Ross Edwards’ (b. 1943) music represents the culmination of decades of Australian musicians working toward developing a distinctive Australian sound. While Edwards’ personal style has evolved over time, it is important to keep in mind the unifying factor in all of Edwards’ music, his connection to the natural world around him and the Australian culture. Edwards went through different periods in his career that can be demonstrated in different personal styles, including serial, sacred, maninya, enyato, and mantra. Throughout each new style, one hears his overwhelming desire to represent the environment around him through the sounds of the Australian Outback and the cultures that have come to call Australia home. It is through a study of his oeuvre that we can see and hear his development into a composer that embraces non-Western influences and embodies the modern Australian voice.
Early education
Ross Edwards, born in 1943, began his musical career as a teenager taking piano and composition lessons. His love of music and the decision to embark on a musical career was sparked after Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and Liszt’s First Piano Concerto at his first orchestra concert attendance when he was just 13 years old.6 In that same year, 1956, he began taking lessons in piano, theory, and oboe at the New South Wales Conservatorium. This formal training helped him to gain admission to the University of Sydney in 1963 to study composition with Richard Meale. It was Meale’s composition Las Alboradas (1963) that drew Edwards to study with him. Besides Meale, Edwards began to take interest in modernist composers such as Stockhausen, Webern, and Boulez.7 Edwards studied with Meale for only two years before dropping out of school in 1966 to work at the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC) as a dispatch assistant.
While working for the ABC, Edward began pursuing a career as a freelance composer. The performance of his Mobile (1965) at an International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) concert that year earned him a scholarship to study with Sir Peter Maxwell Davies at the University of Adelaide the following year. Then, in 1967, Edwards took composition lessons with Sándor Veress during Veress’s composer-in-residence year at Adelaide. While attending Adelaide he would return home to Sydney during breaks,
In my holidays and work for Peter Sculthorpe, I was actually an apprentice. So I got on the one hand very formal training, and then the practicalities in the long vacation where I’d go and live there and I would do everything like copying music, and just basic things round the house, answering the phone, being a secretary and so on. Fobbing people off, because you had to, in order for him to get sustained concentration, and that was really an apprenticeship, and this is very important.8
This mixture of formal and informal training solidified his desire to finish his education.
In 1969, Edwards completed his Bachelor of Music and began a Master of Music degree in Adelaide. After receiving a Commonwealth Postgraduate Award in 1969, Edwards left Adelaide to continue his education with Maxwell Davies in London.9 Up to this point, Edwards’ compositional output was in the modernist vein: serial, atonal, and very structured. This reflects the avant-garde aesthetic of the time and his musical influences of both Meale and Maxwell Davies.
While in England, Edwards continued to write in an avant-garde style, though with less conviction and considerably less success. He wrote both Monos I for solo cello (1970) and Monos II for solo piano (1970) during his first year in London. While Monos I received favorable reviews, with Monos II he decided to break away from the ultra-structured, pre-compositional techniques that were, up to this point, ingrained in his previous works. Monos II began to demonstrate Edwards’ disillusion with the modernist style in which he had been participating up to this point in his career.10
After suffering from writers block for nearly a year, he moved from London to Yorkshire to be near Australian friends who were studying at The University of York: Ann Boyd, Martin Wesley-Smith, and Allison Bauld.11 His connection to nature as a source for his compositions, so leaving the city seemed to work for a short time. In an interview in 1992, Edwards spoke about this rough period in his early life,
I think the turning-point in my early life as a composer took place in a dank Notting Hill basement towards the end of 1970. I was a postgraduate student in London and I existed only for my work, living on bread and cheese, black coffee, chain-smoking Gauloises, writing music compulsively for twelve-hour stretches and taking pills to sleep I clearly found myself questioning the validity of this course of self-destruction and at the same time that of ‘accredited’ post-war European art music. What, ultimately, was the point of all those neurotic convulsions so meticulously ordered?12
Though his time spent in Yorkshire was ultimately unproductive, Edwards was “awakened to the natural environment as a possible source of compositional inspiration.”13 This connection became increasingly more important throughout the next 20 years of his career. After only one year of living in the English countryside, he decided to move back to Australia and finish his Masters of Music at The University of Adelaide. During his time in Adelaide, Edwards was given the opportunity to study with multiple composers including Richard Meale and Sandor Veress. The variety of influences contributed to his penchant for experimentation.
