Spot the Gum

I am no expert at identifying the many different eucalypts around Australia, and do not want to bang on forever about trees.

However, in the course of the TSSS I took early morning walks before the heat of the day and enjoyed discovering unknown territories like Glebe and Annandale. The density and maturity of the housing in these inner suburbs renders the discovery of a little park or open green space a particularly delightful surprise. [The little house shown is actually blessed with more than average elbow room, many houses being narrow-fronted attached terraces in various states ranging from sad disrepair to proud renaissance - pardon the additional reference.]

Actually, I lied. I have previously explored Annandale to some extent as a potential terrorist but don't remember much other than one bathroom. I must have been 5 or 6; we were still living in Mosman in a nice half-house in Central Avenue with the black baby grand with a cracked sounding board - surely everyone does that?  I went to stay for a day or so with a cousin in (the plot thickens) Annandale. 

When time came for an evening bath, I was given instructions on the plumbing and ventured into the forbidding world of the old bathroom. A mysterious rusted gas heater with a bewildering array of pipes and pilots, vents and valves, glared down at me from the wall above a chipped enamel bath with lion's feet. One eye on the heater's frowning presence, I struggled in rising panic to get the hot water flowing, but in vain. In fear of retribution I went out to my aunt to seek further advice, to be met not by scolding but by a look of horror, followed by the rapidly disappearing rear view of aunt as she rushed towards the bathroom. The gas was flowing merrily but the malevolent heater had chosen not to light, or maybe I had not lit it, and I had almost succeeded in blowing up the house and half of Annandale.  The memory of an event of such stark terror to a small boy is inevitably a dominant one, so you will surely forgive a suppressed remembrance of its suburban setting.

Back in modern Sydney musing on these events in the distant past, I turned a corner and peeked across a fence: I was delighted to see a stand of tall trees in a college grounds, proud and peaceful amid the traffic noise and heat. Having in a previous blog mentioned the spotted gum, I could hardly resist including this little snapshot. They are surely spotted gums, if not technically Spotted Gum - good on them anyway.

Although the occasional root sweeping up on an angle at the base of the trunk is visible, such as at left foreground, on the whole many species of eucalypt emerge straight from the ground, maintaining an only slightly reducing diameter as they climb. An impression that they are cylinders or poles just standing on the landscape creeps up on you. Several Australian painters (Arthur Boyd, Fred Williams) have picked this up and represented such trees with a single straight brush-stroke.

The Renaissance Happened

If you were dedicated enough to read the earlier post 'Cats in January' about the Tallis Scholars Summer School and just can't wait to know more, rest assured that a week full of Renaissance a cappella really happened from 18-25 Jan at St John's College within the Sydney University, and read on ...

Let's start at the end: how many concerts have you given on 40 degree C days? Maybe that's why they built these traditional churches so heavily; it was cooler inside. The final show was pretty good from the inside looking out, and audience reports were glowing. What more can one ask?

Actually, a little peace and quiet during the week would be good, too, so you can really hear the ethereal tones of the beautiful people that surround you in full harmony.

Did we get it? Well no, just have a look at this construction site within the compound. Note that a stone's throw would reach the far side of the new accommodation block (ours next year?), the near side being just outside the window of my spartan 1960s style dormitory (seen in photographic evidence for artistic verisimilitude, as G and S would say). No need for an alarm clock, anyway.

Never mind - on with the workshop. Warm-ups every morning, starting often by lying on the floor, progressing to vocal exercises but finishing with weird and wonderful dances to strong beat. That's some sort of broad hint to sing in time during rehearsals, always a trick in polyphonic syncopated parts and rarely achieved to Peter Phillips's satisfaction. 

A sneaky smile at the final chord at the end of a long hard session is about as good as it gets. Then again, Peter has been doing this with notable success all round the world for decades, so he knows how it should be done. No Cats in January and we got a few nods and beams, so there. 

Here, Peter(dark shirt) rounds us up in St John's chapel for a three-hour workout on several pieces for the final concert, the White Lamentations in 5 parts; or Sancte Deus by Thomas Tallis in only 4 parts but quite a tricky little number I assure you. This year we concentrated on a theme of English composers of the Renaissance, although small groups were often heard going hard at Victoria, Schutz or Palestrina. Peter explains that one of the distinctions from the earlier era of Flemish music, together with different style of harmony, is that the English generally favoured a basic structure of five parts minimum, going up from there. 

