Source: Kaylie Dunstan

4.4 Nomadic Journeys (alto voice and baritone ukulele, 2015-2016)

Nomadic Journeys is the third work in which a thread of composing from lesbian life is

present, and, in this way as well as others, it is inspired by the work of Eve Beglarian.

Part of the initial inspiration for this doctoral project was reading about Beglarian’s

four-and-a-half month journey by kayak down the Mississippi River, begun in August

2009. In this major project, Beglarian collected inspiration and materials from which to

produce new compositions, with a view to returning later to places she had visited with

a small ensemble and finished works to perform to members of the communities that

inspired them.92

In the overview of her River Project, Beglarian, as

composer/performer/adventurer’,93

wrote of her vision for the trip, her goals of shared

92

Shattuck, ‘Composer Finds a Muse in the Mississippi.’ 93 Twitter page of Eve Beglarian, https://twitter.com/evbvd?lang=en, accessed June 2018.

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conversation and music-making along the way in 2009, her plan to write music at artist

colonies and retreats in 2010, and of emerging with a body of work including music

performable by members of the communities she encountered.94

Beglarian brought back

her ideas and experiences from the Mississippi and translated them into works that have

been shared on multiple platforms, from the concert hall to the internet. In the years

since her trip she has released Songs from the River Project I, II and III.95

During this doctoral project, an idea for a song cycle using a selection of my own short

poems began to coalesce. From a reconnection with memories of a lesbian/gay bar in

London I began to see that this venue (and others like it) have been spaces through

which I have moved nomadically. I then began to notice this theme of nomadic

movement through spaces in poems written in 2013-2014, and picked the best of these

that I saw as connected by this slightly expanded idea of the nomadic for the song set.

An overarching theme of nomadic journeys (utilising the Deleuzian idea of the

nomad/nomadism as a springboard, and with, to some extent, a creative slant) gradually

came to the fore as an umbrella that could include, but also be larger than, material

stemming from experiences connected in some way to lesbian life, again showing

myself as a lesbian composer having a complex, multi-stranded identity.96

The bringing together of 10 short works/songs deriving from experiences of moving

through different places and spaces drew from the inspiration I found in Beglarian’s

River Project as a larger-scale tapestry of smaller individual works. Some of the

journeying and experiences involved in these poems pre-dated the beginning of my

candidature in 2012, while others were written from experiences in the period 2012 –

2016. Beglarian’s idea of a journey from which creative work would emerge and return

also influenced my thinking about the residency at Bundanon. The impetus to write the

songs came in part through my purchase of a baritone ukulele in 2014. Its capacities as

an instrument on which a notated accompaniment part could be created began to

emerge, with a wide harmonic range easily accessible. The exploration of the baritone

ukulele is part of the offering of this work – an instrument often used in folk music, its

94

Eve Beglarian, Riverblog, http://evbvd.com/riverblog/about/ (accessed May 2018). Beglarian envisioned the

opus including works performable by school bands, church choruses, student groups and retired people. 95

The CDs are dated 2012, 2014 and 2017, and are available as limited edition hard copy CDs available for

purchase through Beglarian’s website and at shows, and for streaming/digital download on music website

Bandcamp (see https://evbvd.bandcamp.com/, accessed May 2018). 96 See this chapter, 108–109.

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rich and delicate tone has proved to be a great resource for these songs, paralleling the

lute in lute songs. I found a combination of staff notation and modern TAB notation an

effective way of notating the parts, and an aesthetically pleasing echo of lute song

notation.97

Example 4.1a – Excerpt from Sleep, Wayward Thoughts (from A Firste Booke of

Songes or Ayres, 1597) by John Dowland (1563-1626).

Example 4.1b – Excerpt from 40 Part Motet, song 5 in Nomadic Journeys

97

I was reminded of the notated parts in lute songs as I talked about my songs with Stephen Adams of ABC

Radio, and am grateful to him for helping me to see this connection. I loved the lute songs of John Dowland in

earlier years and have returned to them in arrangements for guitar along the way.

138

The ten songs in the Nomadic Journeys cycle were written between August 2015 and

June 2016, and the poems they set between 2012 and 2016. They chronicle some of my

experiences of moving through spaces, places and contexts in London, Melbourne and

New York City, from around 1997 to 2016, and form a commentary on changes that

have happened in some spaces, my experiences of ‘in-between’ spaces, my interactions

with art in various spaces, and the changing way people inhabit public space, as

well as including some more personal vignettes.

As already discussed in chapter 1, the idea of ‘nomadism’ comes from French 20th

century philosopher Gilles Deleuze, and is, in part, about the way beings (human and

non-human) move through spaces and contexts, impacting on and being impacted by

them, growing and being transformed in the process. Beglarian’s River Project has

opened up new collaborations, connections and ‘affects’ for her, including the

emergence of the Brim ensemble/band that has performed and recorded the works, in

which Beglarian has moved beyond voice and electronics and embraced new roles such

as playing electric guitar and bass.98

In my case, I am finding that new affects are also

gradually emerging, in part from the connections made through my candidature, and in

part through rediscovering older connections and a growing capacity to organise and

lead projects.99

Like Eve Beglarian, I am trying to share the fruits of my creative

practice in multiple ways. I have performed selections of the songs from Nomadic

Journeys, which I consider to be hybrid folk/art songs, at a Melbourne Composers’

League Elbow Room concert (24/7/16), at Western Sydney University’s Creativity

Unlimited Festival (2/9/16), at the Women in the Creative Arts Conference, ANU in

conjunction with a spoken presentation (11/8/17), and at a range of acoustic/folk gigs in

Melbourne. The MCL performance generated a YouTube video for wider sharing,100

while the ANU performance generated a request to consider making the songs available

with piano accompaniment to extend their accessibility in the art song arena.101

The

songs have been well received at acoustic/folk gigs, and I acknowledge members of the

98

On Songs from the River Project I (see https://evbvd.com/listeners/ and

https://evbvd.bandcamp.com/album/songs-from-the-river-project-volume-1 (accessed February 2019). 99

I was able to bring the ensemble that performed at the launch events for Some Days�Life I Can Live together

drawing on musical connections across a range of spheres in which I am, or have been, involved, including

classical and acoustic/folk strands (see chapter 1, 7–8/n.21). 100

See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hp9lXVK4lIk. 101

This request/suggestion came from Dr Louise Denson, a lecturer and jazz pianist from Griffith University

whose compositions cross jazz and classical genres.

139

Darebin Songwriters’ Guild peer critique group for feedback as the songs were written,

welcoming this different way of writing songs. My ultimate aim is to create fuller

arrangements of the songs, adding parts to the existing arrangements and releasing the

work as part of a commercial product.

4.4.1 Nomadic Journeys102

– poems, background, writing/compositional process

The musical style of the songs combines elements of popular/folk/acoustic, classical

and cabaret/chanson/show tune. Aware of the popular music elements woven into Eve

Beglarian’s works and the part this plays in her creation of a distinctive 21st century

compositional voice, I am happy to have moved into this hybrid space, but in a different

way from the often beat-driven ‘mash-up’ style of Beglarian.103

Working with my own

poems is another element I can bring to a 21st century art music voice, bringing already

developed lyric writing skills from my folk/acoustic singer-songwriter work, and

paralleling the work of a new stream of artists like Corey Dargel.104

A summary of the forms of the poems is given in Appendix D. The haiku is a familiar

Japanese form, and the naga-uta (‘long song’), a related longer form. I found that my

naga-uta poems were of a good length to make these short songs, while the haiku in no.

6 is used as a jumping-off point for an instrumental section that adds duration to that

piece.

102

A complete studio recording of Nomadic Journeys is in progress; a volume including the poems is also

planned. Please visit https://www.christinagreen.net for updates on recordings/projects. 103

Brownie Feet (2008) is an example of a work in which Beglarian fuses a pre-recorded beat track, sampled

spoken word and classical music elements (see

https://evbvd.com/blog/pub/browniefeet/?sf_action=get_data&sf_data=all&_sf_s=Brownie+Feet, accessed

February 2019). 104

See chapter 2, 38. In ‘More Song’, Dargel describes the new breed of songwriters as ‘artsongwriters’ –

musicians coming from an art music background who are writing their own lyrics for songs.

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1. The Fallen Angel

This poem was written following my reading of a journal article about the loss of

lesbian and gay spaces.105

In this article, Nicole Eschen explores Lost Lounge, a show

by lesbian performance duo Peggy Shaw and Lois Weaver. At the beginning of the

show, audience members are asked about the people and places they have lost. This

elicits memories of lost homes, restaurants, bars, and even lost friends and family

members that create another context to the performance. The audience’s memories are

written on slips of paper, and at the end of the show they are read out, creating a

‘community of shared loss’ in the performance context.106

Eschen writes:

Many of the lost objects are community locations such as lesbian bars or

performance venues, so the losses are shared among the audience in mourning

for communal spaces.107

This article reminded me of The Fallen Angel, a queer venue that was located in

Graham Street in Islington, London, UK, and was open in the early 1990s when I was

resident in London. I found information on the venue in an internet search,108

but so far

have been unable to locate a photo of the ceiling mural mentioned in the poem/song.

In my song I have aimed at a chanson style to suit the feeling-tone of the poem;

gradually morphing harmony is my musical device for trying to reflect the change and

dissolution depicted in the poem. The referencing of queer life and the documenting of

it in an artistic form give the work a political underpinning.

105

Nicole Eschen, ‘Pressing Back: Split Britches’ Lost Lounge and the Retro Performativity of Lesbian

Performance’, Journal of Lesbian Studies, 17:1, 56 – 71, 2013. 106

Eschen, ‘Pressing Back’, 63. 107 Eschen, ‘Pressing Back’, 63–64. 108

Colin Clews, ‘1984: Pub: The Fallen Angel, Islington, London.’ http://www.gayinthe80s.com/2012/09/1984-

pub-the-fallen-angel-islington-london/ (accessed December 2014). I am grateful to Colin Clews for his

suggestions for further searching options for images of the ceiling mural at the venue in an email exchange

(2014). Following his suggestion, I contacted the London School of Economics to request a search of materials

that he mentioned as being held by the Hall-Carpenter Archives (the LSE’s main LGBT collection) – some

leaflets relating to art exhibitions at the Fallen Angel. A staff member looked for me but could find no images of

the mural in these materials. Colin Clews also assisted with locating Ewan Munro to request permission to

include a photo on the Gay in the 80s page of the building that formerly housed The Fallen Angel.

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Photo 4.6 – The building in Graham Street, Islington, that once housed The Fallen

Angel. Source: Ewan Munro109

2. On the Tram

This poem about experiences and observations on Melbourne’s trams came out of my

experience of trams as being in a ‘space between’. At the time of writing the poem I

was not a ‘smart phone’ user, and still used an older phone with minimal internet

capacities. The poem is partly a document of my experience of being in a space that

was different from that of the others moving through shared/public space, with the

difference more fully appreciated since my inevitable move into smart phone use on the

demise of my older phone. An upbeat musical feel based around a syncopated rhythm

in the ukulele is employed to amplify the text.

109

Ewan Munro is a photographer with a focus on London pubs. I acknowledge his kind permission to use the

photo of The Fallen Angel, which I found at http://www.gayinthe80s.com/2012/09/1984-pub-the-fallen-angel-

islington-london/ (see this chapter, n. 108). Munro’s work can be viewed at https://pubology.wordpress.com/

and https://www.flickr.com/people/55935853@N00/.

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Photo 4.7 – Alone But Not Alone. Source: Christina Green

3. Irene Warehouse

This poem is about Irene Warehouse, a community arts space in Pitt Street, Brunswick,

Melbourne. I first visited the space around 2003 to go to Barricade Books, an anarchist

bookshop, and also attended a lo-fi (minimally amplified/staged/produced) singer-

songwriter performance there. The artistry mentioned in the song is a reference to paste-

up art by Melbourne's Baby Guerrilla. As I wrote this song I revisited Irene Warehouse

to see how it felt a few years on, and was delighted to see this artwork, which has

spoken to me as I have seen it around the inner suburbs. The song incorporates some of

Baby Guerrilla's description of her work, with her enthusiastic support.110

The

warehouse had a less open feel than it had in the early 2000s, lending it an air of being a

space-in-transition, a space changed by the passage of time, with the anarchist presence

that had been well established there now less so. The song has an energetic cabaret feel,

chosen to resonate with the kind of performance space being described.

110

Email correspondence with the artist, December 2015. See chapter 2, 34–35 for more on Baby Guerrilla’s

work.

143

Photo 4.8 – Mural art by Baby Guerrilla at Irene Warehouse, Brunswick, Melbourne.

Source: Christina Green, included with the kind agreement of Baby Guerrilla

4. Pilgrimage

This poem is about the ‘pilgrimage’ I made to the East Village, NYC, in November

2013, wanting to see St Mark’s Episcopal Church which hosts the Poetry Project in

which poet Eileen Myles was involved. This poem is intended to echo (in a small way)

Myles’s poem Eileen’s Vision, and is centred around a sighting of ‘The Lady’ of my

own, a street art icon of Mary. The song has a reflective musical quality, set up with the

opening ascending major 7th

in the voice, with momentum to amplify the

walking/meandering described in the text created through the 7/8 metre that goes

through most of the setting, and the chromatic shifts in the harmony, returning to the

opening key area in the final bars following the arrival described in the text.

144

Photo 4.9 – Garden and mural art, Mary and infant Jesus, St Mark’s Episcopal Church

(St Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery). Source: Christina Green, used with kind permission

of the artist, Duane Stapp

5. 40 Part Motet

This poem is named after the installation by Canadian artist Janet Cardiff, based on

Thomas Tallis's Spem in Alium, which I saw at The Cloisters, a site of the Metropolitan

Museum of Art, New York, in November 2013. The beautiful space in which the

installation was mounted, the Fuentidueña Chapel, has a Spanish feel, its limestone

Apse (dating 1175–1200) having come to New York from the Church of San Martin,

Fuentidueña, Segovia, Spain, on exchange loan from the Spanish government.111

I was

111

See https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/472507 (accessed January 2019). Another source,

‘Romanesque nightmares: The Fuentidueña Chapel and a bunch of frescoes from San Baudelio de Berlanga’,

Covetotop, ‘https://covetotop.wordpress.com/2013/06/09/romanesque-nightmares-the-fuentiduena-chapel-and-

a-bunch-of-frescoes-from-san-baudelio-de-berlanga/ (accessed May 2018), which dated the loan as being from

1958, is no longer online (as at January 2019).

145

moved by, and continue to feel a connection with, this astonishing space, which I have

since revisited. Musically, the song borrows elements of Spanish/flamenco style, with

the opening C minor tonality chosen to match/evoke the sombre quality of the chapel

space. The experience of seeing an installation only viewable for a short time added

intensity to this nomadic journey.

Photo 4.10 – A shot looking upwards in the Fuentidueña Chapel at The Cloisters,

Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC. Source: Christina Green

6. MoMAnt

This poem came out of a quiet time sitting with my phone near an abstract painting by

Jackson Pollock at the Museum of Modern Art in NYC. After the presentation of the

short poem, the musical setting moves into an instrumental section that is intended, in

an abstract way, to reflect the journey of my text message from NYC to Melbourne. I

146

intentionally brought a hybrid feel to this music, reinforcing the folk/art fusion by

including stomp box and humming sounds in my recorded version of the piece.

Photo 4.11 – At MoMA, NYC. Source: Christina Green

7. Between Worlds

This poem is about the experience of returning to a suburban market in Melbourne, to

play the public piano, not long after arriving back from New York in November 2013. I

played Opening by Philip Glass, a piece I also played on pianos in New York, and

which I aim to play ‘nomadically’ on accessible pianos as I travel.112

A swing feel and

‘show tune’ character in the music matches the sense of relaxation at being back home,

and also something of the jazzy character of Harlem’s 125th

Street.

112

I played the piece again in October 2017 on a public piano at Herne Hill Station, South London, as part of a

busking session there.

147

Photo 4.12 – Payment for busking at the market. Source: Christina Green

8. Officeworks

This poem is a humorous take on an aspect of my life as a postgraduate student. The

triolet is a form familiar to many people through the work of Dr Suess. Officeworks was

shortlisted in the 2017 Roddy Read Songwriting Award at the Maldon Folk Festival,

Central Victoria, where I performed it live, and although it did not win, its selection as a

song outside the standard folk/rock/pop range usually shortlisted there was a welcome

inclusion to me. It was well received by the audience, leaving a sense that an impact

had been made. The 3/4 time signature helps to create a musical feel to match the

‘dance’ of browsing and shopping at Officeworks over the years.

