Ceremony of the Seasons

In the Shadow's Light

Liza LIM
Born 1966, Perth, Australia

In the Shadow's Light (2004)

string quartet
Duration 26'
Commissioned by Festival d'Automne à Paris

The Quickening

Liza LIM
Born 1966, Perth, Australia

The Quickening (2004-05)

soprano, qin
Duration 22'
Commissioned by Festival d'Automne à Paris

Qui es-tu? Vois, moi je souffle le monde,
Il fera nuit, je ne te verrai plus,
Veux-tu que ne nous reste que la lumière?
-- Mais je ne sais répondre, de par un charme
Qui m'a étreint, de plus loin que l'enfance.

Who are you? Look, I blow out the world,
It will be night, I will no longer see you,
Do you want only light?
-- But I cannot answer, for I am seized
By a spell from further off than childhood.

--Yves BONNEFOY L'Agitation du rêve (part 3) from Ce Qui fut sans lumière (In the Shadow's Light) translated John NAUGHTON, Uni of Chicago Press, 1991.

I have thought of this pair of pieces -- In the Shadow's Light and The Quickening -- as a `ceremony of the seasons´. These `seasons´ are aligned to the turning points between autumn-winter and spring-summer, metaphors for journeys into death and into life. Both works inhabit a dream-world where things are not grasped directly, where sensations are filtered through different kinds of veils. These veils might be experienced as a tangle of submerged pathways through which one senses the movement of creatures on the surface above; perhaps as a trance of saturated light coming from a place beyond, or as oscillating interference patterns created by intersecting lines and arising from the coupling and uncoupling of sonic elements.

I am describing a `shimmer´ effect, something that, for me, calls to mind the ecstatic Central Desert art of Aboriginal Australia. This is a culture in which rituals are brought into being by shaman-healers who `stalk and capture´ songs, dances, ceremonial body markings and other designs in dream. It is said that they recognise these forms by the force of their `shimmer´, for instance, songs found in dreams are described in the Kukatja language as `kalyuyuru´ -- `like water shimmering as it falls´.

The `shimmer´ that I seek in my own work is also comprised of physical and visual dimensions as much as being an aural phenomenon. For example, the tactile awareness that the musicians of the string quartet bring to the sounding of their instruments is of key importance in interpreting the music. This kinaesthetic dimension is certainly central to the traditional performance practice of the Chinese zither, the qin, which has a highly refined aesthetics of touch, in which qualities of silence are savoured. Silences -- both furious and tender -- performed as suspended moments and as breathing gestures -- signal metaphorical turning points. They perhaps mark out the `flinching points´ in the radical uncoupling of the senses, of body, memory and spirit in death. And beyond this, the miraculous alchemical quickening of elements as new life is formed.

The term `the quickening´ describes a mother's first sensation of her baby's movement in the womb but also other kinds of `beginnings of life´ whether ideas or the sap running in trees. In the duo for soprano and qin, I have used fragments of Chinese text by Yang Lian whose poems revolve around themes of a dynamic duality that admits a third state `in-between´ and who, like Bonnefoy, finds a light that shines through darkness. The intonation of these Chinese words combine with the strokes of the qin's silk strings to sing of the illumination of flesh, of opening to vulnerability, and the awareness of being truly present in the moment when `cicadas in the body endlessly cry´.

Poems for The Quickening are fragments, used with the poet's permission, from the collection Where the Sea Stands Still by Yang Lian, translated Brian Holton, Bloodaxe Books, 1999.

part 1:

a pair of fleshy wings
has just touched the moon under the water
has time to move in
the radiance that eliminates the ocean
is finally pointed out when it is past

part 2:

one lip has been carved tender as grass
and a tongue so vulnerable it can't help crying out
whatever was called        hired flesh from the dead
shadow dies again          is only then shed to become human skin
big white bird                 tiny baby

wings of trees flapping
from light                       slipping terribly towards the light that lays
you bare

part 3:

a tiny white grain buried in your flesh illuminates you.
because flesh is the only thing that can be lit up.
the dead,  they like a ceremony for childbirth 

part 4:

cicadas
in the body
endlessly cry

In the Shadow's Light and was commissioned by the Festival d'Automne à Paris and premiered by the Kairos Quartett. It is dedicated to the Kairos Quartett and in memory of Mark Randall Osborn.

The Quickening was commissioned by the Festival d'Automne à Paris and premiered by Deborah KAYSER (soprano) and Yang Chunwei (qin). It is dedicated to Joséphine Markovits.

Both premieres were on 29 November 2005, Amphithéâtre, Cité de la Musique, Paris.

Programme note © Liza LIM, January 2005