“Darkness, where I find my sight,” intones the soprano, hardly daring to move from her opening note. So begins Margaret Sutherland’s Six Songs to the poems of Judith Wright. This apparent ‘paradox of opposites’ is a recurrent image for Wright and her problematic if profound landscapes are expertly inhabited by Sutherland’s music. As the poem returns to meditate on this opening line, “Darkness where I find my sight,” with new context and insight, Sutherland returns to the opening musical material in her song, now calmed by its new significance. The piano – restless, searching, throughout – finally begins to repeat its figuration and eventually resolve the otherwise terse harmonies. The female voice is no longer shackled by doubling in the piano, but singing on its own. Continue reading “Some Notes about ‘Women of Note’ (book by Rosalind Appleby, Fremantle Press, 2012)”
Extended Writing
Analogue Landscapes and Digital Ecologies
I was invited to contribute some thoughts about landscape while working on the Landscape Too exhibition (AirSpace Projects, Marrickville, Sydney), in collaboration with visual artists Hayley Megan French and Kate Beckingham
Landscape is a paradox for me. The word ‘landscape’ always betrays more than it defines. I don’t think we consider, and therefore do not talk of something as ‘landscape’ until it has already become more than just landscape. It is not, until it is more than it is. The act of naming becomes part of an act of exaltation. Landscape, is landscape already once transformed; transformed by human imaginative interrogation, or emotional investment, and so any discussion is at once a discussion of the thing before the word, (the physical?) and everything which makes the word inadequate (the metaphysical?). Continue reading “Analogue Landscapes and Digital Ecologies”
musicyoudontknow 