In 1972, Edwards began to depart from the serial, atonal, and twelve-tone compositional techniques that he previously utilized, and started to lean more toward a minimalist aesthetic.14 Mountain Village In A Clearing Mist and Antifon, both written in 1973, are two works that fit into his new minimal style.15 Stanhope describes Mountain Village In A Clearing Mist as having an “absence of harmonic goals or climaxes, lack of sense of development as normally occurs in the European tradition, and emphasis on timbre,” which harkens to the musical aesthetic of La Monte Young’s Trio for Strings.16 Edwards was also deeply influenced by John Cage, Morton Feldman, and Toru Takemitsu. Mountain Village In A Clearing Mist and Antifon also began to bear the markers of the environmental influences as, “the composer later realized that it was the sounds of nature – the insects, frogs, birds and other creatures – that influenced the sound world.”18 The excerpt below is a demonstration of the elongated static atmosphere that Edwards tried to establish by utilizing long durations, soft dynamics, and an indication of no vibrato.
Example 1. Mountain Village In a Clearing Mist, mms. 8-12.
In 1974, Edwards accepted a teaching position at the University of Sydney. That year also marked the beginning of what has been called his ‘period of silence’ by Paul Stanhope, or his ‘confusion of direction’ by Michael Francis Hannan in their respective writings.19 Edwards found it increasingly difficult to teach full-time and compose. His Five Little Piano Pieces from 1976 comprise his entire musical output from 1974-1977. Ultimately this hiatus from composing proved to be quite helpful as he became more focused on the sounds of the environment and tuning out other traditional musical influences. As he put it,
During this time my only serious listening was done sitting in the bush, listening more carefully than most of us get a chance to do to the natural sounds. It helped me come to terms with the fact that al of the world’s music must have originated, in some way from the sounds of nature… and later, when I started writing again, it was especially the insect patterns and rhythms I’d heard that helped me.20
This continued focus on nature and the sounds of the bush, especially insects and birds, has been a long standing idea, as illustrated in Henry Tate’s Australian Musical Possibilities.21
Henry Tate wrote Australian Musical Possibilities in 1924 when the idea of having an Australian national identity through music had yet to take hold. Tate suggests,
The range and freedom or our choice of resources is unparalleled in all the world’s history, and we have good reason to hope and believe that some day the music of Australian composers will be recognized as national, and take a worthy place in the world’s treasure house of tonal art.22
Edwards’ ‘period of silence’ was brought to an end by moving to Pearl Beach along the central coast in 1978. His house was near both the ocean and a national park where he could wander the bush and devote his time to listening.
Sacred style
Emerging from his period of silence, Edwards developed a minimalist approach, the seeds of which can be found in his aforementioned Mountain Village In a Clearing Mist from 1973. By 1978 Edwards had written Tower of Remoteness and Shadow D-Zone to add to his drone inspired works. Both of these works are meditative in character and are referred to as the origin of Edwards’ ‘sacred’ style.23 The term sacred is not used to denote any religious, or faith based, connotation but rather a state of mind more akin to the Buddhist Zen meditative state.24 Edwards describes himself as a Buddhist and uses the term ‘sacred’ in relation to any of his pieces that contain the following characteristics, “long-held sonorities, silences, slow tempi, mostly quiet dynamics, repetitions of short gestures and subdued mood creating a quiet and contemplative atmosphere.” Edwards describes his sacred style as, “characteristically austere and hermetic, is often called my sacred style because of its alignment with certain oriental traditions of music designed to promote spiritual meditation.”26
Maninya style
Edwards began to transition from a pure ‘sacred’ style into his new maninya style with Laikan, written in 1979.27 The maninya style is, “characterised by rhythmic buoyancy and obsessive, chant-like repetition, faster tempos, tonal or modal harmonies, drone-based harmonic structure, and dance based rhythms it seeks to reintroduce corporeal energy and a sense of levity into ‘serious’ music.28 It naturally invites choreography,” according to an interview with Edwards. Maninya is a word made up by Edwards because he “liked the sounds.”30 Laikan, while still being meditative and predominately still, contains two movements that are, as Hannan describes, sped up versions of Tower of Remoteness. This can be seen in the instrumentation, particularly with the predominance of the clarinet and piano, as well as the motivic writing. The third movement, Oay Laiay e (Ohe Anis!), is especially important to the development of his new style. It is based on a Madagascan folk tune, tonal harmonies, and a faster tempo.