People were left to arrange small ensembles during the afternoons. The small groups like the one shown here, singing in a circle for clarity and contact, had one or two voices per part. This is a lovely sound, demanding close connection with each other - and rather leaving nowhere to hide if you get it wrong. The Tallis Scholars themselves almost invariably sing with two voices per part, as you may have observed if you have heard them at one of their concerts. We were left to choose our own music from a substantial library and all performed on Friday night for each other - a sort of peer review, albeit before a friendly audience.

The tutors shown here (Peter, Jan Coxwell and Patrick Craig) each had a group as well. Patrick sings alto and countertenor, and gives the start notes (around 600 so far) at TS concerts. 

For family readers I now indulge in a short listing of the works and small groups in which I performed at the sharing session. Groups' names were definitely tongue-in-cheek - I rather liked Shutz first, thinks later - or conveying an inside joke, which I may or may not explain. The reader who judges such detail superfluous should skip the bullets, go direct to the foot of the page and start composing laudatory comments and arranging a world tour for us.

• The Quakers sang one of William Byrd's shortest but most dramatic pieces, Terra Tremuit. This piece in 5 parts conveys the quaking of the earth at some dramatic moment in the church lectionary.
• The AAAs without valium rolled out a masterful version of O Lord in thy wrath by Orlando (I bet he got stick in primary school) Gibbons
• Six out of Eight was in fact an octet - I'm still trying to work out whether I may have been one of the two miscreants or not but actually, I thought we pulled it off in full 101% style. We sang a piece by Giovanni Gabrieli (good English name that one) for double quartet called O magnum mysterium. Yes, it was a great mystery how we got there given the wobbles in the final rehearsal.
• Chorus Maximus (we kept adding singers to bolster the sound) knocked off Byrd's Miserere mihi Dominus; I don't think anyone noticed my bum notes.
• Finally, though many groups brought a tear to our eyes, JaEd à 12 was the pièce de résistance for me, a superb rendition of Tomas Luis de Victoria's 12-part Agnus Dei from the Missa Laetatus Sum. This is for three quartets, sometimes all voices ensemble, sometimes just four. 

Not a dry seat in the house, to be sure.

Nature calls

Not far from anywhere in Canberra you walk into open land, often nature parks or reserves.

Usually heading for open grass land, the walker's favoured destinations are hills in between suburbs. The hills are open because someone charged with the responsibility of bringing the winning town plan of 1912 into fruition (or was it Walter Burley Griffin himself?) chose to make a rule that no-one could build above a contour line around 600 metres altitude, so the hilltops are gloriously undeveloped. Good thinking, since in most other cities there's a rush to grab the high ground and charge double or put a church on it. 

The rolling grassland around the Canberra area is sparse, the topsoil of this ancient continent well weathered or non-existent, the trees various sorts of eucalypt and wattle, and the undergrowth scrubby. After a few showers of rain, however, the grass starts to take notice; and 'full many a flower is born to blush unseen', as Thomas Gray's Elegy would have it, but not to 'waste its sweetness on the desert air' - as long as we continue to walk the ridges and admire their collective efforts. 

Reminders of a serious bushfire that swept through from the west some 6 years ago, destroying several lives, properties and 500 houses, are still clearly evident. Fire is a natural, in some ways necessary (for regeneration and seed germination), part of the Australian environment, however, and the beauty returns quickly. Birds are heard and seen everywhere, usually black or brown, sometimes a startling red or green of a parrot but often, as in the case of these pink and grey cockatoos, soft and gentle colours that more readily match the smoky greys on which the Australian palette is based. 

Don't get me going on that interesting topic.  The so-called Australian impressionists of the Heidelberg school and later artist like Arthur Boyd and Fred Williams; in Canada the Group of Seven and Tom Thompson, all spent weeks in their own  countrysides trying to absorb, capture and interpret the essential colours that defined the look of their natural environment. In Australia, the heat haze, long distances, dry dusty climate and the resultant vegetation gives the palette a washed or smoky grey feel. In cold Canada by contrast (and alpine Switzerland too no doubt - but other local experts may write more authoritatively on that subject), the dark green pines, brilliant white snow, dark rock formations and deep blue lakes led artists to favour much stronger primaries and contrasts.

