GEORGES LENTZ - composer / sound artist
 
 

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Strings of dots, of time, of stars     Across many of my works - from Monh for viola and orchestra and Anyente for solo viola, to the orchestral Jerusalem (after Blake), the violin concerto ...to beam in distant heavens..., or String Quartet(s) - I have returned, again and again, to the idea of repeated notes. These are often fast, flickering, coloured by microtonal inflections. I conceive of them as strings of beads or lines made of dots - a visual and spiritual image drawn from my own magnificent Kathleen Petyarre painting, whose fields of meticulously placed marks and dotted lines trace ancestral journeys and the vast silence of the land. At other times the repetitions are slow and sustained, hesitant, as if treading carefully. And in some of my newer works they can even be driven, motoric, machine-like, terrifying. These repeated notes are not merely rhythmic or structural. They function as particles of presence, each one a sonic dot marking space, time, memory. They drift like stars across a night sky, or resonate like footsteps across country, suggesting a kind of motion without destination, a deep listening to what is already there. This idea, dare I say, finds an echo in a great, much earlier voice (even if in an utterly different musical guise): Franz Schubert, whose late works in particular I cherish more than I can say for their ever-so-human fragility and vulnerability. In the second movement of his Piano Sonata in A major (D 959), after a catastrophic and puzzling central eruption with terrifying repeated notes, the main, serene F-sharp minor theme returns (almost), now marked by a repeated C-sharp over the top, ever so gentle, yet reminiscent of the terror that has passed. It hovers, like a psychic residue, a tremor, a sound that holds the memory of trauma that won't go away. This is something I too often seek in my music: a repetition not of pattern, but of essence - something between fleeting time and stasis, between shimmer and ritual, between a breath and a scar. In String Quartet(s), this idea is made spatial, projected across four channels inside the Cobar Sound Chapel. Architecture, land and light here shape and emphasise the repetitions, most notably in the rhythmic corrugated pattern of the inner concrete walls. But the gesture itself - the strings of dots, the bar codes, the flickering patterns or the patient pacing - is just as present in many of my other works, large and small. It is one of the ways I try to articulate time and the barely perceptible motion of the cosmos.       G. L.