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Embracing the Other An Introduction to the Music of Derek Strahan
© James Beswick Whitehead, 2001
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1: A Practical Dreamer
It was curiosity about Derek Strahan's music which led me to propose this feature and he kindly supplied me with the materials, which not only showcase his music but set it to some extent in a context. My appetite had been whetted by some short samples of his music on the Revolve website and his ambitious plans for a multimedia opera-cycle of Wagnerian proportions. Massive plans are not in themselves all that rare or interesting. What caught my eye in Strahan's case was the fact that his other activities were perfectly sane: he had a long list of compositions to his credit which were eminently practical. As a writer and actor he had sustained a career in films and television. If he was a dreamer, then he was dreaming with a solid body of achievement beneath him.
It is tempting to see Derek Strahan's first four years in Malaya as a lost Eden, at least as viewed from the succeeding years of grey puritanism in Northern Ireland. In fact, the composer's memories are mainly distressing ones of a colonial early schooling which was far from child-centred. Even so, the exotic bird cries and tropical warmth of Strahan's invented paradise may have emerged gradually from his having roots in a world that quickly became the Other. When you encounter voodoo, jazz or African features in his music it is not in inverted commas or restricted to a gesture: he does not treat non-European music as exotic but gives it an equal status. Intellectually, he can do this because he has made a close study of the difference between notation and played rhythm but more important is the fact that in investigating Otherness Strahan finds himself. This speaking in tongues can be confusing: even where the music delights and entertains, we may be disconcerted by its stylistic fluidity and want the real Strahan to stand up. It is his ability to dare open himself completely to Otherness that sets Strahan apart from those now flying the fusion flag. It is a brave path because it relinquishes the egotistical assumption of personal identity to find the self on another plane. The irony is that only an inwardly assured and integrated personality could risk this degree of exposure to non-Western influences. It is the difference between real freedom and mere escape.
Strahan is largely self-taught as a musician and his move towards devoting himself to writing concert works came as the culmination of a wide involvement with music for film and television. Before that, there were years as a songwriter and performer. More than most composers, he has built his career from the ground up and retains a disdain for theorists, ivory-tower dwellers and bureaucrats. It is more than normal sturdy Australian independence, but a hatred of the forces which have served to divide composers and audiences. Ideology, specifically Marxist ideology is his special demon and the raft of composers who seemed to use public funding as a platform from which to repel all boarders with pieces of barbed wire. Strahan makes his point when he reveals how he forced a confession out of one funding organization that his music was just too accessible to qualify for support. In other words, outside a tiny walled garden it was the brute Darwinism of the free market. With characteristic generosity, he welcomes the fact that accessibility has become more popular in recent years, just gently pointing out that he was accessible long before it became fashionable.
After Cambridge, Strahan was loth to settle into any comfortable niche and pursued a creative Bohemian life in the alternative London which was emerging. Singing for his supper and bit part acting were eked out with whatever work he could find. Some few years before the Beatles made Abbey Road a household name, Strahan was living in the vicinity. He had a bedsit in Abbey Gardens and strutted his stuff at a club called The Living, which he ran with his friend Paul Baron. From the same period dates his first chamber work, scored for the unusual combo of Flute, Clarinet, Saxophone and Typewriter Top. The recording of this has recently come to light as Baron and Strahan have renewed their friendship. At the time of writing, the composer is looking forward to playing back the original reel-to-reel tape of the performance from some forty years ago.
Strahan makes no great claims for his singing voice but the light tenor which emerges from those earliest records is strikingly good. Embarassingly so, perhaps, in a period which moved sharply away from the literate and articulate towards a more demotic style. The influence of French chanson, especially Brassens, is one the composer notes, and the English listener might find something Waltonesque in the bitter-sweet lines of the songs with flute obbligato. The very melodic Chanson style never usually quite translates into English - something to do with the perceived ability of the French to be sophisticated and democratic at once - but Strahan makes it work. A feeling for wind instruments also emerges very early. Then as now, he refuses easy categorization. Is it classical or pop? Any uncertainty must be in the listeners' minds for it does not seem to reflect uncertainty in the composer's. His mind is naturally inclusive and disposed to make a platform out of any barrier it finds.
