If the Song Company were listed on a stock exchange, it would be a hot technology company like Twitter or Apple. Calling this vocal ensemble a choir is like calling an iPhone a mobile. Its CEO/conductor/artistic director Roland Peelman is an inveterate multimedia innovator, lauded by critics and sought after by composers and artists. The Song Company’s varied and eminent catalogue of collaborators include poet Les Murray, choreographer Kate Champion, and didgeridoo player and composer William Barton. In August, comedian Drew Forsythe joins them for a rare revival of L’Amfiparnasso, a 16th-century musical comedy of madrigals and commedia dell’arte characters.
The Song Company’s repertoire of choral music spans the recent millennium, but its reputation for the extraordinary was made on contemporary compositions, many purpose-built for them, and most incorporating other forms of expression, such as poetry, dance, and video. “We’re not just singing heads,” says Peelman. “We use spoken word a lot, and the singers move around. Our instrument is not just that little thing inside our throat.”
Peelman recoils from the dull and obvious with an energy that would make Thomas Edison envious. The Song Company’s end-of-year specials, which usually compete with two or three Messiahs, are a spiritual smorgasbord of exotic carols, thought-provoking readings and joyous cabaret fun; so at Easter no subscriber expects either of the usual Bach Passions from them. This year on Holy Wednesday they premiere a major work by Brisbane composer Gerard Brophy titled Gethsemane. The long and complex collaboration required to realise this hybrid of percussion, pitched instruments, movement and spoken word is typical of their development and rehearsal process.
“Years ago I started talking to Gerard about the Lamentations of Jeremiah,” Peelman recalls. He’s not referring to any of the landmark choral masterpieces of Thomas Tallis, Lassus, or William Byrd, but the text these Renaissance composers took from the Hebrew Bible, commemorating the destruction of the temple of Jerusalem (“Is this the city that men call the perfection of beauty, the joy of the whole earth?”) Peelman says he “always felt it a shame that these great texts were given fantastic treatments in the 16th century, but never really since. They are about suffering, destitution, losing human dignity, losing self-worth. They are very graphic, explicit, taunting, provocative even.”
But Brophy’s musical response was 5,000 kilometers from what Peelman expected. “What’s come out of Gerald’s mind is not a traditional setting, not another attempt to match Tallis. He has set it not in Israel, not Egypt, not Australia, but five spots in Calcutta, at five times of the day. He’s conjured up images of a child left to care for the rest of his family. An old man is waiting to die without anyone to help him, or to mourn for him. Five moments of bitter abandonment, of extreme poverty.”
So why is the piece named after the olive grove on the edge of Jerusalem mentioned in Mark 14? (“They went to a place called Gethsemane, and Jesus said to his disciples, ‘Sit here while I pray… My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death,’ he said to them. ‘Stay here and keep watch.”‘ Peelman explains: “There are snippets of references to the garden where Christ had his moment of loneliness. It’s where he confesses to being frightened, a moment of humanity, of knowing something much bigger than oneself. But the main thread of his piece is Indian.”
Several florid descriptions of Calcutta by Brophy are spoken, along with instruments redolent of India such as the singing bowl, gongs, a snake-charming saxophone, vibraphone and marimba, as well as an electronic track of a sampled church bell, digitally manipulated. “The music sits somewhere between the ancient traditions of both the West and the East, and what we now call world music,” Peelman says.
The choreography of the singers’ movement plus a solo dance performance are the task of the suitably international Martin del Amo, trained in Germany and Japan, now working in Sydney. He describes his goal as “such a turmoil that it comes almost to a standstill. It’s in the realm where one is in a state of such high anxiety that one can’t control the body.” Jason Catlett, Time Out