This style allowed Edwards to write music that was not designed solely for academic listeners. Edwards commented,
About 1980, recognizing my inability to work solely on a disembodied spiritual plane, but unwilling to relax the gnomic severity of the Sacred Series, I responded with enthusiasm to my own impulse to leap in a new direction and compose exuberant dance music.31
The first work to be composed fully in the new maninya style is Maninya I, from which the style derives its name. Maninya I (1981), for cello and voice, is composed of repeated cells, or motives, that Edwards had begun to develop in his ‘sacred’ works. However, here the cells are sped up and juxtaposed against one another in varying meters. This freeness of meter and rhythm gives the music a feeling of improvisation and spontaneity. Like the sacred series, Maninya I expanded into an entire series of works.32 The maninya style has also been compared to minimalism. While the sacred series is akin to minimalism due to the slow pace and use of drones, like La Monte Young’s minimalist aesthetic, the maninya series is more related to Steve Reich and Terry Reilly’s ideal of minimalism.
Example 2. Maninya I, mms. 1-11.
A sense of minimalism is demonstrated in the prevalence of tonal or modal harmonies, non-linear based harmonic structures, and extreme repetition of small fragments of music, or cells.33 Due to the repeated use and importance of these cells, both within individual works and across Edwards’ musical output, the small fragments began to be referred to as “icons” in 1994 researchers Michael Francis Hannan and Paul Stanhope. Later, Edwards accepted the term with the understanding that icons are an archetype and archetypes equal the ‘ideal’. When Edwards composes, he eliminates everything he can while retaining only the ideal, essential music.34
In 1983, Edwards became the composer-in-residence at the School of Creative Arts at The University of Wollongong. That same year he was commissioned to write an opera for the Australian Opera Company. This would be his first attempt at writing opera, though he had previously written works that involved staging.35 He named the opera Christina’s World, and while it made it all the way through rehearsals, the performance was ultimately cancelled due to the firing of the producer.
Edwards moved back to Sydney from Pearl Beach in 1985. Shortly after moving he wrote Reflections (1985), which reworks much of the material from Maninya I.36 Reflections, not strictly in the maninya style due to the predominately slower tempos and drawn out drone-like melody lines, is categorized as a maninya piece due to the borrowed material. Also, the instrumentation and rhythmic instability draws from the maninya characteristics.
Beginning in 1988 Edwards received a number of commissions from the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC). The first was for a violin concerto to be played by Dene Olding. Edwards began composing the new work by reworking some of his previous works, namely Maninya I and Maninya V. Therefore it was only fitting that the concerto be titled Maninyas. Stanhope points out that, “Ross Edwards has shown an increasing tendency to re-use material, a trend that dominates Edwards’s work from 1988 onward.”37 This concerto is clearly written in the maninya style with all of the inherent characteristic markers and was described by Silisbury as, “consonance with respect to dissonance with affection and sets up and teases out harmonic deals with enough ingenuity to restore to minimalism the good name.” Maninyas, in fact, proved very popular with the public and remains one of Edwards’s most performed works.
