GEORGES LENTZ - composer / sound artist
 
 

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Strings of dots, of stars, of time     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 patterns, coloured by microtonal inflections. I see them as strings of beads or lines of dots - a visual and spiritual image drawn from looking at my own magnificent Kathleen Petyarre painting, whose fields of meticulously placed marks to my mind 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. These note repetitions are not merely rhythmic or structural. They drift like stars across a night sky, or resonate like footsteps across country, suggesting a kind of motion without clear 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 and at the risk of sounding totally presumptuous: 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) in particular, after a catastrophic (and highly puzzling) central eruption with terrifying repeated notes, the main, serene F-sharp minor theme returns, now marked by a repeated C-sharp over the top, ever so gentle, yet reminiscent of the terror that has passed. To my mind, it hovers like a tremor or some psychic residue, a sound that holds the memory of the trauma that won't go away. This is something I, in my own humble way, often seek in my music too: a repetition not just of rhythm or pattern, but of a kind of existential essence. Very big words, I know, but for better or worse these ideas do shape my music. Somewhere between fleeting time and static reflection, between a shimmer and a ritual, between a breath and a scar, they express my own fragility. In String Quartet(s), this idea is in fact made spatial and tactile, projected across the four channels of the Cobar Sound Chapel. Architecture and light here help to emphasise the repetitions, the vertical lines, 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, the patient pacing are just as present in many of my other works, large and small. This is one of the ways I try to articulate time and the barely perceptible motion of the cosmos.       G. L.