The slightly brittle and polite impoliteness of the Cambridge Strahan suggests that he could have settled into a niche doing just that. It could have been a cul-de-sac, of course, and it is fascinating to listen to the almanac of more democratic influences - Cohen, Dylan, Chuck Berry, Guthrie and Baez - in the period when the popular song could no longer be too beautiful. A more limited artist might have established a narrower identity and Strahan's songs have a quicksilver quality which enabled him to move from irony to open emotion in a way which trusts the audience also to turn on a sixpence. This kind of emotional literacy works best in the intimate setting of a live performance but the it is good to know that private records preserve so much of this art from a vital period. At the time of writing, the composer is reviewing these early song tapes with a view to their commercial release on CD.
In London, the BBC showed some interest and broadcast one of Strahan's settings of Herrick - still considered risqué, with its encouragement of virgins to use their time pleasurably. Other material is believed to languish in the BBC archives. It was not until after his move to Sydney in 1962 that Strahan became a regular broadcaster. An early appearance on ABC with a showbusiness impressario led to an invitation to be the supporting act for "visiting lecturer", Lenny Bruce. The strange terms on which Bruce was allowed to perform in Sydney turned out to preclude supporting acts. Despite this, Strahan got to meet him and spent an unforgettable night in the comedian's hotel room, listening to his stream-of-consciousness thoughts, which were fuelled by trademark trips to the bathroom for narcotic refreshment.
By 1970, Strahan had talked his way into a weekly slot on Australian commercial television, where he was required to perform a Song of the Week on a topical subject. The engagement came to an abrupt end with a disagreement over a song about Vietnam. Though the composer makes no great claims for this written-to-order material, the Australian balladry does find an appealing and relaxed way of communicating. The fluency that comes from the song-a-week discipline leads him to be entirely unafraid of what works. It is also striking how the accent has moved from Cambridge through various assumed Americanisms to an easy Australian lilt.
There is a flickering irony at work that never quite lets the listener wallow in a cosy bath of feeling and heard in different orders and contexts, these songs can be felt to shift in meaning quite a lot. The song-period Strahan is not yet publically accessible but it does throw a lot of light on that instinctive feel for how an audience concentrates and just when one idea needs to give way to the next. It is the singer's art to respond to that ebb and flow and it is exactly this skill which makes the concert pieces seem so natural in their carefully planned use of the listener's time.
It would be worrying if the demands of Romanticism and Accessibility were to impose themselves between an artist and what he wants to say. Fortunately, Strahan has always been motivated by the need to say what he has to, regardless of fashion. In the current market place, now that time-travelling and tourist-music is the norm, his distinction resides at a different level. He is neither a spongiform reactionary nor an opportunistic jackdaw, plucking trophies from birds of colour. The fusion is deeper, though he is the man least likely to coin an ism. The high pressure at which he works gives an urgency to his music not at all typical of someone who wishes only to say what has already been said. After all, why should audiences take risks if composers have promised not to?
The documentary film does not always get its critical due, being often discussed from the point of view of its information-giving alone. Yet its purpose has usually been more properly an eye-opening, even visionary one. It is a genre in which the world of habit is redeemed by a newer closer attention. We may be taken to distant shores and harsher climates or shown something on our own doorsteps. In observing the intimate details of wildlife, we may seem to glimpse echoes of ourselves. At their worst, they can be cutely anthropomorphic but the best examples can seem to offer us an almost shamanistic share in the lives of strange creatures. The Australian Ark was a classic in this line, introducing the wonders of the continent's fauna to audiences at home and abroad. Derek Strahan's scores were to support the striking visuals and help humanize the animal life without being distracting or merely sweet.
The disciplines of establishing a mood instantly and maintaining it without platitude or monotony, supporting the image on the screen and not competing for attention could be a recipe for blandness. To produce real music that fulfills the brief and also makes pleasing and evocative listening without the pictures is quite an achievement. The Australian Ark Suites, 1970 - 71, show that Strahan had developed a fluent technique and a highly polished professionalism some ten years before he decided to commit himself entirely to music. A flair for writing lines which capture the souls of wind instruments is already strongly evident.
