BRETT DEAN: Carlo: Music for Strings, Sampler, and Tape
Brett Dean was born October 23, 1961, in Brisbane, Australia, and currently lives in Melbourne, Australia. He composed Carlo in 1997 on commission from the Australian Chamber Orchestra for that year’s Huntington Festival in Mudgee, Australia. It was first performed in a concert of that festival, on December 5, 1997, at the Huntington Winery, played by the Australian Chamber Orchestra with Richard Tognetti as leader (concertmaster) and with the composer conducting. The score bears the dedication “. . . for Richard Tognetti and the Australian Chamber Orchestra.” Soloists of the RIAS Chamber Choir, conducted by Marcus Creed, contributed to the tapes and samples employed in this work; others involved in that aspect of the composition were Peter Groß, recording engineer of the Berlin Philharmonic, and Simon Hurt, who oversaw the sampler programming and realization. In addition to the electronic sampler and pre-recorded CD, the score calls for fifteen solo strings: eight violins, three violas, three cellos, and a double bass. For performances in large halls, the composer has also written parts for a further player for each of the string instruments, an expansion that is used in this concert.
Although the Australian composer Brett Dean has been active as a composer for fully two decades, he leapt to a new plateau of international attention when he was named the recipient of the 2009 Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition, one of the most lucrative prizes in the music world. The piece that earned him this honor was The Lost Art of Letter Writing, a four-movement, 40-minute-long violin concerto, premiered in 2007, in which the solo violin plays the roles of the writers and recipients of letters penned in the nineteenth century by the Viennese composers Johannes Brahms and Hugo Wolf, the Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh, and the Australian outlaw Ned Kelly.
It was appropriate that he should have gained such distinction through a violin concerto: He himself is a string player, a violist who for 15 years, from 1984 to 2000, played in the viola section of the Berlin Philharmonic. He had begun as a substitute musician for that orchestra the year before, at the age of only 22, having been trained (obviously very well) as a violist at the Queensland Conservatorium of Music, from which he graduated in 1982. In 1988 he started composing in earnest, producing experimental scores for film and radio. Within not many years he achieved a marked success in the concert hall with his clarinet concerto Ariel’s Dream, dedicated to Ariel Glaser, an American girl who died of AIDS at the age of seven and whose mother, suffering from the same disease, became a revered AIDS advocate; the work was premiered in 1995 with the composer’s brother, Paul Dean, as soloist. Ariel’s Dream proved a critical breakthrough for Dean, earning him an award from the UNESCO International Rostrum of Composers. Dance audiences became acquainted with him through his score (for solo cello and tape) for One of a Kind, a ballet choreographed by Jiří Kylián for the Nederlands Dans Theater in 1998 and performed more than forty times since then. He created numerous sound installations, including the work titled hundreds and thousands (for five-track tape), commissioned for the millennium celebrations at the Berlin Kulturforum.
His career as a violist has also been distinguished. During the Hindemith centennial festivities in the 1995-96 season he appeared as soloist with the Berlin Philharmonic (Claudio Abbado conducting) in Hindemith’s Kammermusik No. 6 for Viola d’amore and Chamber Orchestra. Hindemith’s numerous viola works are one of his specialties as a performer, both in concert and on recordings; and recently Dean has been touring as the soloist in the Viola Concerto he himself composed in 2004. He became sought after as a chamber-music player, and he collaborated with the Brandis Quartet in acclaimed recordings of string quintets by Brahms and Bruckner. Even since leaving the Berlin Philharmonic in 2000 Dean has remained active as a violist, and he added another important responsibility when he assumed the artistic directorship of the Australian National Academy of Music, in Melbourne. “It is sometimes quite a juggling of various tasks,” he allows. “Nevertheless I think it all, particularly the performing I do in the course of the year, feeds into composing. I can’t imagine composing without being a performer or a performer without it leading to composing.”
Then, too, he seems to draw ongoing inspiration from ideas about the distant past. His Amphitheatre (2000), for example, is a scene for large orchestra that depicts the ruins of an ancient amphitheatre as it is described in the book Momo, by Michael Ende, a German author of children’s books. His Moments of Bliss (2004), for orchestra and electronics, is connected to the 1981 novel Bliss by the Australian author Peter Carey, a contemporary elaboration of the ancient myth of Isis and Osiris. Dean’s score turned out to be a first step in his involvement with this novel; he is currently busy with a full operatic treatment of Bliss, to be premiered by Opera Australia in 2010. In addition, several of his compositions have been derived from visual stimuli, including a group of works inspired by the paintings of his wife, Heather Betts.
Carlo, written in 1997, employs a contemporary language that brings together the acoustic sound of the string orchestra—or, to put it more precisely, an ensemble of nineteen solo strings—with a pre-recorded audio CD and electronic sampling. The electronic aspects of the work remind us of Dean’s beginnings as a composer. “My first forays into composing,” he said recently, “were based on studio retracking and overdubbing, in fact. Out of that came the desire to transfer that experience to music that could be performed onstage. . . .The whole electronic world has continued its fascination on me.” Still, the challenges of melding the aesthetic world of electronic music with that of the “acoustic” orchestra is fraught with peril, and the possibility for missteps is ever-present. Nonetheless, writing about Carlo in The Times of London in 2001, the critic John Alison insisted, “It stands out as one of an increasingly small number of pieces that successfully mix live and electronic performance.”
“The title,” Dean explains, “refers to Carlo Gesualdo (1560-1613), Prince of Venosa, esteemed composer of idiosyncratic and highly accomplished vocal music of the Mannerist style and perpetrator of one of the most heinous criminal acts of Italian society in the 16th Century, namely the murder in 1590 of his own wife Maria d’Avolos and her lover, Don Fabrizio Carafa, Duke of Andria. Not surprisingly, this Carlo character has been regarded as a fairly notorious figure ever since.”