Meanwhile, back near the ranch, a walkers' daily encounter includes the Eastern Grey 'roo, often still carrying a well-grown joey in its pouch long after the little terror should have been turfed out of home to fend for itself ( - which Gen was that again?). It's not unusual to see the long hind legs, rather than an inquisitive snout, protruding from the longsuffering mother's (tautology?) pouch. 

The kangaroos will allow you to approach only so far before  hopping off amongst the ubiquitous eucalypts, whose iconic leaves, instantly recognisable to Aussies the world over, are surprisingly short and rounded in the young tree.  

And back at the ranch itself, the beautiful wood of this oiled bench (well known to some readers) is a spotted gum, a variety that grows in a long strip along the east coast. But then again, that depends on which spotted gum you mean, since there are several varieties amongst the hundreds of eucalypts and related species - there were 606 of them in 1934 and now running at around 800.

 

Cats in January

The advent of Christmas and the associated holiday festivities is but one highlight of the long Australian summer. Another, much less known, is the annual Tallis Scholars Summer School held during slow hot January at St John's College, University of Sydney. The TSSS is for people who like to sing unaccompanied Renaissance music for several parts, which is the specialty of the Tallis Scholars and their director, Peter Phillips.

Their mission seems to be not just to sing everything singable from this period - say the century from about 1550 through the 1600s - but also to turn a blinkered and uneducated modern world away from its lightweight and evanescent fascinations, and to remind us of the beauties of Renaissance polyphony. It works for me, I have to say, though I don't mind a good jazz session either.

The beautiful manuscript shown here, which can be found in the small library of the Duomo in Siena, is an antiphonary (or large-print edition chant book), transcribed by some diligent monk in the 15th century. Confession time: strictly speaking it's at least a hundred years older than the music of the Renaissance   And while I am at it, it's quite inappropriate on entirely another score (no pun intended); it's not polyphony at all, having only one part or line of music. And finally, by the time of the Renaissance this attractive and mysterious square notation had gone out of fashion, not least because while it could indicate whether the tune went up or down and by how much, there's no hint as to how long each note should be. OK I admit it - it has nothing to do with the subject other than the fact that it's old music.

But hey, I love the atmospherics and the calligraphy. And what about when they really get going and play fast and loose with the coloured ink quills and gold leaf and all - hang the expense, surely some rich Prince is paying? 

However, in those days around 1500 there was a general feeling that the dark ages had not produced the creative best. Looking back nostalgically to the classical era and feeling the new yearnings of humanism, leaders of town and gown alike felt that music was not doing justice to great poetry and ideas:

“You know how much music was valued among those good ancients as the finest of arts. With it they worked great effects that today we do not. Today … with certain wails, bellows and bleating …  they sound like cats in January.”

So wrote one Bernardino Cirillo of Santa Casa di Loreto in February 1549, presumably during a long hard winter. That sentiment was the incentive that drove some of the giants of secular and sacred music during these Renaissance years to write some magical and inspiring works. So that's why I started here, a century or so early.

Back to the Future

Peter Phillips, the founding director of the 'a cappella superstars' the Tallis Scholars  with dozens of acclaimed CDs to his credit, comes out from London to run the TSSS. Peter's knowledge of music of this era is immense and he is full of insights that bring new life and meaning to the pages of sterile 'dots'. He's accompanied and assisted by two other experienced singers from the Scholars. 

About 60 of us will split into various groupings of various sizes and voices and sing all day and until 10 at night for a week. We sing evensong at Christ Church St Lawrence on the Thursday of that week, then a big concert in Oxford St on the final Saturday night. O yes, and a party to follow.

Quite a bit of the music to be sung is in Latin, with some in English.  The aforementioned munificent Prince presumably did not pay translators, since they all knew the Latin in those days, or if they didn't, probably just as well. And of course there's some music on the menu by the good Thomas Tallis Esq. his-self, who lived 1505 - 1585. Actually, that's not a bad innings for those days, considering Byrd and Tallis were variously in or out of favour depending on whether the reigning monarch decided to be Catholic or Protestant that day. Heads rolled for lesser indiscretions. He tended to keep his Latin masses up his sleeve while the king was persecuting Catholics.