The Land of Birds finds the composer utilizing the striking timbre of the alto flute to echo the cries of exotic species. The love of flutter-tongue effects is a trade mark that re-emerges in Eden, even if the earlier score is closer to Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. In the Coming of Man, the percussive wood-blocks signal an aboriginal strand, while bending notes on the bassoon can make it a surprisingly good stand-in for the didgeridoo. These evocative scores would make a very good Australian ballet but their significance in Strahan's work is at a deeper level: the evolutionary portrait of the continent evolving out of a primeval Gondwanaland will gather associations and undergo a rich sea-change. It is not entirely coincidental that when the fully developed Eden in Atlantis myth begins to emerge, Strahan conceives it as a multi-media piece. His preface pays tribute to the artistic synthesis of the animated cartoon and the Australian Ark was a worthy successor to those Disney features which applied the story-telling techniques of animation to the creatures of the real world.
Aliens Amongst Us was a slightly later score, for a similar venture, this time using magnification to bring us face to face with those domestic monsters the insects. Percussion and harpsichord give a nicely mordant view of life and murder in miniature. The black humour is not allowed to undermine an awareness that matters of Life and Death are afoot. Again there are to be later implications: a fascination with lenses and optical apparatus will haunt the Eden epic, forming the basis of Lucifer's power.
Artisans of Australia, a celebration of traditional crafts, found Strahan turning to his Irish roots to produce a series of tiny variations on a folk theme. Thumbnail composition like this sounds so natural and easy that the listener might like to try it. It really takes a very precise imagination to squeeze so many moods out of a seeming-innocent tune and the ability to organize a piece on a small scale this way suggests a further application of the microcosm-macrocosm idea.
The Cult of Diana is not a tribute to the late Princess of Wales but a 1992 Suite from the score of a detective movie. Strahan wrote the screenplay, which dealt with a pagan cult hiding undercover as TV evangelists - an nice example of how a writer steeped in arcane lore can introduce it into the wider public domain in popular form. Strahan was also enlisted to play the lead rôle of his own Inspector Shanahan. The Suite conjures an atmosphere of menace and ceremonial ritual and though budgetary constraints limited the forces to a synthesizer and a couple of instruments, the music has another life ahead as part of the Eden in Atlantis project. The synthesizer is also used to good effect in the music for the film Fantasy, 1990, a kaleidoscopic tale of erotic mind-games in a remote mansion. The mixed popular idioms in which an old Molloy ballad rubs shoulders with finger-snapping Bernstein-like riffs all project well on the synthesizer timbres.
This ability to write to order as a discipline, using whatever resources can be mustered is an invaluable training ground and Strahan's galley years recall Britten's long apprenticeship writing for the GPO Film Unit and for radio plays. Tailoring music frame by frame is an exacting business but I am inclined to think that Strahan's grounding in film theory - he also directs - has fed into his sense of timing. How long to hold a shot, when to zoom in or out, when to use the reverse angle, above all how to carry an audience through an experience seem more helpful as a way into his techniques than any conventional analysis. He is fascinated by the way a musician can bend time, not only rhythmically but hypnotically so that, although his best works are intense, they never try the patience of the listener and appear to be about half their actual length in performance. Even when the musical relationships seem difficult to explain, ideas follow each other with the kind of inevitability of the strains in a Strauss waltz and this feature is common to his film scores and his more personal projects. His mastery of movement seems to me undeniable and literal repetitions are rare. No suggestion of minimalism darkens any of the scores I have heard: ultimately Man is the measure not the machine.
Wind instruments have a central rôle in Strahan's sound world and the 1995 piece entitled Voodoo Fire is scored for clarinet with percussion and keyboard (piano & synthesizer). The combination of an exotic title and the promise of accessibility might suggest a piece of tourist-chic. In fact, Strahan is no seller of postcards: his approach to Caribbean music is not to use it as an exotic backdrop for his own portrait, rather to involve himself in a kind of speaking in tongues. Over and again we find this composer finds himself in the Other, that can be a person, a city or a civilization. This dissolving of the ego prohibits any sense of distance and the ordinary musical perspectives of Western music are replaced by a world where foreground and background do not resolve themselves.
