GEORGES LENTZ - composer / sound artist
GEORGES LENTZ - composer / sound artist
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About 'Nguurraa'
from 'Mysterium' ("Caeli enarrant..." VII) for clarinet in Bb, violin, cello, piano and percussion (2000-2020) I started writing Nguurraa during my first long car trip to the Australian Outback in 2000-2001. The work is characterised by its generally whispering dynamics, its polarity between a strict crotchet rhythm and free graphic notation, between expanded and contracted time, between unison, microtonality and a sense of twisted harmony, between formal concision and a sprawling sense of reaching way beyond the first and last bar. The final version of Nguurraa was written, revised and expanded between 2018 and 2020, and is is respectfully dedicated to the memory of the great Indigenous artist Kathleen Petyarre (ca. 1940-2018), whose paintings I first discovered in the late 1990s and then admired at a major 2001 exhibition of her work at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney. Kathleen sadly passed away around the same time I started work on my revision. The title Nguurraa (meaning light in the Ngiyampaa language of the original inhabitants of Central Western New South Wales) reflects my love of and deep respect for Indigenous Australian culture, and points to one of the main influences on my work over many years - Aboriginal art. The celebrated technique with innumerable tiny dots and hidden lines or channels, which I particularly admire in the paintings of Kathleen Petyarre (where it creates an extraordinary feeling of space, depth and luminosity) gave me the idea that I might attempt to translate these subtle complexities into musical language. I do hope this is not seen as cultural appropriation - rather it is meant as a loving homage. I simply cannot help being inspired by this extraordinary art, and I see such clear parallels with music.
I returned from that first trip to the Outback overwhelmed by the unimaginable vastness of the desert country, its deep silence and the breathtaking radiance of its starry night skies. And this thought - how utterly insignificant are we against this gigantic backdrop!
G. L. 2020
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