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Lifeflow Studio
8 / 259 Glen Osmond Rd,
Frewville SA 5063
AUSTRALIA
T: 61 8 8379 9001
F: 61 8 8379 9012
E: info@lifeflow.com.au
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Ross Edwards' Symphony
 Australian composer, Ross Edwards, has based his latest symphony, The Promised Land, on Lifeflow visualisations which were
originally derived from the Tibetan tradition and adapted for our
contemporary life in Australia. His friendship with Graham began
when they were students studying music together at the University
of Adelaide. Their paths separated when Ross went to continue his
studies in England and Graham went to France.
Meeting up again many years later, they discovered that, in different
ways, they had both discovered that meditation was at the centre
of their lives. Ross had set out to help establish a tradition of
Australian meditation music, and
Graham to establish
an Australian tradition of meditation teaching. They wanted to bring
what they were doing together, and this is an example of how Ross
interprets, through his music, his experience of the Lifeflow meditations:
"Compassion", "Healing Mind and Body", "Mind
and Body Washing", "The Dance of Life" and "Inner
Joy".
The premier of Ross's fifth symphony, THE PROMISED LAND, will take place
in the Sydney Opera House Concert Hall on Wednesday October 18 and Thursday
October 19. The Sydney Symphony Orchestra will be conducted by David Porcelijn
and Lyn Williams will direct the Sydney Childrens Choir. This large-scale
work includes a setting of a text by David Malouf.
Symphony No. 5 - The Promised Land (2004-5)
Ross Edwards.
It seems to me that a world dominated by hard-nosed economic experimentation
needs music more than ever to help restore some essential qualities of
life that have become marginalised: a spirit of place, of openness, a
sense of community and a recognition of the need to develop and sustain
our own home-grown culture - all values which can, I believe, make for
harmonious coexistence. My fifth symphony, like the other four, reflects
my experience of being Australian in today's world, and is a personal
response to the political and spiritual climate of the times. The title
The Promised Land is both utopian and ironic.
There are five interconnected movements, some of whose titles make obvious
reference to present-day Australia. Four of them are loosely modelled
on Tibetan Buddhist essence visualisations which have been adapted for
Australian use by my friend Graham Williams, pianist, Tibetan lama and
founder of the Lifeflow Meditation Centre. Graham introduced them to me
during the symphony's gestation period and I was astonished by their relevance
to the music I was starting to imagine. Within this framework my essential
symbolic language is consolidated: shapes and patterns distilled from
the natural environment as well as references to musical cultures of South-East
Asia, pre-Renaissance Europe (plainchant) and other works of mine; and
these interplay - especially in the third movement - with fresh material
appropriate to the context.
- 1. Compassion. (Chenrezig). Calm, loving but sad, surrounded by rainbow
light.
- 2. Healing. Subtitled 'Scene by the Brook'- a reference to the corresponding
movement in Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony - this movement is pervaded
by recorded water sounds. I've fused two Buddhist visualisations: Vajra
Sattva - mind and body washing - a light shower of sunlit rain; and Green
Tara - healing the body and emotions. A stream flows through an acacia
forest.
- 3. The Dance of Life. (Vajra Yogini). 'A wild female, both peaceful and
wrathful, dancing on a corpse, naked, with a short, curved sword cutting
through all ideas. She has a crown of five skulls and a necklace of fifty
freshly severed heads. Her hair streams up like fire.' I took this to
be a representation of the life force, equivalent to the dancing Hindu
goddess Kali or the frenzied Dionysian Maenads - and a terrifying symbol
of both the fecundity and destructive power of Mother Nature. An ostinato
adapted from rock music accompanied by an intense red glare (a burning
bush) invite us to break free of the paralysing grip of rationalism and
energize ourselves in the ecstatic world of the senses. As the climax
approaches an alarm sounds: people are breaking out of detention centres!
- 4. Crossing. A calm voyage across a lagoon to an island. This evocation
of a waking dream is no doubt deeply symbolic in some way. The destination
can only be the Promised Land.
- 5. The Promised Land. (Milarepa: Joy). A vision of creative fulfilment
for Australia.'A yogi seated in a cave...his eyes gazing joyfully at you.
He is singing songs of realisation.' The Sydney Children's Choir sings
David Malouf's luminous, subtle words - not so much a song of realisation
as of becoming: a fragile, mysterious vision of wholeness for a virginal
land of promise 'still to be entered, still to be found'.
Symphony No. 5 - The Promised Land was commissioned for the Sydney Symphony
and the Sydney Children's Choir by Symphony Australia, with assistance
from the Australia Council. I'm particularly grateful for the generosity
of Renata and Andrew Kaldor, to whom the work is dedicated and without
whom it could not have been composed. Renata and Andrew were also instrumental
in the commissioning of my Symphony No. 2 - Earth Spirit Songs (1997)
and my Oboe Concerto - Bird Spirit Dreaming (2002), both of which were
also composed for and premiered by the Sydney Symphony in the Sydney Opera
House.
Ross Edwards
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