Unlike most East-West rapprochements, Strahan is not interested in arresting time so much as bending it. This goes for rhythms, where he discovered that jazz had rules of notation that had not been made explicit before. It also goes for the curious way his music seems to telescope time; the lack of ordinary landmarks coupled with an avoidance of monotony at all costs, makes time fly by. I don't mean this as a vague compliment so much as a psychological fact. There are plenty of notes but none of them seem to be there for merely framing and structural purposes. Taking the bones out of music ought to result in an amorphous mess but Strahan has his own structures and it would appear he turns contrast or relief of the ear into a constructional principle. I suspect, consciously or not, he is applying some aspects of film theory to the business of carrying listeners through the experience. Voodoo Fire is intense music, always actively evolving and moving forward.
The performance by clarinetist Alan Vivian is simply stunning and his high level of commitment is typical of the artists Strahan writes for. Strahan is seeking to push classical performers into a region where the composer, performer and listener meet in the notes as events happening in the here and now, a white hot fusion more associated with jazz. The remarkable thing is how much of that is captured on these recordings, taken from the first performances.
At a time when many composers are greedily plucking trophies from the past to adorn their own nests, Strahan's relations with Beethoven and the Classical style are unlikely to cause raised eyebrows. Taking the eruption of earlier styles for granted might serve to obscure the fact that his music really acts a plastic medium in which the classical spirit shows itself and dissolves. The expectations we have of classical style are deeply entrenched, however, so that Strahan's willingness to treat all his visiting spirits as equals does not prevent some of those spirits refusing to recognize the new democracy. Instead of a new union being forged, the listener may feel that the String Quartet, The Key, 1980 - 81, is pulled apart in the tug of styles, beginning with a very twentieth century fever which a double theme and variations never really heals. The highly subjective nature of Strahan's art means that sometimes a piece may be held together by sheer willpower. He senses affinities which others may miss and the risks are that the fusion which has taken place in his imagination has not entirely made it onto the page. The love-affair that gave rise to The Key seems to have thrown him off-kilter and the Quartet has fault lines right through it. It seems to be a work more of fissure than fusion but, to add to Strahan's puns, an absolutely Key work in his development.
What breaks open in The Key finds a new synthesis in The Princess, the Clarinet Quintet which followed directly. Though the first three movements each bear double titles: Profane Love-Romantic Love; Constancy-Deceit; Flirtation-Isolation and the Finale is actually entitled Fusion of Opposites, the music unfolds from the start in a happy equilibrium. Conflict is resolved in the work to such a degree that it can be heard and enjoyed as light music. It has enjoyed the status of a contemporary favourite in Australia with frequent broadcasts of the recording, made some twenty years ago. Happy music is the easiest to underrate but Strahan has underlined the essential unity of The Key and The Princess by issuing them as an album, adorned with the twin portraits of his muse Lorna Key and Beethoven's patron Princess Lichnowsky. The fact that the listener unprompted would never connect the piece with the Princess is a mysterious proof of the degree to which it represents an integration of opposites. It may be a case of cherchez la femme but this fluency is the mark of a composer at a moment when everything is found. The success of the piece is ensured by the clarinet playing of Alan Vivian, who bestrides the jazz and classic idioms with complete assurance. Here is a chamber piece that should be brought to the attention of clarinettists worldwide and one that could serve to banish the lingering fears some listeners have that chamber music is music for only a few people.
The year 1788 was as significant for Australia as the following year was to be to Europe. So the bicentenial year commission for a piano trio seemed to aim at a prelapsarian music. His fluent and confident embrace of the classic-romantic style seems to have puzzled and annoyed in equal measure. "Café music", sneered one critic, though the same charge has been levelled at Dvorák and Brahms. In fact, the composer also includes an Australian folktune as a dart aimed at the influential music theorist, whose pronouncement that a national music in Australia could never be founded on traditional melodies irritated him. For Strahan, the classical-romantic style is a human space that is never far away from popular idioms.