148

Photo 4.13 – Officeworks store, Melbourne. Source: Christina Green

9. Street Whale

This poem was inspired by the Richmond Whale, a mural created by Melbourne visual

artist Mike Makatron, with help from three other artists, PLEA, DEM 189 and OTIS. It

is another example of street art to which I have been attracted and responded in my

work. As discussed in chapter 2, as I move around I maintain an openness to street art,

finding it to be a locus of a particular kind of contemporary voice that is connected with

place in a special way. Mike Makatron studied art in New York113

and has created

murals in many cities including the Brooklyn Snail in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, NYC.

The hammered on chords help to create rhythmic drive and texture on the instrument

that suit the urban subject matter.

113 Bio of Mike Makatron, https://makatron.com/bio/ (accessed May 2018).

149

Photo 4.14 – Partial view of the Richmond Whale mural by Mike Makatron, Richmond,

Melbourne. Source: Christina Green, included with the kind permission of Mike

Makatron

10. Backpack

This poem is about the backpack I travelled with in earlier years, and combines a touch

of humour with an elegaic quality in the music to match the sense of the passage of time

captured in the poem.

Photo 4.15 – Backpack from c. 1987-1988. Source: Christina Green

150

My practice of looking at street art – of being open to these images that ‘speak’ and

provide a connection at a local level with voices emerging from place – as well as

interaction with other art in galleries/museums, has been central to the Nomadic

Journeys cycle. In this solo practice I feel, in the words of On the Tram, ‘alone but not

alone.’ I hope that as I make Nomadic Journeys publicly accessible in various ways, it

will convey the value of this kind of practice, and the joy I have felt in being able to

bring new creative work out of it, journeying nomadically through spaces and contexts,

both being impacted by what I have experienced, and making an impact of my own. As

an artist interested in busking and street performing, I hope where possible, like Eve

Beglarian in her River Project, to take work back to the places and spaces that inspired

it;114

but also, especially where those spaces have changed or disappeared (such as the

temporary space that was The Fallen Angel), to launch my work into other spaces

where it can be received, both online and in real time/place.

I conclude this section with some thoughts from Eve Beglarian on the balance between

solo journeying and sharing in the creative life, bringing energy out of solitude and into

creative work that can speak to others. Beglarian says:

I think the role of an artist is to be completely engaged in the world as it is and

also to stand outside it and give voice to things that people who are in the midst

of it either can’t see or say or don’t want to see or are afraid of seeing. You need

to be a stranger in the midst of the world.115

You need to be alone when you’re travelling in order to be fully available to the

experience … But you don’t have to be alone all the time, and you shouldn’t be.

Going down the (Mississippi) River … I took solo journeys during the day, but

then in the evening I would gather with my fellow travellers and we would set

up camp and make dinner and hang out together.

114

As a starting point, I plan a busking performance at one of Melbourne’s markets in 2019. Another plan to be

actioned as soon as the completed recording is available is to approach the Lesbian Herstory Archives in Park

Slope, Brooklyn, to see if they would be interested in making use of my song about the venue and my visit

there, Park Slope, Brooklyn, on their website. This song is discussed as the final work in the current chapter,

following Nomadic Journeys. 115

Eve Beglarian, ‘The Outcome is Unforeseen: Some Preliminary Notes’, in Arcana VI: Musicians on Music,

ed. John Zorn, New York: Hips Road, 2012, 18.

151

… the act of making something always has hope at its center, and it inspires

faith and engenders faith. And I believe that maybe we really can do that for one

another.116

Inspired by these words and by Beglarian’s life and work, I am committed to

adventurously expanding my capacities for both art-making and connecting with others

in ways that are expansive and that bring life and benefit to as many people as I can

connect with. As well as taking new steps in the world as an artist/observer creating

work from life, performing my own works in multiple contexts, and making more of my

music available for others to perform, I intend to seek an avenue for a performance that

brings together works by Beglarian, Oliveros and Jamie Crofts, taking some of this

music that has meant so much to me to wider audiences here in Melbourne in the near

future.

Photo 4.16 – Playing the baritone ukulele at the Irish and Celtic Music Festival, Yass,

2019. Source: Jo Smith

116 Beglarian, ‘The Outcome is Unforseen’, 19.

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4.5 Park Slope, Brooklyn (alto voice and ukulele, 2016)

The final work in this chapter exploring threads of inspiration in my works from Eve

Beglarian, with a focus on material drawn from the fabric of our lives as lesbians, is a

song, Park Slope, Brooklyn, which chronicles the visit I made to Park Slope, NYC, in

November 2013 (around the time of my interview with Eve Beglarian) to go the

Lesbian Herstory Archives. The Archives were established by a collective including

lesbian writer, archivist and activist Joan Nestle, who is now based in Melbourne.117

The collection’s first home was Nestle's Upper West Side Manhattan apartment, where

it was based from 1975, relocating to its current premises at 484 14th Street in Park

Slope, Brooklyn, in 1993.118

The LHA is home to all sorts of print materials, CDs and

other memorabilia related to lesbian ‘herstory’ (history), much of it gifted and sent by

lesbians in the US and elsewhere.

I was able to scour the collection for materials related to Pauline Oliveros and Eve

Beglarian, to see if the two composers, both resident in New York City and State for

many years, had become known within this lesbian-focused sphere, which includes a

focus on lesbians in music. On arrival I was asked about my mission by the staff

member who opened the door. I was told that the music-related material mostly

documented the activities of lesbians in popular music, particularly in the Women’s

Music scene.119

As the song relates, I found only a small amount of material related to

Oliveros and Beglarian. There were a couple of older articles about Oliveros and

references to a copy of the CD Dream Cum Go Down held by the Archives, effectively

documenting a small impact made by Beglarian in this sphere through her connection

with spoken word artist Juliana Luecking, and connecting my journey and song with her

work, if somewhat minimally. There was considerably more material on Eileen Myles,

and a small amount on other lesbian composers such as Dame Ethel Smyth.

117

My awareness of the Archives came from a connection made with Joan Nestle in 2001, after I heard her

speak at The Builders Arms in Fitzroy, Melbourne, at a queer reading night. 118 Lesbian Herstory Education Foundation, Lesbian Herstory Archives: History and Mission,

http://www.lesbianherstoryarchives.org/history.html, (accessed May 2018). 119

The Women’s Music scene gathered momentum in the 1970s, supported by record labels such as Olivia and

Ladyslipper distribution, and from 1984-1994, HOT WIRE: The Journal of Women’s Music and Culture. The

Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival was a central part of the scene (see this chapter, 110/n. 19, 111/n. 23).

153

The song was composed in July-August 2016, and was refined through workshopping

processes at two songwriters’ peer critique groups. A few final lyric tweaks were made

before recording the song in May 2018, following ideas absorbed from songwriting

academic and workshop leader Pat Pattison,120

who has put two of my songs through

masterclasses given in Melbourne in January 2018 and January 2019.

Photo 4.17 – Handbill from the Lesbian Herstory Archives, collected November 2013.

Source: LHA, included with kind permission of the LHA

Musically, Park Slope, Brooklyn compares with some of the Nomadic Journeys songs,

with a show tune/music hall feel, and is a further offering in the direction of

‘artsongwriting’. It is in AABA form, also known as 32-bar form, a form used by

songwriters in the Tin Pan Alley era of American popular song.121

120

Pattison has taught at Berklee College of Music, Boston, since 1975, where his current focus is lyric writing

and poetry. He maintains a schedule of workshops in several countries with a focus on lyric writing techniques,

and has published several books on lyric writing (1992-2011, see https://www.patpattison.com/quotes-books-

articles, accessed January 2019). 121

The Tin Pan Alley music era centred around a group of publishers and songwriters in Manhattan, from the

late 1800s into the 20th century (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tin_Pan_Alley).

154

My exposure to songs of this era and type began in childhood through listening to

musicals on records owned by my parents, occasional attendance at musicals in

Melbourne, and access to the sheet music my mother owned and played on piano, much

of it passed on to her by her mother, who played accordion. Songs such as The Isle of

Capri and The Surrey with the Fringe on Top are examples.122

The song incorporates

aspects of the ‘vignette formula’ described by Mary Dawson, employing ‘word

pictures’ and unfolding through a timeline beginning with a ‘present tense snapshot’

and then a ‘flashback into the past’.123

Non-standard versions of the AABA form are

common, and this song has a double B section with a melodic variant in B1 followed by

two more sections, A and A1 (variant ending functioning as a kind of coda). My use of

a form like this is different from anything I see in the work of Eve Beglarian, but I do

see echoes of the American popular song style in her recent piece Another Time (2017)

for solo piano, written in honour of Leonard Bernstein’s 100th

birthday.124

The lyric

sections of the song are laid out in Appendix E.

Park Slope, Brooklyn125

is yet to receive a public performance, but may be featured at a

future Melbourne Composers’ League Elbow Room event. It is important to me to have

written this song honouring the work of the Archives at a time when loss of LGBT

space is common and the small (in historical and planetary terms) space, both physical

and cultural, that lesbians have carved out, is in flux. Women’s studies scholar Bonnie

Morris writes:

My concern is that as we advance farther into the twenty-first century, we are

witnessing the almost flippant dismissal of recent, late twentieth-century lesbian

culture, particularly the loss of physical sites such as women’s bookstores and

women’s music festivals and their material legacies (books, journals, albums,

tapes, magazine interviews with artists).126

122

The Isle of Capri, with lyrics by Jimmy Kennedy and music by Wilhelm Grosz, was published 1934 (see

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isle_of_Capri_(song), accessed February 2019). The Surrey with the Fringe on

Top is from the 1943 musical Oklahoma!, with music by Richard Rodgers and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II

(see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Surrey_with_the_Fringe_on_Top, accessed February 2019). 123

Mary Dawson, ‘Songwriting Elegance through Song Form: Part IV, The Internet Writing Journal, March

2003, https://www.writerswrite.com/journal/mar03/songwriting-elegance-through-song-form-part-iv-3034

(accessed January 2019). 124

See https://evbvd.com/bookofdays/texts/0825/ (accessed February 2019). 125

A studio recording of the song is in progress; please visit https://www.christinagreen.net for updates. 126 Bonnie Morris, The Disappearing L (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2016), 2.

155

I intend to focus my song, and indeed, all my work, outward into the wider world,

taking any opportunity I can to share it with others across multiple contexts, my voice

strengthened through this journey with my two lesbian composer subjects, especially

Eve Beglarian, and doing my part to show the lesbian composer as both particular in her

difference, and multiple in her life/work.127

Like Beglarian, I want to cultivate and

convey a complex identity in which the strand of lesbian identity is one among many,

differing from itself over time (the positive difference of Deleuze),128

and traceable

through progressions in my music.

127

Since completing Park Slope, Brooklyn I have written two further songs with content drawn from lesbian

life, and can see this intention becoming reality as I continue to work in a voice that has ‘become other’ (see

chapter 1, 2 and elsewhere) through the process of working on this project. I am also in a process of reviving

further older works, initially in performance, building on the strand of reworking and bringing into the present

undertaken with Three Pieces for Women’s Voices. 128 See chapter 2, 13/n. 16.

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Chapter 5

Onward and Outward: a Final Work

This chapter focuses on the final work written for this doctoral folio, Land, Sea, Sky

(2017) for string orchestra. The work was composed with a sense of moving more fully

into being a professional composer, following the process of absorbing ideas and

inspiration from the compositional practices of Pauline Oliveros and Eve Beglarian.

After mapping out the compositional process, the discussion draws out threads of

connection with Oliveros and Beglarian – in the choice of spirituality-infused

background ideas and inspiration for the work, and in its composition for non-specialist

and non-virtuosic participants.

5.1 Land, Sea, Sky (string orchestra, 2017)

5.1.1 Background

Land, Sea, Sky was written to fulfil a commission for a work for string orchestra by the

Penrith Symphony Orchestra, NSW, and was performed at the Joan Sutherland Centre,

Penrith, as part of the orchestra’s 30th

Anniversary Gala Concert, on May 26th

2018.

The work is titled for the three realms that permeate Celtic thought. In this world view,

land is considered the middle realm (this world), sky is considered the upper realm

(other world) and sea is considered the lower realm (under world).1 I wanted to create

an integrated piece with sections that morphed smoothly into each other, based on a

progression through the horizontal sections in my photo Pelican Point (see Photo 5.1).

The photo was taken at Pelican Point, Hastings, on Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula,

near where I grew up. I envisaged a movement through the sections from bottom to top,

i.e. through the bands of land, sea and sky, which connected for me with the Celtic

1 Dana (?), The Celtic Triplicities, Land, Sky and Sea: Living and Exploring Celtic Paganism,

http://celticpagan.blogspot.com/2011/06/celtic-triplicities.html (accessed February 2019) (author’s full name not

given).

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land/sea/sky idea. The work would end with a joyful return to land, the world in which

we spend so much of our lives and of which we are conscious. There is a sense of

journey, of transformation, going through the realms and areas, and coming back to

land bringing a greater breadth and depth of experience and vision. The device of

morphing from section to section was also underpinned by visual inspiration from M.

C. Escher’s woodcut Sky and Water I where, within a wallpaper-style design featuring

multiple birds in the upper half of the layout, fish emerge in the lower half in the spaces

between the birds, while the birds recede into the background and disappear from

view.2

5.1.2 Compositional process

In this piece I returned to using composition technique-related material, in this case a

talk by Australian composer Matthew Hindson.3 In the article, Hindson explores ways

of working with extra-musical objects, for example a piece of visual art, analysing the

object and structuring the work using this material. In the example Hindson gives, a

student has analysed the ideas and themes of a painting as well as its physical layout,

and has generated her composition from this.4 I found, of course, that this had things in

common with my approach in the Suite from Sighting Silence, Sounding Image, but I

absorbed new ideas and freshness from the article.

I worked with the colours, textures and physical layout of the contrasted horizontal

bands in the photo, mapping out a plan for the sections of the composition, following

Hindson’s suggestions for planning including consideration of elements such as

harmonic direction, texture, and rhythmic complexity versus simplicity.5 The musical

structure I devised is detailed in Appendix F. The letters A – F are the main musical

sections in the work. Musical decisions and ideas that go beyond the formally planned

2 M. C. Escher’s Sky and Water I can be viewed at https://mcescher.com/gallery/switzerland-

belgium/#iLightbox[gallery_image_1]/23 (accessed October 2019). 3 Matthew Hindson, ‘Planning a Two Minute Composition,’

https://www.misscraig.com/uploads/2/4/4/9/24492004/planning_a_2_minute_composition.pdf (accessed June

2018). 4 Hindson, ‘Planning a Two Minute Composition,’ 5.

5 Hindson, ‘Planning a Two Minute Composition,’ 9.

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outline based on the visual material are present in the piece. The table summarises the

main musical ideas, aligning them with the accompanying image-related narrative.

Photo 5.1 – Pelican Point © Christina Green 2017.

Source: Christina Green

As with the works discussed in chapter 3, the two-fold approach outlined by Krausas

was employed:

Planning + rule-making = pre-composition

Rule manipulation + taste + craft = composing.6

For me, the return to a spirituality-related theme in this work, with its concluding

arrival, transformed, after a journey, mirrors the journey I have undertaken in this whole

doctoral project. I moved from the strands of inspiration from Zen and Native American

6 See chapter 3, 58/n. 64.

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spirituality of my pre-2012 works7 through the several Deleuze-inspired works, the Zen,

nature and Oliveros/Deep Listening meditation-inspired Suite from Sighting Silence,

Sounding Image, the focus on the lesbian composer, and back into a theme inspired by a

Celtic worldview that is underpinned by earth-based spirituality. Beglarian, Oliveros

and I share a focus on spirituality in many works, a strand that chimes with the idea of

the lesbian composer as multiple, more than one thing. Many identities could be seen as

multiple, but ours are particular in combining the minoritarian elements of lesbian and

woman8 with other identity strands including our more majoritarian western national

identities and our involvements in the art music field, which in all our cases have been

supported by university study.9 Our identities are complicated again by our choice to

work in the experimental/Downtown, rather than in the more majoritarian concert hall

art music stream. Of course, the time of relative ‘marginality’ of the

experimental/Downtown is in the past. Beglarian expressed this succinctly in our

interview, saying:

Now the academic scene is dead, nobody wants to be an academic composer –

even academic composers don’t want to be academic composers, so suddenly

the Downtown scene was where everybody wanted to be, and every ambitious

person with any idea of being a composer in the 21st century wanted to be a

Downtown composer. Nico Muhly [having an opera, i.e. Two Boys] at the Met

is not Downtown experimental music in the aspect of it that I care most about, in

the same way that [a] suburban lesbian couple with 2.5 children and an SUV

does not represent queerness in the way that I care most about.10

For me, the thread of spirituality is the connection with Beglarian’s and Oliveros’s work

that can be found in this final folio work, and it is a thread (though not the only one!)

through which the three of us have wanted to connect with the wider world.11

This is

the work that is positioned at the threshold of the life/compositional practice I will

7 These works include Just Swim for piano (2011-2012, inspired by a quote from Zen teacher Dainin Katagiri

Roshi) and What Is Life? for piano (2009-2010, inspired by a text by Crowfoot, Blackfoot warrior and orator).