The next large-scale commission from the ABC was Yarrageh: Nocturne for Percussion and Orchestra (1989). This work was to be a percussion concerto for percussionist Ian Cleworth, though the subtitle infers a slightly different relationship. As the title suggests, the percussion is used to create and alter the mood as Edwards moves through the different characteristics of his sacred style.
Example 3. Yarrageh: nocturne for solo percussion and orchestra, mms. 14-22.
Yarrageh bears more resemblance to the sacred series that tends to run counter to what the audience would expect from a standard concerto form. Yarrageh consists of a single movement, compared to the standard three-movement structure. The soloist is not placed in front of the ensemble, and there is a distinct lack of virtuosic writing for the soloist. Also, with the addition of the piano’s important role in Yarrageh the focus is constantly being pulled away from the percussion soloist. In addition, Edwards includes staging instructions that the lights are to be dimmed and stand lights be used by the entire orchestra. Edwards states the effect is to,
Seek to reveal to the listener the ‘mysterious darkness’ that underlies our ordinary consciousness. To do this it’s necessary to ‘turn off’ the everyday world for a time by focusing attention and reducing distraction. This can be achieved by treating the music as a sort of contemplation object in which each single event is as important as every other: you don’t have to think about where it’s going or what kind of structure is being outlined – the present moment, ideally, should capture your full attention.39
While the sacred style and staging are nothing new for Edwards at this point in his career, he does continue to subvert the audience expectations with each new large-scale work.
In 1990 he was granted the Australian Artists’ Creative Fellowship that included steady income for four years. This fellowship afforded Edwards the opportunity to focus on composing, resulting in a large number of new compositions. In 1991 Edwards moved out to the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney, once again returning to his natural surroundings for inspiration. The first major work to come after the move was Symphony Da Pacem Domine. Symphony Da Pacem Domine was his first symphony and it is interesting that he chose to base it upon a Latin text meaning “Give Peace, Lord” and uses a portion of plainchant as the compositional basis.40 Even though Symphony Da Pacem Domine is a large-scale orchestral work, Edwards continues to use his more intimate musical language, the sacred and maninya styles, but in a combination of the two archetypes. The symphony was written as an elegy to the former conductor of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, Stuart Challender who passed away in 1991. Thus, the Latin title and plainchant aspects factor in quite effectively.
Example 4. Symphony Da Pacem Domine, mms. 1-16.
Other smaller works produced around the same time also demonstrate Edwards’s tendency to mix the scared and maninya styles. Prelude and Dragonfly Dance is a two-movement work that pairs the sacred and maninya styles together as a set.41 Pond Light Mantras, 1992, consists of two pieces that have been paired together due to similar aesthetic choices. These two pieces further demonstrate Edwards desire to involve theatrical aspects in his music. In this instance he worked with John Brassil, a visual artist, to combine the music with a video sculptor for the New South Wales Art Gallery. The music consists of overlapping sections of limited material that is repeated and reduced throughout the work.42
After the success of Pond Light Mantras, Edwards wrote several other works for a ritualistic purpose that reused material from earlier compositions, Dance Mantra and Black Mountain Duos were both composed in 1992.43 Edwards states, “all my music is trying to find some ritual that makes sense. That is its implied aim, I think, right along.”44 His next work to push the boundaries of traditional style was Veni Creator Spiritus for string octet, 1993. Here he uses plainchant again but as a cantus firmus for the first movement.45 Though he still maintains his ritualistic writing throughout, Veni Creator Spiritus points the way forward to Edwards next set of compositions, the Enyato series. This new series had already been hinted at by Prelude and Dragonfly and Pond Light Mantras.
Enyato series
In a 1998 interview Edwards states, “that the four works which bear the generic title Enyato are essentially dualistic. The word enyato means ‘contrast’.”46 The pairing of two works together, either intentionally or unintentionally, one sacred and one maninya style movement is intended to create the overall effect of cleansing the aural palette with the sacred material before rejoicing with the maninya. With the start of the Enyato series he begins to expand the structure to include more slow material, or sacred, at the closing, therefore creating a slow-fast-slow hierarchical structure. With the return of the slow material at the end it creates a slightly more cohesive idea as if trying to imply that the slow material and fast material are more closely related than the previous two part structure would suggest, now likening this new series more to an overall arch form.