Unkind voices suggested that the well-heeled corporate audience who were present at the champagne-fuelled premiere would not have been scared by the piece. Any such cynicism would be untypical of the composer. Mischief is never far away, however. Though the piece more properly belongs in the series of chamber works which emerged from Strahan's personal sense of identification with the past. If the Clarinet Quintet was the most contemporary, the Trio is the most classical. This time travelling is not regarded as any more respectable than incorporating jazz. Yet the uncertainty is in the critic or the listener. Strahan, surprisingly is not using the past as a disguise or to show his connoisseurship. Instead of a mask or a series of antique tricks, Strahan offers a fully working Piano Trio. The listener may be reminded of Borges story in which he imagines a twentieth century author who rewrites Don Quixote word for word. Though identical, he concludes that the modern text may be the more subtle and fragrant. When Strahan expands into the past this way, he is refusing to accept barriers of time as well as space.
If Strahan turns most frequently to the flute and clarinet to carry his lyric lines, he has explored the string quartet in The Key and The Princess. Two important virtuoso pieces for cello show what he can do with a solo string instrument for protagonist. China Spring, 1989 uses National melodies to reflect the massive hopes and fears of an incident that captured the imagination of the whole watching world, when an unarmed student defied the tanks in Tianenmen Square. If a description of the piece leads the listener to fear an 1812 Overture, the reality lacks any tub-thumping simplicities. The piece seems to represent the darkling sense of inner strength which crystalizes in an individual at a moment of total commitment. As the National themes drift in and out of the picture, we are left with the solo song of the proud individual, the solo cello being a natural soliloquist. In its representation of a historic moment, it has some kinship with Charles Ives whose From Hanover Square North at the End of a Tragic Day, the Voice of the People again Arose recalls an impromtu hymn heard in New York on the sinking of the Lusitania.
We have only to think of the Bachianas Brasilieras of Villa Lobos to recall how the sturdy German forms have hybridized with Southern Hemisphere warmth to produce some glorious sports. Strahan's Solo Cello Suite of 1991 celebrates twentieth century dance forms. The Cuban and Argentine orquestas tipicas did not usually feature the cello but Strahan's skeletal Tango rattles away in a vein that sounds authentic. A growly boogie-woogie puts us in mind of the power-house left hand of Albert Ammonds while the Blues allows itself a touch of the falsetto wail. The Suite ends with probably the world's first and only Fugal Jive. Strahan calls it "frankly frivolous" but there is a serious questioning why the supposedly austere art-form of the solo suite should have become so remote from modern dance. This is a gutsy piece which concentrates on the deeper regions of the cello's range.
In 1987, the celebrated mezzo-soprano Lauris Elms commissioned Strahan to write a song-cycle to celebrate the city of Sydney. Premiered at the Sydney Opera House, the cycle entitled Rose of the Bay, scored for mezzo, piano and clarinet turned out to be one of the composer's most substantial scores. No picture postcard, Strahan's tribute to Sydney, for which he also wrote the words, is a work of over fifty minutes duration, declamatory in style and in the grand manner. Miss Elms exemplary diction and astonishing chest register are used to explore the city, evoked as the traces of a love affair. It is more of a deconstruction than an ego-trip, however and as much of the ego as the city. The identity seen as a succession of city landscapes, reflected in the loved one is eventually resolved in the evocation of the past. At the end, by touching the keys of a historic organ the protagonist-composer establishes a psychometric contact with another time and place: Beethoven and the memory of his rejection of Napoleon becomes yoked with the notion of a marriage proposal declined.
The cycle is challenging from the start, setting lines about Sydney as a music-hall joke-name with a declamatory intensity that suggests some kind of visionary trance. The word-setting is deliberately rhetorical: the text with its recognizable present-day images of the international decor of the city is not matched by demotic music. Miss Elms becomes a kind of Erda, bringing up these images of a modern city from a distance, meditating on a modern love affair that causes the hard lines of a city to melt. The promise of a music-hall song in the lines "Yes, we have no relationship" only seems to serve to emphasis the distance from any popular idiom.
Rose of the Bay is a claustrophobic experience with something of the determined awkwardness of a real vision about it. I do not know what Sydney made of it: the composer takes the very notion of a place in order to break it down. As a love-gift to Sydney it seems very equivocal and the composer seems to delight in defeating every expectation we might have of a song cycle. But Strahan is the sort of composer whose rewards are unexpected and a work which looks as if it might be an occasional piece of purely local interest proves to be an uneasy universal vision. It is a demanding work which is rewarding to think about, even if it is not a comfortable listening experience. And what does the critic find staring out at him from the middle of the text but an image of the critic as lover and hater in a scene which suggests a sort of reverse Harriet Smithson effect of a piece on the loved one? So even the critical listener finds his response somehow implicated and included in the piece, as if looking into it he will see and hear something of himself responding.