Both are musical responses to the texts (largely, to the imagery in the texts and arising from reading them) rather

than text settings, standing as compositions alongside them and in their own right. 8 See chapter 2, 14.

9 See chapter 2, 24 for more on this, in the context of discussion of the Downtown scene/aesthetic.

10 Beglarian, interview with Christina Green.

11 The theme of facing ‘outward’ is explored in section 5.1.3 following.

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move into beyond this doctoral framework and into a broadening context, transformed

by the encounter with the two composer subjects of my study.

Quite a number of Beglarian’s works draw on spiritual themes. An example of a work

inspired by material drawn from the Zen tradition is Five Things (2001),12

and many

works draw on themes or texts from Christianity, which Beglarian said in our interview

that she embraced in 2003. These include Wet Psalm (2012),13

Night Psalm (2009),14

All

You Got 2 Do (2003),15

Lullaby (2002),16

Do Not Be Concerned (2001),17

and Wonder

Counselor (1996).18

Beglarian leans to the Gnostic in her choice of a text from the

Gospel of Thomas in Do Not Be Concerned, and draws on the Black gospel tradition in

All You Got 2 Do and Carrying the Cross (2016),19

on Ezekiel in Dust (2003),20

and

Charles Wesley in My Heart is Trembling (2005).21

Across these works, Beglarian’s

approach is one of musical sophistication and inventiveness, occasional moments of

humour,22

and respect, highlighting that which could speak universally in the texts.

Oliveros’s works referencing spirituality in various ways include Crow Two (1975), a

work which utilises ritual figures and ideas from Lakota culture – her approach here has

12 Five Things is a setting of a Song Dynasty Zen lesson to a Zen Master (translation by Thomas Cleary) for

spoken voice, flute, and bassoon (or bass clarinet or baritone sax) with optional woodblock – see

https://evbvd.com/blog/fivethings/ and https://evbvd.com/fivethings/FiveThingsTenorClef.pdf (both accessed

June 2018). 13 The text was extracted and redacted from Psalms 70/71by poet Linda Norton from a water-logged Bible found

in post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans – see https://evbvd.com/bookofdays/texts/1122/ (accessed June 2018). 14

Night Psalm is described by Beglarian as having been inspired by Psalm 77, particularly verse 20, with a

melody based on a chant found in a late sixteenth century antiphoner from Augsberg Cathedral in Germany –

see https://evbvd.com/blog/nightpsalm/ (accessed June 2018). 15

This work is described by Beglarian as having been inspired by a sermonette by Rev. Milton Brunson

beginning ‘All you got to do is/stand still/study yourself/be real’, and including the instruction ‘the live player

tries to follow the Reverend’s advice by playing as few notes with as much attention as possible’ – see

https://evbvd.com/blog/allugot2do/ and https://evbvd.com/allugot2do/materials/AllUGot2DoCompiled.pdf

(both accessed June 2018). 16

See chapter 4, 121/n. 58. 17

This piece is a spoken word setting of a text from the Gospel of Thomas, with video lending a humorous take

on the worldly concern with ‘what you shall wear’ – see https://evbvd.com/blog/concerned/ and

https://evbvd.com/bookofdays/texts/0221/ (both accessed June 2018). 18

Wonder Counselor is described by Beglarian as inspired by Isaiah 9:6, for organ with pre-recorded track

embedding images from a text from Proverbs 30, with variations on the medieval sequence ‘Res est

Admirabilis’/‘It is a wonderful thing’ played live by the organist – see https://evbvd.com/blog/wondercounselor/

(accessed June 2018). 19

See https://evbvd.com/bookofdays/texts/0804/ (accessed February 2019). 20

See https://evbvd.com/bookofdays/texts/1005/ and https://evbvd.com/dust/materials/DustCompiled.pdf (both

accessed February 2019). Dust has video by Matt Petty added in 2015 – Beglarian has added video to many

works since beginning to collaborate with Petty, adding these ‘becoming works’ to her Book of Days project. 21

See https://evbvd.com/bookofdays/texts/0730/ (accessed February 2019). 22

As in the video accompanying Do Not Be Concerned, which shows images of clothes and handbags in shop

windows in New York’s Soho.

161

been critiqued by Tara Browner for cultural appropriation.23

I would argue that much of

Oliveros’s work that is based around the cultivation of listening to the sounding world

in a way that points at non-separateness/non-dualism in the Buddhist sense is also

spirituality-informed – and what comes across in this is a desire to facilitate meditative

experiences and a heightened consciousness of sound (including the inward ‘sound’ of

memories), a greater sense of connection with the world and with others, again

underpinned by a sense of ‘offering’.

Mockus draws on interview material in which Oliveros mentions her initiation into

Tibetan Buddhism by Kalu Rinpoche by 1977.24

In my interview with Oliveros she

emphasised her self-identification as a composer from an early point in life.25

She also

said that ‘often people don’t necessarily realise that the work that I do has come from

my own perspective,26

not from traditional practices, even though some of the things

that I do might resemble Buddhist practice or yoga or some other … I certainly respect

those traditions and draw from them when I need to.’27

In my work, aligning with

Beglarian and Oliveros, I am seeking to respond to texts and material from spiritual

traditions with respect and a desire to open that which has spoken to me in this material

to others, using my own compositional voice. Like Beglarian, this for me is

underpinned by my own practice (Buddhist/Christian). In Oliveros’s case, a personal

Deep Listening practice is the parallel ground of practice that informed the composer’s

work in an ongoing way.

23

In ‘“They Could Have an Indian Soul”: Crow Two and the Processes of Cultural Appropriation,’ Journal of

Musicological Research, Volume 19, Issue 3 (2000): 243–263. 24

Mockus, Sounding Out, 150. 25

See chapter 3, 45. 26

See chapter 3, 54/n. 47. 27 Oliveros, interview with Christina Green.

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5.1.3 Onward and outward – an ‘Externally Facing Artistic Practice’28

The opportunity to compose Land, Sea, Sky came through responding to a call for

applications that would be selected on a competitive basis from students at Western

Sydney University for the chance to compose for the Penrith Symphony Orchestra, and

I was one of two student composers awarded the PSO’s commission and prize. I

welcomed the opportunity in the knowledge that the PSO is an amateur orchestra,

which would perform the work at the Joan Sutherland Centre in Penrith, Western

Sydney, under the direction of their conductor, Paul Terracini. At an early point I also

knew that the program would focus on broad appeal classical works from the standard

repertoire. I imagined skilled amateurs equipped to perform in this context, and worked

with supervision input which included considerations of the capacities of the players.

Although no specific brief was given about what to aim for with the orchestra, I chose a

tonal realm, a melodic and often homophonic texture, and a subject for the work that I

hoped would have broad appeal and be non-contentious (this did not seem like the

moment for another work based on specific inspiration from the fabric of lesbian life).

In my experience, Celtic themes are broadly welcomed in music/art in this country, and

I thought the slightly unfamiliar twist (the focus on the three-layered Celtic worldview)

might work well. It is an honour to have been able to write for a group embedded in the

community in Western Sydney, who are establishing a connection with Western Sydney

University, the institution that has given me the opportunity to undertake studies. In all

of this, I wanted to focus outward, embracing a real-world opportunity and allowing

whatever would emerge in this context to take shape. I also drew on inspiration from

Oliveros and Beglarian – primarily from Oliveros’s work designed for non-specialist

and non-virtuosic participants,29

and also from Beglarian’s The Continuous Life (2000),

which has a guitar part designed to be played along with the orchestra in a segment at

28 Steven Schick, ‘Steven Schick: In Pursuit of an Externally Facing Artistic Practice,’ National Sawdust Log –

The Log Journal (keynote address, New Music Gathering, May 11, 2017,

https://nationalsawdust.org/thelog/2017/05/11/steven-schick/ (text with video accessed June 2018). I came to

Schick’s keynote address in my ongoing research on the work of Eve Beglarian. Schick mentions Beglarian

(specifically in relation to her Mississippi River Journey), Oliveros, percussionist/composer/long-distance

cyclist Payton MacDonald and others as examples of composer/musicians who have created work inspired by

nature, seeing them as exceptions to a trend of turning away from the natural world as a source of inspiration for

music during the period following the end of the Second World War. 29 Echoes from the Moon, discussed in chapter 3, is an example.

163

the end of the piece.30

Although working with non-specialist players is not a core

strand of Beglarian’s work, it was also a hoped-for outcome of her Mississippi River

journey,31

and I asked her if she had been able to achieve this. She told me that she had

been successful in involving a group of girls from an at-risk high school in San Jose in a

performance of her work Liement me deport (2008).32

The girls had never sung in a

choir, and she taught them the piece by rote. They performed Liement both at a school

assembly, and as guest artists at Montalvo, the artist colony at which Beglarian was

working at for three months immediately after the river trip. Beglarian said the venture

was successful due to the help of a fellow Montalvo resident who specialised in

community work, and built the relationship with the school that allowed this

performance to go forward. Apart from this experience, Beglarian said she had found

involving community members in performances harder to put together than she would

have imagined. The need for considerable groundwork and community engagement was

beyond her skills and available time, and she would have needed collaborators or staff

to make it possible.33

These threads of outward focus in artistic practice are a big part of

what I want to take into the future from my encounter with the work of Oliveros and

Beglarian (alongside the inspiration drawn from their lives and work as lesbian

composers). A significant step already made in this direction was my involvement in No

Excuses!, a choral suite co-composed with Dr Kathleen McGuire in 2015/2016, and

performed with women’s choirs across a range of contexts in Melbourne, Brisbane and

the Latrobe Valley, Victoria, between 2015 and 2017, with McGuire conducting and

myself co-leading as a singer/guitarist. The suite was commissioned by the School of

Hard Knocks in Melbourne, and the organisation coordinated the rehearsals and

performances involved, as well as managing many other threads. My experience of this

project certainly chimed with Beglarian’s experience with the students – the

groundwork and support of the School of Hard Knocks people underpinned the success

of No Excuses!, for example allowing McGuire and me to walk into a room in Brisbane

30

The compositional process of The Continuous Life is documented by Beglarian on her website; see

https://evbvd.com/continuous/9.html (accessed June 2018). The guitar part was created to be played by anyone

turning up with a guitar to the Miller Outdoor Theatre in Houston where the work received its first performance. 31

See chapter 4, 135, 136/n. 94. 32

This work pre-dates Beglarian’s River journey, which began on August 1st, 2009, but was connected by her to

the outworkings of the project at her residency at the Montalvo Arts Center, Saratoga, CA, as Lucas Artists

Fellow, from January 1st to March 31

st, 2010 (see http://montalvoarts.org/participants/eve_beglarian/). Beglarian

planned residency time for writing music following her trip – see chapter 4, 136/n. 94. San Jose, the location of

the school, is very close to Saratoga. 33 Beglarian shared this story with me in email correspondence, 9th June-2nd July, 2018.

164

and train a pre-formed choir of about a hundred women in minimum rehearsal time for

the show there. The thread of outward focus in artistic practice will be explored further

in the Conclusion following this chapter.

For the 30th

Anniversary Gala Concert of the Penrith Symphony Orchestra, young

players were called in to augment the string section, a move I had not known was a

possibility. This seems likely to have affected the quality of the performance of the

work, which suffers from intonation problems to the extent that I am including both the

mp3 generated from the Finale score and a link to the PSO performance here.34

In an

unexpected twist, it seems that the orchestra gave Land, Sea, Sky, specifically conceived

by me to be mainstream and non-contentious, a queer performance of a kind, ‘queering

the pitch’ in a literal way.35

I am still very glad that my work was performed by the

orchestra, and understand that it was well received by both the players and the

audience.36

I am also happy to know that youth players were given the chance to play

new music by myself and Chloe Hulewicz, the other commission recipient, perhaps

giving them the chance to be introduced to music of a kind they had not played before,

and in the case of my piece, to new ideas embodied in its underpinning story of journey

and transformation. Importantly, the inclusion of our works gave them the chance to

play music by women, which, unfortunately, is still a rare and amazing experience for

young people who are largely nurtured on a diet of dead European male composers.

Hulewicz’s and my works represented women composers in an otherwise male

composer-focused program featuring works by J. Strauss II, Tchaikovsky and

Rachmaninov, as well as Michael Kieran Harvey’s 2011 work, Homage to Liszt.

In his address to the New Music Gathering, percussionist/conductor/teacher Steven

Schick said:

In order to make music, I need three healthy relationships: with the materials of

my art, with the world around me, and with the people with whom I share it.

These are the building blocks of what I think of as an externally facing artistic

34

The May 2019 performance of Land, Sea, Sky by the Southern Cross Philharmonia Orchestra, conducted by

Dr Houston Dunleavy (see this chapter, 165), is at https://soundcloud.com/christina-green-composer/land-sea-

sky (accessed October 2019). 35

I am indebted to my supervisor Dr Sally Macarthur for this humorous insight that references Queering the

Pitch (see chapter 1, 1/n. 1). 36 Through email correspondence from John Pearce, president of the Penrith Symphony Orchestra, 3/6/18.

165

practice. The goal of an externally facing practice is to become as complete a

human being as possible, in whose life music plays a central and defining role.37

I echo these thoughts and uphold my decision to embrace a performance by the

orchestra located within the world of my postgraduate studies. I would welcome further

opportunities to work with community orchestras and ensembles, but on a future

occasion would favour a more selective process for performers that could result in a

bottom line of accuracy and tuning more likely to produce a useable recording for my

benefit as a composer seeking opportunities. Layered processes involving education in

the youth area combined with a higher level of performance would also work for me. A

recent development is two planned performances of the work by the Southern Cross

Philharmonia Orchestra, a professional ensemble in Melbourne now under the direction

of Dr Houston Dunleavy, in May 2019. I am delighted to have been offered this second

performance opportunity for Land, Sea, Sky and hope that it may show what the work

could become in a different kind of space.

37 Schick, ‘In Pursuit of an Externally Facing Artistic Practice.’

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Chapter 6

Conclusion

My encounter and seven year journey with the work and ideas of Pauline Oliveros and

Eve Beglarian has changed my life as a composer/performer. I began this doctoral

project with skills gained in a fairly traditional academic context, and am emerging with

a much fuller picture of what it is to have a 21st century compositional voice – in

particular, one that is emerging from roots in the 20th

century – with a sense of arrival in

the Downtown aesthetic to which I have been exposed through the work of Eve

Beglarian, and an appreciation of the experimental/avant-garde through Pauline

Oliveros. I have worked on my creative practice drawing many strands of inspiration

from both composers, including the different models they embody as lesbian

composers. In the language of Deleuze, I have become other as a composer and as a

person through my experiences in this assemblage.

6.1 An ‘Externally Facing Artistic Practice’

Recalling Schick’s ideal of cultivating an ‘externally facing artistic practice’ and his

view of Beglarian and Oliveros as ‘turning to the world’ and becoming exceptions to

the norm in contemporary art music through drawing inspiration from nature in their

work,1 I want to add that I see Oliveros and Beglarian as externally facing not just vis á

vis nature, but also towards people. Beglarian undertook her river journey with a

conscious intention, using it ‘to escape her decades-long New York/New England

urban-lesbian-artist bubble’, and went out of her way ‘to meet people who didn’t share

her] cultural values’.2

With these words, Beglarian reveals a stance that both acknowledges her lesbian

identity and cultural milieu, and expresses a wish not to allow this to be an identity that

1 See chapter 5, 162–164/n.28 2 Brett Campbell, ‘Weekend Music Watch: Beyond the Bubble’, Oregon Arts Watch, October 22

nd, 2011,

http://www.orartswatch.org/weekend-musicwatch-beyond-the-bubble/ (accessed June 2018). Campbell indicates

that Beglarian shared these thoughts in a post-concert talk with Third Angle music director and violinist Ron

Blessinger. I have been unable to locate this talk online.