Indeed he has. His violent act was well documented by witnesses whose testimony still survives in Italian archives. It seems he roped some servants into assisting but that he personally stabbed his wife repeatedly, screaming “She’s not dead yet!” Don Fabrizio was run through repeatedly by a sword and shot through the head. When discovered, his body was dressed in Maria’s nightgown; it was unclear whether this was his own little idiosyncrasy or a parting touch from Gesualdo. When Gesualdo was finished, he deposited their slaughtered corpses in front of his palace, the Palazza San Severo. Some accounts (now considered suspect) say he went on to kill Maria’s father; others maintain that he killed his infant son (by Maria), having “swung the infant around in his cradle until the breath departed from his body.” Thanks to Gesualdo’s princely status he was immune from prosecution. He was not immune from revenge, however, and accordingly led a rather solitary existence thereafter, devoting himself to musical composition of an experimental bent. He later suffered from depression and lived a life of considerable personal kinkiness; you may read the Gesualdo biography by Cecil Gray and Philip Heseltine if you really must know what he did beyond ordering his servants to beat him daily. He also remarried—what a catch!—and after failing to obtain a divorce from him on the grounds of abuse, his second wife absented herself as much as possible to her brother’s estate.
While the blood was still fresh in the fatal wounds, Italian printing presses whirred with breathless accounts of this double murder. The ill-fated lovers were memorialized in poems by the great Torquato Tasso as well as Giambattista Marino and a bevy of less remembered Neapolitan writers. Gesualdo’s notoriety lived on through the centuries, and in often romanticized form it gave rise to such later creations as a short story by Anatole France (“Histoire de Doña Maria d’Avolos et Don Fabricio Duc d’Andria,” 1895), an orchestral piece by Stravinsky (Monumentum pro Gesualdo di Venosa, 1960), a documentary film by Werner Herzog (Gesualdo: Death for Five Voices, 2007), and at least three operas of recent vintage: Alfred Schnittke’s Gesualdo (1995), Franz Hummel’s Gesualdo (1996), and Salvatore Sciarrino’s Luci mie traditrici (1998).
Gesualdo published his music in six books of madrigals (which appeared from 1594 through 1611) and three collections of sacred music (the first two in 1603, the last in 1611). Much of his music shows the considerable competence one expects from the madrigalists of his era, but in his later collections Gesualdo revealed a distinctive style that involved unanticipated juxtapositions of unrelated chords and occasional dissonances that fell far outside the mainstream of the harmonic writing of his time. It is to these striking works that Gesualdo owes his musical repute, and it is to these that Brett Dean turned when selecting authentic Gesualdo fragments to include in the electronic portion of his piece. We hear most prominently music extracted from Gesualdo’s madrigal “Moro, lasso, al mio duolo” from the Sixth Book of Madrigals for Five Voices (1611), but also fragments from “Tu piangi, o Filli mia” (from the same collection) and the Responsoria for Holy Week (1611)—specifically the second response from the Feast In Coena Domini.
For the rest, let us turn the discussion over to Dean:
Historians to the present day still seem undecided as to the true merits of Gesualdo the composer, unable to separate the characteristics of his compositions, with their harmonic extremities and surprises and their textural complexities, from the infamy of Gesualdo the murderer. There are, no doubt, numerous contemporaries of his whose music would be just as worthy of the kind of attention now given to Gesualdo, composers such as Marenzio and Luzzaschi who didn’t fan the flame by butchering their spouses. But I believe that with Carlo Gesualdo one shouldn’t try to separate his music from his life and times. They are intrinsically interrelated. The texts of his later madrigals, thought to be written by Gesualdo himself, abound with references to love, death, guilt and self-pity. Combine this with the fact that I’ve always found Gesualdo’s vocal works in any case to be one of music’s great and most fascinating listening experiences and you have the premise of my piece.
Carlo starts with pure Gesualdo. From a tape, one hears the opening chorale from “Moro lasso”, one of his most famous compositions, taken from his 6th Book of Madrigals. Following the tragically sinking chromatic line, a prerecorded vocal collage unfolds, the various quotes from the madrigal initially linking harmonically; then going their own way. Sometimes brighter and faster, at other points slower and more solemn. Gradually the orchestra becomes involved in this process, at first displacing the taped quotes from “Moro lasso” with other Gesualdo motives, and eventually leading us to altogether more 20th Century realms of sound. Occasionally the sampler or tape transport us momentarily back into the worlds of Gesualdo, only for the orchestra to embark on their own interpretation and re-working of this material. Throughout this journey between these two different time-zones, Gesualdo’s madrigals are eventually reduced to mere whisperings of his texts and nervous breathing sounds. These eventually also grow in dramatic intensity into what may be seen as an orchestral echo of that fateful night in Naples on 26th October 1590.
—James M. Keller
More About the Music
Recordings HK Gruber conducting the Swedish Chamber Orchestra in Carlo, on a CD that offers four of Dean’s compositions (BIS)
Reading No book-shaped studies on the music of Brett Dean are available. In the general neighborhood are: New Classical Music: Composing Australia, by Gordon Kerry (University of New South Wales Press) and Experimental Music: Audio Explorations in Australia, edited by Gail Priest (University of New South Wales Press) | The reigning tome on Gesualdo is Gesualdo: The Man and his Music, by Glenn Watkins (Clarendon Paperbacks of Oxford University Press) | More sensational is the 1926 book Carlo Gesualdo Prince of Venosa: Musician and Murderer, by Cecil Gray and Philip Heseltine (Kegan Paul)