For example, from the Choral Public Domain Library, see an 8-part work by Henry Purcell. We shall no doubt be singing this little number; in fact I would not mind swinging it, but it's probably not done in this august company. Other composers might include William Byrd, Robert White and the Spanish composer Tomas Luis de Victoria from around that era.

Other works are frequently in 5 or 6-part harmony, sometimes 8, so one rather has to concentrate as you will know. These days we tend to allocate them to soprano, alto, tenor, bass line one or two like the example above, but in those days it was often just parts for various high and low voices, take your pick. (The double staves below the sung parts are a reduction for keyboard for rehearsal only if desired; but at a TSSS it's infra dig to resort to such props, as you are expected to be a good enough singer and sight reader not to need help. Gulp!) 

After a bit of practice, the outcome is usually quite enthralling in the good acoustics at St John's and the other halls. An acquired taste perhaps, but all in all it's a great week of letting the rest of the world go by. Not as good as the real Tallis Scholars, I'm sure - but I hope we don't sound like winterised cats this January.

Trees here and there

There may be nothing new under the sun, but rediscovery is fun - like certain people who at an advanced age suddenly put on green goggles, for example, and review the world from a different perspective. And why not? What my aged Aunt Helen with a wicked gleam in her eye used to call her delayed maturation.

A beautiful Christmas present book about trees reminds me how marvellous these great stalky creations are. The Kimberley has its share of odd ones, from these tall palm and grass tress that manage to grow right up in the rock crevices, to the boab, or baobab, or just upside down tree. A famous, now infamous, very old and fat boab tree in the Kimberley was used for many years as a prison cell. By way of contrast, the tall columns in the Eglise des Jacobins in Toulouse are supposed to have been inspired by the spreading palm.

The Wisteria is hardly a tree at all - but it tries pretty hard sometimes. This one is at an historic homestead called 'Micalago', past Michelago off the Cooma Road. It was built in the mid 1830s, this verandah being of the 'great room' added in 1880 or so. Later, painter George Lambert (born St Petersburg 1873, moving to Australia when he was 14) came to work here, completing his portrait  'The Squatter's Daughter' at Micalago in 1923. [The blue shutters are rather reminiscent of the favoured colours for the volets in Provence in the south of France - the Continental influence?]

Meanwhile back at the ranch, another Continental touch, the lovely birch tree, attracts some very un-European birds. Crimson rosellas apparently rather like the catkins that grow here early in the summer and are often to be seen enjoying the pickings in our front garden. 

Readers based in Europe will seldom see such a colourful sight, although it must be admitted that your favoured photographic records probably include marvelous ancient trees that are a hundred or so times the age of these young saplings. Many of these are of course the ubiquitous plane tree. Seemed like a good idea at the time to line those French country roads with them but cars got bigger and faster and the gaps didn't.

And finally, where would you keen photographers be without that overhanging tree, its type or name ignored as irrelevant but whose hanging foliage provides just the compositional addition - just the frame or line you need - to set up your award-winning photograph perfectly?

[Sunken punt hulls at Isles-sur-la-Sorgue. Don't know about the tree.]

Hot New Year by the Lake

Canberra has been unseasonably cool until Christmas; so a hot day early in the New Year, after a suitably late but musical NYE celebration a day or so earlier, was ideal to laze by the lake with friends. The wind was quite light, always a consideration for one who is torn between the twin but warring delights of sailing, on the one hand, and rowing on the other. So rowing and paddling were the go for the day. 

Younger intrepid explorers in particular took every opportunity to paddle into the reeds and bushes around Lake Burley Griffin, finding birds' nests and other less wholesome items, spurred on by recent news stories of someone who supposedly came across a family of six platypus playing around in the lake. Hmm.

A benefit of the cooler and rainy days late in 2008 has been prolific and glorious gardens, flowers and berries to be enjoyed at every turn. This prompted us to drive out to some open gardens at Bungendore and Braidwood, an hour or so away in the open country

, to see some historic and beautiful country properties.

2009 is already shaping up to be hot and dry so within a few weeks the verdant lawns and gardens will be looking distinctly tired and dry. That's life in a hot dry land - so we enjoy tales from family overseas of snow, skiing and skating and such pursuits all the more!