With the combination of sacred and maninya styles to produce the Enyato pieces the commonalities between the two styles becomes more obvious, harmony and rhythm in particular, and highlight the outside influences. Those traits come from “cultural references from the Pacific/South East Asia, and more recently European/Celtic (especially with the influence of plainsong), together with the shape of Aboriginal chant.”47 Edwards explained, “It seems to be fusing European music, with my own, static, environmental music, as an integration of the two.”48 The most salient new characteristic of the Enyato series is the introduction of plainsong. Edwards uses plainsong in nearly every large-scale work after 1993, all three Symphonies, and as previously stated Veni Creator Spiritus, and White Ghost Dancing (1999).49
Another key change in Edwards’ personal language, starting with his First Symphony, was the transition from a focus on particular instruments, with an emphasis on clarinet and piano, to the use of distilled fragments, or icons. The icons are a, “distilled essence, reduced to the ‘absolute minimum’ representing what is ‘essential and ideal’ for the composer.”50 A list of twenty icons and three piano archetypes have been identified by Philip Cooney for use in his dissertation and this list has been accepted as standard nomenclature when discussing and analyzing Edwards’ music.
These icons are used and re-used by Edwards at the beginning of nearly every work after the First Symphony which helps to create a cohesive personal style and a compositional tool to start new works, beginning with something deemed essential and then branching out to something new.
The intervals in the iconography present us with guideposts to the development of Edwards’ language both melodically and harmonically. The movement or journey from chromatic intervals (semitones, minor sevenths and ninths, augmented fourths and fifths) to modal intervals (major seconds, minor thirds) and diatonic intervals (major thirds and minor sevenths) is evident in the organic growth of the composer’s musical language.52
The next major work Edwards produced was his Guitar Concerto: Arafura Dances, completed in 1995. This concerto was dedicated to guitarist John Williams. The term Arafura refers to the Arafura Sea that lies between Australia and Indonesia. This name also indicates the region from which Edwards borrows inspiration for the musical material; in his words it is “influenced by heterophonic texture of Gamelan music.”53 Arafura Dances is organized in the traditional three-movement structure, First Maninya – Arafura Arioso – Second Maninya. Here Edwards has simply inserted a maninya for each of the faster movements and an aria for the slower/sacred movement. This work points solidly to Edwards’ new proclivity to combine the sacred and maninya as an example of his new Enyato style.
In 1997 Edwards finished his Second Symphony: Earth Spirit Songs for soprano and orchestra. The inspiration for this work came while Edwards was once again in Europe, though this time with the Sydney Symphony as a fully mature composer with his own unique voice. While in Germany he began to compose and incorporate O viridissima Virga, (Oh greenest branch), an antiphon written by Hildegard von Bingen. O viridissima Virga dates back to the 12th century and is a celebration of spring and female empowerment. Edwards uses the overtly feminine voice of the Hildegard text in the solo soprano part.54 Therefore creating a solo plainchant voice for the drones of the orchestra is very reminiscent of the Hildegard antiphon.
The text was assembled in a piecemeal fashion dictated by the musical impulse. The work opens with a fragment of plainchant invoking the Holy Spirit, the life force, the imagination, and this is sent whirling in an ecstatic Australian dervish dance whose rhythmic patterns and drones are modeled on those of the natural world.55
This emphasis and interest in a medieval composer, Hildegard von Bingen, provides another instance of Edwards differentiating himself from his contemporaries.
White Ghost Dancing, written in 1999 and revised in 2007, presents the audience with several exotic sounds that, “resemble the melodic shapes found in the Northern Australian Aboriginal music, as well as in the stepwise movement of plainsong. In White Ghost Dancing, modal and chromatic writing – based on Indian, Indonesian and Japanese scales – are used in the melodies.”56 Along with the exotic sounds and melodies due to these non-Western influences, White Ghost Dancing‘s extensive use of Edwards’s icons has contributed to this work becoming one of Edwards’s most popular and idiosyncratic works.