167

becomes ‘limiting … reducing [her] to particular modes of being and interacting …

affecting [her] potentiality [and] future capacity to be affected.’3

Since her journey, Beglarian’s collaborations have expanded and her work has

broadened into new areas of inspiration, including a project focusing on the work of

several ‘visionary’ artists including Cleveland Turner (1935-2013), an African-

American artist based in Houston also known as ‘The Flower Man’, and the demolition

of Turner’s House, videoed by Matt Petty.4 Beglarian has said that she ‘thinks about the

flower man every day’,5 and the background information to the work on her website

states that as well as its presentation of various text/music/video, Lighten Up also

explores the way Beglarian’s and Petty’s lives have been transformed by their

relationships with these artists and their work.6 In an email exchange/interview with

writer Linda Norton, Beglarian has said:

Collaborating is my natural state of working. Every piece is a collaboration.

“Pump Music” is about a love affair with the hand pump at Wanagan’s Landing.

“The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” is a collaboration with a long-dead British

guy [William Blake].7

Of the collaborative process, she says:

It maybe sounds corny to say this straight out, but I really do feel that art is the

mechanism for bringing us together, for bridging the gulfs that exist between us.

For me, the core experience of making something is making a bridge between

me and not-me, so I guess it makes sense that collaborating with others would

feel like the natural extension of that. The people I’ve worked with are not me,

but as we work together we find a way to think together, to make something

3 Hickey-Moody and Malins, Deleuzian Encounters, 5, writing of the Deleuzian understanding of the limits to

identity and identity politics. 4 Lighten Up is a multimedia song cycle celebrating several visionary visual artists created by Eve Beglarian and

Louisiana video artist Matt Petty, whose first version received a workshop performance in June 2016 at the

Alley Theatre in Houston, Texas. It was performed by Beglarian (vocals/electronics) and Petty

(trombone/vocals) with James Allen (keys/vocals) and David Steele (clarinets). 5 In a post on December 2nd, 2017, on Cleveland Turner: “The Flower Man” @flowermanhouston,

https://www.facebook.com/flowermanhouston/ (accessed December 2018). 6 See https://evbvd.com/blog/lightenup/ (accessed December 2018).

7 The Herb Alpert Award in the Arts: Eve Beglarian, 2017 (email exchange between Linda Norton and Eve

Beglarian in two chapters), https://herbalpertawards.org/artist/beglarian-chapter-one (accessed June 2018).

168

new together, and that intimacy, that bridging of the distance between us gets

embedded in the work and brings texture and meaning and depth. There is

wonder and energy in the distances between us, and if I have the humility and

the confidence to know my own strengths and weaknesses, I can then be open to

the strengths and weaknesses of others. I think my most important strength is

my comfort with being a beginner. It means I don’t have to defend myself.

Every real collaboration starts from ignorance: we don’t yet know what we can

make together until we make it.8

With these words, Beglarian speaks of openness to processes of growth and

transformation in assemblages that result in an increase in affects/capacities in

Deleuzian terms. Her philosophy of openness is embedded in the name she has given

her whole artistic project, EVBVD Music. This name is embedded in the name of her

website and is seen there9 in a calligraphed design that also features on the covers of her

scores. In one of her subscriber list emails,10

Eve explains that the letters in this

acronym stand for EVe Beglarian Values the Decussation, and shares that at some point

in her late college days she discovered the essays of Sir Thomas Browne, ‘which are

full of inventive metaphors and curious neologisms’. Her favourite, she says, is

decussation, which is ‘the point where two opposed forces merge, throwing off new

energy that was not contained in the original elements’. This concept/process has

something in common with the process of transformation/becoming that ensues from

the coming together of an assemblage in Deleuzian thought. While the elements in a

Deleuzian assemblage do not have to be opposed forces, the difference that each brings

to the encounter is part of what is operative in the process of transformation, of

affecting and being affected, that takes place between the bodies involved. From my

original focus on the lesbian composer, I see Beglarian as comfortable in a long-time

lesbian identity which is given voice in works across her output, one of many strands of

identity and resonance that inform her work. Beglarian said in our interview (and has

said elsewhere) that she only feels the need to defend an identity when it is under

siege,11

but I observe that she is able to bring this embraced/absorbed identity and her

8 The Herb Alpert Award in the Arts chapter one (see n. 7 above). 9 For example on the home page, https://evbvd.com/.

10 Eve Beglarian, Your week in A Book of Days: In the Systasis of the Mystical Decussation, subscriber email

newsletter, 13-22 July, 2016. 11 Beglarian, interview with Christina Green (see chapter 4, 108–109).

169

experience of living it, into her collaborations, where it can play a part in the creation of

new energy in the decussation she values. An interesting collaboration to which

Beglarian wanted to draw my attention, in which I see this happening, was her work

with New York Downtown composer Phil Kline, with whom she composed a song

cycle, The Story of B, with texts by Pierre Louÿs, the Chansons de Bilitis. This work,

‘purporting to be translations of verses by an ancient Greek contemporary of Sappho,

gave the 1950s lesbian activist group, The Daughters of Bilitis, its name.’12

Beglarian

said that she was interested in the way the poems were a heterosexual fantasy of a

lesbian relationship, and that the Daughters of Bilitis had named themselves after this

heterosexual fantasy of lesbian relationship, and that from this she had ‘had the idea

that to co-opt the heterosexual fantasy of lesbian relationship and turn it into an

authentic expression of lesbian relationship would be a sort of cool thing to do.’13

She

said that when Phil Kline came to her and suggested doing a project together, and they

began thinking about a song cycle, she put forward the idea of the Chansons de Bilitis,

interested in the coming together of herself, an actual lesbian, with Kline, a

heterosexual man, and the musical work they would make together creating songs using

the purportedly lesbian love poems actually written by Louÿs. Beglarian said she was

very happy with the songs they came up with, and at the time of our interview was

beginning to work on ideas for a theatrical realisation of them with her then partner

Ruthie Stephens, adding a new layer of development to the work originally performed

as a song cycle. Beglarian’s weaving of threads of identity, composition and

collaborative openness with sophistication and humour in this project models a multi-

layered creativity toward which I hope to aim in future work.

I also see Pauline Oliveros as having been open to moving into new assemblages

bringing growth and transformation, focusing her practice outward towards others and

considering elements involved in the transaction. Speaking of her work with Ione on

Nzinga the Queen-King, Oliveros said:

My part of the collaboration is to do the music and sound design. When lone

asked me to do the music for this play, I was a little terrified and thought, "I

12

Eve Beglarian, The Story of B background notes, https://evbvd.com/bilitis/ (accessed February 2019).

Beglarian explains here that the texts are neither authentically ancient nor authentically lesbian, having been

written by Louÿs himself. 13 Beglarian, interview with Christina Green.

170

can't do that. I don't know anything about it; I'm not an African and I'm not a

scholar about African music. I love it but what business do I have in doing

this?" But she insisted and I wanted to do it. I had a long soul-searching time to

figure out how I was going to relate to this work. What I have come up with is a

sound design, which includes all the landscapes that are needed in the play – the

savannah in Angola, urban landscapes – New York, Brazil, Lisbon. Throughout

the play, whenever the scene shifts, the sound shifts as well so that it could be

morning or night in the savannah, village, or urban landscape. This is one layer

in the sound design. The second is that the traditional African music is live on

the stage with the African ensemble. The third layer is my music, which is the

archetypal commentary or emotional support for what is going on in the play.

All of these elements coexist in the work.14

Here the focus is not on what will emerge from the interplay of the composer’s lesbian

identity with other identities and material, but the work is underpinned by the

collaboration between Oliveros and Ione, with Ione’s desire to have Oliveros’s

contribution in the project clearly stated. Oliveros’s composer-self is foregrounded, just

as it was in our interview, and that is the place from which her contribution to the

creation of something new comes, with her music sitting within her overall sound

design. Oliveros’s words here speak to me of the willingness to go beyond what we

think are our limitations, of leaping into a collaborative process with uncertainty but

with courage, and this is also a model that I want to embrace in my own practice. It

chimes with ideas that Eve Beglarian shared with me in conversation. I asked Beglarian

about how and when, if ever, as an artist, one may assert one’s competence and years of

experience. She said:

Expertise is NOT about knowing the answers, whatever that might mean, but

being comfortable in the space of not (yet) having answers. It gets easier, less

daunting, to be in that unknown place if you’ve been in other unknown places

many times before.15

14

Oliveros, ‘Cues,’ 379–380. 15

Email correspondence with Beglarian, 6th

and 8th

October 2019, clarifying a strand of a conversation we had

in late July 2018 at Beglarian’s home in Vermont.

171

I see Oliveros and Beglarian as externally facing also in their way of working as

independent artists in the 21st century, including many uses of technology and the

internet, benefitting both their audiences and themselves. Both have used the internet to

great effect to connect with others and share their work. Beglarian shared her

Mississippi River journey with a wider audience via a blog on which readers could also

leave comments, creating a virtual community around the project as well as the links

she forged with people in real place and time along the way. She has also found a viable

way to generate income as a composer, using her website as a selling point for

performance materials for her works, as well as various online channels for selling her

recordings, working around the changing terrain as online streaming of music has

moved in. She says:

For me, the loss of income from record sales has been counterbalanced by the

increase in publishing, both royalties and sales, because as the music is more

available, then more performers know about it and they buy the scores in order

to perform them. That cycle of income production is working better for me than

it did 20 years ago. For me, having my scores online, as a free download is a

really good idea as well. The more my music gets out there, the more sales I get.

Many of my pieces are available online: You can download the score and the

parts for free. But you can’t play the piece without the electronic part, so people

have to pay me to get the electronic part in order to perform the piece. That’s

working out pretty well for me as a source of income. Streaming [on the

Internet] was going to be the best way of promoting new music. It turns out that

isn’t really true in many domains like in pop music. Free is free. Free is a loss of

income. If you can’t sell a CD because everything is online and you previously

made your living selling CDs, you’re not going to make a living anymore. I

mean, let’s be real, it just doesn’t work. But for me, who was sort of marginal

anyway, it actually works. The loss of income from record sales is

counterbalanced by publishing sales. I still sell CDs at gigs, as many as I ever

did, so it’s fine. I think people buy a CD at a gig as a memento of the gig if the

performance was meaningful for them. It’s a different thing.16

16 Raines, Composition in the Digital World, 261.

172

Oliveros, through her Deep Listening Institute, successfully conducted a ‘virtual

residency’ the ‘Deep Listening Convergence’, with 45 musicians, using Skype.

In this project, new ensembles came together and rehearsed online for five months. The

project culminated in three concerts in real time at a sanctuary, in which only material

that had been developed online was presented.17

Oliveros’s income generation has come

from multiple strands including workshops, teaching and performing as well as from

sales of scores and CDs. My own efforts online are still in the developing stage by

comparison with those of Oliveros and Beglarian, but they model some great ideas that

I can consider in my own situation.18

6.1.1 The lesbian composer and lesbian compositional process

My aim in this project has been to move into the art music sphere with the intention to

be more visible than previously as a lesbian composer. It has been important to me to

do this, and it has been interesting to observe the results. The later stages of this

endeavour have coincided with the successful campaign for equal marriage in Australia,

culminating in the ‘yes’ vote in November 2017. My experience of presenting work

with themes of lesbian/gay life has been very favourable, and I think that the raised

consciousness around the unequal recognition of same sex relationships in Australia

around this time has been a help in this. In August 2017 I presented two songs from the

Nomadic Journeys cycle, The Fallen Angel and On the Tram, in a combined

paper/performance at the Women in the Creative Arts conference at ANU. Members of

the audience were visibly moved by the story of loss of a lesbian/gay space unfolded in

The Fallen Angel, and gave me warm feedback. Kaylie Dunstan has now performed

Eileen’s Vision for a second time, at a warehouse-style venue in Sydney’s Marrickville,

Barbiturates, in a context set up more like a ‘gig’ than a traditional concert as at the first

17

Cory Arcangel, ‘Pauline Oliveros’, BOMB Magazine, April 1, 2009,

https://bombmagazine.org/articles/pauline-oliveros/ (accessed December 2018). 18

In the Australian contemporary art music scene the huge presence of the Australian Music Centre, and its

tangible role in raising the profile of Australian composer and their music is a difference that I am working with.

I am trying to negotiate a path that combines publication of a selection of scores by Wirripang: Home of

Australian Composers, an Australian music publisher based in Wollongong, NSW (see

https://www.australiancomposers.com.au/pages/christina-green, accessed February 2019)

which are then channelled through the AMC’s system, with working as an independent

artist/composer/songwriter/performer, aligning with a younger generation of composers, and still very much

finding my way with this.

173

performance of the work. The concert also involved Sydney-based singer-songwriter

Harry Heart, and was billed as ‘a pop-up warehouse gig of Australian music and

performance art’.19

This mixed genre combination and non-traditional space are exactly

the kind of performance context I am seeking to be involved in, both as a composer and

as a performer. The feedback from Dunstan was that the piece was well received but

that a microphone would have helped audibility of the text, which chimes with

observations made by Corey Dargel about clarity of presentation being achieved by the

artsong writers with whom he is connected who are moving out of traditional concert

contexts and into venues more usually associated with the singer-songwriter genre.20

As noted in chapter 4, the stand-alone ukulele song Park Slope, Brooklyn, whose lyrics

recount the story of my visit to the Lesbian Herstory Archives in Park Slope, Brooklyn,

has not yet been publicly performed. A lesbian composer friend who has heard the song

and loves the way it speaks to her own experience has openly wondered how many

Valium I might need to take to brace myself for such a performance, especially in a

more traditional art music context. Whilst keeping me smiling, this is a reminder of

limitations to visibility – real-world accommodations may be necessary for acceptance

in some art music contexts. I note that Beglarian herself is often the main performer of

her works that are more specifically about lesbian life, and I am happy for this to be the

equation in my own situation, allowing me to seek out contexts that I think will be

favourable. Hares and Hyenas, a queer bookshop in Fitzroy, Melbourne, is a possible

location for a performance of this song and other recent songs with content drawn from

lesbian life.

This thesis begins with a reshaping of musicologist Suzanne Cusick’s question to

herself about what relationship, if any, she could suppose to exist between her being a

lesbian and her being a musician. Through the process of composition and performance

of works in this folio, a process of practice-led research, the bringing of content from

the fabric of lesbian life into my creative work is a vital part of the externally facing

artistic practice that I have come to value as I have researched and lived with the

compositional processes of Pauline Oliveros, and especially, of Eve Beglarian. It is a

19

The Australian Music Centre’s listing at https://www.australianmusiccentre.com.au/event/something-will-

happen and the Facebook event page at https://www.facebook.com/events/429909614201354/ (both accessed

December 2018) are my sources of information about the event, which took place on 2/11/2018. 20 Dargel, ‘More Song, Less (Art)ifice’.

174

musical parallel to the ‘coming out’ process, an ongoing process that situates

lesbian/gay lives as externally facing and not inward/closeted in relation to wider

society/life. It is a strand among many, held within an identity that is stable but also

fluid, not static, open to ongoing becoming. There is no question that working with this

lens and focus has generated new ways of working for me. I was able to generate a

musical structure based on ideas from Rycenga, as well as Deleuze, in Five Journey

into Smooth Space Together, gaining much satisfaction through embedding these ideas

in my work in this way, and I echo Rycenga’s words of summary: ‘Overall, I have

been transformed by the self-consciousness with which I examine my compositional

craft.21

I observe that the mechanics of working in less hierarchical and more collective

ways that form part of Jennifer Rycenga’s lesbian compositional process have potential

difficulties in application in traditional art music contexts, recalling the absence of any

substantial opportunity to interact with the performers in the SYO context. I look

forward to opportunities to work in this way in more Downtown-style contexts in the

future.