By yoking the here and now with intimations of eternity Strahan could be labelled a Sydney Transcendentalist but he achieves a fusion where Charles Ives preferred a collage. Sentiment is a local event in Ives, overlaid by the competing cheerfulness of marches, hymns and other found material. Strahan's music unfolds in real time and nostalgia is not an issue where all places and all times can be subsumed into a moment of expanded consciousness.
From finding himself in other times, other places, other cultures Strahan could move on to the population of an imaginary space. The Atlantis myth and the Prometheus legend fused together to hover on the horizon as a massive operatic project, Eden in Atlantis. Not just an opera but a cycle of operas. It turns out not to be a megalomaniac vision so much as an inclusive one: this earth under two moons would attempt to encompass pure science and pure sensuality. Legendary matriarchal civilizations and the disobedient intellect are to meet in an Edenic garden. Though Strahan derived his scenario from extensive reading in alternative cosmologies - themselves a disobedient science - it would seem as if he found there a quintessentially Australian epic. This is the corresponding movement which testifies to its integrity almost as a mathematical proof: he begins with the notions of difference, imagining an earth tilted on its pole, a pattern of continents unusually fused and finds something very close to home. It is the impact of opposing civilizations and ideas, a reworking of the most fundamental colonial experience in which an advanced technology is potentially both creative and destructive. In time too, these inhabitants of early civilization turn out to be working out their destinies against a backdrop where gay and feminist lifestyles reflect modern mores.
Pieces of Eden in Atlantis began to emerge in the early 1990s. Atlantis for flute/alto flute and piano was the first of these preparatory studies. Strahan's ambitions may seem visionary but he has always been a practical working composer. Atlantis has become a place in the mind to be approached with the available means. A commission for a flute piece was therefore the starting point for the exploration of this exotic internal Eden. To call it a lyrical scene would be to misrepresent it and it is not a flute sonata. Rather imagine a constant metamorphosis in which myths are delineated in the cries of birds. Though its duration is around twenty minutes, the intensity remains high throughout. The première performance by Belinda Gough at her degree recital in 1992 is a remarkable thing to have been caught on tape. The microphone is badly placed: it captures the breath of the player throughout and it is unflattering to her tone. Yet the electricity is palpable. There are sections when the tension rises so high, you feel the performance will collapse; instead it moves up a further gear. Strahan demands a lot from his performers - it is not music anyone would approach halfheartedly. Players rise to the demands with an answering commitment to his music, happy to be pioneers in Atlantis.
A further step along the road to Eden came in 1995 when Strahan unveiled the soprano scene for Eve. In the complete libretto which he drafted in 2001, Eve has become Eva and the scene, which she relives in the 1995 score is moved onto the stage and into the present tense but I think we can assume the ecstatic music will be reused. Scored for soprano with flute/alto flute and piano, it describes a mystical coupling under the light of two moons in eclipse. Eve's lover in this Eden is not Adam, though he is unnamed in the scene, but a figure called Daemon. The sensuality of the language with its images of ripe figs and turquoise skies promises a heady experience and so it proves.
Fortunately there is nothing flyblown about Strahan's romanticism and Eve's blissful caroling is a lively as it is joyous. It is a very liberating ecstasy in which the female voice and flute entwine in the spiritual play as in mad scenes of yore. The association of the flute with the hovering spirit is a powerful one. Instances such as the Missa Solemnis come to mind or the serene final pages of Mahler's Tenth. Strahan's play with the female voice, trills and roulades is both within a tradition, therefore, yet also outside it. Strahan makes huge demands of his singer, requiring the agility of a coloratura and the attack of a Valkyrie. Liza Rintel, the soloist of the first performance, recorded live, has both. To ask for honey on top is not so much a criticism of her as a comment on the superhuman demands of the rôle. The scoring of large sections for piano, singer and flute all in their highest registers makes me yearn to hear Strahan let loose on a full orchestra but, as with the Hammerklavier Sonata or the Grosse Fuge, the strenuousness is part of the point. The creatures that take flight are not nightingales and twittering things but large sweeping Southern birds with an iridescent plumage. This Edenic vision with its dissolution of the subject and the object recalls Marvell's lines:
The mind, that ocean where each kind
Does straight its own resemblance find;
Yet it creates, transcending these,
Far other worlds, and other seas,
Annihilating all that's made
To a green thought in a green shade.