There are recorded instances of Aboriginal People mistaking early Europeans in Australia for the ghosts of their ancestors, since ghosts were believed to be light-coloured.
As I composed White Ghost Dancing, the concept of a white ghost came to symbolize non-indigenous Australia’s innate Aboriginality – its capacity to transform and heal itself through spiritual connectedness with the earth.
I believe that music, which has enormous therapeutic properties and, for me, a close relationship with ritual – and especially dance – is destined to make an important contribution to this transformation and healing. Hence the title.
Typical of my maninya (dance/chant pieces), White Ghost Dancing is a compact mosaic of unconsciously processed shapes and patterns from the natural world: fragments of birdsong, insect and frog rhythms, as well as fleeting references to other works of mine and fusions of Aboriginal and Gregorian chant.57
Edwards extensive use and importance of icons in White Ghost Dancing is explained by the composer stating,
The face that they are all bits of me…There isn’t one thing in the piece that hasn’t been used in some way or touched upon before. So,… it’s all these icons all glued together in different ways, little fragments that recur and recur slightly modified and that’s all done by intuition. But I realized that the whole piece had been, in a sense, composed before and now is reassembled to make something else… nearly everything, or sometimes a direct quotation in a way that it puts it in another context so that it’s renewing it in some way.58
Example 5. White Ghost Dancing, mms. 14-20.
Mantra series
The next “series” of pieces that Edwards embarked upon was his mantra series. The pieces are linked by their meditative qualities and refer back to Edwards’s desire for music to serve a practical function and not be limited to the scope of the concert hall. These are similar to his works in which he collaborated with other artists to expose his music to new venues and audiences.59
Edwards says that the term mantra reflects the nature of the music, which is ‘repetitive, it’s a prayer of some kind of ritual’. They are generally ‘real’ meditational objects – ‘as opposed to Concert Hall pieces which have a meditational quality’60
These mantra pieces combine the sacred and maninya styles and also integrate icons. By utilizing so many of his previous compositional techniques Edwards’ mantra works are a culmination of his personal style to date.
The Fourth Symphony: Star Chart, completed in 2001, is a representative work of Edwards’s desire to combine several different elements of the performing arts. For the previous ten years or so, starting with Sensing in 1992, Edwards experimented with combining musicians with dancers, choirs, and theatrical elements, such as lighting changes, costuming, and even staging the musicians. All of these extra musical elements are in addition to the traditional concert hall setting that helps further Edwards’s goal of making his music more functional and reach a wider audience. The idea for Star Chart was conceived on a trip into the Australian Outback with a group of scientists and is an attempt to musically represent how the peoples of the Southern hemisphere relate to the night sky to demonstrate the way people can and should be humbled by the stars and the universe. Edwards scores this symphony for a fairly large orchestra, two pre-recorded pianos, and choir. This work also represents the first time he has included any form of pre-recorded tape. He also uses lighting changes and backdrops to further the mood, however, each performance can be different according to the hall and the music director’s choices. Edwards tries to allow for personal interpretation of Star Chart, as far as the additional non-musical elements, as this piece is about how individuals and particular groups of people relate to nature.61
This musical fusion of art and science represents a journey through Australia’s night skies. It celebrates the stars in western and aboriginal culture with names taken from both ancient European legend and the Dreamtime stories of many different indigenous peoples. The cement that binds it all together is Ross Edwards’ music, which is itself inspired by the Australian landscape and natural environment. Star Chant is Edwards’ fourth symphony.62
Since 2001, Edwards has composed primarily chamber works, ranging from solo instruments up to quintets, with the major exceptions being Symphony No. 5: The Promised Land (2005) and the Concerto for Clarinet and Orchestra (2007). Most notably he returned to one of his most popular works, Marimba Dances (1982), with More Marimba Dances in 2004. Another piece worth mentioning is Retrospective completed in 2009. Retrospective is scored for Alto flute and piano and bears several similarities to a number of the oboe works that will be discussed in chapter five.