Returning to the original core strand of inspiration from Rycenga, her assertion that

‘being a lesbian makes a difference, transforms the thought/action process that is

composition’, I assert on the basis of my creative practice/research that it does indeed –

that working in this way and with this consciousness has brought a wholeness to my

musical work that helps to locate it firmly in the world, aligning it with the Deleuzian

idea of ‘immanence’, meaning ‘remaining within life rather than transcending or going

outside of life’. I will continue seeking to grow and become more refined as a

composer, but remaining outward-focused, aiming to benefit others through my work,

including continuing to explore ways to involve non-specialist participants in some

works, following the models offered by Oliveros and Beglarian. I hope that the research

and practice embodied in this project will be a resource for others, seeking ways to

bring their whole lives into their music.22

As work in progress, my work with pre-

compositional techniques including the listening meditation from Oliveros provides

tangible outcomes that may be of benefit to others seeking to work with elements

21 Rycenga, ‘Lesbian Compositional Process’, 291. 22

See chapter 4, n. 40 for Beglarian’s statement about being happy to have participated in the Lesbian American

Composers CD knowing that her visibility had helped a young lesbian composer. I would be happy if my work

could help even one person on this level, but beyond that, offer a model, alongside the work of Beglarian, in

which the fabric of lesbian life is a visible strand in a composing life.

175

including the visual and the natural sound world in composition. Above all, my work

will maintain a core orientation toward observing life and reflecting it in music, in a

way that others can connect with. These words of Eve Beglarian, which also resonate

with the spirit of Oliveros’s Deep ListeningTM

practice, sum it up:

The way I see it, it’s the quality of the passion that’s important, and that keeps

me going. It’s not the number of people who are getting off on what I’m doing

that matters to me; it’s the quality of attentiveness that gives it value.23

23 Raines, Composition in the Digital World, 262.

176

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stacy (accessed 23/9/2014).

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Vol. 77, No. 3 (Autumn 1993): 385–396. http://www.jstor.org/stable/742386.

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https://www.sfsu.edu/~newlit/narrativity/issue_one/tea.html (accessed May 2018 and

July 2002).

Teare, Brian. ‘Everything Moves Close: New Poems by Eileen Myles.’ LA Review of Books,

August 24th

, 2012. https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/everything-moves-close-new-

poems-by-eileen-myles/#! (accessed May 2018).

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(Heart Sutra).’ http://torontozen.org/chants_sutras.html#PP (accessed October 2019).

Uhlein, Gabriele. Meditations with Hildegard of Bingen. Santa Fe, NM: Bear and Co./Inner

Traditions, 1983.

University of Western Sydney. Noise and Silence: Sydney Youth Orchestras Composition

Mentoring Project. UWS/SYO, September 2015.

Walker, Diane. Contemplative Photography.

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2019).

Wheeler, Brad. ‘Singer-songwriter Tony Dekker tries to get back to nature with new album.’

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, 2018.

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to-get-back-to-nature-with-new-album/article16393566/ (accessed March 2018).

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February 2019).

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2019).

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2019).

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February 2019).

Wilbourne, Emily. ‘On a Lesbian Relationship with Musicology: Suzanne G. Cusick, Sound

Effects.’ Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture Vol. 19 (2015): 3–14.

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Traditions, 1982.

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Publishing, Inc., 2011.

Zorn, John, ed. Arcana VI: Musicians on Music. New York: Hips Road, 2012.

193

Appendix A – Table 1, Five Journey into Smooth Space Together –

summary

Bar nos. Musical events/features Conceptual narrative

1-27

A (1)

solo statements (dovetailed)

from horn, oboe, bassoon

and flute.

‘Individualistic’, uncollaborative statements by

the musical personae. The horn is the imagined

voice of Deleuze, a ‘clarion call’ saying ‘become-

other, in relation – here is your invitation!’

27-29

B (30)

‘punctuating’ chords with

rests between

Ma, created by rests, as space to absorb the

preceding material and an aid to the listener to be

aware of the space in which the personae are

communicating.

30-38 Pairs of voices in

counterpoint – flute/oboe

Individual lines begin to explore what they can do

together, ‘becoming what they might be in this

space.’ Lines are more ‘co-operative’ and less

wide-ranging.

38-44 Contrasting group texture For musical interest/balance – ‘staggered entries’

creating a mix of group and individual sound

45-53 Pairs of voices in

counterpoint –

clarinet/bassoon

This functions as the clarinet’s ‘individualistic’

statement (ends with a ‘punctuating chord’)

(clarinet accompanied as five solo

unaccompanied statements felt compositionally

weak – see n. 90, ch. 2).

51-67 Various textures, with

punctuating chords

anchoring the texture,

maintaining momentum

Voices ‘becoming in the listening presence of the

others’ (JKSB), ‘neither autonomous nor

dissolved’ (Hoagland/Rycenga) – the horn is back

in the texture, the presence of Deleuze in the

group process. Parts supporting other parts to take

the lead in the texture (e.g. oboe at 57-62) – ‘in

the listening presence’, ‘becoming what we might

be in this space’.

68-79 Fugal section referencing Voices functioning in a more ‘interrelated texture,

194

C (68) the first part of the opening

horn statement, across all

instruments at 72-79

but not yet completely at the ‘neither autonomous

nor dissolved’ (Hoagland/Rycenga) stage –

moving in that direction through using the same

musical material, but ‘individualistic’ character of

opening statements – absorbing something from

Deleuze as they proceed on this journey.

75-83 Hocket-inspired texture -

connection/resonance with

work of Eve Beglarian

described below (following

table 1).

A different form of interrelatedness – material

more melodically limited, with independence

maintained through rhythm/articulation. Moving

out of direct quotation (of voice of Deleuze),

more ‘assimilated’.

84-88 Full-textured punctuating

chords

The section ends with another ‘bringing together’

via the full textured, punctuating/space creating

chords, allowing the atonal/contrapuntal section

to be set in relief and absorbed by the listener.

89-92

D (89)

New five-part texture Voices still not completely interdependent –

flute/bassoon (outer voices) interdependent, with

the others taking an accompanying role.

93-98 Unisons and octaves, hocket

and rhythmically aligned

textures

A sense of continuing exploration.

100-103 Homophonic section Voices coming together rhythmically, with a

movement into longer notes. Rests/spaces

between the note groups help drive this and draw

attention to it as a climax/declamatory point of

arrival, underpinned by the pause (bar 104).

105 Whole bar of silence/space –

marks the end of the first

part of the piece – ma is

being employed structurally.

This bar of silence strategically creates the space

into which, at bar 106-110, the five voices enter –

an important point of arrival.

106-110

E (106)

Five-voice interdependent,

atonal contrapuntal texture

Conveying the ‘neither autonomous nor

dissolved’ state of ‘radical relationality’ that has

been the goal.

195

111-121 This continues … … with interlocutions/interpositions from the

horn/‘Deleuze’. Symbolically/metaphorically the

four other voices are touching base again with

that which has enabled them to reach this place.

122-129

F (122)

Moving back into less

rhythmically interdependent

material

The voices leave the ‘pinnacle’ reached and move

back into less rhythmically independent material.

Being ‘neither autonomous nor dissolved’

requires effort to attain and sustain. Being in this

fragile interdependent relationship is hard work –

each voice/being/body has to sustain both its own

enunciation and its commitment to relationality

with the others, to take a part in the texture in

which it is self-standing but not narcissistic.

130-139 Fuller texture featuring

sustained activity/energy. A

melody is passed from

instrument to instrument,

clarinet first, balancing the

fact that it entered last in the

‘individualistic’ statements

earlier. A counter melody

also emerges.

A different kind of ‘neither autonomous nor

dissolved’ texture/realisation – picking up on

Rycenga’s ‘interacting in situations’ – the voices

are moving easily between one role and another,

and between foreground and background,

working inter-relationally.

140-158

G (140)

A more homophonic texture

returns

Celebration and attainment of a point of rest and

arrival – the voices have ‘become other in

relation’ and journeyed into smooth space

together.

147-158 A last iteration in the more

autonomous

interdependent/atonal

texture, and final section.

Earlier ideas are picked up

and help bring the piece to a

The language is now more tonal, and the accents

more muted, helping to depict/suggest the arrival

into the smooth space, the space in which

transformation and becoming, with an increase in

capacities/affects, can take place.

196

satisfying close musically,

particularly through the

return of the punctuating,

space-creating chords.

197

Appendix B – Table 2, Stone – selected examples: word painting

Bar nos. Musical features/word painting Stone text section

23-36

Musical and technical effects

including trombone slides, rit.,

mutes and overtone singing to

work along with the imagery in

the poem. At bar 35 the repeated

notes in the two brass instruments

precede the ‘sparks fly out’ image

at 37-38, suggesting the irregular

movement of the two stones being

rubbed together

… cow steps on it full weight,

Even though a child throws it in a river,

The stone sinks, slow, unperturbed,

To the river bottom

Where the fishes come to knock on it

And listen

37-38 Bass clarinet multiphonics – effect

chosen by composer with

execution performer-led (in

keeping with Rycenga’s

philosophy of valuing the

subjectivity of the performers).

I have seen sparks fly out

When two stones are rubbed,

So perhaps it is …

39-52 Decrescendo to p, leggieramente

in brass/bass clarinet, overtone

singing in voice around the image

of moonlight coming from a

distance, and flutter tonguing with

‘just enough light to make out the

strange writings’. Instruments

moving back into repeated note

figures with changing dynamics

for a post-text

reflection/commentary, perhaps

suggesting exploration of the

‘inner walls’ in the text …

… not dark inside after all;

Perhaps there is a moon shining

From somewhere, as though behind a hill –

Just enough light to make out

The strange writings, the start-charts

On the inner walls.

198

57-60 … ending with a return of the

baritone voice, wordless (‘mm’)

Overtone singing in voice returns to

conclude the piece.

199

Appendix C – Table 3, Ground Thunder Returns summary

Bar nos. Specific musical features Themes from Hexagram 24, Fu/Return1

1-14 A

Progression through fff – p,

heavy accentuation – more

delicate feel ending pizz.

(double bass)

‘splitting apart’/decay (a life cycle coming

to an end)

15-36 B Piano sets up new gentle

mood, double bass joining it

with solo at b. 20

rest/nurture (the yin part of the life cycle,

inward), with light (related to the Winter

Solstice) entering at b. 20

37-48 C Momentum gathers through

light but energetic 5/8,

becoming louder

‘movement without force’ – dance-like,

birth of the new yang energy (i.e. the

outward energy in life cycle), energised by

the light received, with a new sense of Self

emerging, and becoming more assertive in

the next section, where …

49-63 D Folk dance-style section a more earthed version of the dance moves

in, stable, grounded, reflecting the image of

‘thunder in the middle of the earth’,

‘ground thunder’. The style here is

intended to evoke a feel of Bartók’s

Romanian dances (piano music that I

played and enjoyed in earlier years, with a

sense of return to something that was good

at an earlier time – ‘return to happier

conditions’)

64-69 E Transitional section out of

the dance feel leading to F

‘reversing the path’, exploring the duo

texture with more independent voices than

in the D section

70-77 F Material from B recast with

a more merged/absorbed

1 See chapter 3, n. 137, for source details about the descriptive phrases used here.

200

feel (the light is within

now), major instead of

minor

‘a fresh start’

78-90 G Contrapuntal section ‘friends come, without blame/error/harm’ –

trying to convey a sense of successful

interdependent interaction,2 and, in the

more wide-ranging style employed, ‘it

benefits one to have somewhere to go’ – a

sense of being able to explore new territory

from the newly recharged state

91-101 H Return of A material. The

original idea remains very

recognisable but with some

reinforcement in the parts,

presented first transposed,

then in the original key area.

‘turning around and returning to its way’,

‘returning back on the path’, ‘success’.

2 See chapter 2, n. 93. Interdependent interaction is significant to me through being valued as a higher goal in

the music therapy work I have done for 20+ years.

201

Appendix D – Table 4, Nomadic Journeys – poems

Poem1 Date written/©/form

1: The Fallen Angel

10/6/13

© Christina Green 2013

naga-uta – 5,7, … 7,7 syllables

2: On the Tram

31/5/13, extended 9/15

© Christina Green 2015

hay(na)ku – 1,2,3 words; from the

Philippines … linked hay(na)kus

1 Poem titles and details of their forms are given in this table; please visit https://www.christinagreen.net for

updates on availability of the score and studio recording.

202

3: Irene Warehouse

12/15

© Christina Green 2015

quatrain – 6 stanzas, with irregular

5th

stanza forming bridge section of

song form

203

4: Pilgrimage

6/10/15

© Christina Green 2015

naga-uta – 5,7, … 7,7 syllables

5: 40 Part Motet

12/13

© Christina Green 2013

naga-uta – 5,7, … 7,7 syllables

6: MoMAnt

7/14

© Christina Green 2014

204

haiku – 5,7,5 syllables

7: Between Worlds

5/12/13, extended 28/4/16

© Christina Green 2015

naga-uta – 5,7, … 7,7 syllables

8: Officeworks

7/12/12

© Christina Green 2012

triolet - French form of 8 lines, two

rhymes with rhyme scheme

ABaAabAB – upper case - identical

line, lower case - rhymed line, all

lines in iambic tetrameter, first,

fourth and seventh lines + second

and final lines identical; the initial

and final couplets also identical

9: Street Whale

12/14

© Christina Green 2014

naga-uta – 5,7, … 7,7 syllables

205

10: Backpack

22/2/13

© Christina Green 2013

quatrain, 2 stanzas

206

Appendix E – Table 5, Park Slope, Brooklyn – lyrics1/musical sections

A

A

B

B1

A

A (with ending variant)

1 Please visit https://www.christinagreen.net re availability of score/recording/poem of this work. Park Slope,

Brooklyn – poem © Christina Green 2016.

207

Appendix F – Table 6, Land, Sea, Sky – summary

The ► symbol (also used in the score) signifies a transition section, ‘land becoming sea’, etc.

Bar nos. Pelican Point

photo – reading of

horizontal

sections (from

bottom to top)

Musical events/features Image-related narrative

1-7

A (1)

land

A – land (the

band of sand at

the bottom of the

photo)

Establishing Am7 tonal centre Setting up a multi-layered

texture in the music to

reflect the textured quality

of the sand.

8-16 (cont.) Main melody unfolds in the

violas, moving up an octave to

begin again at bar 15

The texture established

underpins the melodic

statement.

17-24

B (17)

land ►

sea

B – land

becoming sea – a

‘merging’ quality,

picking up on the

blurriness of the

line between the

two areas on the

left side of the

photo

Incomplete restatement of

melody at higher 8ve (bars 17-

18), with a shift towards a

more homophonic texture (19-

20), moving from Am7

through an Eb area with

unisons and 8ves, ending in bar

24 with triplet groups in first

violins for a dovetailing effect

into the next section.

The textural change reflects

the quality of becoming

smoother and less textured

seen in the band of sand

closest to the water’s edge.

25-32

C (25)

sea

C – sea – the first

band of water

A layered texture combining

the triplet idea with elements in

the straight quaver of the 7/8

time signature. An F#m tonal

centre is established. Two

melodic ideas unfold in

counterpoint in the violas and

The 7/8, chosen for its

‘almost-regular-with-an-

unexpected-kick’ effect,

along with the two

simultaneously unfolding

contrasting melodic ideas

(arco/pizz.) + the

208

cellos. accompanying layers work

together to create the effect

of my concept of the sea as

having surface and below-

surface elements &

complex movement.

33-40

sea/land

sea/land – water

with land

elements pushing

through

The sea/land transition is

initiated with an octave shift

upward and a doubling of the

cello melody in the second

violins. The dashed barlines at

bars 32/33 and 40/41 are used

to show the borders between

the subsections of C.

The higher pitch and the

thickening of the pizzicato

melody reflect the pushing

up of land/land features

from the water (esp. on left

side of photo in this band).

41-44

sea

(calm)

sea (calm) – the

calmer +

smoother sea

surface beyond

the plants

Transition at bar 41 to sea

(calm): cessation of triplets, a

shift from 7/8 to regular 4/4

and pizzicato to arco (cellos

and basses). Moves from the

C# area (V of F#m) into an

Em7 chord, and then an EbM7

chord. An oscillation between

the EbM7 and a Bb7 chord

(bars 43-44) creates a

dovetailed merge into D (land,

dense/distant). New rhythmic

material emerges out of the

two-quaver figure (bar 44).