Written in 2000 - 2001, for the clarinettist Alan Vivian, the Clarinet Concerto is a substantial piece in three movements. The author has been privileged to hear the composer's tape of the sequencer score, before the piece receives its première. The first movement finds Strahan closely working his material with a classical discipline. The expansive slow movement is shapely and embraces contrasting material. In the finale, the soloist is given his head to lead a swinging big-band influenced dance. There are signs of a paring-down and tighter discipline in the piece without any peruke-wearing neo-classicism. There is also a sense that the composer has left the right amount of space for the piece to expand under the conditions of a live performance.
Strahan is a self-declared unashamed melodist which is true to the extent that he is a composer who takes a line for a walk and usually with a soloist as protagonist. Continuous melody is a phrase that was queried when Wagner used it: paradoxically to appreciate a long line it needs to be broken up in the manner of a Chopin or Bellini. For Strahan the melody begins in the first bar and ends in the last - regular phrases would tend to become detached entities and these are integral organic pieces.
Visitors to the Revolve website will gain a glimpse of Derek Strahan's wide range of interests: there are essays on racism, sexual politics and Bing Crosby, whose status as the key figure in the development of twentieth century popular music is increasingly appreciated. Strahan as usual was ahead of the game. Wearing his polemical hat, he has declared war on arts-bureaucracy and wittily costed the price of a refusal for funding. It is part of a series of challenges, where he has sought to engage in meaningful debate about how far society wants to be known to posterity for its indifference and neglect of living artists. Today's moneybags do not appear to be using their wealth with as much imagination as the aristocrats of old. So he has come up with proposals for a register of practising artists, where they would surrender some of the mysterious freedom of their calling for a bit of help when they need it to develop works. It is a suggestion that could only be made by an artist who knows he will work on anyway. The point is not raised out of mere self interest but with a concern for the kind of messages that such an indifferent attitude sends out. The protest is essentially about the way the individual is ignored in an increasingly corporate world.
As a writer, he finds Beethoven fascinating and mysterious; he suspects we know little and what we think we know is mainly massaged. Looking at dedications and links between works, he finds the Prometheus theme a powerful thread with a dissident implication. Entwined with a political countercurrent he finds the composer's personal and political life are inextricably linked. Not only does he explore the subject in a series of articles, arranging previously known facts in a new and suggestive way but the notion inspires him musically. In a mysterious synchronicity, he finds a striking resemblance between Beethoven's patron Princess Lichnowsky and his own then-beloved Lorna Key. In the throes of a tempestuous affair, he writes not one but two chamber works in celebration: a quartet and a clarinet quintet.
Elsewhere on the site the visitor will find new and curious light shed on Beethoven's relationship with his aristocratic patrons and an essay which develops a plausible case for regarding works of art as essentially gifts of love, like the structures of the bower-bird. It is at this very literal level that Strahan is a complete Romantic: the women in his life have been responsible for the creative juices bubbling up in strange and unexpected ways. For Strahan, like Blake, instinctively associates creativity and sexuality. The grey, the puritanical ,the life-hating, the nit-picking, the grudging with all their life-denying tendencies are to be the subject of his mental fight and he links them to sexual repression.
Strahan is a life-enhancing composer whose works are highly-wrought labours of love, pieces of a paradise entirely of his own making. His achievement is unusual and is not to be taken in at a glance. While fusion is now almost a buzzword and the classical ivory tower under siege from all directions, it is becoming very difficult to separate wishes from realities. The physical, the emotional and the intellectual are so seldom in the frame together that we may not immediately recognize the achievement of a composer who never lets them out of his sight. By addressing the Whole Man, Strahan is flying in the face of the internalized defeatism and cynicism which underlies the concept of Art as an expensive luxury. His wholehearted music deserves to find a welcome in the wider world.
© James Beswick Whitehead, 2001
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