While Edwards’s personal style has evolved over time, it is important to keep in mind the unifying factor in all of Edwards’ music. His serial beginnings in school with Monos I, developed into his sacred style, and his maninya style. Later he combined them in the enyato series, and ultimately arrived at his mantra works. Throughout each incarnation, one hears his overwhelming love and desire to represent the natural world around him of the Australian Outback and the peoples that have come to call Australia home.
Conclusion
While Edwards’ music has changed throughout his career, from serial, to sacred, to maninya, to enyato, and finally mantra, his inspiration from nature and the cultures in and around Australia has not. His music represents a unique Australian musical voice with a strong connection to place. After reviewing Edwards’ music, one can understand how he has developed into one of the most recognizable Australian composers working today.
6 Philip Geoffrey Cooney, “Ross Edwards: Case Study of a Creative Individual,” (M. Ed., Charles Sturt University, 1995), ii.
7 Paul Stanhope, “The Music of Ross Edwards: Aspects of Ritual (M.A. thesis, University of Wollongong, 1994), 2.
8 Ross Edwards, “Composer Ross Edwards discusses his latest piece and his life as a composer,” Interview by Andrew Ford, The Music Show, August 16, 2003.
9 Stanhope, 2.
10 Stanhope, 3.
11 Stanhope, 4.
12 Ross Edwards, “A Natural Way,” Interview by Gordon Kalton Williams, http://www.gordonkaltonwilliams.com/A_Natural_Way_interivew_with_Ross_Edwards_900_words.pdf (accessed August 15, 2013).
13 Michael Francis Hannan, “Ross Edwards: A Unique Sound World,” APRA Journal 4 (1986), 12.
14 The working definition for minimalism is from Timothy Johnson, “Minimalism: Aesthetic, Style, or Technique?” The Musical Quarterly 78 (winter 1994), 742-773.
15 Philip Geoffrey Cooney, “Beyond Sacred and Maninya: Developments in the Music of Ross Edwards between 1991-2001” (Ph.D. Thesis, University of Newcastle, 2003), iii.
16 Jana Skarecky, “Duality in the music of Peter Sculthorpe: String Quartet #10” (MMus thesis, University of Sydney, 1987), 56.
17 Stanhope, 6.
18 Stanhope, 5.
19 Paul Stanhope and Michael Francis Hannan both spoke about Edwards’ ‘period of silence’ and ‘confusion of direction’ in their writings “The Music of Ross Edwards: Aspects of Ritual” and “Ross Edwards: A Unique Sound World” respectively.
20 Graeme Skinner, “Ross Edwards: Music of Contemplation and Sanctuary,” 24 Hours (August 1992): 42.
21 Henry Tate, Australian Musical Possibilities (Melbourne: E.A. Vilder, 1924).
22 Henry Tate, Australian Musical Possibilities (Melbourne: E.A. Vilder, 1924), 13.
23 A list of Edwards’ sacred works has been created by Paul Stanhope current up to 1993 and then completed by the author. The list is included in the appendix.
24 Philip Geoffrey Cooney identifies the following pieces as falling into the ‘sacred’ category, Shadow D-Zone, Tower of Remoteness, Kumari, Marimba Dances, Etymelong, Reflections, Yarrageh, Prelude and Dragonfly, Dance, Pond Light Mantras, Enyato I, Enyato II, Enyato IV, and Binyang. This list is comprised of works written prior to 2003.
25 Cooney, 21.
26 Christopher Dench and Ian Shanahan, “An emotional geography of Australian composition,” Sounds Australian (Winter 1992), 25.
27 A list of Edwards’ sacred works has been created by Paul Stanhope current up to 1993 and then completed by the author. The list is included in the appendix.