Movement and textural

complexity give way to a

gentle and more

harmonically static feel, to

reflect the calmer/smoother

sea surface beyond the

plants in the photo.

45-62

D (45)

► land

(dense/

distant)

D – land

(dense/distant) – a

dense land band

but more distant

A tonal centre of B is reached

at bar 48, accompanied by an

arrival at a time signature of

3/4. The B tonal centre

underpins the D section (often

The harmonic language,

changing over the pedal

note (generating some

dissonances) has been

chosen to effect a

209

as a ‘pedal’ note with other

chords moving over it).

yearning/reaching toward a

goal-point in the distance

(the land).

63-75

E (63)

sky

(becomi

ng

cloudy)

E – sky

(becoming

cloudy) – the first

sliver of sky is

clear, but cloud

increases going

up, until the very

top area, where

more sky can be

seen.

Tonal centre of B continues,

with new rhythmic material

extending out of the quaver

figures in bar 62 – building

momentum, energy & weight

through new articulations, and

the accelerando (from bar 63).

New time signature of 5/8 at

bar 66. A sense of forward

movement, propelling toward

the ‘sky becoming land’

transition. A tonal centre of F

is reached via a stepping up

progression in the upper parts

(bars 63-65) with the B

retained as a colour in the

melodic line that now emerges

in the bass part.

The heaviness/weight in

the sky with its cloud cover

is reflected in the repeated

notes with various

accent/articulation patterns.

A thinning and lightening

of the texture from bar 70

(fewer notes in the upper

parts) reflects the thinning

of the cloud in the very top

area of the photo, where

more sky can be seen.

76-91

sky ►

land

N/A (the

transition from

sky to land is a

narrative decision

that goes beyond

the two-

dimensional

photo).

A new texture builds with the

five-quaver rhythmic figure

moving up through the parts

(bars76-80, tonal centre Eb). A

new melodic idea dovetails

with this at bar 79 (first

violins), picked up as an

incomplete canonic idea by the

second violins at bar 82. A

cycle of 5ths with chromatic

movement plus a ritardando

from bar 86 sets up the return

This musical section is

based on decisions and

ideas that go beyond the

formally planned outline

based on the visual

material.

210

to the opening material and

Am7 tonal centre at F (A1).

92-105 –

land:

return

F/A1

(92)

F – sky becoming

land – this

transition is

imagined, outside

of the two-

dimensional

photo.

Return of opening material.

Melody (violas) starts earlier

than on first presentation, with

slower tempo than at A. The

additional instruction broadly,

with warmth (for melody) is

intended to convey the joyful

return to land, the middle

realm/‘this world’ of which we

are conscious.

There is also a new

voicing/arrangement of the

parts (the long notes now

appearing in the first violins)

At bar 105 a ritardando and

tremolo creates a tension-

gathering effect that will

launch the piece into its final

iteration.1

Creates a sense of arrival

following a journey that

has involved

transformation along the

way.

The different

voicing/arrangement

reflects what in Zen could

be described as a ‘not one,

not two’ effect similar to

the understanding of the

unfolding of the self over

time as both the same and

not the same as earlier

versions (See n.1 below).

106-115

trans

-formed

N/A A sudden shift to a D tonal

centre, with the opening

accompanying texture minus

This narrative section

imagined beyond the limits

of the photo (see n. 1).

1 This is a good example of a musical idea/device that goes beyond the visual inspiration and the plan based

around that, employed to create a desirable musical shape and outcome. The ‘transformed’ section has been

imagined beyond the limits of the photo, referencing my own experiences of returning to ordinary reality

enriched by journeys involving spiritual practice including two seven day sesshins (intensive Zen meditation

retreats) in Canada in 2005 and 2006.

211

the viola theme. A gradual

decrescendo and an octave

shift downward at bar 110 turn

the work towards its ppp

ending at bar 115.

There is a sense of rest

from the work of

transformation in this final

section, perhaps reflecting

the final instruction given

in Zen sesshins – ‘rest’.

212

Appendix G – Manuscript Drafts

The manuscript drafts of the pieces comprising the Suite from Sighting Silence,

Sounding Image (2012-2013) are included here.1

From chapter 3

I Open Field (62)

II (Give) Voice (66)

III Gate (70)

IV Walking (73)

V Nothing More Than This (77)

VI Kanzeon! (79)

1 Not included in ResearchDirect version. Please visit https://www.christinagreen.net for updates on availability

of scores – inclusion of the pencil drafts in the published score of this work is planned.

213

Open Field pencil draft page 1, showing chords (numbers in boxes above staff) and the

notes from the embedded bird call (letters in boxes below staff).

214

Open Field pencil draft page 2

215

Open Field pencil draft page 3

216

(Give) Voice pencil draft page 1

217

(Give) Voice pencil draft page 2

218

(Give) Voice pencil draft page 3

219

Gate pencil draft page 1

220

Gate pencil draft page 2

221

Gate pencil draft page 3

222

Gate pencil draft page 4

223

Gate pencil draft page 5

224

Gate pencil draft page 6

225

Walking pencil draft page 1

226

Walking pencil draft page 2

227

Walking pencil draft page 3

228

Walking pencil draft page 4

229

Walking pencil draft page 5

230

Nothing More Than This pencil draft page 1

231

Nothing More Than This pencil draft page 2

232

Nothing More Than This pencil draft page 3

233

Kanzeon! pencil draft page 1

234

Kanzeon! pencil draft page 2

235

Kanzeon! pencil draft page 3

236

Appendix H – List of Performances by Christina Green, 2012-2019, and of

performances of works by Christina Green by others, 2012-2019

Summary

This list includes most of the performances I have been part of during the period of my DCA

candidature. They have taken place in many different spaces and contexts, including

folk/acoustic, art music, visual art/gallery and LGBTQIA spaces. The composition of the

works for the project was completed in 2017, but further developments have continued

through my performance practice through 2018 and into 2019. Performing has been an

ongoing practice for me since 1982, across choral music, theatre, folk/acoustic and art music

contexts. Throughout the list, performances of significance for the folio works and themes

(including performances connected with lesbian life, LGBTQIA community life, etc.) are in

bold, and performances that do not include any of my own works are marked with the

symbol*.

2012

26-29/1 – Newstead Live festival, Newstead, VIC, with the Alive and Gigging Roadshow

group (Tracey Roberts, keyboard/vocs, Michelle Chandler (guitar.vocs), Stax

(didjeridoo/multi-instruments), Zoltan Almady (drums), Stuart Semmens (bass), Sue Carr

Amico (accordion)

*5/2 – Pride March with Pride Fiddlers group (members of Melbourne Scottish Fiddle

Club and others, coordinated by Jean McConnachie), St Kilda, Melbourne, part of

Midsumma LGBTQIA carnival

9/2 – 9/2, 10/5, 14/6, 12/7, 13/12 – Acoustic Brew (part of band – members of Alive and

Gigging group – supporting people playing open mic spots), Burrinja Café/Venue,

Dandenong Ranges Community Cultural Centre, Upwey, VIC

25/3 – The Basin Festival, The Basin, VIC, acoustic/folk set

4/3 – Support artist (acoustic/folk set) for poetry book launch by poet E. A. (Anne) Gleeson,

Ballarat, VIC

14/4 – Set at 50th

birthday of Tracey Roberts, keyboard/vocalist collaborator, The Patch, VIC

20/4 – Alive and Gigging + Maria Forde at the Albert Park Yacht Club, Albert Park, VIC –

in-the-round style acoustic/folk concert

2/5 – Preview of Shooting Star Woman (2008, for women’s chorus and organ, text by Maria

Sabina, music by Christina Green) by the women of OBesa Cantavit and the Griswold

Community Chorus, United Church of Stonington, CT, USA, directed by Dara Blackstone

237

18/5 – Premiere of Shooting Star Woman (details as at 2/5) by the women of the Griswold

Community Chorus, St Mary’s Jewett City/Griswold, CT, USA

17/6 – Performance of Shooting Star Woman (details as at 2/5) by the women of OBesa

Cantavit at Horizons, United Church of Stonington, CT, USA, directed by Dara Blackstone

23/6 – Guest appearance at Victorian Recorder Guild Soireé, High Street Road Uniting

Church, Mt Waverley, VIC

19/8 – ReGroup Women Composers’ Concert at Montrose Town Centre, Montrose,

VIC – with Jacqui Rutten (composer/performer), Holly Caldwell and Dindy Vaughan

(composers) and pianist Cass Richards – performing Just Swim (piano, 2010) and

Cosmos (2010, video by Josie Telfer/pre-recorded piano). This group and context could

be described as ‘Downtown’ in aesthetic/practice.

1/11 – Live performance of three acoustic/folk songs at CAPOW! (Composers and

Performers Out West), University of Western Sydney (WSU), Kingswood Campus, NSW,

with Adrian Barr, Eleanor McPhee, Cathy Aggett, Diana Blom, Richard Salmon, Ayse

Shanal, Naomi Cooper, John Encarnacao, Mark Fleming, Emlyn, Alan and Sarah Powell,

Peter Jovanov and Daniel Portelli (variously involved as composers and performers)

21/11 – Preview (read-through/mini-launch) performance of pieces I, II, III and V of the

Suite from Sighting Silence, Sounding Image in the old Homestead at Bundanon, with

Flossie Peitsch and other residents and staff/CEO.

25/11 – Guest artist (acoustic/folk set) at Melbourne Recorder Orchestra Annual Concert,

conductor Rachel Snedden, at Armadale Uniting Church, Armadale, VIC

2013

14/2, 14/3, 11/4, 9/5, 8/8, 12/9, 10/10, 12/12 – Acoustic Brew (part of band – members of

Alive and Gigging group – supporting people playing open mic spots), Burrinja Café/Venue,

Dandenong Ranges Community Cultural Centre, Upwey, VIC

24/3 – The Basin Festival, The Basin, VIC, acoustic/folk set

13/4 – PAVE (Performing and Visual Arts in Emerald) festival, Emerald, Dandenong

Ranges, VIC, acoustic/folk set at the Village Bakery

20/4 – PAVE festival, acoustic/folk set at Elevation

28/4 – The Dancing Dog bar/venue, Footscray, VIC, short acoustic/folk set

22/6 – St Margaret’s Anglican Church, Eltham, VIC, music at the labyrinth and performance

following labyrinth walk

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11/7 – Victorian Artists’ Society, East Melbourne, VIC, acoustic song performance with

Jenny Stengards, jazz/choral music singer/collaborator

23/6 – A Pleasant Sunday Afternoon of Music Making – Victorian Recorder Guild concert,

Bentleigh Uniting Church, Bentleigh, VIC, short acoustic/folk set

29/7 – Radio appearance including live performance on 3WBC, community FM station, Box

Hill, VIC

20/10 – Sacred, Classical and Celtic concert (organiser Jacqui Rutten of Sacred Stage),

acoustic/folk set (songs/instrumental) with Stax, multi-instrumentalist collaborator

3/10 – Live at Baker Street – feature concert/gig with accompaniment from Tracey Roberts

(keyboard/vocals) in the 33 and 1/3rd

Amphitheatre

3/11 – Short set for the women of OBesa Cantavit choir, Stonington, CT, USA, with

background talk about Three Pieces for Women’s Voices, with Two Cellos, being

performed by them with conductor Dr Dara Blackstone

17/11 – Folk Victoria, feature artist – acoustic/folk set at the Dancing Dog, Footscray

17/11 – Adam Starr’s Jazz Composition Forum – the ensemble (Adam Starr, guitar, Jordan

Murray, trombone, Anthony Schulz, Jonathan Zion, bass and Danny Fischer, drums)

performed my work Three Mantras (djembe, alto saxophone, guitar and optional alto voice,

2008). Although not of specific importance for the folio, this performance and the

subsequent publication of the work by Wirripang – Home of Australian Composers were

pivotal in my completion of the requirements for achieving status as a represented artist

(composer, associate level) with the Australian Music Centre in January 2015.

My regular performances (Sundays when in session) an alto in the choir of St John’s

Anglican Church, Toorak, beginning mid-2013 and continuing through 2018 and into 2019,

are not listed (occasional performances in which I performed my own music are listed in the

years following).

2014

12/1 – Improvisations as Nature event at Sacred Stage, Belgrave (organised/hosted by

composer/performer Jacqui Rutten) – outdoor improvised performance of In

Consideration of the Earth, text score by Pauline Oliveros, and a ukulele improvisation

31/1 – Rent Party gig at Hares and Hyenas LGBTQIA community bookshop and

performance space, Fitzroy, VIC – acoustic/folk set with Michelle Chandler, singer-

songwriter collaborator, and Auslan sign language interpreter Lynne Gordon

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13/2, 13/3, 10/4, 8/5, 10/7, 11/9, 13/11 – Acoustic Brew (part of band – members of Alive

and Gigging group – supporting people playing open mic spots), Burrinja Café/Venue,

Dandenong Ranges Community Cultural Centre, Upwey, VIC

16/3 – The Basin Festival, The Basin, VIC, acoustic/folk set with collaborator Tracey

Roberts, singer-songwriter

23/3 – Music for St Patrick’s Day at The Celtic Club, North Melbourne, with Jacqui Rutten

(composing singer) and Mick Ryan (singer-songwriter)

4/4 – OBesa Women Celebrate 10 Women Composers of the 21st Century - United Church

of Stonington, CT, USA – Three Pieces for Women’s Voices, with Two Cellos performed

by the women of OBesa Cantavit, director Dr Dara Blackstone

12/4 – PAVE (Performing and Visual Arts in Emerald) festival, Emerald, Dandenong

Ranges, VIC, acoustic/folk set at Zest Café

6/6 – Songs of Spring – St Mary’s Jewett City/Griswold, CT, USA – The Library (song for

voice/guitar by Christina Green, songwriter, arranged by the composer for SATB/piano)

performed by the Griswold Players Community Chorus, director Dr Dara Blackstone

11/6 – United Church of Stonington, CT, USA – Three Pieces for Women’sVoices, with

Two Cellos performed by the women of OBesa Cantavit, director Dr Dara Blackstone –

celebrating 10 Women Composers of the 21st Century (with a brief talk by the

composer)

13/4 – PAVE festival, acoustic/folk set outside the General Food Store

13/6 – House concert for a group of women drummers organised by professional drumming

circle facilitator Julie Corey, Lake Sunapee NH, USA

11/7 – Australasian Computer Music Conference, Federation Hall, Victorian College of the

Arts, Melbourne – 60x60 – Diamond Valley from Three Journeys (recording by Christina

Green, piano) included in collage of recorded works) in Program 2 of two programs

organised by Melbourne experimental musicians Warren Burt and Susan Frykberg (other

works included were pieces by women composer/collaborators Dindy Vaughan, Judy Pile

and Holly Caldwell)

15/7 – Murmur Bar, Warburton Lane, City Centre, Melbourne, VIC – Wax Lyrical

(Australian Songwriters’ Association) singer-songwriter night, folk/acoustic set in program

including Vanessa Craven, Leo Kahans, Dean Lombard and Danny Spooner

27/7 – Solo folk/acoustic gig at the Narre Warren Library, Narre Warren, VIC, Music

Sundays series

17/9 – Whole Lotta Love bar/venue, East Brunswick, VIC – short acoustic/folk set

28/9 – Whole Lotta Love bar/venue – feature artist acoustic/folk set

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4/10 – Solo house concert, Yarragon South, Gippsland, VIC, through connections with

members of an older lesbian network/community (Melbourne/Gippsland)

26/10 – Victorian Recorder Guild Soireé at St Philips’s Anglican Church, Mt Waverley, VIC,

short acoustic/folk set

26/10 Whole Lotta Love, bar/venue – acoustic/folk set

30/10 – CAPOW! (Composers and Performers Out West), University of Western

Sydney (WSU), Kingswood Campus, NSW, showing of PowerPoint presentation of Line

of Flight (solo ukulele, 2012, recording by Christina Green, tenor ukulele) amongst

works by Ian Stevenson, Michael Coombes, Paul Smith and Sharon Williams

30/11 – Whole Lotta Love bar/venue – feature act, acoustic/folk set

2015

22/1 – Forest Edge Winery, Gembrook, VIC – short acoustic/folk set

2/4 – Forest Edge Winery, Gembrook, VIC – short acoustic/folk set

6/4 – Wild Thyme Café, Warburton, VIC – two-set feature show (acoustic/folk) with Tracey

Roberts, singer-songwriter/keyboard/vocals

25/4 – Farouk’s Olive bar/venue, Thornbury, VIC – two-set feature show, acoustic/folk

19/5 – Murmur Bar, Warburton Lane, City Centre, Melbourne, VIC – Wax Lyrical

(Australian Songwriters’ Association) singer-songwriter night, folk/acoustic set in program

including David Cox, Mitch Power and Bree Schembri

28/5 – Forest Edge Winery, Gembrook, VIC – short acoustic/folk set

31/5 – Forest Edge Winery, Gembrook, Vic – two-set show (acoustic/folk) with Tracey

Roberts, singer-songwriter/keyboard/vocals

3/6 – Western Sydney University, NSW – two-song acoustic/folk performance at award

presentation night, Bankstown Campus (also receiving student composition award for

the academic year 2014 the Suite from Sighting Silence, Sounding Image on this

occasion)

19/7 – Sooki Lounge, Belgrave – acoustic/folk set

12/8 – The Ivy, Olinda, VIC – Leggacy Sessions (ongoing project supporting emerging artists

and commemorating Dandenong Ranges singer-songwriter Alex Legg) – acoustic/folk set

21/8 – St John’s Anglican Church, Toorak, VIC – GLOW Winter Arts Festival in the City of

Stonnington (inner south-east Melbourne) – as member of St John’s choir, with associates –

short acoustic/folk set

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10/9 – The Playhouse, Western Sydney University, Kingswood Campus – Noise and

Silence Sydney Youth Orchestras composition mentoring project – performance of Five

Journey into Smooth Space Together for wind quintet – Clara Pitt, flute, Eve Osborn,

oboe, Jessica Budge, clarinet, Maria Smith, horn, and Eve McEwen, bassoon, conducted

by James Pensini

13/9 – Sooki Lounge, Belgrave, VIC – acoustic/folk set

20/9 – Kennon Memorial Uniting Church, Sassafras, VIC – with ReGroup women

composers/composer-performers Holly Caldwell, Johanna Selleck, Lisa Dean/Margaret

Chlebnikowski, Dindy Vaughan, Jacqui Rutten, with performers Larissa Aguiar

(violin) and Laaarissssa Cox (piano) – acoustic folk/world music-flavoured

instrumentals in duo with Hayley Anderson, violin - this group and context could be

described as ‘Downtown’ in aesthetic/practice.

