With Sydney Chamber Choir performing Joe Twist’s Australian Song Cycle this Saturday, the composer shares his inspiration rediscovering Australia’s nature after his career in Hollywood, and in animations, musicals and the concert hall.
As COVID-19 descended, I got the very last Qantas flight out of Hollywood. Moving back in with my parents after 20 years, my lockdown was in beautiful Burleigh Heads with the beach and rainforest just outside. I continued writing music for the TV series Bluey, and my Hollywood-based work, including the Tom and Jerry movie, producing orchestrations from my old bedroom.
My daily swims back in Burleigh were not only soul nourishing. My works have so often been drawn from my love of beaches, forests, sunsets and other natural wonders, even in LA where I enjoyed stunning west coast sunsets and frequent Pacific swims.
But here the anger surrounding inaction on climate change was palpable to me, especially as communities were still recovering from the 2019-20 bushfires. Returning to the Gold Coast, my appreciation of our natural wonders, the rainforests and astonishing wildlife and bird song, intensified my own anger that we are not doing enough to protect our planet.
Working with my father, a former English teacher, we explored how our unique natural environment and flora and fauna was expressed by our most celebrated poets. An Australian Song Cycle traverses a comprehensive and contrasting array of Australian voices over the last century, with each movement drawing on poets such as Banjo Patterson, Henry Lawson, Judith Wright, Michael Leunig, Les Murray and Oodjeroo Noonuccal.
These poems are rich with distinctly Australian imagery, perfect for a choral setting, each exploring different elements of our natural surround and here scored for choir, piano and cello, I’ve tried to highlight these musically. For Banjo Patterson’s Sunrise on the Coast, I’ve created calm waves of sustained singing, while Henry Lawson’s Andy’s Gone with Cattle is more intimate and impassioned, a tribute to the life of the drover and the struggles of drought. Judith Wright’s Wonga Vine is more mysterious in its description of flowers; leading to bursts of colour and driving rhythms from rapid piano flourishes and florid vocal writing for Michael Leunig’s Magpie and Les Murray’s Jellyfish.
But something new was needed to relate directly to the bushfires. My Dad provided his own poetry for the work, Ashes, which follows the plight of an animal left with no habitat and highlights the shocking statistics of wildlife lost from devastating fires. The rhythmic grooves that painted flocks of lorikeets and magpies earlier in the Cycle now become subdued and poignant as the choir begins chanting startling statistics of wildlife killed: “143 million mammals, 2.46 billion reptiles, 180 million birds, and 51 million frogs.”
The colourful celebration at the outset of the Cycle culminates with Noonuccal’s Time Is Running Out, a passionate response to the destruction of sacred land stolen from First Nations people, and here a vital voice to the work. Earlier lyrical melodies give way to loud, declamatory singing and hammered piano chords for words like “the miner rapes the heart of earth.” With this dramatic music I’ve endeavoured to amplify the need for “truth telling” about the social and environmental atrocities of our history as well as the urgency of our climate crisis. For this Australian Song Cycle, it was imperative that the work reach its climax with Noonuccal’s poem, so that we are left with the poignant, resounding words of an Indigenous voice.
When writing for film or animation, you’re always syncing your music to pictures. In creating a new concert work, it’s more the other way around – the music governs the structure of the piece as it unfolds. What really connects these different projects is the art of using music to tell a story. To be this versatile, it’s important to be able to write fluidly, so I try to view all types and styles of music as having equal value.
Joe Twist’s An Australian Song Cycle commissioned by conductor Sam Allchurch for the Sydney Chamber Choir is part of its concert, The Human Spirit, at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music on Saturday September 23.
Bookings on www.sydneychamberchoir.org