28 Cooney, iv.
29 Dench, 25.
30 Cooney, 28. This is one of the few times Edwards decided to invent a word rather than borrow an Aboriginal term.
31 Ross Edwards, “Reflections: the performing arts,” Transforming art 4, no. 1 (1992), 30.
32 Though not all of the works retain the title of maninya they are all connected through the style established in Maninya I, Maninya I, Maninya II (1982), Maninya III (1985), Maninya IV (1985), Maninya V (1986), Marimba Dances (1982), Flower Songs (1987), and Maninyas (1988).
33 Stanhope, 14.
34 Cooney, 47. Cooney has created the first attempt to catalog all of the icons for his Ph.D. Dissertation. This table of icons will be used later in the analysis of the individual works.
35 Antifon (1974) is written for a large choir, brass sextet, organ, and percussion. The choir is supposed to process through the performance space and flashing lights are to illuminate the stage coordinated with the music. Though due to weather concerns the staging ultimately did not come to fruition.
36 Stanhope, 19.
37 Stanhope, 20.
38 John Silisbury, “Auntie’s whalebone snaps as winds of change sweep the last Town Hall ABC concert,” Advertiser 2 (September 1988), 2.
39 Ross Edwards, “Yarrageh: Nocturne for Solo Percussion & Orchestra (1989),” http://www.rossedwards.com/yarrageh-1989/ (accessed August 19, 2013).
40 Stanhope, 22.
41 The same combination can be found in the Yanada and Ulpirra.
42 It is very much like the “second movement” of the Oboe Concerto.
43 The term ritual is being used here based on the definition provided by Paul Stanhope derived from Bocock’s Ritual in Industrial Society. Stanhope states, “Bocock gives the examples of Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem and Richard Wagner’s Parsifal as examples of ritual inside Aesthetic Ritual. The War Requiem is said to be ritualistic because of its appropriation of a traditional religious form, namely the requiem mass: the work is deemed to be ritualistic by its association with religious ritual. Parsifal is ritualistic since its subject matter is religious, it uses ritual as a central part of its dramatic action and is designated by Wagner as Bühnenweihtestspiel– ‘sacred festival drama’, as distinct from his music dramas (operas).” Stanhope 34-35.
44 Stanhope, 53.
45 Stanhope, 24.
46 Cooney, 36.
47 Cooney, 68.
48 Cooney, 68.
49 Yanada and Ulpirra are dualistic and strongly related to the Enyato series, Cooney, 95-100.
50 Sydney Symphony Orchestra and New South Wales, Sydney Symphony Orchestra Education Program 1991: Meet the Music Teaching Kit 4. Sydney: Sydney Symphony Orchestra and the Performing Arts Unit of the NSW Dept. of School Education, 1991.
51 The list of icons has been reproduced in the appendix from Philip Cooney’s Beyond Sacred and Maninya: Developments in the Music of Ross Edwards between 1991-2001, 53, and will be used extensively in my performance analysis of the oboe and English horn works. Cooney identified the icons by either occurring more than ten times in significant works or smaller works that have been deemed important in Edwards’ oeuvre, 52.
52 Cooney, 51.
53 Cooney, 349.
54 The Hildegard von Bingen text was translated by Judith Wright.
55 Ross Edwards, “Symphony No. 2 ‘Earth Spirit Songs’ (1996-97),” http://www.rossedwards.com/symphony-no-2-earth-spirit-songs-1996-97/ (accessed October 2, 2013).
56 Cooney, 353.
57 Ross Edwards, “White Ghost Dancing (1999),” http://www.rossedwards.com/white-ghost-dancing-1999/ (accessed October 2, 2013).
58 Cooney, 368.
59 A list of the mantra series works is included in the appendix.
60 Cooney, 362.
61 Ross Edwards, “Symphony No. 4 ‘Star Chant’ (2001),” http://www.rossedwards.com/symphony-no-4-star-chant-2001/ (accessed October 3, 2013).
62 Ross Edwards, “Symphony No. 4 ‘Star Chant’ (2001).”