7/10 f Generation – Feminism, Art, Progressions, at the George Patton Gallery,

University of Melbourne – contemporary feminist performance event for opening of

exhibition curated by Veronica Caven Aldous and – single song performance (Myth of

the Other, about Lepa Mladjenovic, lesbian activist supporting women experiencing

male violence in the Former Republic of Yugoslavia), with other artists including

gender non-binary classical guitarist Tonié Field (Queering the Classical solo

performance), performance artist Tania Smith (Trashbags queer performance),

Cunt/Tamponary/Art Manifesto spoken word event, Kalinda Vary and Danielle

McCarthy. Cosmos (2010, video by Josie Telfer/pre-recorded piano) was part of the

exhibition.

20/10 – Some Velvet Morning bar/venue, Clifton Hill, VIC – feature/two-set acoustic/folk

show

25/10 – Darebin Songwriters’ Guild Hello Sunday performance afternoon at Northcote Town

Hall, as part of the Darebin Music Feast – short acoustic/folk set

29/10 – Forest Edge Winery, Gembrook, VIC – Spookin’ on the Edge Halloween celebration,

acoustic/folk set

5/11 – The Drunken Poet hotel, West Melbourne, VIC – short acoustic/folk set

20/11, 21/11 – Big West Festival – HOUSE at the Big West Village, cnr Paisley and

French Streets, Footscray, VIC – first performances of No Excuses! suite for women’s

choir, soloists and instrumentalists by Christina Green and Kathleen McGuire (two

songs each) – a community choir project working with women’s stories/experiences of

family violence in Melbourne’s west. Kathleen McGuire (conductor), Christina Green

(performing songwriter/singing leader), choir and instrumentalists. The project was

informed by a feminist outlook and created with a view to empowering the women

involved and raising the profile of the issue of family violence. This and most of the

performances of the work were under the auspices of the School of Hard Knocks, who

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commissioned myself and McGuire to compose (non-SOHK performances are

indicated.

25/11 – No Excuses! performance for health professionals at Sunshine Hospital Atrium,

Sunshine, VIC (details as above)

27/11 – No Excuses! performance at Crown Metropol, Southbank, Melbourne, VIC

(details as above) – a performance to support the funderaiser for the Luke Batty

Foundation, with speech by Rosie Batty, who lost her son to family violence, Australian

of the Year 2015

2/11 – Soul Sistar, Warburton, VIC – two-set acoustic/folk show

2/12 – The Dancing Dog bar/venue, Footscray, VIC – short acoustic/folk set

17/12 – Forest Edge Winery, Gembrook, VIC – short acoustic/folk set

2016

24/1 – Busking at market, LaTrobe University (exploring busking as parallel modality

to street art involving nomadic movement through spaces and contexts

31/1 – St John’s Anglican Church, Toorak, VIC – performance as vocalist/guitarist

(Britten, Vaughan Williams, Green) – with Hayley Anderson, violin

7/2 – Darebin Songwriters’ Guild performance afternoon, Bar 303, Northcote, VIC – short

acoustic/folk set

26/2 – Sydney Conservatorium of Music, Conservatorium Road, Sydney, NSW –

Percussion Theatre recital by percussionist Kaylie Dunstan, including the first

performance of Eileen’s Vision for percussionist and speaker

2/3 – Some Velvet Morning bar/venue, Clifton Hill, VIC – shared show with singer-

songwriter Suzette Herft, including Irene Warehouse from Nomadic Journeys song cycle

5/3 – Farouk’s Olive bar/venue, Thornbury, VIC – solo acoustic/folk performance

including the first performances of The Fallen Angel, On the Tram, Street Whale and

Backpack from Nomadic Journeys song cycle

5/3 – Seventh Day Adventist Church, North Fitzroy, VIC – ‘unplugged’ performance of

one song from No Excuses! with choir members (non-SOHK)

8/3 – Salvation Army Hall, Sunshine, VIC – International Women’s Day performance

of No Excuses! choral suite, with women’s choir, soloists, instrumentalists, Kathleen

McGuire (conductor) and Christina Green (performing songwriter/singing leader)

13/3 – Ulumbarra Theatre, Bendigo, VIC – No Excuses! performance for Rotary

District Conference (details as above)

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*18/3 – Where the Heart Is festival, Edinburgh Gardens, North Fitzroy, VIC – leading

singing with the McAuley singers, small choir from McAuley House, McAuley Community

Services for Women, North Melbourne, VIC

20/3 – No Excuses! live video recording at the Iwaki Auditorium, Southbank, VIC –

ensemble as above, with live interviews for use in television documentary, Cathy Jacobs,

ABC producer

2/4 – Holy Trinity Anglican Church, Fortitude Valley, QLD – Green, Refresh, Renew –

performance of Free! (2008, string orchestra), by Collusion Music Dance Ensemble

members including Benjamin Greaves, Diana Tolmie. Violinist Benjamin Greaves I

discussed and agreed to an alternative interpretation of the work using amplified string

quartet with electric bass played by clarinettist Diana Tolmie instead of traditional

double bass, effectively creating a Downtown-style performance of this piece inspired by

the rescue/escape from the Colombian jungle of politician and activist Ingrid

Betancourt and her colleagues.

3/4 – Darebin Songwriters’ Guild performance afternoon, Bar 303, Northcote, VIC – short

acoustic/folk set

10/4 – Farouk’s Olive, Thornbury, VIC – Hills Songwriters Writers in the Round, with Brian

Baker, Michelle Chandler, Cathy Dobson, Kevin O’Neill, Sue Carr Amico and Meg Smith

14/4 – PAVE festival, Emerald, VIC – acoustic/folk set at The Hive Pop-Up Bar/Arts Space

16/4 – PAVE festival, Emerald, VIC – acoustic/folk set on outdoor stage, Men’s Shed, U3A

building

*17/4 – Astra Choir, Melbourne – 1916/2016 concert, Church of All Nations, Carlton, VIC –

alto in choir, works by Helen Gifford, Alexander Kastalsky and Vlad-Răzvan Baciu, Phoebe

Green, solo viola and John McCaughey, conductor

2/5 – Opera America/the National Opera Center, midtown Manhattan, NYC –

Premiers: Volume 5, Loadbang contemporary quartet – works by David Bird, Michael

Edwarde Edgerton, Paula Matthusen, Gary Philo, Beth Wiemann and Christina Green

– first performance of Stone – Jeffrey Gavett, baritone, Andy Kozar, trumpet in C, Will

Lang, trombone and Carlos Cordeiro, bass clarinet

13/5 – Belonging installation launch at the Centre for Theology and Ministry, Parkville

– visual art works from the Sighting Silence, Sounding Image residency and beyond by

Flossie Peitsch, music by Christina Green – mini concert-style live performance of four

of the pieces (Open Field, (Give) Voice, Nothing More Than This and Kanzeon!, and first

live performance of Line of Flight for solo ukulele, amongst other pieces for ukulele

played live around the art works. The music was also included in a slide show shown

during the evening.

18/5 – The Dancing Dog bar/venue, Footscray, VIC – acoustic/folk set

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29/5 – The Post Office Hotel, Coburg, VIC – acoustic/folk set, shared gig with singer-

songwriter Suzette Herft

5/6 – Brisbane International Singers’ Festival, School of Hard Knocks, Valmai Pidgeon

Performing Arts Centre, Somerville House, Brisbane, QLD – performance of No

Excuses! with women’s choir assembled in Brisbane, Kathleen McGuire/Christina

Green (roles as above), pianist

11/6 – ACMI (Australian Centre for the Moving Image) Bar and Café, Federation Square,

Melbourne, VIC – acoustic/folk set (part of Melbourne International Singers’ Festival,

School of Hard Knocks)

12/6 – Melbourne Recital Centre, Southbank, VIC – No Excuses! (extended version,

three songs each by Green/McGuire - with women’s choir, soloists, instrumentalists,

Kathleen McGuire (conductor) and Christina Green (performing songwriter/singing

leader), Melbourne International Singers’ Festival, School of Hard Knocks

16/6 – Sunshine Hospital, Sunshine, VIC – Western Health Auditorium – No Excuses!

(ensemble/work details as 12/6), for City of Brimbank

16/6 – The Lomond Hotel, East Brunswick, VIC – Writers’ Block #16 (‘Winter Words’) –

acoustic/folk songs on the theme/in the round, with singer-songwriters Justine Walsh, Bill

Jackson, Enda Kenny, Aminah Hughes and Frank Jones

3/7 – Centre for Theology and Ministry, Parkville, VIC – acoustic/folk set including

Irene Warehouse from Nomadic Journeys

5/7 – Open Studio bar/venue, Northcote, VIC – acoustic/folk set including Irene

Warehouse from Nomadic Journeys

22/7 – The Skylark Room, Burrinja, Upwey, VIC – guest artist for the Tracey Roberts Trio –

acoustic/folk set including Irene Warehouse from Nomadic Journeys

24/7 – Wesley Anne bar/venue, Northcote, VIC – Melbourne Composers’ League Elbow

Room concert, solo feature performance of The Fallen Angel, On the Tram, Irene

Warehouse, Officeworks, Street Whale and Backpack from Nomadic Journeys, with

works by Howard Dillon, Colin McKellar, Gary McKie, Andrian Pertout, Paul

Moulatlet, Peter Tahourdin, Felix Werder, Jacqui Rutten and Caerwen Martin also

featured

7/8 – Darebin Songwriters’ Guild performance afternoon, Bar 303, Northcote, VIC – short

acoustic/folk set

17/8 – Some Velvet Morning bar/venue, Clifton Hill, VIC – feature acoustic/folk show

with singer-songwriter Cathy Dobson, including On the Tram, Irene Warehouse,

Officeworks and Backpack from Nomadic Journeys

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1/9 – The Playhouse, Western Sydney University, Kingswood Campus, NSW – Western

Prospects concert presented by the Melbourne Composers’ League as part of WSU’s

Creativity Unlimited festival – pianist Michael Kieran Harvey performing diverse

Australian works including nos III and IV of the Suite from Sighting Silence, Sounding

Image – first performance of these two pieces

2/9 – Swamp Bar/Connect Café, Western Sydney University, Kingswood Campus, NSW

– Creativity Unlimited festival – solo acoustic ukulele set – The Fallen Angel, On the

Tram, Irene Warehouse, Officeworks, Street Whale and Backpack from Nomadic

Journeys

2/9 – Main studio, building F, Western Sydney University – Concert Micro Series,

Creativity Unlimited festival – improvisational realisation of Ear Rings, text score by

Pauline Oliveros, with Catherine Golden (bass recorder/double bass) and members of

North Sydney Strings Ensemble John Dabron (violin), Allison Balberg (viola da gamba)

and Christina Green (soprano recorder/baritone ukulele, leader/coordinator)

21/9 – Melbourne City Library, City Centre, Melbourne, VIC – International Peace Day

event, short acoustic/folk set

28/9 – The Lomond Hotel, East Brunswick, VIC – Lomond Acoustica night, feature set

on program with singer-songwriters Monica Weightman and Emma Wall including

Irene Warehouse from Nomadic Journeys

29/10 – Neighbourhood Centre, Maldon, VIC – Roddy Read Songwriting Memorial Song

Contest, Maldon Folk Festival – performance of shortlisted song Some Days (with Sue Carr

Amico, accordion)

30/10 – Bar 303, Northcote, VIC – Melbourne Ukulele Festival, short set including Irene

Warehouse from Nomadic Journeys

2/11 – The Thornbury Local bar/venue, Thornbury, VIC – short acoustic/folk set

4/11 – Preston Fresh Hood, Preston Market, Preston, VIC – Darebin Songwriters event –

short acoustic/folk set

13/11 – Lentil as Anything vegan restaurant at Abbotsford Convent, Abbotsford, VIC –

feature acoustic/folk performance over dinner

25/11 – Federation Square, City Centre, Melbourne, VIC – White Ribbon Day performance

of No Excuses! (Green/McGuire with women’s choir and pianist, shorter version)

30/11 – The Thornbury Local bar/venue, Thornbury, VIC – short acoustic/folk set

3/12 – Farouk’s Olive bar/venue, Thornbury, VIC – two set acoustic/folk show

including Irene Warehouse and Officeworks from Nomadic Journeys

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4/12 – Oscar’s Alehouse, Belgrave, VIC – MC-ing and acoustic/folk set at ALMF (Alex

Legg Memorial Foundation) night

14/12 – The Thornbury Local bar/venue, Thornbury, VIC – short acoustic/folk set

including Irene Warehouse from Nomadic Journeys

17/12 – The Skylark Room, Burrinja, Upwey, VIC – Songwriters’ performance and

discussion night presented by The Writers’ Patch songwriting group – with singer-

songwriters Jenny Biddle and Doc White – acoustic/folk set (in-the-round with discussion)

2017

15/1 – The Thornbury Local bar/venue, Thornbury, VIC – feature acoustic/folk show

including Irene Warehouse and Officeworks from Nomadic Journeys

22/2 – The Thornbury Local bar/venue, Thornbury, VIC – acoustic/folk set

1/3 – Oscar’s Alehouse, Belgrave, VIC – ALMF/Leggacy Sessions MC-ing and feature

acoustic/folk set including Officeworks from Nomadic Journeys

4/3 – Traralgon Sound Shell, Traralgon, VIC – No Excuses! performance with Latrobe Valley

Community Choir (Green/McGuire, women’s choir and instrumentalists, full version)

15/3 – The Thornbury Local bar/venue, Thornbury, VIC – acoustic/folk set

29/3 – Oscar’s Alehouse, Belgrave, VIC – ALMF/Leggacy Sessions MC-ing and short

acoustic/folk set

6/4 – PAVE festival, Emerald, VIC – acoustic/folk set at The Hive Pop-Up Bar/Arts Space –

pre-CD launch gig with band – Louise Godwin, cello, Sue Carr Amico, accordion, Tracey

Roberts, keyboard/vocals, Hayley Anderson, violin and Rachel Nendick, alto saxophone/

recorder

19/4 – The Lomond Hotel, East Brunswick, VIC – Lomond Acoustica night with singer-

songwriter Raelene Bruinsma and Soloman/Lacey duo, including Officeworks from

Nomadic Journeys

26/4 – The Thornbury Local bar/venue, Thornbury, VIC – acoustic/folk set

30/4 – Wesley Anne bar/venue, Northcote, VIC – Melbourne Composers’ League Elbow

Room concert – short acoustic/folk/cabaret set – presenting songs in Downtown context

13/5 – Club Voltaire, North Melbourne, VIC – feature acoustic/folk/cabaret set including

Officeworks from Nomadic Journeys

20/5 – Munsterhaus vegan café, North Fitzroy, VIC – feature acoustic/folk show including

Officeworks and Irene Warehouse from Nomadic Journeys

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21/5 – The Thornbury Local bar/venue, Thornbury, VIC – first launch gig for Some

Days�Life I Can Live with Peter Anderson, accordion and support from Vanessa

Craven/Lunar Dust trio (CD includes Line of Flight – mention here only)

24/5 – Oscar’s Alehouse, Belgrave, VIC – ALMF/Leggacy Sessions MC-ing and short

acoustic/folk set

26/5 – Sash Bar, Northcote, VIC – acoustic/folk set

28/5 – Farouk’s Olive bar/venue, Thornbury, VIC – second launch gig for Some Days�Life I

Can Live with support from Vanessa Crave/Lunar Dust trio, acoustic/folk set including Irene

Warehouse from Nomadic Journeys

30/5 – Moonee Valley Racecourse, Moonee Ponds, VIC – Communities Conference

performance with Hayley Anderson, violin, songs/instrumental

2/6 – The Lomond Hotel, East Brunswick, VIC – third launch gig for Some Days�Life I Can

Live – with band comprising Tracey Roberts, keyboard/vocals, Sue Carr Amico, accordion,

Hayley Anderson, violin, Louise Godwin, cello and Rachel Nendick, alto saxophone/recorder

4/6 – Bar 303, Northcote, VIC – Darebin Songwriters’ Guild performance afternoon, short

acoustic/folk set

7/6 – The Thornbury Local bar/venue, Thornbury, VIC – short acoustic/folk set

10/6 – Lentil as Anything vegan restaurant, Thornbury, VIC – feature acoustic/folk

performance over dinner including Irene Warehouse from Nomadic Journeys

17/6 – Babushka Bar, Ballarat, VIC – fourth launch gig for Some Days�Life I Can Live with

support from Vanessa Craven/Lunar Dust trio, including Officeworks from Nomadic

Journeys

2/7 – Old Hepburn Hotel, Hepburn Springs, VIC – fifth launch gig for Some Days�Life I

Can Live with support from Vanessa Craven/Lunar Dust trio

7/7 – Skylark Room, Upwey, VIC – sixth launch gig for Some Days�Life I Can Live with

band comprising Tracey Roberts, keyboard/vocals, Hayley Anderson, Violin, Peter

Anderson, accordion, Sue Carr Amico, accordion and Louise Godwin, cello, with support

from Vanessa Craven/Lunar Dust trio

9/7 – Caravan Club, Oakleigh, VIC – Annexe Arts performance on program with Alex Attrill

and Callum Edwards duo

14/7 – Lentil as Anything vegan restaurant, Thornbury, VIC – feature acoustic/folk

performance over dinner

20/7 – Lentil as Anything vegan restaurant, Thornbury, VIC – feature acoustic/folk

performance over dinner including Officeworks from Nomadic Journeys

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23/7 – St John’s Anglican Church, Toorak, VIC – original instrumental music with Hayley

Anderson, violin

28/7 – Old Railway Station, Creswick, VIC – acoustic/folk performance in the round at the

Creswick Folk Club

2/8 – The Dancing Dog bar/venue, Footscray, VIC – acoustic/folk set in preparation for

Australian National University presentation/performance, including The Fallen Angel,

On the Tram, Officeworks, Street Whale and Backpack from Nomadic Journeys

11/8 – Australian National University, Women in the Creative Arts conference – The

Fallen Angel and On the Tram from Nomadic Journeys as part of paper/presentation

‘The Lesbian Composer through a Deleuzian Lens’

27/8 – The Brunswick Hotel, Brunswick, VIC – acoustic/folk support slot for Dean

Lombard/CD launch, with Hayley Anderson, violin, including Irene Warehouse and

Officeworks from Nomadic Journeys

6/9 – The Thornbury Local, Thornbury, VIC – short acoustic/folk set

21/9 – The Lomond Hotel, East Brunswick, VIC – Writers’ Block #31, with singer-

songwriters Glen Phelp, Rat Child, Frank Jones, Mel Taylor, acoustic/folk set in the round

23/9 – The Diggers RSL, The Entrance, NSW – Central Coast Ukulele Festival – ukulele

set including Irene Warehouse and Officeworks from Nomadic Journeys

25/9 – Western Sydney University, Kingswood Campus, NSW – Diversity Festival –

acoustic/folk set

29/9 – Blue Bean Love Café, Hepburn Springs, VIC – acoustic/folk two-set show with

Hayley Anderson, violin – songs and instrumentals including Irene Warehouse,

Officeworks and On the Tram from Nomadic Journeys

1/10 – Bar 303, Northcote, VIC – Darebin Songwriters’ Guild performance afternoon –

short acoustic/folk set including On the Tram and Officeworks from Nomadic Journeys

5/10 – Islington Folk Club, The Horseshoe Tavern, Clerkenwell, London, UK – short

acoustic/folk performance in the round

15/10 – King Charles I Hotel, Islington, London, UK – guest artist acoustic/folk set with

Loose Moods (Keith Bray, Peter Beverley and Lucy Panbocch)

4/11 – Neighbourhood Centre, Maldon, VIC – Roddy Read Songwriting Memorial Song

Contest, Maldon Folk Festival – performance of shortlisted song Officeworks from

Nomadic Journeys

12/11 – The Thornbury Local bar/venue, Thornbury, VIC – feature acoustic/folk show with

singer-songwriter Dean Lombard including Officeworks and On the Tram from Nomadic

Journeys

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19/11 – Farouk’s Olive bar/venue, Thornbury, VIC – feature acoustic/folk show with

singer-songwriter Ellen Mary Fish, featuring a selection from Nomadic Journeys – The

Fallen Angel, On the Tram, Officeworks, Street Whale and Backpack, making

connections with the recent ‘yes’ vote for equal marriage in Australia

20/12 – The Thornbury Local bar/venue, Thornbury, VIC – short acoustic/folk set

27/12 – The Dancing Dog bar/venue, Footscray, VIC – short acoustic/folk set

*31/12 – St John’s Anglican Church, Toorak, VIC – music by Philip Glass and Benjamin

Britten for New Year with Hayley Anderson (violin)

2018

22/1 – Lentil as Anything vegan restaurant, Thornbury, VIC – feature acoustic/folk

performance over dinner

28/1 – St John’s Anglican Church, Toorak, VIC – original instrumentals and a traditional

carol with Hayley Anderson, violin

29/1 – Lentil as Anything vegan restaurant, Thornbury, VIC – feature acoustic/folk

performance over dinner including Officeworks and Irene Warehouse from Nomadic

Journeys

*31/1 – Goddess Grooves – Cabaret at Hares and Hyenas LGBTQIA community

bookshop and performance space, Fitzroy, VIC – a performance of songs by women

artists with Bernadette Carroll, Freya Hanly, Annie Posterino and Ruth Katerelos –

Midsumma Festival event – my selection featured songs by lesbian and genderqueer

singer-songwriters Cheryl Wheeler and Chris Pureka as well as a ukulele song by

Australian artist Rose Turtle Ertler

2/2 – Munsterhaus vegan café, North Fitzroy, VIC – acoustic/folk set including

Officeworks, Irene Warehouse, On the Tram, Street Whale and Backpack from Nomadic

Journeys

5/2 – Lentil as Anything vegan restaurant, Thornbury, VIC – feature acoustic/folk

performance over dinner including Officeworks from Nomadic Journeys

9/2 –The American Hotel, Creswick, VIC – acoustic/folk in the round at the Creswick

Folk Club, including Officeworks and On the Tram from Nomadic Journeys

12/2 – Lentil as Anything vegan restaurant, Thornbury, VIC – feature acoustic/folk

performance over dinner including Officeworks from Nomadic Journeys

19/2 – Lentil as Anything vegan restaurant, Thornbury, VIC – feature acoustic/folk

performance over dinner

250

24/2 – Joan Sutherland Performing Arts Centre, Penrith, NSW – first performance of

Ground Thunder Returns by Catherine Golden, double bass and Daniel Thorpe, piano,

in Secrets Through a Soundglass, research project of Sean Botha, WSU PhD student –

other works on the program by Felicity Wilcox, Peggy Polias, Catherine Golden and

Daniel Thorpe

26/2 – Lentil as Anything vegan restaurant, Thornbury, VIC – feature acoustic/folk

performance over dinner

2/3 – Folk Alley Café, St Andrews, VIC – acoustic/folk performance over dinner

including Officeworks from Nomadic Journeys

18/3 – Wesley Anne bar/venue, Northcote, VIC – Melbourne Composers’ League Elbow

Room concert – instrumentals and songs presented in Downtown context, with Hayley

Anderson, violin

21/3 – Queenscliff Uniting Church, Queenscliff, VIC – Sacrededge festival launch event –

short acoustic/folk set

25/3 – Farouk’s Olive bar/venue, Thornbury, VIC – two-set acoustic/folk show with

singer-songwriter Tracey Roberts, including On the Tram and Officeworks from

Nomadic Journeys

31/3 – Clydesdale Hall, Clydesdale, VIC – 3rd

Clydesdale Hootenanny and Tomato

Tussle – feature acoustic/folk performance including Officeworks from Nomadic

Journeys

12/4 – Littlefoot bar/venue, Footscray, VIC – two-set acoustic/folk performance with

singer-songwriter Dean Lombard, including Officeworks from Nomadic Journeys

14/4 – PAVE festival, Emerald, VIC – acoustic/folk set at The Hive Pop-Up Bar/Arts Space

29/4 – Blue Bean Love Café, Hepburn Springs, VIC – two-set acoustic/folk performance

with Hayley Anderson, violin and Jo Smith, darabukka, including Irene Warehouse, On

the Tram and Officeworks from Nomadic Journeys

5/5 – Queenscliff Uniting Church, Queenscliff, VIC – Sacrededge Spirituality in Diversity

festival – two feature acoustic/folk sets. The festival included people of diverse

sexualities and gender identification. I featured some songs by lesbian singer-

songwriters and a Buddhist chant in my performances as well as my own material

15/5 – Tago Mago/Swamplands bar/venue, Thornbury, VIC – acoustic/folk set

24/5 – Sloth Bar, Footscray, VIC – short acoustic/folk set

26/5 – Joan Sutherland Performing Arts Centre, Penrith, NSW – PSO 30th

Anniversary

Gala Concert – first performance of Land, Sea, Sky for string orchestra, with conductor

251

Paul Terracini, in program including works by J. Strauss II, Tchaikovsky, Michael

Kieran Harvey, Rachmaninov and fellow WSU student composer Chloe Hulewicz

3/6 – Bar 303, Northcote, VIC – Darebin Songwriters’ Guild performance afternoon – short

acoustic/folk set

14/7 – The Skylark Room, Upwey, VIC – Gathering for Janette Geri (memorial/celebration

of life) – short acoustic/folk set

24/7 and 26/7 – The Stony Point Centre, Stony Point, New York State, USA – acoustic/folk

short performances in student shows at SummerSongs Songwriting Retreat

16/8 – The Skylark Room Upwey, VIC – ALMF Songwriter Session – short acoustic/folk set

in the round

28/8 – Tago Mago/Swamplands bar/venue, Thornbury, VIC – short acoustic/folk set

30/8 – Platform 3095 restaurant/venue, Eltham, VIC – short acoustic/folk set

2/9 – Upwey/Belgrave RSL, Upwey, VIC – acoustic/folk set

12/9 – The Dancing Dog, Footscray, VIC – short acoustic/folk set

13/9 – Lentil as Anything vegan restaurant, Thornbury, VIC – feature acoustic/folk set, ‘Jose

and Friends’ evening, with Andrew Lockwood, Viki Mealings/Brittle Sun and Wayne

Thompson

21/9 – Yes – fundraiser for City of Yarra Green Party candidate Kathleen Maltzahn,

with photographic exhibition documenting the equal marriage campaign by Suzette

Mitchell – acoustic/folk set with featured songs on themes of environment and an

Indigenous Women’s political campaign

29/9 – Brunswick, VIC – house concert with Catherine Golden, double bass – two-set

show combining acoustic/folk songs including Officeworks from Nomadic Journeys with

the second performance of Ground Thunder Returns (double bass + piano played by

myself)

30/9 – Montsalvat, Eltham, VIC – Melbourne Composers’ League Elbow Room mini-

festival – Ground Thunder Returns – Catherine Golden, double bass and Christina

Green, piano, in program including works by Eve Duncan, Howard Dillon, Peter

Tahourdin, William Kimber, Haydn Reeder, Livia Judge, Allan Holley, Caerwen

Martin, Andrián Pertout, Stefan Hakenberg, Dindy Vaughan, Colin McKellar, Johanna

Selleck, Susan Frykberg, Ros Bandt, Paul Moulatlet and Michael Kieran Harvey

5/10 – Folk Alley Café, St Andrews, VIC – acoustic/folk performance over dinner

including On the Tram, Irene Warehouse, Officeworks , Street Whale, Backpack and

Officeworks from Nomadic Journeys

252

7/10 – Bar 303, Northcote, VIC – Darebin Songwriters’ Guild performance afternoon – short

acoustic/folk set

14/10 – St John’s Anglican Church, Toorak, VIC – music for Blessing of the Pets event –

acoustic folk songs/instrumentals

18/10 – The Lomond Hotel, East Brunswick, VIC – Writers’ Block #43 (‘Food and Drink’) –

acoustic/folk songs on the theme/in the round, with singer-songwriters Melissa Main, Frank

Jones, Dave Walker, Kira Janowsky and Khristian Mizzi

25/10 – Platform 3095, Eltham, VIC – acoustic/folk set

28/10 – Kinglake Hotel, Kinglake, VIC – short acoustic/folk set

2/11 – Barbiturates bar/venue, Marrickville, NSW – Something Will Happen – a pop-up

warehouse gig of Australian music and performance art presented by Kammerklang –

second performance of Eileen’s Vision by percussionist Kaylie Dunstan, in program

featuring works by Australian composers Cameron Lam, Peggy Polias, Paul Sarcich,

Matthew Shlomowitz and performers Kaylie Dunstan, the Nano Symphony, Jesse

Horne, Liberte LaFemme and singer-songwriter Harry Heart in a Downtown-style

performance context.

15/11 – Lentil as Anything vegan restaurant, Thornbury, VIC – feature acoustic/folk set,

‘Jose and Friends’ evening, with Ellen Mary Fish and Jose Garcia

17/11 – Five Play Farouk’s Olive – feature acoustic/folk set with Hayley Anderson,

violin, on program including Monique Kenny and Siren duo (Sally Koster/Mary Lynn

Griffith), including On the Tram and Officeworks from Nomadic Journeys

24/11 – Terminus Hotel, North Fitzroy, VIC – Celebrating the Life of Malcolm J.

Turnbull – short set at memorial event for longtime Guild member – two songs on

activist/GLBT themes to honour Malcolm’s life

19/12 – The Welcome Swallow bar/venue, Brunswick, VIC – short acoustic/folk set

21/12 – The Skylark Room, Upwey, VIC – Farewell to the Burrinja Café – event celebrating

twenty years of live music at the Skylark Room (fka Burrinja/Uncle Neil’s) – short

acoustic/folk set in evening-long program featuring many musicians from the community and

beyond

2019

14/2 – Lentil as Anything vegan restaurant, Thornbury, VIC – feature acoustic/folk set, ‘Jose

and Friends’ evening, with Patrick Evans and Edward Nass

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27/2 – Feature acoustic/folk set, with Dana Crowe and Michelle Chandler. This set

featured a new song about the Amazons (Women’s Motorcycle Club of Toronto) and

connected with community present at the gig (including two of the members visiting

Melbourne) ahead of the Chillout Festival (LGBTI Pride Festival) in Daylesford, VIC.

22/3 – Old Railway Station, Creswick, VIC – acoustic/folk performance in the round at the

Creswick Folk Club